Come Back Dead (25 page)

“Down the stone steps and onto the grounds?”

“Whitehead never made it onto the grounds. You got him to the edge of the terrace and slugged him with a piece of the ornamental statuary. Then you tipped him into the river. That's why Gustin found the marks of two blows on Whitehead's skull: one from the murder and one from the fall.”

Drury released the table long enough to brush the hair from his eyes. The face he revealed was as white as his shirt. “I ran a considerable risk.”

“It wasn't as risky as letting Whitehead go to pieces in front of the Traynors. Sooner or later he would have spilled what he'd seen at the farm.”

“Gilbert already knows what John saw,” Drury said. He was smiling at me again, a long, thin smile that curled at the ends. He'd jumped ahead of me somehow, just when I'd had him all tied up.

“How could he?” I asked.

“Because John told him. You haven't solved the murders, Scotty, but you've cleared up a mystery for me. You see, I didn't take John back because I felt lonely or sorry for him or because it had been Hank's dying wish. I did it because Gilbert forced me to. Gilbert came to see me on Monday night, not John. He told me to take John in or lose all his financial support. He even threatened to hold the
Albertsons
negative hostage–it's still in a Traynor vault–until I complied. Unlike you, Gilbert still believes I intend to make a movie.”

“Why would he intercede for Whitehead?”

“That's the mystery you've solved. I didn't know that John had been at Riverbend the night Hank died. I believe now that he saw something there and used it to blackmail Gilbert.”

“You're playing for time,” I said. “How could Gilbert be involved in Shepard's murder?”

“I don't know. You're the psychiatrist. Maybe Hank reminded Gilbert of his dead father or a dog that had bitten him as a child. I don't understand Gilbert at all. I thought I did once. I thought he sincerely wanted to help me as a way of rebelling against his family. But since we've arrived here in Indiana, he's been sitting back and waiting like a man who has set a match to a fuse. I don't know who he's hoping to hoist or why.”

“You don't know anything,” I said. “You're improvising.”

“Aren't we both?” Drury asked. “What happens to your improvisation if Gilbert was the target of John's blackmail and not me?”

It and I were out of commission.

Drury knew it, too. “Would you mind handing me my cigar, Scotty?”

I was still wording my reply when a key scraped its way into the lock on the door behind me. It was Rodman, back from his break. The deputy looked from the wheelchair to Drury and then to me without blinking. On the basis of that feat, I decided it was safe to leave him in charge. I handed him Paddy's telegram and the recovered script.

“Get Gustin over here,” I said. “Give him those.”

“He's still at Traynor House.”

“Call him there. Tell him you're holding the murderer at gunpoint.”

I nodded at Drury, who obliged me by grinning sardonically. Rodman shifted the script to his left hand and put his right hand on his gun.

I patted his shoulder as I left. “If he tries to talk,” I said, “shoot him.”

41

I took the scenic route to the mansion. On the way I stopped at the Traynor plant to ask at the front gate for Gilbert. I didn't expect to find him at the factory after Linda's comment on his early morning drinking. Then again, he might have wanted to drink in peace, which would have been hard to do at home with Gustin and Paddy stomping around. The factory guard recognized my borrowed Studebaker. On the strength of that, he told me politely that Gilbert had not been to work that day.

I had another reason for taking the long way to Traynor House. I wanted to give Rodman plenty of time to reel in Gustin. Drury had tossed the deck in the air with his claim about Whitehead blackmailing Gilbert. Until I had all the cards collected again, I didn't want the sheriff's company or even Paddy's. I especially didn't want them rooting about in Traynor House, Linda's home. I'd begun to fear that she needed more help from me than an occasional comforting word.

The private guards were still on duty at the mansion's pylons, but they seemed dispirited. Gustin might have kicked the stuffing out of them on his way to storm Marvella's tower. One of them stepped forward as I turned into the drive, but when I drove past without slowing, he only shrugged.

Greta the maid had lost some starch herself. She was wiping her eyes with the tip of her apron as she opened the door. “They're gone,” she said simply.

“The family?” I asked.

“No, the sheriff and the other bully. You go, too, mister. Mrs. Traynor has been through enough.”

“I'm here to see Gilbert,” I said as I stepped around her. “Please tell him I'm waiting on the terrace.”

I made my way to the site of my own confrontation with Marvella Traynor. Her chaise lounge was there, but it was unoccupied. The table next to it had not been set for tea today. The table's big, striped umbrella was furled, like the flag of a beaten army.

