“Not as ridiculous as it’s going to be,” I said. “Miss Eaton, will you call the police.”
“You needn’t bother,” Gordon said. “I am the police.”
“You change identities with breath-taking rapidity. Go ahead, Miss Eaton. I’ve got him covered now.”
Gordon reached for his hip pocket.
“Keep your hands in sight,” I said sharply. “Put them on your head.”
“Very well, if that appeals to your boyish sense of fun.” He raised his hands, grinning at me sardonically. “Take my wallet out of my left hip pocket. You’ll find my identity card in it.”
I circled around him with his body at the hub of my line of fire and secured his wallet. It contained a card which identified him as Chester Gordon, Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I felt cheated, doubtful and angry. My melodrama had descended into farce, and all the wasted adrenalin turned sour in my veins.
“I’m sorry to have spoiled your game of cowboys and Indians,” Gordon said acidly. “Now put down that gun, or it may get you into trouble.”
“You could have stolen this FBI card,” I said uncertainly.
“Put down that gun,” he said with authority. “Hefler wouldn’t like it if you shot me by accident.”
I remembered the smooth-talking red-haired man in the FBI office on Lafayette Street. “Are you working for Hefler?”
“I could arrest you for assaulting me, Mr. Drake. You’ve acted like a damn fool.”
I lowered the gun. He took his hands from his head and stroked his bruised jaw.
“I’m not in a mood for apologizing,” I said bitterly. “If you had taken me into your confidence–”
“We don’t take the general public into our confidence when we’re working on a case.”
“God damn it, there wouldn’t be any case if it weren’t for me!”
“I’d be just as happy,” Laura Eaton said, “if you men wouldn’t stage another brawl in my living-room. We’re all three on the same side, aren’t we?”
Gordon said, “Excuse me.”
Further recriminations rose from my wounded feelings to my lips: If you had cooperated with me we might have been able to save Hatcher, we might have been able to trap Anderson. But I swallowed them and held my tongue. I could see his point. An investigator of murder and espionage had to work in secrecy, especially in the cramped intimacy of a train.
I said, “Excuse me,” to Laura Eaton. To Gordon: “What were you doing on the train? You weren’t checking up on me, by any chance?”
“I was there partly to protect you. Two deaths had coincided with your presence. It looked as if the trouble was following you. After Hatcher died I was certain of it.”
I couldn’t resist saying: “Your protection didn’t do me much good. Nor Hatcher.”
“I could hardly serve as your food-taster, Mr. Drake. Nor am I ubiquitous.”
“You’re ubiquitous enough to suit me. What brought you here tonight?”
“After Hatcher was killed, my suspicions narrowed on Anderson. I did my best to shadow him. When you jumped me at the door of the smoking-compartment last night I think he caught on. He got off the train at Gallup and I followed him, but not fast enough. He took the only available taxi to Albuquerque, and I had to wait for the train to leave. When I got to Albuquerque he had already gone.
“I traced him to the airfield and found that he had chartered a plane to Los Angeles. I took the first commercial flight but when I got to L.A. there was no trace of him there. Like you, I got the idea that he might have come to Santa Barbara to intercept Hatcher’s letter to Miss Eaton. I flew up here at noon and found that he had. He landed at the Santa Barbara airport this morning, and disappeared. Only Miss Eaton has seen him since. The local police informed me of the entry into her house this afternoon. Since then I’ve been watching this house. The local police are watching the roads in and out of town.”
“I didn’t realize I had a bodyguard,” Laura Eaton said. “It feels nice. I don’t know as much about handling a gun as I pretended to.”
“Our organization exists for the protection of the public,” Gordon said sententiously.
“I suppose you know all the circumstances of Bessie Land’s death?” I said.
Laura Eaton leaned forward in her seat and looked at me curiously, but had enough character to hold her tongue.
“I’ve been over the evidence with Hefler,” Gordon said. “As a matter of fact, I examined the cadaver.”
“Do you agree with the police that it was suicide?”
“No, I don’t. Some of those municipal police are textbook-ridden. They’ve learned that hesitation-marks are often associated with suicide, so whenever they see a hesitation-mark they jump to the conclusion that it’s suicide. In this case, a more likely hypothesis is that Bessie Land was murdered while in an alcoholic coma. The tissues of her brain were saturated with alcohol.”
“I saw her a couple of hours before she died. She was terribly drunk then.”
“Exactly. It’s quite likely that the killer hesitated in the act of murder and made a shallow cut in her throat before he could gather enough courage to complete the act. Alcohol is an anaesthetic, and Bessie wouldn’t necessarily be aroused. That’s one way of accounting for the hesitation-mark. Another way, and I consider this more probable, is that it was deliberately inflicted to make the murder look like suicide. That would call for almost surgical coolness, and for some knowledge of medico-legal doctrine. But I think the criminals we’re dealing with are cool enough and intelligent enough. Besides, murder arranged to look like suicide fits in with the previously established pattern.”
“You mean Sue Sholto’s murder?”
“Sue Sholto’s murder?” Laura Eaton said in a shocked whisper.
“There have been three murders,” Gordon said. “Your friend Hatcher was the third.”
Laura Eaton’s face became pale and her body seemed to grow smaller. She put her hands over her face.
“You spoke of criminals,” I said. “In the plural.”
“There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that we’re up against an organization–”
“Black Israel?”
“Black Israel is part of the organization, or associated with it. I got a wire when the train stopped in Kansas City. They’ve picked up the Negro who was sitting beside Bessie Land the night she was killed–”
“I knew he had something to do with it.”
“He didn’t kill her,” Gordon said. “He proved that he remained in the Paris Bar and Grill continuously until after 2 A.M., and she was dead long before that. But he is a member of Black Israel. He broke down and confessed.”
“Are the Japs behind it?”
“If they are, he doesn’t know, or won’t admit it. He did admit that Black Israel takes a passive-resistance stand on the war effort. As a matter of fact, his own draft status was not what it should be. That’s the charge we’re holding him on. He’s given us some leads, and we’re rounding up the leaders. Hector Land was a minor leader and a comparatively recent member, he said. And he mentioned a white man who supplied Black Israel with funds for propaganda purposes.”
“Anderson.”
Gordon leaned back and lit a cigarette. “I think so.” There was still tension between us, like an electric arc whose contact points were my sore knuckles and Gordon’s bruised jaw. I said sharply: “If you thought so, why didn’t you arrest him on the train?”
His black eyes gave me a cold superior stare. “For the simple reason that I had no legal evidence against him. You don’t seem to realize how the police must work in a democratic country, Drake. During this war, our Bureau has watched known criminals for as long as two or three years without acting to arrest them. Watched them every minute of every day for years, waiting for something to give them away. In the end, something always does. A slip of the tongue, an error in planning, a chance meeting–”