Come Back Dead (10 page)

15

Clark was waiting for us at Riverbend. The property's name was painted on an elegant colonial sign at the end of a long gravel drive. The farmhouse at the other end of the drive wasn't elegant or colonial. It was a simple white-frame model whose front porch was as wide and almost as deep as the building behind it. I'd seen hundreds of farmhouses like it growing up, but none that had glowed like this one. The windows had certainly been washed that morning, and the white paint around them shone just as brightly in the afternoon sun.

The property was framed by fields of corn that ran all the way to the road, giving the front yard the look of a green alley. There wasn't a dandelion visible in that gently rising lawn or a dead branch in the giant tulip poplars that stood on either side of the porch. Beyond the rightmost tree and across a gravel courtyard was the main outbuilding, a barn. It was a dark, unweathered red with white trim, and its highest gable bore the date 1852. Traynor had said it himself: The place was a museum without customers.

The museum's custodian stood on the front porch, dressed in an undershirt and holding a saw that gleamed like a naked sword. To protect himself from the sun, Clark wore a ball cap with a long bill. It hadn't kept his face from burning to about the same shade of red as the barn. At first glance his face seemed less disfigured than worn away. Traynor parked the wagon about twenty yards from the porch. From that distance I could just make out that Clark had a flat, featureless nose, no cheekbones to speak of, no eyebrows, and only a faint, uneven trace of lips, tightly drawn.

Clark stood in place while Shepard and I got Drury's chair down from the roof of the wagon and loaded him into it. The caretaker didn't offer to help, but he didn't hide himself, either. I decided that he and Traynor together–or coincidentally–had hit upon the least painful way for the three of us to make Clark's acquaintance: an extended period of stealing glances at him from a distance.

The saw in Clark's hand and a toolbox at his feet were explained by a recent addition to the front porch steps. It was a ramp for Drury's wheelchair, a long ramp with a very gradual incline. When Drury saw it, he thrust himself forward across the gravel, making a wide turn that brought him to the end of the ramp. With no more running start than that, he was able to ascend unaided to the porch.

“Perfect,” he said when he'd gotten there. “Absolutely first rate.” He extended his hand to the retreating Clark and held it out until Clark returned to take it. “Thanks for the ramp and for taking us in.”

Clark said nothing that I could hear. He didn't have much time to reply before Drury wheeled his chair around and took off down the ramp. Shepard and I moved instinctively to head him off at the bottom, but he stopped in a shower of gravel without our help.

“Works going down, too,” Drury said. He craned his head around to address the caretaker, but Clark had disappeared inside the house.

Traynor was still standing by the station wagon. “I'll help you with your bags,” he said from there. “Then I'll let you settle in. The wagon's for your use while you're here.”

Drury wheeled himself back to the car. “Gilbert, if I start thanking you, I won't know where to stop. So I won't start. But I hope you know how I feel.”

We could all tell how Gilbert felt: uneasy. “I've a favor to ask,” he said. “My family would like to meet you. We're having a little dinner tonight at our place, Traynor House. Nothing very formal. Just my mother and my sister-in-law. You're all invited.” His voice trailed off on, “If you're not too tired.”

“Can't think of a nicer way to spend our first evening in Indiana,” Drury said.

I could have come up with a short list. Traynor, too, from the look of him. He glanced at Shepard and me almost pleadingly, and we chorused in with Drury. Traynor gave us directions and then took off in a low-slung Studebaker President Speedster. The coupé was sleek in outline and garish in color, a lime green over lemon yellow.

Shepard watched him go. “There's a guy who fits right in around here, I don't think.”

“No,” Drury said. “Poor Gilbert is definitely out of sync.”

I ad-libbed a line: “Is it just me, or did he seem less than thrilled about having us over tonight?”

“He's uncomfortable, Scotty, that's all. This whole town is a suit that Gilbert has outgrown. With our help, he's going to cast it off.”

“And come out as what?” Shepard asked. “A butterfly?”

“A free man,” Drury, the model free man, replied. “In the meantime, it won't kill us to spend some time with his family. In fact, it could help us. Out in Hollywood, Gilbert confided to me that beyond a certain point, his ability to invest in the picture will be dependent on the goodwill of his mother. He's the president of the Traynor Company, but she's still firmly seated on most of the Traynor money. So we have to make a good impression on the old lady, and Gilbert's nervous about it.”

