There's been times when Catalina has challenged me to this game of skill or that contest of agility and endurance. There's only one I've ever agreed to. She outlasted me. She outlasted me five times in a row, but then she's considerably younger than me and I know when losing ain't losing.

  Her house is far enough out of town that she can keep horses and dogs and cats and goats and I don't know what all else. Every time I drive or walk up to her kitchen door these creatures set up a hell of a racket.

  When I stepped out of my car around four o'clock in the afternoon, the biggest gander I ever saw came running around the corner of the tool shed. I was in no mood to get into a territorial dispute, so I jumped up on the hood.

  He stood there, neck outstretched, hissing at me until Catalina came out laughing to beat the band and shook her apron at him.

  "Well, aren't you the brave one?" she said, her fine blond hair breaking loose from the bun in the back of her head and whirling around her face.

  I got down with a sheepish smile on my face. It always pleases Catalina when I act like she's caught me out in some foolishness or some weakness, though I hope she knows it's just a game so far as I'm concerned.

  "What brings you calling?" she asked.

  "The hope of heaven," I said.

  "If your idea of heaven is what I think is your idea of heaven, you'd better just put it aside."

  "I always thought your idea of heaven was the same as mine."

  "God, you can be coy when you want to be. What I'm saying is I've lost my appetite for casual dalliance . . ."

  "There's a nice old-fashioned word."

  ". . . and such pastimes. There'll be no more slap and tickle, Jake. It's time we both grew up . . ."

  I didn't want to hear what I knew was coming next.

  ". . . and thought about a grown-up relationship."

  "I never thought you were a marrying woman. That's what you always said."

  "That's what I said and that's what I meant." She ran her brown hand across her hair, smoothing it back out of her eyes. "But there's silver threads among the gold now, Jake."

  "In case you haven't noticed, I haven't been standing still."

  "A little snow looks good on a man like you, Jake. It's different for a woman."

  "I never thought of you as a woman," I said as I followed her through the mud room and into the kitchen.

  She tossed a look at me over her shoulder.

  "That didn't come out exactly the way I meant it," I said, practically stumbling over my apology, my thoughts being so confused what with two lady friends in a row giving me veiled ultimatums.

  "I know you didn't, Jake. You've proven to me often enough that you don't have any doubts about my gender. Just like I don't have any doubts about yours. However, I've been thinking about it and I think it's time for me to stop being frivolous."

  I sat down at the kitchen table. It was covered with new oilcloth with a pattern I remembered being on my mother's kitchen table when I was a boy. At least some things didn't change.

  "I like the oilcloth," I said, running my hand back and forth over the slick surface.

  "It's a pretty pattern, isn't it? The storekeeper says that's the last of it. The company that makes it went out of business six months ago."

  It looked to me, so far as women were concerned, I was going out of business too.

  "It might look like I stopped by for comfort or recreation, Catalina," I said, "but the truth is I came to pick your brain."

  "About what?" she asked, taking some homemade wheat-raisin bread from the keeper and cutting off several slices.

  "Guns and ammunition."

  While she toasted the bread and got out a tub of sweet butter, I filled her in about what had happened to Mr. Chaney and the conditions of the shooting so far as I knew them.

  "You think to take down the make and model of the rifles and the kind of cartridges they used?"

  I grinned with satisfaction. Catalina knows I hate firearms of any sort and know less about them than any self-respecting country boy should know. Even when I was a youngster, after being blooded, I couldn't see the excitement in going out and killing some small animal, like a rabbit or a squirrel, who'd never done me any harm. When she wants to chide me about my squeamishness, she points out that I don't hesitate a minute to wolf down the saddle of venison she's butchered out of a deer she's shot with her own hands.

  We could argue about that for a lifetime and come to no conclusion. Those who love to hunt will talk about thinning herds and keeping down rodents, and those who hate the idea of killing helpless animals'll still eat meat and wear leather shoes.

  She looked over my list and nodded her head. "How long a shot?"

  "Anywhere from three hundred to four hundred yards."

  "No," she said.

  "An accidental bull's-eye?"

  "Anything's possible. But with the trucks bouncing, train moving at a different speed, catching up or falling behind, rifles firing at random, an accidental hit is very unlikely."

  "Would it be less unlikely with a scope?"

  "A deliberate shot with a scope from a moving vehicle? Ever try to keep a gull in the field of a pair of binoculars when you were standing on the deck of a boat? Making a shot with a scope from a pickup would be worse than firing from the hip if you wanted to hit something. Field of vision'd jiggle all over the place. I'm also saying no because from this list of rifles and the description of the ammunition they used the bullet wouldn't have acted the way you say it acted."

  "The coroner found traces of cupronickel," I said.

  "English slugs."

  "So, tell me about what bullets and rifles were probably used."

  I won't go telling you what she told me, because it would only confuse you as much as it confused me. I wasn't just flattering Catalina asking her to give me lessons about weight and muzzle velocity and trajectories and penetrating power. Since I didn't know much, I was hoping that if I listened to all she had to say, she'd finally say something that was useful to me. And she did.

