The Clay Hand

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Did you know Kevin Laughlin?”

  “I knew him from seeing him around the town. I knew him for a nut.”

  “He wasn’t around town much,” Fields said. “He was a bashful sort of man, looking for a woman he lost a long time ago. I’ve been told you were seen with him along the tracks out there back of the mines.”

  “Then you’ve been told a cock-and-bull story. I never met nobody along the tracks unless it was the ginks working there.”

  “You’ve the use of one of them little handcars, Glasgow. It comes in real handy, don’t it?”

  Glasgow smiled. “You’re fishing in muddy water, Sheriff. You checked my record with the company. They wouldn’t stand any nonsense.”

  Fields studied him. “Not a nerve in your body, is there, Glasgow? How much do you get in your pay envelope?”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “I won’t have much trouble finding it out.”

  “Twenty-eight dollars.” Glasgow looked at his wife.

  There was a faint change of expression on her face. Fields caught it. “Did you think he made more, Mrs. Glasgow?”

  She lifted her head but did not answer him.

  “That ain’t much for a skilled worker. You wouldn’t have to put in much time for that.”

  “What are you getting at, Sheriff?”

  “Nothing special. I was just figuring you get quite a bit of time to yourself—one end of the line or the other. I was wondering what you did with it.”

  “I read a lot,” Glasgow said sarcastically. “I want to improve my mind so’s I can talk with my family.”

  Through it all the old man sat, his head bowed, his hands clinched together. Fields folded the illusion and put it back in the bag. “Somebody took this out of the house here,” he said quietly. “There’s three people living here, and one regular visitor when he was living. Sooner or later I’m going to find out who took it. It’d save the wear and tear on all of us if you could give me the answer right now.”

  “I gave it to Mr. Coffee,” the old man said then. “Yes. He asked if he might borrow it, and I gave it to him.”

  “When, Mr. Clauson?”

  “When? I don’t know when. What is one day from another to an old man?”

  “Did you see him give it to Coffee, Mrs. Glasgow?”

  “No.” There was real fear in her face now. “Papa, did you give it to him?”

  “I have just said that.”

  “Maybe he wanted something to remember you by, Becky,” her husband said. “The old boy would have been all for that. Oh, how he’d like to have a son-in-law like Coffee.” He slapped his hand on the record album. “Opera, books, Latin, Hebrew, Greek. Godalmighty, maybe the Greeks had a word for it. So do I.” He spat a vulgarity at them.

  “Norman, why don’t you get out of this house?” the old man said, his voice quivering.

  “I will when I’m damn good and ready, Pop. She took me for better or worse, and damn glad to get me. Now I’m sticking.”

  How many scenes like this had Dick suffered through, Phil thought. This was no new routine. Night in, night out when he was home, it must have gone on like this, the nagging, the baiting, the fear and hate.

  Fields put on his hat. “I’m glad you’re sticking for a while, Glasgow. I’ll want to talk to you some more.”

  “I’ve the Louisville run in the morning.”

  “Just see you come home from it on schedule.”

  He and Phil left then, none of the three moving from his place until the door was closed. Fields turned the car around at the back of the house, the headlights catching the eyes of one of the goats as it poked its head out of the shelter.

  “Shooting from a blind,” the sheriff said. “It was like aiming a cannon at a gopher.”

  “I don’t believe Clauson gave that illusion to Dick.”

  “If he didn’t, one thing’s sure. He wasn’t protecting Glasgow.”

  Chapter 30

  “IT’S TIME THEM BOYS were breaking it up,” Fields said as they passed McNamara’s. “They’re spoiling for trouble.” He drove on to Krancow’s and parked the car. From the parlor steps they could hear the shouting and the clamor. There was no more music, just oratory, loud and abandoned.

  Through the big window, they could see one of the deputies stretched out on the sofa and the other sprawled on a chair…the sleeping disciples. Fields opened the door. “How long’s it been since you were down the street there?”

  One of them leaped to his feet. “Gosh,” he said, shaking off the sleep.

