A man does not dine at 8:05 and sleep through eight o'clock in the same evening.
Cobb got up. He dressed in the dark, in his shirtsleeves and his steward's apron because he had not the presence of mind to take it off, and he took the chit book from under his pillow and held it in both hands, and he understood, with a clarity that made his stomach turn, what he was about to do.
A steward does not accuse a passenger. That was not written anywhere in the rule book, but it was written everywhere else — in the union hall, in the dining car, in twenty years of knowing exactly where the line was and never stepping over it. Passengers were passengers. The company settled its own accounts with them. A steward who pointed a finger at a first-class passenger would find himself stewarding a lunch counter in a town he had never heard of, if he stewarded anything at all.
Cobb had seen it happen once, years back, to a steward named Reilly on another line — a good man who had sworn he saw a passenger lift a wallet in the club car, and had said so, loudly, in front of witnesses. The wallet had turned up in the passenger's own coat, forgotten, and Reilly had been gone by the end of the month, and the story of him had been told in every dining car west of Chicago for a year as a warning with his name on it. The company did not forgive a steward who embarrassed a passenger. That was the arithmetic, and every man in the service knew it by heart.
But the woman in Car Seven had stood in the corridor with her book in her hand and said she had never seen the brooch, and Cobb had a book of his own that said a man had lied about where he was when a jewel case was taken. And the book did not know how to lie.
He walked forward through the sleeping train at a quarter to one in the morning, past the darkened cars with their curtains drawn and their vestibules swaying, the chit book held tight against his chest under his coat. The Pullmans breathed around him in the dark — a snore from behind one curtain, a child's restless murmur from another, the long sigh of the air brakes now and then as the grade changed. Twice the sway of the car on a curve caught him and he had to take hold of a doorframe, and each time his heart hammered against the book under his coat as if it could hear him coming. He had walked these aisles ten thousand times in daylight, master of them; at night, carrying what he carried, they felt like another man's train entirely. He found the special agent's compartment in Car Five — Dillard, roomette nine — and knocked, and waited, and knocked again.
The door opened on a man in his shirtsleeves with a notebook in his hand and no sleep in his eyes at all.
"Mr. Dillard. Henry Cobb, dining-car steward. I need five minutes."
Dillard looked at the chit book, and then at Cobb's face, and stepped back from the door. "Come in, Mr. Cobb."
The roomette was small and the berth was turned down and unslept-in. Dillard had clearly not been to bed. He sat on the edge of the berth and gestured Cobb to the little seat, and Cobb laid the chit book open on his knees and turned the pages with hands that he was annoyed to find were shaking.
"Second seating, Friday," Cobb said. "Table two. Party of one. Mr. Raymond Kessler." He put his finger on the line. "Sat down eight-oh-five. Rose eight-forty."
Dillard looked at the line for a long time. Then he looked up. "You're certain of these times, Mr. Cobb."
"I write them as they happen, sir. Eight-oh-five when he sat. Eight-forty when he rose. I gave him a plaster myself, at half past eight, for a scratch on his right hand. Fresh scratch. Like a clasp."
"And Mr. Kessler has told me," Dillard said slowly, "that he was in his berth asleep from eight o'clock onward, and never left it all evening."
"Then Mr. Kessler told you wrong, sir. He was in my dining car from eight-oh-five to eight-forty, eating his dinner a second time and asking for a plaster. That's in the book."
Dillard took the chit book gently from Cobb's knees and studied the page — the columns, the times, the waiter's initials, the little notation in the margin: plaster issued. Then he opened his own notebook beside it, and Cobb saw the neat rows of times set against times, and saw Dillard's pencil stop, and saw the man's face change in the way a man's face changes when two lines that should run parallel cross.
"Mr. Cobb," Dillard said, "do you understand what you're telling me?"