“Would you tell anyone that? What good would it have done to dig that up? My uncle has been dead for twenty years. He wasn’t under one of the hoods you saw. Neither was I.”
I had been considering the latter possibility, thinking back on Drury’s insight into the Klan, the idea that the frightening thing about it was its facelessness. Drury had also guessed that Gilbert was using us and Albertsons to rebel against his family–more specifically, against his mother. But when the chance had come for Gilbert to rebel in a big way, he’d ignored it.
“If you’d reminded Gustin about the Pallisers,” I said, “you might have given him the real motive for the cross burning. It wasn’t revenge against Drury for First Citizen. It was an attempt to scare him out of Indiana so that he couldn’t separate you from your money.”
Gilbert thought it over. “There’s no way we’ll ever know that for sure. Frank Gustin isn’t going to give my mother the third degree.”
“I know. He has a wife and kids to feed.”
“So do you,” Gilbert said, suddenly as sentimental as Paddy on Saint Patrick’s Day. “You should be thinking about getting back to see them. They’re missing you a lot more than anyone will ever miss Hank Shepard.”
Spoken in Gilbert’s wistful tone, the reference to my family and the possibility of never seeing them again didn’t come across as a threat or even a veiled threat. But it was surely a warning.
“Are you ready to tell me what goes on in Traynorville?” I asked.
“I told you before, I don’t know myself.” It was clear that not knowing no longer excited him. He told me why next. “Hank Shepard would still be alive if I had guessed what was going to happen. Right now I’d just like to go home. Carson is coming to dinner, and I should be there when he arrives. If you’d get to the point of this meeting, I’d appreciate it.”
“Tell me about the Liberator.”
“It was a bomber, I think,” he said, wary now in spades.
“I mean the pistol.”
“I know what you mean. Who told you about that?”
A man who was overdressed for the Interurban car he was riding, a man who had shaken my hand good-bye, but hadn’t told me he loved me or that he forgave me for deserting my dying mother. It was a good thing I had seen enough movies to read all that into the handshake.
“An old friend,” I said. “He told me the Liberator was a forty-five-caliber handgun made right here by the Traynor Company during the war. It fires a standard round through an unrifled barrel, which means it will blow a hole through a guy at close range and leave behind a bullet with no scoring.”
“No what?”
“No marks made by the rifling inside a normal barrel. Any bullet fired through a normal gun has them. That’s why I’m a free man. My gun scores a bullet. The gun that killed Shepard doesn’t.”
I hadn’t expected that to be news to Gilbert, but it was. Somehow he hadn’t gotten today’s briefing from Gustin. He wouldn’t have gotten one if he was busy pretending that none of this was happening. He’d be hiding in his office, reluctant to see even me. He’d be back to defending the family he’d previously wanted no part of. I’d misjudged the entire interview, I realized, right down to handing him the one piece of information I should have held back.
I watched him figuring and refiguring over the course of a long minute. Then, without taking his close-set eyes from the point in space where they were focused, he reached out with his right hand and pulled open a drawer concealed behind the shark’s fin leg of his desk. He rummaged in the drawer, still gazing into space. Then his hand came out holding a gun.
It came out so slowly that I had plenty of time to get my own gun out and ready to fire. That drew Gilbert back to earth. “This isn’t loaded,” he said.
“Mine is,” I said. “Put yours down on the desktop and push it across to me.”
He looked as though he’d rather throw it at me, but he did as I said. “I used that as a paperweight for years. We have one in the company trophy case, but there were extras, so I appropriated one. It reminded me that the company had done some important work during the war.”
I put my Colt away and examined the Liberator. It was small and light, so light that I might have mistaken it for a toy gun if I’d just happened across it. As my father had said, the frame was formed by two pieces of stamped metal, joined along the gun’s vertical axis and spot-welded together. These halves were clamped around the short barrel. The barrel received some additional support from the trigger guard, a broad, flat band of steel that curved up from the metal grip to encircle the tube at a point very close to its smooth bore. At the opposite end, the barrel had been reinforced by an extra sleeve of pipe crudely welded into place. The whole assembly was painted olive drab.
“How do you load it?”
“I don’t know. I was still in school when that was made.”
I’d figured it out by then. The hammer was made of pot metal and shaped like the plug at the end of an electric cord. The hammer pivoted out of the way, and the rear sight slid upward to expose the breech. Nothing was in the chamber now, not even the faintest whiff of spent powder.
“I told you it hasn’t been fired,” Gilbert said.
The best proof of that was the fact that the gun was still in one piece. It was hard to imagine a Liberator having a long service life. I found a sliding panel on the bottom of the grip. It opened to reveal a compartment as empty as the chamber but bigger.
“What went in here? Spare rounds?”
“Nylon stockings, probably,” Gilbert said, “for bartering with the natives. I promise you, that gun hasn’t been out of this plant.”
“Let’s check the one in your trophy case,” I said.
“Fine. It’s on the way to my car.”
I pocketed the Liberator. Gilbert thought about that, but didn’t say anything. He climbed into the padded shoulders of a sports coat and led me to the elevator. We rode down without chatting.
I hadn’t noticed a trophy case on my way into the office building. It wasn’t a problem with my eyesight, either. Gilbert double-timed us out of the modern office block and across a brick plaza to an older, lower structure identified simply as “Building 1.” Inside were half a dozen Traynor automobiles, including a midnight blue Phaeton Six. Gilbert ran his hand over its gleaming fender without breaking stride.
At the center of the car collection sat the trophy case. It contained the whole history of the company: silver loving cups and jugs from races that early Traynor cars had won, framed newspaper articles and ads for later models, and chrome-plated examples of the pistons and rods and other odds and ends the company had fallen into making when it had stopped building cars.
In a place of honor at the center of the case was something I hadn’t expected to see: a tiny, silken banner with a gold star embroidered on it.
“Mark’s, of course,” Gilbert said, following my gaze. “From the front window of Traynor House. The ladies of the plant made it for my mother after he was killed.”
I remembered the little banners from the war years. Almost all the houses had had one, or so it had seemed. A star for every son or daughter in the service. A gold star for every son or daughter who wasn’t coming back.
“Your mother gave that up?”
“There’s your damn gun,” Gilbert said in reply.
The Liberator was affixed to a wooden plaque. The brass plate beneath the pistol read: oss liberator, 1,000,214 produced, 1943.
“Do you want to dust the plaque for fingerprints?” Gilbert asked.
I had him open the case so I could see how securely the pistol was fastened to the board. I decided it would come apart before it would come off.
“Satisfied?”
“I will be when you tell me about the other examples.”
“What other examples?”
“You said back i
n your office that you took one of the Liberators because there was one in the trophy case and extras. How many extras? Just answer me. Don’t work out the chances of lying to me first, or I’m going to the cops–the real cops, not Gustin.”
“There were two extras, mine and another.”
“Where’s number two? Traynor House?”
“You don’t want to know where.”
“Why not?”
He rammed the glass door of the case closed, rattling the whole display. “Because it makes you a suspect again.”
“It was at the farmhouse? I never saw it.”
“You’ll have to convince the police of that, not me.”
It was an easy bluff to call. “The police are going to be busy asking why you never mentioned this gun.”
“I never even thought of it. The world is full of guns. I didn’t know about any marks on any bullets. I didn’t even know the Liberator wouldn’t make them. I had no reason to connect that relic with the murder.”
He’d let his voice get out of control. He heard it bouncing around the museum and shrank a little more. “If the reporters get hold of this, they’ll storm the house. You have to help me keep this quiet, Scotty.”
Hank Shepard’s murder was doing wonders for broken relationships. First Drury and Whitehead had mended their fences. Then my father and I had. Now Gilbert was holding an olive branch out to his business associate’s hired man. Waving it in my face, in fact.
“What are we going to do, Scotty?”
“Go home and enjoy your dinner,” I said. “I’m going to take your farmhouse apart.”
32
The Traynor farmhouse had already been taken apart, figuratively speaking, by Gustin’s troops the day after the murder. I didn’t think they’d have missed a clue as obvious as a gun, not even a gun that looked like a toy. Then again, after they’d found my automatic, which hadn’t been hidden at all, they might have lost interest. So I decided a search was worth my time. I had a second, better reason for putting in the effort: I couldn’t think of another move.
I stopped at the end of Riverbend’s drive when the deputy on duty waved me down.
“Sheriff’s looking for you, son,” he said. He was the oldest deputy I’d seen so far. Gustin was having to call in the reserves to man his investigation and keep the Traynors happy.
“If you heard that before three o’clock,” I said, “it’s old news.”
“Just checking,” the deputy said.
“Any visitors?”
“Just that Clark guy. Saw him on the farmhouse porch. I didn’t drive down to ask him his business. I figure his business is no business of mine.”
I hadn’t the deputy’s sensitivity regarding other people’s privacy. It would have held me back professionally. Unfortunately, Clark was no longer on the farmhouse porch when I climbed out of the black coupé. He wasn’t in the house, either. But someone had been. There were subtle signs.
The visitor had anticipated my plan to take the farmhouse parlor apart, but he had done it literally. The old settee and the spindly chairs were on their sides, and the hooked rug was in a heap in the corner where someone had thrown it. The secretary had been opened and its drawers turned out. Every shelf of the glass-fronted bookcase had been emptied. Its collections–the arrowheads and butterflies and horseshoes–were scattered around the room. The old hornet’s nest had been ripped in half lengthwise.
The object of the search hadn’t been Casey Atherley’s film. I found the plate among the broken butterflies and pocketed it. I didn’t find the Liberator. I checked the halves of the hornet’s nest for a cavity big enough to have held a gun. There wasn’t one, but I did note that the hands that had dug their fingers into the nest were bigger than mine. Clue number one. Clue number two was the pump organ. It now sat at a forty-five-degree angle to its wall. I tried pushing it back into place and found that it was a job to shift it at all. My two clues pointed in the same direction as the tip I’d gotten from the old deputy: to Clark.
I checked the rest of the farmhouse. None of the other rooms had been disturbed. Nor had the tack room of the barn, with one notable exception: The rails for the wheelchair ramp that Clark had never gotten around to finishing had been kicked to splinters. It was enough to make a guy circumspect if he were inclined that way.
I left my suit jacket and hat hanging on the back door of the house. It was too hot to wear them hiking. And without the jacket, only a blind man could miss the big gun I was wearing. For safe-keeping, I took Gilbert’s Liberator along, tucked in my belt at the small of my back.
I followed the packed-dirt path back to Clark’s woods, watching a red-tailed hawk circling overhead, and whistling as I went. The tune had popped up out of nowhere, but its name hadn’t tagged along. Then it came to me. It was the title song from Rhythm on the River, the epic that had made such an impression on John Piers Whitehead. I switched over to “Everything but You.”
I stopped whistling altogether when I reached the last of the cleared land. Clark’s woods had been nothing more than a stretch of nondescript hardwood on my previous visit when I’d had Linda Traynor and Gustin along for company. Now I noticed every tree, reciting their names–sycamore, shagbark hickory, green ash, maple–as I scanned them. The pride of the collection was a pair of old oaks that straddled the path, their crowns forming a single canopy of green so dark it looked black in places. As I passed between the oaks, I heard the sounds of wood being split. The alternating splintering and thudding relaxed me. It placed Clark up ahead, not behind the next tree or the last one I’d passed.
He was still at it when I reached the clearing that held his cabin, working one-handed with an ax that looked like a Boy Scout hatchet in his good hand, his right. He was working bare-chested, which let me confirm what I already knew: He was built like Max Baer in his prime. The exception was his left arm, which, while far from withered away, was less substantial than the rest of him. Gilbert had told me that Clark had an arm he couldn’t lift above his shoulder. Even from across the clearing I could see the outward mark of the damage: a deep triangular scar on the back of his left shoulder, bloodred with his exertions.
His face, when he finally noticed me at the edge of his clearing and swung around, was also dark red, a bad sign according to Augie. But he was no authority. He’d been wrong, for example, when he’d said that Clark had only one expression. With his eyes squeezed down to slits, Clark conveyed hatred very well.
“How’d you know?” Clark asked. He spoke conversationally, but his words carried easily across the hot stillness.
“How did I know what?” I replied as innocently as I could. I thought he was asking how I’d tied him to the destruction of the farmhouse. I wanted him to mention it first.
“How’d you know that this wood splitting isn’t getting the job done for me?”
He wasn’t wearing his red cap, so I got the full benefit of his disfigurement: the normal scalp and bit of forehead and the red rawness below, still looking after all these years like the skin had just been ripped away by the blast of a shell. The only thing that damped down the effect at all was the distance I’d left between us–a safe thirty yards.
“What job would that be?” I asked, genuinely lost now.
“The job of wringing out my bad temper. I thought if I split a cord or two it would go away, but it hasn’t. There’s no resistance to this stuff. The ax goes through it like it wasn’t there. I don’t want splitting. I want smashing.”
I’d been Paddy’s straight man too long. I couldn’t keep myself from asking, “Where do I come in?”
“I figured you were volunteering to go a few rounds with me. Shepard told me you’d boxed a little in the service.”
“Shepard talked too much.”
“Yeah, he did. My face brings that out in some people. Either they can’t think of a word, or they can’t shut up. So w
hat do you say?”
“Nothing. I’m the kind who can’t think of a word.”
Clark brought the ax down on the stump he was using as a chopping block, burying the head without putting much effort into it. He started across the clearing to me.
“It’s a funny thing,” I said. “I go months in Los Angeles without drawing my gun. In Traynorville I have to do it twice in one day.”
“If you pull that gun out,” Clark said, “I’ll make you use it.”
“That’ll teach me a lesson.” I said it in my best offhand, tough-guy delivery. Torrance Beaumont couldn’t have done it better. It was a tone of voice that meant business in any corner of the country, but it didn’t impress Clark. He kept limping toward me, slow but steady.
When I was down to my last fifteen yards, I said, “What were you looking for up at the house?”
“You can guess what it was,” Clark said, “since you’re guessing I was up there looking.”
“Okay.” I reached behind my back for Gilbert’s paperweight. “I’m guessing it was this.”
Clark stopped in his tracks at the sight of the Liberator, and I breathed again. “How did you find that?”
“I backtracked from Hank Shepard’s body.”
“I didn’t kill Shepard.”
“Everybody tells me that. It’s amazing he’s actually dead.”
Clark took another step. I raised the empty gun. He laughed at it. “You’re holding a smooth barrel three inches long. You couldn’t hit me from there once in twenty tries. And you’ve only got one try.”
“So I’ll wait.”
He stopped again. A fox squirrel climbed down on a hickory branch to my right and began to scold me. It knew better than to scold Clark. The caretaker was staring at the gun in my hand. As I watched, he licked at his ragged excuse for lips.
“I’ve heard you don’t like guns,” I said. “How is it you know so much about this one?”
“I’ve spent a lot of time studying it,” Clark said. “I have a lot of time, and it was around. In the farmhouse.”
Come Back Dead Page 21