The Clay Hand

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Does this hill have as abrupt a drop as the one Dick fell from?”

  “No. The rise is about the same, but the decline is more gradual. Only near the tracks there’s a drop of about twelve feet.”

  Phil nodded. “Then if Dick came out this entry—say he came out in a hurry, thinking it was the one at the other end of the valley—if he had come out here and it was dark, he might have run up the hill toward your place, thinking he was going in the opposite direction.”

  “Yes. That could very well have happened,” she said. “He was probably guiding himself by the sound of the train, and was actually following the echo.”

  “It isn’t too farfetched to suppose that he was following someone, is it?” Phil said evenly, although he felt the tension straightening every fiber of him.

  “No. It’s not farfetched. Dick knew these hills well. He must have been rather desperate to take the chance.”

  “The person he was following must have known the deception of the hills, too.”

  “I don’t know that,” Rebecca said.

  “You know it as well as I do,” Phil said. “We’re both trying to get at the truth by looking at all the possibilities. Aren’t we?”

  She did not answer him.

  How great was her loyalty to Glasgow, he wondered. Before he and Margaret had come to Winston, it was common knowledge that Fields had started on that tack, Glasgow’s having killed him, using the time alibi of his work. Randy Nichols had picked it up within an hour of getting into town. His next question was abrupt, but he hoped that her thinking might parallel his own and make it seem a natural part of their combined exploration.

  “Why did you marry Glasgow?”

  “Because he asked me. Because I was sick of my father’s solicitude and the town’s contempt. I thought a husband—I don’t know what I thought a husband was. Happiness, I guess.”

  “Have you been happy with him?”

  She looked at him then, her long face old and homely in its bitterness. She brushed the tears away without shame. “Dick asked me that, too. I’ll tell you the truth, Mr. McGovern. I’d like to see him hang for Dick’s murder.” She turned her back on him and hurried through the valley. Nor would she wait when he called to her. Instead, she began running, and he could imagine the tears falling freely. He walked in the opposite direction, past the newly found entry, coming presently to the highway. There he hitched a ride into town in the first farm truck passing.

  Chapter 25

  THE SHERIFF WAS AT his desk when Phil reached Krancow’s. He listened to Phil’s story without interruption, but his face showed no enthusiasm for it. “I thought about that some,” he said finally. “I didn’t get it worked out like you did, of course. But the truth is, I’ve been afraid of it coming out that way.”

  “Why?”

  Fields rubbed his chin with the flat of his hand. “How do you think you can bring an indictment for murder against an echo?”

  “At least we can prove it wasn’t suicide,” Phil said.

  Fields looked at him. “Would you settle for that?”

  “Not if it was murder.”

  Fields shrugged. “Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe before we’re done we’ll both be glad to settle for it. Now I’ll give you some more information on your friend. He did a lot of traveling between the sixth of December and coming down here. Last night I checked it with the stories you brought me of his. He flew to Los Angeles December eighth, and from there to New Orleans, December fifteenth. Between then and January eleventh, he covered every doggone town on your list except Detroit. Everyone since after the war, that is.”

  “What did he do in them?”

  “I don’t know that yet. I got this information from the Chicago police. And I still don’t know where he was the two weeks before he got here.”

  “You know that he came by way of Naperville,” Phil reminded him.

  “Yes. I know that. I’ve been reminded plenty of it. Too much, maybe. And I know he had a five-hour stopover at Cleveland.” Fields got up and locked his desk. “Any notion why he wouldn’t go back to Detroit when he was going all the other places?”

  “Yes,” Phil said. “Margaret wasn’t with him in Detroit.”

  Margaret was on the back porch when they drove up, throwing feed over the railing to the chickens.

  “Looks real domestic, don’t she?” Fields said. “I never seen her kind outside the movies. And they weren’t feeding chickens.”

  She waited for them, apparently hoping to talk outdoors, Phil thought. Fields motioned her into the house.

