Clay Hand

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “That fits as well as anything else,” Fields said. “Maybe a little better. I ain’t seen any evidence of the bootleg stuff here—not that I’ve done much looking so far—but people drinking it do crazy things. It comes out. It’d be a lot safer to sell it a ways from where it’s made…” He shrugged. “It’s possible.”

  “Clauson mentioned someone by the name of Martin Shaw being there from Zanesville the day Dick first called.”

  Fields wrote down the name. “I don’t think there’s a question of him being a magician…but that’d be a nice sideline.” He squinted up at him from the notebook. “Not that I believe it any more than you do. But it can’t hurt to check.”

  “How long ago was the still used?”

  “There’s nothing down there now. But that hose is in pretty good shape. I’d say a month, put or take a week.” Fields got up and looked at his watch. “Did you ever write down Coffee’s history for me?”

  “No. I’ll do it now.”

  “What I’d rather you did—go up to Corteau. They’d have them things in the library, wouldn’t they?”

  Phil nodded.

  “I’ll give you a note to the librarian so you can take them out. I want everything he wrote. And as long as the wife’s here, you might get her to help you. I want to know how long he stayed places, if she was with him …anything you think might be interesting.”

  “How much shall I tell Margaret?”

  “Don’t you trust her? How much can you tell her, anyway?”

  “Not much,” Phil admitted. “She wanted to go home before the inquest. In the middle of it she changed her mind. She made friends with Mrs. O’Grady. Why?”

  Fields leaned toward him, his face almost in his. “For the same reason maybe she was making such good friends with you that morning you took her out by the cliff?”

  Phil met his eyes, but he could feel the color rising to his face. “That was my fault, Sheriff.”

  Fields leaned back and picked up the transcript of the inquest proceedings. “Maybe I couldn’t see so good, but I’ve always had the notion a kiss takes cooperation. You might think about you being the reason she’s hanging around Winston.”

  Chapter 21

  PHIL THOUGHT ABOUT IT. But somehow he could not make it fit the situation. And yet Margaret always bridled at his censure. If she did not give a damn she might well have let it pass. She had slapped him down the night before for it. That had been the trouble between them even before Dick’s death. They had been baiting one another—resisting one another—that was what it amounted to in his case at least. And Fields was right. The kiss was—a kiss.

  While he waited for her to dress to go to Corteau with him, he thought back over these days with her, and began to speculate on what might have happened had he not been sent to Chicago to cover the basketball tournament. Would she have come to Winston alone? Or would she have called on someone else? Who?

  As they drove to Corteau, he asked her.

  “I’d have come alone,” she said. “I might have wired you or called you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I needed you.”

  “I haven’t been much help.”

  “That’s because you’re afraid of me, Phil. You’ve always been afraid of me from the day we first shook hands in New York.”

  “You know the reason for that, Margaret.” He did not take his eyes from the road.

  “Because I was Dick’s wife?”

  “That usually means hands off, you know.”

  “Don’t try to be funny, Phil. It doesn’t fit.”

  “A lot of things don’t fit, Margaret. I’ve told you before, I’m no sophisticate. Something happened to me the first time I saw you. I’ve told myself a thousand times since that I’m a damned fool. But there it is. I’ve never gotten over it. I thought I was cured once. I made the mistake of introducing Eleanor to you. She was smarter than I was, because she knew immediately. I think that was why she called it off although she didn’t say so.”

  “Do you still feel that way, Phil?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Although he did not look at her, he saw her chin go up and he imagined the color flaming in her face.

  “Shall I tell you something about yourself, Phil McGovern? You’re a coward. I’ve always thought it was the fine moral stuff in you. The discretion. I admired it. I was wrong. You got a nice, narrow bringing up, and you’re afraid to stray out of the lane.”

  It was strange, he thought, that her words did not anger him. If they were the truth it would have angered him. There was an element of truth in them. “Perhaps it’s that,” he said. “But maybe it’s my instinct toward self-preservation.”

