The Clay Hand

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “It accounts for her staying here,” Phil said. “She was all set to go before the inquest.” He remembered Glasgow’s eyes on her, insolent and, he thought now in retrospect, provocative—a brash dare.

  “Was there a chance of a meeting here between them?” Fields said.

  “Yes. The night before last. When I went up from town, Anna began jangling the gate as though she was crazy.” He told of going into the house and finding the widow alone in a smoke-thick room.

  “Was your husband home then, Mrs. Glasgow?”

  “He was home, but he went down to the yards for a couple of hours, or so he said.”

  Fields got up. He sighed wearily. “That brings Mrs. O’Grady in on the whole mess.”

  “She dealt herself in the day Dick was killed,” Phil said. “She told me to listen up there in the hills. I think she even knows how Dick died.”

  Chapter 34

  “POOR OLD LAUGHLIN,” PHIL said as they drove back to Krancow’s. “Poor old man, to be caught in the middle of a mess like this.”

  “I don’t know,” Fields said. “I’m getting so I’d be suspicious of the Pope of Rome.”

  Krancow was waiting for them at the parlor door. “They’re recertifying Number Three,” he said. “They can start hoisting in the morning.”

  “They put the heat on for that recertification,” Fields said. “They really cooked on it.”

  “Sam, if the men don’t go down, the mine people are going to put it up to the National Labor Board as a breach of contract…”

  “So that’s it. The blister’s ready for me now, is it? Well, they’re not going to make it stick. Get Lempke on the phone for me.”

  Fields unlocked the desk and took from it one of the magazines Phil had brought from Corteau. He waited without speaking for Krancow to put through the call.

  Lempke talked first. Fields heard him out, and then said curtly: “The men will go down in the morning. It may disappoint you, but they’ll go down in the morning. Now I want to know what Coffee called your people for when he was in Cleveland.”

  He listened to the hemming and hawing a moment, frowning. He interrupted. “I’ll give you just ten minutes. Then I’m putting the Cleveland police on it. The Winston Collieries ain’t so goddamn important to them. They’ll get the information.”

  He hung up and checked his watch. He fingered through the magazine until he found the article he wanted. He looked at Phil. “That fifteen hundred dollars Coffee took from the bank bought something, McGovern. And it wasn’t women, dope or liquor.”

  “Information?”

  “Information. And he wanted it bad to pay for it in a place like that. That information brought him to Winston in the end. He wasn’t…”

  Fields caught the phone at its first indication of a ring. “I’ll hold on all right,” he said, adding then to Phil: “They’re going to talk to me now from Cleveland. Why in hell can’t you get any place in this world if you don’t show your teeth? Aren’t we anything more than dogs?”

  He waited, pencil in hand. On the phone, he repeated one name aloud, and wrote it down: “George Norton.” The call completed, he swung around to Phil. “There’s a stone in your shoe to walk with. He tried their Pittsburgh office first. Them two weeks must of been spent looking up George Norton.”

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “I sure do.” He put the magazine he had selected in his pocket and locked the desk. “He was superintendent at Number Three when Laughlin’s wife was killed.”

  Chapter 35

  IT WAS ALMOST NOON before they got to see Father Joyce. The priest was visiting the hill country to the south. While they waited they looked at the marker on Laughlin’s grave:

  KEVIN LAUGHLIN 1885-1949

  He hath labored all the days of his life

  The grave was out of line with the others in that section, as though it had been added where no grave had been intended. Moving along the row they saw the reason. The next grave was that of Kathleen Laughlin, 1902-1921, the child bride, as Mrs. O’Grady had called her, and beside her, Eileen Laughlin, the child of the child bride and Kevin. When Phil had first met Fields, the sheriff had said that he thought the makings of how a person was going to die was sometimes in something that happened in his youth. For Laughlin surely.

  “It was Coffee dug his grave,” Fields said, motioning to the stone, “and Coffee thought he might of saved him from it.” He scratched a bit of dirt from the marker.

