The Man Who Followed Women Page 4

  The man stopped and lifted his arms jerkily. He was no more than a solid shadow to Kernehan, the lifted arms dim in the fog. He sucked in such a hard, ragged breath, though, that Kernehan felt the trembling all the way up through the heavy gun to his hand and wrist.

  “Step this way.”

  Kernehan snapped on the light over the tool-shed door and inspected his catch. He was surprised. This was a respectable, middle-class sort of man; not a bum. Kernehan said, “Stand two feet from the wall, lean over, and put your finger tips on it and keep still.” Kernehan slid the gun into the holster on his hip and gave the guy a quick frisk. Nothing on him. After sizing him up Kernehan would have been surprised to find anything.

  “What are you doing here in the yards?”

  “C-c-cutting across to save time.”

  This was such a silly excuse that Kernehan almost laughed over it. “Where were you headed? Glendale?”

  “I guess I got lost.”

  He was looking at Kernehan over his shoulder and Kernehan was sizing him up more closely. Around fifty, five-six or so, getting bald, the clothes not new or expensive—Kernehan had a sudden hunch the guy had put on an old outfit for this little errand. The hunch came from nowhere, but he would have bet on it. He said, “Don’t do anything funny. Move slowly. Take your hands off the wall and get out your wallet and show me your identification. Driver’s license and so on.”

  The little man licked his mouth. “Oh, Lord, do we have to go through all that rigmarole? I was just walking through.”

  “You’re a trespasser on company property,” Kernehan reminded. “Let’s see the I.D.”

  The man sort of moved backward with a funny jerk, and Kernehan had the gun out in an instant. “You’d better take it easy.”

  “What the hell do you expect me to do? Jump you?” He sized Kernehan up through the drifting foggy light. He was sore because he’d been caught and perhaps because he had lost the woman who had preceded him, and Kernehan’s scaring him with the gun made him even madder. “Here, take a look. Here are some of my salesman’s cards, I sell tile for a wholesale outfit, and here’s the sheet provided by the bonding company. I have a perfectly good job, and I’m not here to steal tires or anything.”

  Kernehan examined the identification while he thought about that last remark. The little guy probably didn’t even know what he’d said, didn’t have any idea of the implications. When they got excited they said the first thing that came to mind.

  “I guess we’d better go over to the yard office,” Kernehan told him. “I’d like to talk to you.”

  The other man stood flat-footed, facing him. “I haven’t done a goddam thing.”

  “You coming with or without handcuffs?” Kernehan asked.

  “How do I know you’re even a police officer?”

  “I’ll show you my I.D. in the office.”

  He would have liked to bolt. Kernehan knew it. The gun kept him from trying it. He would have liked to belt Kernehan one, too. But then there was a little matter of eight inches or so difference in their height, and some forty-odd pounds. Plus the fact that the little man was made of middle-aged mush and Kernehan was young and hard.

  They went across tracks to the yard offices, and Kernehan thought about this pigeon as they walked and got more and more interested in him.

  He had a job selling tile, all right; but jobs had been used before to cover up. He could be selling tile in the mornings and doing something else in the afternoons and evenings. Like peddling hot merchandise.

  The name was Howery, Leonard Howery, and the address wasn’t too far away, over in the direction of the park, a pretty good neighborhood, some big old homes and some of them cut up into flats and apartments. Kernehan had been thinking of the district in regard to his own need for a new home.

  That business of following the woman brought a quirk to Kernehan’s lips. If he hadn’t made the slip, mentioning the tires, Kernehan might have figured that the guy had simply come in to see where the woman was going. He could be a boy friend or husband, and she could be slipping around on him, and him suspicious. Or she could be a dame he’d picked up in a bar and made a rendezvous to meet in an empty boxcar. Hell, it-had been done before. The only thing was, Howery wasn’t quite the type to take his lady friends to such surroundings. And what in hell had she been doing, walking so far ahead, if they were that intimately acquainted?

  Lots of possibilities.

