“Depends on the advice, I guess.”
Saunders slowly tucked the sheet back into place, as tenderly as if preparing the dead man for a long nap. “This is an unusual case, and unusual cases tend to have something sinister attached to them. Be careful, Sam. So many think that the story ends here, with a dead man on a slab. More often than not, this is where the story begins.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Back at his desk at the police station, Sam typed up another memo, in triplicate, while Mrs. Walton sat glumly nearby, working at her own typewriter.
TO: City Marshal Harold Hanson
FROM: Inspector Sam Miller
An autopsy performed by Rockingham County Medical Examiner DR. WILLIAM SAUNDERS has determined the cause of death for the unidentified male found last night by the B&M railroad tracks to be a HOMICIDE. According to DR. SAUNDERS, his autopsy results have not yet been finalized, although he is confident in his finding of HOMICIDE. No progress has yet been made on the victim’s identification, although the investigation continues.
It was time to notify the state. In New Hampshire, the state’s attorney general was brought in for all homicide cases, and for the first time in his career—feeling just a bit nervous, despite the giddiness of having a murder case before him—Sam picked up the phone, got an operator, and placed the call to Concord.
A bored-sounding woman on the other end of the line informed him that all available assistant attorney generals were at court, with the state police, or otherwise engaged. She promised a return phone call later today or perhaps tomorrow. Depending.
Sam hung up the phone, feeling oddly satisfied. Fine. He would continue the investigation on his own, which suited him perfectly. Next to his typewriter was a manila envelope with the return address of the Portsmouth Herald. Opening the envelope, he slid out a handful of black-and-white photographs of his John Doe, sprawled on that bare stretch of mud. How in hell did he get there? Dropped? Thrown? From where? And why?
He picked up the phone again and dialed a four-digit number from memory. In seconds, he was talking to Pat Lowengard, the station manager in town for the Boston & Maine railroad.
“Sam, how are you today?” Pat’s voice was smooth and professional, as though it belonged over a station’s PA system.
“Fine, Pat, fine. Looking for a bit of information.”
“Absolutely. What do you need?”
Sam picked up his fountain pen. Pat and the cops had a long and cooperative relationship. The department and its officers got a break on ticket prices to Boston and New York, and the railroad station got a break from automobiles parked illegally on side streets.
“What trains did you have come by two nights ago?” Sam asked.
“Can you narrow it down a bit?”
“Yeah. Hold on.” He looked at his notes. “Anytime before six P.M.”
“Just a sec. Let me check that day’s schedule.”
Sam leaned back in his chair until Pat came on the line again. “Got two in the afternoon. One at two-fifteen P.M., the other at five forty-five P.M.”
Two-fifteen in the afternoon? No, too early. The body would have been noticed way before Lou Purdue stumbled across him. So it had to be the later train, for if it were a train that went to the Portsmouth B&M station, it would have slowed before stopping. Which meant maybe John Doe was murdered on the train and tossed off. From there, start checking the train, the passenger manifest, the conductors and the train crew, and you could start making some effort to finding out just who in hell had been—
“The five forty-five P.M.,” he said. “A local?”
“Nope,” Pat said. “Express. Straight shot from Boston to Portland.”
Damn, he thought. So much for that theory. “How fast does the express go?”
“Through town? Thirty, maybe forty miles an hour.”
Sam looked back at the glossy prints of his John Doe, lying peacefully in the mud. At thirty to forty miles an hour, the body would have been tumbled in a mess of broken limbs and torn clothes. But there he was. No broken bones, no smears of mud on his clothes, no identification, half starved…
He rolled the fountain pen between his fingers. “Any unscheduled trains come through yesterday? Trains associated with the Department of the Interior?”
A pause, as though the connection had been broken, and then Pat’s voice returned. “No, nothing like that, and please never ask me that again over the phone, all right?”
Sam dropped his pen on his blotter, hearing the sudden fear in the station manager’s voice. “Sure.”
After a quick stop in the grubby men’s room, Sam went back to his desk. The phone started ringing and he picked it up as he sank into his chair. “Miller, Investigations.”
“Inspector? Inspector Miller?” From the rumble of traffic over the wire, he could tell the call was coming in from a pay phone. “It’s me. Lou Purdue. Lou from Troy. You was lookin’ for me earlier, weren’t you?”
Inadvertently, Sam touched his sore cheek. “Yes, I was.”
“Good, ’cause I want to see you again. The other night you said to call you if I remembered somethin’. And I did.” Lou coughed. “Shit, I know I only got a couple of minutes ’fore the pay phone hangs up on me. Look, meet me over at the camp, okay? I’ll be there in five minutes. Hey, will I get another buck from you?”
“You’ll get more if you tell me what you remembered.”
Another cough, and in the background, the sound of a truck driving by. “Like this, I remember standing there in the rain, waitin’ to see if a cop car was gonna come over, there was another guy waitin’, too. So what, right? But now I remember. His shoes were all muddy… and they was nice shoes, too… but they was muddy like he had walked down the side of the tracks, just like me and you and those cops. Made me think maybe he knew somethin’ about that dead guy.”
“What did he look like?”
“Oh, a nice-lookin’ fella, you could tell that—”
Click.
“Hello? Lou? You there?”
Nothing save the hiss of static. The operator had cut him off after the first three minutes.
“Dammit!” he said, banging the phone back into the cradle, shoving back his chair and grabbing his coat, leaving the station and Mrs. Walton to her typing, before she could say a word.
Back to the encampment he went, making that long walk after parking in the Fish Shanty lot. Like before, the old man who was the unofficial mayor stalked up to him and said, “You, the cop. Lookin’ for another slug?”
Sam poked him in his skinny chest with his index finger. “Are you?”
The old man laughed. “Like I said ’fore, cop, arrest me, I don’t give a shit, and—”
Sam stuck out a leg and then tripped him. He fell to the ground and squawked. Sam pressed his boot down on his left wrist, bent, and said, “I gave you that last one, pal, but don’t think you can screw with me again, all right? And maybe I’m not in the mood for arresting you, maybe I’m in the mood for breaking a finger or two, so shut up, all right?”
The old man grimaced, and Sam knew he should feel guilty, but he didn’t. He looked around at the worn-out cars and trucks, the shacks and lean-tos, the smoky fires and the children, children everywhere, thin and too quiet. “Lou from Troy. Is he around?”
The old man spat up at Sam. “Nope. He was here a few minutes ago. But he’s gone now. Jesus, step off my arm, will ya?