  Fields disgustedly waved him back where he was. He and Phil started down the hill. They broke into a run, for at that moment the door to McNamara’s swung open. Nichols hurried out, the roar of the men following him until the slamming door muffled it. Fields called out to him.

  “You better break them up,” Nichols said. “The talk in there now is that Coffee and the girl murdered Laughlin.”

  Fields threw the tavern door open, and for a moment the place was hushed. It was the same crowd as in the afternoon, only swelled, and uglier for the more of them. Their faces were flushed, their eyes bloodshot from the smoke, so thick in the room that Phil brushed it from his face like a spider web.

  The sheriff walked to the bar and turned his back on it, facing the men. “Is there something you’d like to say to me, any one of you?”

  There was a grumbled, indistinct response.

  “Is it that you have the case solved for me?”

  “You’re the servant of the people, Sheriff. Maybe if you solved it, we wouldn’t be troubled this way.”

  Fields whirled around, for it was Eddie Halloran, helping McNamara behind the bar. The big man himself was tight-lipped. Billy Riordon came up and stuck his face under the sheriff’s. “Eddie’s put it right on the line to you, Sheriff. Did you bring the woman in?” His voice hardened. “Or is it you’d like us to go out and assist you?”

  “Do you have some evidence I haven’t seen?” Fields said, pushing Riordon from him with the back of his arm.

  “It isn’t that you haven’t seen it, Sheriff. You don’t seem to get the sense of it.”

  “Let me hear the sense of it then.”

  “There’s a simple thing. Old Laughlin got in the way of their pleasure. Coffee and her tried scaring him out of the mine with a ghost. Instead they scared him into a bloody gas chamber.”

  “Did you see the ghost, Billy?”

  “I heard tell of it.”

  “I can believe that. Where’s Whelan?”

  “Here!” Whelan shouted from the back. “Here and accounted for.”

  “Look, Sheriff,” Riordon insisted, pulling at Fields’ sleeve. “He knew there was gas there. Why didn’t he tell them before Laughlin was dead, and not after it?”

  “Answer it, you. You’ll have solved one of my problems. Remember it’s Coffee’s death I’m investigating.”

  “We think you’d be better investigating Laughlin’s death. He was one of our own.”

  “Sam, there’s something to what the men say,” McNamara said then, “and they’re in terrible need of the work. Give them some satisfaction.”

  “What are you persuading for?” Jerry Whelan thrust himself through the crowd. “I say we go up in a body. There’s ways of squeezing the truth out of one like that. You’re too easy, Sheriff.”

  “But who the hell wants to squeeze her?” someone yelled.

  There was ribald laughter. Whelan pounded his fist on the table. “You never can tell. The thorniest bush is often the mother of the sweetest berries.”

  “Ah, you’re a philosopher, Jerry.”

  “A philosopher and a philanthropist,” Riordon said, his tongue thickening on the word. He lifted a glass of beer. “Here’s to Jerry Whelan. May he live forever and get no older than he is today.”

  Fields looked at McNamara. “What have you been pouring tonight?”

  “Beer. Nothing but beer.”

  “They smell of more than bee
r.”

  “Some of the boys had a drop of their own. At times like these, I close my eyes to it, Sheriff.”

  “At times like these you should open them. You had a sample this afternoon, didn’t you?” Fields strode across the room to Jerry Whelan and caught him by the front of his shirt. “So you’re a philanthropist, Jerry? Your wife and kids’ll be glad to know it.” In an instant he ran his hands over Whelan’s pockets, drawing from one of them a half-filled whiskey bottle. “Old Oak,” he read the label. He uncorked it and put the bottle to his nose. “The makers’ll be glad to test it for us. Where did you get this, Jerry?”

  “I bought it. A man’s entitled to a bottle now and then. What’s this world but a misery without it?”

  “Where did you buy it?”

  Whelan’s voice rose to a falsetto. “In the liquor store. Where else would I buy it?”

  “I thought maybe you made it. I’ll take it along for tests in the morning.”

  As the sheriff let go of his shirt, Whelan rocked on his feet. He threw his hands up pleading to the men. “He’s trying to distract youse, making me out a bootlegger.”

