Come Back Dead (14 page)

That was surprise number two for Gilbert, but he recovered faster this time. He said, “I'd like to be here if those hooligans come back,” with conviction, meeting his sister-in-law's gaze and holding it. “Ask Mother to send some things over.”

“I will,” she said. “Mr. Faris, I'll drop you at your hotel on the way–or the train station, if you'd prefer.”

21

The Klan didn't show up on Saturday night, maybe because they didn't like crowds. Gilbert Traynor stuck by us and even seemed to enjoy himself once he'd had enough to drink. The suitcase Hank Shepard retrieved for him from Traynor House contained, along with a week's supply of clothes, two bottles of very good scotch. Two bottles of liquor should have been at least a week's supply, but it turned out not to be.

Drury and Gilbert killed the first soldier as the long afternoon turned into a longer evening. Our resident genius was in a celebratory mood. He composed telegrams to half of Hollywood, which Shepard dutifully wrote down and then tossed into a stack in the corner. Gilbert started out less jolly than his guest, but he warmed to Drury's planning and dreaming as he drank.

Between bottles we, the condemned, had our dinner, a lavish five-course affair sent over by the Traynor chef. It was one of Shepard's inspirations.

“I did a little organizing while I was over at the mansion,” he told me when the food arrived. He was in a jovial mood, too, though for once he wasn't drinking. “It would have been a wasted opportunity if Carson had sent you after Gilbert's suitcase, Elliott–Eagle Scout that you are.”

It was a harmless enough remark, but he leaned into it as though he was expecting the jibe to earn him another poke on the chin. He'd been quiet since the Klan's visit, maybe because he'd just held up under it. So I figured he was taking his embarrassment out on me.

Halfway through the second bottle, Drury was wheeled off to bed. Gilbert and Shepard had the first shift of guard duty, which is to say, Shepard had it. By that time Gilbert was only a threat to Klansmen who got close enough to breathe on. I'd been waiting all day for a chance to talk to him alone. The chance came at the start of his watch when Shepard asked me to sit with Gilbert while he walked to the end of the drive to check on Gustin's men.

I knew as soon as I sat down opposite Gilbert that interrogating him was a waste of my sleeping time. He'd acquired that Cheshire cat look drunks sometimes have, the drunks who figure the booze has made their brain cells swell up. He was sprawled on the old walnut settee, his thin frame making so little impression on its rounded, rock-hard cushions that I expected him to roll off at any moment.

“You're not enjoying this party, are you, Scotty?” he asked when he'd grinned himself out.

“Whose party is it?”

Gilbert waved vaguely in the direction of Drury's unsent telegrams. “Carson's, I guess. Or maybe Linda's.”

“Or maybe yours,” I said. “What's really going on here?”

“You don't know, do you? And it bothers you that you don't know.”

“Yes,” I said. “When you tell me, I'll sleep a lot better.”

“Me? I don't know what's going on.” He waved his empty hands at me like a magician reassuring a mark. “Something's going to happen, but I don't know what it will be.”

“Or much care,” I said.

“No, I don't. That's one difference between us. You don't like not knowing the schedule of events, but I love it. What I hate is always knowing what's going to happen. Not knowing's more fun.”

“It's a shame you missed the war,” I said. “You would have enjoyed it.”

That was the wrong remark to make because it sent Gilbert off on a tangent. “I often wonder how I would have done if I'd seen some fighting. My mother doesn't wonder. She knows I wouldn't have done as well as Mark. I never did as well as Mark. That's one of the worst things about his being dead. I can never top him now. He'll always be that much ahead of me.”

My guess was that Mark would have traded his permanent lead for his brother's long life, but it would have been rude to point that out. I sat watching Gilbert's eyes glaze over until Shepard came back from his reconnaissance. The publicist was gray in the face again.

“Trouble?” I asked.

“Heart trouble,” Shepard said. “I just bumped into Lon Chaney, Jr., out there. Clark, I mean. He scared the crap out of me, looming out of the dark like he'd just popped up from the ground. That guy's quieter than an Indian.”

“What's he doing?”

“Keeping a watch of his own, with a length of pipe for a nightstick.” Shepard shuddered. “Go on to bed. There's no chance of my dozing off now.”

Clark was still patrolling when I relieved Shepard around three. I learned that from Sheriff Gustin, who had come by to share my watch. Gilbert Traynor was snoring away on the parlor settee, so Gustin and I set up camp in the kitchen.

I made us a pot of coffee. While it was bubbling away, I asked the sheriff about the Traynors' caretaker.

Gustin looked at the screen door and the black yard beyond as he answered. “Don't know him very well,” he said, echoing Linda Traynor. “He mostly keeps to himself, just like you'd expect him to, poor guy. Every now and then some drunk looks at him the wrong way and ends up bloodied. Clark's a mean fighter, bad arm and all. But that doesn't happen very often. Most everybody around here tolerates him, and he tolerates most everybody.

“You're the exception to that rule,” Gustin said, looking back from the screen door to me. “I've never known him to turn away a person like he did you. And in front of Mrs. Traynor, too. What did you do to rate that?”