“Him and me both,” Shepard said.

We met the first requirement of a good impression by arriving on time. I drove the wagon through the front gate of Traynor House at five minutes to eight. There was no actual gate, just two slightly tapered brick pylons that might have supported one. All they were currently supporting was a pair of globe-shaped copper light fixtures, weathered green. The pylons were inset with ceramic tile in a geometric pattern. Drury had me stop the wagon so he could examine the tile.

“You're the Hoosier, Scotty. What does that design mean?”

“Money, straight ahead.”

The house was an imposing pile of the same tan brick as the pylons. It had a green tile roof and sprawling one-floor wings on each end of the main structure. During the short trip up the crescent drive to the front steps, Drury gave us a pocket lecture on the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright.

“Not a Wright house, obviously, but you can see the Prairie School touches. Many of the mediocrities who criticized Wright eventually adopted his ideas. That's frequently how a genius does his most lasting work: not through his own creations, but in unofficial collaboration with his enemies.”

I waited for some wry response from Shepard on the autobiographical quality of Drury's observation, but none came. The publicist had been quiet since we'd settled in at Riverbend–Drury in a first-floor sitting room converted to a bedroom and Shepard and I upstairs. Now he was positively grim. I checked Drury's expression in the rearview mirror. He was perfectly composed, but eager, too. I'd seen the combination before on long-lost soundstages. It was the contained excitement of a well-prepared actor anxious to get on with his scene.

The front door was answered by a maid more formally dressed, in shiny black and starched white, than the three of us. She let us in as far as a paneled foyer. Directly before us, an extra-wide staircase rose to a landing and then split off in two different directions. Like Drury's unlucky movie set, the landing was backed by a stained-glass window. This one was representational, a rolling green landscape across which an antique car was traveling. A Traynor Phaeton Six.

“Wonderful,” Drury said, by which I guessed he meant awful.

To our left was a large, brightly lit room. Gilbert Traynor was standing in its doorway, waiting for his cue. When Drury spotted him there, he crossed to us. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “Mother will be down in a minute. You'll want a drink first. And you can meet Linda.”

He led us into a powder blue room decorated like a standard living room but big enough to handle a dance. In front of a limestone fireplace stood a conventional grouping of sofa and chairs so dwarfed by the room's proportions that they looked like a showroom display. A woman sat alone on the sofa. Oddly, she didn't seem at all dwarfed by the room, or intimidated by the procession bearing down on her. She was wearing a dark red cocktail dress that came within an inch or so of being off the shoulder. Her dark lipstick matched the dress, as did the stones in her golden jewelry: necklace, earrings, and bracelet.

She was holding an unlit cigarette. Perhaps she'd been holding it for hours. Shepard was pushing Drury's chair and Gilbert had his hands in his pockets, so I found my lighter and circled the low, gilt table, adding to my list of observations as I went. Her slightly slanted eyes were a mossy brown, her small nose was upturned, and her dark brown hair was pulled back, loosely on top and tightly on the sides, and gathered in a roll at the back of her long, slender neck.

Everything pretty much tallied until she thanked me for the light. Her voice was down-home Hoosier without a single rounded edge. If my rusty ear could be trusted, she was from that part of the state where Drury's glacier had deposited all the hills.

I was surprised enough by that to miss my chance to introduce myself. Gilbert did the honors, billing me somewhere below Drury's wheelchair. Linda Traynor wasn't put off by the slight. She seemed genuinely impressed by Drury, and she gave Shepard a friendly smile. But her dark eyes kept stealing back to me. And I hadn't even remembered to bring my pipe.

“I've made some martinis,” Gilbert said. “Can I interest anyone?”

“Put an onion in Elliott's,” Shepard said. “He only drinks Gibsons.”

“Why,” Linda asked, “does substituting an onion on a toothpick for an olive on a toothpick give a glass of gin and vermouth a whole new name?”

She asked the question of me, but Drury fielded it: “It's a tribute to Charles Dana Gibson, the famous illustrator. Years ago he ordered a martini at The Players Club in New York. The bartender was out of olives, so he snuck a pearl onion into Gibson's glass. The innovation should have been named for the bartender–old Charley Connolly–but Gibson got the credit. Not that it matters. The olive fanciers have kept the Gibson a footnote.”

