“The spoilsports,” I said.
Drury was looking about the way I felt. His trademark hair was stringy and dull, and his chin was blue. There were matching circles around his big, soulful eyes. Gilbert, on the other hand, was as natty as ever. “Keep up appearances” was probably the Traynor motto. But he was spending a lot of time smoothing his perfectly trimmed moustache.
“Carson can’t go back to the farm,” he said. “The reporters have already come in from as far away as Chicago. So I’ve had the top floor of the Roberts Hotel cleared. We can protect Carson there–from the reporters.”
“Good idea,” I said. There was one possibility I hadn’t discussed with Gustin and Zimmerman. Shepard might have been killed by mistake or because he had stumbled on someone intent on murdering Drury. That meant my post was at Drury’s side, but I had no intention of staying there. So Gilbert’s plan to lock Drury away suited me fine.
“I’ve arranged to have Carson’s things brought over from the farm,” Gilbert added. “I’ll have yours fetched, too.”
“Don’t bother. If it’s all right with you, I’ll stay where I am.”
“You’re not resigning, are you?” Drury asked.
“Not yet. I am dropping the driving and chair pushing and light hauling. I’m going to do what I was hired to do and figure out what’s really going on. I can’t get that done if I’m holed up in the presidential suite.”
“But you’ll report to me,” Drury said.
“Right now I’m doing my reporting to Sheriff Gustin. It’s a condition of my parole. Besides, it’s my duty not to hold back evidence.”
That echo made Gilbert cringe all over again. “I’ll check on John,” he said and left us.
Drury got in the first lie. “I really didn’t mean to make trouble for you, Scotty. I’ve been in a daze since you woke me with the news about Hank. You don’t know what his death has done to me. It’s more than the shock of losing a friend. I feel as though I’ve lost a part of myself. I may have been looking around for someone to blame, I don’t know. I remembered how you’d struck Hank, and I resented you for it. But that was just a product of my confusion. I could never believe you’d kill him. As for dragging your wife into this, I can only apologize for that, deeply and sincerely.”
“I’d prefer to discuss it when you’re out of the wheelchair. In the meantime, you can make things up to me by staying put at the hotel.”
“Do you think I was the real target last night?” Drury asked with something like his old élan. The idea clearly appealed to him. Some people would take any spotlight, even one attached to a gun.
To deflate him I said, “Probably not. You were a sitting duck, before and after Shepard caught it. I think the real target was the Albertsons negative. Anyone who’d cased the farm and knew what editing equipment looks like could have counted on that negative showing up in the tack room sooner or later. That person could have been checking the barn every night–at least the nights the sheriff’s men weren’t there.”
Drury looked past me. “Where’s that ambulance?”
“Why did you give the deputies the night off? It was because you were meeting Faris last night, wasn’t it?”
“Of course. Do we have to speak of that now?”
“Yes. Once you’re boarded up inside the hotel, you may forget to give me the password. What were you after from Faris?”
“Money,” Drury said through bared teeth. “Money. Money. Money. All I’ve ever wanted to do with my life is create beauty. And I’ve spent most of my time begging money from men who wouldn’t know beauty if they woke up in bed with it.”
“Why would you need more of Ralph Lockard’s money? Linda Traynor’s promised you the moon.”
“A very apt image, I’m afraid. Haven’t you caught on yet to the dynamic of the Traynor family? You’ve spent as much time with them as any of us. More time than any of us with Linda. Poor Hank was jealous of that.”
“What dynamic are we talking about?”
Drury brought his elegant hands together, the tips of their tapering fingers touching. “The individual members of the Traynor family are in tension, in opposition, like the stones of an arch. The opposing forces are held in place by a keystone, but they’re pressing the stone, too, threatening to crush it. Linda Traynor is that keystone. She’s holding the family together, standing between Gilbert and his mother. She’s taken the place of her dead husband in the family as well as the business, but her situation is far from secure, which means that my financing is far from secure. If Linda should decide to give up the fight or if she throws the dynamic out of balance by siding with Gilbert and ends up ousted from her job, her promises to me won’t mean much.
“That was the background for my dinner with Eric Faris. I wanted to reopen negotiations with Lockard while I appeared to be in a position of strength. If he thinks he isn’t going to get Eden, he might be interested in a percentage of the profits from Albertsons in exchange for an infusion of cash.”
“Lockard’s not interested in any movie profits.”
“But he might have been interested in increasing the mortgage on Eden to an amount that no one–not even the Traynors–would consider paying off.”
Drury shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. None of my scheming matters now. Not with poor Hank gone.”
He gazed off into the middle distance while I wondered if he was being sincere for once or just improvising another scene. I hadn’t made up my mind before Gilbert opened the courthouse door to announce the arrival of the ambulance.
I hung around long enough to see Drury off. Then I snuck away myself in the station wagon Gilbert had generously left at my disposal. I drove to the O’Connor Funeral Home and morgue, thinking about how Shepard had once joked that O’Connor’s might end up burying the Albertsons negative. Now Shepard was somewhere in the old Victorian pile himself, being explored by the deliberate Dr. Cortese.
