The Clay Hand

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “About five minutes. Can you wait?”

  “I’d be interested seeing what would happen if I couldn’t.” He drew Phil to the window. “Is the wife still up there?”

  “Yes.”

  “At the kitchen pump, I’ll bet.” He took an envelope from his pocket. “I got the warrant for searching the Number Three. But they really put the heat on me. Did the men go back this morning, Joe?”

  “Most of them did,” Krancow called.

  “I hope to the Lord they stay there. If we flush them out again and don’t get something, we’re in trouble. McGovern, did you mention to anyone I was going down there?”

  Phil thought for a moment. “No, I didn’t.”

  “Good.”

  “All right, Sheriff,” the phone man called. “Take it away.”

  Fields waited until he and Phil were alone in the room. He put through his call then and asked for Howard Lempke. “Any time you’re ready. I got the search warrant, and I’d like to get it over just as soon as I can.”

  He listened to what must have been considerable objections from the other end. “Mr. Lempke, I don’t want them out no more than you do. Matter of fact, I’ve got a notion your people don’t care much, and I don’t want to be your scapegoat. Now I’ll be over there in fifteen minutes, and I’ll go down alone if you don’t take me.”

  He hung up the phone and rubbed his nose viciously. “A hell of a lot we’d find going down there alone.” He looked at Phil. “What makes this so doggoned tender—it’s just a matter of time till they close up Number Three for good and all. But they got a contract with the men, and they’d be within their rights if that was breached by the men refusing to dig…” He broke off. “I got no business saying what I can’t prove. That’s just what it looks like to me. You can come out there with me if you want to, McGovern. But just keep quiet about it.”

  Lempke and Fred Atkinson, the state inspector, were waiting for them at the abandoned entry. “This is what you call a drift mouth,” Fields explained to Phil. “All the first diggings here were near the surface. There aren’t many entries like this, are there, Mr. Lempke?”

  The superintendent was ripping the boards from the frame. “One or two over on Number One that I know of. The old plans show more here, but I never heard of them.” He straightened up, then, and adjusted his lamp. “Fields, I’d be real careful before repeating what you said to me over the phone. I’m going to give you every cooperation I can. I got orders from headquarters to do that. We’re trying to make this old horse pull its load. As long as it does that, it stays hitched. We’re in business, but Winston Collieries got a pretty good reputation in the last few years for being square, and we don’t aim to lose it now.”

  “Okay,” Fields said. “Let’s go.”

  “You understand what I’m saying, Fields?”

  “I understand. I’m not out to make trouble, especially for myself.”

  “All right. Outside of Laughlin and this other pair, I don’t know of anybody’s gone in here in twenty-five years. You’re going to find a lot of rooms down in, damp and raw. I don’t know what. Just remember Laughlin. It may be all cleared out, but we don’t want to get separated. Don’t let the fellow ahead of you get where you can’t touch him. I’m dead serious about that. I’m going to mark our way with chalk.”

  Phil and the sheriff were provided with lamps, and they followed Lempke and Atkinson without a word. As soon as they passed beyond daylight, a dankness fouled the air. Under foot, the ground was like hard, rough clay that scuffled beneath their shoes. The lamps playing along the walls of the tunnel caught weird shaggy growths, crusted stuff that looked like green snow. As they moved in, the passage grew narrower, so that at times they stooped almost double to make their way.

  There was looseness now, under foot, where the walls had crumbled. Lempke threw his lamp across the entrance to a room. It was clogged almost to the top of the opening. He lay across the debris and threw the light inside. Little white nubs the size of half-snowballs clung to the green-black ceiling. “There’s rats down here,” Lempke said. “You can smell ʼem.”

  Moving along the passage again, they stumbled over tracks that had not been taken up. Phil dropped his light on them. They, too, were almost covered with a thick black moss. The men had to squeeze past a car that lay on the track where it had been abandoned. Even the shovel had been left in it, only the handle showing above the accumulated moss and dirt. As he realized what it was, Phil wondered if this might be the car that, loosed from its coupling nearly thirty years before, had killed Laughlin’s wife.

