by Todd Downing
So engrossed was he in his thoughts, in fact, that his eyes almost missed an object in the battered yellow handbag which one of the soldiers was turning inside out. With a word to the man he took the bag and carried it across the aisle. The end of the label which had been pasted upon it at the border certified to the fact that it belonged to William Searcey. Rennert took the object in his hands and stared at it. It was a bottle of brown hair dye.
His face thoughtful, Rennert returned it to the bag and went through the rest of the contents. There was nothing else there, however, that any male, without too great a thought for his own comfort, might not have carried in his luggage. He closed the bag and returned it to its place under the seat. Searcey, it seemed, had no other equipment.
The soldier whom Rennert had interrupted had continued his search of the vacant seats to the rear. The other had concluded his search of Miss Talcott’s luggage and the unoccupied seat behind it. Both of the men now stood facing Rennert, their black eyes fixed on his face.
“You found nothing?” he asked. “Neither the needle nor the knife?”
“Nada, señor,” they responded in unison.
Rennert then gave them directions for completing their search of the Pullman and of the diner as well. (The needle, of course, might have been tossed from the observation platform or a door but in the darkness search for it would in that case be practically futile.)
As he walked slowly back toward the smoker, Rennert was asking himself whether he should not have taken the time to search the luggage of each of the passengers as he had done that of Searcey and Radcott. Certainly, the results in those two instances had justified it. He decided to let the rest remain for a later time. That needle was, after all, the most important thing right now. The needle and the paper-knife of Miss Talcott’s …
In the smoker he found an uncommunicative weary group.
He stood in the doorway and said: “I wish to thank you for your cooperation. You may go back to the Pullman now if you wish.”
King asked eagerly: “Did you find the needle?”
“No,” Rennert answered, “we did not find it.”
“You didn’t!” King stared at him. “That means it’s not in the car then.”
“The rest of the car is being searched, Mr. King. Unless the needle is found within a few minutes you can rest assured that the murderer has thrown it from the train.”
“What about that knife Miss Talcott mentioned? Did you find that?” Radcott asked.
“No, I regret to say that it has not been found either.”
Radcott bit his lip. “I suppose,” he said, “that it has been thrown away too. Still,” he paused, “what would have been the use of anyone taking it if he was going to throw it away?”
Rennert looked at him steadily. “Your answer to that question, Mr. Radcott, is as good as mine.”
“Yes,” Radcott said weakly, “I suppose so.”
He walked straight for the door, pushed aside the curtains and went out. King followed him, a preoccupied frown on his face. Spahr had been sitting by the window, staring out into the night. He got up now and walked out.
Searcey and Jeanes remained. Each, Rennert thought, was waiting for the other to go.
At last Searcey moved forward, paused by the door and said gravely: “I don’t like to say this, Mr. Rennert, but I suppose you realize that one person wasn’t searched tonight?”
“You mean Miss Talcott?”
“Yes, someone mentioned the fact in here a few minutes ago. Of course, I don’t suppose there’s any reason to suspect her but I thought I’d call it to your attention. In fairness to the rest of us, you understand.”
“Thank you, Mr. Searcey, I haven’t forgotten the fact.”
Searcey started to say something, evidently thought better of it, and turned away.
When the curtains had fallen to behind him Jeanes stood for several seconds in the center of the room, his shoulders thrown back and his hands clenched at his sides.
Rennert waited for him to speak.
His voice, when it came, was quick and marked with a slight sibilance which might have been the product of emotion. “I must speak to you, Mr. Rennert, at once!”
“Very well, shall we sit down?”
“No, no, there is no time for that.” Jeanes began to pace up and down. “I have reached a decision. I must come to an understanding with you and there is no time to waste.”
Rennert lit a cigarette and watched him.
His throat seemed to contract for an instant then he went on: “These people in the Pullman do not interest me. The question of these two deaths is important, yes, terribly important to them. But I have sworn that I know nothing of them. You must believe me!” his voice was raised in its intensity. “Other things, beside which these two deaths are insignificant, are at stake, Mr. Rennert! I am but an agent here, an implement in the hands of a power which counts me as one of the sands upon the seashore. But I too may render service! It is sometimes given to an individual, even a weak one such as I. I am in danger. If I alone were concerned I should keep silent. But for the Cause which I serve, Mr. Rennert, I am asking you to give me that message which you read, to let me destroy it. I am asking you to erase from your memory the words which it contained.”
In the intensity of his emotion he thrust forward his right hand and held it, trembling slightly, before Rennert.
Rennert studied him for a moment. “You admit, then, that these messages were meant for you?”
“Yes, yes, of course,” there was a note of impatience in the voice.
“And you persist in your refusal to reveal the meaning of them?”
“I cannot.”
“As I told you back in the Pullman, Mr. Jeanes, I. am convinced that you are making a grave mistake. I have no wish to pry into your private affairs. But my own safety and that of the other passengers on this train are concerned now. That being the case, I cannot conceal any matters which have come to my attention since this train left San Antonio.”
