Murder on the Orient Espresso (18 page)

‘You mean the less trouble they'll be to us?'

‘That's exactly what I mean. You saw it. Their imaginations are already running away with them.'

I found it hard to believe that the imaginations of even a bunch of mystery writers could measure up to the reality of what we'd just witnessed.

‘The minute Missy mentioned pythons,' Pavlik continued, ‘they started fabricating. That's what I want to avoid.'

‘That's not really fair,' I protested. ‘There was a python. A big one. And eggs, filled with little bitsy pythons. Remember?'

‘But not on the train.' Pavlik spaced each word as though it were a separate sentence.

‘True.' As far as it went.

‘Remember, Maggy: we obtain information, not provide it. The detail of the python's involvement is better kept among those of us who are already privy to it.'

The detail of the python's ‘involvement'? I was starting to feel like I'd fallen down the rabbit hole with Alice. ‘You've reminded Missy, Zoe, Boyce, Markus and Engineer Hertel to keep mum?' Our privy wasn't very private.

‘I have.'

‘Then consider the snake off the table,' I said. ‘What's next?'

‘Any chance you remember the order of the witnesses called in
Murder on the Orient Express
?'

‘No, but we do have access to a crib sheet.'

Pavlik, for nearly the first time since I'd known him, let a look of confusion cross his face.

G
race/Greta's copy of
Murder on the Orient Express
in front of us, we surveyed the chapter headings of ‘PART II – THE EVIDENCE.'

‘Let's see, first witness.' I looked at Pavlik. ‘Pete the bartender is playing the role of Pierre Michel, the fictional “Wagon Lit conductor.”'

‘I can't imagine he has anything to tell us,' Pavlik said. ‘He's been behind the bar in the club car most of the time. Besides, he's not one of the people we want to keep occupied.'

‘Good point. What about Engineer Hertel? Should we call him to the stand?'

‘I'm not sure we can keep the natives from getting restless out there while we get an encyclopedic lowdown on Wild Kingdom – The Everglades Franchise.'

Another good point. Hertel was probably more a bizarre Marlin Perkins than a carnivore's Euell Gibbons.

‘Still,' the sheriff said. ‘I do have one thing I need to clarify with him before we talk to anyone else. So yes, bailiff, please bring in the first witness.'

I grinned and got up.

Pavlik's hand stopped me before I could get any farther. ‘I know this hasn't been exactly what you expected when I asked you to come along.'

I smiled. ‘You mean when I invited myself?'

‘Yeah, since you mention it.' His blue eyes flashed. ‘But I'm glad you did. Even now, and maybe especially now, given what's happened. You were truly stand-up brave following me off the train when I know you were scared.'

‘Try terrified.'

A grin. ‘Yet when we confronted that goliath of a snake, you were nigh-on to heroic.'

‘Just “nigh-on”?' I teased, giving him a quick kiss on the lips. ‘And there's no one else
I'd
rather be with, either. Especially stuck in the Everglades with a murderer onboard.'

His hand stopped me again. ‘That person
is
still here somewhere, Maggy. The only other possibility was that he – or she – bailed into the Everglades.'

I remembered what I'd been thinking earlier. ‘Do you want me to take a head count and compare my tally to Zoe's passenger list?'

‘Already done.'

‘By whom?'

‘By me, just now, when everyone was seated in the passenger car arguing with you. Nobody's missing.'

I shook my head. ‘What a mess.'

‘You're telling me. And God knows whose jurisdiction we're in. We could be on federal park land, the Seminole Indian Reservation or just county, state or private land.'

‘Aren't you going to get in trouble with whoever the authorities are?' I blushed. ‘I mean, you've scolded me often enough for sticking my nose in and mucking things up and now you've …'

‘Become functionally you?'

‘A civilian,' I tried.

‘Technically, but I'm still law enforcement. And I'm the best we've got or will have until we can contact someone both official and local. I'd like to get what we can down on the record before people start swapping – and blending, and embroidering – their individual stories.'

‘Like they probably are, as we speak.'

‘Which suggests …' He gestured toward the door.

