do?” He handed me the snapshot.
I went back in and sat down with Anna and her mother. The benches were starting to fill up for the afternoon Santa Fe train.
“Anybody in Los Angeles you can call? Any friends of Mary’s?”
“She lived with three other girls in a very nice apartment,” Anna said. “We talked to them long distance this morning. They drove her to the depot and saw her get on the train.”
I asked why she was coming home. The old lady’s face had hardened into a sullen mask while Anna and the cops had talked. Now she looked at me fiercely. “That’s none of your concern. My daughter is missing from one of your trains. That should be your concern.”
Anna touched my arm. “Mother is very tired. Mary was coming home on family business. It’s nothing.”
I found myself studying the blonde’s ankles. She probably thought I was just being fresh. They were nice ankles, naked thanks to the nylon shortage. I pulled out my smokes and offered them. Anna took one and I studied her face while I lit her cigarette. It looked like a face that might tell me things if the mother wasn’t there. Then I asked her what her sister might have been wearing on her trip home.
After I left them, I made a few checks with the dispatcher. He was already in a bad mood. Extra engineers and firemen had been called in and he didn’t know why. The section foreman had been out all day on the line. “Nobody gives me the word,” he mumbled. After a few minutes of commiseration, he told me that the train Mary Becker boarded in Los Angeles had arrived on time the night before. It had been divided into three crowded sections, the last one coming in shortly after 10. It stayed fifteen minutes then departed for Tempe, Mesa, Tucson, El Paso, and points east. Next I went to the baggage room through the double doors just beyond the ticket counter. Anna had described Mary’s luggage: a matching suitcase and overnight bag, burnt-yellow and streamlined, with three brown stripes. The baggage men let me be: they were loading carts for the Santa Fe. It only took a few minutes of prowling to find the set. It looked almost new and the tag said, M. Becker, with an address in Los Angeles. I told the head baggage man to set them aside and headed back to the waiting room.
The women were gone.
It would have to wait. I needed to check the line and report to the chief at 8 o’clock “sharp.” I pushed through the front doors and heard a woman yell. She sounded a lot like Anna Becker. Looking around an archway, I spotted her with a man, standing beside a roadster with the top down. The car glistened red in the afternoon sun. So did Anna’s golden hair. She was in an agitated conversation with the man, chopping the air with her hands. Twice I made out the name Mary, said with urgency. They couldn’t see me. The thick pillars and archways of the station portico concealed me. Anna moved enough that I could take him in: dark hair in a crooner’s hairstyle, a kid’s face but the muscular body of a twenty-five-year-old. He was wearing a leather jacket and driving gloves. I didn’t see many able-bodied men his age around, and I wondered how he’d bugged out of the draft. He didn’t look like 4-F material, but you couldn’t tell. He sneered at something Anna said and she screamed, “How could you! What kind of man are you?” That’s when he hit her, so hard that the sound echoed in the portico.
That was enough. I knew what kind of man he was. But when I stepped out, the car was already speeding up Fourth Avenue, Anna’s blond hair fluffing out in the wind. I tapped the roof of a taxi and got in. In only seconds the cabbie had caught up. They paused at the light at Jefferson, then turned right. I didn’t know what I was doing. At that moment, I would have showed the kid in the leather jacket what it was like to be hit by somebody his own size. By the time we reached Second Street, however, I had hold of myself again. They turned south and parked. I sent the cab half a block past, paid him, and got out.
We were a long way from Palmcroft. The sidewalk was filthy and