“Does that make you a believer in lost causes, Mr. Elliott?” Linda asked.

“Just a believer in onions,” I said.

By that time Gilbert had handed round the cocktails. He turned toward an oil painting that hung over the fireplace, a portrait of a very young army lieutenant, and raised his glass to it.

Linda said, “We really should toast our guests tonight, Gilbert. Gilbert and I have a little tradition. We always toast his brother, my late husband, Mark.”

That was the family loss Gilbert had mentioned back at the farm. He'd tried to make it sound like a minor loss then. Now he looked as if he'd just gotten the bad news.

“Let us join you,” Drury said, raising his own glass. “To Lieutenant Traynor.”

“To Mark,” Gilbert said.

Shepard was standing close enough to the portrait to identify the ribbons on the uniform. “He won the Silver Star, too, Elliott.”

“Posthumously,” Linda said. “His mother insisted on its being added to the painting.”

“It was only right,” a voice behind us said. The voice belonged to a small, thin woman in black who was standing in the doorway of the room. “Mark paid for that medal very dearly.”

16

“Hell of an entrance,” Shepard whispered as the woman slowly crossed the ballroom and joined us by the dead fireplace.

She had Gilbert's delicate features and narrow head, made to look even narrower in her case by stiff gray hair teased outward and by folds of skin that allowed the lower part of her face to drain directly into the high neckline of her black dress. But she had none of her son's hazy amiability. At the moment he didn't have much left of that himself. He repeated the introductions in a monotone, ending with, “Gentlemen, this is my mother, Marvella Traynor.”

I thought Drury might say “wonderful” again when he heard the woman's first name, but he was on his best behavior. Sitting in his chair, he was at just the right height to look Mrs. Traynor square in the eye. They stared at each other for the time it took me to finish my drink.

Then she said, “I saw you in 1943 at a bond rally at the armory in Indianapolis. You performed a scene from Shakespeare, a dialogue between Othello and Iago. You played both parts and convinced me I was listening to two separate men.”

“Thank you,” Drury said. “It was an idea that fascinated me at the time: the possibility that conflicting personalities might be sides of a single person. I ended up using it in a little picture called
The Gentleman from Macao
. Perhaps you saw it.”

“No,” Mrs. Traynor said flatly. “I seldom go to those. I'll never forget that bond rally, though. You followed the Andrews Sisters on the program. They were exceedingly loud, but the crowd seemed not to mind. In fact, many of the young people stood up and danced in their places. I remember feeling sorry for you when you came onstage all by yourself with the crowd still unsettled. But by the time you'd finished, the place was as quiet as an empty church. I'll never forget that.”

I wondered if Drury had. That Indianapolis rally had surely been one stop in an endless succession of stops. Drury had probably topped the Andrews Sisters every time he'd grabbed the microphone. Or maybe he hadn't. Maybe that evening in Indy had been a shining moment, a small success he'd misfiled among all his failures.

He straightened himself in his chair and said thank-you again, sounding this time as though he really meant it.

“I'm anxious to hear more of your plans for my son, Mr. Drury. Perhaps we can speak of them at dinner. It's ready now, Gilbert, I believe.”

Dinner was served in an elegant, oval room that impressed even Drury. He presided over the meal, telling stories about the '43 bond drive that Mrs. Traynor had brought back to life for him. She sat at the head of the table and watched him. As she watched, she chewed each mouthful of her meal forty or fifty times. I never actually caught her swallowing. She might not have had any reason to.

Drury made two mistakes during his performance. One came after he'd segued from his wartime reminiscences to his plans for reviving
The Imperial Albertsons
. He hadn't gotten past his sketch of the movie's basic premise–that the coming of the automobile had blasted a moribund society–before Mrs. Traynor gave her molars a rest and broke in.

“You called the Albertsons social dinosaurs, Mr. Drury. Just what did you mean by that?”

“Please call me Carson, Mrs. Traynor,” Drury said, his accent as English as it got. “I meant that the dinosaurs expected, if the creatures thought at all, that their warm, comfortable world would last forever. In the same way the Albertsons expected their almost feudal life of ease and privilege to last forever.”

“If the creatures thought at all,” Mrs. Traynor added coldly.

Drury was so taken aback by her sudden hostility that I was able to hit on its explanation first. “Your son showed us around town today, Mrs. Traynor,” I said. “We saw the mansion your uncle once owned. It must have been quite a place in its day. It reminded me of the Morris-Butler House in Indianapolis.”

