Come Back Dead (15 page)

23

I had some time before my next appointment. I used it to visit Crown Hill Cemetery, which was only a mile or so from Butler. Crown Hill contained the highest ground in the city, the actual peak being the site of James Whitcomb Riley's grave. The Hoosier poet wasn't the cemetery's only celebrity. The place also housed John Dillinger, the Hoosier gangster.

I'd come to Crown Hill to visit my mother's grave. I needed the help of the resident caretaker to find it, and it embarrassed me to ask him. It needn't have. The caretaker had no way of knowing that I was June Elliott's son and that I hadn't been by to visit her since the day of her funeral, five years before. And if he had known, he wouldn't have cared. He probably guided a different neglectful son or daughter every day of the week.

After the Crown Hill stop, I drove around the city for a time, ending up on Meridian Street, the most important north-south street in Indianapolis. With the east-west Washington Street, it formed a gigantic cross on which the city was laid out. But Washington had never been very fashionable. Nor, for that matter, had south Meridian. North Meridian was the address to have, so that was where my father had to live. He couldn't afford a mansion like Traynor House, duplicates of which lined Meridian north of Thirty-eighth Street. So he'd settled for an apartment building a little to the south of Thirty-eighth, the Woodruff Building. It was a Greek temple inflated to six stories, the kind of temple the Greeks would have built if Archimedes had gotten around to inventing the elevator.

Farmers ate their Sunday dinners early, so my father ate his fashionably late. I got to Meridian Street about four, and I still had time to pace the sidewalk and smoke a Lucky from the pack I'd bought after leaving the cemetery. That purchase was my revenge against Ella for organizing this little dinner party. A couple of cocktails would have been better preparation, but there was no place to buy one in Indianapolis on a Sunday. So I finished my cigarette, passed another one to the Woodruff's doorman, and took the building's tiny elevator to the fifth floor, thinking how like my dad it was to have missed the penthouse by a single stop. How like the Elliotts in general.

I knew my grandmother would answer the door, and she did. Outside of Hollywood, where a star might change hair colors as often as husbands, it was common for people to pick a certain style at a certain point in their lives and stick with it until the finish. My grandmother had made her final selections around 1935. They included hair in tight curls worn short and steel-rimmed spectacles that somehow looked frilly against her soft, jowly face. The way that face lit up when the door opened reminded me of another home-coming a decade earlier.

“Tommy,” she said, using the name my parents had given me and Hollywood had taken away. She said it softly, just as she had the day I'd stopped by on my way to California after the war, so as not to ruin the surprise for the rest of the family.

There was no family left to surprise except my father, which meant I wasn't surprising anyone. He was sitting in an overstuffed chair next to the radio cabinet in the formal, little living room, lying in wait for me. My grandmother had seemed unchanged to me, perhaps because I'd always thought of her as ancient. I'd never thought of my father that way. I was shocked to see how he had aged, how dull his eyes were, how little color was left in his hair and the skin of his face.

He'd always reminded me of Walter Huston. Not the crazy prospector of
The Treasure of Sierra Madre
Huston. Not the character actor but the leading man. The Walter Huston of
Dodsworth
, a tall, dignified Midwesterner with a long, thin face, a squared-off nose, and eyes that were narrow without being shifty. Now my father only reminded me that Walter Huston was dead.

He shook my hand without getting up from his chair.

“How are you?” I asked. It was as close as I could come to asking if he was ill.

“Fine” was as close as he could come to telling me.

We got through dinner on the strength of my grandmother's cooking and her storytelling. When she finally ran out of family stories, I considered telling a few of my own about the California branch of the Elliotts. Instead I told a story about a favorite actor of my grandmother's, Ronald Colman. I'd met Colman some years earlier in a professional capacity. I related the outlines of that case to give my grandmother a chance to catch her breath and to give my father an idea of how I spent my days. My better days. She listened wide-eyed. He rubbed the edge of his knife with his thumb and said nothing.