Paddy had told me to use his methods. One that came to mind was his talent for obtaining official police information before the police had it themselves. I decided to chat up Dr. Cortese.
The front door of O’Connor’s was locked, which seemed odd on a business day during business hours. I rang the bell until it couldn’t hold my attention any longer. Then I took a walk around.
The place had more doors than a fun house: French doors painted shut on the front porch, doors under a porte cochere where the gentry had once been handed into their broughams–now probably the place where caskets were handed into their hearses–padlocked doors for coal delivery, and three different back doors. Two of this trio served the kitchen, and one, at the bottom of a short flight of steps, led to the basement. That was the door I chose, because its lock was a model I’d teethed on at the Maguire School of Charm and the Dance.
Once inside I didn’t tiptoe. It wasn’t a place where I felt comfortable tiptoeing. I’d let myself into a dimly lit storage room stacked with caskets. From there I went down a corridor of white-painted brick, saying hello every few steps and ducking my head under caged light bulbs whose switch never came to hand.
There was a light at the end of the corridor, spilling out from a side room. I found Hank Shepard in the room, alone, beneath a sheet on a long metal table that had a conspicuous lip around its edge. At least I assumed it was Shepard. I never got around to looking under the sheet.
Someone else started calling hello, someone in the house above me. A door opened somewhere, and the lights in my corridor came on. I could see a stairway at the far end and the feet and legs of a man, the feet wearing socks and no more. When the rest of him appeared, it was wearing a white lab coat and glasses that reflected the light of the naked bulbs, hiding the eyes behind them. He stood stooped over, and the hair he wore parted down the middle was shot through with gray.
“Dr. Cortese?” I asked.
He didn’t make any jokes about how gla
d he was to see me instead of his patient wandering around. He was too filled with anger for jokes; his little, white fists vibrated with it.
“I’ll have you arrested. As God is my witness, I’ll have you locked up. I gave you fair warning to stay away and to keep your cameras out of my place.” He looked me over for a Brownie.
I held up my empty hands. “I’m not a reporter,” I said. “And I just came from the sheriff. He’s not arresting me today.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Elliott.” I was going to tell him that I was a friend of Shepard’s, and maybe even the Traynors’ for good measure. I didn’t have to.
“You’re one of the fellows from out at Riverbend,” the man said. He straightened up slightly as the anger drained out of him. “You’re the one who found our guest there.”
“That’s right. Are you Dr. Cortese?”
“No. The doc’s gone. I’m O’Connor. I own this place.”
I apologized for letting myself in. “I rang the bell, but no one answered.”
“I heard you ringing. I thought you were a reporter. They’ve worn out that bell today. Did you come to see your friend? I haven’t cleaned him up yet. He won’t clean up, much. Not after the examination the doc gave him.”
“What did Dr. Cortese find?”
“Nothing the rest of us didn’t already know. Your friend died of a single gunshot wound. A contact wound, the doc called it.”
“Time of death between sunset and sunrise?”
O’Connor smiled. He had a gold tooth that somehow inspired confidence. “Sounds like you know our coroner. Eleven to midnight is what he said.”
Just as Gustin had guessed. I’d wasted my time coming to O’Connor’s. The owner looked as if he’d waste the rest of my day if I let him. He was scratching at his chin and considering me.
“Heard you had trouble out at the farm the other night,” he finally said.
“Did you?”
“Heard there was an old-time cross burning out there.”
“Did you happen to hear who did the burning?”
“Names, you mean? Wouldn’t be anybody I know. There’s no Klan around Traynorville. There was once. But there hasn’t been for thirty years.”
“That’s what people keep telling me.”
O’Connor scratched some more. “I have something here you might be interested in.”
“My widow will make my funeral arrangements,” I said.
That got a chuckle out of him. “I’m not selling, I’m showing. Excuse me.”
He squeezed past me and headed toward the storage room where I’d come in. Before he got there, he took a left. Another overhead light came on. The light was still swinging on its cord when I reached the doorway. I could see trunks and packing cases in the moving light. O’Connor was in a far corner, pulling at a canvas tarp.
“Found this in the basement when I bought the place,” he said. He had the tarp off by then. It had covered two figures, each between three and four feet tall. They were dressed in the regalia of the Ku Klux Klan and mounted one behind the other on a four-wheeled cart.
“That’s a man in front and a woman in back, though it’s hard to tell with them robes. The women didn’t wear masks with their pointy hats is how you tell. Their robes were shorter, too. That’s one part of the Klan platform I could agree with.”
The male mannequin was dressed exactly as the speaker at the cross burning had been: a round emblem on each breast and a red cord around his waist.
“What is that thing?” I asked.
“It’s a parade float, a little one. Left over from one of the parades the Klan held back in the twenties. Like I said, I found it down here when I bought the place.”
“This house once belonged to the Palliser family, didn’t it?”
My local knowledge impressed O’Connor. “There’s a name you never hear anymore. Yep, the Pallisers built this house.”
“Were there any owners between the Pallisers and you?”
“Nope.” I could see his eyes now. They were congratulating me. “I bought it from old man Palliser’s estate.”
