Come Back Dead (20 page)

32

The Traynor farmhouse had already been taken apart, figuratively speaking, by Gustin's troops the day after the murder. I didn't think they'd have missed a clue as obvious as a gun, not even a gun that looked like a toy. Then again, after they'd found my automatic, which hadn't been hidden at all, they might have lost interest. So I decided a search was worth my time. I had a second, better reason for putting in the effort: I couldn't think of another move.

I stopped at the end of Riverbend's drive when the deputy on duty waved me down.

“Sheriff's looking for you, son,” he said. He was the oldest deputy I'd seen so far. Gustin was having to call in the reserves to man his investigation and keep the Traynors happy.

“If you heard that before three o'clock,” I said, “it's old news.”

“Just checking,” the deputy said.

“Any visitors?”

“Just that Clark guy. Saw him on the farmhouse porch. I didn't drive down to ask him his business. I figure his business is no business of mine.”

I hadn't the deputy's sensitivity regarding other people's privacy. It would have held me back professionally. Unfortunately, Clark was no longer on the farmhouse porch when I climbed out of the black coupé. He wasn't in the house, either. But someone had been. There were subtle signs.

The visitor had anticipated my plan to take the farmhouse parlor apart, but he had done it literally. The old settee and the spindly chairs were on their sides, and the hooked rug was in a heap in the corner where someone had thrown it. The secretary had been opened and its drawers turned out. Every shelf of the glass-fronted bookcase had been emptied. Its collections–the arrowheads and butterflies and horseshoes–were scattered around the room. The old hornet's nest had been ripped in half lengthwise.

The object of the search hadn't been Casey Atherley's film. I found the plate among the broken butterflies and pocketed it. I didn't find the Liberator. I checked the halves of the hornet's nest for a cavity big enough to have held a gun. There wasn't one, but I did note that the hands that had dug their fingers into the nest were bigger than mine. Clue number one. Clue number two was the pump organ. It now sat at a forty-five-degree angle to its wall. I tried pushing it back into place and found that it was a job to shift it at all. My two clues pointed in the same direction as the tip I'd gotten from the old deputy: to Clark.

I checked the rest of the farmhouse. None of the other rooms had been disturbed. Nor had the tack room of the barn, with one notable exception: The rails for the wheelchair ramp that Clark had never gotten around to finishing had been kicked to splinters. It was enough to make a guy circumspect if he were inclined that way.

I left my suit jacket and hat hanging on the back door of the house. It was too hot to wear them hiking. And without the jacket, only a blind man could miss the big gun I was wearing. For safe-keeping, I took Gilbert's Liberator along, tucked in my belt at the small of my back.

I followed the packed-dirt path back to Clark's woods, watching a red-tailed hawk circling overhead, and whistling as I went. The tune had popped up out of nowhere, but its name hadn't tagged along. Then it came to me. It was the title song from
Rhythm on the River
, the epic that had made such an impression on John Piers Whitehead. I switched over to “Everything but You.”

I stopped whistling altogether when I reached the last of the cleared land. Clark's woods had been nothing more than a stretch of nondescript hardwood on my previous visit when I'd had Linda Traynor and Gustin along for company. Now I noticed every tree, reciting their names–sycamore, shagbark hickory, green ash, maple–as I scanned them. The pride of the collection was a pair of old oaks that straddled the path, their crowns forming a single canopy of green so dark it looked black in places. As I passed between the oaks, I heard the sounds of wood being split. The alternating splintering and thudding relaxed me. It placed Clark up ahead, not behind the next tree or the last one I'd passed.

He was still at it when I reached the clearing that held his cabin, working one-handed with an ax that looked like a Boy Scout hatchet in his good hand, his right. He was working bare-chested, which let me confirm what I already knew: He was built like Max Baer in his prime. The exception was his left arm, which, while far from withered away, was less substantial than the rest of him. Gilbert had told me that Clark had an arm he couldn't lift above his shoulder. Even from across the clearing I could see the outward mark of the damage: a deep triangular scar on the back of his left shoulder, bloodred with his exertions.

His face, when he finally noticed me at the edge of his clearing and swung around, was also dark red, a bad sign according to Augie. But he was no authority. He'd been wrong, for example, when he'd said that Clark had only one expression. With his eyes squeezed down to slits, Clark conveyed hatred very well.