  Yeah, little man, Kernehan thought, you and I are really going to have a chat.

  I only wish I could have snagged the gal, too, so we could really have a party.

  Since New Canyon Yards was a relatively recent expansion and had only been in operation a little more than a year, the yard offices were big and modern. There was a separate office for the use of the railroad police, an outer interrogation room and an inner office, a telephone hookup to all the outlying phones in the yards, modern furniture and good desks. Kernehan got a patrolman in from the yards to stay with Howery while he went into the inner room and called the night sergeant, Burns. He finally located Burns in the Brett Street Yards. The night sergeant was not expected to hold down the office at night, but to get out and circulate.

  Burns agreed to come at once. He thought he could make it in under fifteen minutes.

  Kernehan took the patrolman out into the corridor and told him to look for the woman in the vicinity of the overpass. He went back to Howery. Howery was more nervous now, the anger subsiding under the bright lights and perhaps too under the realization that he actually was involved with a branch of the law. He had no doubt of it after Kernehan showed him his I.D. and badge.

  When Kernehan got a sheet of paper from the desk, and took a pen from his pocket, and again asked Howery for his full name and address, Howery almost shouted, “Oh, for Lord’s sake, do we have to—”

  “Yeah. We have to.” He wrote it down as Howery grudgingly gave it again, Howery adding that he couldn’t see why Kernehan couldn’t remember what was in the wallet. Ignoring this, Kernehan went on asking questions. Howery said he wasn’t married, he lived alone. He had never been in New Canyon Yards before tonight—nor in any other yards, nor had he had any truck with a railroad except a trip to San Francisco long ago when he and his mother had gone to a cousin’s funeral.

  No, he most certainly didn’t have any company property at home, nor did he have stolen merchandise of any kind there.

  “Will you give us permission to look?” Kernehan asked.

  “I most certainly will if it will put an end to this nonsense.”

  Kernehan nodded impassively and began to look in the desk drawer for a search release. When he found one he put it aside, awaiting Burns’s arrival. “You say you live alone? Don’t you have a dog?”

  “A dog?” Howery said it as if Kernehan had asked if he kept a dinosaur.

  “Dog. D-o-g.” Kernehan waited and watched.

  “Of course I don’t have a dog. What would I want with it?”

  “You have something against dogs? Don’t you like them? They mess the lawn? They bark and keep you awake nights?” Kernehan offered.

  “My mother always said they smelled up a house. What’s this line leading to, anyway? I don’t know of a dog in my neighborhood except a Chihuahua kept by an old lady next door, and as far as I can see the thing is a deaf-mute; it never lets out a peep. What’re you trying to get me to say?”

  “Just routine questions, Mr. Howery.” Kernehan had been listening with an inner ear; Howery’s puzzled annoyance, his impatience had sounded genuine. “How did you happen to come in here tonight? Really, I mean. Don’t you want to tell me about it now?”

  Howery blurted, “I know it sounds like hell but as a matter of fact I was following a woman. Goddam it, is that such a crime?”

  “Who is she?”

  “I don’t know.” He folded his hands suddenly, clenching them as if they held a secret; and Kernehan decided that he knew the woman and wasn’t going to tell.

  “She
’s been giving you a bad time?” he hazarded.

  “What the devil do you mean by that?”

  “Stepping out on you? She must be acquainted with some rough types if their idea of where to meet is out by the tracks in the dark.”

  Howery squinted at him. “I don’t know the woman, I don’t know who she’s meeting. If anybody. I’d say she was just a girl who has a yen to watch freight trains.”

  Kernehan gave him an odd, thoughtful look that caused some color to come up under the film of perspiration on Howery’s face. Burns came in about that time. He checked what Kernehan had put down, then asked Howery sharply what he was doing in the yards.

  “Following a woman. Following a woman. How many times do I have to tell you?” Howery shouted.

  “Where did you meet her?” Burns demanded. He was cool; his voice remained heavy and unruffled.