After the banana pudding dessert, I helped my grandmother clear away the dishes. When I came back into the dining room, my father was gone. I spotted him slipping into a room down the hall, his study, a place that had always been off-limits to me. So much for that, I thought, but my grandmother thought differently. She was waving me on with both hands like a third-base coach who knows that the catcher has forgotten his glasses. I rounded the dining room and headed for the study.

My father was seated behind his desk, cleaning his pipe; that is, he was going through the motions of cleaning it, working a furry bit of wire around and around in the stem, reenacting a ritual I'd surely watched from my cradle. It really was a ritual this time and not a practical exercise. The pipe cleaner came out as white as it had gone in.

I could have asked him for some tobacco from the glass jar on his desk if I'd remembered to bring my pipe. I lit a Lucky instead and took a long, self-conscious drag.

“I suppose you're drinking now, too,” my father said.

“When I don't need a clear head for shooting craps.”

He acknowledged the joke by grunting. “I suppose the war did that to you.”

“Turning twenty-one did that to me, which happened some years back.”

“Don't remind me. I hate to think of the time that's gone.”

And the people, I thought. “Your grandchildren are doing fine, by the way. And your daughter-in-law.” That didn't even rate a grunt. “They wanted to come out to see you, but I thought it might be dangerous.”

“Did you think I'd bite them?”

“I meant the job I'm doing is dangerous.” I gave him a rundown of the attacks on Drury's movie, ending with our visit from the Klan.

That got his full attention. He left off packing his pipe with tobacco, the step I'd actually wanted to see.

“The Klan?” he repeated. In his incredulity he sounded like an older, better educated Sheriff Gustin. “You saw Klansmen?”

“And a burning cross. It brought back the night they marched here in Indianapolis. I thought they were coming for you that night.”

“I was too small an annoyance to merit that kind of attention. I'm proud to have been an annoyance to them, though, proud to have had a small part in ridding the state of them.” He went back to packing his pipe before adding, “For a time at least.”

“You believe they're still around?”

“As long as hate is around, the Klan will be. I won't live to see a world without hate. But it is surprising to hear of Klansmen showing themselves again. Something's not right about that. You should look into it.”

“I will,” I said.

We'd made some real progress. Somehow, my run-in with the Klan had validated me in a way no amount of Hollywood name-dropping could ever do. The smart play would have been to quit while I was ahead. I bet on another roll.

“I went by Crown Hill Cemetery on my way here.”

My father set his pipe down unlit. “I'm sure your mother would have appreciated the effort. Think of how much more it would have meant to her if you'd made it during the years it took her to die.”

It was a lead-in for the question I'd been dreading all day, a variation on the one Carlisle had asked of Whitehead. Why had I stayed on in Hollywood, a failure, when I could have come home to help her? My father stopped short of asking the question, but I answered it anyway.

“She knew how important that dream was to me.”

“Yes,” my father said. “I never understood it, but she did. It's a shame the dream didn't work out for either one of you.”

That exchange really ended my visit, but I sat out the evening in the formal living room for my grandmother's sake. It was after ten when I started for Traynorville with Shepard's leftover chicken for company. I drove more slowly going back on the lonely, underlit roads. It was nearly midnight when I arrived at the end of Riverbend's gravel drive.

I knew right away that something was wrong. There were no sheriff's deputies at the spot where the drive met the road. The farmhouse was dark. I'd decided by the time I reached the house that the farm was deserted, that Drury and Shepard had packed up and moved to Traynor House–or all the way back to Hollywood.

Then I climbed out of the wagon and smelled smoke. It was wood smoke, and it was coming from the barn. I ran across the gravel courtyard, my footfalls sounding like rifle fire in the stillness of the night. When I reached the grass near the building, I heard a softer sound: the crackling and popping of kindling. It led me to the back of the barn. There, someone had made a pile of sticks and dry grass and set it alight. The flames were licking away at the barn's tinder siding.

