“No. I never asked him about it. That wasn’t why I’d been sent. I was just scouting. I told him that I represented an investor who was anxious about the future of Drury’s movie. Whitehead let me know how desperate he was to be involved in it again. He mentioned that he’d begged an old friend for a job here in Indianapolis so he could be close to Drury. The friend was a college professor.”
“Walter Carlisle.”
“Yeah. But Whitehead didn’t have the money to make the trip. When I told all that to Lockard, he sent me back with a plane ticket and cash. He considered it a cheap insurance policy.”
“He hoped that Whitehead would pick up out here where he’d left off in Hollywood.”
Faris nodded. “I never thought there’d be violence–not after meeting Whitehead. But there was. Now you know why I have to get away. Ralph Lockard and I could be named as accessories in Shepard’s murder. Lockard is safe in California, hiding behind his lawyers, but I’m here with my neck stuck out.”
“You’re only an accessory if Whitehead is the murderer. And he has an alibi. He was in Indianapolis with Carlisle on the night of the shooting.”
Faris waved my cigarette smoke away from his face and mumbled, “His friend could have lied for him.”
He tried to make it sound like no more than another guess in the guessing game we were playing together, but he was too tired to carry it off. I was suddenly wide awake.
“You know Carlisle lied for Whitehead,” I said.
“I don’t know anything.”
“Your brand of scared doesn’t come from could haves or maybes. You’re sure Whitehead’s alibi is no good. That’s why you tried to get on a plane tonight.”
He addressed his friend the door again. “Hey!”
“They’ll come when I call them, Faris. First I’m going to tell you the latest news from Traynorville. Whitehead did a little skipping out of his own tonight. He’s disappeared. He may be halfway to Canada by now. Or he may be waiting around in the shadows to shoot somebody. The longer you cover up for him, the more years he adds to your sentence.”
That bit of hard sell got me zip. I tried the high ground. “If Whitehead is the killer, it’s up to you to stop him before he hurts someone else.”
Faris sat for a long time without saying anything. I couldn’t think of another way to get at him, so I stood up.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Sit down. I’ll tell you. The night Shepard died, I drove Drury back to the farm after dinner. But I didn’t hang around. As soon as I got him into his wheelchair, I left. I’d had enough of his company for one evening.
“I’d just turned out of the drive when I saw a man walking along the road toward the farm. He stepped down into the drainage ditch to hide as I passed, but I saw him clearly. It was John Piers Whitehead.
“I didn’t know how he’d gotten there or what he was up to, but I was glad to see him. Drury had been cocky as hell at dinner, telling me how the Traynors were going to write him a blank check and how Lockard was going to be out in the cold if he didn’t come across with more money fast. I knew it would cost me my job if I told Lockard that Drury had outsmarted him. I was looking to Whitehead to bollix up the deal somehow.”
“The next day,” I said, “when you heard about Shepard, you were sure Whitehead had done that and more.”
“Yes.”
“And you kept quiet about it.”
“I had to. You can understand that. I couldn’t tell what I knew without implicating myself. I was safe as long as I sat tight and kept my mouth shut. But the pressure of staying there, knowing what I knew, got to be too much. I had to get away.”
“So you went to see Carson Drury, to ask for his help. And who should answer the door but John Piers Whitehead. No wonder you came in looking like the Grim Reaper was a step behind you.”
“I still don’t understand it,” Faris said. “Why did Drury take him in?”
I couldn’t remember which of Drury’s five explanations I’d believed that day, so I didn’t bother reciting them.
“It was all so much like a dream by then,” Faris was saying. “I keep telling myself that. I keep thinking I must have dreamt it all.”
This time he didn’t object to my standing. I crossed to the door and rapped on it hard.
While we waited for our keeper, I asked, “What do you have against Linda Traynor? When I mentioned her name just now, you almost spit.”