  “You’ve been drinking his liquor,” Fields said. “How do you feel?”

  A chorus of “greats” went up.

  “You’ll be retching your guts before morning.”

  Whelan lurched toward the sheriff, the whole weight of his bulk falling against him. He was not that drunk, Phil thought. He moved in quickly, taking the bottle from Fields where he was falling back over a chair under Whelan. He no more than had the bottle in his hand when someone, in howling glee, leaped on him. Another man wrested it out of his hand. The bottle was hurled against the wall and smashed in a thousand pieces.

  Fields got up and went to the bar. “Close up, Mac.”

  “Why don’t you run Whelan in, Sam?”

  “Because running him in, he’d be all by hisself, and Whelan never did anything by hisself in his life.”

  Fields went outdoors to a chorus of laughter, Phil after him. They crossed the street to where the taxi was parked. Fields threw his flashlight on it. It was as dirty and sloppy looking as its owner. He examined the upholstery, spotted and torn, and pointed the light under the seats. The only thing he caught in its beam, aside from tools, was an old paving brick under the front seat. “For parking on hills,” Fields said. He turned the light on the dashboard and looked at the mileage. “Broken.”

  He turned off the flashlight. “If only he had brains,” he said, more to himself than to Phil.

  “For bootlegging?”

  “For distributing it. That’s the rub. He’s giving out nips and pulls there tonight. But I’ll bet there wasn’t a man had a bottle in his hand more than a minute. They’re not hard drinkers, McGovern.”

  “How about Glasgow? He seems to have the time. Does he have the brains?”

  “Maybe. He’s got the cunning. One thing interesting, McGovern—for all their information in there in the tavern, nobody mentioned that room in the mine being marked.”

  The men began to lurch out of McNamara’s, sullen, fuzzy and tired. Fields pulled Phil back into the shadows and watched. Whelan was lingering outside the tavern door, not detaining the men, indeed seeming to speed them on their way. Phil caught the sheriff’s arm. “That guy isn’t drunk,” he said. “He’s as sober as we are.”

  Fields grunted. “Look at the other poor devils. They’re out on their feet.” He shoved the keys of the car into Phil’s hand. “Keep out of sight, but get the car ready. When he starts his engine you start coasting, and pick me up. Don’t turn on the lights.”

  “I got you,” Phil said.

  He moved swiftly up the street in the shadows. It was not much trouble keeping out of the lights in Winston. He reached Krancow’s, and then, acting on a hunch, got into his own car. The last of the men gone, Whelan crossed the street briskly and started the taxi motor. He drove toward the railway station, and Phil started down the hill. Fields got in.

  Before he reached the station, Whelan turned right at Lavery’s corner, taking the road in the opposite direction of Mrs. O’Grady’s. He turned back on the town, then, in back of Krancow’s so that he would drive past it. His brake light flashed on as he slowed down to look in at the parlor.

  “Good boy,” Fields said. “He was checking to see if my car was there.”

  Picking up speed then, Whelan once more drove toward the station. He crossed the tracks and started on the road alongside them. It was little more than a path, used by the rail workers when they drove back to the loading tracks. He had made no more than twenty yards, however, when he was flagged down by one of Fields’ deputies. Phil and the sheriff drove by on the main highway, seeing the deputy talking to Whelan.

  “Damnation,” Fields said. “The ones I want on the job are asleep, and this one’s alert as a hoot owl. Drive on out to Clauson’s now, and we might as well see where we’re going.”

  The two deputies there had nothing to report. They climbed into the back seat. On the way back to town, they stopped at the station. One of the men on duty came over to the car.

  “What’d Whelan say when you stopped him?” Fields asked.

  “Aw, the drunken bum. He thought he was on Mill Street going home.”

  “In a pig’s eye he did. All right, knock off for the night.”

  He directed Phil to drive up Mill Street. There the cab sat alongside the house. Through the unshaded window they could see Whelan struggling out of his clothes.

  Chapter 31

  PHIL AWAKENED AS USUAL to the heavy footsteps of the boarders going down the stairs. He could hear Mrs. O’Grady shaking down the ashes in the grate. How long could she go on like this, an old woman getting up in the cold of mornings? But if she were not to do it, what would become of her?