I kicked the pile apart and threw handfuls of dirt on the barn wood where it had begun to char. Then I backed toward the house, scanning the darkness and reaching for the gun I wasn't wearing.

I hadn't gotten very far before I noticed that the light was on in the little tack room I'd checked on Friday night. I decided to check the room again.

Clark hadn't had time to finish the ramp for Drury's wheelchair. He'd been too busy wandering around looking for Klansmen to flatten with his lead pipe. I stepped over one of the rails and then stopped to listen. The door to the room was slightly ajar, throwing a thin shaft of light across the yard. There was no sound to go with the light, but there was another smell. Spent powder.

I pushed the door open and saw a man lying on his back on the raised floor near the room's far wall. It was Hank Shepard. I noted that his eyes were open and his arms were limp at his sides. I didn't bother saying his name. Shepard wouldn't have answered me. He had a bright red stain on the front of his white shirt. It was centered above his heart.

24

It was another bad connection, worse than the one I'd had the night I'd called Ella. This time, though, I was calling Paddy Maguire, a man who had learned to speak on the telephone back when it was commonly believed that the lines were hollow and the system ran on lung power.

“Hank Shepard murdered? Mary, Mother of God. What about Drury?”

“Napping in his wheelchair when it happened. He'd had dinner with Eric Faris, Ralph Lockard's man. Set it up on the sly and sent me off to see Whitehead in Indianapolis so I wouldn't know about it.”

“John Piers Whitehead's in Indiana, too?”

“We're expecting Garbo at any moment.” I could only guess how the joke came across in California. In Indiana, it sounded as flat as the beers of yesterday, to use Shepard's phrase. It was Monday afternoon, and I was pretty flat myself. I hadn't spent much time sitting down in the hours since I'd found Shepard. I certainly hadn't shaved or changed my shirt.

“What did Drury want from Faris?”

“I haven't gotten that out of him yet. He's pretty shaken. Faris picked Drury up about seven and took him to a roadhouse halfway to Indy. They left Shepard at the farm to keep an eye on the place. Drury had chased off the sheriff's men we'd had on guard, probably to keep them from telling the Traynors about Faris coming by.”

“What sheriff's men?” Paddy asked, sounding no farther away now than Kansas City.

“There was some trouble a couple of nights ago. It's a long story. I'll write you a letter.”

“And forget to mail it probably,” Paddy said.

“Faris drove Drury back around eleven. Shepard was gone. Drury figured he was visiting the caretaker on the far end of the property. He fell asleep waiting for Shepard to come back. He may have heard a shot a little while after that. He didn't wake up enough to be sure.”

“What
are
we sure about?”

“I found Shepard's body in the tack room of the Traynor barn at twelve-fifteen. He'd been shot at close range with a good-size round. A forty-five, probably. The muzzle flash scorched his shirt. The bullet went through him and ended up in the wall of the barn. The sheriff's people have it.”

“Is this Sheriff Whosits up to a murder investigation?”

“It's Sheriff Gustin, and no, he's not. But Gustin's smart enough to know he's in over his head. He's already called in help from the state police and a crime lab down in Indy. Gustin has the Traynors' political clout behind him, so he's getting everything yesterday.”

“How about you, Scotty? Do you have this Gustin's ear? Are you on the inside of the investigation?”

“I'm calling you from the sheriff's office right now.” I didn't tell Paddy that I was there for questioning, that I was so much on the inside of the case that I'd actually made the list of suspects, that I should have been calling a lawyer on the phone Gustin had provided instead of making long-distance calls collect.

“Good man,” Paddy said. “You know my methods. Apply them. Use this Gustin character's inexperience to your advantage. Tell him you've seen more murders than newsreels. Encourage him to lean on you.”

The beanpole deputy who had escorted Faris to Riverbend after the cross burning arrived at my borrowed desk. He wasn't smiling.

