The kid ate an enormous meal. Bored, Kernehan thought.
When Kernehan headed for his car after lunch, Randy hurried after him. “Can I go?”
Kernehan looked at Bucklen, who was still sitting at the table after lighting a pipe. “If you want him along,” Bucklen said, as if indifferently.
Was it part of the pattern, keeping an eye on what he was doing? Or was the kid really eager to get away for a little while?
“Just one thing,” Bucklen added. “Iff’n you take a notion to go to town, bring Randy back here first. He don’t go to town. Not ever.”
Kernehan got into the car, the kid getting in opposite.
Kernehan was thinking of the other pattern, the other bunch whose members never seemed to get to town, either.
Chapter 14
Farrel had awakened a little after five o’clock that morning, feeling chilled and apprehensive, the aftermath of a disturbing dream.
In the dream he had been standing just inside the open door of his home, the house he had owned years ago, and coming up the front walk in the sunlight outdoors had been his wife and child. In spite of the bright light, the clarity of the surroundings, the two figures had had something insubstantial about them. They were more like shimmering illusions than real people, and no amount of squinting and focusing made them any more believable. In the dream Farrel had made a tremendous effort, willing them to be alive, willing them to take on flesh and bone; and when he woke his heart was pounding and his face wet with sweat.
Twenty years ago his wife had walked out, taking their child, and Farrel had never heard from her again.
He got up and went into the bathroom and splashed water on his face at the basin. He dried himself, feeling the quiet of the house around him. Soon Mrs. Bellows would be in the kitchen downstairs, preparing breakfast for the boarders, rattling pots and crockery. Farrel thought about the day ahead and decided not to wait; he’d warm up last night’s coffee and get out before she stirred.
He went into his room and looked over the clothes in the closet. He selected the least wrinkled of several shirts hanging on hooks. Pants needed pressing; he looked at the baggy knees in disgust. The jacket had a button gone, a raveled spot near the cuff. It was time to buy some clothes for himself, a chore Farrel put off as long as possible.
Dressed at last, he went to the dresser and tightened his tie. Then he bent and pulled open the bottom drawer, and from a nest of old papers and magazines and pocket-sized books he took a bottle of whisky. There was a good-sized snort left in it. Farrel tilted the bottle against his teeth.
In the kitchen he heated coffee, poured it into a cup, drank it standing by the nook. The kitchen smelled of cooking, a clean yeasty smell, and of the battery of soaps and cleansers with which Mrs. Bellows attacked every cranny.
He rinsed the cup, left it in the sink under the tap, went out to the parking space in the rear, and got into his car. The car was eight years old; it started sluggishly. He listened to the motor, thought about the long desert miles to Vermillion. Well, he’d put in an extra quart of oil; that should do it.
He picked up a pint at the first liquor store he saw open; stowed it in the dash compartment. When he reached Colton, he stopped in a diner for another cup of coffee and then, since Richie would be on duty by now, he headed for the freight yards. Richie was there, but he had nothing new on the robberies, nor on Jennings’s murder.
Farrel headed the car for the highway east out of town, and then changed his mind and swung back. He drove out past the warehouses and truck depots as he had done before, past the used plumbing and stands of pipe, to the lot with the broken pavement and the faded used-car signs and the shack at the rear.
It took a lot of knocking before Mac stirred, before the bed creaked as he got out of it. He came to the door wrapped up in an old bathrobe. His eyes were watery and his face covered by a gray stubble, and under the network of broken veins his flesh looked pasty. “Hello, Farrel.” He left the door open and waddled back to the bed. “I’ve been sick with the flu. You better not get too close to me, you’ll catch it.”
“Need a pill?” Farrel asked, sitting down and glancing at the array of bottles on the table.
“Full of’em,” Mac complained. He stretched out on the patchwork quilt, reaching down to wrap the bathrobe across his shins. “Mostly it’s just resting that gets you over it. My widow lady’s been bringing me soup and stuff. What brought you back so soon?”
