Super (21 page)

“Get back there and clean it up. Our railroad doesn’t like it when sick people are put off our trains—particularly VIPs.”

“I really don’t think this guy rates as anybody that important—”

“Just take care of it, Jack. I already got word to that kid from the traffic office—Sanders. He’s still in Bethel. I told him to get over to Dodge and cover us in case the guy really dies before you get there.”

Before Pryor could respond, Captain Lordsburg said, “Got to run. Some drunk ballplayer’s gone nuts on the Texas Chief north of Houston and is using the dining car china as baseballs. He’s mad because the Dodgers cut him from their roster—something like that. Talk to you soon, Jack.”

Lordsburg hung up as abruptly as he had begun.

Jack Pryor went to the waiting room and looked up at the schedule board. It confirmed what he already knew. The El Capitan, the Santa Fe’s eastbound high-level chair-car streamliner, would depart at 1:15, less than three hours from now. And he would be on it.

Pryor turned around to see Albert Carlton Browne standing there, also looking up at the schedule information.

“Where you headed, detective?” Browne asked.

“Back to Kansas,” Pryor said.

“Me, too,” said Browne.

And a while later, Pryor spotted Darwin Rinehart staring off into space, sitting by himself in a far corner of the waiting room.

“Can I help you, sir?” Pryor asked Rinehart, who just shook his head and looked away. He seemed embarrassed that he had been seen.

Pryor’s cop antenna was alerted. He thought he saw something
new and alarmingly sad in the face of this man of Hollywood who had disembarked from the Super only a short time ago.

“I’m going back on the Super Chief,” Rinehart said to Pryor after several seconds of uncomfortable silence. He spoke in a near whisper.

The Santa Fe detective had learned that often the best way to get people to say something is just to remain silent. He wondered, What in the hell is going on? Two passengers from the Super—the Kansas editor and now the movie man—turning around to head back the other direction the same day they arrived?

“Forget something?” said Pryor to Rinehart, smiling.

“Yeah, you might say that.” Rinehart still hadn’t spoken in full voice or made eye contact with Pryor.

The Santa Fe man looked up at the schedule board. “The El Capitan leaves at one fifteen …”

Darwin Rinehart glared at Jack Pryor. “I only travel on the Super Chief!” he said with indignation.

“That’ll mean waiting six more hours,” said Pryor.

There was no response from Rinehart, and Jack Pryor finally just walked away.

It was all over by the time Jack Pryor got to the hospital in Dodge City.

“That guy Lawrence is dead—as of about ten minutes ago,” Charlie Sanders reported to Pryor.

Sanders had been waiting for Pryor just inside the hospital’s main entrance. He had had to wait six hours in Bethel to ride a slow-moving train named the Grand Canyon, the next westbound, for the two-hour trip to Dodge City.

Now he told Pryor that he had stayed with Lawrence until the end. Sanders said the poor man had been in terrific pain from what the doctors said was cancer in his stomach and lungs; he could speak only in a weak whisper just before he died.

“The Kansas man with the British accent—you know, the one who hung out with President Truman—was in the room with Lawrence the last few minutes,” Sanders said.

As they walked up the hospital stairs together, Sanders reported that last night a watchman had come across Lawrence lying on the ground between two graves in the Boot Hill Cemetery. One grave contained a buffalo hunter who had frozen to death in a blizzard, the other a dance hall madam known around town as a soiled dove. Lawrence was shivering, pale, feverish, coughing like hell and talking crazy. An ambulance was called and he was brought here to Trinity Hospital.

Now Pryor went with Sanders into a room where A. C. Browne was seated in a small green metal chair on the other side of Lawrence’s now-empty bed. He was writing in a small notebook.

“I knew you were going to Kansas but why did you come
here
, Mr. Browne?” said Pryor, unable to hide his wariness about the unexpected presence of Mr. Truman’s journalist friend.

Pryor had run into Browne briefly a couple of times on the El Capitan but figured he was on his way home to Strong. Pryor, who’d been preoccupied with railroad business on arriving at Dodge, had not seen Browne disembark from the train.

“I came here for the same reason as you, detective,” Browne said now to Pryor. “To visit Dale Lawrence.”

Pryor was annoyed with himself for taking his sweet time finishing various reports and doing other tasks at the Dodge City station. Now—too late—he knew he should have rushed immediately to the hospital as Browne obviously had done.

The detective took a breath, held it a few seconds and then asked, “Did you talk to him about … you know, my having put him off the Super Chief?”

“No, no,” Browne said. “As far as I could tell, his conduct toward President Truman justified what was done.”

“He didn’t have a ticket either,” Pryor said, a bit too loudly, defensively.

Browne resumed writing something in a narrow spiral notebook, about the size of a paperback book.

“So you’re not doing a newspaper story about the way he was treated by the Santa Fe?” Pryor asked, trying to remain as nonchalant as possible.

Browne smiled, shook his head and said his interest was in something very different. “Lawrence was able to speak to me
only for a few moments but it was all about what he’d been saying to President Truman about nuclear testing.”

When Pryor didn’t immediately respond, Browne added, “He said a lot of people are dying because of the tests in Nevada.” Then, looking down at his notebook, Browne said, “‘I’m one of them.’ That was probably the most coherent thing he said. He also mumbled something about John Wayne and Susan Hayward being victims.”

“John Wayne’s sick?” Pryor asked.