“I think Gustin's ready to start leaning on me right now,” I said. “Call Ella before the afternoon papers come out. The story will have broken by then. Tell her I'm okay. I'll call her later.”

The sheriff's office was in the county courthouse in the center of the Traynorville town square. It was an old brick and limestone building, dating from the pre-automobile time that Drury so despised. It had the same blackened woodwork as Riverbend, stone floors that should have been cool but weren't, and high ceilings with lazy fans. The fans were my age, probably, but they looked glaringly modern against the tiles of pressed tin that covered the ceilings.

The deputy escorted me to a room that was even hotter than the rest of the courthouse. Paper shades had been pulled down to cover windows as tall as a man; yellowed, rain-spotted shades that cut off the light and the air without blocking the heat. Gustin sat behind the centerpiece desk, looking even pinker than usual. He'd rolled up his sleeves and undone his tie. So had the state police lieutenant from Indianapolis, whom I'd met at the farm, and a civilian I hadn't met. I figured him to be the county prosecutor's man, and that was the way Gustin introduced him. Gustin didn't introduce the male stenographer or the woman seated in the corner behind the stenographer. That last introduction would have been silly, given how chummy Linda Traynor and I had become. She looked perfectly cool in her tan suit, her expression especially so. The only surprising thing about her presence was that she wasn't installed behind Gustin's desk.

The sheriff said, “You'll be happy to know that your gun is in Indianapolis right now.”

“My gun that hasn't been fired in weeks?”

“Your gun that hasn't been fired since the last time it was cleaned,” the state cop, whose name was Zimmerman, said.

Gustin ignored the interruption. “The murder bullet is also at the laboratory. We should hear something soon. We've been promised top priority for the ballistic tests.”

“Thanks for going to so much trouble to clear me,” I said.

“You're a professional, Elliott,” Zimmerman said. “You know we have to check every lead.” He was a leather-faced citizen, wire thin and as seasoned as the courthouse woodwork. With him around, even Paddy would have had a hard time landing the job of wise, old counselor.

“You've spoken with Drury,” I said, “so you know I was hired to protect Shepard, not shoot him.” Specifically to watch his back, I reminded myself for the sixtieth time.

“We learned more than that from Mr. Drury,” Gustin said. “He told us you'd had a run-in with Shepard back in Hollywood. That was confirmed by Gilbert Traynor. Mr. Traynor saw Shepard get fresh with your wife and saw you drag Shepard off. According to Mr. Drury, you assaulted the guy.”

“I tagged him on the jaw. That's what you do to a drunk who gets fresh with your wife. You don't murder him.”

Gustin shifted in his chair, which for him was quite an attack of nerves. He started to glance over toward the corner where the invisible Linda Traynor sat, but caught himself. “Shepard did more than get fresh with your wife. He'd had a prior relationship with her. He told Mr. Drury that he'd thrown that and other things in your face.”

I'd have to apologize to Ella for dismissing her concerns too casually. They
had
heard about her reputation in Indiana, courtesy of Carson Drury. It would have been nice to have returned the favor and implicated Drury somehow. Nice but impossible. Shepard's killer had stood close enough to him in the murder room to touch his shirt with the muzzle of the gun. That left Drury out because the wheelchair ramp for the tack room was still unfinished. I had to look elsewhere for a substitute fall guy.

“Where does the Klan fit into this?” I asked.

“I told you Saturday,” Gustin said. “There's no Ku Klux Klan left in this county.”

“Sorry. I meant the Fuller Brush men who torched the cross on our lawn on Friday night. They threatened to burn us out, remember? I found Shepard in a barn that was ten minutes away from being a bonfire.”

“A barn being set afire doesn't necessarily point to your visitors from the other night,” Gustin said. “We've had barn burnings in this county before, God knows. There was a spate of them during the war, from what I've heard. Besides, anybody might have thought to burn that barn to destroy evidence.”