“But I have told you that these messages have no connection with the deaths which have occurred on this train.”
“You are sure of that, Mr. Jeanes?”
Again Rennert had the curious feeling that a shadow darkened for an instant the translucence of the face before him.
“I am sure,” Jeanes said in a suddenly low voice, “that they have no connection.”
“And are you sure that they have no connection with the delays which this train has suffered, with our stopping out here upon the desert?”
Jeanes’ hand dropped slowly to his side and his eyes went to the window. They stared unseeingly into the darkness which it framed.
“It is possible,” he said, “that they have.”
“You expected this train to be stopped en route to Mexico City?” Rennert’s voice hardened.
“Yes,” Jeanes’ voice was almost a whisper now, “I expected it.”
“And yet what you expected to happen has not happened, even though the train has stopped?”
He stood for a moment in silent abstraction then looked suddenly at Rennert. His face was hard and frozen and his eyes glistened under the light.
“I see, Mr. Rennert, that I must talk to you in other terms.” His right hand went to his coat pocket and brought out a thick billfold. He held it out. “I have here three thousand dollars in cash, American money.” He leaned forward slightly and deliberately spaced his words. “It is yours if you give me the message which you have and if you forget that you ever saw it.”
Rennert’s gaze was steady. “Your folly, Jeanes, is increasing,” he said evenly, “if you think I’d risk my life for three thousand dollars.”
The muscles of Jeanes’ throat stood out like tautened cords. His right hand traveled again to his pocket. He brought out a packet of travelers’ checks, flipped them between his fingers.
“Here is more money, enough to make you rich, Mr. Rennert.”
Rennert turned toward the door. “Th
e Mexican officials,” he said curtly, “may be more susceptible to bribery than I. I’d advise you to save it for them.”
Jeanes swayed upon his feet, as if the train were moving.
“Then may God’s mercy rest upon your soul!” he said.
15
The Needle and the Knife (9:10 P.M.)
The needle lay in shattered fragments in the soldier’s outstretched palm. His upraised lantern cast a wavering illumination on the bent point, the glass cylinder broken in the center, the loosened plunger.
“Yes,” Rennert said as he held out a handkerchief, “it is the needle that we were looking for. Where did you find it?”
The soldier carefully turned his hand so that the pieces fell into the handkerchief. The lantern light slanted across his dark face, whose prominent cheek bones left his eyes two glittering imbedded flakes of light.
“Under the water cooler in the passage, señor, where the empty paper cups are thrown.”
Rennert folded the handkerchief, knotted it and slipped it carefully into his pocket. In the passage outside the door of the girl’s compartment, he thought, where the murderer tossed it as he emerged. Although the discovery of the needle told him nothing of the identity of this person he was conscious of a feeling of relief that at last the murderer was deprived of the little instrument of death which he had used three times with such effectiveness.
“And the bronze paper knife?” he asked. “You did not find it?”
“No, señor, we did not find it. We searched the Pullman, the diner, the smoker, the passages between them.” He hesitated. “We searched all the places except one.”
“And that one?”
“The room of the ladies, señor. Shall we search that, too?”
Rennert held an unlighted cigarette between his fingers and stared down at the whiteness of it.
“Yes,” he said, “search it too.”
“Bueno, señor. ¿Es todo?” the soldier started to turn away.
Rennert thought a moment. “Have the kindness to ask the conductor to come here,” he said.
“Bueno.”
Rennert stood and watched the man walk toward the steps, his heavy shoes crunching against the loose gravel. When he and his lantern had disappeared, he still stood and stared into the darkness.
When he had first stepped upon the ground the darkness had been complete, Stygian. Now, as his pupils contracted, he was aware of the cold faraway glitter of the stars that studded the sky and began to make out shadowy details of the landscape about him. The black columns of the telegraph poles stretching away to the right and left like ruins of an ancient roofless temple … undulations upon the desert floor that he knew were cacti and stunted trees.
At his back the train lay like a monstrous reptile whose flat back blotted out the stars. From apertures in its belly glowed faint rectangles of light.
Up front in the second-class coach someone was strumming at a guitar.
“No vale la pena
el pensar tan hondo,
el buscar el fondo
de las cosas tristes,
de las cosas bellas
si siempre se esfuman
como luz de las estrellas.”
The soft voice, singing in steady melancholic monotony of the futility of striving for things as ephemeral as starlight, emphasized the sense of isolation which Rennert felt. Between the singer and his listeners up front and the Pullman behind there lay a chasm as deep, as impassable as that between the passengers in the Pullman and the desert outside their windows. A chasm of language, of blood, of unspoken thoughts and long thought-filled silences across which their eyes must look uncomprehendingly….
The shadow of the conductor wavered across the gravel. He descended the steps and advanced toward the spot where Rennert stood.
“¿Sí, señor?” he queried softly, his body motionless while his eyes darted into the darkness.
“There has been no news of the engine?” Rennert asked.
“No, señor, no news.”
“It should be returning soon, should it not?”
“Yes, señor, soon now.”