  The wind was crying outside his window like a small child. He got up and dressed, and went into the hall. He paused outside Margaret’s door, thinking he heard movement within her room. It was only the wind, or the old house creaking. Margaret Coffee was never up at that hour in her life unless it was finishing a day. The board sounded beneath his foot. Mrs. O’Grady would cock her head and listen. She would trace his journey down the hall. He moved quickly to the stairs.

  He washed in the back kitchen, and sat down to breakfast as the two men were almost finished. “You’re lucky to be working on Number Two,” he said.

  “Lucky?” one of the men repeated.

  “As lucky as any guy who digs coal for a living. I mean you’re not in the confusion over on Number Three.”

  “I wouldn’t work Number Three if I was to starve,” the man said. “There’s a curse on it.”

  “Peh!” the widow said, her first comment of the morning.

  “Wherever a woman’s been in a mine there’s a curse on it,” the man said, pointing his fork. “And mark my words, the mine’ll get her one way or the next.”

  “Rubbish,” Mrs. O’Grady said.

  “It got Laughlin’s wife when she went down there, didn’t it?”

  “You’re full of ignorant superstitions,” the widow said. “Finish your breakfast.”

  “Superstition,” he started again.

  “That’s enough of your gab,” the widow said fiercely.

  He looked up at her. “What the hell’s eating you this morning?”

  She flung the wet dishcloth she was carrying across his face. “Get out to your work!”

  He got up sullenly. “You old witch. If you wasn’t so crippled I’d say you was the haunt of them.”

  The old woman laughed then, and for one wild moment Phil wondered if she were going out of her mind. There were indeed moments when the devil seemed to ride between her hunched shoulders. The two men went out of the house, banging the door behind them. She turned on Phil abruptly. “What did Sam Fields say to that thing?”

  “He didn’t say anything. It belonged to the Clausons.”

  “Tell me something I didn’t know. Did they own up to it?”

&nb
sp; “Yes. The old man said he gave it to Dick.”

  “What for?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “He didn’t say. Isn’t there ways of making him say?”

  “Mrs. O’Grady, how well do you know Jerry Whelan?”

  “What do you want with him?”

  “He’s been trying to stir the men up. I’d like to know why.”

  “He’s a stupid lump. There’s no harm in him.”

  “There’s not much good in him either. He makes the most of the information Anna takes home out of here. It didn’t take him long to carry the tale of that magic piece down to the tavern last night.”

  “He’s the tongue of an old woman.”

  “He’s the tongue of an asp. They’re saying Dick and the Glasgow woman killed old Laughlin.”

  “They bottled the gas and took it into the mine,” she said sarcastically. “They lured the poor man in and left him there. The stupid lumps. Aw no, if there’s blood on her hands it isn’t poor Laughlin’s.”

  “It’s too bad you weren’t at McNamara’s last night. They could have used some of that eloquence.”

  The widow poured herself a cup of coffee, ignoring him. The kitten crawled out from under the stove and began mewing.

  “Have you fed it yet?” Phil asked.

  “Tell me the cat caught a mouse on a full stomach.”

  Phil poured some milk in his saucer and set it on the floor. The cat reached it no quicker than the old lady’s cane. She tipped the saucer over, and the cat fled beneath the stove. “I’ll say what’s to be fed in this house. You’re not the master here.”

  He pushed away from the table, got his coat and went outdoors. The six o’clock siren sounded. Men would go to work in Number Two, and others would arise with the wish for going to work, or, he thought, remembering the liquor some of them consumed, the wish to stay asleep. The church bell tolled early Mass. Father Joyce would come in from the sacristy to the altar of God, to God Who gives joy to His youth, and only the angels would attend His sacrifice. The priest would turn with his Pax Vobiscum on an empty church. There was no peace in Winston.

  As he watched the sun sweep the mists from the valley, he saw Sheriff Fields turn up past Lavery’s. He went to the gate to meet him. The sheriff was unshaven and grey with the lack of sleep. He handed Phil a telegram without speaking.