“How'd you know?” Clark asked. He spoke conversationally, but his words carried easily across the hot stillness.

“How did I know what?” I replied as innocently as I could. I thought he was asking how I'd tied him to the destruction of the farmhouse. I wanted him to mention it first.

“How'd you know that this wood splitting isn't getting the job done for me?”

He wasn't wearing his red cap, so I got the full benefit of his disfigurement: the normal scalp and bit of forehead and the red rawness below, still looking after all these years like the skin had just been ripped away by the blast of a shell. The only thing that damped down the effect at all was the distance I'd left between us–a safe thirty yards.

“What job would that be?” I asked, genuinely lost now.

“The job of wringing out my bad temper. I thought if I split a cord or two it would go away, but it hasn't. There's no resistance to this stuff. The ax goes through it like it wasn't there. I don't want splitting. I want smashing.”

I'd been Paddy's straight man too long. I couldn't keep myself from asking, “Where do I come in?”

“I figured you were volunteering to go a few rounds with me. Shepard told me you'd boxed a little in the service.”

“Shepard talked too much.”

“Yeah, he did. My face brings that out in some people. Either they can't think of a word, or they can't shut up. So what do you say?”

“Nothing. I'm the kind who can't think of a word.”

Clark brought the ax down on the stump he was using as a chopping block, burying the head without putting much effort into it. He started across the clearing to me.

“It's a funny thing,” I said. “I go months in Los Angeles without drawing my gun. In Traynorville I have to do it twice in one day.”

“If you pull that gun out,” Clark said, “I'll make you use it.”

“That'll teach me a lesson.” I said it in my best offhand, tough-guy delivery. Torrance Beaumont couldn't have done it better. It was a tone of voice that meant business in any corner of the country, but it didn't impress Clark. He kept limping toward me, slow but steady.

When I was down to my last fifteen yards, I said, “What were you looking for up at the house?”

“You can guess what it was,” Clark said, “since you're guessing I was up there looking.”

“Okay.” I reached behind my back for Gilbert's paperweight. “I'm guessing it was this.”

Clark stopped in his tracks at the sight of the Liberator, and I breathed again. “How did you find that?”

“I backtracked from Hank Shepard's body.”

“I didn't kill Shepard.”

“Everybody tells me that. It's amazing he's actually dead.”

Clark took another step. I raised the empty gun. He laughed at it. “You're holding a smooth barrel three inches long. You couldn't hit me from there once in twenty tries. And you've only got one try.”

“So I'll wait.”

He stopped again. A fox squirrel climbed down on a hickory branch to my right and began to scold me. It knew better than to scold Clark. The caretaker was staring at the gun in my hand. As I watched, he licked at his ragged excuse for lips.

“I've heard you don't like guns,” I said. “How is it you know so much about this one?”

“I've spent a lot of time studying it,” Clark said. “I have a lot of time, and it was around. In the farmhouse.”

“In the bookcase?”

“In the secretary. Wrapped in an oiled rag. It's been there since I hired on.”

“Tell me more.”

“It's called the Liberator and sometimes the Woolworth gun. It was dropped behind enemy lines with a round in the chamber and ten spares in the grip. The grip also held a little instruction sheet with pictures instead of words. It showed that the only way to kill a person with the gun was to clamp it to the side of the target's head.”

“Or poke him in the chest,” I said. “It doesn't say Woolworth on it anywhere–or Liberator, for that matter. Where'd you pick up all those details?”

“Around town. The locals made the damn thing. I've heard talk. At Augie's, mostly.”

“Last Monday night?”

“No, years ago. Nobody's mentioned that gun recently. Nobody's connected it with the murder.”

They would, I thought, once word got out about the ballistics test. After that, the Traynors would be prisoners in their own little kingdom.

Then I remembered what had brought me to the cabin. “You tore the house apart looking for this thing. You knew it was the murder gun. How did you make the connection if you didn't do the shooting?”

“I admit I looked for the gun, but it wasn't because of the murder.”

“Why then?”

“I missed it. Woolworth gun isn't the only nickname that pistol had. It was called the suicide gun, too, because using one was practically a suicide mission. To kill a Nazi soldier or a Japanese sentry, a resistance fighter had to get close enough to shake his hand. Not the kind of job you'd expect to walk away from.”

That was as much as he'd tell me, but it was enough. “You miss having the gun around because it gave you an out.”

