Super (13 page)

“Yeah. Maybe we could get Gable to play the preacher,” said Mathews with a laugh.

“No way Clark works in a preacher picture,” Rinehart said. “That would be like Widmark doing a comedy.”

Mathews grinned, shrugged.

Rinehart said, “I don’t have to tell you that Clark’s got that bastard daughter with Loretta Young he won’t acknowledge or support. The kid—a girl in her teens now—doesn’t even know. Everybody else in Hollywood knows but her.”

Mathews wasn’t listening. He already knew all that was known about Clark Gable. He was one of the Everybodies. But Rinehart finished the indictment anyway.

“He shaves all the hair off his body. Everywhere except over his lip where that mustache is. Not just the head like Yul Brynner and I do. But off his chest, his arms—I mean everywhere. Takes four or five showers a day. He’s a clean freak, not in a league with Howard Hughes but close. He’s got false teeth. The women call him Bad Breath behind his back.”

“Jesus, Dar, give it a break,” Mathews said, looking up from his book. “Everybody knows all that.”

“And those ears. They’re as large and floppy as lily pads. He wears his hair long on the sides to hide it—”

“I know, I know,” Mathews interrupted to finish the point. “They taped his ears to the sides of his head they looked so bad. They were calling him Donald Duck behind his back. That kid of his and Loretta Young’s has his ears. It was so bad Loretta had ’em fixed by surgery when she was six or seven. She was afraid the kid looked too much like Clark. That’s it. Now let me get back to reading.”

Rinehart looked out the window at the passing early morning landscape of western Kansas. “He’s a coward, too. The reason he’s on this train isn’t because he loves the Super so much. The big American hero hasn’t been on an airplane since Carole Lombard went down in that airliner crash in forty-two. Think about that.”

Mathews shut the book again and pushed it aside. “Enough of this,” he said. “Clark Gable enlisted in the Army Air Force after Carole died even though he was too old to be drafted and he didn’t have to. He trained and flew as a tail gunner on a B-17, took movies on raids, won some medals. He may be a whiskey-soaked hairless whoremonger with smelly false teeth and floppy ears but he’s no coward, Dar. Just because he won’t speak to you doesn’t rate all this.”

Darwin Rinehart resumed looking out at Kansas.

And after a while he said to Mathews, “I’m back to thinking that guy on the train—the ratty-looking one—was a government man.”

Charlie Sanders hustled through the Bethel train station with the sheriff and three deputies in search of a man in a dark suit, tie and shirt.

Sanders had done as he was told. He briefed Sheriff Ratzlaff on the Truman gunshot information and the rest of what Pryor had found—and not found—on the train after Wheeler’s body was removed.

And now, in this most impressive of small-town Kansas train stations, they were acting on that information.

The place was classy. The architecture, said a brass plaque at the main doors, was based on Shakespeare’s house at a place in England called Stratford-upon-Avon. A red brick structure with white wooden window frames and doors, it was four stories high and almost a city block long, with at least twenty long rows of polished pine benches. Large signs on the walls displayed the arrival and departure times of the trains as well as framed advertising posters, most of them for the Santa Fe’s Indian-related destinations in Arizona and New Mexico. The floor was covered in small white and light blue tiles; the fluted light fixtures were recessed.

“We’re a division point and that’s serious business on the Santa Fe,” explained Halstead, the chief station agent, a husky man with a large black mustache. He wore a white dress shirt, black tie and a cream-colored jacket cut like a suit coat: standard railroad-issued dress for most male “inside” station employees.

“I don’t remember seeing anybody like that get off,” said Halstead. “But it was still half dark and there was a lot going on connected to Mr. Wheeler’s … situation.”

Sanders and the sheriff and his men got similar answers from the ticket agents, baggage handlers, porters, cleaning men and all others who were on duty just an hour ago when the Super Chief came through.

Then Charlie Sanders had a detective-like thought. If the man did get off here that meant he now had to get out of town, most likely in the easterly direction from which he had come.

He asked the sheriff to have someone check with the ticket agents at the Continental Trailways bus waiting room, which was also in this building, Santa Fe having at one time owned a bus company that mostly paralleled the railroad from Chicago to the West.

Then Sanders began studying the big train schedule board under Departures. No eastbound trains had stopped here since the Super Chief. The next one was The Chicagoan, a combination sleeper-chair streamliner due from Wichita, Oklahoma City, Dallas and points south at 8:40, just half an hour from now.

This would be the killer’s first opportunity to get out of town on a train.

Sanders scanned the waiting room once again and, to his surprise, saw a familiar face enter through the main doors leading in from the street. It took a second or two for him to place the man as the assistant to the late Mr. Wheeler. Pollack,
wasn’t that his name? Sanders hadn’t seen him after they arrived at the funeral home with Wheeler’s body.

“You leaving town, sir?” Sanders asked Pollack, who had not seen him approaching. Pollack lurched back as if he’d been whacked with a two-by-four.

“No, no,” he said.

“On behalf of the Santa Fe, let me say that we stand ready to assist you in any way we can,” said Sanders.

“Thank you,” said Pollack, who steadied himself and even seemed to brighten a bit. “I’m shocked that someone would murder him … but at least, well … his suffering has ended.”

Murder him
. Those words jarred Charlie Sanders. They were said so directly, almost casually.

