The Man Who Followed Women

by Bert Hitchens

  “You work here around the clock?”

  “Not all the time. Sometimes we get an order to fill, some big contractor, we rush it.”

  “The gravel must have been poured in on him shortly after he was hurt,” Kernehan pointed out.

  “Yeah, they explained that. It doesn’t take long to run a string of hoppers up from the siding in Sidewinder. We could have run him in here and filled, and him been gone within an hour. I guess it happened that way.”

  “You ever know the guy?”

  The swarthy man shook his head. “Nope. Jennings, wasn’t it? Young guy? Our men are all old hands. I asked around, none of them ever heard of Jennings.”

  Kernehan had been looking around at the barren, scraped, and denuded bowl among the hills. “Where do your men live?”

  “Toprock, most of them. It’s north of here, a better road than the one you came in on. Know the place?”

  Kernehan knew it, a small sun-baked desert town, not on the railroad but straddling one of the highways east. If the men who worked here lived in Toprock, there was little likelihood any of them had known Jennings, whose late years seemed to have centered in Colton and Vermillion.

  He and Farrel went back to the car and drove down the way they had come, to the junction, crossed the spurs and sidings, and headed west. They had a late lunch in Colton and then saw Richie in the yards.

  Kernehan made up his mind all at once. There was the afternoon to kill, before it got dark and he and Farrel could go back to Sidewinder and stake-out. “Give me the address of Pethro’s wife,” he said to Richie. “I’m going out there and talk to her.”

  Richie looked sly. “Ask her for the picture of her husband while you’re there. I haven’t been back for it yet.”

  “Coward.”

  “Oh, I’ve been busy,” Richie defended himself. “We’re working like beavers, trying to find another car with the seal cut the way it was with that load of cigarettes. I had another idea too. I asked the local P.D. to check any unused warehouses, store buildings, and so on. I talked to Dyart in Vermillion, and he’s going to do the same thing over there. By God, if they’re hitting it this big they’ve got to have a place to keep it.”

  Farrel glanced at Kernehan as if wondering why he hadn’t already taken care of this obvious item, and Kernehan controlled his irritation; he should have thought of this angle at once. But then another hunch intruded. The outfit they were trying to find had figured a foolproof and so far unguessable way to hit the freights between here and Vermillion. If they were that good, why would they do the stupid and obvious thing and rent a place for storage that the cops would spot?

  He said, though, “Sure, give it a whirl,” without expressing his doubts to Richie.

  Farrel had someone else he wanted to see—he didn’t say who—and so Kernehan went out to Pethro’s address alone. It was on the outskirts of Colton, a street that petered out against some bean fields in the distance, small, old, white frame houses and a lot of pepper trees, the kind of street where kids ran around bare-footed and wiped their noses on the backs of their hands. Down at the corner was a little grocery, a sign over the door, advertising wine; and Kernehan remembered what Richie had said about the woman, about smelling wine on her, and just on a hunch he stopped the car and went in and bought a bottle of dry sherry.

  She came to the door when he knocked. The porch was shadowy under the pepper trees, and through the rusted screen Kernehan couldn’t see her so well, but he got an instant impression of a rather good-looking woman who was pretty drunk.

  When he explained who he was and flashed the I.D., she opened the screen and asked him in. Kernehan couldn’t remember whether Richie had said that she’d had him inside, or whether they’d talked through the screen. She spotted the sacked bottle in Kernehan’s arm; she gave him a smile.

  “What am I supposed to do for that?”

  “Damned if I know,” Kernehan admitted. “What do you feel like doing?”

  “I’ve been deserted.” She turned to face him in the middle of the room. “My husband left me. I feel like doing whatever I damn please.”

  Kernehan put the sherry on a table, took a quick look around. It wasn’t much of a place, the furniture was shabby, the rug faded, and in the corners the floor was very dusty. “You talked to one of our investigators yesterday, a man named Richie.”

  Without replying she went to the kitchen for a couple of glasses, came back, burst the wine-bottle seal with her nail, poured them each a drink. “Here’s how!” She drank. “You know, neither you nor him fool me a bit. I know exactly what you want.”

