Chapter Eight: Murder on the Dumbo Express!
They got to the train station an hour later. The Pope had asked if they could go to the Starbucks at the back of the laundromat, but Dumbo was sure that the train would have coffee. Dumbo was glad that it was a train station for elephants. Those were rarely made, ever since The War. Dumbo hated flying over trains, so he was glad that he could sit in a compartment.
He was playing a game of gin rummy with the Pope when a fat lady bringing snacks came by their compartment. They didn't want any snacks, as they had brought their sandwiches from home. Dumbo liked that the Pope was cool with this. It saved him money, which he could then put back into the stock market. The Pope was very distracted and kept playing with things in his pocket. Dumbo worried he was going to light up again, but he knew that it was illegal to vape on a train, and the Pope would never go against the laws of the land.
Dumbo was heading to the bathroom to take a big poop and check the Dow Jones when he accidentally ran into a man. Dumbo tried to say sorry, but the man just spat on him, called him the E word, and walked away.
Dumbo was in the bathroom and had just gotten done with his bowel movement, when suddenly he heard a cry from another compartment. He washed his hands for more than a minute and ran out of the bathroom. "What was that?" he wondered.
Dumbo and Pope Francis went to the hallway, but they were quickly ushered back into their compartment by a man in a bowler hat and what looked like a pigeon for a mustache. After that, Dumbo and the Pope played the card game President for a few more hours, and then they went to sleep.
In the morning, they were walking to the dinner car when they overheard the man with the pigeon for a mustache say, "I see evil on this train." The Pope and Dumbo exchanged looks, but kept walking to the dinner car. They both ordered grilled cheese sandwiches with coffee. There was an air of gloom over the train. Just then, the train came to a halt.
"A passenger has died on the train," the pigeon faced man's assistant said. Dumbo and the Pope were scandalized. Then they heard the pigeon-faced man say, "He was murdered!"
Dumbo and the Pope gasped. No one else did. The other passengers all seemed like they knew it was going to happen.
"And the murderer is still on the train!" the man continued. Dumbo and the Pope gasped again. Still, no one else moved or seemed interested in the events at all.
"Good God, murder? Here?" a lady with blonde hair, who definitely wasn't the murderer, said in a stunned voice.
"Indeed. I will be interviewing you all," the pigeon-faced man said.
With that, Dumbo and the Pope went about eating their grilled cheese. They didn't say much - there wasn't much to say. They didn't know the brutally murdered man, whose name was apparently Ratchett, or maybe Cassetti. Dumbo worried he would be a suspect just because of his fame as a flying elephant. The Pope was also worried. What if the detective thought that he, the Pope, had asked God to kill the man? That was a method of murder that left no trace. And he did have a direct line to God, after all. They were both stewing in anxiety when they returned to their own passenger car.
"Dumbo, we need to be careful," the Pope said, taking out his notebook. He was taking notes of all the banalities surrounding them.
"Yeah, this could be one of Chuck Norris' or Sissy Spacek's tricks," the elephant commented.
"Most likely it is," agreed the Pope, and wrote down what Dumbo had said.
They both pulled out books and began to read. The Pope was reading Siddhartha, and Dumbo was reading the novelization of Snakes on a Plane. They were both enjoying their novels when the man with a pigeon for a mustache knocked on their compartment door.
"Hello," he said, through greying feathers.
Dumbo and the Pope introduced themselves.
"So what are you doing on this train?" asked the mysterious man.
"Going to Sissy Spacek's house," Dumbo replied with ease.
"Oh, that checks out," said the detective. And with that, he left. Dumbo and the Pope both went back to their books.
Much later in the night, all the passengers were called into the dining car. The man with the pigeon for a mustache had an announcement to make. Dumbo and the Pope assumed he would announce who the killer was. But there was a lot of buildup, so Dumbo and the Pope weren't really listening. Anyway, they knew they hadn't killed anyone, and they were caught up in their own Sissy Spacek thing. Finally, the pigeon-faced man revealed that he had caught the killer.
Or at least that was what Dumbo and the Pope thought, until a while later they were dragged off the train with all the train passengers. Dumbo was surprised anyone could drag him, since he was an elephant. Apparently, they were in Yugoslavia and their cops wanted the truth of the murders at that very moment. They were in front of a cave. The pigeon-stached detective was telling everyone what didn't match up about the murder.
"The first solution is that a stranger entered the train when it stopped at Vinkovci, killed Ratchett, and disembarked from the train. The second solution is that all the passengers aboard the Orient Express participated in stabbing Cassetti/Ratchet to death. I suggests that 12 of the 15 passengers, all close to the Armstrong case, killed Ratchett to avenge the murder of Daisy Armstrong," the detective asserted. The Pope wrote down the murder victim's name in his notebook.
Then, Mrs. Hubbard said with Gravity (the DVD she was holding), "The second solution is correct."
"Holy shit!" Dumbo said. He had been playing Bloons Monkey Tower Defense 6 on his phone during all this. He had better things to think about. Really, this entire "murder on the train" thing was just slowing down his catching of Sissy Spacek.
"You guys are all murderers?" Dumbo asked
"Yeah, all of us on the train except you two and the detective," Mrs. Hubbard said.
"Jesus, and you guys didn't even offer to let us stab the guy as well?" the Pope said. The Pope believed that everyone should be given a chance in the world. He cared a lot about sharing. So he was pretty livid when he realized he'd been left out.
"Hey, c'mon, this was personal to us, you didn't even know the guy!" said the woman.
Dumbo scoffed. "Yeah sure, easy for you to say. That guy spat at me when I passed him to go to the bathroom!"
"Did he spit at you, or did he just drop his water bottle when a literal elephant walked up to him?" the detective said, as if he was solving the crime of Dumbo's accountability.
"He fucking spat at me, man! That guy was an elephant hater. Honestly, you guys should have let us stab him!" Dumbo was yelling by this point. If everyone else got to spit on that murdered man, then he should have gotten to spit on him as well.
"Come on, Dumbo. We don't need this," the pope said, and grabbed his hoof. Together, they walked away. The Pope's hand was shaking from lack of vaping.
Then the Pope and Dumbo went back onto the train, started the engine, and drove away without the rest of the cast of Murder on the Orient Express. Dumbo hated being a background actor in movies that didn't have any elephants in leading roles. He took one last glance out the window at the group of murderers (and one detective). He noticed that the tax collector had set up a large anvil. It was going to fall right where Dumbo and the Pope had been standing before the big murder reveal.
Dumbo made eye contact with the collector and put his middle finger up. The tax collector was scandalized. He pulled out his tax collecting manual, but there was no section about what to do if someone gave him the bird while on the job. So he called his supervisor, who told him to just act as if he hadn't seen it. The tax collector did nothing.
As they drove away, some of the passengers were staring, wide-eyed. Dumbo and the Pope had just stolen a train. At that point, it was the biggest train robbery seen in history. Sure, people had stolen jewelry from trains, but no one had stolen an entire train.
Dumbo and the Pope, for their part, were frustrated that they had gotten caught up in this train murder thing. They were also frustrated that they didn't get to meet Dame Judi Dench. But that also meant they had avoided Johnny Depp, so they hadn't missed much.
When they finally rolled into the subway station, they saw a bunch of cops. They were looking for the stolen train. Dumbo and Pope Francis jumped out of the train as it rolled up to the subway station and ran off before the cops could see them. And what do you know, the subway station was right in front of Sissy Spacek's house.