She led me down the street to a place called the Old Post Tavern. “Nobody knows who I am in here. Do you think you can go an hour without saying the word Traynor?”
“I’ve gone years without saying it.”
Until we’d arrived in Middletown, I’d been hoping for some country club or at least a secluded restaurant with a bartender who knew his way around a Gibson. The Old Post was neither of those. The front door was propped open to let the heat circulate, and it was guarded by a sleeping yellow dog. Linda scratched its ear before stepping over it. I just stepped. Beyond the dog was a long bar, dimly lit but well manned. I took one look at the bartender’s straw hat and mentally changed my drink order to cold beer. Several of the customers greeted Linda, calling her “little lady” and “darling.”
Beyond the bar was a section of tables, most of them occupied. We found an empty one in a corner. Three of the table’s four legs were the same length.
Linda had brightened up enough to grin at me as we sat down. “Were you expecting the Stork Club?”
“No,” I lied.
“I like this place. I feel at home here. And they make a good tenderloin sandwich. Order it deluxe if you want tomato and lettuce.”
“I know what deluxe means. I’m a Hoosier, too, remember?”
“You’re a city boy,” Linda said. “Like Mark. You should have seen him down at Camp Atterbury learning to be a soldier. I’d never imagined a grown man could be so lost out of doors. And him going off to war. I think I fell in love with him because he was so lost and because he stood for a world I’d only seen in a movie or two, a world where men didn’t all farm and hunt and spit for no reason. Mark offered me a way out of the simple, little world I knew. I was thrilled to leave it behind. I’d be even more thrilled now if I could get it back.”
She fell into a brown study until the waitress came to take our order. Over lunch Linda asked me questions about the army, short questions that required long answers. I played along until we’d turned down the peach cobbler and the waitress had taken away our plates.
Then I said, “What did you want to talk to me about?”
“I need your advice. I should just go to Sheriff Gustin and get it over with, but I thought I’d ask you first. It’s about the murder.”
“What about it?”
“I’d arranged to meet Hank Shepard the night he died.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think? He was a man, and I hadn’t been with a man in one hell of a long time. Don’t get any more genteel on me, Scotty. I couldn’t stand it. Shepard came by Traynor House on Saturday afternoon to pick up Gilbert’s suitcase. I offered him a drink while he waited. Just a drink. I didn’t know his reputation then, but I found out what he was like soon enough. Before I knew what was happening, we were going at it pretty seriously.
“It wasn’t like the other night with you, Scotty. I wasn’t the aggressor, and Shepard wasn’t a gentleman. Or maybe I did lead him on without realizing it. Maybe I’m looking for another man to step in and change my life for me. That would be sad and pathetic, wouldn’t it?”
“What happened?”
“Nothing, really. Not when Marvella could have walked in at any moment. He asked me to come by the farm on Sunday night. He said you’d be away in Indianapolis, so I agreed.”
That explained a lot: Shepard’s chipper mood on Saturday afternoon, his crack about how sending me after Gilbert’s bag would have been a wasted opportunity, his eagerness for me to make the drive to Indy on Sunday.
But it didn’t explain everything. “Shepard couldn’t have known that Drury was going to send the sheriff’s men away. Weren’t you afraid they’d see you?”
Linda echoed the photo hound, Casey Atherley. “Anyone who wasn’t born in a city could find a quiet way on and off that farm. I wasn’t worried about them or about Drury, stuck in that wheelchair of his.”
She fell silent again. I said, “So?”
“So nothing. I didn’t go. I lost my nerve. And I couldn’t be disloyal to Mark.”
Glad as I was that she hadn’t gone, I couldn’t understand her reasoning. “You speak of your husband as though he’s still alive.”
“Living with Marvella, it’s easy for me to think of Mark that way. I have to make an effort sometimes to remember he’s dead. On the night I promised to see Shepard, I felt like one of those wives who played around while their husbands were overseas. God help any woman in Traynorville who did that. We had two or three, and we shunned them worse than any lepers, shunned them until they moved away. Somebody did even more than that.”
“Like what?”
“Do you remember Sheriff Gustin telling you yesterday about barn burnings during the war? They were connected to the cheating wives. I never knew who was behind the burnings–they happened just after word had come about Mark, and I was in shock–but the farms involved belonged to men who were known to be taking advantage of other men’s war service. The men had their barns taken away, and the women had everything taken away.
“Last Sunday night I felt like one of those poor souls myself. I still feel that way.”
“You didn’t go.”
“No. But Hank Shepard died. I can’t help feeling that he died because I’d promised to meet him, because I wanted to meet him so badly.”
It wasn’t an idea that required a rebuttal. I waited for it to fall apart on its own.
“I know,” Linda said. “It doesn’t make sense. It’s just my guilt getting to me. Maybe I’ll feel better after I talk to Frank Gustin. I’ve wanted to talk to him, but I’ve been afraid of its getting back to Gilbert and Marvella. When I heard yesterday that your wife had had her own run-in with Shepard, I thought I’d talk to you first. I thought you’d understand.”