I'd chosen the terrace for my interview with Gilbert because I wanted to confirm my guess that Drury could have tipped Whitehead's body over the railing and into the river. At its farthest point from the house, the semicircular terrace overlooked the river itself, with no intervening bank. Whitehead could have fallen straight down from there and found the water. Dropping from that height, he would also have found the rocky bottom. In the bright afternoon sun, I could see the floor of smoothed stones clearly, and the fat bass patrolling it.

Next I checked the statuary on the terrace balustrade to verify my guess that one of the dancing figures had been Drury's weapon of opportunity. The statues weren't anchored to the railing's stone cap, and they were small enough to heft easily. Neither of the figures on the tip of the terrace closest to the water showed any trace of damage or blood. But there was something wrong about one of the figures, a woman doing a beginner's pirouette. I remembered it being behind Marvella's lounge chair on the day I'd interviewed her.

I checked the stretch of railing behind her empty chair and found a potted fern. Someone had used the pirouetting woman to fill a gap in the line and then replaced it with a plant. Had Drury taken the time to make the switch after he'd flung the murder weapon into the river? It didn't seem likely. But if not Drury, who?

I looked back to the house for an answer and saw Marvella Traynor staring down at me from an upstairs window. I only got a second's glimpse of her before she yanked the window's curtain closed. In that second I saw the familiar hatred and something my talk with Linda had prepared me to spot: fear.

I expected the hired muscle to appear after that, nightsticks at the ready. Gilbert came out instead. He was unarmed, and he walked with the ceremonial precision that always gives away a drunk.

“Glad to see you're still with us,” I said.

“I can't say the same,” Gilbert replied, his speech as stiff as his walk. “I was hoping I'd seen the last of you. And Carson Drury.”

“I may be able to help you with that. I need the answer to a question. Drury told me he took Whitehead back because you forced him to. Yes or no?”

Gilbert's beady eyes grew to normal size, and his thin face flushed red.

“Damn,” I said. Drury hadn't been bluffing. Whitehead hadn't blackmailed him, which meant Whitehead hadn't seen Drury kill Shepard. What had frightened the old man that night?

Gilbert was still pondering the question his face had answered. I grabbed the front of his polo shirt and shook him. “How did Whitehead force you to back him? What did he threaten to say?”

“I don't know what you mean,” Gilbert said. “He never threatened me. He came to me because I was Carson's backer. He asked me to use my influence for him. He was such a sad case, I decided I would. That's all there was to it.”

He put a hand on my wrist to remind me that I was still holding his shirt. I let him go. “You're lying, Gilbert. Whitehead had something to sell. You wouldn't have helped him otherwise. You've never looked out for anyone but yourself.”

Gilbert was tucking his shirt back in. He paused to look offended. “You wouldn't even be out here if I didn't think about other people. If I hadn't tried to help Carson, you'd be back in California at your usual stand, peeking through some hotel keyhole.”

“Stop it,” I said. “You're making me homesick. You never meant to help Drury. You've been working some scheme of your own from the start.”

“I've never had a scheme,” Gilbert said, and his eyes filled up with tears.

“Damn,” I said again. I knew he was telling me the truth. He'd been telling me the truth all along when he'd insisted, first whimsically and then fearfully, that he hadn't known what was going to happen next.

“You've never had a plan,” I said, working it out as I spoke the words. “Linda thought you did. So did Drury. He started off believing that you were using him to cut your mother's apron strings. But he was selling you short.”

“Was he?” Gilbert asked hopefully.

“We all did. Back in Hollywood, I took you for a small-town playboy with so many stars in your eyes you couldn't see to shave. But it was all an act. You were taking everything in–and everybody.

“Even Drury. While he was setting you up, you were researching him. You found out the essential truth about him, which is that he's a walking disaster area. Bad luck follows him wherever he goes. Did your old college buddy Tyrone McNally pass that on to you when he told you he'd sold Drury the
Albertsons
negative?”

“No,” Gilbert said, shaking his sleek head. “You're making it sound too much like a plan again. Tyrone only gave me an excuse to go to Hollywood in the first place and an introduction to Drury. I just wanted a break from the monotony of my life. And I didn't research Drury. I just spent time with him. I heard what was happening to his movie, what had happened to his last dozen projects. I listened to the jokes about how unpredictable life in his circle could be. Hank Shepard liked to tell them. You heard those jokes yourself.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And I thought how wonderful it would be to live around a person whose life was never the same two days in a row. Who unsettled everything and everybody just by being himself. And I got an idea–not a plan, not a scheme, just an idea. I decided to bring Carson to Traynorville. To introduce him into my routine, predictable life just to see what would happen.”