Anybody, including me. I dodged in another direction. “How about a tie-in to a Hollywood fire? Or did Drury forget to mention the sabotage against his picture? That cast on his leg is a souvenir of the last attempt. He could easily have been killed in that accident. Now someone has been killed–the guy who went into a burning building back in Culver City to save the movie's negative. He ends up shot in a burning barn in Indiana where the negative was going to be edited. Maybe the murderer thought it was already there. Maybe Shepard surprised him.”

“He left his revolver in his room,” Gustin said. “The night I came by to sit with you, Mr. Shepard never let that gun get out of reach.”

“Besides,” Zimmerman said, “nobody around here cares about a motion picture negative. Your saboteur would have to be an outsider. And our other visitors from California are accounted for. Faris spent the evening with Drury. After he got Drury back to the farm, he left. Drury watched him drive off and noted the time. So did the night clerk who saw Faris arrive at his hotel. We've clocked the drive, and the times check out. Faris stayed up for a while, talking to the clerk. She had him in sight until well after the time you say you found the body.

“The other fellow, John P. Whitehead, was in Indianapolis. He's staying at the home of a friend, a Professor Carlisle. The prof says Whitehead was there all night Sunday.”

“Even so,” Gustin said, “we're bringing Mr. Whitehead up here for questioning.” He made another of his aborted glances toward Linda. It told me that Whitehead was scheduled for the Traynor treatment. He was going to be warned off as Faris had been. I wished Linda luck with that.

“I was in Indianapolis myself,” I said, “as I seem to remember telling you.”

“I've spoken to your father,” Gustin said. “He told me you left his apartment at ten. If you got to the farm a little after midnight, you didn't make very good time.”

I didn't bother explaining it. No excuses about the roads being bad or me being down or the station wagon being a plow horse would have bought me anything. Gustin and company were right: I could easily have shaved twenty minutes off the drive. That would have given me enough time to shoot a squad of Shepards.

“You've gotten a time of death?”

“Not even an official cause of death,” Gustin said. “Our coroner, Dr. Cortese, is still at it over to O'Connor's.”

“The funeral home?”

“And morgue, when we need one. Doc Cortese is very methodical and very cautious. When he does get around to giving us a time of death, it'll be as vague as a horoscope. Seeing how warm it was last night, I'm guessing he'll say that the murder could have happened anytime between eleven and the minute before you phoned it in.”

I noted that Gustin had been too polite to say “the minute after you phoned it in.” The whole interrogation had been polite. With no more to go on than Gustin had, the L.A. cops would have been sweating me good, just to keep their joints limber. The Traynorville murder squad was going through the motions, following its leads, as Zimmerman had said, but not pressing. Either the Elliott charm was working its way past my wilted linen, or someone was looking out for me. This time I was the one who almost looked at Linda Traynor.

I decided to test my pull. “Is that all you have to ask me, or is there something else about my wife you'd like to drag up?”

Gustin darkened a shade. “We expect the results of the ballistic tests today. If you keep us informed of your movements, we'll be able to return your gun.”

Or club me with it if the slugs matched. “I'm not going anywhere,” I said, “except maybe to bed.”

I stood up. Nobody batted an eye, so I went out the way I'd come in. Linda Traynor followed me into the outer office.

“I'm sorry about all that, Scotty,” she said.

“Thanks for keeping me out of a cell.”

“I had to. I need to talk with you. Could we have dinner tonight?”

“How about lunch tomorrow? I may be awake by then.”

“Come by the plant. Anyone in town can point you to it.”

She didn't have a chance to set a time. John Piers Whitehead was led in just then by a bored-looking state trooper. Whitehead had cleaned himself up since we'd had breakfast together back in Hollywood. His shirt was white and crisp, and his plaid suit was fresh from some tailor's needle. We'd traded wardrobes, I thought wryly. That might have been why Whitehead didn't say hello. He looked past me to Linda as though he'd never seen me before. Then he was ushered into Gustin's presence.

Linda joined the procession. Over her shoulder she said, “Please don't stand me up.”