  Father Joyce parked the car as they turned back from the cemetery. The priest went directly into the church without speaking, carrying the Sacrament. They went into the church vestibule and waited for him, both of them looking up at the giant angel spreading its mildewed wings. A solitary vigil light burned before it. Fields moved uneasily from one end of the vestibule to the other. The priest finally came to them.

  “Can we talk here, Father?” Fields asked.

  “Yes, of course.” He nodded to Phil.

  “I’d like to ask you something more about Kevin Laughlin.”

  The priest frowned. “Ask it.”

  “When he came to you, he’d been gone from Winston a long time.”

  “He had. He asked at the rectory for Father Duffy.”

  “Did he tell you where he’d been?”

  The priest turned the vigil light around so that it would burn evenly. “Sheriff, I am not permitted to pass along that information.”

  “Even with him dead?”

  “Even then.”

  “All right, Father. I have my own notion where he was, and I can find it out without disturbing you.”

  “It isn’t a matter of disturbing me, man. You know yourself the vows that are upon me.”

  Phil thought then that there were times when Father Joyce tried very hard to be a simple man among simple people. He was no hypocrite, but he could neither understand nor make a compromise.

  Fields drew the magazine from his pocket, opened it to the page he had marked, and showed it to the priest. He had underlined a passage. When Father Joyce returned it, Fields handed it to Phil. He read:

  …It is high time a distinction was drawn here between potential “repeaters” and the offender who has lusted after his concept of justice only. For example, I have studied an inmate of a federal penitentiary who is serving a long sentence for an attack upon a man whose negligence he blamed for his wife’s death….

  “I’m sure now that was Laughlin he was writing about,” Fields said. “Richard Coffee traced him through George Norton. He was superintendent on Number Three then, and he’s been gone from Winston since that section was closed.”

  “I know that,” the priest said. “I did not know Coffee was looking for Laughlin.”

  “I don’t know why he had to trace him that way,” Fields continued, “but he did. I don’t know just why he traced Laughlin either, but I’m going to find out.”

  “Will it account for Coffee’s death?” the priest asked after a moment.

  “I think it will. And I know it’s going to account for Laughlin’s. Do you know how he got out of prison, Father? Or do I have to wait?”

  “He served his term.”

  “For murder?”

  “He did not murder,” the priest said coldly. “The man he assaulted died of a heart attack.”

  “You checked the story, Father?”

  “I did not. When a man brings me the story of his misfortune in penitence, I do not question his honesty.”

  Fields stood a moment thinking. “Father, what would you say if I told you Laughlin was operating an illegal still over in the abandoned section of Number Three?”

  The priest shook his head. “I cannot believe that, Sam. He had neither the guile nor the wit. He was a broken, harmless man. He didn’t want money. He didn’t have it. No, Sam, I won’t believe Kevin had any part of a thing like that.”

  Fields agreed. “When did he come here?”

  “Three years ago.”

  “The thing really botherin
g me,” Fields said, “if Coffee came on account of Laughlin, why did he stay on after the old man was dead?”

  That was not bothering him at all, Phil realized. Fields knew now where he was going. But he was testing a part of the prejudice in the town that had complicated the entire investigation. In a way he was testing himself; for in the very beginning, he too had come dangerously close at one point to accepting Dick’s death as suicide, because he believed the dead man to have lost his faith.

  “I thought that testimony had already been given,” the priest said quietly.

  “The Glasgow woman?”

  The color rose in the priest’s face.

  “Coffee wasn’t a very penitent man, was he, Father?” Fields said. He did not wait for an answer.

  Chapter 36

  FIELDS RETURNED BRIEFLY TO the parlor and put through a phone call to the United States marshal at Los Angeles. He stationed Krancow at the phone to await the information he wanted. He and Phil drove once more to the Widow O’Grady’s.

  Anna was finishing her chore in the chicken coop when they drove up, the widow directing her with her stick from the back porch. The girl fled inside the coop as they came through the yard, the chickens raising a racket in their flight from her.