I was feeling the heat. I sat down on the edge of Marvella's lounge chair. Gilbert, whose brandy-soaked skull should have been cracking in the full sun, looked totally unaware of the temperature.

“Drury told me you were like a man who'd lit a fuse,” I said. “He hasn't realized yet that he's the bomb.”

“It was exciting at first,” Gilbert said, “just the way I'd hoped it would be. I enjoyed the tension of not knowing what the next phone call or knock on the door would bring. It was a feeling I've never really known. And I enjoyed watching the rest of you react. Especially my mother.”

“And Linda,” I said. “Don't leave her out. Your little experiment is squeezing her hard.”

He looked away. “I never meant for it to.”

“You're lying again, Gilbert. You're jealous of her.”

“Of course I'm jealous. Who wouldn't be? But I'm fond of her, too. I don't want to hurt her. I never wanted anyone to be hurt–not Hank or Whitehead or Linda.”

“But they all have been. The first two are dead, and Linda has herself half-convinced that she's responsible. She made arrangements to meet Shepard at the farm Sunday night. She's afraid he died because she almost gave in to her loneliness.”

Gilbert was still staring out at the river. “The only man who would kill to keep her faithful is dead,” he said.

“Being dead doesn't hold your relatives back. Your uncle is dead, and his bedsheet goes marching on, courtesy of your mother and Nast. Did she send Nast to the farm to act for her dead son? So she could keep Linda faithful and chained to this town? Is that what Whitehead saw?”

“I can't tell you.”

“You wonder how you would have done in the war. You're in a war now. The people around you are in danger, and you can help them. What are you going to do?”

“Nothing,” Gilbert said. Then he started to cry again.

42

Tears were all I got from Gilbert after that. Tears and pleas for another brandy. When I gave up hoping that he'd dry out, I went looking for a bottle on the slim chance a drink would get him talking again.

The only supply I knew of was in the living room's corner bar. The bar wasn't locked up. Either Greta was a teetotaler, or she had the run of the place. I found a bottle of Gilbert's favorite brandy, cleverly hidden among six other bottles of the same brand. As I reached for it, I felt someone's eyes caress the back of my neck.

I swung around with the brandy bottle drawn back for a forward pass. There was no one behind me, but that didn't make the feeling I was being watched go away. The only eyes I could see belonged to the portrait of Mark Traynor. I crossed to its place of honor over the mantel to verify that the eyes were really the painting's and not those of Nast, peering out at me from some secret passage. That gag was so hoary, Hollywood scriptwriters only used it in comedies, but the old traditions died hard in Traynorville.

The eyes I found in the portrait were the ones the painter had put there, blue eyes that had a hard edge. They created the impression that the boy lieutenant was looking into his own hard future. It hadn't been the noble death that soldiers think about when they let themselves think of death at all. He'd simply died, according to his widow. I'd never asked her what she'd meant by that. It couldn't have been a training accident, although those had been all too common during the war. Mark had died in Germany. He might have turned his jeep over. He might have stepped on a mine. Ella's own brother had met that end.

Or Traynor might have had an even more wasteful death. He might have been a victim of friendly fire, like Clark. The thought stopped me cold. Clark. I stared up into those hard blue eyes, my mind an empty space in which Clark's name echoed on and on. It was finally overlaid by a replay of Gilbert saying, “The only man who would kill to protect her honor is dead.” Like everything else I'd been told in Traynor House, it was a lie.

I ran back out onto the terrace, but Gilbert had gotten away. I could see no sign of him down on the grounds near the river, so I reentered the house using a different door, one that led to a library. I searched the first floor without finding another soul. Then I went up the grand staircase, taking the right fork when the stairs split beneath the stained-glass homage to the Traynor Phaeton Six.

The second floor was served by a single hallway, the center of which overlooked the first-floor foyer. Opposite this balcony were three doors opening on rooms that faced the front of the house. They were bedrooms. The leftmost was Linda's comfortable, uncluttered room. Next to it and serviced by a connecting door from Linda's was the room Gilbert had told me about, Mark Traynor's room. It was preserved as he'd left it when he'd gone off to fight, complete with school pennants and model airplanes. The third door of the trio opened onto a guest room that was as impersonal as any hotel's.

I had company when I came out from checking the third bedroom. Greta was standing at the end of the hallway to my left, her arms thrown out protectively across a set of double doors–Marvella's suite.

“Go away,” Greta said.

The opposite end of the hall dead-ended in an identical pair of doors: Gilbert's rooms. I crossed to the locked doors and banged on them.

“He's gone,” Greta called to me. “He's gone.”

