Росс Макдональд - Trouble Follows Me

The conductor and the S.P. man paid no attention to me. They were making plans to get Hatcher’s body off the train.

“Look,” Major Wright said. “I like my work, but one corpse on my hands is enough for one evening. For God’s sake go to bed. That’s an order in two senses, professional and military.”

“All right,” I said finally. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“Good night. Pleasant dreams.”

On the way out I heard him tell the conductor that he thought he’d close Hatcher’s eyes, because the sclera of the eyeball was drying and turning brown.

The ladder was standing ready at my upper berth. As I started up on shaky knees, I noticed that the light in Mary’s lower berth was still on.

“Sam?” I saw her white hand fumbling between the heavy green curtains, and then her face. Washed shining for the night, with her bright hair done up on top of her head, she looked naïve and very young, like a nymph peering between green boughs.

I said, “Good night.”

“Sam, what’s the matter with your face? What’s happened?”

“Be quiet. You’ll wake everyone.”

“I won’t be quiet. I want you to tell me what’s happened. You’ve got a bruise on your forehead, and you’re covered with dirt. You’ve been fighting.”

“No, I haven’t. I’ll tell you in the morning.”

“Tell me now.” She reached up and took light hold of my arm. The confused alarm on her face was so flattering that I almost laughed.

“If you insist. Move over.”

I sat on the edge of her berth and, in a low voice which grew steadily hoarser, told her what had happened.

More than once she said, “You might have been killed.”

The second time I answered, “Hatcher was. By God, I don’t believe it was an accident. Maybe that poisoned bottle was intended for me.”

“How could anyone know that you were going to drink out of it? And didn’t you say a hole had been bored in the bottom and resealed? That couldn’t have been done on the train.”

“I don’t know. I do know one thing. I’m not going to touch another drink until I get to the end of this trouble.”

My mind’s eye was struck by the sordidness of the scene which had seemed jolly enough at the time: Hatcher and me sprawled on the shabby leather seats of the smoking-room drinking ourselves to death or to the edge of it. A strong revulsion placed me for the first time in my life on the side of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

The remembered scene was so vivid that I could see every detail of the room, the brown bottle on the floor, Hatcher’s thin lips mumbling over his letter.

“I wonder if it’s still on the train,” I said to myself.

I must have spoken aloud because Mary said, “What?”

“Hatcher’s letter. He wrote part of a letter while I was with him and went to mail it in the club car. Maybe it’s still there.”

“Do you think there could be anything in it bearing on his death?”

“It’s possible. I’m going to the club car now, before that letter’s taken off the train.”

I leaned forward to get up but she laid a restraining hand on my arm. “No. I’ll go. You look terrible, Sam.”

“I admit my head’s swimming. I think it’s trying to swim the English Channel.”

“Poor dear.” She patted my arm. “Please go to bed, Sam.”

“See if you can read the name and address on that letter through the sides of the box.”

“I will.”

I climbed the ladder to my berth. It seemed very high. I took off my coat. It was such an effort that I played with the idea of simply falling back and going to sleep as I was, without undressing. I heard the heavy rustle of Mary’s curtains falling to behind her, and then the soft rapid sounds of her feet retreating in the direction of the club car.

Then I heard fainter sounds moving towards me, a mere susurrus of feet so faint that it was suspicious. I opened a narrow crack in my curtain and peered down. Moving swiftly and silently like a panther in the jungle path which I had imagined the aisle to be, a man glided beneath me in the direction Mary had gone. All I could see was the top of his head and his shoulders, but I knew him by their shape.

When the door at the end of the car had closed softly behind him I climbed down the ladder and followed him. My mind, inflamed by shock and fear, hated the beady-eyed man so much that I hoped wildly I would catch him in some overt act, and have an excuse to club him with my fists. He had looked like an animal stalking game. I felt like another.

But when I stood on the shaking windy platform at the end of the club car and saw him again through the window in the door, he was standing in the passageway quietly doing nothing. Rather, he was standing with his face turned away from me, intently watching the interior of the car. Making no attempt to conceal my movements, I opened the door and walked towards him. He started and turned in a quick graceful movement and his right hand jumped unconsciously towards the left lapel of his coat. I deliberately jostled him as I passed him, and made contact with a hard object under his left breast which could have been a gun in a shoulder holster.

It was Mary he had been watching. She was sitting by the mailbox at the far end of the shadowy car, which was half full of sleeping people and dimly lit by a small light at each end. As I walked towards her among stretched-out legs, I tried to keep in the line of vision of the man in the passageway. She glanced up startled when she heard me. She had a pair of eyebrow pluckers in her right hand and Hatcher’s letter in her left.

“Put it back,” I said in a hoarse whisper. “You’re being watched, and it’s a Federal offense to tamper with a mailbox.”

“You didn’t tell me!”

“I told you to try to read the address through the glass. Now put it back.”

There was so much intensity in my voice that her hand moved as if in reflex and dropped the envelope through the slot.

“Did you get the address?”

“No. It was your fault I didn’t.”

I looked back over my shoulder and saw no one in the passageway. “I didn’t want you to get in trouble. There was a man watching you.”

“Who?” The pupils of her eyes had expanded, making them seem almost black. Her mouth was soft and vulnerable, and her hands were trembling slightly.

“The black-haired man with the beady eyes. He was in this car this morning.”

“Oh.”

I crouched down and tried to read the address on the envelope, but it was lying in shadow. I lit my lighter and tried again. I couldn’t make out the complete address but I saw enough for my purpose: Laura Eaton, Bath Street, Santa Barbara. I wrote it in my address book while Mary looked on.

“Why are you doing that?”

“I’m going to go and see her. I want to know what’s in that letter.”

“Is it that important?”

“It’s important. I’m getting very tired of people dying. People should die of old age.”

Her hysteria suddenly matched mine. She rose with her blue silk robe sweeping about her in tragic folds and embraced me with arms so tense they almost hummed.

“Please drop it, Sam,” she said. “I’m afraid you’ll be killed.”

“I’m beginning to think that’s not so important. I don’t like these ugly deaths.”

“Don’t you want to live, Sam?” Her eyelids held bright tears like evening dew on the closing petals of flowers. “Don’t you love me?”

“I hate the cause of these deaths more. If you got off at the next stop I’d stay on. Perhaps you’d better.”

Her mood changed suddenly. “Don’t worry, I’ll stay on. If you’re going to be any good tomorrow you’d better get some sleep.”