perhaps tomorrow. Depending.
Sam hung up the phone, feeling oddly satisfied. Fine. He would continue the investigation on his own, which suited him perfectly. Next to his typewriter was a manila envelope with the return address of the
He picked up the phone again and dialed a four-digit number from memory. In seconds, he was talking to Pat Lowengard, the station manager in town for the Boston & Maine railroad.
“Sam, how are you today?” Pat’s voice was smooth and professional, as though it belonged over a station’s PA system.
“Fine, Pat, fine. Looking for a bit of information.”
“Absolutely. What do you need?”
Sam picked up his fountain pen. Pat and the cops had a long and cooperative relationship. The department and its officers got a break on ticket prices to Boston and New York, and the railroad station got a break from automobiles parked illegally on side streets.
“What trains did you have come by two nights ago?” Sam asked.
“Can you narrow it down a bit?”
“Yeah. Hold on.” He looked at his notes. “Anytime before six P.M.”
“Just a sec. Let me check that day’s schedule.”
Sam leaned back in his chair until Pat came on the line again. “Got two in the afternoon. One at two-fifteen P.M., the other at five forty-five P.M.”
Two-fifteen in the afternoon? No, too early. The body would have been noticed way before Lou Purdue stumbled across him. So it had to be the later train, for if it were a train that went to the Portsmouth B&M station, it would have slowed before stopping. Which meant maybe John Doe was murdered on the train and tossed off. From there, start checking the train, the passenger manifest, the conductors and the train crew, and you could start making some effort to finding out just who in hell had been—
“The five forty-five P.M.,” he said. “A local?”
“Nope,” Pat said. “Express. Straight shot from Boston to Portland.”
“Through town? Thirty, maybe forty miles an hour.”
Sam looked back at the glossy prints of his John Doe, lying peacefully in the mud. At thirty to forty miles an hour, the body would have been tumbled in a mess of broken limbs and torn clothes. But there he was. No broken bones, no smears of mud on his clothes, no identification, half starved…
He rolled the fountain pen between his fingers. “Any unscheduled trains come through yesterday? Trains associated with the Department of the Interior?”
A pause, as though the connection had been broken, and then Pat’s voice returned. “No, nothing like that, and please never ask me that again over the phone, all right?”
Sam dropped his pen on his blotter, hearing the sudden fear in the station manager’s voice. “Sure.”
After a quick stop in the grubby men’s room, Sam went back to his desk. The phone started ringing and he picked it up as he sank into his chair. “Miller, Investigations.”
“Inspector? Inspector Miller?” From the rumble of traffic over the wire, he could tell the call was coming in from a pay phone. “It’s me. Lou Purdue. Lou from Troy. You was lookin’ for me earlier, weren’t you?”
Inadvertently, Sam touched his sore cheek. “Yes, I was.”
“Good, ’cause I want to see you again. The other night you said to call you if I remembered somethin’. And I did.” Lou coughed. “Shit, I know I only got a couple of minutes ’fore the pay phone hangs up on me. Look, meet me over at the camp, okay? I’ll be there in five minutes. Hey, will I get another buck from you?”
“You’ll get more if you tell me what you remembered.”
Another cough, and in the background, the sound of a truck driving by. “Like this, I remember standing there in the rain, waitin’ to see if a cop car was gonna come over, there was another guy waitin’, too. So what, right? But now I remember. His shoes were all muddy… and they was nice shoes, too… but they was muddy like he had walked down the side of the tracks, just like me and you and those cops. Made me think maybe he knew somethin’ about that dead guy.”
“What did he look like?”
“Oh, a nice-lookin’ fella, you could tell that—”
“Hello? Lou? You there?”
Nothing save the hiss of static. The operator had cut him off after the first three minutes.
“Dammit!” he said, banging the phone back into the cradle, shoving back his chair and grabbing his coat, leaving the station and Mrs. Walton to her typing, before she could say a word.
Back to the encampment he went, making that long walk after parking in the Fish Shanty lot. Like before, the old man who was the unofficial mayor stalked up to him and said, “You, the cop. Lookin’ for another slug?”
Sam poked him in his skinny chest with his index finger. “Are you?”
The old man laughed. “Like I said ’fore, cop, arrest me, I don’t give a shit, and—”
Sam stuck out a leg and then tripped him. He fell to the ground and squawked. Sam pressed his boot down on his left wrist, bent, and said, “I gave you that last one, pal, but don’t think you can screw with me again, all right? And maybe I’m not in the mood for arresting you, maybe I’m in the mood for breaking a finger or two, so shut up, all right?”
The old man grimaced, and Sam knew he should feel guilty, but he didn’t. He looked around at the worn-out cars and trucks, the shacks and lean-tos, the smoky fires and the children, children everywhere, thin and too quiet. “Lou from Troy. Is he around?”
The old man spat up at Sam. “Nope. He was here a few minutes ago. But he’s gone now. Jesus, step off my arm, will ya?
Sam saw three men, joking and talking by one of the shacks, ignoring him and the man on the ground. “Where did he go?”
“Lucky son of a bitch got himself a job. Ran into camp, grabbed his bundle, said he had a job up north, won’t be back for a month. A month! Lucky bastard.”
“Nope. Jus’ that he was gone, it paid okay, and he’d be back.”
Sam stepped off the old man, who scrambled to his feet, rubbing his wrist, eyeing Sam, spit drooling down his chin. Sam slid a business card from his wallet, passed it over to the old man with a quarter and a nickel. “You save that nickel and call me the minute Lou comes back. Okay? You do that and I’ll pay you a dollar.”
The old man shook his head. “Think you can bribe me, that what you’re thinking?”
Sam said, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m thinking.”
“Mister, that there’s a deal, no matter what you call it.”
A man emerged from one of the shacks, laughing. Sam watched him go over and josh some with his coworkers—oh yeah, they were Navy Yard guys. The four of them—in dungarees, work boots, and heavy shirts— looked at him as he approached.
“Fellas, time to leave,” Sam said.
A pudgy guy said, “Hey, take your goddamn turn, okay? We got here first.”
Sam held out his inspector’s badge. “I got here last, and you’re leaving now, and you’re not coming back. Unless you want your names and pictures in the paper.”
Eyes downcast, they moved away hastily, and as Sam left, a woman yelled at him, “Who the hell are you, huh? Mind your own goddamn business!”
He looked at the shack, saw it was the woman he’d seen before, the one collecting her dollar from the visiting dockworker. She said, “You gonna make up for these guys not comin’ back here? Huh? Are you? You got money for me, a job for me, you got anything, you bastard?”
Sam shook his head and walked on.