  Crawling now, they moved from one abandoned room to another. At one place Lempke stopped. He had dropped the chalk. Atkinson gave him another.

  “Hold it a minute,” the inspector said. He pushed inside a room, the dust he stirred up choking them. They threw their lights on him. He lit a match and touched it to one of the fluffy lumps on the wall. It gave off tiny sparks, and the room was suddenly filled with a horrible screeching as the lump plopped to the floor. Phil caught the back of his head tightly in his hand to deaden a quick pain the noise had started.

  Atkinson crushed the lump beneath his foot. “A bat,” he explained. “They can cling there for years with life in them.”

  “Where did they find Laughlin?” Fields asked.

  Lempke focused his lamp on a survey map. “We’ll be coming there soon if this plan is accurate.”

  They passed into a widening passage soon. The air seemed fresher. An air circuit had been opened from another entry, giving it a crosscut with some outlet in the present diggings. There was a white cross mark on the wall. “Right in here,” Lempke said.

  Fields threw the light of his own lamp on the chalk mark. He moved very close to it and studied the wall. Phil, behind him, saw him run his finger along a carved marking; the movement of his finger described the letter G. Fields dropped the light and stood a moment.

  “Are you going in or not?” Lempke said impatiently.

  “Mr. Lempke, when you people found Laughlin, did you know where to look for him?”

  “Hell, no. We didn’t know he was here. We were testing for gas. It was Atkinson here made sure we came all the way.”

  “Did you know where to look for it?”

  “No. That kind of gas doesn’t spell itself out, you know. We just knew pretty well if there was gas down here, it came from the point nearest the section working now. We moved in here from the nearest drift entry to the tipple where we’re hoisting.”

  “Then Coffee didn’t tell you he’d marked the room?”

  Phil could see Lempke’s face above the pale light. The mine superintendent had no notion of what Fields was talking about. The sheriff threw his light on the wall again, and pointed to the letter. “Any other explanation you can think of for this mark?”

  Lempke and Atkinson examined it. Lempke shook his head. “You’d need to be a bat to see it.”

  “That was grooved out with a knife,” Fields said. “No reason your people would do it?”

  “No. We wouldn’t do it that way.”

  “How long would a man have to be in there for the gas to get him?”

  “Hard to say. A few minutes might do it. You just drop off to sleep.”

  Fields nodded. “Let’s see the room.”

  The sooted floor was streaked with trailing footprints.

  “What in the name of heaven was he doing here?” Atkinson said.

  “Got lost, probably,” Lempke said. “Why he was here, I don’t know. They say he was daft. He lost his wife in this section maybe thirty years ago when she was trying to find him and got in the way of a car. They always say a woman in a mine’s a bad omen. It was here. Seemed like every vein in the place ran thin just after that. What with that, and the men leery of coming down, it was closed up.”

  “I remember,” Fields said.

  “That’s right. You were digging yourself then, weren’t you? Before my time. Now we can go back the other side or go on to t
he Pinewood entry. The air’s a lot better.”

  “We’ll go the other side of the way we came,” Fields said. “But first I want to go over this room.”

  The light moved over the walls and floor as the sheriff examined the blackness foot by foot, the three men watching him from the opening. He bent down now and then, examining the floor carefully.

  “Sherlock Holmes,” Lempke said. Then he called out: “I wouldn’t lean on any of them beams, Sheriff. There’s places down here wouldn’t take much to cave in.” His voice came back at them as though he had spoken against a wall. The room was as dead as the man found in it.

  “I’m not doing any leaning,” Fields said. He stooped down and picked something up, a straight trail of dust rising from where he shook it loose.

  “Got something?”

  “A piece of string,” Fields said, testing it for age.

  “One thing,” Atkinson said, hawking the dust from his throat, “nobody was flying a kite down here.”

  Fields rejoined them. “That’s as foul a pit as I ever smelled. Let’s go.”