“That's right. It was for my personal liberation, for when I couldn't stomach another moment of my life.”

The confession should have been the cue for yet another reconciliation. I was willing, but not Clark.

“Give me that gun,” he said. “You can unload it first if it makes you nervous. I won't beat the teeth out of your head if you do it right now.”

“Sorry,” I said. “This isn't your gun. I picked this one up at the Traynor plant an hour ago.”

Clark's color had faded during our heart-to-heart. Now he darkened dangerously. “Where's mine?”

“Only the murderer knows that. You can help me find him.”

“How?”

“Tell me about the night of the cross burning.”

“It was a Friday. I was at Augie's as usual. I got drunk. I came home. I passed out.”

“You stayed at Augie's until closing. You haven't been doing that lately. You wanted to stay away from the farm as long as you could and come back as drunk as you could. You knew something was going to happen.”

“What if I did?”

“Tell me who tipped you off.”

“You don't want to fool with those guys, Hollywood. I'm Santa Claus compared to them.”

“I'll take my chances.”

Clark shrugged with his good shoulder. “You've got it coming.”

33

Business had picked up at Augie's. A half-dozen men were spaced out around the bar, and two of the booths held couples. From a back room came the clack of pool balls. It was the last of the after-work crowd, I decided, lingering over their aperitifs.

I sat down at the bar and listened to the Gale Storm record playing on the jukebox until the man behind the bar noticed me. He was my friend with the Civil War sideburns, Augie himself. He broke off a conversation on the evils of fluoridated water and strolled over.

“Didn't expect to see you back in here,” he said.

“Why not?”

“You didn't finish your drink this afternoon. From what I could tell, your friend didn't even start his.”

“We had to see a man about a train.”

“Make you another?”

“No, thanks.” I didn't have a prayer of blending into the crowd holding a cocktail glass. “Draw me a beer.”

When he brought it back, I said, “You can do me a favor.”

“Is that right?” Augie asked. The question was a Hoosier standard, a way of keeping a conversation going without committing oneself.

“I'm looking for a man named Nast. He's a foreman at the Traynor plant.”

“I know Nast.”

“I'm told he's in here most evenings. Is he here tonight? I'd like to talk with him.”

“You said you wanted a favor. A favor would be warning you when Nast is coming so you could go the other way. He's nobody you'd want to know.”

“Is that right?” I asked, to practice my blending in.

Augie didn't think much of my technique. “That's damn right,” he said. “He's been a pain in this town's butt since his dishonorable discharge from the Marines. Took a sailor's eye out in a bar fight. After that he turned mean.”

“How's he stayed clear of the law?”

“Friends in high places.”

The county had only one place that high. “He doesn't sound like the Traynors' type.”

“Let's say they like him better than they like the United Auto Workers. Nast hired on at the Traynor plant during some big strike after the war. Started as a scab and worked his way down. There's always some dirty job needs doing in a factory that big. Nast is what you might call the foreman of the dirty job detail.”

“A dirty job is just what I wanted to see Mr. Nast about.”

“You still want to see him?” Augie asked, speaking a little louder, as though he suspected that my hearing was bad.

“More than ever,” I said.

“Try the poolroom then. Wait a minute.” He took away my glass of beer and handed me a bottle of the same brand. “Nast used a broken bottle on that sailor. You might want to have your own along to even things up.”

I overtipped him and followed the sound of men laughing. It led me to a back room that duplicated the proportions of the pool table it held exactly. There was just enough room around the table–an old one with ivory inlays and woven leather pockets–for the players and their cues. Four men stood around the table, three in a group to my left and one across the table from my doorway. The loner was the only one holding a stick. He was using it to tell a story.

“Skeets was drunk,” the man said. “That's all there was to it. He'd done everything to prove it except hit the floor with his chin. He should have gone home, but he wanted to play pool in the fanciest hall in Noblesville. You know the place–never a stray piece of lint on one of their tables. No sir. And each table lit by a big old fixture with a glass shade that some beer company gave 'em.”

The three-man audience made various noises to show that they knew the fancy Noblesville pool hall. I didn't, but no one had taken any notice of me yet. Certainly not the speaker, a thin hatchet-face with a squint that was distributed unevenly between his dark eyes. I identified him from Clark's description as the man I'd come to see. Clark's information was verified by the storyteller himself. That is to say, I recognized Nast's reedy voice. He was the leader of the cross burners, the man who had pronounced Carson Drury's doom.