“Well, we’ve figured out how it’s being done,” Farrel said.
“They’re using rope ladders, hanging down the side off the catwalk and hitting the cars while they’re moving.”
“No kidding? I’ll be damned!” Propped on an elbow, Mac shook his head unbelievingly. Then he thought it over for a minute. “Pretty cute. It means they know just what cars to hit. They know exactly what’s inside. What’d I tell you?”
“Oh, sure, it has to be. I’m on my way to the Vermillion office now to try to get a line on the stoolie. He’ll be expecting me, of course.” Farrel had spent the previous afternoon going through the records in Personnel. A few scraps of what he had learned flickered in memory: one man, a clerk who had almost twenty-five years with the company, was in a mess financially, had been buying a new car and a houseful of new furniture on time, and had at the same time at his wife’s insistence gone co-signer on a note for his brother-in-law. The brother-in-law had skipped out with the loan money, and now the clerk, whose name was Grofsky, was in over his neck and growing visibly more shaken every day—according to the grapevine. One of the young clerks in the Vermillion office had been warned on making book on the races, was a notorious gambler. Another had a two-year-old baby with a heart defect, had been financing trips for his wife and baby to eastern specialists.
Mac said, “You don’t know where the stuff’s going, yet.”
“No, we haven’t figured that out.”
Mac stretched out on his back and looked at the cracked plasterboard ceiling. “Jeezez, I feel lousy…. They’ve got a spot picked where they throw down. A truck waiting. If you knew where it was you’d have them cold turkey.”
“If we knew. And if they used the same spot every time.”
“Big hunk of territory out there. Damned empty, too. Anything like they got ought to be pretty conspicuous. Why don’t you run over the country with a helicopter?”
“There are helicopters out. The sheriff’s office has one for desert rescue, and the marine base the other side of Vermillion sends them out in flocks in all directions. If there was a new warehouse, we’d know it. We’d know it without helicopters.”
“Yeah, sure,” Mac agreed. “Oh, I guess I didn’t tell you. This guy Jennings, the one got killed in the gravel hopper, he was trying to peddle some tires a while back. I was chewing the fat with the kid in the lot next door, and I mentioned his name, and the kid remembered him.”
“How come they didn’t buy?”
“Jennings must of got scared off somehow. He made the deal, but he didn’t come back with the tires. This was several weeks ago, a long time before he got bumped.”
“New tires?”
“He said so.”
“Kernehan’s got a hunch Jennings was with them,” Farrel said, thinking aloud. He remembered Ryerson’s surmise, that one of the gang might try something along the line of individual enterprise.
“Then Kernehan’s got a good head on his shoulders,” Mac commented. “Jennings might have needed a little cash and made off with some of the hot stock.”
Farrel nodded, but now he was remembering how the kid in the lot next door had made him for a cop, and the conversation that had passed between them. “You brought up Jennings’s name?”
“Sure. Just casual-like. And the kid remembered.”
“I wouldn’t do any more talking to him. I don’t like his looks.”
Mac grunted, “Aah, he’s just a snot-nosed squirt. I asked him what kind of car Jennings was driving, how’d he get out here, and how he ha
ppened to pick that lot over there, and the kid said he hadn’t seen the car, all he did was overhear Jennings talking to the boss.”
“I don’t like it,” Farrel said abruptly. “Leave him alone.”
“Don’t believe it, then,” Mac said with a touch of grouchiness.
“I think he was giving you a line,” Farrel added. “And I’ll bet he’s told his boss about your curiosity.”
“I might be sick,” Mac promised, “but if anybody comes pussy-footing around this shack, I’ll fix’em so they won’t forget.”
Farrel lit a cigarette and sat smoking and thinking. He didn’t quite know how to figure what the kid had told Mac. It could be a lie, something made up on the spur of the moment to lead Mac on and have him asking other questions. Or it could have some truth in it. The funny thing was, if it was true, it fitted in with all of Kernehan’s suspicions. Kernehan might be a pretty-boy cop and a pain in the neck, all togged out and with something eating him he wasn’t talking about, but there was nothing wrong with the inside of his head. He was smart.
