Come Back Dead

by Terence Faherty

  Linda Traynor got out of the driver’s seat of the coupé before the dust had settled behind it. She was wearing another crisp white blouse, this one with short cuffed sleeves. There was a wisp of orange scarf tied around her neck. It matched her uncuffed, Saturday-morning slacks. Her brother-in-law also looked as if he’d been caught on his way to the golf course–or maybe the polo field if he’d gotten around to building himself one. Gilbert shook my hand but didn’t meet my eye.

  “Sorry I haven’t been out to see you,” he said. “Hope you’ve had everything you’ve needed.”

  “And then some,” I said.

  “We tried calling, Scotty,” Linda said, “but your phone is out of order.”

  Gustin, who had been standing at attention, finally thought of something practical to do. “I’ll radio for a repairman.”

  “Already taken care of, Frank,” Linda said. “Why didn’t you call us, Scotty?”

  “Carson didn’t want to bother you,” I said, being careful not to say “frighten you off” by mistake.

  “He should have known we’d hear,” Gilbert said. “Everyone in Traynorville knew about it within an hour of your call to the sheriff.”

  “A fair number of people knew about it before that,” I said.

  Linda led the parade in to see Drury. She headed up the little conference that followed, too. This time, Gustin sat down, with his hat off. We all sat, the six of us, in a circle of chairs while Drury told his story again. Given a more appreciative audience, Drury put a little more into it. I was surprised to hear, for example, that I’d stared down the mob with flinty eyes. Gilbert and Linda both glanced at me on that line. I couldn’t call up flinty on short notice, so I just smiled modestly. Neither Traynor smiled back.

  “I’d like to apologize to you three on behalf of the town,” Gilbert said.

  “We owe them more than an apology, Gilbert. We owe them action.”

  Gilbert looked as stuck for an inspiration as Gustin had been. Then he said, “There is that Faris person.”

  “Who?” Drury asked.

  It was my dropped ball, so I picked it up. “Eric Faris, Ralph Lockard’s man from Alora. He’s here in Indiana. Mrs. Traynor stopped by last night to tell you that. I forgot about it in all the excitement.”

  “Think you could find Mr. Faris for us, Frank?” Gilbert asked. “Maybe bring him here for a visit?”

  “If he’s still in Traynorville, we’ll find him.” Gustin went out to his car to make the call.

  Linda didn’t stop him, but when he’d gone, she said, “No stranger from California could arrange a cross burning in Traynorville.”

  “It has always amazed me what money can arrange,” Drury said. It was a casual comment, but it killed the conversation. We all sat watching one another until Gustin came back in.

  “He’s likely to be staying in the hotel in town or the motel out on 32,” the sheriff said. “It won’t take long to check.”

  “You should be staying at the hotel, Mr. Drury, or at our home,” Linda said. “You shouldn’t spend another night out here.”

  “I can’t let myself be scared off by some thugs in bed linen, either,” Drury said. “I have my reputation to think of. Anyway, I’m safe enough here with Hank and Scotty and Clark.”

  “Clark made himself plenty scarce last night,” Shepard said. “I wonder if he knew what was going to happen.”

  “Something may have happened to him,” Gustin said. “I’d better go back and check.”

  I was curious about Clark’s absence, too, so I volunteered to go along for the walk. Linda made it a threesome. “I could use the exercise,” she said.

  This time Gustin led the way. It was an easy route to follow. Clark’s solitary comings and goings had worn a smooth path from the collection of outbuildings, along the edge of the fallow field, and into the woods.

  Gustin pulled away from us as we neared the field. Linda had lost the take-charge air she’d arrived with, or she’d set it aside. Even her purposeful walk had changed, becoming so hesitant that she actually stumbled once on the featureless path.

  I caught her arm. “If seeing Clark bothers you, maybe you should go back.”

  “It’s not that. I wanted a chance to talk with you about last night. Alone. Now I don’t know how to start.”

  “Drury didn’t leave anything out of his report except maybe the bit about how scared we were.”

  “That’s not the part of last night I mean, and you know it. Don’t make this harder on me than it has to be.”

  Gustin had stopped to examine the ground at the point where the field met the woods, and we caught up to him there, cutting our private conversation short.

  “Deer tracks,” Gustin said as we came up behind him. “I do a little hunting,” he explained to me. “I wonder if Clark does. This would be a great spot.”

  “Clark doesn’t like guns,” Linda said.

  Clark’s home was a hundred yards or so into the woods. The cabin, which stood up off the ground on fieldstone pilings, was built of hewn timbers notched together at the corners and chinked with cement. The wooden shingles of the roof were green in spots, and the door and the window frames were unpainted, their wood as gray with weathering as the timbers. The only decorative thing about the building was its chimney. In place of the flat, sharp-edged stones that held up the cabin, the chimney’s mason had used rounded stones from the bed of a creek or a river, probably the river that had given the farm its name. I couldn’t see any water or hear any, so I asked Gustin where it was kept.