“You've been to Indiana before?”

“He was born and raised in Indianapolis, Mother,” Gilbert said. He said it in a condescending way, as though she'd missed a sign pinned to my back.

She didn't take offense. “I have many fond memories of my uncle's house, Mr. Elliott. We always spent Christmas day there. My mother's family were the Pallisers, once the most prominent family in this county.”

The local branch of the Albertsons, in other words. Drury had gotten that message loud and clear. “Then you know the tragic implications of our story firsthand, Mrs. Traynor,” he said, “the basic truth that you have to adapt to survive.”

“I must admit that you adapt very well, Mr. Drury,” she said. She capped the line with a tiny bite of dressing. Before she began to puree it, I thought I saw a faint trace of a triumphant smile.

Drury's second slip occurred after Mrs. Traynor had come down with a headache and retired. Linda Traynor, who'd been content to sit back and listen during dinner, asked Drury if he'd worked out the cost of finishing the picture. Drury blew her some smoke about the numbers being someone else's worry, that they always managed to work themselves out and that he preferred to concentrate on the creative aspects of the film. The speech sounded canned, and his delivery of it was halfhearted. He frequently looked away from his audience and toward Mrs. Traynor's empty chair, as though her headache had somehow taken him off the clock. It hadn't.

Linda interrupted him when he mentioned his muse for the third time. “You won't mind my speaking frankly, I hope,” she said, her voice trading its drawl for a steely terseness. “We'll get along a lot better that way. When Gilbert first wired that you might be coming out, I had our lawyers make some inquiries. We learned that your last three pictures didn't recover their basic production costs. I believe you call it the negative cost in your business.”

“Yes,” Drury said, “we do.”

“That caused us some concern. Gilbert's interest in this project is such that we may be willing to lower our normal requirements for a return on our investment. But naturally we'll need to have a clear idea of our potential risk.”

“Naturally,” Drury said, adapting yet again to the changing situation. “If you can give me a few days to scout locations and revise my shooting schedule to reflect what I find, I think I'll be able to give you some solid numbers.”

Linda thanked him and went off to check on her mother-in-law.

Shepard gave her a ten count before piping up. “So, Carson, what do you say we bring the maid back in. Maybe you can go oh for three.”

Drury laughed himself out of wind. “Let's leave the poor maid alone. The way my luck is running, I'll probably remind her of an ex-husband. God, I could do with a drink. Do you have any crusty old port in the basement, Gilbert?”

“Yes, I think so. Come help me with the glasses, Scotty.”

I trailed him to the living room's discreet corner bar. An even more discreet push button was set in a brass plate on the bar's side. Gilbert held the button in for a moment. Then he poured brandy into two balloon glasses and handed me one. Before I could ask what had happened to Plan A, the formal maid rustled in.

“Greta, please take a bottle of port and a box of cigars to Mr. Drury and Mr. Shepard. Tell them we'll be in directly.”

He'd somehow talked and emptied his snifter at the same time. He collected the brandy bottle and led me toward his brother's shrine. “Sit down, Scotty. I'll feel better about facing Carson after he's had a drink and I've had several.”

“He dropped the ball in there, not you.”

“Carson may not see it that way, once he's had a chance to reflect.”

Gilbert played with a gold tassel on the arm of the sofa, giving me a chance to reflect. “You didn't tell Drury that your sister-in-law is involved in the Traynor Company's financial decisions?”

“Linda makes the Traynor Company's financial decisions. I told Carson that I'm president of the company, and that's true as far as it goes. But the head of our board of directors is L. D. Traynor. That's Linda.”

He watched me closely while he caught up on his drinking. “I didn't expect the chairwoman-of-the-board angle to throw you, Scotty. Your wife has a successful career of her own.”

“L. D. Traynor's sex doesn't throw me, but I am surprised to hear that an in-law is running the family company.”

Gilbert shrugged. “That's just an example of ‘talent will out.'” He filled his glass again, checked mine, and set the bottle down on the gilt table. “Linda has a genius for business. Nobody knew that until after Mark was killed, not even Mark himself. He only knew that he loved Linda and that loving her infuriated our mother. That's something of a hobby with us Traynor boys.”

“Why would Linda infuriate your mother?”

