Super (9 page)

“There seemed to be a little spot of something liquid soaking through that thick Santa Fe blanket of his, that’s what I mean.”

“Come on, Pryor!” Conductor Hammond yelled.

The Super Chief was starting to move. Pryor intercepted Charlie Sanders, who had already turned toward reboarding the train. “Stay here,” Pryor said forcefully. “Talk to Sheriff Ratzlaff. Make sure the railroad’s interests are covered.”

“My main assignment was to help President Truman,” said Sanders. “Besides, my suitcase is in a locker in the ‘Kansas City’ car.”

“I’ll have it put off at Hutchinson and sent back here on the next eastbound.”

Jack Pryor took off running, climbing aboard as The Train of the Stars picked up speed to continue its trip west.

Charlie Sanders decided it was all right to fudge a bit about himself. Being a very junior assistant general passenger agent for the Santa Fe simply wasn’t going to get him in the middle of affairs for the railroad the way he was certain Jack Pryor would want.

That, at least, was the way Sanders saw it as he chatted with Helfer, the undertaker.

“How long have you been a Santa Fe detective?” Helfer had asked.

“Only awhile,” said Sanders, taking a deep breath before committing a lie of confirmation by omission. He could only hope that his tone resembled the way Robert Mitchum—no, Clark Gable!—might have said it.

They were pulling away from the Bethel station platform right behind the hearse, which, like Helfer’s matching car, was black and a Packard. Pollack, the late Otto Wheeler’s assistant who had arranged all this, was riding in the front seat of the hearse with one of Helfer’s men. Another mortician was in Helfer’s car with Sanders.

“You must have started when you were in knee pants,” said Helfer, but he did so in a pleasant, jokey way. He bought it. Charlie Sanders had just become a railroad cop.

There had been a time, as there had no doubt been for most every little boy who listened to the radio crime shows, when Sanders wanted to be a detective when he grew up. Some of that came from his movies obsession but also from reading the Chicago newspapers, which specialized in gangster and mayhem news.

“Tell me about Mr. Wheeler,” said Sanders, asking his first question as a detective.

“Well, the main thing is that we had the funerals for both his parents, two of the biggest and best we’ve ever done,” Helfer said. “Otto’s will be a whopper, too, depending on what Mr. Pollack and the family decide.”

“Family? What kind of family does Mr. Wheeler have? I thought somebody said he was all alone.”

“He is, here in Bethel, which is what was meant. Otto’s got a brother and a sister, but both of them went off to Kansas City or New York or someplace and never came back. Otto did go away to school but he came back.”

A few minutes later the undertaker and his men eased the blanket-covered body from the hearse. Sanders, like Pryor, had heard what was said about the spot on the blanket but hadn’t really seen it.

Now he did see as the stretcher was taken into the huge white frame mansion of Helfer & Sons Funeral Directors. A stain about the size of a softball had come through the blanket.

Sanders tried to deflect his mind by noting that the funeral home bore an amazing resemblance, tall columns and all, to “Tara,” the plantation house in
Gone with the Wind
.

“I’m sure you’re going to want to get a good look at the body, detective,” said Helfer, nodding for him to follow. “I’ve called the sheriff. He should be here in a minute or so, too. I told him it was most likely a suicide and, because of Otto’s sickness, the sheriff understood. Everybody will—except Pastor Funk, of course.”

“Pastor Funk?”

“Mr. Wheeler’s pastor at church.”

Before Sanders had time to follow up, he was ushered into a small room where Otto Wheeler had been laid out on a padded metal table. Helfer and one of his men pulled back the blanket so Charlie Sanders, the railroad detective, could get a good look at the dead body.

Sanders’s kid-thoughts about being a detective had never gone quite this far. Before him lay an awful sight—unlike anything he had ever seen, except in the movies. He fought down a surge of vomit in his mouth.

Blood had spread from Otto Wheeler’s chest down to the waist of his off-white silk pajamas.

“He blew quite a hole in himself, didn’t he?” Helfer asked.

Yes! Yes! Oh, my god, look at that! Wheeler’s been shot!

Sanders simply nodded. That was because, among other things, he was unable to open his mouth to speak.

He tried to keep his eyes on Otto Wheeler’s face, which was a dark gray-white but appeared otherwise normal. The eyes. They were dark blue. They were staring at something on the ceiling. No, no. They were not staring at anything. His nose. Look at that nose. That is some nose. Round, blunt, but not too obtrusive. And his hair. Blond, good solid blond. Ears are terrific, and what about those eyebrows?

“Let me turn him over for you,” said Helfer.

If Sanders could have spoken he would have told Helfer that would not be necessary …

Blood was on the back, too.

“Looks like that bullet went right through his heart, that’s for sure,” said Helfer. “He didn’t want to take any chances about lingering … you know, before death.”

Sanders nodded. There was nothing to attract the eye now except blood.

“Did you find a gun?” Sanders asked. It seemed like a natural
question for a detective to ask—particularly one who was desperate for a distraction.