  Kernehan felt a little uncomfortable. He wasn’t supposed to drink on the job, or, in fact, much at all; there was always Rule G breathing down your neck. An investigator was supposed to be on call twenty-four hours a day, sober, ready to go. He tentatively sipped at the wine. “Do you?”

  “You think my husband killed his friend. You want me to tell you where he is now, and whether he and Jennings had a fight.” She stood there with the half-filled glass in her hand, looking at him. She had rather striking eyes, tawny colored with darker flecks, and fine fair skin now quite flushed from drinking. Her hair was cut short, something Kernehan knew, from Lora, that had come from Italy, shaggy half-curled locks that cupped her forehead and cheeks. It was brown hair, quite lustrous. When she was not drinking, when she had on makeup and a neat white uniform, she must make a hell of a good-looking waitress, Kernehan thought.

  “What are you staring at?”

  Easy to make, right now. Mad at Pethro. Scared, probably, about finances. Owed for the rent, maybe for groceries and wine. Pretty drunk.

  “Can I sit down?” Kernehan asked.

  “With me? On the couch?” She went wavy-legged to the davenport over under the windows.

  “This is fine.” He sat down on a chair, still holding the glass.

  The pepper trees in the yard made ferny shadows on the blind above her head. She finished the wine. “But it’s not true,” she said all at once, as if there had been no interruption. “That pair wouldn’t fight. Not each other. Sure, they’ve been in plenty of scrapes. But they were like brothers. Even, I guess, from the time they were kids. Do you know where I think my husband is now?” She put the glass on the floor, looked suddenly at the one in Kernehan’s fist. “Hey, aren’t you drinking?”

  “I brought the wine for you,” Kernehan said, thinking how graceful her hands were. It would be easy to let things slide, take love where you found it, forget Lora and her brother. Well, it might not be too easy at first, he corrected, but time should improve the way he felt.

  “I’ll tell you where my husband is.”

  Kernehan waited; he shifted his eyes off her and looked at the fern-patterned blind above her head.

  “He’s hunting for the one who killed Jennings.”

  Kernehan nodded. It was somehow what he had expected her to say.

  Chapter 9

  She picked the glass up off the floor, went to the table, refilled it with a fresh drink. She was going to be awfully drunk pretty quick, Kernehan thought, if she didn’t slow down. She sat down on the couch. “And another thing,” she said. “Why’re you and Mr. Richie so interested in Jennings getting killed? I’ve known railroad bulls before. They didn’t go in for homicide. It was always … oh, somebody breaking a switch light or swiping tools out of the yards.”

  “Jennings had worked for the railroad,” Kernehan offered. “He was found dead in one of our hopper cars.”

  “Still … it ought to be up to the local police department, shouldn’t it?”

  Kernehan decided that she really had known a railroad cop. Pretty well. Enough to get the hang of the limits of their job. “We’re just giving the local police a hand, looking around where they might not find time to. Where do you think your husband will be, hunting Jennings’s murderer?”

  “How would I know?”

  “When he left you, where did he go?”

  “Vermillion. That’s
where Jennings was hanging out.”

  Kernehan recalled that Dyart, in Vermillion, hadn’t been able to find any trace of the dead man there. “Do you know where Jennings was working?”

  “He wasn’t. He was just bumming around. He and my husband—” She cut it off. She gave Kernehan a hazy, contemptuous, twisted smile. “My God, I’m spilling my guts to a goddam cop. Shows what drink will do.”

  “I’m not trying to pump you,” Kernehan said indifferently. “I don’t think Pethro would have told you anything about his business, anyway.”

  “His business? His business?” She laughed. “You make him sound like he was somebody. Believe me, he’s nothing. All he ever wanted was an easy job with a little gravy on the side. Like the transfer outfit.”

  The ferny shadows moved on the blind, and outside in the street some kids were hollering.