  “You think I destroyed Dick. Is that it?”

  “I don’t know. Something did. Why did you change your mind about leaving Winston, Margaret?”

  “You’re a fool as well as a coward, Phil.”

  He glanced at her then, and found the full wide beauty of her eyes on him. The car wavered on the highway, the right wheels slipping off the macadam onto the gravel. He pulled it back.

  “Park the car, Phil, and let’s talk this out.”

  “No, Margaret. Not now. There’ll be a time for it, but not now. First, there’s Dick.”

  “First, there’s Dick, dead or alive,” she said. After a moment she added: “That was a horrible thing to say.”

  Reason began to return to him. “When he left home this time he was through; wasn’t he? I could tell by the house. You didn’t expect him back. Do you remember suggesting that I invite you and him to Rockland that night? Why, Margaret?”

  “I thought you might do something for him. He was changed, Phil. You know that now. You could see it in those fragments that he wrote.”

  “What changed him? What happened between him and you?”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that it happened between him and someone else?”

  “No. That did not occur to me.”

  “Between him and God, Phil, when it comes right down to it. The last four months of his life he was at war with himself, and I had no place in it. I had no place in his life at all.”

  “Is that why you thought he had committed suicide?”

  “That’s why I hoped he was in Winston,” she said not hearing him. “I hoped he was trying to find himself. Maybe he was. I don’t know if we’ll ever know that.”

  Phil pulled himself up from where he had hunched over the steering wheel. He was suddenly tired beyond any weariness he could remember. Margaret and the priest—suicide. Mrs. O’Grady and himself—not suicide. The sheriff—murder?

  “Why are we going to Corteau, Phil?”

  He opened the car window for a moment. “To get copies of Dick’s work for the sheriff. He wants to read them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he wants to know Dick as well as we do. And I’ll tell you, Margaret, before he’s through, he will. And he’ll span the difference between my friend and your husband.”

  “If he does, Phil, you’re in for a great shock. It was my husband who died in Winston.”

  At the librarian’s desk at Corteau, one after another of the publications in which Coffee’s articles appeared was brought to them. Margaret prompted where his memory failed him. Even so, he checked the Readers’ Guide back year by year to the first story on which Dick received a by-line. “It’s like living over a lifetime,” she whispered. Her fingers trembled as she touched the pages.

  Phil signed for the magazines, and watched the librarian attach the slip to the sheriff’s order. In the car again, he took a pad and pencil from his pocket. “Fields wants to know on which of these stories you were with him,” he said.

  “Why? There was nothing wrong with Dick when he was doing these.”

  “He doesn’t think there was anything wrong with Dick in Winston. You were in Naperville…” He checked it and wrote down the date.

  “I’m cold, Phil. Will you roll up the window, please?”

  “S
orry. ‘I am growing cold here, even as the days grow warmer….’” He thought of the words and repeated them aloud. “Do you remember that in the notes, Margaret? How did it end? ‘…and loneliness makes desperate wooers of us?’ Why was he lonely, I wonder, when the voice of his beloved was always near him, skipping over hills?” He saw her grow pale and taut beside him. He continued talking quietly, as though it were to himself more than to her. “He wasn’t lonely in New Orleans, was he? That was on combustible exports. You were with him, weren’t you?” He laid the magazine aside.

  “Yes.” Her voice was small and choked.

  “And San Francisco. That was the bloody strike, the seamen. He wasn’t alone there either.”

  “No.”

  “And Los Angeles last summer? You were with him on the campuses?”

  She nodded.

  He checked it. “And three years ago, doing the prison story. Prisons are lonely places. But you were there beside him, weren’t you, Margaret?”

  “Yes. I was there.”

  “And in Detroit, the shirt organization.”

  “I stayed at Ann Arbor. We were afraid.”

  “Are you afraid now, Margaret?”

