He put a hand on my wrist to remind me that I was still holding his shirt. I let him go. “You’re lying, Gilbert. Whitehead had something to sell. You wouldn’t have helped him otherwise. You’ve never looked out for anyone but yourself.”
Gilbert was tucking his shirt back in. He paused to look offended. “You wouldn’t even be out here if I didn’t think about other people. If I hadn’t tried to help Carson, you’d be back in California at your usual stand, peeking through some hotel keyhole.”
“Stop it,” I said. “You’re making me homesick. You never meant to help Drury. You’ve been working some scheme of your own from the start.”
“I’ve never had a scheme,” Gilbert said, and his eyes filled up with tears.
“Damn,” I said again. I knew he was telling me the truth. He’d been telling me the truth all along when he’d insisted, first whimsically and then fearfully, that he hadn’t known what was going to happen next.
“You’ve never had a plan,” I said, working it out as I spoke the words. “Linda thought you did. So did Drury. He started off believing that you were using him to cut your mother’s apron strings. But he was selling you short.”
“Was he?” Gilbert asked hopefully.
“We all did. Back in Hollywood, I took you for a small-town playboy with so many stars in your eyes you couldn’t see to shave. But it was all an act. You were taking everything in–and everybody.
“Even Drury. While he was setting you up, you were researching him. You found out the essential truth about him, which is that he’s a walking disaster area. Bad luck follows him wherever he goes. Did your old college buddy Tyrone McNally pass that on to you when he told you he’d sold Drury the Albertsons negative?”
“No,” Gilbert said, shaking his sleek head. “You’re making it sound too much like a plan again. Tyrone only gave me an excuse to go to Hollywood in the first place and an introduction to Drury. I just wanted a break from the monotony of my life. And I didn’t research Drury. I just spent time with him. I heard what was happening to his movie, what had happened to his last dozen projects. I listened to the jokes about how unpredictable life in his circle could be. Hank Shepard liked to tell them. You heard those jokes yourself.”
“Yes,” I said.
“And I thought how wonderful it would be to live around a person whose life was never the same two days in a row. Who unsettled everything and everybody just by being himself. And I got an idea–not a plan, not a scheme, just an idea. I decided to bring Carson to Traynorville. To introduce him into my routine, predictable life just to see what would happen.”
I was feeling the heat. I sat down on the edge of Marvella’s lounge chair. Gilbert, whose brandy-soaked skull should have been cracking in the full sun, looked totally unaware of the temperature.
“Drury told me you were like a man who’d lit a fuse,” I said. “He hasn’t realized yet that he’s the bomb.”
“It was exciting at first,” Gilbert said, “just the way I’d hoped it would be. I enjoyed the tension of not knowing what the next phone call or knock on the door would bring. It was a feeling I’ve never really known. And I enjoyed watching the rest of you react. Especially my mother.”
“And Linda,” I said. “Don’t leave her out. Your little experiment is squeezing her hard.”
He looked away. “I never meant for it to.”
“You’re lying again, Gilbert. You’re jealous of her.”
“Of course I’m jealous. Who wouldn’t be? But I’m fond of her, too. I don’t want to hurt her. I never wanted anyone to be hurt–not Hank or Whitehead or Linda.”
“But they all have been. The first two are dead, and Linda has herself half-convinced that she’s responsible. She made arrangements to meet Shepard at the farm Sunday night. She’s afraid he died because she almost gave in to her loneliness.”
Gilbert was still staring out at the river. “The only man who would kill to keep her faithful is dead,” he said.
“Being dead doesn’t hold your relatives back. Your uncle is dead, and his bedsheet goes marching on, courtesy of your mother and Nast. Did she send Nast to the farm to act for her dead son? So she could keep Linda faithful and chained to this town? Is that what Whitehead saw?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“You wonder how you would have done in the war. You’re in a war now. The people around you are in danger, and you can help them. What are you going to do?”