“The trouble started when old Skeets tried to make a shot behind his back,” Nast said. He acted it out, bending forward and placing his left hand on the felt of the table to form a bridge for the cue. His right hand was behind his back, but the cue it held was aimed at the ceiling. “He was too drunk to know where his stick was pointing, which was up. So he's poking away with it and looking down at his left hand, sort of amazed, you know, that there's no cue down there when he knows he came in with one.

“Meanwhile, the cue is banging the glass shade above the table.” He demonstrated on the green shade that hung over Augie's table. From the look of the battered paper cone, it had heard the story before. “Whack, whack, whack. Skeets keeps banging that shade, all the time looking down at the table with a ‘What the hell?' on his face.

“Across the room, the pantywaist they've got running the place starts yelling.” Nast made the half-step climb to a falsetto. “‘Take it away. Take that stick away from him. Take it away.'”

I was expecting a bigger finish, but that was all I got. The other listeners, who probably knew the story better than Nast, signaled the curtain by laughing wildly. Nast was pleased, until he finally got around to acknowledging me.

“Don't strike you as funny?” he asked.

“Guess you had to be there,” I said.

“Who the hell are you?”

I drank some beer. “Don't you recognize me?”

“No.”

“I must look different by torch light.”

That got a snicker out of the other three. Nast quashed it with a glance. “I don't know what you're talking about,” he said.

“If you have a minute, I'll explain it.” I backed out of the doorway and sat down in the first booth I came to. Nast joined me after a moment, carrying his own beer bottle, an empty one.

“Buy you another?” I asked. “Or do you just keep that around for self-defense?”

Nast smiled. He had a complexion as ingrained with dirt as a mechanic's fingertips and hair as black as Drury's, thick and heavy with tonic–Wildroot, by the smell. “Somebody's been talking about me.”

“That's definitely the problem,” I said.

He raised his empty without looking away from me. Augie brought him another. I noticed that the bar owner was carrying his weighted club in his hip pocket.

When I reached for my wallet, Nast shook his head. “I run a tab. Whether I pay it or not is Augie's lookout. You said something about a problem.”

“Word's getting around about the cross burning at Riverbend. When it gets to the right ear, you'll be in trouble. For starters, you're going to lose your job.”

“You're pissing in the wind, trying to scare me,” Nast said. “I'm not going to lose an hour's pay.”

“Don't count too much on the Traynors backing you. I don't think you have the right one in your corner. And none of them is going to want any part of a murder charge.”

“Murder?” Nast asked, mixing curiosity with offended dignity.

“You ought to get somebody to read you a newspaper now and then. We had a guy killed at Riverbend the other night. It was two nights after you told us to leave town or else.”

“I still don't know what you're talking about.”

“I'm talking about you murdering a guy or being set up by someone to take the blame for the murder. My guess is somebody's setting you up, you and your merry men.”

“Guess and be damned,” Nast said. “You can't prove anything.”

“That's where your men come in. There are too many of them. When they figure out that they're accessories in a murder, one of them will come forward to tell what he knows. After that, they'll be lining up to sing. This is an electric chair state.”

Nast took a drink, jerking the bottle up and down again so quickly that the beer foamed over and ran down his hand. He dried it on his shirt. “What's your price?”

“I want the guy who shot Hank Shepard. If it wasn't you, you'd better start talking. For starters, you can tell me who set up the cross burning and why.”

“I can't afford to be seen jawing with you,” Nast said, glancing nervously around the bar.

I glanced, too, collecting a few hard looks for my trouble. Even the jukebox had turned against me. Hank Williams was crooning “Your Cheating Heart,” a song that brought Ella and Linda Traynor to mind simultaneously.

I blocked out both of them. “It's me or the police,” I said. “Me
and
the police if I don't like your answers.”

“I'll talk to you,” Nast whispered, “but not here. Meet me in the rail yard west of town in half an hour.”

“The rail yard next to the Traynor works? Doesn't sound like a neutral site.”

“You go there first and check it out if you don't trust me. It's a big open space with an old switching tower. I'll meet you by the tower.”

“All right,” I said.

“I'll yell something at you now, and you get up and leave, okay? I'll say, ‘Go to hell,' and you leave and I'll follow.”

“Half an hour.”