  “The west fork of the White River is just through those trees behind the cabin. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Traynor?”

  “Yes. We’ll wait here while you knock, Sheriff.”

  Gustin hitched up his holster and stepped forward. The cabin door opened before he reached it. Clark came out as far as the top step. I’d seen him several times over the course of the week, and I’d almost gotten used to his face–or his lack of a face. But I was shocked all over again by the sight of him in the cabin doorway. It took me a second to realize that it was the first time I’d seen him without his ball cap. The cap had hidden a scar that ran across his forehead, a jagged dividing line between the pale, ordinary skin of his scalp and the red, raw remains of his face.

  Clark missed the cap, too. He raised one hand to cover the scar, pretending to shield his eyes from sunlight that was barely penetrating the canopy of trees. “What do you want?” he asked.

  The question hung there for a moment, allowing me to think, not for the first time, that the voice didn’t match the man. It was too soft, too genteel. It seemed especially out of place against the background of the rustic cabin.

  Then Gustin said, “We wanted to see if you were all right. There was some trouble at the farm last night.”

  “What trouble?”

  “May we come in?” Linda asked.

  “You’re welcome and you,” Clark said, looking from Linda to Gustin, “but not him.”

  “Mr. Elliott is a guest of our family,” Linda said.

  “He’s not my guest,” Clark said.

  Linda stepped closer to me. “If he’s not welcome here, I’m not staying, either.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  The insubordination so moved Gustin that I thought he might pull his gun. He collected himself with an effort. “If you two would like to start back,” he said, “I’ll be along directly.”

  Linda nodded and led me away. It was an opportunity to resume our interrupted talk, but she was too shaken to take advantage of it. She did take advantage of my arm, though. She slipped her own arm under mine after another misstep, and left it there.

  When we were clear of the woods, she said, “I apologize for Clark. He can be difficult. And unreliable. I meant what I said earlier. You three should come and stay with us at Traynor House.”

 
“Put Drury under the same roof as your mother-in-law? That wouldn’t make your life any easier.”

  A little of her hard edge came back. “What do you know about my life?”

  I knew what Gilbert had told me, that Marvella had seized on her son’s widow as a way of keeping the Traynor Company alive. But I didn’t mention that. Gilbert was in enough hot water with his boss. I said, “The warning you passed on last night about Marvella–about her having to be in control–that’s based on your own experience, isn’t it? It can’t make life very easy for you.”

  “It makes it impossible,” Linda said. She slid her arm out from under mine. “I forgot you were an investigator. Or is this a sample of your hand holding?”

  “I’m also a good listener. If you ever want to talk about it, give me a call.”

  She didn’t have a chance to turn the offer down. Gustin came up behind us then at a quick march. If he’d seen the local gentry walking arm in arm with the rabble, he kept it to himself.

  “Clark was drunk last night, ma’am. That’s all there was to that. He got back from Augie’s around midnight and fell asleep or plain passed out. Didn’t hear any of the commotion. I can check in town to verify the timing.”

  “Don’t bother,” Linda said. And then, less curtly, “Thank you, Sheriff.”

  She had reason to thank him again when we reached the house. Eric Faris was already there, in the custody of a beanpole deputy. The baby-faced land agent was even more fidgety than he’d been in Alora. Of course, he now had something worthwhile to fidget about. He straightened, smoothed, and scratched away, presenting quite a contrast to Gustin, the deerstalker, who could do stock-still as well as any tree stump.

  Their confrontation took place in the parlor with the rest of the cast looking on. It was a short confrontation, as it consisted of Gustin asking Faris where he’d been at two that morning and Faris stammering, “In bed.”

  Before Gustin could ask about witnesses, Linda Traynor stepped in. “That should do for the moment, Sheriff. Mr. Faris, we know why you’ve come to Traynorville: to make trouble for Mr. Drury. We asked you here this morning to tell you that while Mr. Drury is staying in Indiana, he is under the protection of the Traynor family. You’ll find that means something around here.”

  Faris had found that out already.

  “I’d also like you to pass a message along to your employer in California. Please tell him that the Traynor Company is prepared to offer Mr. Drury whatever financial backing he needs to finish his picture.”

  That was news to everyone in the room, including, it seemed to me, Gilbert. The way he looked at Linda reminded me of how Drury studied Shepard during their chess games when the publicist made an unexpected move.

  Linda was all moves now. Her energy was back, and she fairly glowed with it. “Sheriff, please arrange to have deputies posted here tonight. You can coordinate it with my brother-in-law. He’ll be staying here, too.”

  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.