  “He always had an angle, and it was always little and lousy. Cheap. When he was working for the transfer outfit, he used to take something out of the load and hide it, pretend to lose it, something he figured the family would miss and get worried about, some little old fancy table or part of a bedroom set, like the bench to a vanity. He’d hide it and then three or four days later he’d show up with it, driving his own car, and he’d make the suckers believe he’d had a hell of a time running it down. Had run it down on his own time. He almost always wangled a tip. Once he got ten dollars.” She shook her head slowly. “You’d have thought he’d made a fortune.”

  “What about Jennings?”

  “Just like my husband. My God, I told you they were like brothers. Just like that.” She held up two fingers plastered tight.

  Smalltime chiselers, Kernehan thought. He sipped a little of the wine, slowly, so she wouldn’t figure he was letting her drink alone.

  “Furthermore,” she said, her tone slurring, “I don’t want to find my husband, I don’t want him to come home. I’m having too good a time as it is. I’m going to get a job and move out of here. I ought to go back to L.A. Or Hollywood.” The glass tipped as she lowered it from her lips, some of the wine dribbling out upon the yellow skirt of her housecoat. “I can get a good job, and to hell with Mr. Pethro.”

  Her legs were round and firm, the ankles slender. Kernehan found himself looking at the edge of the yellow skirt, and she must have noticed, for she moved one knee a little, and he saw the rolled top of her stocking and the creamy curve of her thigh. But he was thinking, too, remembering what the trainmaster had said about Jennings, that Jennings wasn’t up to being much of a crook, wasn’t a mover or an organizer, but liked to share in the pickings. Like the stolen whisky.

  “That drink’s lasting you a long time, Mr. Railroad Bull.”

  “I have to be careful.”

  “Sure. I know. Rule G. I told you I’ve known railroad cops before.”

  “How’d you get along with him?”

  Her eyes seemed shadowed all at once. “We were engaged to be married, and then we had a fight and I never saw him again.” Kernehan found suddenly that he didn’t want to pursue this line any further.

  “I found out later he quit his job—this was in L.A.—and went back east and married some girl he had known when they were kids. It just shows you. It shows what happens if you fall for a cop.”

  “Yes, I guess it does.”

  “Then I met Pethro and he was kind of dark and good-looking, and I let him take me out and first thing I knew, I’d married him.”

  “You don’t have any children.” Richie had already mentioned it. “Thank God for small favors.”

  “If your husband shows up, will you tell him we’d like to talk to him about Jennings? We don’t suspect him. Make that plain. Jennings died in an accident. We’d just like to know what he was doing on the train.”

  Her mouth dropped. “An accident?”

  “Did Richie give you the impression it was murder? I’m sorry,” Kernehan said, standing up. He put the wine on the table. It might not work, she might already know somehow that Jennings had been beaten to death. He didn’t think Richie would have spilled it, though.

  She got her feet under her, stood up, came to the table. Her expression seemed genuinely bewildered. “I guess I just took it for granted. They’d worked around trains, they knew the ropes, both of them. It didn’t seem as if Jennings would have been killed in an accident.”

  “I should have made it clear at the beginning.” He moved over to the door. “You see now why the railroad has to help out in the investigation. We have to make sure what happened wasn’t our fault.”

  She accepted it, nodding. Kernehan couldn’t be sure, but he thought her surprise was real; she had thought that Jennings had been murdered, had assumed it all along; and then Kernehan decided that she knew something she hadn’t told him and that whatever it was, was the reason she was so sure Jennings had been killed deliberately.

  If he waited she might get drunk enough to tell him about it, but the probability was that she wouldn’t. There was an inner guard; he’d sensed it when she had suddenly chided herself for spilling to a cop.

  Even a secret kept had implications. There was something to hide.

  She stood at the screen and watched him leave the porch. He looked back at her from the grassy yard and could see her dimly. “Good-by, Mrs. Pethro. And thanks for your time.”

  “Good-by.”

