Come Back Dead (19 page)

30

A message was waiting for me at the main gate of the Traynor plant when Linda and I got back from Middletown. She was wearing her suit jacket again, and her hair was pinned up tighter than Eric Faris's nerves. The Traynor guard touched the brim of his hat to her before addressing me.

“The sheriff wants you down at the courthouse. Something important.”

Linda climbed out of the coupé. “Use this car for a change,” she said. “It's more your style.”

The important something Gustin had to see me about turned out to be a visitor from Indianapolis, my father. My father the lawyer, to be precise. He was sitting in the sheriff's waiting room, ramrod straight and dressed for a day in court, right down to his old briefcase and his favorite prop, a pair of gold pince-nez glasses that were currently parked in the breast pocket of his three-piece suit. I remembered the glasses from my time in the visitors gallery as a boy when he would adjust and readjust them on his nose while he marshaled his thoughts or wave them in front of a witness like a hypnotist's watch.

“Tom,” he said when I stepped up to him, “you've had us worried.”

By “us” he had to be referring to himself and my grandmother. The only other person in the waiting area, Gustin's maiden-aunt receptionist, was indifference itself.

I asked her to thank the sheriff for tracking me down and led my lawyer out into the slightly cooler hallway. “Did you think I'd been arrested?” I asked as the door closed behind us.

“I didn't know what to think. First the sheriff called to check your whereabouts on Sunday. Then the
Times
made it sound as though you were a suspect in the murder investigation. It said your gun was being tested.”

I held open my coat to display the forty-five. “It passed.”

At the sight of the gun, my father's normally narrow eyes grew wide, as though I'd revealed a tattoo or other, less artistic needle marks. I felt an impulse to apologize to him for the way I'd turned out, for rejecting his plans for me as too small and then ending up smaller by far. The impulse passed.

“Let's find a quiet place to talk,” I said. “There are benches out on the square.”

I'd covered up the gun again, but my father was still looking at it. He roused himself. “Is it too early for a drink?” he asked.

It was my turn to stretch my eyelids. “Not where I've been living,” I said.

I happened to know of a place nearby, Augie's, the bar on the square where Clark drank his Friday nights away. I expected a twin of the Old Post Tavern, but Augie's surprised me, pleasantly. It had pine paneling indirectly lit, an oval bar surrounded by booths, and almost no business on this Tuesday afternoon. The bartender–Augie himself–had even heard of Gibsons.

I watched him mix one while my father selected a booth. “I think I know a customer of yours,” I said for no particular reason.

“That so?” Augie said. He had long sideburns like the ones some of the men from my old battery had worn, the kids from Tennessee.

“His name is Clark. I'm told he's a regular on Friday nights.”

“Maybe on Monday nights, too, from now on,” Augie said. “He was in here last night, drinking to get drunk like he always does. I thought we were in for trouble from the look he had. I don't mean his expression. He don't have but one expression. Don't have enough face left for two. You have to tell his mood from his color. The darker he gets, the closer I keep my old keg tapper.” He reached under the bar and pulled out a short wooden club with holes drilled in its head, the holes crudely filled with lead. “He was plenty dark last night, but nothing happened.”

“Was he here last Friday night?”

“Yep. Stayed till closing, too, which he hasn't done for years. When I locked up, he was out on the square, pissing on that old French gun. He likes to do that. Don't know why.”

I thought I did, but I kept my guess to myself. I paid Augie and carried the drinks over to our booth. My father took the smallest possible sip of his rye and water and then opened the briefcase that shared his side of the booth. I thought he might produce some evidence he'd brought along to prove my innocence–my report cards or my honorable discharge–but the only things that came out of the case were his pipe and a pouch of tobacco.

“I've been trying to learn to smoke one of those,” I said.

“Really? How is it going?”

“I don't seem to have the knack.”

“Like most bad habits, it doesn't come naturally,” he said. “You'll get the hang of it in time. You're packing the bowl too tightly, more than likely. Half as much as it will hold is about right. Loosely arranged. Leaves room for the smoke.”

As he demonstrated, I asked, “How did you come up from the city?”

“By the Interurban,” he said, naming the system of glorified trolleys that connected Indianapolis with neighboring towns. “I can catch the five o'clock car home, as you don't need my help.”

He was already slipping back into the person I'd visited on Sunday, the old man sitting by his radio. It was enough to make me wish I'd been arrested.