  “Come out of there, you dull-witted girl. You’ll scare the birds from a month of laying! Bring her out of there, Philip. You’re nothing but trouble around the place, Sam Fields. What is it you want now?”

  Fields strode toward the steps without answering. The widow hobbled into the house ahead of him. Phil went to the chicken house door. Anna was crouching in the corner, the scraper in hand, a look of terror on her face.

  “What’s the matter, Anna?” he asked gently. “What are you afraid of?”

  “You leave me alone.”

  “Have I ever touched you? Have I ever said a harsh word to you?”

  She only crouched deeper in the corner.

  “Anna, are you afraid because you’ve told a lie? Is that what it is?” He moved slowly toward her, the words purringly soft. “Sometimes we do things and we don’t know why we do them. Maybe it’s because we want somebody to pay attention to us. We want them to listen to us—maybe to laugh at what we say. So we make things up, things that aren’t quite true, but after we’ve told them a few times, we get to believe them ourselves.”

  Phil was almost to her now. She stood hugging herself as though she were trying to hide nakedness, but still clutching the hoe. He could feel the dust of the coop in his nose, a nauseating smell, and the sweat broke out on his back. “Anna, when you were at the gate the night before last, were you warning them that I was coming? Who was in there, Anna?”

  She swung out wildly at him with the hoe then, catching him on the elbow with it as he threw up his arm to protect himself. He caught the hoe, but the girl fled out of the building, and then down across the field, leaping over the rough ground like a young doe.

  Phil swore to himself and went into the house.

  Margaret was opposite Fields at the kitchen table, the widow on the stool by the sink. She pulled herself up when Phil entered. She had never looked more elegant, her hair freshly yellowed and waved, her gnarled fingers bizarrely jeweled—the color on her cheeks red roses, the skin beneath it like withered leaves. Phil wondered if she had not been waiting all these weeks for this moment.

  “Where’s the girl?” Mrs. O’Grady demanded.

  “She’s scared out of her wits,” Phil said.

  “She hasn’t the wits to be scared out of.”

  “You’ve just about convinced her of that, haven’t you, Mrs. O’Grady? Between you and her father she hasn’t a chance. You like to see people suffer, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” the widow hissed, “the way I suffer. Do you know what it’s like to be prisoner of your own body? To sit night in, night out, a lifetime in the company of jackeens?”

  “Then take it out on the jackeens,” Phil said fiercely, “and not on a girl who can’t defend herself. You think because you’ve a crooked body you can put a crook in the minds of them weaker than yourself.”

  The widow rocked on her cane. A grin spread on her face that showed every tooth in her head. Dear God, Phil thought, this was her pleasure.

  She clapped her hand on his arm, the whole weight of her body seeming to lean on him. “You’ve spunk in you, after all, Philip. Take me over to the table beside her.” As they moved across the room, and he felt the hard, dead weight of her hand upon his arm, he remembered that he had not offered her a ride in the car. Dick had done that. He had borrowed Father Joyce’s car and driven her over the countryside, easing her great lump of pain. What a concoction of vinegar and gall she was, contemptuous of the weak, but unenvious of the strong—the old lady at the pump, indeed, waiting to be disenchanted. Beside her at the table, Margaret was a tall, pale lily, the flower of purity. Both of them sat prim and erect, waiting. Fields, too, waited. Tired, overwrought, he would need all his reserve to win this struggle of nerves.

  The sheriff lit a cigaret and blew the smoke between them. “You’re a liar, Mrs. Coffee,” he said then. “You’ve spun us the damnedest string of lies any human ever put together. And you almost made them take. It’s you scraped the bottom of the barrel and smeared it over your husband—every place you went. As close to despair as that man came, you drove him there.”

  “Sheriff, if you’re saying that Dick committed suicide on account of me…”

  “I’m not saying that, and you know it. Your husband died chasing a man who committed murder. You know that man, Mrs. Coffee.” He turned to Mrs. O’Grady. “And you know him, too.”

