Mystery on the Tramway Read online

  Mystery

  on the

  Tramway

  a

  Henry Wright Mystery

  by

  Albert Simon

  Books by Albert Simon

  The Henry Wright Mystery Series:

  For Sale in Palm Springs

  Springtime in Sonora

  Drama in the Mother Lode

  Mystery on the Tramway

  a Henry Wright Mystery

  by

  Albert Simon

  ISBN 0-976200-36-8

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright © 2004 by Albert Simon

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission. This eBook is licensed to the user that purchased it for reading on any computer or PDA.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  For information, contact [email protected]

  This book is for my wife who never doubted that I could write.

  Chapter 1

  Wayne Johnson was frustrated. He kicked at a rock at the desert gravel on the edge of the parking lot and muttered a curse under his breath. Damnit, how did this happen? The murder rate in the Coachella Valley was relatively low, and it was practically non-existent in Palm Springs. Wayne figured the criminals took a break during the hot weather and didn’t bother getting sweaty by killing anyone. The temperature in the Sonoran Desert was well over one hundred at the end of June. Though as everyone always said, “It’s a dry heat!” He kicked at another rock and sent it flying back towards the desert that surrounded the pavement.

  Dry heat indeed, anytime that the temperature gets to be over one hundred degrees - it is hot - regardless of how low the humidity is here in the desert. The temperature today had the thermometer registering one hundred and two degrees Fahrenheit at Palm Springs International Airport. In the Coachella Valley the breeze comes up in the late afternoon from the west and the distant Pacific Ocean and cools the air off to make the outdoors a little more comfortable.

  The convection of the cooler air coming into the valley from the inland area to the west was pleasant and predictable. So predictable that enterprising entrepreneurs constructed windmills that used the constant breeze to generate electricity at the entrance to the valley. The windfarms, as they were called, next to the Interstate announced to visitors coming to the valley from the West that they had arrived in the Coachella Valley and its unofficial capital, Palm Springs.

  Those same breezes made it pleasant outside and Wayne and his wife Elliot generally sat on their patio after dinner. At this time of the evening, when the sun had been down for several hours, they usually retired with a glass of milk and some cookies to the table next to the pool at their home in Indio talking about their day before heading to bed. This night, the married couple was enjoying some quiet conversation over a glass of iced tea when the cell phone that was always clipped to Wayne’s belt disrupted them with its annoying electronic chirp. It was his boss at the police department, Captain Jim Fegosi, who told him to head out to the Palm Springs tramway where a body had been found in the tram car by the janitor. Some poor unfortunate soul took a ride and ended up with a bullet hole.

  Wayne exchanged his shorts for long pants, changed his shirt and grabbed a sweater, since it was always thirty degrees cooler at the top of the tram, and kissed Elliot goodnight. He got into his city issued, unmarked Ford Crown Victoria and headed for the tramway. There was no time for a leisurely drive up to Palm Springs on Highway one-eleven tonight. He took the Interstate, I-10, north to the Date Palm exit. He’d thought of using lights and siren as he was cruising along, but it was late, traffic was light and he was able to make good time. Wayne took the exit and jogged over to Vista Chino and drove west on it back to Palm Canyon Drive and headed up the steep Tramway Road to the base of the tram.

  Wayne was captain of detectives on the Palm Springs police force. He spent most of his time investigating burglaries, car theft, and the occasional vice problem in one of the hotels downtown. He didn’t often investigate murders and didn’t like doing it, though that was what he was trained to do. When he called, Fegosi didn’t have any details on what had happened, he only said to get over to the tramway, pronto, there was a corpse with a hole in his head in the tram.

  Wayne parked the Crown Vic in the parking area in front of the Valley Station next to the coroner’s van who had managed to beat him there from Perris. There were a number of black and whites and several unmarked, but obviously police vehicles, in the parking lot below. One of the uniformed officers was unreeling crime scene tape from a large roll and sealing off the stairs that led up to the lobby from where the tram departed.

  The Palm Springs Tramway was a great tourist attraction. Its two gondolas carry up to eighty people at a time through the Chino Canyon up to the top of Mount San Jacinto at over ten thousand feet from the Coachella Valley floor. The tramway was an engineering marvel when it was first constructed in the early 1960’s and even today was still awe inspiring. The terrain in the canyon is so rugged and impassible that four of the five towers were built with helicopters, an unusual construction technique more than forty years ago.

  Wayne had now been here for a couple of hours and while he learned a lot since getting here, there were still a lot of unanswered questions. Well, kicking at rocks out here wasn’t going to get any of them answered so he started walking back to the station from the parking lot and pulled his notepad out of his shirt pocket and checked what he had learned so far.