  “I didn’t. I just followed her, and she turned into the yards, and I thought, my God, she might be raped in there. I didn’t come in to steal a goddam thing or to wreck one of your trains, or any such kind of thing. I was just following this woman.”

  “He has agreed to sign a release for search of the house he lives in,” Kernehan said, pushing the release forward.

  Howery signed it, Kernehan and Burns putting down their names as witnesses. They took Burns’s car over to Howery’s apartment; it was one of the new cruisers, equipped with radio-phone. During the ride Howery grew increasingly quiet and sullen.

  The two-bedroom flat looked to Kernehan as if someone had filled it up with knickknacks and dust catchers and had then decided to hell with it all. There were a lot of signs of a woman’s touch, but they were faded and filmed by neglect. There were a couple of religious pictures on the walls. When Burns mentioned them, Howery said that they had belonged to his late mother; he just hadn’t taken them down as yet.

  “She must have been a nice lady,” Burns commented, and Kernehan thought that the look Howery gave in answer was full of hate.

  He and Burns, though, found no company property, nor any signs of the stolen and missing shipments of the sort that had lately become such a mounting problem in their office.

  In the shared garage at the rear of the lot Howery’s car sat alongside two others. Howery explained that he did a lot of driving in his job, that on weekends and during the evenings he had had to get out to walk for the sake of exercise.

  “You’d better watch where you walk from now on,” Kernehan remarked.

  “I intend to.”

  Howery knew that they were going to let him go with a warning; the knowledge shone in his defiant eyes.

  At the yard offices Kernehan checked with the patrolman he’d sent to look for the woman. The patrolman hadn’t found anyone near the footbridge overpass, nor the gate.

  Ducked out, Kernehan decided. Heard the patrolman coming, or saw an incautious light, and ran. Those footsteps he’d heard, just before he’d caught Howery, had been real.

  He and Burns discussed Howery’s actions, and his explanations.

  “He could be doing what he said, sneaking along after the woman, but I’m surprised he’d admit it,” Burns commented.

  “There’s more to it than that. I’m sure of it,” Kernehan said. He stood frowning and quiet, trying to organize his impressions of Howery. It hadn’t simply been the slip, Howery saying he hadn’t come into the yard to steal tires. “There’s something he hasn’t told us. Maybe something about the woman. I think he knows her.”

  “Check with L.A. robbery detail and see if they’ve got anything on him.”

  Kernehan nodded slowly. “And I’ll see him again. He won’t expect that.”

  Burns, looking at him in the bright light, thought what a good-looking bastard he was; and then for an instant he glimpsed beyond the handsome façade, saw something more: an iron resolve, a fixedness beyond ordinary interest in the job. The movement of insight was somehow chilling. It set Burns wondering.

  Kernehan said, “I’ll figure out a way to run into him again that will give him a shock.”

  “I’ll bet you will,” Burns agreed.

  Chapter 5

  At a quarter of nine the next morning the outer office was busy—several investigators were checking schedules and writing up reports on the previous day’s work, and Pete was rattling out a batch of official letters on the typewriter. In the inner sanctum, beyond the glassed-in barrier, Kernehan sat with Ryerson. They were talking about the freight losses.

  Ryerson’s air was as grim as the dead cigar in his jaws. “I’ve had a real blast from Whittaker in Freight Claims. These losses are really starting to add up. We’re going to have to break this thing, or we’ll be looking for new employment. And without recommendations, yet.”

  Kernehan said, “What about our man in Vermillion?”

  “He hasn’t been able to find any seals cut and stuck back the way we get them here. Looks as if it’s between here and the river.”

  “Plenty of territory.” Kernehan looked at the big railroad map on the wall behind the chief’s desk. Vermillion was at the Arizona border, on the Colorado, a sun-baked town of about five thousand, built mostly of adobe bricks and corrugated iron, a railroad division point with sprawling freight yards, repair yards, division offices, and a big passenger and freight depot. Kernehan had been over there a couple of times, but not within the past year. “We ought to be able to narrow it down better than that.”