Got it: bring on the engineer.

‘Well, golly, that's a real good question.' Engineer Theodore B. Hertel, Jr was sitting across from us, pulling on his earlobe. I hoped, for symmetry's sake, not the one he'd been dragging down out on the railbed with Potter and the python.

He stopped and then went to his chin. ‘What's this?'

I set down the camera/phone and leaned across the table. ‘Looks like you missed a spot,' or three, ‘when you shaved.'

‘That's a relief,' he said. ‘Thought it was a hairy mole. Those puppies can turn into cancer, you know?'

I didn't know. And I didn't want to know. Not now and preferably not ever, especially from this master of disaster.

‘Back to the question,' the sheriff prompted.

‘Which was?'

A trained interrogator, Pavlik didn't roll his eyes, though I feared I might be rolling enough for the both of us. ‘Given that we found Laurence Potter's body on the opposite side of the flooded track from where we sit now, can you tell me when we passed through that area on the way out into the Everglades?'

I thought I knew where Pavlik was going with this.

‘Before we reversed direction to go back east, you mean?' He was back to tugging on the lobe, but the one on the other side of his head.

‘Correct.' Pavlik waited.

‘Well, now. That's hard to say. You see, I'm not quite sure just where we are.'

‘I can understand that,' Pavlik said mildly. My brain, on the other hand, was screaming in all capital letters, ‘WHAT THE HELL DO YOU
MEAN
YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF THIS—?'

‘Let's start with the “when,” then,' Pavlik continued, giving my nervously vibrating thigh a reassuring squeeze under the table. ‘We know that tonight's event was to be a three-hour-long round trip. That would mean you turned the train around halfway through that time or ninety minutes after we departed the station, right?'

‘Well, technically we don't turn around. Just stop and I take her back the other way.'

I could have smacked the man, but the sheriff apparently thought we were making progress. ‘So you confirm that you “took her back the other way” ninety minutes after we left the station?'

‘Probably that, like you say, give or take. This isn't an exact science, you know.'

Seemed like a hell of a way to run a railroad.

‘And how many miles into the Everglades would that have taken us?' Pavlik was writing again.

‘No way of telling.'

Pavlik looked up from his notes. ‘You didn't glance at your odometer?'

Hertel looked puzzled. ‘Odometer? Ain't got one. Leastways that's any use to the engineer. No, we just chug from one assigned stop to 'nother along the same track. What would I do with an odometer?'

I suppressed a grin as Pavlik seemed to ponder what Hertel could do with his odometer. ‘So you don't know how far we traveled before we reversed directions.'

‘No sir, that I don't.' Hertel shifted on the banquette. ‘Not quite sure why it matters, tell you the truth.'

I saw Pavlik's knuckles whitening as he gripped his pen, so I took over before he decided to bayonet the guy's eye. ‘Let's forget distance for now. If we know what time we reversed, and how long after that we came to a stop because of the damaged track, we'll know approximately when we passed this spot on the way into the Everglades.'

‘Meaning that's when this Potter became snake-bait, huh? Well, that's real good reasoning, I have to say. Not sure it'll hold water, though.' Hertel was grinning.

‘And why is that?' I asked between my own clenched teeth.

Mercifully, my tag team partner stepped in. ‘We left the station a little after eight?'

‘Correct-o-mundo. Eight-oh-four, to be exact.'

‘And we've agreed we reversed ninety minutes after we left the station, so as to be back within the three-hour timeframe. That means, of course, nine thirty-four.'

‘Give or take,' I added before Hertel could.

Pavlik's pen hovered over a sheet of paper he'd torn from his pad. ‘And the train travels how fast?'

Hertel worried the errant patch of chin hair. ‘We averaged about forty on our way out.'

‘Good, good.' The sheriff wrote it down. ‘So at forty miles an hour, we'd cover sixty miles in an hour and a half.'

I gave Pavlik an admiring glance. He'd get his gold star later.

The sheriff began chewing on the eraser end of his pen, giving me a glimpse of little Jacob Pavlik in grade school. ‘We still need to know what time we were stopped here by the flooding. With all the commotion, I didn't think to look.'

