Super (12 page)

Pryor, anxious to move on, said, “Yes, something did happen. He passed away this morning.”

Rinehart smiled. “Good for him,” he said.

Pryor’s facial expression must have transmitted concern over that response, if not alarm.

Rinehart quickly added, “If you have to go, what better way than The Chief Way,” referring to that well-known Santa Fe motto he had seen on every Santa Fe ticket envelope and advertisement: “Travel Santa Fe, The Chief Way.”

Pryor moved on.

But nobody had seen either man. His Dale Lawrence description brought a particularly distasteful response from the
dining car steward, reminding Pryor that some of the most discriminating people aboard the Santa Fe’s first-class trains were the employees rather than the passengers.

Pryor ended up again at the last car.

He realized that it had been a while since he had seen Ralph, the ever-present sleeping car porter. Where was he? He should be around here somewhere.

And there he came from the next car.

“Where you been, Ralph?” Pryor asked, as calmly as he could manage.

“Oh, I had to see about breakfast for some of my people.”

“One of your people is dead, Clark Gable’s already eaten and most of the rest of your people, your movie people, are up in the dining car.”

“That’s where I was, seeing to their comfort. Mr. Rinehart is always one of my biggest tippers. I do special seeing about him.”

“That’s interesting because I was just in the dining car talking with Mr. Rinehart and I didn’t see you, Ralph.”

Ralph smiled, shrugged and raised his arms in front of him in an exaggerated way, as if saying only God in Heaven knows the answer to some of our mysteries.

“How long you been a Santa Fe cop?” asked Hubert Ratzlaff, the husky, bald county sheriff.

“Only awhile,” said Charlie Sanders, keeping his big lie alive with his same stupid answer.

“Must have gone right from grade school, I’d say,” said the sheriff. “Kansas is one of the few states in the Union that’s had mandatory free kindergarten for years. Did you know that?”

“No, sir, I didn’t.”

“Most of the detectives I’ve run into have been a lot older than you look, that’s all I’m saying.”

Sanders elected to remain silent.

The sheriff and Helfer were standing at the table looking at the remains of Otto Wheeler when Sanders had returned from the restroom.

“Helfer here says it was probably suicide,” said the sheriff. “Otto Wheeler was definitely a man dying of cancer. Is suicide what the Santa Fe thinks?”

What the Santa Fe thinks?

Here now was a question that Charlie Sanders had never been asked before—about a dead man on a train or anything else. What the Santa Fe thought about anything was what others at the railroad decided.

“All the evidence certainly seems to point that way,” said Sanders, giving it as much authority as he could manage.

The sheriff asked for a rundown on what was known about what had happened on the train. It took only a couple of minutes because Sanders didn’t know very much. There was very little time between the porter’s discovery of Wheeler’s body and the arrival in Bethel.

“No weapon then, is that right?”

Sanders told him he hadn’t seen one. Jack Pryor remained on the train to handle that part of the investigation.

“I know Jack Pryor,” said the sheriff. “He’s been around awhile. Knows his stuff except when he thinks the Santa Fe Railroad has more authority than the people of Valerie County, Kansas, as he’s been known to do.”

Charlie Sanders chose, on behalf of the Santa Fe, not to speak to that issue.

“Do you know about the connection between Valerie County and the Santa Fe?” asked the sheriff.

Sanders shook his head.

“Valerie was the wife of a Santa Fe vice president when they founded our town, so they named us after her,” said the sheriff. Then back to business, he asked, “Do you know where the Super Chief actually was when the shot was fired—when Otto Wheeler shot himself?”

Again, Sanders said that, presumably, was also under investigation.

“How sure are you that it happened in my county?”

“Not sure at all, sir.”

“In the State of Kansas?”

“Pryor’s the one who’s working on that, sir.”

“I hope to Randallite hell the FBI doesn’t get involved in this,” said the sheriff.

Randallite hell?
Sanders could only assume it was worse than the regular hell.

When neither Sanders nor Helfer responded, Sheriff Ratzlaff added, “Most FBI agents are lawyers, the others are accountants and they’re all afraid to say or do anything that might get them transferred to the end of the earth. I tell them they’re already in Kansas, where else is there to send them, you know what they say?”

Sanders said he didn’t know.

“Butte. Butte, Montana. That’s the place nobody in the FBI wants to go.”

Sanders had never been to Butte, Montana, because it was not served by the Santa Fe. He knew the Northern Pacific (“Main Street of the Northwest” was the company slogan) ran its best Chicago–Seattle train, the North Coast Limited, through there. It left Chicago at eleven o’clock at night and, while it was a streamliner with sleeping cars and a decent dining car, it wasn’t even close to being in the class of the Super Chief. Besides movies, the other interest Sanders had pursued as a kid was trains. Garrison, Indiana, was served by four major railroads on the way east from Chicago, as well as what was called the South Shore Line, an electric commuter service.

“Anybody talked to the church folks yet?” the sheriff asked Helfer.

“Not that I know of.”

“The cause of death isn’t going to please Pastor Funk now, is it?”

“Maybe because it’s a Wheeler he’ll make an exception.”