That made sense in an oddball way. She couldn’t confess to Mark, so she’d picked another wounded husband as a stand-in. I didn’t mind. And I didn’t see what good Linda’s story would do Gustin. It explained why Shepard had remained alone at the farm, but not who had taken advantage of the opportunity.
“Why don’t you wait and see if telling me helps,” I said. “Maybe you’ve gotten it out of your system already.”
30
A message was waiting for me at the main gate of the Traynor plant when Linda and I got back from Middletown. She was wearing her suit jacket again, and her hair was pinned up tighter than Eric Faris’s nerves. The Traynor guard touched the brim of his hat to her before addressing me.
“The sheriff wants you down at the courthouse. Something important.”
Linda climbed out of the coupé. “Use this car for a change,” she said. “It’s more your style.”
The important something Gustin had to see me about turned out to be a visitor from Indianapolis, my father. My father the lawyer, to be precise. He was sitting in the sheriff’s waiting room, ramrod straight and dressed for a day in court, right down to his old briefcase and his favorite prop, a pair of gold pince-nez glasses that were currently parked in the breast pocket of his three-piece suit. I remembered the glasses from my time in the visitors gallery as a boy when he would adjust and readjust them on his nose while he marshaled his thoughts or wave them in front of a witness like a hypnotist’s watch.
“Tom,” he said when I stepped up to him, “you’ve had us worried.”
By “us” he had to be referring to himself and my grandmother. The only other person in the waiting area, Gustin’s maiden-aunt receptionist, was indifference itself.
I asked her to thank the sheriff for tracking me down and led my lawyer out into the slightly cooler hallway. “Did you think I’d been arrested?” I asked as the door closed behind us.
“I didn’t know what to think. First the sheriff called to check your whereabouts on Sunday. Then the Times made it sound as though you were a suspect in the murder investigation. It said your gun was being tested.
”
I held open my coat to display the forty-five. “It passed.”
At the sight of the gun, my father’s normally narrow eyes grew wide, as though I’d revealed a tattoo or other, less artistic needle marks. I felt an impulse to apologize to him for the way I’d turned out, for rejecting his plans for me as too small and then ending up smaller by far. The impulse passed.
“Let’s find a quiet place to talk,” I said. “There are benches out on the square.”
I’d covered up the gun again, but my father was still looking at it. He roused himself. “Is it too early for a drink?” he asked.
It was my turn to stretch my eyelids. “Not where I’ve been living,” I said.
I happened to know of a place nearby, Augie’s, the bar on the square where Clark drank his Friday nights away. I expected a twin of the Old Post Tavern, but Augie’s surprised me, pleasantly. It had pine paneling indirectly lit, an oval bar surrounded by booths, and almost no business on this Tuesday afternoon. The bartender–Augie himself–had even heard of Gibsons.
I watched him mix one while my father selected a booth. “I think I know a customer of yours,” I said for no particular reason.
“That so?” Augie said. He had long sideburns like the ones some of the men from my old battery had worn, the kids from Tennessee.
“His name is Clark. I’m told he’s a regular on Friday nights.”
“Maybe on Monday nights, too, from now on,” Augie said. “He was in here last night, drinking to get drunk like he always does. I thought we were in for trouble from the look he had. I don’t mean his expression. He don’t have but one expression. Don’t have enough face left for two. You have to tell his mood from his color. The darker he gets, the closer I keep my old keg tapper.” He reached under the bar and pulled out a short wooden club with holes drilled in its head, the holes crudely filled with lead. “He was plenty dark last night, but nothing happened.”
“Was he here last Friday night?”
“Yep. Stayed till closing, too, which he hasn’t done for years. When I locked up, he was out on the square, pissing on that old French gun. He likes to do that. Don’t know why.”
I thought I did, but I kept my guess to myself. I paid Augie and carried the drinks over to our booth. My father took the smallest possible sip of his rye and water and then opened the briefcase that shared his side of the booth. I thought he might produce some evidence he’d brought along to prove my innocence–my report cards or my honorable discharge–but the only things that came out of the case were his pipe and a pouch of tobacco.
“I’ve been trying to learn to smoke one of those,” I said.
“Really? How is it going?”
“I don’t seem to have the knack.”
“Like most bad habits, it doesn’t come naturally,” he said. “You’ll get the hang of it in time. You’re packing the bowl too tightly, more than likely. Half as much as it will hold is about right. Loosely arranged. Leaves room for the smoke.”
As he demonstrated, I asked, “How did you come up from the city?”
“By the Interurban,” he said, naming the system of glorified trolleys that connected Indianapolis with neighboring towns. “I can catch the five o’clock car home, as you don’t need my help.”
He was already slipping back into the person I’d visited on Sunday, the old man sitting by his radio. It was enough to make me wish I’d been arrested.
“I’m not making much progress,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind talking the case over with someone.”
“I’d be pleased to listen.”