“I'm not making much progress,” I said. “I wouldn't mind talking the case over with someone.”

“I'd be pleased to listen.”

During my visit to his apartment, I'd told him about the sabotage attempts in Hollywood and the Klan visit to the Traynor farm. So I launched into the murder without preamble, starting with the moment when I'd found the body and the twelve hours afterward during which I'd told my story over and over to different policemen. I described Faris's alibi and Whitehead's and my lack thereof. I explained Gustin's interest in me by admitting that Shepard had gotten fresh with Ella at Drury's party. My honesty had its limits, though. I didn't say that Ella had known Shepard earlier. I also omitted, for practice, Linda Traynor's unkept appointment with Shepard.

Through all that, my father smoked and said nothing. I slipped out of sequence, telling him first about the strange results of the ballistics test and Gustin's guess that the murder bullet had been fired by a homemade gun and then about the Pallisers' connection to the Klan. I'd saved that for last, thinking it would be the part that interested him the most. I was wrong. I noticed that his eyes weren't focusing on me, and his pipe was smoking itself.

I stopped short of my big scene with Marvella Traynor and said, “What's wrong?”

“That bullet. Something about that bullet.” He set his pipe down on the table, leaning it against his forgotten drink. “I was counsel to Indiana's production board during the war.”

“I remember,” I said.

He pulled his glasses from the pocket of his jacket and began tapping the table with them. “I remember a project–a top secret project–a handgun for the OSS. The code name for the gun was the Flare Projector, but even back then people were calling it the Liberator. It even had a nickname, the Woolworth gun, because it was so inexpensive to make. The frame was stamped steel, and the barrel–this is what brought it to mind–the barrel was unrifled.”

“What did the OSS want with a gun like that?”

“They intended to drop them from planes behind enemy lines for use by resistance forces. They did drop them, over a million of them, in Europe and the Philippines. I would have forgotten all about that gun except that I ran across one after the war. Rather, a friend of mine did, a friend from the production board. He saw one in a gun shop in Indianapolis. Evidently some of our boys brought them back as souvenirs.”

“Gustin and Clark are veterans,” I said, thinking out loud. “Hank Shepard was himself. But then, half the men in Indiana are.”

“Let me finish, son, and maybe you won't have to search from house to house for this gun. One job of the production board was assigning projects to various factories around the state. As you know, certain industries went over to war production completely, like the automobile industry. The bigger plants built tanks and planes, and the little ones picked up piecework and special projects like this gun.”

“The Traynor plant.”

“That's what I'm trying to tell you. If my memory isn't failing me, the works right here in Traynorville made that gun. It was supposed to be a secret project, as I said, but a lot of the people around here must remember it. I'm surprised that sheriff of yours doesn't.”

“He's not my sheriff,” I said. “He belongs to the Traynors.”

31

Gilbert Traynor was seated in his office at the Traynor Automobile Company, looking smaller than life, as he almost always did. This time the culprit was his desk. Being Gilbert's, it was naturally out of keeping with the rest of the company's furnishings, which might have been listed under the heading “Overinflated Leather” in some supplier's catalogue. The desk, on the other hand, was out of a world's fair exhibit on the office of tomorrow: an elliptical slab of exotic wood, supported by three legs, one of them a sweeping, inverted fin.

As I waited for our meeting to begin, I had a second thought on the subject, deciding that Gilbert was being dwarfed by his tie. Not a bad trick, either, because the tie was an exceedingly narrow bit of striped silk. He'd loosened it, perhaps when he'd heard the five o'clock whistle blow, which made the tie look as if it had been knotted for a larger man.

“What's the emergency, Elliott?” he asked mildly but warily.

There was no emergency, at least no new one. I'd implied that there was at the plant's main gate when my initial call to Gilbert's office hadn't gotten me inside. I'd winded myself and the Studebaker racing to the Interurban stop with my father and then to the plant to catch Gilbert before he escaped into his mother's fortress, Traynor House. When I'd been told by Gilbert's secretary through Gilbert's front-gate guard to make an appointment, I'd realized that the plant was Gilbert's own fortress. So I'd tried to give the impression that the murderer was snapping at my heels, or vice versa.

The ruse had worked, but we'd both had time to think about it while I'd taken the elevator up to the bridal suite. Gilbert had gotten suspicious. I'd gotten angry.

“Why am I using the tradesman's entrance with you?” I asked. “I thought we were on the same side.”