  “Peh,” the widow said, but she did not deny it.

  “He was here the night before last. He knew you, Mrs. Coffee, long before that, and when we take him into custody this afternoon, he’s going to tell us from where.”

  “That should be interesting,” Margaret said serenely.

  “He’s going to tell us of a prison break in California three years ago—right in the middle of a drive there for reforms. He’s going to tell how he took a simple little man with him because he was always talking about an abandoned mine where he lost his wife. That was a good place for a man to hide out till he could make himself respectable. He killed that little man when he was afraid he’d talk to Coffee. And there’s something terrible twisted in the way it turned out. Dick Coffee helped him, finding gas in that room and marking it. More than that, he almost got himself blamed for it.”

  “Dick’s clay hand,” Margaret said then. “So many things he touched turning to clay, and all the time he thought he was giving life to them.”

  “Do you deny knowing Glasgow, Mrs. Coffee?”

  “Sheriff Fields,” Margaret started with a great show of tolerance.

  The widow laid her hand on Margaret’s wrist. “It’s a story worth telling, dear,” she coaxed. “What can they do to you?”

  The trace of a smile played at the corners of Margaret’s mouth. “I’m not one for boasting myself,” the old lady continued, “but I’d give them a story with a stick in it if I was you. Where’s the guts you told me about, the love of taking a chance, the wild dares of living with a man and cuckolding him at every turn of his back? Aye, and in all the ports of the world, and them sanctifying him.”

  Margaret lifted her head proudly, defiantly. The widow had struck a responsive chord and knew how to play it. “Tell them the talk here the night before last,” she leaned into Margaret’s face… “the times you had with him on the seamen’s strike, was it? The thugs he run through the lines like water, and you riding the night rounds with him picking them up from the water-front hellholes, filling their guts with whiskey and shooting them through. Tell them that, and all the while the poor cuckold writing holy protests of the violence.”

  She twisted her head around to Phil. “Did you think you were in her class at all? Or him? Was our Dicky boy in a class like that? No! He vomited every port he traced her to, but he couldn’t spit out his lov
e of her. It was in him like bile.”

  “You can’t spit out poison,” Phil said. “Not once you’ve swallowed it.”

  The widow rocked in her chair. “There’s a fine bit of philosophy. I waited a long time for her coming.”

  “From the letter she wrote him from Chicago?” Fields said then.

  Margaret looked at Mrs. O’Grady.

  “Aye. You’re sharper than I thought, Sam Fields. We’re not all dolts down here. He burned the letter here in the stove. But I fished it out before it caught.” Again she stretched her hand to cajole Margaret. “It skipped my mind to tell you that, my dear. But there was nothing much in it. It was no more than you telling him part of you was in him forever. That, and warning him about Glasgow. That was a great kindness.”

  “Then it was Glasgow told you he was here?” Fields said.

  “Yes, it was Glasgow.”

  “And Glasgow saw you in Cincinnati, too, didn’t he, and told you to get him away from here?”

  “No. He didn’t tell me that.”

  “Can you think of the reunion here that night?” the widow said. She would not be done out of the leading part. “Can you think of it, Sam Fields?”

  “I can think of it,” he said. “And I can think of the reunion on that prison story, too. Did you help in the break, Mrs. Coffee?”

  “Save some of your questions for him, Sheriff.”

  “I got enough for him to answer.” Fields looked at his watch. “About one more little tea party like this is all my stomach can take.”

  And this was Margaret Coffee, Phil thought—the lovely woman he had envied his friend all these years.

  “Margaret.” He waited until her eyes met his. “Why? Why to Dick? What started it?”

  “You would even find an excuse for me, Phil? Dick knew what he was marrying—a girl that lived by her—beauty. Do you remember in New York? A pickup, he told you. It was the truth, and he never let me forget it. He was so proud of marrying a Magdalene.”

  “You knew all this,” Fields said to Mrs. O’Grady from the door. “Even to how he died.”