  "The way you describe the damage to the head and blowing the back window out the way you said it did, I think I can describe the bullet and how it performed. Now, just about any bullet hitting just right could explode a man's head, and there are several can do the job as you describe it—though few could do so at the distance—so this is an educated guess."

  "I won't be taking it into a court of law."

  "The bullet went clean through the glass, then hit the victim, spread out, and broke up, smashing his head and going on through. By the time it hit the window it was like a load of buckshot and blew it out. So, first of all, the cartridge was an oversized twenty-two or something bigger. Probably a thirty-thirty or a thirty-ought-six—which the six in this case doesn't designate the load of powder but because it was the U.S. military cartridge modified to its present form in nineteen hundred and six."

  "These footnotes are very interesting, Catalina," I said, "but I'm afraid they'll only get me all confused. Are you saying the bullet was high-powered?"

  "Probably not. Too high-powered and a bullet hitting a living target could go right on through. Then you find yourself tracking a lion or a wild boar through the bush. The idea is to deliver a bullet that will penetrate, then spread out and deliver a killing wound. You're probably looking for what remains of a hunting round, maybe a hundred-and-fifty-grain soft-point fired from a rifle that has a muzzle velocity of three thousand foot-seconds. Probably a wildcat cartridge."

  "How's that?"

  "A wildcat's a cartridge that's no longer in production. Somebody fancies they need a cartridge a little different than any available for a certain job, so they rework and reload an existing case and fit their own specs."

  "Who'd do that sort of thing?"

  "Enthusiasts get on to it. What you'd call gun nuts. Some competition shooters. Some hunters."

  "Can they get it done?"

  "I suppose some gun shops would find a craftsman prepared to make tailor-made loads but, mostly, they do the reloads themselves."

  "So a hundred-and-fifty-grain wildcat cartridge with a soft-point bullet finished with cupronickel fired from a thirty-ought-six rifle."

  "With a scope."

  "You just now said a scope would be a drawback trying a shot from a moving vehicle at a moving target."

  "Well, that's just it, Jake. Unless they stashed the rifle or threw it away altogether, nothing on your list could do the job the way you tell it. The shot couldn't have been made from a moving vehicle, not if it was deliberate. I'd be willing to bet the shot was made by a shooter laying prone, resting the barrel of the rifle on a tripod or a mound."

  NINE

  CATALINA INVITED ME TO SUPPER. I thanked her kindly and said I'd best be on my way.

  "I hope you understand my feelings about the other," she said.

  I allowed as how these were trying times and we all had to muddle along as best we could, not letting her off the hook altogether.

  "It's not for spite you won't stay for supper?" she asked.

  I put my arms around her and held her for a little, whispering into her hair the way ladies like you to do, saying, "If we were never to lie close together again, Catalina, I'd still always remember you as one of the treasures of my life."

  That made her shiver a little, but she still let me walk out the door.

  The sun was going down. It lay at my back so that I was chasing the shadow of the car along the highway. By the time I got to the outskirts of Omaha, two and a half hours later, it was dark and I was feeling hungry, a little sorry I hadn't taken Catalina up on her offer of a meal since now all I had to face was a frozen dinner.

  I knocked on my landlady, Mrs. Dunleavy's, door and asked her did anything much happen while I'd been gone. She said since I'd only been gone over night, she expected things were much as they were except that Barney had come home with a torn ear and I really should get him neutered, if not to keep down the cat population of the neighborhood, at least to keep him from fighting and maybe getting himself killed.

  She didn't invite me to stay for supper.

  I went up the back way. Barney was on the porch off the kitchen and gave me a look that said if I'd stay home more often maybe he wouldn't go out seeking companions and getting himself tangled up in the wrong crowd.

  I let him in through the door and hit the light. I got his dish and put half a can of cat food in it.

  "Where you been eating while I've been gone?"

  He told me.

  "Down at the Chinese restaurant, hey? Well, there's your trouble."

  He asked what trouble.

  "That monosodium glutamate, MSG, they put in their food. Throws your metabolism all out of whack. Makes you nervous and careless. That's why you got your ass kicked."

  He told me what I could do with my preaching.

  Instead of a frozen dinner, I opened a can of soup and toasted a three-day-old roll I found in the bread box. I ate it feeling sorry for myself, which some people would say would show how foolish I am since I've had more than one chance to marry and settle down. More than one chance to just live with someone, for that matter. I choose to live alone but I don't see that means I gave away the right to feel lonesome every now and then.

  The next morning I was up and at the office even before Spinks walked through the door.

  "You look into that little matter up the line?" he asked.

  "It was no little matter. A passenger had his head blown off."

  Spinks looked at me as though testing the truth of that.

  "I mean that like I said it," I added.

  "Clean off?"

  "Well, it wasn't clean."

  "Get the men who done it?"

  "They were Indians, just like you thought."

  "I never thought they were Indians, but it figures."

  "What figures?"

  "It figures Indians or Mexicans would do something like that."

  "Not drunken redneck white men, though?"

  "Was they white men?"

  "No, they were Indians."

  "So what the hell are we disputing?"

  "How the hell do I know?"

  "Something biting your ass?"