“I have a business relationship with the man you work for,” Gilbert said, no longer mild, but under control. “Not with you. When Mr. Drury finishes with your services, I won't even have that distant connection. I'll expect you to vacate the farm and return the company car.”

It was the morning after in a big way for Gilbert and me. He'd been friendly enough at the courthouse on the prior afternoon–penitent, even, over his role in bringing my fight with Shepard to Gustin's attention. I asked myself what had happened since to change things.

“Your mother mentioned my stopping by for tea, I take it.”

“How dare you be flip about threatening my mother?” Gilbert demanded, sounding so much like Marvella that, angry as I was, I felt sorry for him. “How could you abuse our hospitality like that?”

“As I recall, your mother did most of the threatening. And since when is burning crosses on people's lawns called hospitality?”

There didn't seem to be much of anything in Gilbert, not even fight. He sank a little in his jet-pilot chair and started to pull at his moustache.

“Why didn't you tell us your uncle had been bucking for grand dragon of the Klan?”

“Would you tell anyone that? What good would it have done to dig that up? My uncle has been dead for twenty years. He wasn't under one of the hoods you saw. Neither was I.”

I had been considering the latter possibility, thinking back on Drury's insight into the Klan, the idea that the frightening thing about it was its facelessness. Drury had also guessed that Gilbert was using us and
Albertsons
to rebel against his family–more specifically, against his mother. But when the chance had come for Gilbert to rebel in a big way, he'd ignored it.

“If you'd reminded Gustin about the Pallisers,” I said, “you might have given him the real motive for the cross burning. It wasn't revenge against Drury for
First Citizen
. It was an attempt to scare him out of Indiana so that he couldn't separate you from your money.”

Gilbert thought it over. “There's no way we'll ever know that for sure. Frank Gustin isn't going to give my mother the third degree.”

“I know. He has a wife and kids to feed.”

“So do you,” Gilbert said, suddenly as sentimental as Paddy on Saint Patrick's Day. “You should be thinking about getting back to see them. They're missing you a lot more than anyone will ever miss Hank Shepard.”

Spoken in Gilbert's wistful tone, the reference to my family and the possibility of never seeing them again didn't come across as a threat or even a veiled threat. But it was surely a warning.

“Are you ready to tell me what goes on in Traynorville?” I asked.

“I told you before, I don't know myself.” It was clear that not knowing no longer excited him. He told me why next. “Hank Shepard would still be alive if I had guessed what was going to happen. Right now I'd just like to go home. Carson is coming to dinner, and I should be there when he arrives. If you'd get to the point of this meeting, I'd appreciate it.”

“Tell me about the Liberator.”

“It was a bomber, I think,” he said, wary now in spades.

“I mean the pistol.”

“I know what you mean. Who told you about that?”

A man who was overdressed for the Interurban car he was riding, a man who had shaken my hand good-bye, but hadn't told me he loved me or that he forgave me for deserting my dying mother. It was a good thing I had seen enough movies to read all that into the handshake.

“An old friend,” I said. “He told me the Liberator was a forty-five-caliber handgun made right here by the Traynor Company during the war. It fires a standard round through an unrifled barrel, which means it will blow a hole through a guy at close range and leave behind a bullet with no scoring.”

“No what?”

“No marks made by the rifling inside a normal barrel. Any bullet fired through a normal gun has them. That's why I'm a free man. My gun scores a bullet. The gun that killed Shepard doesn't.”

I hadn't expected that to be news to Gilbert, but it was. Somehow he hadn't gotten today's briefing from Gustin. He wouldn't have gotten one if he was busy pretending that none of this was happening. He'd be hiding in his office, reluctant to see even me. He'd be back to defending the family he'd previously wanted no part of. I'd misjudged the entire interview, I realized, right down to handing him the one piece of information I should have held back.

I watched him figuring and refiguring over the course of a long minute. Then, without taking his close-set eyes from the point in space where they were focused, he reached out with his right hand and pulled open a drawer concealed behind the shark's fin leg of his desk. He rummaged in the drawer, still gazing into space. Then his hand came out holding a gun.

It came out so slowly that I had plenty of time to get my own gun out and ready to fire. That drew Gilbert back to earth. “This isn't loaded,” he said.

“Mine is,” I said. “Put yours down on the desktop and push it across to me.”

He looked as though he'd rather throw it at me, but he did as I said. “I used that as a paperweight for years. We have one in the company trophy case, but there were extras, so I appropriated one. It reminded me that the company had done some important work during the war.”