  George Margolis, the tramway’s chief of engineering, had been very helpful, answering all of his questions. Since the victim was found in the closed gondola, and the only way to operate the tram was from inside the car, the obvious solution was that the killer had to be in the car with the victim when the shooting happened. The problem was that the witness swore that only the victim’s body was on the tram when it came to a stop at the Valley Station.

  Margolis was obviously proud of the tramway, he told Wayne that a couple of years ago the entire system was refurbished. The cars were replaced; they were now the largest rotating tram cars in the world. The gondolas made two slow revolutions as they ascended and descended to give the tourists a view of the Coachella Valley and the ruggedness of San Jacinto Mountain. At the same time as it was modernized, the tramway was designated a civil engineering historical site. What that meant wasn’t clear to Wayne, but the chief of engineering obviously thought it was important for him to know.

  Wayne continued his interview with Margolis, and the kid that found the body when the car arrived at the station. They both said that everything appeared routine with the tram until the kid opened the door at the station once the car came to a stop. After he talked with the two men, Wayne had an initial look at the rather messy murder scene; after which he had to get some air and he headed for the parking lot where he was now. Now matter how much blood and gore he had seen in his career, nothing could prepare him for the bits of skull, brain and large amount of blood of what had once been a human being splattered inside that small space.

  His eyes followed the tramway’s cables in the moonlight up the canyon; they appeared as gossamer strands of a large spider’s web as they made their way up the steep mountainside. He looked up towards the mountain as though the answer to his frustration could be found there. There was a bright light at the top, where the upper terminus of the cableway was. It was impossible to see the upper station from here despite the moon which was nearly full tonight. The top of the tram was just too high and the mountains too jagged. He was going to have to come back in the morning, in fact he would probably spend all day here tomorro
w interviewing additional employees and having a closer look at how the tram worked to see if he could work out this strange puzzle.

  Wayne walked back towards the scene of the crime - such as it was. They had established the official crime scene at the Valley Station of the tram. It wasn’t really where the crime occurred; it was where the crime was discovered. The actual murder had taken place somewhere between Mountain Station at the top of Mount San Jacinto and here. Over two-and-a-half miles, George Margolis told Wayne, nearly thirteen thousand feet of tram travel. All of it except the five hundred feet or so closest to the Valley Station inaccessible - except by a bird.

  The body inside the car was Terrance Quinn. He was the superintendent of maintenance of the tramway and one of his responsibilities was riding down the mountain on the last tram of the day. That had been about nine forty-five this evening. That last ride took the trash and anything else that needed to come down from Mountain Station at the top, to Valley Station on the valley floor. This particular ride was not only the last tram trip of the day, it was the last trip that Terrance Quinn would ever take.

  The victim was shot by a powerful hand gun at close range. There was no entry hole for a bullet anywhere in the tram car’s sheet metal or through the windows. So he had to be shot from inside the gondola. When the car came to a stop and the janitor opened the door, the only one inside was Quinn. How had someone managed to get in the car, shoot the victim, and then get out again before it arrived at the station? If Wayne could find that out, he would be a long ways toward figuring out who did this.

  The young janitor was waiting at the station for the car to come to a stop in order to help his boss empty the trash bags from the car. When he opened the door he saw that there was a large pool of fresh blood that covered the entire floor of the tram car. He received the shock of his young life when he looked down and in the midst of all the black plastic garbage bags was Quinn’s body. His eyes were open and the bullet hole in his forehead almost looked like a third eye, looking straight at whoever opened that door. Wayne shuttered even now as he thought about first viewing the body a couple of hours ago.

  Wayne walked around the lab crew from the Riverside County Sheriff’s office that was busy photographing and dusting for prints, he looked for the kid who had discovered Quinn’s body. Wayne warned him not to leave yet, where did he go? What was his name again? Wayne pulled his pad out of his pocket again to check his notes, Todd Gregory. Wayne put the pad back in his shirt pocket. Todd was over near the maintenance area talking with George Margolis.

  As Wayne walked over, he could see that Todd was still upset, the skinny kid in the oversized overalls was practically crying as he talked with George. Margolis was patting the younger man on the shoulder in an attempt to console him without much effect. Gregory had called Margolis first when he discovered the body; it was Margolis who had called 911 from his cell phone on his way over to the tramway. When he first interviewed Gregory, Wayne had grilled him to see why he hadn’t called the cops first, but the young man had been so distraught that he said that when he saw all the blood and realized it was Quinn that he panicked and didn’t know what to do.

