Росс Макдональд - Trouble Follows Me

“You’d make a good wife.” I kissed her.

“Do you think so, Sam? Do you really think so?”

A disturbed sleeper in the shadows behind us began to snore in loud protest.

“We’d better go to bed,” I said.

We passed the dark man again in the vestibule of our Pullman. He was standing at the window looking out, but he turned and stared at us as we went through. Tension hung sharply in the air for a moment and the blood pounded angrily in my temples. But I could think of nothing to do except to go to bed.

When I closed my eyes in my berth, it swayed like a windswept treetop. Outside my cell the train whistle howled desolately, and the night rushed by like a dark wind. Where are we going? I wondered in languorous desolation, and then in sleep moved confusedly among blank staring eyes. I wandered among forests of dead flesh beside typhoid streams, and emerged in an open space where a hunchbacked spider cocked his beady eyes at me and scurried away on many legs. The sun was bloody red and throbbing in the lowering sky, a beating heart which as I watched it became pale and still, and the pulse of the world stopped. I wandered in the desert of the dead world, its rotting crust crumbling beneath my running feet till it gave way utterly and I fell endlessly in a soundless void.

The worried and impatient face of the Pullman porter appeared between my curtains and announced that it was noon.

I GOT to the diner on the last call for lunch. On the way I saw Mary in the club car, where she was talking with the Tessingers. She walked down to the end of the car with me. She looked fresh and untroubled, clear of last night’s hysteria.

“Are you all right, Sam? You slept like a log all morning, and I hated to wake you.”

“There’s nothing I like better than sleeping in till noon. But it’s the first time I ever had a hangover after twelve hours’ sleep.”

“You should stick to nice pure alcohol.”

“I’m sticking to nice pure water.”

“I know you are. Everybody’s out of whiskey and we can’t buy any from here on.”

“It’s just as bad as being at sea.”

She leaned towards me and kissed me lightly on the cheek. “Is it?”

“Well, not exactly. Life was generally much more tranquil at sea, and much less interesting. There weren’t enough women to go around–”

“None at all, in fact?”

“None at all, in fact. It’s sort of nice having women around again. I’ve always wanted a dog, too.”

“Dogs are easy to get.”

“Not as easy as you think. I am a victim of a dog shortage. Behold me dogless.”

“You are feeling better today.”

“I had to. I couldn’t have felt any worse.”

“You’d better hurry if you want anything to eat. I had my lunch ages ago.” She went back to the Tessingers.

The diner was still crowded, and my ears turned red as I walked down the aisle between the alert tables. I knew what the old ladies of both sexes would be saying behind their hands. Practically drank himself to death. Think he’d have more self-respect. Gentleman by Act of Congress. Disgrace to the uniform he wears. The trouble was that the old ladies had half the truth on their side. In the white light of hangover, my actions of the night before looked criminally foolish.

Major Wright was at a table by himself and nodded to me to join him. “You’re looking a bit better. Feeling all right?”

“Pretty good. My throat’s still sore, though.”

“Ether’s a pretty powerful irritant. I’ll have a look at your throat this afternoon.”

Looking out the window I was struck, with the inextinguishable surprise of travelling, by the difference that a day’s journey made. I had left Detroit and Chicago shivering in the grip of the northern lake winter. The prairie outside the window now was snowless and sunlit under a summer sky.

“Where are we? I haven’t looked at the timetable.”

“The Texas Panhandle. The last town we stopped at was Amarillo.”

“The spring comes early up this way.”

“It’s the best time of the year here. It gets too hot in the summer.”

The subject of the weather had been exhausted, and I asked him the question that was on my mind: “What happened to Hatcher?”

“His body was taken off at Wichita. I turned him and the whiskey bottle over to the Kansas state police. They’re going to get the Missouri police to try and find the man that sold it to him. They seemed rather doubtful that they’ll be able to. Kansas City is a big town.”

“What will happen to his body?”

“It’ll be shipped to his next of kin in Kansas City. He’s got a brother there, according to his papers. They’ll do an autopsy, of course. I would have liked to do that autopsy myself.”

“I don’t share your wish.”

“It’s a very interesting process. You retrieve the ether from the tissues by distillation. Gettler has described it, I believe.”

Over our inadequate meatballs we watched the sere flat fields slide sideways past us. There was a charcoal smudge across the horizon from the carbon-burners in distant oilfields.

“Hatcher’s death has definitely been put down to accident, then?”

“I don’t know what else you could call it, from his point of view, that is. From the point of view of the dealer, it’s technical homicide.”

“Isn’t it possible that the bottle was poisoned on the train?”

“That hole couldn’t have been made on the train.”

“But perhaps the ether was added after I opened the bottle. It was sitting in there unguarded at various times.”

“Who would be carrying ether on a train?”

“A doctor might,” I said at random. “Are there any other doctors on the train?”

The suggestion didn’t please Major Wright. His round face set in a frown of offended dignity. “I don’t know, I’m sure. Members of the medical profession don’t go around putting poison in liquor bottles.”

“Of course not,” I said soothingly. “You’re satisfied in your own mind that Hatcher died by accident, then.”

He didn’t answer for a minute. Then he said: “From the physical point of view, yes. From the psychological point of view, it’s not so simple. Hatcher must have known that he was drinking bad liquor. You did, too, didn’t you?”

“I knew it was bad. I didn’t know it was that bad.”

“Still you must have known you were taking a chance. Then why did you drink it?”

“I wanted a drink, and that was the only drink available.”

“Precisely. You wanted a drink. Why did you want a drink? Why did Hatcher want a drink? I’ll tell you why. In a word, because life wasn’t good enough for you. You wanted a little escape, a little death. Perhaps it was the war you wanted to get away from. Basically, though, you wanted to get away from yourselves. Excessive drinking is deliberate suicide by degrees.”

His discourse would have interested me at another time, but right now I had too many other things to think about. The night before I had intended to tell Major Wright the whole story. Now it seemed useless. His mind was made up, and it would probably be a waste of breath to try to change it. Even if I tried, what reason could I offer for Hatcher’s death? And which of the passengers would make a plausible suspect?

I tried to go over in my mind the events which led up to Hatcher’s death. My brief period of unconsciousness hung in front of the evening like a transparent curtain which distorted it. My memories of the night were empty glasses magically refilled, a warm ballooning sensation whirling towards the edge of nausea, snatches of conversation, too many cigarettes, sudden faces in the bright light. Anderson, Miss Green, the Tessingers, Teddy Trask, the dark man in the blue suit – I still didn’t know his name, but Uriah would do. So far as I could recall, any one of them could have had access to the bottle. It had been unguarded in the smoker for at least ten minutes, while Mary and I went out on the platform to look at Topeka.