Gone to warn his brother, I thought, thanks to the head start I'd spotted him.

I left the house at a run. My Studebaker hadn't been impounded by the family chauffeur. I drove it full-out to Riverbend, pushing seventy until I came to the dip in the road where Casey Atherley had hidden his car. Beyond it, at the end of the drive, a familiar deputy was on duty: the old man who had spotted Clark on the farmhouse porch the day before. He wasn't spotting anybody today. He was snoring away with his head back and his mouth wide open. The sound of my car sliding to a halt on the gravel drive next to his cruiser brought him up, swatting at bluebottles and asking, “Who the hell?”

“Elliott,” I said. “Scott Elliott. Has Gilbert Traynor passed here?”

“What?”

“Call Sheriff Gustin on your radio and tell him I need help at Clark's cabin as soon as he can get there. Tell him I'll have the murderer waiting for him.”

“Yes, sir,” the deputy said and then, less encouragingly, “Who'd you say you are?”

I drove on, wondering whether he'd find Gustin and whether the sheriff would respond to another call from me, the guy who had just cried wolf over Carson Drury. I shook off that doubt. Paddy would march Gustin over if he had to push him with a gun.

I checked my own gun as I left the coupé. I kept the forty-five in my right hand as I made my way across the backyard to the path along the edge of the field. The automatic gave the game away, hanging there at the end of my arm, but I didn't think empty hands would fool Clark. I'd tried that approach on my last visit to the cabin, and he'd all but attacked me. I knew why now. He'd assumed when I'd shown up that I'd discovered his secret, that I'd figured out he was really Mark Traynor, alive but so disfigured that he could live unrecognized in his own hometown. I'd set his mind at ease when I'd asked about the cross burning. He'd handed me a red herring, Nast, and sent me on my merry way. He wouldn't try finessing me this time. He'd be sure I knew the truth.

Who else knew? Gilbert, of course. He'd bowed to Whitehead's blackmail in order to save his brother. Clark was the one Whitehead had seen go into the tack room that night. No wonder the old man had still been frightened hours later when he'd stumbled into Carlisle's house. But how had Whitehead connected Clark and Mark Traynor? He couldn't have expected Gilbert to pay off to protect a caretaker. And when had Whitehead even heard that Gilbert had an older brother?

I asked myself another question I couldn't answer as I reached the start of the woods. How did Linda Traynor fit in now? She had to know Mark was still alive. Even if he'd been reported by the army as killed in action, she had to know the truth. She couldn't have lived so close to him for ten long years and not known. She'd told me she had a hard time believing that Mark was really dead. Had she been hinting that he wasn't? Why hint at it? And why pretend to be uncertain about the connection between her tryst with Shepard and his murder? She could have told me everything if she'd wanted her husband punished. If she'd wanted to protect him, she could have kept quiet about her appointment with Shepard.

The answer had to be Linda's old dilemma of being held in check by opposing forces. This time the rival pressures were the need to protect her husband and the desire to prevent further violence.

I put my doubts and questions away as I neared the clearing. Gustin could work it all out at his leisure, once he had Clark behind bars. It would probably require no more than sweating Gilbert, which the sheriff could handle with his feet up.

The little forest seemed unnaturally quiet. I decided it was due to the heat of the afternoon, that the birds and the squirrels were all napping in the shade. If I was lucky, I told myself, Clark would be napping, too. I'd never felt less lucky in my life.

Even so, there was no sign of Clark in the clearing around the cabin. No sign of any living thing. I'd left the farm without the slightest thought of sneaking up on Clark. My plan had been to march in and take him, period. Somewhere along the way I'd wised up. I waited at the edge of the clearing for a long time, watching and listening and sweating.

When I finally crossed the open ground, I ran in a crouch, something I wasn't often called on to do as a civilian. The moment brought the war back so vividly, I almost reached up to hold my helmet in place.

I arrived at the timber building at the corner to the left of the front door. Between the corner and the door was a window. Because the cabin stood above the dirt floor of the clearing on stone legs, the sill of the window was at the height of my nose. I could stretch just enough to look into the structure's single room. No one looked back.

I tried the front door. It was made of three roughly sawn planks, and it was unlocked. I stepped inside–still moving on my toes–with one last look behind me for a glimpse of a red ball cap.

The floor plan was bed and fireplace to the right, cook stove and sink with hand pump to the left, and a table and chairs in the center. I couldn't see any cover in which Clark could be lying in ambush. The furniture was all unpadded wood. The two chairs were homemade, their legs and arms still covered with bark and their seats with leather straps woven loosely. The bed was a surplus cot straight from an army barracks. Clark's closet was a pole that spanned the walls of the corner nearest the bed. The few clothes hanging there wouldn't have hidden Frank Sinatra. I checked the clothes anyway, tapping the shirts and pants with the barrel of my gun.