  “What are you trying to do to me, Phil? Are you out of your mind?”

  “No. Not at all. I’m just trying to figure out why Dick chose to be alone in Winston. New York on ‘How Private, Private Detectives?’ … That must have been nostalgic for you, Margaret. Dick couldn’t have been lonely there.”

  “It doesn’t occur to you, Phil, to ask if I was ever lonely, does it? You don’t ask what it was like to sit in Ann Arbor and wait, to walk the floors of a hotel room, to see a hundred movies, scarcely caring whether it was one I had seen before—to sit in the same house with him those last weeks in Chicago, and be more alone than if he were in China.” She drew a long, shivering breath. “You’re as blind as they come, Phil. You’re like all the rest of the do-gooders. You canonize the dead and persecute the living. It makes the great average man of you.”

  He laid the last magazine on the seat between them. “I am a fool, blind, and a coward, by your own description, Margaret. How could you ever have found it worth your while to stay in Winston, in Mrs. O’Grady’s house, to be near me?”

  “Go to hell,” she said, and coming from her, it sounded particularly ugly.

  Chapter 22

  FIELDS WAS NOT AT Krancow’s when Phil returned. He had been gone the whole afternoon, and Krancow did not know when he would return. Lempke was looking for him. He had called several times. There was unrest in Number Three again. Even as the constable strung out his worries, the phone rang again, and Krancow complained bitterly. At best, he had no use for the telephone. In his business, his wife always attended it.

  Phil watched the men moving down the street from their work. The daytime shift was up. They walked, most of them with a tired stoop. The first day back from a layoff was probably the longest, and the first glass of beer the best. Several of them lingered at McNamara’s door, coaxing their fellows who were inclined to go home first.

  Krancow returned from the office. “That was that reporter, Nichols. He wants a confirmation from the sheriff on him exploring the abandoned section. I can’t give it to him. He didn’t tell me itself.”

  It was strange, hearing that phraseology from Krancow. The Irish spilling over… Phil snapped out of his contemplation of it. “Where’s Nichols now?”

  “On his way over here. He says it goes, confirmation or not, in an hour. It won’t do him any good to threaten me. You can’t cut hair from an onion.”

  Phil went outdoors and waited on the steps for Nichols. He saw him coming from the railroad station, and met him halfway. “Where did you get your information, Randy?”

  “Not from you, that’s a cinch.”

  “He swore me to secrecy on it. There were just four people knew it, the four of us down there.”

  “That’s a lot of people on one secret,” Nichols said. “The most fragrant little man I ever met told me. I’d swear he was an unwashed leprechaun.”

  “Jerry Whelan, the taxi man?” said Phil.

  “That’s the one.”

  “What else did he tell you, Randy?”

  “That was all, but I wasn’t the only one he told. He was carrying it round the town like news of a wedding.”

  “Where did he get it?”

  “Ask him. What did you find down there?”

  “Work on the sheriff for it, will you, Randy? It may be worth the working.”

  “I’ll tune in next week and find out.”

  It was almost eight o’clock when Fields returned. He was dirty, tired and discouraged. He beckoned Phil and Krancow into the office with him, and then listened to the constable’s accounts of his calls without a word. Occasionally, he scratched a word on a piece of paper on the desk.

  “And all that got out, then, was us being down there?”

  “That’s all I heard. There’s an envelope came there for you on the night train.”

  Fields picked it up, and Phil saw the letterhead of the Cleveland and Mobile Railway. “All right, Joe. I’ll take over for the night. Get some rest.”

  He opened the envelope and read its contents. “This is Glasgow’s record with the railway,” he said presently. “It looks clean as a whistle without a toot.”

  He handed it to Phil. On the back of the questionnaire a photostat of Glasgow’s army discharge was attached. Phil read the form through and then looked at the discharge. “I wonder why the army when he was in the Merchant Marine at one time?”