“Nothing,” Gilbert said. Then he started to cry again.
42
Tears were all I got from Gilbert after that. Tears and pleas for another brandy. When I gave up hoping that he’d dry out, I went looking for a bottle on the slim chance a drink would get him talking again.
The only supply I knew of was in the living room’s corner bar. The bar wasn’t locked up. Either Greta was a teetotaler, or she had the run of the place. I found a bottle of Gilbert’s favorite brandy, cleverly hidden among six other bottles of the same brand. As I reached for it, I felt someone’s eyes caress the back of my neck.
I swung around with the brandy bottle drawn back for a forward pass. There was no one behind me, but that didn’t make the feeling I was being watched go away. The only eyes I could see belonged to the portrait of Mark Traynor. I crossed to its place of honor over the mantel to verify that the eyes were really the painting’s and not those of Nast, peering out at me from some secret passage. That gag was so hoary, Hollywood scriptwriters only used it in comedies, but the old traditions died hard in Traynorville.
The eyes I found in the portrait were the ones the painter had put there, blue eyes that had a hard edge. They created the impression that the boy lieutenant was looking into his own hard future. It hadn’t been the noble death that soldiers think about when they let themselves think of death at all. He’d simply died, according to his widow. I’d never asked her what she’d meant by that. It couldn’t have been a training accident, although those had been all too common during the war. Mark had died in Germany. He might have turned his jeep over. He might have stepped on a mine. Ella’s own brother had met that end.
Or Traynor might have had an even more wasteful death. He might have been a victim of friendly fire, like Clark. The thought stopped me cold. Clark. I stared up into those hard blue eyes, my mind an empty space in which Clark’s name echoed on and on. It was finally overlaid by a replay of Gilbert saying, “The only man who would kill to protect her honor is dead.” Like everything else I’d been told in Traynor House, it was a lie.
I ran back out onto the terrace, but Gilbert had gotten away. I could see no sign of him down on the grounds near the river, so I reentered the house using a different door, one that led to a library. I searched the first floor without finding another soul. Then I went up the grand staircase, taking the right fork when the stairs split beneath the stained-glass homage to the Traynor Phaeton Six.
The second floor was served by a single hallway, the center of which overlooked the first-floor foyer. Opposite this balcony were three doors opening on rooms that faced the front of the house. They were bedrooms. The leftmost was Linda’s comfortable, uncluttered room. Next to it and serviced by a connecting door from Linda’s was the room Gilbert had told me about, Mark Traynor’s room. It was preserved as he’d left it when he’d gone off to fight, complete with school pennants and model airplanes. The third door of the trio opened onto a guest room that was as impersonal as any hotel’s.
I had company when I came out from checking the third bedroom. Greta was standing at the end of the hallway to my left, her arms thrown out protectively across a set of double doors–Marvella’s suite.
“Go away,” Greta said.
The opposite end of the hall dead-ended in an identical pair of doors: Gilbert’s rooms. I crossed to the locked doors and banged on them.
“He’s gone,” Greta called to me. “He’s gone.”
Gone to warn his brother, I thought, thanks to the head start I’d spotted him.
I left the house at a run. My Studebaker hadn’t been impounded by the family chauffeur. I drove it full-out to Riverbend, pushing seventy until I came to the dip in the road where Casey Atherley had hidden his car. Beyond it, at the end of the drive, a familiar deputy was on duty: the old man who had spotted Clark on the farmhouse porch the day before. He wasn’t spotting anybody today. He was snoring away with his head back and his mouth wide open. The sound of my car sliding to a halt on the gravel drive next to his cruiser brought him up, swatting at bluebottles and asking, “Who the hell?”
“Elliott,” I said. “Scott Elliott. Has Gilbert Traynor passed here?”
“What?”
“Call Sheriff Gustin on your radio and tell him I need help at Clark’s cabin as soon as he can get there. Tell him I’ll have the murderer waiting for him.”