‘Maybe Missy or Zoe noticed,' I suggested.

‘Well, now, I can tell you that,' Hertel said.

‘You can?' Pavlik and I looked at him. ‘Why didn't you say so?'

‘You asked how far we chugged into the Everglades, which I didn't know, and what time we left the station, which I did. You never did ask when we stopped out here.'

‘I'm asking it now.' Pavlik's eyes were narrow slits. ‘When?'

This time I patted his thigh.

‘Why, a mite before ten p.m.'

I threw a smile at Pavlik. ‘That means that Potter went off the train here about nine.'

‘And “here” is approximately forty miles west of the station.' Pavlik leaned back against the banquette and stretched.

‘And how do you figure that?' from Hertel.

‘Easy.' I pushed Pavlik's paper in the middle of the tabletop so the engineer could see the sheriff's notes. ‘We reached the place we reversed at nine-thirty and, according to you, our current position at ten. That's a half hour after reversal, meaning we must have passed this spot a half hour
before
reversal or nine p.m. That also means that at forty miles an hour we would have covered – you guessed it – forty miles between eight and nine p.m.' I sat back now, too, pleased with our paired reasoning.

But Hertel frowned. ‘Sounds simple enough, but the problem is we weren't traveling at the same speed coming back east as going out west. In fact, I was keeping the throttle at near crawl because the track was flooding. And good thing, too, or I wouldn't have been able to stop before that wash-out.'

The engineer pulled the paper toward him and dug a stub of a pencil out of his bib pocket. Touching it to his tongue, he started to work. ‘Now if a train's heading one direction at forty miles an hour, and another at, say, twen—'

I let my forehead hit the table and took the self-inflicted pain without whimpering.

P
avlik's eyes were glazed over the instant Theodore B. Hertel, Jr closed the door behind him. ‘So the long and the short of it is that the later it got, the more the rain slowed us down.'

‘There is no short, when it comes to our engineer.' I was holding my head in my hands. ‘Only long. Really, really long.'

‘Did you understand all that?' Pavlik asked. ‘I feel like we just lost more ground than the road bed in front of the locomotive's nose.'

We had Hertel's chicken scratchings in front of us, but given that we hadn't maintained a steady speed, even he hadn't been able to calculate our location with any degree of reliability. And I wasn't sure we'd have understood if he had. The man had the presentational skills of your average batty theoretical physicist.

‘Well, we have to start somewhere.' Pavlik drew himself up. ‘We know we reversed around nine-thirty and got stuck here at ten.'

‘Correct. What we don't know is where “here” is.' I checked my cell. One a.m.

The ‘Dark Side of Midnight,' as legendary Milwaukee jazz DJ Ron Cuzner had dubbed his late-night show way back when. Ron had kept me company through countless hours spent rocking Eric when he was a colicky baby. And today …

I shook myself back into the present.

‘… try to bracket the time of death,' Pavlik was saying. ‘We know Potter was alive as Zoe got up to welcome people. Hopefully she'll be able to tell us exactly what time that was.'

Or, more likely, Missy would. ‘So that time, whatever it is, will be the early end of our bracket. The latest has to be well before we reversed directions at nine-thirty.'

‘Why “well before”?'

I chewed on my lip. ‘I see your point. Since we don't know how slowly we've traveled since the turn-around – or “reversal,” as Hertel insists – let's just say Potter went off the train before nine-thirty.'

‘Why not after?'

‘Because you said he'd fallen or been pushed—'

‘Let's use “exited,” since we don't know. It'll be more consistent.'

Honest to God, Pavlik was nearly as maddening as the engineer. ‘You said he'd
exited
when we came past this point on the way into the Everglades.'

‘Actually, I didn't. You did.'

I tried to think back to the conversation with the engineer and who had said what.

‘See?' Pavlik pointed at his notes. ‘You took over questioning here and made the statement to Hertel.'

Son of a bitch, but the sheriff was right. ‘Only that has to be how it happened. We're on
one
side of the break in the tracks—'