  “Draft probably,” Fields said. He took a pipe from his pocket and filled it. “One thing, he don’t work as much as he seems to be away from home. He must have a lot of layovers some place.” He took back the papers and went over them again. “He don’t earn much money either. But you can’t accuse a man on account of that.”

  “Accuse him of what?”

  “Bootlegging. I spent the whole blessed day tracing that stuff. I’ve been in the next county on all sides. Nothing. Nobody ever heard of Whelan or Laughlin…or Glasgow or Clauson. I checked on the magician he mentioned being here. He’s legitimate. Does a lot of Legion shows.”

  “What about Whelan giving out information on our being in there this morning?” Phil asked. “Where did he get it?”

  “Lempke’s the only source I know. But with no word about the still, it may be somebody saw us. I didn’t really expect to keep it quiet. I just wanted Lempke to know we were trying.” He lit his pipe. “Have you got anything for me?”

  Phil pointed to the stack of magazines on top of the desk. “Margaret was very cooperative,” he said. “She even confirmed your suspicions on why she was staying on in Winston.”

  The sheriff grinned. “You don’t know your own strength, lad.”

  “But I do. I know my weakness, too.”

  Fields walked through the parlor to the porch with him. They could see the shadowy traffic about McNamara’s from where they stood for a moment. “I don’t like them all in there,” Fields said. “I hope Mac’s got the sense not to serve them much. They’ll get up groggy and sore in the morning and they’ll be sulking about going down. We’ll get the blame for it. Well, goodnight to you, lad. And thank you for your help.”

  Phil went down the street. He looked back before reaching McNamara’s. The sheriff had turned back into the parlor. Beneath the porch light, his worn coat shone green, the rounded slump of his shoulders exaggerated in the play of shadow over them the instant before he passed out of sight.

  From where he stood, Phil could hear the hard, cold music of a pounded piano. The rhythm was there, and the skeleton of a tune, but it was not melody. He paused and peered above the half curtains into the smoky room. Several men were slouching around tables and the bar in their heavy shirts, their jackets hung in a row on the wall beyond the piano. At the piano itself, a tall, melancholy looking man was beating the keys, his head bobbing just off the jig-time rhythm. Above him, John L.
Sullivan was shivering naked in his picture frame. Nichols glanced up from his usual place at the bar, saw Phil, and waved him in. The reporter held up a glass of milk. “Mac bought the cow for me. He figured it’ll pay off in the long run.”

  The rumble of talk among the men had died down with his entrance, leaving the pianist cruelly alone with his playing. They knew he had been in the mine, Phil thought. McNamara looked uneasily from him to the men. He shoved a glass and a bottle before him without speaking.

  “I’d be better off with a cow myself,” Phil said, pouring the whiskey.

  “Or maybe a goat,” the man next to him said.

  Phil glanced in the mirror. The men were all looking at him.

  “Will you lay off the murdering of that unfortunate instrument, Frankie,” one of them called out.

  In the mirror, Phil saw Frankie quit his playing, the muscles of his back relaxing beneath the wool shirt. Presently he reached for a glass of beer on top of the piano.

  “And how’s the dear lady of the boarding house?” McNamara said to him then with a loud, false heartiness.

  “Holding her own,” Phil said.

  “It isn’t her own she’s holding,” somebody called. Phil recognized the voice and spotted Jerry Whelan then. He was sore at being banished from the widow’s.

  “Mind your knitting there, Jerry,” the barkeep said.

  “You’d defend her, Mac, and her housing a viper.”

  McNamara ignored the remark and looked at Phil. “You better go home, McGovern.”

  “I’ll finish my drink.”

  He watched Whelan say something to the man next to him and that one get up and go over to the pianist. Frankie nodded and set his glass down. He played a few chords, and the one who had prompted him started singing in a high, lilting voice…

  As I went a-walking one morning in spring,

  To hear the birds whistle, and nightingales sing,

  I heard a fair lady a-making great moan,