“No, sir,” Helfer replied and then added quickly, “I think I hear the sheriff coming in upstairs. I’ll go get him and show him down.”

Charlie Sanders smiled weakly.

“As they say to the kids at the candy store, don’t touch anything,” Helfer said as he laughed and left the room.

Charlie Sanders did not laugh.

Then, moving like a flash, he found a restroom down the hall where he proceeded to have his first stress-triggered bout of diarrhea as a detective.

And that caused him to wonder if that movie man Rinehart felt the same about diarrhea movies as he did vomit ones.

Ralph was standing at the closed door of the compartment.

“Nothing’s been touched, Mr. Pryor,” said Ralph. “Nobody’s been in there since they took him away.”

“Wait here,” the detective said as he stepped inside the compartment, closed the door behind him and was hit with a smell of death—urine, crap, blood. The blanket and the top sheet were gone from the bed. There on the bottom sheet was a thick smear of blood that resembled the insides of a small, smashed cherry pie.

In his twenty-two years with the Santa Fe, Pryor had had several experiences with dead people but most of them, such as the great musician Fats Waller, had calmly died from heart attacks or simply drifted off and away in their sleep. An exception was a drunk baseball player who fell under the wheels of the speeding westbound San Francisco Chief while trying to demonstrate how he could hang halfway out a vestibule door between cars. Jack Pryor had also officiated over what little recognizable remained of several unfortunate hobos whose decision to travel on the outside of Santa Fe passenger and freight trains got them sliced, mangled or crushed. Some, having miscalculated temperatures on speeding trains in cold weather, had frozen to death.

Now Pryor took a deep breath, vowed to breathe in and out of his mouth only, and went over for a closer look at Otto Wheeler’s deathbed.

He spotted a tiny round hole in the center of the bloody mess. It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes or J. Edgar Hoover to deduce that this was where a bullet went after it passed through Otto Wheeler. Without touching anything—or even considering doing such a thing—Pryor scanned the area around the bed for a shell casing. There was none.

He inspected the rest of the compartment, first once over lightly and then down on his hands and knees, inch by inch. He found nothing, most importantly no weapon as well as no casing.

Then he lifted the mattress and looked underneath: there
was a spent slug. He grabbed it and rolled it between the fingers of his right hand. It was a .38. Or at least, that’s what it looked like. A ballistics expert would eventually determine that for sure.

Oh, yes. A ballistics expert. One in Bethel, Kansas? Or someplace else in Kansas? Where exactly was the Super Chief when Wheeler shot himself?

Shot himself?

Jack Pryor’s face was suddenly red hot, his mind racing.

Was there any way in hell, or Kansas or anywhere else Otto Wheeler could have killed himself with a pistol and then pulled up the blanket and disposed of the weapon?

Pryor leapt at the compartment door and yanked it open. “What did you do with Wheeler’s gun, Ralph?” he barked.

“Mr. Pryor, I do not know what you’re talking about!” Ralph shouted back. “I told you I haven’t touched a thing and that is the absolute truth!”

As much as Pryor distrusted Ralph about his Privates business, something about the unexpected force in his denial rang true.

A homicide? Why would anybody sneak into this compartment and shoot to death a man who was on the verge of death anyway from natural causes?

Pryor stuck the bullet slug in his suit coat pocket as another consideration struck him. At this moment there could be an armed killer on The Train of the Stars along with a former president of the United States and Clark Gable.

Hutchinson, Kansas, was the next stop, only twelve minutes away.

The first thing Jack Pryor did at the Hutchinson station was deposit Charlie Sanders’s suitcase with one of the baggage agents with instructions to send it back to him at Bethel on the next eastbound train.

Pryor then composed two teletype messages.

The first was to the Bethel stationmaster, asking that Sanders be told to be standing by for a telephone call when the Super arrived in St. Mark, Kansas, thirty-three minutes from now.

The second message was to Captain Wynn Lordsburg, the chief of the Santa Fe railroad police in Chicago. Pryor decided to keep it simple.

Conductor Hammond fidgeted behind Jack Pryor at the telegraph desk.

“We’ve got to go, Pryor. This is the Super Chief.”

Jack Pryor was proud of his reputation for calmness, for coolness under fire or agitation. This conductor, who saw himself as a kind of ship captain and the Santa Fe’s real royalty, was testing it.

Pryor knew the rules and he knew Hammond knew them, too. Everyone who worked on the Santa Fe knew The Rules.

He said to Hammond, in a harsh, official tone as if reading from the Declaration of Independence:

“I hereby declare this train as being involved in a legal emergency. Under the powers vested in me as a law enforcement officer commissioned by the Santa Fe to uphold the laws of our country, the states through which we pass and the rules of our railroad, I order you to hold this train whenever and for however long as I say to hold it. Do you understand me, conductor? If you have a problem with this, I hereby invite you to get on this teletype or a phone and tell somebody in Chicago, Heaven, the moon or wherever else you conductors believe your orders come from.”