“Not likely at all and you know it, don’t you?” the sheriff
said. “You ever had him make an exception for one of your customers?”

Helfer didn’t answer.

To Sanders, Helfer said, “My boys are now going to take off Mr. Wheeler’s clothes so everybody can see what was done by the bullet. Do you want the clothes as evidence or something?”

“I’ll take them when you’re finished,” said the sheriff. “We have a death here that is at least temporarily under our jurisdiction until somebody comes along and tells me differently. Is the Santa Fe all right with that, detective?”

Sanders, on behalf of the Santa Fe, said he was all right with that. “I think,” he added.

“You are welcome to stay and observe now,” Helfer said to Sanders.

Again, speaking on behalf of the Santa Fe, Sanders said he’d take a pass on the opportunity to see Mr. Wheeler’s bloody body completely naked. He had already seen enough, thank you.

He walked out of the room with the sheriff.

“I don’t understand the church issue you were talking about just now,” Sanders said once they were in the hallway.

“Otto Wheeler was big, big in the most conservative wing of the Randallite Church—that’s what most of us are around here, Randallites—which doesn’t approve of suicide. It’s a sin. You can’t be blessed and sent off to Heaven unless you’ve confessed all your sins, and how can you confess you killed yourself after you’re dead? Most of the pastors around here don’t
make a big deal about it, though, and go ahead to do the full funeral with all the church trimmings. But not Pastor Funk. He’s old and old-fashioned, he’s rigid, he’s stubborn. He won’t say so much as a prayer over you if you take it upon yourself to end your life.”

“So that would mean what exactly for Mr. Wheeler?”

“No funeral in the church or burial in the church cemetery, for sure. Maybe no preacher presiding even if the service is held in a hotel coffee shop or the waiting room at the train station. We Randallites aren’t prone to suicide but the few that have popped up who weren’t even members of Funk’s church got nothing because he pressured other pastors to toe his line, too.”

At that moment, a plump fortyish woman came down the stairs. Sanders remembered seeing her sitting behind a desk when they came in.

“You’re the Santa Fe man?” she said.

Charlie Sanders said he was indeed.
I am the Santa Fe man!

“They want you back at the train station by 6:47 to take a call from a Detective Pryor in St. Mark,” said the woman.

“The Super doesn’t stop at St. Mark,” Sanders said, mostly to himself.

Conductor Hammond, after protesting, bowed to Pryor’s authority and a little bit of Santa Fe history was
made. For the first time ever the Super Chief came to a full rest in St. Mark, Kansas, population 1,735. Until now, only local trains stopped here.

Pryor flashed his gold pointed-star Special Agent badge to a startled station agent and headed for the first office with a telephone and a door that could be closed for privacy.

“Tell me it was suicide, as we thought, and not murder,” Pryor said to Charlie Sanders almost immediately once the connection was made.

“I certainly hope it was murder,” Sanders said. “That would be great.”

“Great? What in the hell are you talking about, Sanders? Murder on a Santa Fe train is never great! Are you crazy? Drunk?”

Pryor was the one who was on the verge of going crazy. He yelled silently at himself and at the heavens for not having stayed in Bethel himself after that spot turned up on the blanket, for having let some kid passenger traffic agent office boy “handle” the Wheeler death.

“I mean only that it’s great that Mr. Wheeler can have a real church funeral if it’s ruled murder instead of suicide,” Sanders said.

And then he quickly explained to Pryor what the Randallites believe about suicide and how a particular Randallite preacher was likely to punish the late Mr. Wheeler.

Pryor listened, understood but then yelled: “So what was it? Murder or suicide?”

“The sheriff’s still working on that ‘or’ part,” Sanders said.

Pryor quickly told Sanders what
he
knew—and didn’t know—about what happened on the Super that pointed toward murder, whatever the Randallites might want. No weapon, no shell casings were found. There was a man in the compartment next to Wheeler’s. He’d disappeared from the train. His bunk wasn’t even slept in.

“Maybe he slipped off the train there in Bethel during the commotion,” Pryor said. “Tell the sheriff all this and go with him to the station and ask everyone who was around this morning when the Super Chief was in the station if they saw this man get off the train. He was a white man, dark curly hair, suit, shirt and tie. He was traveling under the name Rockford. That’s all I know. Are you on it, Sanders?”

“I’m on it,” said Charlie Sanders, who would have sworn Pryor had habitually called him by his first name before now—before their business turned so serious.

Jack Pryor had one last and most important question for the kid passenger traffic agent office boy.

“Is Sheriff Ratzlaff officially taking jurisdiction over the Wheeler case, whatever kind it may turn out to be?”

“Yes,” Sanders said. “Well, at least temporarily.”

“Tell him the time of death has been determined by a most credible witness,” Pryor said. “He heard a gunshot at a particular time when we know the Super had already crossed into Valerie County.”

“I’ll tell the sheriff,” Sanders said.

“Tell him the witness was Harry S Truman,” Pryor said.

Still in the dining car, Rinehart said to Mathews, “So, how about
Gantry?
Is there a picture there?”