  Wayne stepped up to the two men and told Todd Gregory to go home and come back for his shift tomorrow. He didn’t consider Gregory a suspect, but all the same, he cautioned him about not leaving town. At this point he didn’t have any suspects, he wanted to talk with all of the tramway employees, and certainly he would want to talk with Gregory in more detail. The young man nodded at Wayne, said good night to George, wiped his nose on the sleeve of his overalls and walked off to the parking lot.

  Wayne then asked Margolis if it was possible to shut down the tramway the following day so that the crime lab could finish processing the car. Margolis explained that there were a number of people at the upper campground with no way down if the tram was shut down.

  Margolis told Wayne that the tramway was used by campers and hikers to get to Tamarack and Round Valleys at the top, some of who probably needed to be brought down. After going back and forth discussing the difficulties of closing down and stranding the campers or disappointing tourists who wanted to ride the attraction up the next day, Margolis agreed to phone his boss, the general manager of tramway operations to see if they could barricade the parking lot at the Valley Station. That would in effect keep the day tourists from going up and down, but they could run a tram in the afternoon in case they needed to bring the campers down the mountain.

  Wayne even thought of asking the Riverside Sheriff’s Department to send their helicopter up to Mountain Station if they had to, but he didn’t mention it to Margolis and thought he could keep that as his hole card for the time being.

  Margolis walked off to make his call and Wayne could see him standing in the parking lot talking on his cell phone a few minutes later. The guys from the coroner’s office were standing near the souvenir shop chatting, one of them smoking a cigarette. Obviously the lab crew had not released the body yet. He walked back over to the tram car and found the crime lab crew supervisor. Wayne asked him if he had any preliminary results and how much longer he and his crew were going to take.

  He got a lecture that this was a murder scene, not a television show and there was no way to process everything in an hour or so. The supervisor did tell him that there were no powder burns on the victim’s hands or overalls, and it looked as though the gun was fired from six or seven feet away. He said based on that, and since there was no weapon in the gondola, he had to rule out suicide. As far as the rest was concerned, he wouldn’t be able to tell Wayne any more information until tomorrow at the earliest.

  Wayne considered calling Fegosi from his cell phone, but it was well after midnight and he didn’t really need to ask permission to go home. He felt that he couldn’t do much at the tramway anymore, he decided to leave and come back early in the morning. He talked with the senior uniform officer on duty and gave him his card and cell phone number and asked him to call right away if anything new came up.

  Wayne walked back to the parking area where he had taken a break from the gore just a few minutes before when Margolis stopped him. He said he’d checked with the general manager, who apologized for not being there but he was at a nephew’s wedding in San Diego. Margolis said while his G.M. was concerned about his dead employee, he reluctantly agreed that they would shut down for a day. Margolis said he would personally put up barricades and a sign that the tram was closed for maintenance and would call the campground host at the upper station and explain the situation to him. He said goodnight to Wayne who started his car and headed for the exit of the parking lot.

  As he turned the Crown Vic back onto Tramway Road to head down to the valley floor, he drove down the hill until he cleared the steep canyon walls and the view unfolded before him. He stopped the car in the middle of the road to admire the view. The station was several hundred feet higher than the Coachella Valley floor and the view of Palm Springs and the surrounding cities was beautiful from here. The lights from Palm Springs and its grid of streets was nearest to him, off in the distance he could see Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert.

  There was a break in the grid of lights directly in front of him which had to be the airport. Beyond it he could see the Interstate, even at this time of night there was a fast flowing river of headlights that were heading towards Los Angeles two hours west. Paralleling the white river was a red ribbon of taillights driving to Arizona, two hours east.

  Wayne sighed as he eased off the brake and headed back towards the Interstate and home to Indio where Elliot was sound asleep. It was after two when he finally rolled into bed, she patted him in her slumber and he was asleep within minutes.

  Wayne was back at the tramway at eight-thirty the next morning. He’d stopped at the Starbucks on Palm Canyon Drive on the way in and picked up the largest cappuccino they made. He figured he was going to need it; he didn’t get very much sleep, and this was going to be a long morning. He drove around the barri
cades and tape and an official looking sign that said the tramway was temporarily closed due to maintenance.

  The parking lot was not nearly as full as it had been last night. The crime scene lab crew had a van parked there, the coroner’s van was gone and there were two black and whites, officers guarding the area. Wayne parked the car, pulled his cappuccino from the cup holder and walked towards the station. Today was going to be another warm one, despite the early hour the temperature was just over ninety. On this side of the Valley, the sun had worked its wonders for almost three hours already and the pavement was already radiating its heat.