  He knew what she was doing now. She was trying desperately to think back through everything they’d said, trying to remember if she had given anything away. Letting him know how sure she was that Jennings had been murdered had been a bad break; she’d be biting her tongue over it. Kernehan thought, hell, the wine had been a good investment, after all.

  Driving away, he remembered that he had intended to ask for a picture of Pethro. But he decided against going back to ask for it. There might be need of an excuse to go back another day.

  Farrel drove down past some warehouses and truck depots, a couple of wrecking yards, a display of used plumbing and rusty pipe, until he found the place he wanted, a shack at the rear of an area of weedy pavement where once had been a used-car lot. He parked the car he’d borrowed from Richie, got out, looked around, and then crossed the broken pavement to the back of the lot and knocked at the door.

  There were some grunts, a yawn, the creak of bedsprings. Then the lock rattled and the door opened a couple of inches. A bloodshot eye looked him over. “Yeah?”

  “What’s the matter, Mac? You forget me?”

  Mac blinked. “Oh hell. I’m not awake yet.” He pulled the door open and Farrel went in. It was dark inside, the blinds drawn. The man who had let him in went over and raised the blind on one of the windows. He had on shorts and socks, nothing more; he was in his fifties, about Farrel’s age, gray and quite paunchy. On either side of his nose the flesh was marked by a network of tiny veins; he had the look of a heavy drinker, but Farrel noted that he seemed sober enough now.

  Mac sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed his hands over his hair. “Sit down.” Farrel pulled a broken-backed chair away from a kitchen table. “How you doin’?”

  “Can’t kick too much.” Farrel noted that since his last visit, at least six months before, nothing had changed except that there was a new patchwork quilt on the bed. He pointed to it. “Where did you get that?”

  “My widow lady made it for me. Did I have her when you were here? Guess I didn’t.” He scratched his chest and covered another yawn.

  “Widow lady? Now, that’s something. You’d better watch yourself, you’ll be getting married next.”

  Mac quit yawning and scratching to give an indignant snort. “Now, wait a minute.”

  “She’ll have you taking the pledge. And giving up smoking.”

  Mac winced as if over a painful nudge. He got up from the bed and went to a table against the far wall, poured water in a cup, took a pill from a medicine bottle. “She’s a swell old gal and all that, but what do I want with a wife, me a broken-down watchman with a bum ticker. As for the booze, I ha
d to cut it out on my own. Or kick off. And so what the hell did you come for, except to pry into my love life?” He grinned wickedly.

  Farrel slapped his hat on his knee, looked closely at the big shabby man drinking down his pill. “Well, we’ve got a little problem.”

  Mac shook his head. “Nobody’s shooting anything through the junk yards around here. I’d know if they were. And they’re not. The last thing we had that was hot was that brass you was looking for. If they knew I’d tipped you off, I’d be in real bad shape. They’d beat the hell out of me.”

  “I don’t think this stuff is going through a junk yard,” Farrel said. “New tires, some cigarettes. But they’re keeping it somewhere. They’ve got at least one truck. Have to have.” He was frowning.

  “You think, here in Colton?”

  “We don’t know that, either. It’s disappearing out of the cars between here and Vermillion. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d say it was being snatched off while it was moving.”

  Mac came back to the bed, sat down, and belched. He put a hand over his stomach and blinked his eyes. “I haven’t heard a word.”

  “Anybody come around with new tires, cheap?”

  Mac shook his head.

  Farrel got out a pack of cigarettes, offered it to Mac, one pulled up, and Mac grunted, “That went out along with the booze, dammit.” Farrel lit a cigarette and sat smoking for a couple of minutes, just trying to think. Mac said, “It’s pretty big, huh?”

  “Yeah, it’s beginning to hurt. It’s not just a one-shot, it keeps on, and there’s system to it. Brains in it. Good planning.”

  Mac turned around and put his feet up on the widow’s patchwork quilt, stretched out with his hands behind his head. “Reminds me. Once up north, around Bakersfield—this was before I went to work with you—we had a lot of pipe going out. Hell, they were highjacking whole loads of it. Oil casing … once they got it in the ground, how would you find it again?”