  What was biting my ass was that a man I'd worked with for years, a good and loyal friend, had just let it drop that he had a casual bias against Indians and Mexicans and didn't even know it. If I took exception, he wouldn't know what the hell I was talking about. There're more people like that than I'd like to count.

  "No. Nothing like that."

  "Then like what?"

  "It seems everybody's ready to accept this as an unfortunate accident. Maybe charge these young Indians with involuntary manslaughter. Give them all a few years apiece to think about discharging firearms in such a careless way."

  "That sounds fair to me. There's a lot of talk lately of cracking down on drunk drivers. What they did was just as irresponsible."

  "I don't deny that. If they fired the shot that killed the man."

  "What makes you think they didn't?"

  "My bones."

  "I don't want to hear about your bones."

  "I read, not long ago, that great detectives work on instinct more than they do on reason."

  "Be that as it may, what we got here is something that's really none of our business. I can't let you waste time on it. The front office'd raise hell, great detective or no great detective. You want to nose around something like this, you'll have to do it on your own time."

  "You mean I'd have to use up vacation if I was to take a day or two just to poke around here and there?"

  "How about this?" Spinks said. "I'll put you down for sixteen hours overtime added to your accumulated vacation. I'll let you have the use of a company car."

  "How about the gasoline?"

  "As long as you don't drive to California, you can put it on the company credit card."

  "Expenses?"

  "Don't test my good nature. You find yourself away from home at mealtime or at night, you'll just have to visit one of your widows, divorcees, or maiden ladies. That should be no hardship. You decided what you want to do?"

  "Well, for one thing, I want to talk to the dead man's wife again."

  "Where's she at?"

  "I saw her in Des Moines at the morgue but I'm sure she'll be in Chicago by tonight."

  "Okay. Meanwhile, type me up a report."

  "What do you want me to put under cause of death?"

  "Why, misadventure, what the hell else?"

  TEN

  IT STARTED TO RAIN around three in the morning. Barney came rushing in off the back porch through the window in the kitchen I keep cracked a couple of inches, knocking over a jam jar full of pennies on the sill in his hurry to get in out of the wet.

  Barney likes to gallivant but he don't like to stay out in bad weather.

  He came in and sat on my feet, glowering at me like I was the one who spoiled his fun.

  "Wise up," I said. "It's got nothing to do with the wind and the wet, Barney, it's old age creeping up on both of us. If either of us had any brains we'd get ourselves a wife and settle down in front of the fire and stop running around the countryside."

  He reminded me we didn't have a fire to sit in front of.

  "We could get one," I said, and rolled over for another forty winks.

  When I got up at my usual hour of five, it was raining in earnest, beating against the windows in bursts and gusts like the rain itself wanted to get in where it was warm.

  After I dressed and fed Barney and myself, I decided, convenience or no convenience, I'd take the train into Chicago and use taxicabs when I got there. Driving through the rain can be an unnerving occupation, giving you no chance to mull things over as you tootle along, but slashing through a storm on a train is almost like an adventure. The speed of the train makes the rain do tricks as it gets blown away in sheets by the speed of passage, and what lands on the windows blows across the glass like little rivers traveling by.

  I was at the station in plenty of time for the six-forty.

  Halt Ennery, the conductor, saw me climb aboard one of the coaches, and by the time we reached Creston, two hours late, he was ready for a break, so he slid into the seat next to me so we could chew the fat for a little while.

  "Was that your train got shot at?" I asked by way of starting the conversation, though I already knew it'd been his.

  "Wouldn't you know it?" he said. "Any misfortune or disaster waiting to happen along the Burlington Northern's waiting for my train."

  "You don't want to start thinking that way. The next thing you know you'll be looking for the Jonah."

  "Well, I've been keeping an eye on Laws Ruskell. I got my doubts about him."

  "That's just because you two don't get along too well."

  "I'm not saying it's his fault, mind. What I'm saying is some people are like lightning rods—they attract bad luck like magnets attract iron filings."

  "You think the man who was shot in the head was that sort of lodestone?"

  "Harold Chaney? I'd say anything but. There was a man with a golden touch. Throw him into a manure pile with a horseshoe in each hand and he'd come out of it riding a racehorse."

  "You know him pretty good?"

  "I knew him the way you'd know a friendly passenger who rode the train a lot. He always took a room, and when I'd stick my nose in he'd ask me to sit and chat a while. He even gave me a couple of tips on the futures market, but I talked it over with the wife and we decided better safe than sorry. He was a nice man who happened to have the gift of making money."

  The way a lot of people in the Midwest still think about fame and fortune is that, first and foremost, you got to be a decent human being, a regular guy, one of the boys who maybe sits around the diner playing nickel poker and talking about the crops, who's not above coming to the dance at the Grange Hall on Saturday night and bringing along the little woman. They don't bother to think anybody who does that is doing something smart, something in his own interest, like that fella out in Indiana who cornered the soybean market one year with hardly a penny in his pocket to start, just because the farmers and elevator operators knew and liked him. A reputation for hard work is also useful, even if the hard work lasted two summers when you were just a boy. The thing is, you shouldn't be seen to be afraid of it, so when fame and fortune does finally drop into your lap it's seen as something you deserved.

 

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