“Nothing, I guess,” Faris said. “I can’t figure her out is all. At the farmhouse on the morning the deputy drove me out, the morning after the cross burning, she really ripped into me. She finished up by offering me a drive back to my motel so I could pack up and leave town.”
“I remember,” I said.
“I took the ride. I didn’t want to walk or go back in a sheriff’s car. She didn’t say a word to me the whole way there. Okay, I thought, I’m beneath her notice. Then, when we got to the motel, she leaned over and kissed me. I mean really kissed me. I jumped out of that car like a spooked rabbit, and she peeled off.”
“That’s the part you dreamt,” I said, angry and not sure why.
“Maybe I did,” Faris said.
38
The Indy cop who showed me the way out was a friendly guy trying to get through a long shift. He was happy to lend me a city directory and then to tell me how to get to the address I found in it, Professor Walter Carlisle’s address.
After he’d given me the directions, the cop pointed to a wall clock that was covered with greasy dust. “It’s a little early to be calling.”
“Tell Carlisle that if he should report a prowler,” I said.
According to the directory, Carlisle lived alone on a street called Kenwood, not far from his college and his precious outdoor theater. The simple frame house looked well kept, but it was a dark night, and my eyes felt as filmed over as the police station clock. Carlisle’s screen door was certainly warped. It put out a very satisfying reverberation when I beat on it.
I raised a dog down the block first. Then I got a light in a neighbor’s house. Finally, I got Carlisle. That is, I got his disembodied voice. The front door opened a crack, and he asked, “John?”
“Nope,” I said.
He switched on the front porch fixture. It had a yellow bulb of the type guaranteed not to attract moths. It took the professor a long time to place me. When he did, he said, “John’s not here.”
“So I gathered. Have you gotten a call from Sheriff Gustin tonight?”
“No,” Carlisle said, looking a little ill in the yellow light. “I was at a rehearsal until very late. Why would the sheriff be calling me?”
“Let me in. You don’t want the neighbors to hear the rest of this.”
The dog down the street was still barking. With him on my side, I won the argument. Carlisle opened the screen door and stepped back into the darkness. A second later, the darkness was shooed into the corners of the room by a standing lamp.
It was a music room of sorts. An ancient upright piano took up most of stage left. To my right was a very modern hi-fi, its Hollywood blond top littered with records. At the center of the platters were wineglasses, two of them. Carlisle was standing near the phonograph, retying his bathrobe. The robe was the gray-brown color people used to call “mousy,” back when they admitted to occasionally seeing a mouse. There was no trace of pajamas above or below the robe, but then, it was a hot night.
“What’s happened to John?” Carlisle asked.
“In a minute,” I said. “First tell me why you lied about last Sunday night.”
Carlisle drew himself up and stuck his ball-peen chin out at me. There’s a limit, though, to the dignity you can muster when you’re barefoot in a bathrobe. His “How dare you?” missed the target low.
“You told Gustin that Whitehead was down here Sunday night while a pal of Drury’s nam
ed Shepard was getting himself murdered up in Traynorville.”
“That is correct,” the professor said.
“I just came from the Indy lockup. They’re holding a witness who can place Whitehead in Traynorville on Sunday night. In fact, he can place him within a few hundred yards of the barn where Shepard died.”
“Then it will be his word against John’s and mine. And I must say, he doesn’t sound like a very reputable witness.”
“He was only a mildly crooked accountant until he met Drury,” I said. “And it will be his word against yours, period.”
“Why? What’s happened to John?”
“You live here alone, don’t you, Professor?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have company?” I nodded at the wineglasses.
“Not now. A colleague stopped by earlier, after the rehearsal for Knickerbocker Holiday. I have to direct the play myself now, since John deserted me to rejoin Drury.”
“When did you get the word on that?”
“This morning. I mean yesterday morning, Tuesday morning. John was driven up to Traynorville on Monday afternoon for questioning. He never came back. On Tuesday morning he called and asked me to send up his things. He didn’t apologize or offer an explanation. I didn’t ask for one.”