Farrel said, “I wish you’d keep your ears open. Find out if any of the hot stuff has been coming his way. But don’t talk to that kid again. Leave him alone.”
“I’m telling you,” Mac growled, “they fiddle around with me and they’ll wish they didn’t.”
When he left, Farrel closed Mac’s warped door and paused on the broken paving, covering his looking around by lighting a new cigarette, and sure enough over in the next lot by the wire fence was the kid. He was sitting on the earth, pulling a wheel off a wreck, and Farrel thought that though his back was turned, there was somehow about him a look of listening.
Farrel walked out to the curb and got into his car, moving deliberately, and sat for some moments behind the wheel as if thinking things over. He saw the kid take a couple of looks over his shoulder at him. He thought, I ought to go back and tell Mac to keep his eyes open. But then, it wouldn’t do any good. Mac knew the score and should be able to look after himself. He’d been a railroad cop, and these last few years—Farrel suspected—he hadn’t been above garnering a shady buck if it looked safe to do it.
Farrel drove away, headed east out of town, and the desert miles began to roll away under the tires, the sandy stretches of nothing fading into tawny distances, crumpled hills coyote-colored, brushed by the empty wind.
He noted the big, abrupt change as he drove near Vermillion, the sudden greenery and the smell of irrigation water and weedy canals.
At the freight yards he looked up Dyart, and Dyart took him into the office and they pretended to go over some reports, nothing to do with the recent thefts, while Farrel could get a look at the three men he thought most promising.
Grofsky, the old-timer who was in such a financial bind, was a tubby type with sandy hair and reddish skin. He was on the phone at his desk during most of the time Farrel was in the office. While he made calls and listened and talked, he constantly twiddled his knuckles on the desk and gnawed his lips, giving every indication that he was as disorganized and apprehensive as the grapevine had it. With all that extra movement, Farrel couldn’t understand why Grofsky wasn’t thinner.
Dyart pointed out the young clerk who gambled, a tall dark-haired man in his twenties, quite good-looking. He was working at filing some reports and seemed, in contrast to Grofsky, utterly relaxed. His name was Mark Kodear. Farrel looked him over, and then looked at the other one Dyart indicated, the clerk who had a baby with a defective heart; and then Farrel’s eyes swiveled back to the younger man. “Kodear …”
Dyart said, “Seen him before?”
“I don’t know. I thought so for a minute.”
“He worked in the L.A. offices for a while, couple of years ago. In Commissary, I think.”
“Guess that’s where I might have seen him.” Farrel looked away, out the window, his gaze thoughtful. They were on the second floor of the rambling Vermillion offices, and below were the freight yards.
A teletype machine had begun to clatter in a corner of the office. After a while Kodear left the file cabinets, went over, read through what had come in, detached the message with its five carbons. He discarded the carbon paper, put the original copy on a spindle on a desk by the machine. He headed out the door with the four carbons. Farrel knew where they’d be going—the yardmaster, the agent, and other officials. The original copy on the spindle lay there for all to see. Farrel went over as if on his way to the water cooler. It was a train consist, all right. He paused to look it over, noting that it had been sent from the division point in New Mexico and that among other things there were two carloads of tires.
He and Dyart went outside. “Suppose you pass the word that I’m from the Car Distributor’s Office in San Francisco, I’ve come down here to try to round up some cars for Imperial Valley produce.”
“If Kodear knows you, he’ll know better and he’ll tell the others.”
“I don’t think he made me,” Farrel said slowly. “In fact, somehow it wasn’t exactly him I recognized … I’ve seen someone who looks a lot like him, and I can’t remember who.”
Dyart nodded. “All right, I’ll tell everyone you’re from the Car Distributor’s Office.”
“It will give me a chance to scout around, not just inside but everywhere.” A big freight swung into view down the track in the bright sunlight, and Farrel remembered the consist on the spindle upstairs. “I noticed a couple of carloads of tires coming in tonight on their way to L.A. I want to be here when you check them.”