  Lempke led the way once more, and presently the air clogged up on them again. Its dampness was painful in the nostrils. The rooms on the other side were higher vaulted, and seemed cleaner, consequently. Atkinson delayed them.

  “Just look at these pillars.” He ran his hand down one of them as he spoke. “These were done by pick miners. No machines. The human back, eye, arms. Straight as a beam.”

  “I knew a picksman once could strike fifty a minute and have it come out that straight,” Lempke said. “There aren’t craftsmen like that around anymore.”

  “For a dollar a day, too,” Fields said.

  Lempke started on. “You never got over having to quit, did you, Fields?”

  “I got over it the day I got elected sheriff. I was lucky. How many guys get to be sheriff?”

  They passed once more into dingy, suffocating rooms. Fields would not leave one of them without casting a light about it. Finally, his search was rewarded. Lempke’s lamp beam caught a round object that, from where they stood, looked like a nail keg. The men approached it without speaking. Beside it several lanterns were lined up, a thin film of dust covering them. There was an army cot and a blanket in a folded heap. There were other kegs, and as they approached them, an acid, silage-like smell was noticeable. The light further caught a row of medicine bottles and old whiskey bottles, and a length of small hose lying over them.

  “I’ll be a little catfish,” Fields said. “The old coot was making moonshine down here.”

  Chapter 20

  WITHIN TEN MINUTES OF leaving the room, they reached the mouth of the mine. Phil and the sheriff left the mine people to board it up and returned to the car. “I don’t like this a bit,” Fields said.

  He sat a moment, running his hand around and around the steering wheel. “Not a little bit,” he repeated.

  “If Dick found that still, it accounts for his warning Laughlin before going to Lempke.”

  “It accounts. It don’t account,” Fields said. “For a guy who spent so much time talking, there’s doggone little Coffee talked about you can lay your finger on.”

  “At least the way you’re hearing it now.”

  Fields looked at him. “That’s so. Either he stopped short in letting on what he was after, or somebody’s stopping short in telling us.”

  “Is there a market for that stuff? I thought it went out with prohibition.”

  “There’s quite a bit of it around. Especially where the state holds the only license for selling. When times are bad it flows pretty thick. You find this stuff floating when the men are out. I’ve come on a few stills the last year or so.”

  “Where did Laughlin live?”

  “In the church basement. He had a cot down there and a bag of old clothes. He left sixty-eight dollars.”

  “And a still,” Phil added.

  “And a still—if it was his. The more I think about it….” Fields started the car and turned it around. “If it was his, where did he get the makings? No car. No friends that we know about.”

  “And yet nobody else has been seen around there,” Phil said.

  “Who was there to see them?”

  Rebecca Glasgow, Nat Watkins, Dick, and Anna Whelan. Phil named them. He repeated the girl’s name.

  “Yes,” Fields said. “I’ve thought about Whelan. It was Anna gave us the story of seeing Coffee and Mrs. Glasgow go in there. If her father was mixed up in it, I don’t see why she’d tell that at all.”

  “Because it was coming out and they wanted to implicate the Clausons?”

  Fields shook his head. “That’s quite a bit of thinking for either one of them.” He passed Clauson’s and then swung the car along the tracks on a path that took them back of the hills to the loading area. He parked near the railroad shacks and got out. “I won’t be gone long.”

  Phil saw him go into an office and come out presently with someone he took to be a foreman. Together the two men moved on down the tracks and spoke to various workers along the way. Ten minutes later Fields returned. “That seemed like one good spot to peddle the stuff. Too simple. Things don’t fall in place for me like that.”

  As they drove past the railway station, they saw Whelan’s cab. Fields pulled up beside it. Whelan came out of the station.

  “Hello, Jerry,” Fields said, getting out of the car. “How’s business?”

  “Keeping body and soul together. That’s about all.”

  “Is it all the trips up to Corteau that make you a living?”

  Whelan screwed up his face. “I’m to Corteau no more than a time or two in a month.”

  “What for?”

  “Taking them in the big houses up there for a lark,” he nodded toward the one prosperous street in Winston. “The things I could tell you on them if I was loose in the mouth.” Fields showed scant interest. “And I’m sent up for a wreath of flowers when there’s a funeral.”