I put my Colt away and examined the Liberator. It was small and light, so light that I might have mistaken it for a toy gun if I'd just happened across it. As my father had said, the frame was formed by two pieces of stamped metal, joined along the gun's vertical axis and spot-welded together. These halves were clamped around the short barrel. The barrel received some additional support from the trigger guard, a broad, flat band of steel that curved up from the metal grip to encircle the tube at a point very close to its smooth bore. At the opposite end, the barrel had been reinforced by an extra sleeve of pipe crudely welded into place. The whole assembly was painted olive drab.

“How do you load it?”

“I don't know. I was still in school when that was made.”

I'd figured it out by then. The hammer was made of pot metal and shaped like the plug at the end of an electric cord. The hammer pivoted out of the way, and the rear sight slid upward to expose the breech. Nothing was in the chamber now, not even the faintest whiff of spent powder.

“I told you it hasn't been fired,” Gilbert said.

The best proof of that was the fact that the gun was still in one piece. It was hard to imagine a Liberator having a long service life. I found a sliding panel on the bottom of the grip. It opened to reveal a compartment as empty as the chamber but bigger.

“What went in here? Spare rounds?”

“Nylon stockings, probably,” Gilbert said, “for bartering with the natives. I promise you, that gun hasn't been out of this plant.”

“Let's check the one in your trophy case,” I said.

“Fine. It's on the way to my car.”

I pocketed the Liberator. Gilbert thought about that, but didn't say anything. He climbed into the padded shoulders of a sports coat and led me to the elevator. We rode down without chatting.

I hadn't noticed a trophy case on my way into the office building. It wasn't a problem with my eyesight, either. Gilbert double-timed us out of the modern office block and across a brick plaza to an older, lower structure identified simply as “Building 1.” Inside were half a dozen Traynor automobiles, including a midnight blue Phaeton Six. Gilbert ran his hand over its gleaming fender without breaking stride.

At the center of the car collection sat the trophy case. It contained the whole history of the company: silver loving cups and jugs from races that early Traynor cars had won, framed newspaper articles and ads for later models, and chrome-plated examples of the pistons and rods and other odds and ends the company had fallen into making when it had stopped building cars.

In a place of honor at the center of the case was something I hadn't expected to see: a tiny, silken banner with a gold star embroidered on it.

“Mark's, of course,” Gilbert said, following my gaze. “From the front window of Traynor House. The ladies of the plant made it for my mother after he was killed.”

I remembered the little banners from the war years. Almost all the houses had had one, or so it had seemed. A star for every son or daughter in the service. A gold star for every son or daughter who wasn't coming back.

“Your mother gave that up?”

“There's your damn gun,” Gilbert said in reply.

The Liberator was affixed to a wooden plaque. The brass plate beneath the pistol read: oss liberator, 1,000,214 produced, 1943.

“Do you want to dust the plaque for fingerprints?” Gilbert asked.

I had him open the case so I could see how securely the pistol was fastened to the board. I decided it would come apart before it would come off.

“Satisfied?”

“I will be when you tell me about the other examples.”

“What other examples?”

“You said back in your office that you took one of the Liberators because there was one in the trophy case and extras. How many extras? Just answer me. Don't work out the chances of lying to me first, or I'm going to the cops–the real cops, not Gustin.”

“There were two extras, mine and another.”

“Where's number two? Traynor House?”

“You don't want to know where.”

“Why not?”

He rammed the glass door of the case closed, rattling the whole display. “Because it makes you a suspect again.”

“It was at the farmhouse? I never saw it.”

“You'll have to convince the police of that, not me.”

It was an easy bluff to call. “The police are going to be busy asking why you never mentioned this gun.”

“I never even thought of it. The world is full of guns. I didn't know about any marks on any bullets. I didn't even know the Liberator wouldn't make them. I had no reason to connect that relic with the murder.”

He'd let his voice get out of control. He heard it bouncing around the museum and shrank a little more. “If the reporters get hold of this, they'll storm the house. You have to help me keep this quiet, Scotty.”

Hank Shepard's murder was doing wonders for broken relationships. First Drury and Whitehead had mended their fences. Then my father and I had. Now Gilbert was holding an olive branch out to his business associate's hired man. Waving it in my face, in fact.

“What are we going to do, Scotty?”

“Go home and enjoy your dinner,” I said. “I'm going to take your farmhouse apart.”