They arranged to meet at eight o’clock, and Farrel got back in his car and drove off. He had made note, in Los Angeles, of the home addresses of the three clerks he was most interested in. He inquired at a service station, got directions for all three.
Kodear lived in an old home which had been turned into bachelor apartments. Long ago, when there had been river traffic on the Colorado, Vermillion had been a river port. There had even been an army post here, with cavalry ready to protect the settlers, and those traveling through, from the Apaches. Kodear’s neighborhood seemed to belong to this older area of the town. The street led down to the wide muddy Colorado, the old homes sitting back under immense shade trees. There were picket fences, most of them needing paint, and some of them needing pickets. Lawns were scraggly. At Kodear’s address the gate was missing, and the walk which led up to the wide shadowy porch had cracks in it, grass growing in the cracks. Three signs were tacked, one above the other, on a porch pillar. The bottom one said: Apartment For Rent. The middle one: Garage For Rent. The topmost: Sleeping Rooms. Farrel parked the car and went up to the porch and punched the button beside the door.
The inner door was open, and through the screen he could see a red hall runner, dim-papered walls, and a big staircase to the upper floor. The smell was warm and muggy, the odor of an old house lived in for a long time, the smell of people. He heard tripping footsteps. A blond girl came to the screen, leaned close to look out at him. “Yes, sir?”
“About the sleeping room …”
She widened the opening, turning. She let him come in and inspected him sharply, Farrel thought on the instructions of someone older, looking for obvious disqualifications like shabby clothes and a dirty neck and perhaps the bloatedness of the heavy drinker. “It’s an upstairs room, front. A nice big room. Mamma put in a new mattress, and there’s all new curtains. She doesn’t mind smoking, if you don’t do it in bed, but she’d rather the tenants didn’t drink.”
“How much is she asking?”
“Fifteen a week.”
“Would she rent it by the night?”
She glanced at him uncertainly. “Gee, I really don’t know. I guess so, though. How long would you want it?”
“Three or four nights.”
She was slender and pretty. About eighteen. The blond hair had a tight natural wave, and she wore it cut short, in little ringlets. “I’d have to ask her. Meanwhile I could show it to you, if you’d like.”
She went up the st
airs with a light quick step, and Farrel followed more slowly. The place looked very clean. Farrel regretted that the girl’s mother didn’t want drinkers, because he would have liked to sleep here, where it was quiet and well kept, like Mrs. Bellows’s place at home.
When he had inspected the room and expressed his satisfaction with it, he mentioned to the girl that he was a railroad man. “I don’t suppose you have any other railroad people here?”
“Oh, yes.” Her eyes lit up, quite blue and sparkly. “Mr. Kodear. He’s over there.” She indicated the door opposite, the other front room. “He’s been here ages.”
Crazy about him, Farrel thought, and remembered Kodear’s dark good looks and his lazy air of amiable humor.
She was looking at Farrel more closely. “Do you know him?”
“No, I don’t. You see, I’m here from San Francisco, the offices up there.”
“Oh, I see.” He obviously lost glamor, not knowing her friend.
“When could I call, find out if your mother will rent by the night?”
“She ought to be back here inside an hour.”
Farrel went back downstairs, thanked the girl for her trouble, went back to the car. He knew which room Kodear occupied, knew that a lovely eighteen-year-old was infatuated with him, knew that to judge by the house Kodear wasn’t living beyond his normal standard as a clerk.
He headed for Grofsky’s.
Grofsky’s place was on the outskirts of town where some new houses had been built on rising ground, perhaps to catch the breezes in summer, and obviously to give a new view of the Colorado. They were nice houses, low and ranchy, some of Mexican burned brick and some of native stone. The cars in the carports were long and glittering. The big front yards were landscaped with various kinds of ice plant and desert creepers, something to withstand the frightful summer heat.
The Man Who Followed Women Page 13