Sheriff Ratzlaff joined them and exchanged greetings with Pollack, who then said, “I just came by to see if a friend … an old childhood friend of Mr. Wheeler’s was here. I had heard he might leave town and might not yet know about Mr. Wheeler’s passing. But I don’t see him around the station. So I must have gotten wrong information.”

And he turned and left the waiting room—almost at a running pace.

The sheriff said to Sanders, “My deputy says there have been two buses out of here since the Super Chief. Nobody got on who fit our white man/dark clothes description.”

Sanders made his case to the sheriff about the Chicagoan possibility and, thirty minutes later, on time, the Chicagoan arrived.

One of the deputies was checking on the platform near the end of the ten-car train, another up front behind the engine while Sanders, the sheriff and a third deputy took up watch on the middle cars.

In the few minutes the train was in the station, less than a dozen passengers boarded. None of them was a white man in dark clothes.

“The next train is at eleven o’clock,” said Sanders. “It’s a slowboat LA–Kansas City local—Train #4. Maybe our man is waiting for it. Maybe he figured the Chicagoan would be watched.”

“Yeah, and maybe you’re the Lone Ranger and I’m Tonto,” said Sheriff Ratzlaff. “Tonto say, You do what you think you need to do, Lone Ranger. I’m going to get some breakfast and then head to the office and see what else needs to be done in my county today besides hang out at this train station looking for a man who may have killed Otto Wheeler on the Super Chief who nobody saw get off the train but he may have and may now be waiting for an opportunity to sneak onto another train back to Chicago or wherever.”

Charlie Sanders understood the message. “Thanks for coming over here with me, sheriff. We appreciate what you’re doing by taking official jurisdiction over Mr. Wheeler’s death, too.”

Sanders had thanked him before, but he felt it ought to be said again—on behalf of Jack Pryor and the Santa Fe.

“Want to join us for a Randallite breakfast?” the sheriff asked.

Sanders declined. He didn’t know what he was going to do—
should
do—but having a Randallite breakfast, whatever it was, didn’t seem right.

“I have to ask, sheriff,” he said. “What exactly is a Randallite breakfast?”

“Crisp bacon, runny scrambled eggs, buttermilk biscuits, apple juice mixed with orange juice, coffee with cream and sugar and a thirty-second saying of grace with your eyes closed and your utensils at the ready.”

Sanders’s face must have said, I don’t get it, loud and clear.

“A Randallite’s breakfast is just like everybody else’s,” said the sheriff. “That’s the message. So is most everything else about us—but not quite
every
everything.” He gave Sanders an all-in-fun pat on the shoulder and left with his crew.

Sanders stood there by himself in the middle of the waiting room for a few seconds. Now what? was the question for the moment. The only answer that came to him was why not have a look around Bethel for that white man in the dark clothes?

Then he remembered his suitcase, which he had not had time to retrieve from the Super Chief. It was a small leather case his mother had given him when he went off to college; it didn’t have much in it besides a change of underwear, a couple of shirts and ties and his shaving kit. But it would be nice to have. Maybe Jack Pryor had, in fact, remembered to put it off at Hutchinson and it came to Bethel just now on the Chicagoan.

He walked outside on the platform to the main baggage room and there on an unloaded cart was his case.
Thank you, Jack
.

But he stopped abruptly and turned back toward the waiting room, then kept on going through the main door and outside to the street.

A walk around Bethel, Kansas, to see whatever there was to see, struck him as a particularly good detective thing to do—
now
.

Truman and Browne had barely noticed the brief stop at St. Mark. They were working on their second cup of coffee in the Turquoise Room, advertised by the Santa Fe as the only private dining room on any train in America. A small room that seated twelve or so at various-sized tables that could be arranged to suit the crowd, it had turquoise-colored decor related to various birds and other Navajo signs and symbols. It was available to Super Chief passengers by reservation only, for intimate dinners and cocktail parties as well as special occasions such as breakfast served by an attentive waiter for a former president of the United States.

Jack Pryor, having delivered his prized possession, Harry Truman, to breakfast with a promise to return shortly, was gone in further search for both the sickly man and the man in dark.

And then, from out of a small Turquoise Room closet in which only a tiny man could have hidden, Dale Lawrence emerged, shabby and coughing as ever.

“Mr. President,” he said. “Please, sir. Hear me out. That’s all I ask.”

The attentive waiter had gone to fetch orange juice and a plate of small sweet rolls. A. C. Browne, sitting across from Truman, grabbed the table knife by his right hand.

Harry Truman made no movement or any sign of alarm. “All right, all right,” he said to Lawrence. “Sit down, say your piece and then leave Browne and me alone so we can have our breakfast.”

Lawrence, moving slowly as if in pain, grabbed a chair and drew it up to the table between Truman and Browne, who took his hand off the knife. Truman had not told Browne about the earlier incident with Lawrence, so he didn’t know what was going on—or why.

Lawrence opened his mouth to speak, but before he could he threw his right hand up to his mouth to muffle a cough.

Truman and Browne, almost as one on instinct, threw white linen napkins up over their own mouths and noses.

Truman said, “You need to see a doctor, not me. I don’t have the time or the inclination to argue with you or with anybody else about the atomic bomb, testing or anything else like it.”

Lawrence said, “What about those people downwind from the Nevada testing grounds?”

“What about ’em?”

“You and I are killing them, Mr. President.”