“Yes, sir,” the deputy said and then, less encouragingly, “Who’d you say you are?”
I drove on, wondering whether he’d find Gustin and whether the sheriff would respond to another call from me, the guy who had just cried wolf over Carson Drury. I shook off that doubt. Paddy would march Gustin over if he had to push him with a gun.
I checked my own gun as I left the coupé. I kept the forty-five in my right hand as I made my way across the backyard to the path along the edge of the field. The automatic gave the game away, hanging there at the end of my arm, but I didn’t think empty hands would fool Clark. I’d tried that approach on my last visit to the cabin, and he’d all but attacked me. I knew why now. He’d assumed when I’d shown up that I’d discovered his secret, that I’d figured out he was really Mark Traynor, alive but so disfigured that he could live unrecognized in his own hometown. I’d set his mind at ease when I’d asked about the cross burning. He’d handed me a red herring, Nast, and sent me on my merry way. He wouldn’t try finessing me this time. He’d be sure I knew the truth.
Who else knew? Gilbert, of course. He’d bowed to Whitehead’s blackmail in order to save his brother. Clark was the one Whitehead had seen go into the tack room that night. No wonder the old man had still been frightened hours later when he’d stumbled into Carlisle’s house. But how had Whitehead connected Clark and Mark Traynor? He couldn’t have expected Gilbert to pay off to protect a caretaker. And when had Whitehead even heard that Gilbert had an older brother?
I asked myself another question I couldn’t answer as I reached the start of the woods. How did Linda Traynor fit in now? She had to know Mark was still alive. Even if he’d been reported by the army as killed in action, she had to know the truth. She couldn’t have lived so close to him for ten long years and not known. She’d told me she had a hard time believing that Mark was really dead. Had she been hinting that he wasn’t? Why hint at it? And why pretend to be uncertain about the connection between her tryst with Shepard and his murder? She could have told me everything if she’d wanted her husband punished. If she’d wanted to protect him, she could have kept quiet about her appointment with Shepard.
The answer had to be Linda’s old dilemma of being held in check by opposing forces. This time the rival pressures were the need to protect her husband and the desire to prevent further violence.
I put my doubts and questions away as I neared the clearing. Gustin could work it all out at his leisure, once he had Clark behind bars. It would probably require no more than sweating Gilbert, which the sheriff could handle with his feet up.
The little forest seemed unnaturally quiet. I decided it was due to the heat of the afternoon, that the birds and the squirrels were all napping in the shade. If I was lucky, I told myself, Clark would be napping, too. I’d never felt less lucky in my life.
Even so, there was no sign of Clark in the clearing around the cabin. No sign of any living thing. I’d left the farm without the slightest thought of sneaking up on Clark. My plan had been to march in and take him, period. Somewhere along the way I’d wised up. I waited at the edge of the clearing for a long time, watching and listening and sweating.
When I finally crossed the open ground, I ran in a crouch, something I wasn’t often called on to do as a civilian. The moment brought the war back so vividly, I almost reached up to hold my helmet in place.
I arrived at the timber building at the corner to the left of the front door. Between the corner and the door was a window. Because the cabin stood above the dirt floor of the clearing on stone legs, the sill of the window was at the height of my nose. I could stretch just enough to look into the structure’s single room. No one looked back.
I tried the front door. It was made of three roughly sawn planks, and it was unlocked. I stepped inside–still moving on my toes–with one last look behind me for a glimpse of a red ball cap.
The floor plan was bed and fireplace to the right, cook stove and sink with hand pump to the left, and a table and chairs in the center. I couldn’t see any cover in which Clark could be lying in ambush. The furniture was all unpadded wood. The two chairs were homemade, their legs and arms still covered with bark and their seats with leather straps woven loosely. The bed was a surplus cot straight from an army barracks. Clark’s closet was a pole that spanned the walls of the corner nearest the bed. The few clothes hanging there wouldn’t have hidden Frank Sinatra. I checked the clothes anyway, tapping the shirts and pants with the barrel of my gun.