“Because Linda's family lacked little things like social position and money and indoor plumbing. Mark met her when he was stationed down at Camp Atterbury in southern Indiana. Met her, married her, and went off to be killed.

“It's a shame Mother didn't take to her daughter-in-law. Linda's own mother died in an accident when Linda was very young. Mark told me the story, which was an ugly one. Linda watched her mother step in front of a truck during a shopping trip to town. It would have been natural for Linda to reach out to her mother-in-law as a substitute, but Mother wasn't interested. It was fortunate for Linda that Dad wasn't as fussy socially.”

Gilbert filled his glass again, this time without a glance at mine. “My father had his first heart attack a few months after Mark died, probably because Mark had died. That left Mother in a fix. I was away at school and destined for the army myself–too late to see any action, incidentally. Mother knew nothing about business, the Pallisers being above trade, but there was Linda. She'd been helping Father since Mark shipped out. They got along well, Dad and Linda. They had a lot in common.”

The memory made the mild Gilbert mildly jealous. “Like what?” I asked.

“Just a practical, do-your-job-and-shut-up way of looking at the world. Quiet competence, Mother calls it. The kind of thing they can't teach you in years of college, as I was to learn. Dad was the first to recognize Linda's potential. He had an eye for potential. During his illness, Linda became his deputy at the plant. By the time he had his second attack, she was practically running the place. A natural genius, as I said.”

“It must have been tough on your mother, having to depend on a woman she didn't like.”

“It was, but Mother had no choice. Linda was essential to her plan for the future. Rather, she was essential to Mother's plan that there be no future. You see, my mother's life stopped the day the telegram came about Mark. That's a cliché, I know, but everything about her has become a cliché: the endless black dresses, the room preserved just as Mark left it. Just like in a movie.”

Gilbert leaned toward me. The brandy in his glass and in his face picked up the golden glow of the table. “I was struck by that quality of our lives when I was out in movie land. I'd gone out there to get away from this house for a while, but somehow I hadn't gotten away. I finally realized it was because I'd been living in a movie for years. A movie without an ending.”

He stopped speaking and focused on something over my left shoulder: Linda Traynor.

“You're neglecting your guests, Gilbert.”

“Sorry, Linda. I had to hear about Scotty's Silver Star. I got caught up in the story.”

He hurried off to rejoin Drury. Linda didn't, so I hung around, too. On our walk in to dinner, I had noted that Linda was tall with wide shoulders that made her look slender and almost boyish. Now, standing next to her, I crossed out the boyish part.

“Were you two really talking about the war, Mr. Elliott?”

I didn't answer right away. I'd never lied to a board of directors before.

“It's all right,” she said. “I'm fond of Gilbert. I know he has to have his little plots and schemes.”

“Doesn't sound like a very endearing quality.”

“You have to understand his motivation.”

I'd have to guess it, too, because she wasn't about to fill me in. She sat down in Gilbert's vacated seat on the sofa, the full skirt of her dark red dress arranging itself artistically across the cushions. She collected a cigarette from a box next to his forgotten brandy bottle and pushed the box across to me. I took a cigarette–a Turkish blend Fatima–as I resumed my seat, figuring it would have been the least of Ella's worries if she'd been around to worry. The Fatima was the least of my worries.

“Gilbert calls you Scotty. May I?”

“Yes,” I said.

“How did you come to win the Silver Star, Scotty?”

“I got it for not being killed.”

“Just the opposite of my husband's method.”

The remark was tossed off and even a little brutal, but that was the way some people dealt with the war. “He must have died doing something important,” I said.

“No. Mark just died, a mile or two into Germany. The medal was his mother's idea, something she used the family's influence to get. She said earlier that he paid for it dearly. Actually, she paid for it by buying mountains of war bonds.”

“At the armory in Indianapolis?”

“That would be a coincidence to make your skin crawl, wouldn't it? No, she didn't buy that particular block in Indy. Mark was still alive when Mr. Drury and his muse floated through in 1943.” She repeated “muse” and shook her head.

“Drury's not as phony as he comes across,” I said.

“He has a fancy line of bullshit, though, doesn't he?” She said it to shock me and succeeded. “Not a very endearing quality.”

“You have to understand his motivation,” I said.

Linda smiled. “Sophisticated people say ‘touché' at moments like this. In Indiana we sometimes say ‘to hell with you.'”