Mr. Kessler — Raymond Kessler, table fourteen, party of one — had dined at the first seating. Cobb remembered him because he was the kind of passenger stewards notice and then try not to: smooth, well-dressed, traveling as a wholesale representative out of Kansas City, with a laugh that came a half-second too easily and a habit of calling the waiters by their first names as if he had known them for years. He had the fish. He had coffee. He tipped adequately. Nothing about him had been worth a second thought.
What had been worth a second thought — though Cobb had not thought it at the time, there being no reason to — was that Mr. Kessler had come back for the second seating.
It happened sometimes, on a full train, when a passenger missed something or wanted a nightcap of coffee. The dining car was doing a brisk business and the door steward was seating parties as fast as tables turned, and Kessler had simply presented himself at the door at five past eight with a smile and been given a table for one at the far end, table two, where a party of two had just risen. Cobb had made the notation without looking up: Kessler, 2nd, 8:05.
He rose at 8:40. Cobb wrote that down too. And between those two times, at about half past eight, Mr. Kessler had caught Cobb's eye as the steward passed and said, "Steward, have you a plaster? I've scratched my hand on something," and held up his right hand.
Cobb had fetched the first-aid kit from the pantry and given him a plaster himself, because Kessler was a first-class passenger and it was quicker than sending a waiter. The kit was a tin box with a red cross on the lid, kept on the second shelf beside the coffee urns, and Cobb knew its contents the way he knew his own pockets. He cleaned the scratch with a bit of gauze — Kessler winced, theatrically, and laughed — and laid the plaster across the back of the hand with the neatness of a man who has done it a hundred times for scalded waiters and nicked fingers.
The scratch was fresh — a raw red line across the back of the hand, the skin lifted, the kind of scratch a stiff clasp leaves when it slips. The kind of scratch, Cobb thought later, that a jewel case's clasp leaves. At the time he thought nothing of it at all, except to notice that it ran against the grain of the knuckles, as if the hand had jerked back from something that bit.
"Sample-case clasp," Kessler had said, easily. "These new clasps. They make them to keep honest men out, and the rest of us bleed." He had laughed his half-second-too-easy laugh, and flexed the hand to show the plaster held, and asked Cobb's name, and used it twice in the next five minutes as if they were old friends.
He wished Mr. Kessler a good evening, and Mr. Kessler thanked him, and went back to his coffee, and rose at 8:40, and that was that.
The dining car closed at ten. Cobb did the accounts in the pantry with the adding machine, checked the waiters' chits against his book the way he always did, locked the liquor, and was in his bunk by half past eleven with the book in the drawer under his pillow, the way he always slept with it. A steward's book was a steward's livelihood. You did not leave it about.
It was gone half past midnight when the knocking woke him — young Eddie, the second waiter, with his jacket half on and his face white.
"Mr. Cobb. They've taken a woman off in Car Seven. Put her off at Alder Creek. They say she stole Mrs. Vance's jewel case."
Cobb sat up slowly. "What woman?"
"A schoolteacher. Traveling alone. They found the brooch in her berth."
Cobb said nothing for a moment. Then he said, "What brooch?"
"The sapphire. From the case. It was in her berth, under the pillow."
Eddie went on, the way young men do when they have a story too big for them — the search, the conductor, the special agent riding the train in plain clothes, the woman standing in the corridor with her book in her hand saying she had never seen the brooch before, the decision to put her off at the division point. And then Eddie said the thing that made Cobb's blood go cold in a way the cold pantry air never had.
"Mr. Kessler told the agent he'd been asleep since eight. In his berth. Said he never left it all evening."
Cobb lay back down and stared at the ceiling of his bunk and thought about his chit book in the drawer under his pillow. Kessler, table two, second seating. Sat down 8:05. Rose 8:40. A plaster for a scratch on his right hand at half past eight.