“I don't know. We started out okay. Then he'd suddenly had enough of me.”

“Excuse me for prying, but were you in the service?”

“Yes,” I said. “The army.”

“Overseas?”

“Yes.”

“That's stranger still. As prickly as Clark is, he'll usually cut a veteran a break. He only gives me the time of day because he knows I carried a rifle around Italy.”

“I was in the artillery.”

“Oh,” Gustin said. “Does Clark know that?”

“He might.” He might have heard it from Hank Shepard, the man who was so tickled by Clark's dislike of me.

“That's it, sure as you live. Clark was wounded by artillery fire. U.S. artillery fire. One of our batteries got its signals crossed and kicked the hell out of Clark's unit. Killed a bunch of his friends and blasted Clark into little pieces.”

“Where did it happen?”

“In the Hurtgen Forest, I think.”

“I missed that slaughterhouse.”

“I don't imagine that makes much difference to Clark. You're artillery, and that's that.”

I nodded. That did seem to be that.

At first light, when it was obvious that nothing was going to happen, Gustin left and I turned in again. When I awoke for the second time that day, it was to the sound of Drury calling my name–yelling my name, actually.

I found him in his bed, his lap and legs covered with sheets of discarded newspaper. He held an undiscarded sheet in clenched hands.

“That backstabber is here. He's followed me. Am I never to be rid of that spineless excuse for a man?”

Shepard was standing in a corner, looking unmoved. “Whitehead,” he said.

I reached for the newspaper, and Drury reluctantly handed it over. It was the state edition of an Indianapolis paper, the
Star Republic
. Whitehead's elaborate name jumped out at me from a two-paragraph story at the bottom of the page. The headline was Hollywood Producer Visits.

Beneath the headline was the announcement that John Piers Whitehead, “distinguished Broadway director and Hollywood producer,” had arrived in Indianapolis to direct a production of
Knickerbocker Holiday
for a local college's summer theater. The story's second paragraph was a quote from a college professor named Walter Carlisle, who gushed about how lucky he and his school, Butler University, were. His enthusiasm left me wondering if he and Whitehead had ever met.

I glanced over my shoulder toward the parlor. “Does Gilbert know about this?”

“No,” Shepard said. “The Traynor dogsbody who brought the Sunday papers took what was left of Gilbert home.”

“Forget Gilbert!” Drury thundered. “We have to take action. This is the most transparent ploy I've ever seen, hiring himself out to direct some summer musical. He's just trying to get close enough to sabotage me again.” He held his hand out for the paper, and when I'd given it back, he crushed it into a ball.

The same man who had taken the Ku Klux Klan in his stride was in a genuine rage. That or the odd way in which Drury's Hollywood enemies were reassembling themselves around us had me seeing spots. I shook my sleepy head, but the picture didn't get any clearer.

From his neutral corner, Shepard said, “I've been trying to tell Carson not to get himself worked up until we know the score. I told him you could check it out during your visit to Indianapolis.”

“What visit would that be?” I asked.

“Have you forgotten your grandmother's dinner invitation?” Shepard asked back.

I hadn't forgotten it. I'd decided that the Klan threat had canceled all bets. “I can't leave after what's happened.”

“Yes, you can,” Drury said, shaking the balled-up paper at me. “You have to put the fear of God into that wretched person. You have to scare him off.”

“You'd better wire Paddy for a replacement,” I said. “Leg breaking is a separate department.”

“Carson didn't mean it that way,” Shepard said. “Just talk to the guy, that's all we're asking. Then go visit the folks. Stay over if you want to. We'll be okay without you for one night. Leave that howitzer of yours where I can find it and have a good time. Bring me back a drumstick.”

22

So, while Traynorville waited for whatever was going to happen to happen, I went visiting in Indianapolis. I took Highway 32 west to Noblesville and west from there to the highway's intersection with 31, where I turned south. About an hour into my drive, I passed through the belt of little communities that separated Indy from the serious farmland. Those towns were bigger than I remembered, almost sprawling into one another and the city without a break. Indianapolis itself looked like the blueprint for the decade: clean, quiet, and prosperous. Fat, dumb, and happy, Shepard would have called it. Every block had people dressed up for church and enough gaudy, new sedans and coupés on patrol to make me feel homesick for my DeSoto.

I didn't drive very far into Indy. Butler University was on the city's north side in a section of upscale homes and wooded streets. The school was upscale itself, with stone buildings done up in a streamlined Gothic style that said middle of America, middle of the century, middle of the road. It wasn't a university really, not if you went by acreage. Just a nice little college appended to the largest basketball facility in the state, the Butler Field House. The university's teams played there, of course, but more important to the average Hoosier, the field house was the place where the finals of the state high school basketball tournament were held. That made it more than a sports facility. It was the local Lourdes, a redbrick cathedral whose altar was a stretch of varnished hardwood with a font at either end.

I found myself in the shadow of this shrine after I'd determined that no one was home at Butler's theater department on this hot, still Sunday afternoon. I'd asked around for the school's summer theater; it was next to the field house, an open-air theater nestled in a natural bowl in the trees.

