The train pulled in on time. I climbed aboard and had fifteen minutes to wait. I had a lower berth. The cars were air-conditioned. It was still warm in the depot and after the desert heat, the air-conditioned cars seemed chilly. There wasn’t anything else to do, so I undressed while the train was still in the depot, slid into my berth, found that a single blanket didn’t feel at all uncomfortable, and dropped off to sleep. I didn’t even know when the train pulled out.
Somewhere along the road, I dreamed there was a big earthquake. The track had twisted and turned like a tortured snake trying to crawl off a hot iron. The train buckled in the middle, slewed sideways. Cars were rolling over and over—
A voice kept saying in a hoarse whisper, “Lower nine — lower nine — lower nine,” and I realized the earthquake was caused by hands tugging at the blanket.
I knuckled my eyes and said, “What is it?”
“Ge’mman has to see you right away.”
“What the devil,” I said, fighting against the sense of unreality and a growing irritation.
“Turn on the light in there,” a voice said.
I sat up in the berth, and pulled the curtains aside.
Lieutenant Kleinsmidt was standing in the aisle with the white-coated, big-eyed porter at his side.
The car was rolling slowly along — gathering speed. Far up ahead I could hear the mellowed whistle of the locomotive drifting back across the roofs of the air-conditioned cars. The aisle was a dim mist of green curtains swaying with the motion of the train. Here and there, heads stuck out as curious passengers wondered what the commotion was about.
I stared at Kleinsmidt. “What’s the idea?” I asked.
“You’re going back, Lam.”
“Back where?”
“To Las Vegas.”
“When?”
“Right now.”
I said, “Guess again. I’m going to be in Los Angeles at exactly eight-thirty in the morning.”
He looked at his watch. “I got on at Yermo at two-thirty,” he said. “We stop briefly at Barstow at three-ten. You’re going to be dressed and off the train then.”
“This is the kind of co-operation I get in return for giving you a break, I suppose.”
He started to say something, changed his mind, said instead, “Start getting dressed, Lam,” and added, “This is an official visit, and I’m talking in my official capacity. I mean it.”
“How’d you get here)” I asked, accepting the situation and wriggling out of my pajamas.
He stood with one elbow propped against the lower part of the upper berth, looking down at me. “Airplane. There’s a car following the train. We’ll go back and—”
A man’s voice from the upper berth asked irritably, “Why don’t you get a ship-to-shore telephone?”
“Sorry,” Kleinsmidt said.
The porter moved up “Beg pand’n, ge’mmen, if you all don’t mind.”
“It’s all right,” I told him. “We’ll be quiet.”
I dressed in silence. Kleinsmidt’s big hand reached in and took my bag as I finished packing.
He led the way down to the men’s washroom. “What do you want out, Lam?” he asked.
“Toothbrush, hairbrush—”
He looked at his watch. “All right. I’ll play valet.”
I combed my hair and brushed my teeth, washed up, and reached for my shirt. Kleinsmidt handed it to me. He’d been holding it — looking at it.
I put my hairbrush, toothbrush, and tooth paste back in the bag. Kleinsmidt snapped the bag shut and wrapped his big hand around the handle.
“I can take it,” I said.
“It’s all right. I have it.”
The porter came in. “Jus’ a few minutes we’ll be in Barstow, suh. We only stop there jus’ a second. If you ge’mmen will be all ready to hop off.”
Kleinsmidt nodded.
“Ah’s openin’ up at the rear,” the porter said.
I lit a cigarette. “What’s it all about?” I asked Kleinsmidt.
“Sorry, Lam, I’m not doing any talking right now.”
“I’ll say you’re not. The way you’re acting, a person would think you were breaking a murder case.”
I could have bitten my tongue off as soon as I’d said it. The look on his face told me everything I needed to know. “How did you know there’d been a murder, Lam?”
“Has there?”
“That’s what you said.”
“Don’t be silly. I told you you were going through as much agony as though there had been a murder.”
“That isn’t exactly what you said.”
“The hell it isn’t.”
“You know it isn’t.”
“I know it is. I was merely using a figure of speech anyway. But that’s no sign you can’t tell me.”
“We’ll talk about something else until we get to Las Vegas.”
The train slowed down. We walked back through the vestibule. The porter stood at the door, his hand on the catch. When the train came to a stop, he slammed up the platform, jerked open the door, jumped down the stairs, and stood staring. I could see the whites of his eyes.
The sharp tang of pure desert air knifed my nostrils. Even in the air-conditioned car I’d been conscious of sticky emanations oozing into the atmosphere from persons who were sleeping. Out in the desert, the cold, dry air, pure and sharp, dissolved those impurities from my lungs so rapidly it was like a stab.
I held a quarter out to the porter. He started to reach for it, then suddenly jerked his hand back and said, “No, suh. That’s all right, suh. Ah ain’ courtin’ no bad luck— Ah means— Good mornin’, suh.”
I put the quarter back in my pocket.
Kleinsmidt chuckled.
I looked forward along the train. There was a wind blowing. Smoke and steam from the locomotive were whipped back, and tossed about to dissolve into fragments. Kleinsmidt walked ahead with my bag, seemed to know very definitely where he was going. Out beyond the station, I looked up at the sky. The stars were staring steadily down, close to me, unwinking and brilliant. It seemed there wasn’t an inch of the heavens that wasn’t blazing with pin points of light.
