For ten years he resides in Oroville with nobody the wiser as to who he really is. But then circumstance, or fate-call it what you wanted-brings Charles Bradford here. And puts Raymond at the Western Pacific freight yards at the same time Bradford goes there from the hobo jungle to report the streamliner’s theft. Wheel flanges were a railroad item; the only local businessman who was likely to order a shipment of them was the owner of a railroad museum. The logistics of it had to have worked that way.
Bradford sees Raymond talking to the yardmaster, probably without Raymond seeing him, and recognizes him. It’s been fifteen years since he’s laid eyes on his old friend, and Raymond has added the beard and hairpiece; but you don’t forget what your friends look like, particularly one as notorious as Lester Raymond. Still, Bradford isn’t completely sure, so he doesn’t approach Raymond in the yards. Maybe he hangs around long enough to watch Raymond drive away in that van with the name of the museum on it; that’s how he knows where to go looking for him later on. Then Bradford heads for the library to check past city directories to find out how long the Roundhouse Museum has been in operation, and to refresh his memory on the details of Raymond’s fifteen-year-old crime in Malibu.
When he leaves the library Bradford heads out to Firth Road to confront his former pal. Object: blackmail. Not major blackmail, necessarily; maybe Bradford is only after a few bucks and a hot meal. But he’s after something. He’s down-and-out and maybe bitter about it, and he’s gone to too much trouble to be looking up a fugitive murderer because of simple curiosity or for old time’s sake.
What was it Kerry had said to me last night, the line from the poem about hoboes? Each man’s grave is his own affair. Yeah. Hannah Peterson had told me her father didn’t care about money, was only interested in the adventurous hobo life. A fat lot greedy Hannah Peterson knew. In more ways than one, she was her father’s daughter.
But the real irony was that Bradford hadn’t known there was twenty thousand dollars waiting for him from his late uncle’s estate; that he didn’t have to resort to blackmail to get money, to maybe turn his life around…
Without more facts, that was as far as I could piece things together. What had happened after Bradford arrived at Firth Road was still a mystery. But it figured to be one of two things. The first was that Raymond had paid him off and Bradford had left Oroville for parts unknown-that he’d received enough money to take a bus instead of a freight train, or maybe even to have bought a secondhand car. The other possibility was a hell of a lot grimmer.
The other possibility was murder.
Raymond had a violent temper; he had killed twice before when that temper was aroused. It was plenty possible that Bradford’s blackmail demand, particularly if it was for a substantial amount of cash, had bought him a bullet or a cracked head instead. I hoped that wasn’t the way it had been, but I had an uneasy hunch that it was.
There wasn’t any basis for the hunch… or maybe there was. Something had begun to scratch at the back of my mind, something about my own meeting with Raymond /Dallmeyer that hadn’t been quite right…
And then I knew what it was, and the skin along my back tightened and began to crawl. “Jesus,” I said aloud. “Sweet Jesus!”
I jumped up from the desk and ran out through the main part of the library, startling Mrs. Kennedy and a couple of patrons. I should have gone straight to the local police with it-but telling them the whole story, convincing them to question the man they knew as Dallmeyer and search the museum, would take too much time. Hours, maybe. By then it would be too late. It might already be too late, but there was still a chance that it wasn’t. I had to go out to Firth Road myself.
Chapter 12
It was dusk when I made the turn off Oro Dam Boulevard, shut off my headlights, and drove slowly toward the museum complex. Nightlights burned on poles inside the wire-mesh fence; there were lights on inside the roundhouse, too, and in one of the facing windows of the cottage at the rear. The van I had seen earlier was still parked on the same diagonal back there.
I drove past the entrance, peering over at the museum yard. There was no sign of Raymond. Near the dead-end barrier, an unpaved drive angled alongside the PG amp;E substation; I pulled up there and left the car in the shadows behind the building, where it couldn’t be seen from across the street. Then I moved over into the trees and underbrush that flanked the railroad right-of-way, and cautiously worked my way parallel to the museum fence until I got to where I could see the back of the roundhouse.
The engine doors were still open. The interior lights let me see the Baldwin locomotive’s cowcatcher and part of her blunt nose. There was no longer any steam coming out of the exhaust, and the boiler had been shut down; no sounds drifted over from there, or from anywhere else in the vicinity. If Raymond was inside the roundhouse he was doing something pretty quiet.
He was inside, all right; I had been standing there waiting and watching for five minutes when he appeared alongside the locomotive and came walking outside. He paused long enough to light a cigar, take a couple of deep puffs on it. Then he went across the yard to the side gate, unlocked it, stepped through, locked it again behind him, and vanished into the shadows fronting the cottage.
He would be coming back to the roundhouse sooner or later, though; otherwise he wouldn’t have left the engine doors open or the lights on. I would have to hurry. And I would have to be damned careful while I was poking around inside there. I didn’t have a gun and it seemed likely that he did. I did not want to end up where I was afraid Charles Bradford had.
Quickly, I went back along the fence to a point where the high bulk of the roundhouse loomed between me and the cottage. A long time ago, a tree had fallen against the fence here; the wire mesh was bent inward slightly and flattened down and rusted at the top. Somebody had come out with a power saw and cut the tree into six-foot segments, also a long time ago, because the segments were still scattered over the ground and starting to rot. One of them lay close to the fence; when I got up on the decaying log I could reach the tubular top bar and get enough of a grip on it to haul myself up.
The problem was, I couldn’t maintain much of a hold with the crabbed fingers on my left hand and I had to do most of the work with my right, clenching my teeth against the pain. It took me a good three minutes of grunting and heaving to hoist my fat backside over the bar and drop down on the other side. The noise I made doing it seemed loud enough to alert half the town, but that was a product of tension and my heightened senses. The cottage was two hundred yards away, and the sounds wouldn’t have carried that far.
Still, I ran ahead to where one of the old passenger coaches was set roughly parallel to the back wall of the roundhouse. I knelt along the coach’s front end, massaging my cramped hand, flexing it. I listened and watched the cottage for more than a minute before I was satisfied Raymond wasn’t coming back to investigate.
All right. I moved back to the other end of the car, crossed to the roundhouse’s side wall, then went forward again to the rear corner. Still no movement over at the cottage. I slipped around the corner, ducked inside through the open door.
And stopped in front of the turntable and tried to keep from gagging. There was a burnt-meat smell in the air, faint but nauseatingly pungent. That told me all I needed to know; I was too late, all right, but not by much more than an hour.
I went ahead anyway, around on the right side of the Baldwin and then up through the gangway and inside the cab. The smell, as I had known it would be, was coming from inside the firebox. I did not want to pedal open the butterfly doors and look inside, but I steeled myself, breathing through my mouth, and did it just the same.