“Why not? He was hanging you out to dry.”
“Because he sounded so happy. It was more than that–he sounded reborn. Please tell me what’s happened to him.”
“He disappeared tonight. He walked away from an important dinner in Traynorville and hasn’t been seen since. He may have met with foul play, or he may be hiding somewhere. Here, for example.”
“There’s no one else here,” Carlisle said.
“Then you won’t mind if I look around.”
I hadn’t taken a step, but Carlisle moved to cut me off from the rest of the house. “I most certainly do mind. You’re not a policeman, and you don’t have a warrant.”
“I can have both here faster than you can sneak Whitehead out the back.” It was a thin bluff, but I was too tired for embroidery.
“You don’t need a policeman,” a voice behind Carlisle said. The speaker was standing at the foot of the staircase. She was dressed even more casually than the professor, in a bedsheet toga. She had red hair as artlessly arranged as her sheet, and legs that could have given Arlene Dahl’s lessons in geometry. I guessed her age at eighteen, give or take a semester.
“Go back upstairs, Daphne,” Carlisle said.
“We’re not ashamed of anything,” Daphne said in parting. She couldn’t see Carlisle’s face. If she’d been able to, she would have chosen a different tag line.
I now understood why Carlisle had stayed with the academic life so long and maybe why he changed colleges so often. “Relax, Prof,” I said. “I’m from Hollywood. I’ve stumbled across auditions before.”
“The point is,” Carlisle said, “John Whitehead isn’t here.”
“I’m more interested in where he was on Sunday night.”
Carlisle gave his face a good long rubbing. When he’d finished, he said, “John was in Traynorville–at the Traynor farm. He went up that evening on the Interurban. I’m not sure why. He didn’t get back here until dawn. He’d walked and hitchhiked the whole way down. He was in a terrible state, exhausted and frightened to death of something he’d seen at the farm.”
“Or done,” I said.
“I’ll never believe that. I told you before that John is incapable of violence. Nothing I’ve seen since he arrived here in Indiana has changed my mind about that. Do you think I would have agreed to give him an alibi if I’d had the slightest doubt about his innocence?”
“Why did you agree to it?”
“To save him from the kind of small-town justice they have in places like Traynorville. The lock-up-the-stranger style of justice. You’ve seen what it’s like up there. Tell me I’m wrong.”
I couldn’t. I’d not only seen that kind of justice, I’d almost been a victim of it. “What scared Whitehead at the farm?”
“He never told me. He was too spent. He slept until noon. Then he barely had time to pull himself together before the police came to collect him for questioning in Traynorville. The next thing I heard, John had been hired by Carson Drury. I still can’t make sense of that.”
“No one has,” I said.
I should have stopped by my father’s apartment and borrowed a couch–or, better still, checked into a hotel under an assumed name. I was too tired to make even the short drive to Traynorville safely. But I’d left Paddy in a bad spot, so I pointed the Studebaker northeast.
I was also too tired to think, but that didn’t stop me from kicking around the possibility that Whitehead was the murderer. It seemed a likely enough idea, now that I was beyond the range of Walter Carlisle’s stubborn faith. He was remembering his friend as he’d been in New York in the thirties. The whole world had changed since then, and Whitehead with it. He was a broken man now, unable to get past the loss of Drury. And poor Hank Shepard was the sap who had taken Whitehead’s place in Drury’s affections. It had been an even worse career move than Shepard had thought.
The problem with the Whitehead solution was the weapon, the Liberator. How had Whitehead come to have it? He’d never been to the farm before the fateful night. He’d have had no reason to suspect a gun was even there. And he couldn’t have searched the house even if he’d hoped to find a gun. Drury had already been there, dropped off by Faris before the unlucky accountant had spotted Whitehead. Then there was the question both Faris and Carlisle had raised: Why had Drury taken Whitehead back? Had Whitehead performed a service for Drury that night, with the job his reward? Or had Whitehead been telling Carlisle the truth when he’d said he’d seen something terrible at the farm? If so, had that something also been valuable?