  “Brush your feet there,” the widow called out. “Anna’s after scrubbing the floor, and I can’t spare her doing it again.”

  Anna couldn’t spare it either, Phil thought.

  Inside the house, Margaret turned and waited, only mildly curious.

  “I wanted to ask you, Mrs. Coffee,” Fields started, “was your husband home much the last couple of months before he came down here?”

  “I already told you that, Sheriff. He was away a great deal of the time.”

  “Any notion where he was?”

  “Yes. He was revisiting the places he had done his work on.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us that till now?”

  “It didn’t seem pertinent.”

  “Maybe you’d like to tell me some other things now didn’t seem pertinent.”

  Margaret did not answer, but her face was defiant. Mrs. O’Grady rattled the pump, but she, too, was waiting.

  “Do you know what he was doing there?” Fields said finally.

  “I know what he learned there. In every place he went, he found the grass as thick as before he had taken the scythe to it. He found the same corruption, the same bigotry, the same stupidity. Naperville was closed down entirely. That was part of his despair.”

  Fields did not take his eyes from her face. “And Detroit, Mrs. Coffee—why didn’t he go back there?”

  “That was where he did a story on fascism,” she said evenly.

  It was the sheriff who gave ground, or seemed to. The word, and not her implication, backed him up to recalculate. It came too readily, an intended shocker, true or false. But Lavery’s account that morning of the closing down of Naperville fit so perfectly into her story of Dick’s disillusionment that Phil, too, felt the need to recapitulate.

  Mrs. O’Grady came from the pump and caught his arm. She pressed her fingers into the muscle. “There’s a sight of difference between a word and a deed, and the devil a man ever turned a deed was afraid of the name of it.”

  She moved between him and the sheriff, and sat down at the table opposite Margaret.

  Phil caught her meaning the instant he saw Margaret’s eyes on the old woman. Whatever allegiance was between them, it was not bound in love. “Margaret,” he said, “would it be that Dick went to Ann Arbor instead of Detroit?”

  “I don’t know,” she said placidly. “In those days he did not confide in me. But why should he have gone to Ann Arbor?”

  “Because that’s where you were waiting for him while he did the job on the shirt organization.”

  She smiled. “Believe me, Phil, these last trips were not sentimental journeys.”

  Fields joined them at the table. “I wonder if you have the letter your husband sent, telling you that he was in Winston, Mrs. Coffee?”

  “No. I destroyed it.”

  “Why?”

  She spread her hands. “There was no reason to keep it. It was a letter he might as well have sent to the post office.”

  “You didn’t keep it for the address?”

  “General Delivery, Winston, is not hard to remember, Sheriff.”

  “And you didn’t hear from him again?”

  “I told you that.”

  Fields nodded. “How often did you write to him?”

  “Twice. Once from home, and once from Cincinnati.”

  “I wonder what he did with the first letter,” Fields said.

  Margaret shrugged.
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  “Do you mind telling me what you said in it, Mrs. Coffee?”

  “You read the second letter, didn’t you?”

  Fields admitted that he had.

  “It was very much the same. Only then I asked him to write to me. I went to Cincinnati because he did not answer.”

  Phil, watching Mrs. O’Grady, saw her face pucker, almost as though something was tickling her nose.

  “When you were in Cincinnati,” Fields persisted, “what did you do?”

  Margaret got up impatiently. “Wait. What did I ever do all my life with Dick Coffee but wait.”

  Fields, too, got up. “So much, it’s gotten to be a habit with you. Is that it, Mrs. Coffee?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Are you doing anything here in Winston, besides waiting?”

  Margaret shook her head, but the widow answered for her. “She’s keeping me from my loneliness,” the old lady said. “We’re the consolation of one another in our misery.”

  Chapter 26

  THE SHERIFF LET THE car slide into gear turning out of the widow’s driveway.