“I wanted to ask you,” Rennert said, “about your actions after the train stopped. After you left me here and returned to the car did you meet or see any of the passengers from the Pullman?”
The man seemed to drag his thoughts with difficulty from some recess of their own. “Yes,” he said, “a man was coming out of the smoker as I came to the top of the steps. He asked me why the train had stopped. I tried to tell him but I do not think that he understood. He went down these steps then.”
“He was a small man, with gray hair and glasses?”
“Yes.”
Rennert nodded, satisfied on that point. “Thank you,” he murmured abstractedly, “that is all.”
When the conductor had gone he began to stroll slowly up and down the gravel beside the track, smoking a cigarette and letting the cool night air aid in the ordering of his thoughts.
He went over again and again the testimony to which he had listened back in the Pullman, trying to find flaws in it.
At last he had to give it up.
These accounts of time and place and movements had dovetailed too nicely together, formed too perfect a chain of connecting inter-supporting links. Even taking into consideration the unreliability of the average person’s calculation of time, if each of the versions were true, or evenly fairly accurate, only one of the passengers had had time enough, between the stopping of the train and his discovery of Miss Van Syle’s body, to ransack her compartment and murder her.
Jeanes had been in sight of Miss Talcott, of himself and of King during the entire time, except for the brief interval when he had walked back to the observation platform. If Miss Talcott’s and King’s estimate of time were correct there would have been an insufficient interval for him to leave the platform, proceed along the ground beside the train, enter by another door and gain the compartment before Rennert. He would have had to go far up the train to find a door through which he could enter unobserved and would have had to traverse the same route on his way back to the observation platform.
Miss Talcott had not left the Pullman. Her story was verified by himself, by Jeanes and by King, at least one of whom had been in the same car with her the entire time.
King’s account of his actions was vouched for by Radcott, who had left the diner and entered the smoker with him; by Searcey, who had found them there; by the conductor, who had seen King emerge from the smoker and go down the steps; and finally by himself, who had seen him descend the steps and who had followed him back into the Pullman.
Radcott had quite as unshakable an alibi. He had not been alone for an instant from the time of leaving the diner with King. When the latter had left him, Searcey had been with him in the smoker. Both of them had been there when Rennert went to call them.
Searcey had been in the diner with at least one other person from the time the train stopped until Spahr went out. He had accompanied Spahr to the door of the smoker, and from then on had been in the company of either King or Radcott.
There remained only Spahr. No one had seen him during those minutes which had elapsed between his departure from Searcey at the door of the smoker and his entry into the smoker, sick. There would have been ample time for him to have gone to the compartment next the smoker, murder the girl and proceed about his search of her belongings.
Far that morning, likewise, when the train had been passing through the tunnel, Spahr had no satisfactory alibi. He might easily have left the diner, gone back to the Pullman and returned before the train emerged from the darkness.
There remained still unexplained that confounded reference to an extra edition of a newspaper. Spahr was, by his own admission, a newspaperman.
Rennert tossed away his cigarette, watched with narrowed thoughtful eyes as it cut a wide spiral through the darkness to glow for an instant against the sands.
He felt, for some reason for which he was
unable to account, a reluctance to admit Spahr’s guilt but could see no alternative. There was, of course, the possibility of collusion throughout the affair, that two people had been involved in the Montes kidnapping business, that both had entered the Pullman in San Antonio. In that case each would have an alibi prepared for the other. He saw, however, no reason to consider that possibility seriously.
He watched the same soldier step to the ground and walk toward him.
The man held his right hand outstretched. Upon the handkerchief which was spread over his palm lay an object which gleamed dully in the lantern light.
“I have found it, señor,” he said.
Rennert gazed down at it. It was a slender knife of bronze, profusely decorated with scrollwork. He took it, still swathed in the handkerchief, and put it into a pocket.
“Where did you find it?” he asked.
“In the room of the ladies, señor. It was wedged behind the cushion of the seat. It is the knife which you wanted?”
“Yes,” abstraction was in Rennert’s voice, “it is the knife. Thank you.”
Two men sat in the smoker. For exactly three minutes neither had spoken. It was as if the blue haze which filled the little room stood like an impalpable barrier between them, a barrier through which nothing but trivialities could sift.
Jackson Saul King sat upright upon the leather seat, his hands resting very firmly upon his knees, as if for support. His tired shoulders ached with the effort to keep them from sagging. In the silence he heard very distinctly the dispassionate ticking of his watch. The blind beside him was pulled down full length against the darkness and the desert and the panic that would surge in upon him if for an instant he relaxed his pose, lost his contact with reassuring leather and wood and manmade metal. He resolutely kept his mind on San Antonio, far away on the other side of the Rio Grande, where his wife had stayed in safety, surrounded by street-lights and pavements and honking auto horns. He thought: I am glad that she is not here because I couldn’t hide from her, as I am doing from these others, the fact that I am afraid. She would be understanding and try to act as if she didn’t know it. That would only make it worse. That reminded him of the lie which he had told Rennert regarding Mrs. King. He frowned. If there should be further investigation …
