You Bet Your Life: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Three) Read Free Page A

I had never found a piece of wood in a tuna sandwich before either, but I did now and spat it out while the fat women watched me in disgust. By West Palm Beach the two ladies were gouging chasms in their peach melba, and I was nibbling soggy potato chips and drinking beer while I looked for more gators in the sunset. I didn’t see any. I should have been thinking about where I was going and what I was going to do when I got there.
    By Fort Pierce my suit was dry and slightly stiff. I carried it on a hanger to my seat as the sun went down and the Florida East Coast Railway carried me through New Smyrna Beach. When Louis Garner Simmons ran me out of Miami, I had acted cheap and bought a coach seat without even asking about compartments, even though the freight was being paid by Louis B. Mayer. Habits are hard to break. My seat was next to one of the fat ladies from the dining car. She looked up at me over bifocals as we went through Daytona Beach, and then she turned back to the book on what remained of her lap.
    I glanced over her shoulder at the book—no mean task considering the size of her shoulder.
    “How’d you like an elbow in your neck?” she said, giving her subtle opinion of literary eavesdropping. Her voice rang clear enough to be heard back in Miami in spite of the noise of the train. Her eyes didn’t leave the page. Then she turned her gaze on me. We had clearly begun a beautiful friendship—the start of a trainboard romance.
    “No thanks,” I said.
    The book she was reading was The Grapes of Wrath. I hadn’t read it, but I had seen the movie. I decided to cement our relationship.
    “Tom Joad joins the Commies at the end,” I whispered.
    The fat lady threw her elbow back, hitting my shoulder and letting out a massive grunt. The conductor, who looked old enough and mean enough to have been John Wilkes Booth’s accomplice, came running down the aisle. His lip was turned up on one side in a pained sneer, and his ticket punch was held high like a weapon.
    “What’s the trouble he-ah?” he said, making it clear that he and the woman were of the same tribe. I was outnumbered. If I struggled, four hooded Klansmen might thunder out of the baggage room and trample me.
    Before anyone could answer, the lady hit me in the neck with a second book. A car full of people rose to stare and an infant began to howl. I could swear that it howled with a Cracker accent.
    “Now listen, mister,” sighed the conductor, “we don’t want no trouble from your kind and no smart talk.”
    The lady tried to punch me with her chubby arms but I backed away.
    “He’s bothering me,” she said. “Insulting me.”
    “That true?” said the conductor.
    “No,” I said, “but—”
    “Come with me,” he said, and hurried down the aisle. I grabbed my suitcase and picked up the book the woman had thrown at me. It was an Agatha Christie novel, The Peril at End House. I had read that one.
    I picked up my suit and leaned toward the woman over the conductor’s outstretched boney arm and his hand holding a ticket puncher.
    “Sorry ma’m,” I whispered with a smile, knowing my smile resembled a twisted grimace, “but the girl did it in this one. She set up the whole thing to make it look like she was the victim.”
    The book came back at me as I tripped up the aisle escorted by the conductor and dozens of eyes. I could hear the pages flutter open as Hercule Poirot hit a wall and came down on some soprano who sang, “Hey?”
    Nobody tripped me as I tried to keep up with the old conductor. I had a lot to be proud of. A Southern cop had run me out of Miami, so I had gained my revenge against the South by doing battle with a rotund belle of the rails. Maybe if the South had enough fat women, and I had enough time to provoke them, I could eventually gain my confidence back and destroy the Union.
    Two cars down the old conductor stopped and pulled his blue cap firmly over his eyes to show he meant business. His face was filled with