I was looking for the Liberator. Having it accounted for would make me that much happier about confronting Clark. I checked the supplies that stood on open shelves above the stove–sugar and flour and cornmeal in canisters, everything else in cans–and the stove itself.
As I searched for the gun, I thought back on the hunger I’d seen in Clark’s eyes when I’d produced Gilbert’s copy of the Liberator. If that had been an act–if he’d really been a murderer and not a suicide cut off from his weapon of choice–it had been a great act. And why had Clark torn Riverbend apart looking for the gun? The murderer had to know where the gun was. Had that been another dodge?
I shut the questioning off as soon as it started. I couldn’t let it distract me from what I was seeing and what I was listening for: the sound of Clark’s footfall behind me. For the same reason I blocked out images of Whitehead when the smooth river stones of the fireplace brought him to mind.
That is, I tried to block them. As I pulled apart the stack of firewood on the hearth, I saw Whitehead rolling along the black bottom of the river. I even heard the tapping he made as he touched the stones with every slow revolution.
Then I realized that the faint tapping sound was real, that it was coming through the floor beneath me. I went back out through the front door and down the block steps, scanning the woods as I stepped onto the clearing floor. When I felt able to turn my back on the wall of trees, I stooped and looked under the cabin. My view of the corner where I’d heard the tapping was blocked by a stack of lumber.
I circled the building, noting for the first time that the ground fell away at the back. The stone legs supporting the rear of the structure were twice as tall as those in front. Their added height created a storage space below the cabin floor. Clark had filled it with the lumber I’d seen from in front, as well as drums of kerosene and olive drab cases that I recognized as surplus ammunition boxes.
I took all those things in peripherally. What grabbed my gaze and held it was the source of the tapping sound: a pair of human legs that ended in work boots bound together by heavy cord. The boots were kicking feebly at an outcropping of stone.
I put a hand on the bound ankles, and a low moan floated out from beneath the cabin, followed by a strangled attempt at speech. I stuck my gun in its holster and dragged the unresisting form down the slope and into the daylight.
It was Nast, bound and gagged and half-dead. His greasy hair was caked with dirt, and his eyes were black and blue. His gag was a twisted strip of dirty rag that cut into t
he corners of his mouth like a bit. I untied it first. Nast worked against me by struggling to speak before I had the gag clear of his parched tongue. His voice, when he could finally use it, was a croak.
“Did you kill him?” he asked. “For the love of God, tell me you killed him.” Then his bruised eyes locked onto something over my shoulder, and he screamed, “No!”
I rolled away from Nast and drew my gun. Clark timed his first kick perfectly, knocking the gun from my hand. It rattled down the slope toward the trees. His second kick was off balance. I grabbed his foot and twisted it, and he went down, tumbling well clear of me. We scrambled to our feet at the same time. Clark was nearer to my fallen gun, but he didn’t turn to pick it up.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said. “I knew you wouldn’t quit.”
“It’s time you quit,” I said. “I know what’s been going on.”
Clark shook his head. “If you knew, you’d still be running. Now it’s too late to run.”
He came at me up the slope, his fists held low like another John L. Sullivan. He had no choice with his left; he couldn’t raise it any higher. Knowing that, I stood my ground, jabbing with my left and throwing everything into a right cross aimed at the unprotected side of his head.
He’d been waiting for that. He showed me how a man with no left held his own in a fight, tilting his head away from the blow and letting it bounce into his ruined ear. Then his big right hand brushed by my guard and caught me square on the jaw. I staggered backward against the side of the cabin but kept my feet under me. Clark nodded his approval as he closed in for round two.
I led with the same left jab and then faked a right. Clark leaned his head away again, as I’d hoped he would. I snuck in a quick left, hitting him on what passed for his nose. He backed away, wiping at blood.
Come Back Dead Page 28