Typical of the vagaries of desert climate, the heat had given way to an intense, dry cold.
“Got an overcoat?” Kleinsmidt asked.
“No.”
“Okay, the car’s warm.”
He walked across to where a car was parked. A man jumped out and pulled the rear door open.
Kleinsmidt saw that I got in first, tossed the bag in, and climbed in beside me.
“Let’s go,” he said to the driver.
We slid into smooth motion out from the railroad grounds in a wide, sweeping turn, up to the highway, and across a bridge. It was warmer inside the car, but there was the nearness of the stars the vast space of the desert stretching away on each side, in front and behind, gave one a feeling of cold insignificance.
I said to Kleinsmidt, “Nice weather we’re having.”
“Isn’t it.”
“What’s the idea? Am I being charged with some crime?”
“You’re just going back, that’s all.”
“If I’m not charged with anything, you haven’t any authority to take me off a train and take me back.”
“That may he. However, the chief said to bring you back, and you’re going back.”
“What’s the car?”
“One I rented down the line a piece. I have a plane parked down there.”
I said, “Well, anyway, I’m glad we’re friends. If we hadn’t been, you might have got sore and decided not to tell me anything.”
He laughed at that. The driver half turned, then pivoted his head back so his eyes were on the road.
The car roared into high speed, taking a series of dips in the road so fast I could feel the body lurch and sway on its springs.
I settled back into the corner and wrapped myself in silence. Kleinsmidt bit the end from a cigar and smoked. There was no sound save the noise made by the cold desert wind as it whistled around the car, and the sound of the motor. Once or twice we went through streaks of sifting sand hissing across the highway in long tendrils of drifting white.
The pitted crescent of an old moon came up when we had been traveling about half an hour, and a few minutes later the car slowed.
Ahead, a square of multicolored lights marked the location of a landing-field. The driver slowed the car, searched for a turn-off road with a spotlight, found it, and approached the field. Almost at once, I heard the roar of an airplane motor and saw lights come on on a plane.
Kleinsmidt said to the driver, “I’ll want a receipt for this so I can turn it in on expenses.”
The driver took the money Kleinsmidt gave him and scrawled out a receipt. Kleinsmidt opened the door, grabbed my bag, and we stepped out into the cold. The driver of the car backed it around and started back for the highway. The motor on the plane was turning over with clicking regularity. I could hear the coarse sand crunching beneath our feet.
Kleinsmidt said to me, out of the corner of his mouth, “They’d break me if they knew I’d done any talking. You’re supposed to hit the chief’s office without knowing anything about what the score is.”
“Why?” I asked.
Kleinsmidt measured the distance to the waiting airplane, slowed his pace somewhat so he wouldn’t get there too soon. “What time did you leave Bertha Cool in the Sal Sagev Hotel?” he asked.
“Why, I don’t know. Yes, I do, too. It was shortly after eight.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Down to my room.”
“What’d you do there?”
“Packed up.”
“You didn’t check out?”
“No. I left that for Bertha to do. They’d have charged me for another twenty-four hours on the room, anyway, and Bertha’s the treasurer. She knew I was going.”
“You didn’t say anything to anyone in the hotel?”
“No. just took my bag and walked out. I put a note for Bertha on the desk.”
“This one bag all the baggage you have?”
“Yes. What’s the idea?”
He said in a low voice, “Somebody got killed. The chief thinks you may have had something to do with it. I don’t know what makes him think so, but somebody gave him a bum steer. He thinks it’s hot. Keep your head. Don’t talk after we get in the airplane.”
I said, “Thanks, Lieutenant.”
“It’s okay,” he mumbled. “Just keep turning this over in your mind, and try and get an alibi.”
“For what time?”
“From ten minutes to nine until the time the train pulled out.”
“I can’t do it. I got to the station about nine o’clock. The train pulled in at five minutes past nine, and I got aboard.”
“The porter doesn’t remember you.”
“No. He was talking with someone. My bag was light, and I just climbed up the car steps. I was tired, and I undressed at once. I—”
“Save it,” he said as the figure of the pilot loomed up in front of the plane.
“All ready?” Kleinsmidt asked.
“All right. Hop aboard.”
We climbed into the low-ceilinged cabin of a single-motored plane. The pilot looked at me curiously, said, “You ever flown before?”
“Yes.”
“Understand about your safety belt and all that?”
“Yes.”
The pilot jerked down a curtain behind him, gunned the motor into a roar, and we started moving. After a few minutes, the wheels gave a series of short, sharp jolts, and then we zoomed upward and out across the line of colored lights. Ahead, the circling finger of an airway beacon cut through the darkness. Kleinsmidt tapped me on the knee, held his finger to his lips for silence, slid my bag over so that his leg was holding it tightly against the side of the cabin, out of my reach. He closed his eyes and almost immediately began to breathe heavily.
I didn’t think he was asleep. Apparently, it was some sort of a trap to see if I’d try to get something out of my bag. I noticed he kept the edge of his foot pushing against the corner of the bag. He’d have felt it if I’d so much as touched the bag.
I thought back on it and remembered how he’d grabbed that bag as soon as he’d got aboard the train, and hadn’t let it out of his possession since. Then I remembered how he’d examined my shirt in the washroom. Evidently, the chief of police had been given a very hot tip indeed.