I felt blocked and yet, to a certain extent, vindicated. Perhaps my questions, which had seemed asinine at the time even to me, had frightened him off the train. If I could get the FBI in Los Angeles to cooperate with me, he could be found and asked those questions again.
I went back to the Pullman and asked the porter if Anderson had taken his bags with him.
“No, suh, he told Miss Green to tell me to put them in the baggage car. She said that he’ll be going on to Los Angeles in a couple of days and they’re to be held for him there. Mr. Gordon only had one bag and I guess he took that with him.”
“Is Gordon gone too?”
“Yes, suh. It suits me.”
“Did the two of them leave together?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Drake. All I know is that they both got off at Gallup. Neither of them said a word to me.”
Three possibilities occurred to me besides the one I had suggested. Gordon was following Anderson. Anderson was following Gordon. Or one had killed the other and bundled his body off the train. Actual melodrama and violence had accustomed my mind to move easily among melodramatic and violent possibilities. The melodrama of the situation deepened when I made inquiries and found out that nobody had seen Gordon or Anderson leave the train.
Miss Green and Mary came back from the diner together, and I asked Miss Green if Anderson had made arrangements for his luggage in advance.
“He left me a note. It was under my pillow when I woke up this morning. It was a very nice letter, not just a note.”
“Are you sure he wrote it?”
“Of course I’m sure. Who else would write me a note?”
“Did you know his handwriting?”
“I don’t know. No, I guess I don’t. But I’m positive he wrote it. He said he was going to Albuquerque and to send his bags on to L.A.”
“Had he mentioned getting off the train before?”
“No. I was surprised when I got his note.”
“Where is it now?” I said.
“The note? Just a minute.” She went to her compartment and searched it. But she came back empty-handed.
“It’s gone,” she said. “I can’t understand it. I had it less than an hour ago.”
The unreal painted flesh of her aging face hid her thoughts from me. I couldn’t tell whether she was lying or not. Everything she said and did was artificial, slightly off the human center-line. The steady trembling of her hands was as if her nervous system had received a delicate and irreparable damage. A corpse returned to life after the tissues had decayed a little would have moved and spoken as she did, and had her taste in clothes.
Miss Green returned to her love-story magazines, and quickly became absorbed in a Spicy Romances. I went back to our compartment and sat down beside Mary.
“Miss Green wants to know if there’s anything the matter,” I said in a low voice. “If you ask me, there’s something the matter with her.”
“What do you mean? She’s a type you see all over. An ignorant woman who got hold of money somewhere, and doesn’t know how to use it on herself.”
“Yeah, but how did she get her money?” I looked over my shoulder at Miss Green. Her fading prurient eyes were fastened on the pages of her pulp magazine. “There’s something about her I don’t like, something reptilian.”
“Maybe she won it in a lottery,” Mary said with a laugh. “Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Sam. She’s a pathetic old hag. I think I know women, and that’s all I can see in her.”
“She was pretty friendly with Anderson, too. I was beginning to feel there was something queer about him and now he’s dropped out of sight. Too many people have been dropping through trap-doors. Gordon’s gone, too.”
“Gordon?”
“The man that was spying on you the other night in the club car. He left the train last night.”
“Is that sinister? For all you know, he may have had a perfectly respectable reason–”
“Maybe he had. But I’m not taking it for granted. He acted fishy.”
“Everything’s looking fishy to you, Sam. Aren’t you letting the whole thing get you down?”
“You’re damn right I am. Can’t you see we’re both in this thing up to our necks? You or I may be the next to drop through the trap-door. I almost did.”
“I know you did.” She leaned towards me and put a firm white hand on my knee. “Then why do you insist on sticking your neck out?”
“There’s trouble in the air, and I believe in meeting trouble halfway. I want something to get hold of.”
“But what if there isn’t anything to get hold of?”
“A minute ago you said I was sticking my neck out. Now there’s nothing to get hold of, and all this is my imagination. But I suppose I can’t expect a woman to be logical.”
“Maybe I’m not logical. I follow my feelings. And my feeling is that you should try to forget about this business.”
I couldn’t forget it, and I knew that she couldn’t either, but I dropped the subject. My nerves were stretched and waiting, but there was nothing to do. I did my best to enjoy the long peaceful day.
We read and talked, intimate desultory talk. The train dragged itself across Arizona, spanned the Colorado gorge, spiralled up into the last great wall of mountains, slid down through blue-white light into the California coastal plain and the green season.
At ten-thirty that night the train stopped for the last time in the Los Angeles station, and we left it together. Climbing up the long sloping tunnel from the train, I had more than the usual feeling of strangeness on coming into an unfamiliar city. It was like climbing out of a tight little hell into an unpredictable chaos. Even my own intentions were unpredictable, but at the last minute I made up my mind.
“I’m going to Santa Barbara,” I told Mary at the baggage counter.
“But you said you were coming to San Diego with me!” There was an angry flush in her cheeks. Her proprietary tone made me angry, too.
“I’m not,” I said bluntly. “I may see you in Diego tomorrow night.”
“What on earth are you going to Santa Barbara for?”
“I’m going to look up Laura Eaton. The girl Hatcher wrote the letter to.”
She put her hand on my arm and drew me aside from the crowd at the checking desk. “Please don’t go, Sam. Stay in Los Angeles with me tonight.”
“You’re not jealous of a girl I’ve never seen?”
“I’m not jealous of anybody. I just don’t want you to go to Santa Barbara. I’m afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“What might happen to you. You mustn’t go running around the country looking for trouble.”
“I don’t have to look for it. It found me long ago: I want to know what’s in that letter, and I have to go to Santa Barbara to find out.”
“And if I don’t like I can lump it!” she said flatly.
She took her hand away from my arm. I felt very much alone.
Part IV
THE END OF THE RIDE
11
I LEFT her at the taxi-stand. She didn’t say good-bye. I checked my bag through to San Diego, and took a northbound train. The hundred-mile journey in a coach was not pleasant. I was sick of trains anyway, and conflicting feelings were churning inside me. I hated to leave Mary standing, but unfinished events were tugging at me. I couldn’t relax until I had done something, and the only feasible action I could think of was a visit to Laura Eaton, whoever she might be.
Between one and two in the morning I got off at the Santa Barbara station. The town had the salt smell of a seaport, but it was as dark and deserted as any prairie village in the middle of the night. I found a telephone book in a station booth and looked up Laura Eaton. There was a William Eaton at 2124 Bath Street.