  “Did Mrs. O’Grady have the opportunity of going over Dick’s things before you put the lock on the door?” Phil asked.

  “She’d have a tough time getting up the stairs, but I guess it’s possible. Why?”

  “I got the impression she might have seen that letter you asked Margaret about, the one she’s supposed to have written from Chicago.”

  Fields reached inside his jacket and drew a letter from his pocket. He gave it to Phil. It was the letter Margaret Coffee had written her husband from Cincinnati. Phil read:

  “Dearest,

  This silence is more than I deserve. I shall wait here until Friday in the hope that you will come. Or, if you say the word, I shall wait here forever.

  Margaret.”

  Phil returned it to the sheriff.

  “When you saw her there in Chicago, McGovern, do you remember her telling you if she’d heard from her husband?”

  Phil thought about it a moment. “Yes. She said he was gone two weeks before she knew where he was, even.”

  “But did she say he’d written to her?”

  “Not explicitly,” Phil said after a moment. “But she told me I could write him here, General Delivery.”

  “That’s as well directed mail as anybody gets here,” Fields said. “Just on a hunch, I’m wondering if he told her he was here at all. Or if maybe she didn’t find it out on her own.”

  “Who would she find it out from?”

  Fields glanced at him. “From Mrs. O’Grady?”

  “Why?”

  “I can give you a wherefore for every why. She’s got things down too smooth to suit me. Take that business about Naperville shutting up. Coffee wasn’t back there till he was on his way here. It’s no secret, of course, that Naperville’s closed…” He shook his head. “It just looks like she’s got all her ducks lined up in a row, and I keep wondering what would happen if we knocked one of them out of line too soon for her.”

  He looked at his watch. “I’m going over to see the mine people now. Want to come?”

  “Sure. Aren’t you going back to the mine?”

  “After the meeting. I’ve sent a deputy up for fingerprint equipment. I’d like to see if there’s any prints on that still.”

  An official of the Winston Collieries from their main office in Cleveland was waiting with Lempke at the Number Three office. There were brief introductions, and Lempke took the offensive immediately. “We’ve been going over production figures, Sheriff. Do you know how many ton we’ve hoisted in the last month?”

  “I didn’t think you had enough to measure it. How many men went down this morning?”

  “Less than fifty. Let me ask you something else, Sheriff. Do you know what it costs to resume hoisting after a layoff?”

  “Look,” Fields said, “I know you’ve got a legitimate complaint. That’s why I’m working night and day trying to clean this up.”

  “Are you any closer to it than you were the first of the week?”

  “I think I am. But I’m not making any promises.”

  The man from Cleveland spoke then. “Lempke here has given me an account of the inquest proceedings, Sheriff. It seems to me the thing is only vaguely connected with the mines—much too vaguely to warrant the emphasis you’ve placed on it. Isn’t there considerable evidence that Coffee might have leaped to his death?”

  “There’s some might be taken that way.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better for all concerned here if that were the case?”

  “For everybody excepting the dead man,” Fields said.

  “Well, the dead have buried the dead for a long time, so to speak, haven’t they?” the man said easily. “It’s the men who have to keep themselves alive that are primarily our concern now. Sheriff, you must look at the cold facts.”

  “I know,” Fields interrupted. “I know the cold facts. I don’t see how you could make them any colder for me. There’s one thing bothering me where you gentlemen are concerned….”

  “Laughlin’s death?” Lempke asked when he hesitated.

  Fields looked at him. “Yeah.”

  “You and I know the coroner has a personal grudge there. He resents the mines being taken out of his jurisdiction. Are you questioning whether Laughlin died of the gas?”

  “No. I talked with Doc Turpel. He knows gas. I’m satisfied with that part of it for now. Matter of fact, that wasn’t what I had in mind. I just found out Coffee was in Cleveland a few hours before coming down here. And I know he contacted your people. Now this gentleman from Cleveland or nobody else connected with the Winston Collieries has volunteered that information to me. I had to have it checked through the hotel phone calls where he took a room. Don’t that strike you as peculiar, Mr. Lempke, when they instructed you to give me every cooperation?”