  “What gave you the notion of having Coffee dig Laughlin’s grave, Jerry?”

  “I told you that yesterday. It just come to me seeing him standing around. I says to myself: it’s a shame to see him idle when it takes so little to keep him busy. So I says to him, ‘There’s a gravedigger’s grave to be dug at the parish.’ It was him took me up on it. He could as leave let it lay as a joke. I don’t know what you’re persecuting me for, Sheriff. I’m an easy man, free with my tongue some of the time. But there’s no harm in me at all.”

  Fields heard him out, and it seemed to Phil that Whelan could go on for hours making talk about nothing. The sheriff was looking over the taxi as though appraising its worth. “Jerry, how did you ever gather enough money in a piece to buy the cab?”

  “I’ve had it three years and it wasn’t new then,” Whelan said. He was surly now. He jerked his head in Phil’s direction. “He’s put you up to this, sucking in with the old woman.”

  Fields did not look at him. He squatted down and examined the tires. “Is Anna paying it off to her in wages?”

  “What if she is? Isn’t a daughter meant to be helping out her poor da, and him with a string of others to bring up behind her?”

  Fields touched the car wheel with his toe. “You don’t take much better care of it than you do of them, do you, Jerry? Did Anna tell you about Coffee and Mrs. Glasgow?”

  “She told the mother, and the mother told me.”

  She would not be very likely to tell him anything, Phil thought.

  “Did you know Kevin at all, Jerry?”

  “Laughlin?” Whelan shrugged, although there was no easiness in his face. “The way you get to know most of the people when you’re a sociable sort. From seeing him round.”

  “Around where?”

  “I told you all this. The church. And I often seen him roaming around the tracks over to back of the hills. I’d see him go by when I was sitting here at the station.”

  Fields nodded. “Do you know Glasgow?”

  “To pass th
e time of day with. I seen him of a Saturday night around town, and coming and going from his work there by the tracks. He’s not a bad sort. A queer duck to get mixed up with the likes of them, though.” He glanced at Phil then, remembering probably their words on the subject in the widow’s kitchen. “Not that I’ve anything against them,” he added.

  “I’m glad to hear that, Jerry,” the sheriff said. “I hope you’ll keep playing that tune for as long as we’ve the trouble around us here.”

  He got into the car and Whelan came to the window. “I’ll play it as if it was a flute. And Mr. Fields, Sheriff—if there’s any traveling to be done between here and the county seat—I’ve a reliable service. And there must be an allowance for that in the county budget. You shouldn’t be running yourself all the time and me sitting here expanding my backside.”

  “I’ll remember it, Jerry,” he said, starting the motor. As they drove away from the station, he glanced at him through the rear-view mirror. They went on to Krancow’s in silence.

  In his office there, Fields took the piece of string he had picked up in the mine from his pocket and tested it again. He reached for the phone then and called Doctor Turpel. From their conversation, Phil gathered that Turpel was on a retainer for the mines and had examined Laughlin. Fields made an appointment to see him a few minutes later. When he hung up, he swung around in the chair. “You see, McGovern, him marking that room—well, whatever he intended that for, it was marking off the place a man could die. Why didn’t he tell Lempke he marked it?”

  “Two thoughts come to me on that,” Phil said. “Either somebody else marked it, or Dick marked it for Laughlin. Nobody would see that unless he was looking for it.”

  “That’s a fact,” Fields said. “When they marked the room with that chalk cross they didn’t see it.” He took the phone again and dictated a telegram to the Cleveland and Mobile Railway office, asking complete information on Norman Glasgow. Listening to Fields, Phil recalled his visit of the night before to the Clausons, and the magician’s telling him of the devices he made and sold. Could that not be a blind? That Clauson should be mixed up in any way in bootlegging seemed incredible. But if it were so, that was how it was meant to look. The more he thought about it, the more of a point Clauson seemed to have made of showing him the product of his work. He described the incident to the sheriff.