“I don’t know,” Browne said. “The best I could understand was that it had to do with making a movie in Utah—which I couldn’t follow.”

“The Conqueror
, yes, I saw it,” said Charlie Sanders, who had accompanied Pryor to the hospital room but so far had remained silent. “It was truly awful. John Wayne was wearing heavy makeup and a drooping black mustache.”

Pryor, not interested in a movie review at the moment, motioned for Sanders to follow him and said to Browne, “We’ll leave it to you, sir. We’re taking the Super Chief back home to Chicago at ten fifteen tonight. You?”

“I’m returning to California on a westbound at eight fifty,” said Browne. “I think I’ll go back to the story I was working on in the first place—out in Hollywood.”

Pryor said nothing because he did not really know what Browne was talking about.

“I wasn’t able to get enough from Lawrence to put his tale together,” Browne added.

They made their perfunctory farewells.

“No offense, Mr. Browne,” said Pryor, “but for a man from Kansas you sound a lot like Winston Churchill.”

“There’s more to Kansas than an accent, detective,” replied A. C. Browne.

On the Super, Pryor and Sanders were met by Conductor Hammond in a vestibule between cars in the middle of the train. Hammond, having napped and freshened up in crew quarters at LA, was on the eastbound return trip. He, too, was going home to Chicago.

Hammond said they were really full of movie people this time—actresses, actors, bit players, directors.

“A couple of really big lady Stars are aboard traveling under other names,” Hammond said. “I mean, really big.”

Only on the Super Chief, The Train of the Stars, would—
could
—any conductor talk like this. It made Charlie Sanders proud to be of the Santa Fe family. And he wondered—oh, how he wondered—who those two big lady Stars might be.

Hammond said, “That producer Rinehart is on board, too, if you can believe it.”

“Yeah, he told me he was heading right back on the Super,” Pryor said. “I didn’t ask him why but I figure that kind of thing is known only by people in the movie business—not ours.”

Pryor then told Hammond he was most interested at the
moment in finding a place to sleep. The conductor pointed him toward a sleeping car four up the train that had a couple of vacant roomettes.

Charlie Sanders and Pryor said they would meet up later.

Sanders had a question for Conductor Hammond.

“It concerns Mr. Wheeler, the Bethel man who died on the westbound,” Sanders said, remaining in the vestibule. “Do you remember his friend here on the Super, a woman from the movies?”

Hammond grinned. “Oh, yeah. She’s one of the big Stars. They were a regular sight. She’d get on in LA, sleep late the next morning, go to bed early that evening and then get back up just in time to meet Mr. Wheeler at one thirty in Bethel, first in the lounge and then in one or the other’s drawing rooms.”

“Then she quit traveling on the Super?” Sanders asked.

Hammond said, “I didn’t see her at least and I asked other crews and they didn’t either. But Mr. Wheeler kept riding, even after he got so sick. There was a routine chore for his porter—usually Ralph—to check out the train from one end to the other for his girlfriend.”

Sanders took a deep breath. “Who is she?”

Hammond looked at Charlie Sanders, then down at his leather pouch where he carried tickets and other papers, then out the window of the moving train.

“I don’t think I should tell you that, Mr. Sanders,” said Hammond. “I’m thinking Jack Pryor’s got it right about what’s anybody’s business—including the Santa Fe’s.”

“Everybody knows about Clark Gable and his goings-on,” said Sanders, still a little full of himself from his successful debut as a faux detective. “Movie star business is everybody’s business. I don’t get the secrecy about Mr. Wheeler and his friend.”

The conductor replied as if issuing a papal edict, “This is different. Now he’s dead. She’s married. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“Half the women Gable’s gone to bed with on this train and elsewhere were married, too, I’ll bet.” Sanders had to control himself. He was aware his voice was rising, something this little exchange truly did not rate.

“That’s his reputation and he lives up to it,” said Hammond. “This woman’s reputation is for other things. It’s not for me to smear it. Sorry. But if you find her on your own, so be it. That’s your business, not mine.”

“Find her? You mean she’s one of the two you were talking about on
this
train?” Charlie Sanders said, almost shouting.

Hammond shrugged and started to leave. “Why do you want to talk to her anyhow? I hope you’re not just being nosy.”

Sanders had to think about that a couple of seconds. “I think she should know about Otto Wheeler’s death.” He knew it was a weak point the minute he said it.

Hammond, moving away, said, “I’ve got to walk the train and start getting ready for Bethel and Kansas City.”

So be it, indeed
, thought Sanders. It really was none of his business. Okay, maybe it was … a little. There might be a role for a beautiful woman in the Super Chief movie.

He decided he would head to the observation car lounge, where he would just sit for a while. There were empty roomettes that he could, like Jack Pryor, use but suddenly he was too excited to sleep.

Who are those two big lady movie stars?

Sanders passed through three cars to the deserted lounge at the end of the train.

He found a place behind the magazine rack for his suitcase, stuck it there and looked through the darkness at the rest of the car. He switched on one of the tiny wall lamps and decided he would take one of the two chairs on either side of the rear window at the very end of the car.

He was no sooner seated when he heard noise from the door opening at the far end of the car. Then a shadow appeared at the doorway into the lounge. It was a woman—a small woman.

Charlie Sanders stood.

“Good evening, ma’am,” he said.

The woman stopped. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t expect anyone to be in here this time of night.”