  “A clue of sorts has turned up. One car with some leather goods missing—expensive stuff, handbags and such—had a seal on it which turned out to have been issued to the Colton office. I called Colton this morning. Richie remembered it, remembered testing the car seal and finding it cut and stuck back. He replaced it with one of his own. This same car had been checked at Vermillion because of the kind of shipment. Nothing wrong, there.”

  “It’s going on between Colton and Vermillion, then.”

  “There’s something else. As I mentioned, the kind of shipment. It’s either tires or cigarettes, once in a while soft goods like leather and fabric, or plastics. They’ve never tried for anything like television sets, for instance, though you’d think the resale possibilities would have tempted them, the kind of setup they seem to have working for them.”

  “They ever tackle something they decide they don’t want? Break a seal and take a look and then leave it alone?”

  Ryerson shook his head angrily. “Never. They know exactly what they’re going for.”

  Kernehan was silent; he didn’t have to speak out, what both of them were thinking. Somebody was tipping off the thieves, and there was an inside angle somewhere.

  “I want you to go to Colton and look around.”

  “And take a run over to Vermillion?”

  Ryerson thought about it, chewing the cigar. “No. I’ve got another idea for Vermillion. Send you down there under cover. You know the place, but it’s been a while since you were there—”

  “A year.”

  “You ought to be able to manage it. Now, while you’re in Colton, there’s another thing, just came in.” Ryerson yanked a written report out of a stack on the desk. “Dead man in a hopper car, showed up in a load of gravel for Union Concrete. Colton P.D. or sheriff’s office is on it by now, of course; you can check first with them. The stiff is a former employee of ours. Canned six months or so; try to find out what he was doing back there. Find out where the car was loaded. Oh well, you know what to do.” He skipped the sheet across the desk to Kernehan.

  Kernehan stood up. He glanced at the sheet briefly. The corpse was identified as a male white American, twenty-eight years old, six foot two and weighing a hundred and fifty-five pounds—this information, Kernehan judged, having been taken from the dead man’s work record. Name, Hart Jennings; former employment, switchman in the Vermillion and Colton yards. Cause of death was given as brain hemorrhage, due to injuries to the head. Cause unknown.

  “Who identified this stiff?”

  “Somebody on the switcher at the cem
ent works. You can check that item in Colton. They think it could have been an accident, him riding the hopper and falling asleep, waking up when they started to fill it, trying to get out and falling back somehow.”

  “Could be.” Privately, Kernehan thought it sounded cockeyed. It sounded as if somebody wanted to put in an accident report to save himself the trouble of working on a murder. Kernehan put the folded sheet in his pocket. “By the way, I picked up a trespasser on that stake-out last night. Name of Howery. Claims he was following a woman. I heard a woman’s footsteps, but we didn’t find her. It was foggy.”

  “He’s been bringing in those goddam dead dogs?” Ryerson asked hopefully.

  “I doubt it. One thing sticks with me, though. He said he hadn’t come into the yards to steal tires, or anything—using his words.”

  Ryerson seemed to chew on it along with the dead cigar. “You went to his place?”

  Kernehan went into details of his visit to Howery’s flat, with the night sergeant. “On the surface he seems a respectable salesman—except for this business of having followed a woman he says he doesn’t know. I’m going to check with the employer, of course. But I have a hunch his days go the way he says … he peddles tile to contractors in the big subdivisions.”

  Ryerson speculated, “Maybe the dame gave him the eye in a bar. Maybe she had a friend waiting somewhere, it was a come-on for a mugging.”

  Kernehan was looking out into the big light well that opened up the middle of the huge old-fashioned building. A girl with shiny black hair and a red blouse was over there in another office; she was trying to change a typewriter ribbon. Something had gone wrong. Loops and snarls of ribbon hung from her hands, and she was staring in perplexity at the machine. “It could be, but I don’t go for it. Howery knows something he didn’t tell us. Maybe, who the woman is and what she was doing there. I’m going to make sure he doesn’t forget us. It might take a little time, but I think he’ll talk. Eventually.”