I made it to the Roberts Hotel in one tired piece. The night shift desk clerk left his post and took me to the seventh floor himself. On our way up, I asked him if I’d missed any excitement.
He said, “It’s been as quiet as a cemetery,” and then got embarrassed about it, maybe because he’d tied me in with Shepard or maybe because I looked as if I had one foot in the grave.
Paddy answered the door to Drury’s suite in his undershirt and suit pants, one suspender on his shoulder and the other hanging down like an empty scabbard. He took one look at me and postponed his lecture. “Let’s hear about it,” he said instead.
I gave him my report in a low voice, knowing that Drury was somewhere nearby. When I’d finished, Paddy said, “We’ll chew it all over in the morning. There’s a spare bed through that door over there. I’ll wait up and watch for a while.”
“As long as you’re going to be up,” I said, “how about making a call to California for me?”
“It’s one a.m. in California. Your kids have been asleep for half an hour at least.”
“I want you to call one of your other operatives. Lange would be best; he could intimidate Khrushchev. Tell him to visit Dr. Petry, Drury’s pill pusher.”
“What, yet tonight?”
“Yet tonight. Tell Lange to demand to see Drury’s X rays. He can say he’s a fraud investigator from RKO’s insurance company. He can say anything as long as it throws a scare into the doctor.”
“What’s this about?”
“A boy who ran away to join the circus,” I said and called it a day.
I couldn’t escape Traynorville, not even in my dreams. They were a reworking of my day, with the episodes and the players jumbled. I was in the rail yard again, being menaced–ineffectually–by Whitehead. Then I was in Gilbert’s office to collect the Liberator. The man behind the sleek desk, who pulled the gun from its hiding place and pointed it at my chest, was Gilbert’s dead brother, Mark. Before he could shoot me, I was in Carlisle’s house, pointing to the incriminating wineglasses. The professor ste
pped aside to reveal his latest conquest, Linda Traynor.
I awoke with Paddy shaking my shoulder. “Sorry, Scotty. I let you sleep as long as I could. We just got a call from Gustin. He’s finally found John Piers Whitehead.”
“Safe?”
“For good and all. They pulled him out of the local river at a spot called Victory Park. Drury and I are headed there now. Follow us when you can.”
39
I was surprised to find my bag packed and standing at the foot of my bed, next to a breakfast tray. A Traynor footman had brought the case over at dawn, Paddy told me as he left. Gilbert had wasted no time in severing his last tie to Carson Drury’s hired man.
Thirty minutes after Paddy wheeled Drury out, I pulled the Studebaker into the gravel lot of Victory Park. It was a little stretch of sycamore trees and concrete picnic tables on the bank of the White River a mile out of town. A limestone marker at the gate dedicated the park to the “Men and Women of the Armed Forces, 1941 to 1945.” The marker was mossy with age.
I felt a little mossy myself. I’d gotten all of four hours’ sleep and five minutes in the shower, but I’d done better than Gustin. I found the sheriff by the bank of the river, looking like the before picture in an ad for nerve tonic. He and Paddy were inspecting an outcropping of land on which stood a particularly brave sycamore. The current, eating away at the little peninsula, had exposed the stone underneath the soil and the roots of the tree, creating miniature caves that collected the debris of the river. Gustin was explaining to Paddy how the snag had collected Whitehead.
“I had some men out on the river before dawn. They found the body here about nine o’clock. They’d been past this spot earlier, but they’d missed him in the darkness–if he’d made it this far by then.”
Gustin lost his balance climbing back up the bank. Paddy caught him at the last second and hauled him up one-handed.
“Thanks. It’d serve me right to fall in the damn river. It would have served me right if the river had washed Mr. Whitehead up to my door. That’s where his death should be laid,” he said, addressing me now. “If I’d gotten myself out to Traynor House last night when you’d told me to, he’d still be alive.”
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