O’Connor threw the tarp back over the float, hitting the light and sending it swinging again.
“Why do you keep that thing?”
He chuckled again. “You should know why, after what you went through the other night. This float doesn’t belong to me. Not my property at all. If the rightful owners should show up looking for it, I sure don’t want to disappoint them.”
26
A sentry was on duty in front of the pylons that flanked the Traynor House drive. His navy blue uniform didn’t belong to a sheriff’s deputy or a state trooper, so I figured him for a private guard. He was leaning against a navy blue sedan, reading a newspaper. Reading about Hank Shepard, ten to one.
I slowed the wagon and tried to think of a story that would win me an audience with Marvella Traynor. I was too sleepy to work one out, but it didn’t matter. The guard hardly glanced at me before waving me through the pylons. As I passed his sedan, I spotted a logo on its front door: the Traynor Company’s winged T. My wagon had the same decoration, which had led to the guard’s mistake and, probably, to his eventual firing. Well, things were tough all over.
The mansion’s front door was answered by a familiar face: Greta, the rustling maid from the Traynors’ dinner party. Like Whitehead at the courthouse, Greta seemed to have forgotten me.
“I’m working my way through college selling magazine subscriptions,” I said to fill the rustling void. “Is the lady of the house in?”
“Mrs. Traynor is indisposed.”
“There’s one disease poor people were spared,” I said, but the sociology was wasted on Greta. “Please tell her that Scott Elliott is here. I have a question to ask her regarding her late uncle’s hobbies. Please add that I’m up to my knees in newspaper reporters.”
Greta checked my knees, nodded, and shut the door. She shot home the bolt for luck.
The bolt was withdrawn again before I’d finished a Lucky. Greta led me back to the oval dining room where Drury had laid an egg on our first night in Indiana. There were French doors on one end of the oval. Greta opened one for me and sent me out into the world on my own.
The doors led to a stone terrace. It was also oval shaped, but one end was squared off by the side of the house. The rounded end was edged with a low stone railing. Small statues were spaced out along the railing’s cap. I studied the statue behind Marvella Traynor as I walked toward her across the hot flags. It was a female dancer, dressed in a toga and frozen in an awkward pirouette. I glanced at the other statues to confirm that they were all dancers, each caught in a different pose. Beyond their static chorus line was a backdrop of hazy blue sky.
Marvella was reclining on a chaise lounge on the leftmost edge of the terrace. To the left of her chair were stairs that descended to a formal garden. Beyond and below the garden, the White River wound its way toward Traynorville. Marvella sat with her back to the scenery in the shade of a big striped umbrella that rose from the center of a glass-topped table. Tea for one had been set on the table near Marvella’s elbow. She didn’t have to worry about the tea getting cold on her today, I thought.
Her attire was as out of step with the heat as her choice of drink. She was wearing a long housecoat in a Chinese print of red and black with a high collar and a skirt that fanned out across the bottom of the lounge chair. Her head was supported by pillows, and she held a black handkerchief to one temple. From something–the handkerchief or the woman or the garden below us–came the scent of jasmine.
I was scented without jasmine, so I kept my distance. “I’m sorry to have come by when you’re not feeling well,” I said.
“How dare you be polite to me after you’ve blackmailed your way into my house,” Marvella said. “‘Come by,’ indeed. You’ve intrud
ed. You and Mr. Drury have done nothing but intrude–into my community, into my family, and into my privacy.”
If I accomplished nothing else, I’d brought her color back. “You forgot to list Mr. Shepard,” I said. “He’s the one who was found dead this morning.”
“You’re correct,” Marvella snapped. “I have forgotten Mr. Shepard. Very shortly I will have forgotten you. Now, what did you have to say regarding my uncle?”
The gloves had come off in a hurry, but I was ready to play it that way. “He was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Given his position in this county, he was probably the member.”
“It was not unusual for men of position to belong to that organization during the troubled times between the wars. They were men who recognized the threat to our country posed by the unwashed of Europe. You’re too young to remember those days.”
“I remember the nights. And the men in the robes.”
“It may interest you to know, then, that some of those men have achieved high office in this state. Those men will answer a telephone call from me.”
“Will they also answer a call to arms?”
I’d noted before that Marvella’s eyes were small, like Gilbert’s. They had an intensity, though, that Gilbert’s lacked. It was a fire no big doe eyes could ever handle.
“I beg your pardon?” she said.
“I’m asking if the men who burned the cross at Riverbend were supreme court justices and state senators.”
“You have the gall to accuse me of organizing that?”
“Do you have the gall to deny it?”
“Most emphatically.” The hand holding the black handkerchief came down on the arm of her chair with a sharp crack. “And I’d advise you not to repeat that accusation in front of reporters. The world may be falling apart, but in this corner of it, the Traynor name still means something.”
“Your daughter-in-law is fond of saying that.”
“My daughter-in-law,” Marvella sneered back, “will never be a Traynor in anything but name.”
“That’s true of you, too, isn’t it? You’re really a Palliser, after all. You’re part of the old regime. How did you wind up married to the man whose factory was attracting those unwashed Europeans to your little kingdom?”
Come Back Dead Page 17