  Lempke looked to his superior for an answer.

  “Yes,” the Cleveland man said, “very peculiar. Will you believe me, Sheriff, when I tell you this is my first knowledge of such a call?”

  “I won’t have any choice but to believe you if you find out for me in the next few hours what he wanted there.”

  “I’ll put through a call immediately.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” Fields said. He turned to Lempke. “You aren’t going to like this, but I want to go down in that section of Number Three again. I want your diagrams of it, showing all the old drift entries.”

  There was a quick exchange of glances between Lempke and his superior. “All right,” Lempke said. “I’ll take you down in the morning.”

  “No. I’ve been in the mines before. I want to go down alone, or with McGovern here to help me. I don’t want any more of us tracking it up till I’ve been over it myself. And I want to go now.”

  Again Lempke and his superior exchanged glances. The man from mine headquarters nodded, and Lempke took the plans of the mine from his desk. He explained them to the sheriff.

  The extent and limit of their cooperation was all decided beforehand, Phil thought. There was something in their attitude that intimated they intended giving Fields enough rope to hang himself. He was convinced of it when he started to the door with the sheriff and the Cleveland man called after them: “Sheriff, isn’t bootlegging a federal offense?”

  “Yes, it is,” Fields said slowly.

  “Have you contacted the federal authorities?”

  “I haven’t seen anything that was bootlegged yet, sir. We’ve found the accoutrements of it, but that don’t prove the stuff was made and sold. All you need to close the place tight is a flock of federal men moving in there. I’m going to try and give them a package. But like you say, if I get hold of the stuff, I’ll be the first one to bring them in.”

  Rebecca Glasgow was herding the goats into the yard in back of the house when they passed. Phil waved, but if she saw him, she gave no sign of it.

  “The husband home?” Fields asked.<
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  “I don’t know. She doesn’t talk much about him, except that she’d like to see him hang for Dick’s murder.”

  “They must have a real chummy life,” Fields said.

  He drove beyond the cliff and parked the car opposite the valley where the two entries were. Phil helped with the lamps and his fingerprint kit. As they trudged toward the entry, the three-o’clock siren sounded. Fields checked his watch with it. “Well, them that’s down are coming up now. I wonder how many’ll go down again in the morning.”

  At the mouth Phil and Rebecca had found, Fields removed the boards. The touch of his hand was sufficient. He examined the floor near the entry before going in cautiously. “Footprints don’t mean very much, in spite of all you hear about them,” he explained. “Especially in the stuff we’re coming into.”

  Their underground journey was similar to the one they had taken the day before, the smell and coloring of the dank passage familiar. Fields chalked the walls as they passed. Now and then he paused to study the floor under his lamp. “This is a pretty well-worn track,” he said. “Matter of fact, it’s better worn than the way we came in yesterday. If they was using an automobile to transport the stuff, I’ll bet….”

  He did not finish the sentence. From somewhere in the darkness ahead of them came a noise like muffled gunshot. The noise was small, but the floor beneath them vibrated with increasing intensity. They careened crazily with the shock. The light in Field’s hand wavered with the sway of his body, but he did not fall. In a few seconds the floor steadied beneath them, but the walls gave off an acid-like smell.

  “Goddam,” Fields said. “Come on back, McGovern.”

  He kept his light to the wall, and picking up one marking after another, they scrambled on as though the ground were actually giving way beneath their feet. He made sure of the next marking, however, before leaving the last. Before they reached the mouth, a swirl of smoke and dust overtook them from the depth of the mine where the explosion had taken place. It seared their throats and nostrils, and worst of all, stung their eyes so that they imagined flashes of light where there were none. Fields stopped and shoved his electric torch into Phil’s hand. “Stand still. I’ve goggles in that kit.”