Super
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The blonde from Missouri who visited the Masters/Gable compartment went ahead with her I-had-sex-with-The-King boast. Her lawyer husband divorced her, and he was about to sue Gable until it was proved Gable was nowhere near the Super Chief that night. The woman lost her job with the Missouri lieutenant governor.
Ralph, the sleeping car porter, knew it was not the real Clark Gable. Ralph had been close to The King too many times before. But he had no reason to help Jack Pryor expose the man and, besides, he figured the phony was likely to give a larger tip than the real Gable. The imposter did give Ralph seventy-five dollars—a crisp fifty, a twenty and a five. Gable’s usual amount was fifty. Ralph retired without ever being caught on a Private transaction or identified as the go-between for the Wheeler shooting. He lives now on a beachfront estate in the Virgin Islands.
The Super ended its thirty-five-year Santa Fe life on May 1, 1971, when the federal government, through Amtrak, took over. Santa Fe made Amtrak remove the Super Chief name when onboard service deteriorated, but Santa Fe partially relented in 1984 to permit what remains to this day as the Southwest Chief.
The full Super story has been preserved at the Museum of the Super Chief, the only institution of its kind in the world devoted to a single train. It is housed in the restored Santa Fe depot and Harvey House hotel/restaurant in Bethel, Kansas. A reconditioned Warbonnet diesel engine and seven cars of the Super Chief sit on a track next to the buildings.
In exchange for a tax-free contribution, the display train is being made available for two television projects—a cold cases story about the Rinehart death and a pilot for a fictional miniseries based on the Super deaths fifty years ago.
The Museum of the Super Chief is open to the public Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. April through October, 11 to 3 the rest of the year. Admission is $7.50—seniors $3.00, students free.
Acknowledgments
I needed a lot of help in walking my wavy lines between the real and the made-up.
I mined a variety of printed and video material—from newspaper clippings, Google entries and thick books to short documentaries and full-length feature movies. The details of The Barbarians saga came from Harry and Michael Medved’s The Hollywood Hall of Shame. Gar Alperovitz’s The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and David McCullough’s Truman were important sources. So were Super Chief … Train of the Stars by Stan Repp, Clark Gable by Warren G. Harris, Picture by Lillian Ross, Rising from the Rails by Larry Tye and Frederic Wakeman’s novel The Hucksters—plus the movie it spawned.
Bob LaPrelle, director of the Museum of the American Railroad in Dallas, was with me from the beginning. I visited a restored Super Chief dining car at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. The Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, answered a call for assistance. So did Jan McCloud of the Newton, Kansas, police department, the folks at The Emporia (Kansas) Gazette, Sue Blechl of the Emporia Public Library and Chris Childers, a young man of Emporia research.
I am grateful to everyone involved and I hereby absolve them of any responsibility—or blame.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
This is JIM LEHRER’S twentieth novel. He is also the author of two memoirs and three plays and is the executive editor and anchor of PBS News Hour. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his novelist wife, Kate. They have three daughters.
Super is a work of fiction. Though some characters, incidents, and dialogues are based on the historical record, the work as a whole is a product of the author’s imagination.
Copyright © 2010 by Jim Lehrer
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Lehrer, James.
Super: a novel / Jim Lehrer.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-970-3
1. Super Chief (express train)—Fiction. 2. Passenger trains—
United States—Fiction. 3. Travelers—Fiction. 4. Murder—
investigation—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.E4419S86 2010 813′.54—dc22 2009014448
www.atrandom.com
v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright