Come Back Dead

by Terence Faherty

“In the bookcase?”

  “In the secretary. Wrapped in an oiled rag. It’s been there since I hired on.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “It’s called the Liberator and sometimes the Woolworth gun. It was dropped behind enemy lines with a round in the chamber and ten spares in the grip. The grip also held a little instruction sheet with pictures instead of words. It showed that the only way to kill a person with the gun was to clamp it to the side of the target’s head.”

  “Or poke him in the chest,” I said. “It doesn’t say Woolworth on it anywhere–or Liberator, for that matter. Where’d you pick up all those details?”

  “Around town. The locals made the damn thing. I’ve heard talk. At Augie’s, mostly.”

  “Last Monday night?”

  “No, years ago. Nobody’s mentioned that gun recently. Nobody’s connected it with the murder.”

  They would, I thought, once word got out about the ballistics test. After that, the Traynors would be prisoners in their own little kingdom.

  Then I remembered what had brought me to the cabin. “You tore the house apart looking for this thing. You knew it was the murder gun. How did you make the connection if you didn’t do the shooting?”

  “I admit I looked for the gun, but it wasn’t because of the murder.”

  “Why then?”

  “I missed it. Woolworth gun isn’t the only nickname that pistol had. It was called the suicide gun, too, because using one was practically a suicide mission. To kill a Nazi soldier or a Japanese sentry, a resistance fighter had to get close enough to shake his hand. Not the kind of job you’d expect to walk away from.”

  That was as much as he’d tell me, but it was enough. “You miss having the gun around because it gave you an out.”

  “That’s right. It was for my personal liberation, for when I couldn’t stomach another moment of my life.”

  The confession should have been the cue for yet another reconciliation. I was willing, but not Clark.

  “Give me that gun,” he said. “You can unload it first if it makes you nervous. I won’t beat the teeth out of your head if you do it right now.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “This isn’t your gun. I picked this one up at the Traynor plant an hour ago.”

  Clark’s color had faded during our heart-to-heart. Now he darkened dangerously. “Where’s mine?”

  “Only the murderer knows that. You can help me find him.”

  “How?”

  “Tell me about the night of the cross burning.”

  “It was a Friday. I was at Augie’s as usual. I got drunk. I came home. I passed out.”

  “You stayed at Augie’s until closing. You haven’t been doing that lately. You wanted to stay away from the farm as long as you could and come back as drunk as you could. You knew something was going to happen.”

  “What if I did?”

  “Tell me who tipped you off.”

  “You don’t want to fool with those guys, Hollywood. I’m Santa Claus compared to them.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  Clark shrugged with his good shoulder. “You’ve got it coming.”

  33

  Business had picked up at Augie’s. A half-dozen men were spaced out around the bar, and two of the booths held couples. From a back room came the clack of pool balls. It was the last of the after-work crowd, I decided, lingering over their aperitifs.

  I sat down at the bar and listened to the Gale Storm record playing on the jukebox until the man behind the bar noticed me. He was my friend with the Civil War sideburns, Augie himself. He broke off a conversation on the evils of fluoridated water and strolled over.

  “Didn’t expect to see you back in here,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “You didn’t finish your drink this afternoon. From what I could tell, your friend didn’t even start his.”

  “We had to see a man about a train.”

  “Make you another?”

  “No, thanks.” I didn’t have a prayer of blending into the crowd holding a cocktail glass. “Draw me a beer.”

  When he brought it back, I said, “You can do me a favor.”

  “Is that right?” Augie asked. The question was a Hoosier standard, a way of keeping a conversation going without committing oneself.

  “I’m looking for a man named Nast. He’s a foreman at the Traynor plant.”

  “I know Nast.”

  “I’m told he’s in here most evenings. Is he here tonight? I’d like to talk with him.”

  “You said you wanted a favor. A favor would be warning you when Nast is coming so you could go the other way. He’s nobody you’d want to know.”

  “Is that right?” I asked, to practice my blending in.

  Augie didn’t think much of my technique. “That’s damn right,” he said. “He’s been a pain in this town’s butt since his dishonorable discharge from the Marines. Took a sailor’s eye out in a bar fight. After that he turned mean.”

  “How’s he stayed clear of the law?”

  “Friends in high places.”

  The county had only one place that high. “He doesn’t sound like the Traynors’ type.”

  “Let’s say they like him better than they like the United Auto Workers. Nast hired on at the Traynor plant during some big strike after the war. Started as a scab and worked his way down. There’s always some dirty job needs doing in a factory that big. Nast is what you might call the foreman of the dirty job detail.”

  “A dirty job is just what I wanted to see Mr. Nast about.”

  “You still want to see him?” Augie asked, speaking a little louder, as though he suspected that my hearing was bad.

  “More than ever,” I said.

  “Try the poolroom then. Wait a minute.” He took away my glass of beer and handed me a bottle of the same brand. “Nast used a broken bottle on that sailor. You might want to have your own along to even things up.”

  I overtipped him and followed the sound of men laughing. It led me to a back room that duplicated the proportions of the pool table it held exactly. There was just enough room around the table–an old one with ivory inlays and woven leather pockets–for the players and their cues. Four men stood around the table, three in a group to my left and one across the table from my doorway. The loner was the only one holding a stick. He was using it to tell a story.

  “Skeets was drunk,” the man said. “That’s all there was to it. He’d done everything to prove it except hit the floor with his chin. He should have gone home, but he wanted to play pool in the fanciest hall in Noblesville. You know the place–never a stray piece of lint on one of their tables. No sir. And each table lit by a big old fixture with a glass shade that some beer company gave ’em.”

  The three-man audience made various noises to show that they knew the fancy Noblesville pool hall. I didn’t, but no one had taken any notice of me yet. Certainly not the speaker, a thin hatchet-face with a squint that was distributed unevenly between his dark eyes. I identified him from Clark’s description as the man I’d come to see. Clark’s information was verified by the storyteller himself. That is to say, I recognized Nast’s reedy voice. He was the leader of the cross burners, the man who had pronounced Carson Drury’s doom.

  “The trouble started when old Skeets tried to make a shot behind his back,” Nast said. He acted it out, bending forward and placing his left hand on the felt of the table to form a bridge for the cue. His right hand was behind his back, but the cue it held was aimed at the ceiling. “He was too drunk to know where his stick was pointing, which was up. So he’s poking away with it and looking down at his left hand, sort of amazed, you know, that there’s no cue down there when he knows he came in with one.

  “Meanwhile, the cue is banging the glass shade above the table.” He demonstrated on the green shade that hu
ng over Augie’s table. From the look of the battered paper cone, it had heard the story before. “Whack, whack, whack. Skeets keeps banging that shade, all the time looking down at the table with a ‘What the hell?’ on his face.

  “Across the room, the pantywaist they’ve got running the place starts yelling.” Nast made the half-step climb to a falsetto. “‘Take it away. Take that stick away from him. Take it away.’”

  I was expecting a bigger finish, but that was all I got. The other listeners, who probably knew the story better than Nast, signaled the curtain by laughing wildly. Nast was pleased, until he finally got around to acknowledging me.

  “Don’t strike you as funny?” he asked.

  “Guess you had to be there,” I said.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  I drank some beer. “Don’t you recognize me?”

  “No.”

  “I must look different by torch light.”

  That got a snicker out of the other three. Nast quashed it with a glance. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “If you have a minute, I’ll explain it.” I backed out of the doorway and sat down in the first booth I came to. Nast joined me after a moment, carrying his own beer bottle, an empty one.

  “Buy you another?” I asked. “Or do you just keep that around for self-defense?”

  Nast smiled. He had a complexion as ingrained with dirt as a mechanic’s fingertips and hair as black as Drury’s, thick and heavy with tonic–Wildroot, by the smell. “Somebody’s been talking about me.”

  “That’s definitely the problem,” I said.

  He raised his empty without looking away from me. Augie brought him another. I noticed that the bar owner was carrying his weighted club in his hip pocket.

  When I reached for my wallet, Nast shook his head. “I run a tab. Whether I pay it or not is Augie’s lookout. You said something about a problem.”

  “Word’s getting around about the cross burning at Riverbend. When it gets to the right ear, you’ll be in trouble. For starters, you’re going to lose your job.”

  “You’re pissing in the wind, trying to scare me,” Nast said. “I’m not going to lose an hour’s pay.”

  “Don’t count too much on the Traynors backing you. I don’t think you have the right one in your corner. And none of them is going to want any part of a murder charge.”

  “Murder?” Nast asked, mixing curiosity with offended dignity.

  “You ought to get somebody to read you a newspaper now and then. We had a guy killed at Riverbend the other night. It was two nights after you told us to leave town or else.”

  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about you murdering a guy or being set up by someone to take the blame for the murder. My guess is somebody’s setting you up, you and your merry men.”

  “Guess and be damned,” Nast said. “You can’t prove anything.”

  “That’s where your men come in. There are too many of them. When they figure out that they’re accessories in a murder, one of them will come forward to tell what he knows. After that, they’ll be lining up to sing. This is an electric chair state.”

  Nast took a drink, jerking the bottle up and down again so quickly that the beer foamed over and ran down his hand. He dried it on his shirt. “What’s your price?”

  “I want the guy who shot Hank Shepard. If it wasn’t you, you’d better start talking. For starters, you can tell me who set up the cross burning and why.”

  “I can’t afford to be seen jawing with you,” Nast said, glancing nervously around the bar.

  I glanced, too, collecting a few hard looks for my trouble. Even the jukebox had turned against me. Hank Williams was crooning “Your Cheating Heart,” a song that brought Ella and Linda Traynor to mind simultaneously.

  I blocked out both of them. “It’s me or the police,” I said. “Me and the police if I don’t like your answers.”

  “I’ll talk to you,” Nast whispered, “but not here. Meet me in the rail yard west of town in half an hour.”

  “The rail yard next to the Traynor works? Doesn’t sound like a neutral site.”

  “You go there first and check it out if you don’t trust me. It’s a big open space with an old switching tower. I’ll meet you by the tower.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “I’ll yell something at you now, and you get up and leave, okay? I’ll say, ‘Go to hell,’ and you leave and I’ll follow.”

  “Half an hour.”

  34

  Nast was a convincing actor, at least when he was playing a heavy. He cursed me out of the place, to the visible gratification of the other customers. My friend Augie shook his head like a man who had backed the wrong horse.

  I was tempted to cross the square to Gustin’s office and arrange for some company, but I didn’t want to be the last one to arrive at the rail yard. And I didn’t want the trail to end at Nast. The loyal sheriff might be content to hang everything on him and call it an evening. I wanted more than a fall guy.

  I’d driven past the yard on my way to the Traynor plant, but I hadn’t taken much notice of it. There wasn’t that much to notice, as it turned out, just a big open space next to the rail line with parallel sets of track connected by switches. Nast had picked a place where he’d have an easy time spotting a trap. I hoped I would, too. I could see only two potential trouble spots: the two-story switching tower at the center of the yard, where Nast and I were to meet, and a string of three boxcars parked back in one corner.

  The sun had set while I’d interviewed Nast. It was going on full dark as I scouted the yard. I’d hidden the useless Liberator under the front seat of the coupé and moved my Colt to the pocket of my jacket, where I could keep my hand around it. I made the trek over to the parked boxcars, slipping and sliding on the clinkers that paved the place as I walked. The boxcars were closed up tight and sealed. I checked the switching tower next. It was a wooden structure, its siding protected by soot and little else. The tower was dark, and its single door was locked. Across the street, the factory was lit up like a ball diamond awaiting a night game. I could see the guard’s shack at the main gate a hundred yards down the road. I could even see the guard himself. He’d hear a shot from there, asleep or no. And I’d hear anyone sneaking up behind me. The clinkers made a sound like glass being ground with every footstep.

  I decided that I had nothing to fear except a rifleman lurking in the weeds at the edge of the yard. And an operative who worried about an invisible rifleman was no use to anyone. All the same, I kept close to the tower as I waited and shielded the burning end of my Lucky.

  Nast showed up twenty minutes later. He parked his truck on the shoulder of the road, next to the rail line. I could just make him out as he crossed to the tower, scanning left and right as he came on. I did some scanning myself, watching the rest of the yard for any sign that Nast hadn’t come alone. I didn’t see so much as a cat.

  When Nast neared the tower, he called out, “Hey! You there?”

  I waited until he turned away from me before I stepped out, my gun drawn. “Don’t move,” I said.

  I patted him down and then stepped back toward the tower. “All right. Let’s talk about the Klan.”

  “There ain’t no Klan around here,” Nast said. “I’d be the first one to sign up if there was. Those robes we had on the other night were hand-me-downs. They had so much moth ball in them I’m surprised you didn’t smell it from the house.”

  “Where did you get them?”

  “A lady’s attic. What do you say we talk on the other side of the tower, away from the road.”

  “I like it here. What lady are we talking about?”

  “You know the one–the lady who wants to keep her son away from you flimflammers.”

  A train sounded its whistl
e at a crossing not far away. “Marvella Traynor?”

  “Mrs. Traynor to you,” Nast said, showing his canines.

  “What did Mrs. Traynor tell you to do?”

  “‘Put the fear of God in them’ was what she said. She had it all laid out. She even wrote down my speech for me herself on a little card.”

  “Happen to have it on you?”

  “Don’t you wish. I used it to light the cross.”

  The train whistle sounded again, much nearer. “That’ll be the through freight on its way to Indianapolis,” Nast said. “You’ll begin to feel the ground shake directly.”

  I already could. “Why didn’t you come back to the farm Saturday night and finish the job?”

  “That was never part of the deal. It was one night only–scare you and get out. Fifty dollars a man and liquor. If it had been up to me, I would have burned you out on Friday night instead of standing there getting preached to by that Drury. I wanted to ram his big speech back down his throat so bad it hurt.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Mrs. Traynor doesn’t like violence.” He was having to work at projecting the words, the sound of the approaching train having grown steadily. I could see its headlight flickering on the farthest pair of rails. “She thinks you can scare a person into damn near anything. Scare ’em or wear ’em down. She’s wrong. It doesn’t work on everybody.”

  He kept on talking, but I couldn’t hear him anymore. I couldn’t hear anything but the freight train. The sound seemed to be everywhere in the yard, rising up through the ground beneath me, bouncing off the tower behind me. Cutting me off, I suddenly realized, flanking me.

  I swung around in time to catch the first blow on my forehead. It wasn’t hard enough to knock me out, but it made me a spectator for what happened next. My arms were grabbed, and I was hauled to my feet. Then I was dragged across the yard by two men. I measured our progress by the iron rails that struck out at my feet and ankles. I tried shouting, but the passing train was so loud I couldn’t hear myself.

  When we reached the parked boxcars, my escort steered me between two of them and dropped me onto the tracks. I was shoved and kicked beneath the locked couplers while I breathed in a dust that was half coal and half rust with old oil thrown in for body. Then I was seized by men waiting on the other side. They pulled me through, yanked me up onto my feet again, and banged me against the side of the car.