During my visit to his apartment, I’d told him about the sabotage attempts in Hollywood and the Klan visit to the Traynor farm. So I launched into the murder without preamble, starting with the moment when I’d found the body and the twelve hours afterward during which I’d told my story over and over to different policemen. I described Faris’s alibi and Whitehead’s and my lack thereof. I explained Gustin’s interest in me by admitting that Shepard had gotten fresh with Ella at Drury’s party. My honesty had its limits, though. I didn’t say that Ella had known Shepard earlier. I also omitted, for practice, Linda Traynor’s unkept appointment with Shepard.
Through all that, my father smoked and said nothing. I slipped out of sequence, telling him first about the strange results of the ballistics test and Gustin’s guess that the murder bullet had been fired by a homemade gun and then about the Pallisers’ connection to the Klan. I’d saved that for last, thinking it would be the part that interested him the most. I was wrong. I noticed that his eyes weren’t focusing on me, and his pipe was smoking itself.
I stopped short of my big scene with Marvella Traynor and said, “What’s wrong?”
“That bullet. Something about that bullet.” He set his pipe down on the table, leaning it against his forgotten drink. “I was counsel to Indiana’s production board during the war.”
“I remember,” I said.
He pulled his glasses from the pocket of his jacket and began tapping the table with them. “I remember a project–a top secret project–a handgun for the OSS. The code name for the gun was the Flare Projector, but even back then people were calling it the Liberator. It even had a nickname, the Woolworth gun, because it was so inexpensive to make. The frame was stamped steel, and the barrel–this is what brought it to mind–the barrel was unrifled.”
“What did the OSS want with a gun like that?”
“They intended to drop them from planes behind enemy lines for use by resistance forces. They did drop them, over a million of them, in Europe and the Philippines. I would have forgotten all about that gun except that I ran across one after the war. Rather, a friend of mine did, a friend from the production board. He saw one in a gun shop in Indianapolis. Evidently some of our boys brought them back as souvenirs.”
“Gustin and Clark are veterans,” I said, thinking out loud. “Hank Shepard was himself. But then, half the men in Indiana are.”
“Let me finish, son, and maybe you won’t have to search from house to house for this gun. One job of the production board was assigning projects to various factories around the state. As you know, certain industries went over to war production completely, like the automobile industry. The bigger plants built tanks and planes, and the little ones picked up piecework and special projects like this gun.”
“The Traynor plant.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. If my memory isn’t failing me, the works right here in Traynorville made that gun. It was supposed to be a secret project, as I said, but a lot of the people around here must remember it. I’m surprised that sheriff of yours doesn’t.”
“He’s not my sheriff,” I said. “He belongs to the Traynors.”
31
Gilbert Traynor was seated in his office at the Traynor Automobile Company, looking smaller than life, as he almost always did. This time the culprit was his desk. Being Gilbert’s, it was naturally out of keeping with the rest of the company’s furnishings, which might have been listed under the heading “Overinflated Leather” in some supplier’s catalogue. The desk, on the other hand, was out of a world’s fair exhibit on the office of tomorrow: an elliptical slab of exotic wood, supported by three legs, one of them a sweeping, inverted fin.
As I waited for our meeting to begin, I had a second thought on the subject, deciding that Gilbert was being dwarfed by his tie. Not a bad trick, either, because the tie was an exceedingly narrow bit of striped silk. He’d loosened it, perhaps when he’d heard the five o’clock whistle blow, which made the tie look as if it had been knotted for a larger man.
“What’s the emergency, Elliott?” he asked mildly but warily.
There was no emergency, at least no new one. I’d implied that there was at the plant’s main gate when my initial call to Gilbert’s office hadn’t gotten me inside. I’d winded myself and the Studebaker racin
g to the Interurban stop with my father and then to the plant to catch Gilbert before he escaped into his mother’s fortress, Traynor House. When I’d been told by Gilbert’s secretary through Gilbert’s front-gate guard to make an appointment, I’d realized that the plant was Gilbert’s own fortress. So I’d tried to give the impression that the murderer was snapping at my heels, or vice versa.
The ruse had worked, but we’d both had time to think about it while I’d taken the elevator up to the bridal suite. Gilbert had gotten suspicious. I’d gotten angry.
“Why am I using the tradesman’s entrance with you?” I asked. “I thought we were on the same side.”
“I have a business relationship with the man you work for,” Gilbert said, no longer mild, but under control. “Not with you. When Mr. Drury finishes with your services, I won’t even have that distant connection. I’ll expect you to vacate the farm and return the company car.”
It was the morning after in a big way for Gilbert and me. He’d been friendly enough at the courthouse on the prior afternoon–penitent, even, over his role in bringing my fight with Shepard to Gustin’s attention. I asked myself what had happened since to change things.
“Your mother mentioned my stopping by for tea, I take it.”
“How dare you be flip about threatening my mother?” Gilbert demanded, sounding so much like Marvella that, angry as I was, I felt sorry for him. “How could you abuse our hospitality like that?”
“As I recall, your mother did most of the threatening. And since when is burning crosses on people’s lawns called hospitality?”
There didn’t seem to be much of anything in Gilbert, not even fight. He sank a little in his jet-pilot chair and started to pull at his moustache.
“Why didn’t you tell us your uncle had been bucking for grand dragon of the Klan?”
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