“Yes. For the X ray and to have your wounds treated properly.”
“What time is it?”
He frowned. The thick-necked guy took out a railroad pocket watch, looked at it, and said, “Quarter past ten.”
More than two hours since I’d had my run-in with Lester Raymond. Damn! “I can’t go to the hospital right now,” I said. I gestured toward the uniformed cop. “I need to talk to the police. It’s urgent.”
The four of them held a short conference. Then the doctor went away, still frowning; the yard bull went with him. But the thick-necked guy stayed.
The cop said, “I’m Sergeant Collins, Oroville police. This is Mr. Buckner, the night yardmaster here.”
“I’m a private investigator,” I said. “But I guess you know that by now.”
He nodded. “We looked at your ID. You’re the man who was in to see Sergeant Huddleston this afternoon, the one who turned up the kid thief.”
“Right. And that’s not all I turned up today.”
I told him the full story of Charles Bradford and Lester Raymond, everything I knew for certain and everything I had surmised. I left nothing out, including my ill-advised excursion to the museum tonight and the rationale for it and what had happened afterward. I also gave him Bradford’s pendant, which was still in my pocket.
He was not happy with any of it, but he didn’t openly condemn me for my actions. Like Huddleston, he was a professional; upholding the law was more important to him than anything else.
Buckner, however, looked shocked. “By Christ,” he said, “I can’t believe it. I’ve known Jim Dallmeyer for years. Hell, we played softball together…”
“I know him, too,” Collins said. “But maybe neither of us knows him or anybody else as well as we think we do.”
“I still can’t believe it.”
“Well, we’ll damn well check it out.” Collins looked at me. “You feel up to taking a ride?”
“Down to the police station?”
“The hospital first, then the station.”
“Whatever you say. But you’d better hurry. Raymond-Dallmeyer-has had better than two hours to go on the run again. He might have figured he finished me off in that boxcar, but with a triple homicide rap hanging over him, he can’t take the chance. He’ll be gone by the time you can get your men out to the museum.”
“We’ll see about that,” Collins said. “If he isn’t gone, if all of this is a load of crap…”
“Believe me, it’s not a load of crap.”
“For your sake, mister,” he said, “it better not be.”
A brace of uniformed patrolmen drove me to the hospital. Collins went elsewhere, presumably to the railroad museum to check out my story. The trim doctor was waiting for us when we arrived; he saw to it that I got my head x-rayed and partially shaved and bandaged. He seemed to prefer that I spend the night at the hospital, as a simple precaution, but he didn’t put up much of an argument when the patrolmen told him their orders were to take me to the police station. I did not put up any argument at all. I had had enough of hospitals to last me the rest of my life; just the few minutes I’d spent in this one made me twitchy, and I couldn’t wait to get out of it again.
When we came into the police station, the cop manning the desk-one I had never seen before-asked me if I wanted to make a telephone call. Meaning did I want to get in touch with my lawyer. I said no. I had no reason to want to do that-not yet, anyway. So they stuffed me into one of the holding cells and left me to do my waiting alone.
The doctor had given me some pain pills at the hospital; I had already taken two, but I swallowed another one dry and then lay down on the cot. Some of the ache in my head abated after awhile, but the drugs made me drowsy. I was hanging onto the edge of sleep when the desk cop showed up again and roused me and let me out.
I got taken then to a door marked CHIEF OF POLICE. On the other side of it was a small, functional office containing nondescript furniture and two men, both of them standing: Collins, and an angular guy of about fifty with a long, narrow face and spatulate hands. The angular one’s name was Lydecker, it developed. He was Oroville’s chief of police.
Lydecker told me to sit down. He and Collins remained standing. “Looks like you were right about Jim Dallmeyer,” he said. But he didn’t sound too pleased about it.
“No sign of him at the museum?”
“No sign of him anywhere,” Collins said. “His van was gone when we got there. Front door of the cottage was standing wide open. Dresser drawers pulled out, closet in the bedroom half-empty-looks like he packed and beat it in a hurry.”
“Then you believe me now?”
“We believe you. We searched the place and found a couple of incriminating things-a wallet belonging to Charles Bradford, for one. We’ve got an APB out on Dallmeyer right now.”
“But we’d have him in custody already,” Lydecker said to me, “if you’d played it by the book. Christ, man, why didn’t you come to us right away instead of trying to take him by yourself?”
“What can I say? I screwed up; I admit it. But I didn’t go out there with the idea of tackling him myself, trying to play hero. I thought it would take too long to convince you to investigate, and I figured maybe he hadn’t cremated Bradford’s body yet. Proof was all I was after. I found it, too-that pendant…”
Lydecker was shaking his head. “You screwed up, all right,” he said, “and I don’t like it. On the other hand, you did turn up a homicide in my town, and a multiple killer to boot… Hell, I don’t know what to do about you.”
I didn’t say anything. Things were a little dicey now; if he wanted to make trouble for me, I stood to lose my license all over again. In fact, with the publicity this was bound to get, maybe I stood to lose it no
matter what Lydecker decided to do. I could just see the headlines: PRIVATE EYE IN HOT WATER AGAIN. FIRST DAY BACK IN BUSINESS-ANOTHER HOMICIDE.
My head had begun to throb as intensely as before. My thoughts were running a little fuzzy at the edges, too. I hoped they weren’t going to keep me here very long. If this session lasted much more than another fifteen minutes I was liable to fall asleep in the chair. Or fall out of the damned chair altogether.
It didn’t last much longer, thank God. They had some questions for me, mainly about the details of my activities in Oroville, for clarification purposes. I did some babbling in answer to the last one Lydecker asked-I was pretty woozy by then and my mouth flapped like a ventriloquist’s dummy’s-and that convinced them to call a halt to the proceedings.
Evidently they had decided beforehand to put me up for the night at a local motel, rather than stick me back in the holding cell. Collins said something about the motel and took me outside to his car and drove me a short distance to a place that had a blue neon sign and some buildings arranged in a half-circle. Then we were in a room, and he said somebody would be back for me in the morning. Then I was alone, sitting on the edge of the bed. Then there was nothing-an absolute void, dreamless, that wasn’t like sleep at all.
Chapter 14
The young, flat-faced sergeant, Huddleston, was the one who came for me in the morning. He woke me by banging on the door, and I staggered out of bed and let him in. I must have looked pretty bad; the first thing he said was, “Man, you had it rough last night, didn’t you?”
I mumbled something only half coherent, because I was still trying to fight off the loginess of sleep, and shambled into the bathroom and splashed my face with cold water. It made my teeth chatter, and that in turn made my head hurt. But it was a muted kind of aching, not unlike that of a hangover. The inside of my mouth tasted like I had swallowed something that had crawled out from under a woodpile, something nobody should ever try to eat.
Huddleston was standing in the bathroom doorway. “How do you feel?” he asked.
“I may live,” I said. “I’m not sure yet.”
“I had a concussion once. I know what it’s like.”