Dillard looked at the entries. The handwriting was small and furious and exact. The times were underlined once, the way a steward underlines a thing he wants no one to dispute.
"He told me he had been asleep in his berth since the first seating," Dillard said.
"Yes, sir," Cobb said. "He told me he was hungry."
Dillard wrote it down. Time on the left, fact on the right, inference nowhere at all. But his hand, for the first time in his professional life, wanted to write the inference, and he had to stop it.
"Thank you, Mr. Cobb," he said. "I will want this book kept exactly as it is. No one touches it but you."
"No one will, sir," Cobb said, and closed the book, and held it against his chest again, and went back to his car.
Dillard sat for a long time with the notebook open. Then he turned back to last night's pages and read them the way he had been trained to read them — not as a story but as a ledger, each entry tested against the others — and he took his pencil and drew a single circle around the entry that had decided him. KESSLER, R. — STATES ASLEEP BERTH SINCE FIRST SEATING. A man asleep in his berth. He had written it down and he had believed it, because it was neat, because it closed the matter, because it let the night be over. The chit book said eight oh five to eight forty. The pencil hovered. Then he drew a line through the circle, hard enough to dent the paper, and got up and went forward through the sleeping train to Car Seven, where he found Thomas Avery in the vestibule, polishing the brass of the door handle with a cloth, the way he had polished it ten thousand times before.
"Mr. Avery," Dillard said, "I want you to tell me, standing here, what Mrs. Ellison's berth held at six o'clock yesterday evening."
The porter was fifty-one years old, twenty-six years in service, and he had the particular dignity of a man who has been invisible for a living and has decided, just this once, to be seen. He folded the cloth and put it in his pocket, and he stood straight, and he looked Dillard in the eye.
"It held nothing, sir," he said. "I made it up at six o'clock with my own hands. It was empty and clean. There was no brooch in it. There was nothing in it but the pillow and the blanket, folded square."
"You're certain."
"It is my car, sir," Avery said. "I know what is in it."
"And at twenty past eight?"
"I saw Mr. Kessler in the corridor, sir. He was carrying a bundle wrapped in a towel. He was walking toward the linen hamper." A pause. "I thought it was laundry, sir. A porter does not ask a passenger about his laundry."
Dillard wrote it down. The vestibule swayed gently under them. Somewhere forward, the dining car was setting up for breakfast, and the smell of coffee moved through the train like a rumor.
"That will cost you something, Mr. Avery," Dillard said quietly. "Saying it."
"Yes, sir," the porter said. "It will."
They stood there a moment longer, the special agent and the porter, and then Dillard went aft to find the bride.
Dorothy Marchetti was twenty-two, four months married, traveling with her husband Paul in the sections at the end of Car Seven. She had given her statement last night in tears, and then the conductor had hushed her, and she had given it again this morning to no one in particular, in the washroom, to the mirror. When Dillard found her she was sitting with her husband's hand over hers, and her eyes were red, and she was angry now instead of frightened, which was better.
He took her statement down clearly at last, in his notebook, word for word, and she watched him write, to make sure he got it right.
"About eight o'clock," she said. "I was going back to our section from the washroom. There was a man at the drawing-room door — the Vance drawing room. He tried the handle. Then he glanced up the corridor, both ways, and he went in."
"Did you see his face?"
"Not then. But I know him now. He's the wholesale representative. From Car Seven." She lifted her chin. "Mr. Kessler."
"You're certain it was the drawing-room door."
"I know where the drawing room is, Mr. Dillard. It's the big door. I've been looking at it for two days, wondering what it would be like to travel like that." Her voice caught. "I thought nothing of it. That's what I keep telling myself. I thought nothing of it."
"You thought nothing of it because there was nothing to think," Dillard said. "Until there was. That's not a fault, Mrs. Marchetti."