I was looking for the Liberator. Having it accounted for would make me that much happier about confronting Clark. I checked the supplies that stood on open shelves above the stove–sugar and flour and cornmeal in canisters, everything else in cans–and the stove itself.

As I searched for the gun, I thought back on the hunger I'd seen in Clark's eyes when I'd produced Gilbert's copy of the Liberator. If that had been an act–if he'd really been a murderer and not a suicide cut off from his weapon of choice–it had been a great act. And why had Clark torn Riverbend apart looking for the gun? The murderer had to know where the gun was. Had that been another dodge?

I shut the questioning off as soon as it started. I couldn't let it distract me from what I was seeing and what I was listening for: the sound of Clark's footfall behind me. For the same reason I blocked out images of Whitehead when the smooth river stones of the fireplace brought him to mind.

That is, I tried to block them. As I pulled apart the stack of firewood on the hearth, I saw Whitehead rolling along the black bottom of the river. I even heard the tapping he made as he touched the stones with every slow revolution.

Then I realized that the faint tapping sound was real, that it was coming through the floor beneath me. I went back out through the front door and down the block steps, scanning the woods as I stepped onto the clearing floor. When I felt able to turn my back on the wall of trees, I stooped and looked under the cabin. My view of the corner where I'd heard the tapping was blocked by a stack of lumber.

I circled the building, noting for the first time that the ground fell away at the back. The stone legs supporting the rear of the structure were twice as tall as those in front. Their added height created a storage space below the cabin floor. Clark had filled it with the lumber I'd seen from in front, as well as drums of kerosene and olive drab cases that I recognized as surplus ammunition boxes.

I took all those things in peripherally. What grabbed my gaze and held it was the source of the tapping sound: a pair of human legs that ended in work boots bound together by heavy cord. The boots were kicking feebly at an outcropping of stone.

I put a hand on the bound ankles, and a low moan floated out from beneath the cabin, followed by a strangled attempt at speech. I stuck my gun in its holster and dragged the unresisting form down the slope and into the daylight.

It was Nast, bound and gagged and half-dead. His greasy hair was caked with dirt, and his eyes were black and blue. His gag was a twisted strip of dirty rag that cut into the corners of his mouth like a bit. I untied it first. Nast worked against me by struggling to speak before I had the gag clear of his parched tongue. His voice, when he could finally use it, was a croak.

“Did you kill him?” he asked. “For the love of God, tell me you killed him.” Then his bruised eyes locked onto something over my shoulder, and he screamed, “No!”

I rolled away from Nast and drew my gun. Clark timed his first kick perfectly, knocking the gun from my hand. It rattled down the slope toward the trees. His second kick was off balance. I grabbed his foot and twisted it, and he went down, tumbling well clear of me. We scrambled to our feet at the same time. Clark was nearer to my fallen gun, but he didn't turn to pick it up.

“I've been waiting for you,” he said. “I knew you wouldn't quit.”

“It's time
you
quit,” I said. “I know what's been going on.”

Clark shook his head. “If you knew, you'd still be running. Now it's too late to run.”

He came at me up the slope, his fists held low like another John L. Sullivan. He had no choice with his left; he couldn't raise it any higher. Knowing that, I stood my ground, jabbing with my left and throwing everything into a right cross aimed at the unprotected side of his head.

He'd been waiting for that. He showed me how a man with no left held his own in a fight, tilting his head away from the blow and letting it bounce into his ruined ear. Then his big right hand brushed by my guard and caught me square on the jaw. I staggered backward against the side of the cabin but kept my feet under me. Clark nodded his approval as he closed in for round two.

I led with the same left jab and then faked a right. Clark leaned his head away again, as I'd hoped he would. I snuck in a quick left, hitting him on what passed for his nose. He backed away, wiping at blood.

When he came for me a third time, he did it with open hands. I couldn't back up the slope fast enough to stay away from him. I tried throwing another combination, but this time
he
had the plan. Instead of shrugging off my right, he grabbed my arm and drew me into his knee. As I buckled, he chopped at my head.

Gravity saved me. I rolled into Clark's legs as I fell, taking him down with me. At first it didn't seem like much of a break. He didn't need any swinging room to land blows that hurt all the way to the bone. He rained them on me as we tumbled over and over down the slope. But when we came up against the trees, I was on top, and my left hand was on the barrel of my gun.