Chapter 4: Night Train

Frank sat in a dark corner of Our Place and scanned the unsigned note: “I don’t think she did it.” Neither did Frank, but he couldn’t prove it. Yet. It was one of those cases that had come together too quick, too clean. Big Jim’s body, face down, a penknife in the back. Had to be one of them: Lily. Rosemary. The Jack of Hearts. Rosemary was the obvious one to take that walk up to the gallows.

“I asked her point blank,” said the hanging judge. “Not a word in her own defense.”

“Maybe she was protecting someone?” asked Frank.

“My job is to judge, not speculate.”

And mine is to speculate and not judge.

People in this town are tight lipped, as if their job is also to judge, not speculate. Frank was used to it. People dish out a lot of crap when they’re not being tight lipped, hoping to throw you off track or gain favor, somehow. Everyone’s got their own theory of what went down. Frank’s job was to extract what he could from the tight-lipped, sift through the garbage of the loose-lipped, and get to the truth. He was good at it. Nobody had a record like Frank’s. He was the last resort, the bright side of a coin flip when the logical choice was to give up.

The first thing to know about solving a case is that somebody’s got to want to solve it. Not true here. It’s not that everyone thought Rosemary did it. Lots of people figured it must be one of the other two. They just didn’t care enough to rip everything open on a strictly personal matter. Why upset the apple cart?

“Something funny’s going on,” according to the backstage manager. “I could feel it in the air.” The festival was over, but the real show was about to begin. Other than the drilling, which nobody seemed to mind, everything was quiet. Some girls in back, playing cards. Waiting, yet not waiting. Only the backstage manager’s sense of doom, and nobody to share it with who was willing to listen.

Big Jim owned the mine just outside of town. Gold, silver, rocks, who knows? Arsenic, for sure, but that’s just a byproduct. He could take whatever he wanted and throw it all away. What did he care? The mine was his, and so was Rosemary, with a dish of Lily on the side. When he spotted the Jack of Hearts across the room that night, he knew he’d seen that face somewhere, and he knew he didn’t like it. He just needed some time to figure out where.

Big Jim wasn’t the only one. Lily knew that face, and so did Rosemary. Had Big Jim asked, they each would have shrugged, none of your damn business. He didn’t need their help. He figured it out on his own, then he dragged Rosemary up to find Lily and the Jack of Hearts, to confront the Jack and show them all who was king.

Frank scratched his head. Night Train on the jukebox helped him think. He played it over and over, to drown out the background noise. Up to now, no matter how difficult, he’d always cracked the case. This one was different. Nobody cared except for whoever wrote “I don’t think she did it.” Why the anonymous note? A ruse to throw him off another case? A sideways confession from the real killer?

My job is to speculate, not judge. Could’ve been Rosemary. Or one of the other two. Nobody else, no way. And so we rule them out.

The Jack of Hearts? Long gone. Lily? Long gone. Nothing to go on but Night Train on the jukebox, and a cigar, unlit, hanging from Frank’s mouth.