I inquired at the box office for Whitehead and, when that drew a blank stare from the kid behind the window, for Professor Walter Carlisle, the man quoted in the
Star Republic
article. Carlisle was on hand, supervising the construction of risers on the theater's wooden stage. The sound of hammering covered my descent on a gravel path past row after snaking row of green folding chairs. Even so, the man who turned out to be Carlisle spotted me before I'd made it to the end of the aisle. He climbed down from the stage and came up the path to meet me.

I'd left my suit coat and hat in the station wagon, rolled up my sleeves, and loosened my tie. Carlisle still made me look like a member of a wedding party. He wore an almost white undershirt, fatigue pants cut off at the knees, and army boots that made my feet feel so nostalgic, they ached. Carlisle might have earned his boots the hard way, although he looked a little too old to be a veteran. He was forty-five by my guess, but fit, his walk and his build both athletic. His sunburned face was dominated by a jutting, ball-shaped chin, but that impression might have been due to the way he stuck the chin out toward me, like he was spoiling for a fight.

“Help you?” he asked when we came together a few rows shy of the orchestra pit.

I determined that he was the professor I was looking for. Then I asked after John Piers Whitehead. “I read in the paper that he was in town.”

“And you are?”

I thought about omitting my connection to Drury and trying to pass myself off as an old Hollywood friend of Whitehead's. Carlisle was more likely to reveal the producer's current whereabouts to a friend than a draftee leg breaker. But I didn't try it. The professor was still sticking his chin out at me, looking as though he knew exactly who I was and why I was there. And I had a second reason for showing my hand: I didn't like my chances of scaring off Whitehead, a man with nothing to lose. Telling Carlisle the whole story might accomplish the same thing. Once he realized that Whitehead was using him and his theater as part of a vendetta against Drury, the professor might yank Whitehead's meal ticket and send him packing.

Unless, of course, Carlisle already knew all about Whitehead's schemes and didn't give a damn, which turned out to be the case. He listened calmly while I identified myself and told him why I was in Indiana. But when I started to describe the sabotage attempts against
The Imperial Albertsons
, Carlisle began to shift his weight from boot to boot. By the time I reached the accident with the camera crane, he'd had enough.

“Anyone who thinks that John Piers Whitehead could hurt another human being never met the man,” Carlisle said, a single pulsing vein splitting his high forehead. “I've known him for twenty years, and a more sensitive human being never drew breath.”

“You knew Whitehead in New York?”

“Yes. He gave me my first job at the height of the Depression when I was fresh out of college. Not just a job, either. He gave me a love of theater and a mission to protect it. His little government project was doing just that. We thought of ourselves as the Irish monks of a new dark age, keeping the candle of learning, of theater, alight.”

“Then Carson Drury switched you over to electricity.”

“Carson Drury,” Carlisle repeated, using the tone most people reserved for Hitler or Joseph McCarthy. “That charlatan. He co-opted our project, turning it into his own private stock company, Repertory One.”

“And giving you the heave-ho?”

“No. He never fired me or anyone else. He left that kind of unpleasantness to John. Drury simply deserted us, dozens of theater people desperate for the work. He ran off to Hollywood with a few of the chosen and left the rest of us to starve. Luckily, I had a friend in John Whitehead. His letter of recommendation got me my first teaching position. I've followed the jobs ever since, ending up here.”

We both looked around at the little theater in the hollow. It was a long way from New York.

“Let's talk about how Whitehead landed here,” I said.

“Why would I discuss that with you?”

“You might be as curious as I am about what he's up to.”

“There's nothing mysterious about that. He and I have kept in touch. He wired me last week to let me know that he was going to be in Indiana. He asked me to arrange some temporary employment, lectures or teaching. I got the idea of asking him to direct the last production of our season. I was scheduled to do it myself, but I decided I'd earned a break.”

“Some break. You've hired a guy who can't direct his own feet.”

Carlisle unbent a little. “All John needs is a little rest.”

“In a sanitarium. You didn't know about his drinking, did you?”

“No. Our correspondence dropped off during the past few years. I wasn't aware that he'd fallen on such hard times.”

“But when he wired you out of the blue for a job, you found him one.”

The chin came up again. “I owed him that and more.”

“When did he tell you that Carson Drury was here in Indiana?”

“Not until after he arrived. He came off the plane from California drunk. I couldn't believe the change in him. He told me then about Drury's plan to refilm
The Imperial Albertsons
. John's life is somehow tangled up with that film. He sees this as his last chance. I won't be the one to take that chance away. I won't hand him over to Drury or to you, so don't even ask me where he is.”

That left me without another question, so I made an observation. “If you were really Whitehead's friend, you'd get him as far away from Carson Drury as you could.”

Carlisle surprised me by nodding in agreement. “Drury is really the addiction for John, not alcohol. Or maybe the movie business is. If only he'd gone back to New York ten years ago. He's still respected there–or he was, for a long time after Hollywood had forgotten him. I've often wondered why he stayed out there where he wasn't wanted.”

I'd worked out an answer to that very question during my drive down from Traynorville. I was expecting my father to ask why I'd stayed on in a town that didn't want me. I tested my answer out on Carlisle. “Some people have only one genuine love affair in them.”