Come Back Dead (23 page)

38

The Indy cop who showed me the way out was a friendly guy trying to get through a long shift. He was happy to lend me a city directory and then to tell me how to get to the address I found in it, Professor Walter Carlisle's address.

After he'd given me the directions, the cop pointed to a wall clock that was covered with greasy dust. “It's a little early to be calling.”

“Tell Carlisle that if he should report a prowler,” I said.

According to the directory, Carlisle lived alone on a street called Kenwood, not far from his college and his precious outdoor theater. The simple frame house looked well kept, but it was a dark night, and my eyes felt as filmed over as the police station clock. Carlisle's screen door was certainly warped. It put out a very satisfying reverberation when I beat on it.

I raised a dog down the block first. Then I got a light in a neighbor's house. Finally, I got Carlisle. That is, I got his disembodied voice. The front door opened a crack, and he asked, “John?”

“Nope,” I said.

He switched on the front porch fixture. It had a yellow bulb of the type guaranteed not to attract moths. It took the professor a long time to place me. When he did, he said, “John's not here.”

“So I gathered. Have you gotten a call from Sheriff Gustin tonight?”

“No,” Carlisle said, looking a little ill in the yellow light. “I was at a rehearsal until very late. Why would the sheriff be calling me?”

“Let me in. You don't want the neighbors to hear the rest of this.”

The dog down the street was still barking. With him on my side, I won the argument. Carlisle opened the screen door and stepped back into the darkness. A second later, the darkness was shooed into the corners of the room by a standing lamp.

It was a music room of sorts. An ancient upright piano took up most of stage left. To my right was a very modern hi-fi, its Hollywood blond top littered with records. At the center of the platters were wineglasses, two of them. Carlisle was standing near the phonograph, retying his bathrobe. The robe was the gray-brown color people used to call “mousy,” back when they admitted to occasionally seeing a mouse. There was no trace of pajamas above or below the robe, but then, it was a hot night.

“What's happened to John?” Carlisle asked.

“In a minute,” I said. “First tell me why you lied about last Sunday night.”

Carlisle drew himself up and stuck his ball-peen chin out at me. There's a limit, though, to the dignity you can muster when you're barefoot in a bathrobe. His “How dare you?” missed the target low.

“You told Gustin that Whitehead was down here Sunday night while a pal of Drury's named Shepard was getting himself murdered up in Traynorville.”

“That is correct,” the professor said.

“I just came from the Indy lockup. They're holding a witness who can place Whitehead in Traynorville on Sunday night. In fact, he can place him within a few hundred yards of the barn where Shepard died.”

“Then it will be his word against John's and mine. And I must say, he doesn't sound like a very reputable witness.”

“He was only a mildly crooked accountant until he met Drury,” I said. “And it will be his word against yours, period.”

“Why? What's happened to John?”

“You live here alone, don't you, Professor?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have company?” I nodded at the wineglasses.

“Not now. A colleague stopped by earlier, after the rehearsal for
Knickerbocker Holiday
. I have to direct the play myself now, since John deserted me to rejoin Drury.”

“When did you get the word on that?”

“This morning. I mean yesterday morning, Tuesday morning. John was driven up to Traynorville on Monday afternoon for questioning. He never came back. On Tuesday morning he called and asked me to send up his things. He didn't apologize or offer an explanation. I didn't ask for one.”

“Why not? He was hanging you out to dry.”

“Because he sounded so happy. It was more than that–he sounded reborn. Please tell me what's happened to him.”

“He disappeared tonight. He walked away from an important dinner in Traynorville and hasn't been seen since. He may have met with foul play, or he may be hiding somewhere. Here, for example.”

“There's no one else here,” Carlisle said.

“Then you won't mind if I look around.”

I hadn't taken a step, but Carlisle moved to cut me off from the rest of the house. “I most certainly do mind. You're not a policeman, and you don't have a warrant.”

“I can have both here faster than you can sneak Whitehead out the back.” It was a thin bluff, but I was too tired for embroidery.

“You don't need a policeman,” a voice behind Carlisle said. The speaker was standing at the foot of the staircase. She was dressed even more casually than the professor, in a bedsheet toga. She had red hair as artlessly arranged as her sheet, and legs that could have given Arlene Dahl's lessons in geometry. I guessed her age at eighteen, give or take a semester.

“Go back upstairs, Daphne,” Carlisle said.

“We're not ashamed of anything,” Daphne said in parting. She couldn't see Carlisle's face. If she'd been able to, she would have chosen a different tag line.

I now understood why Carlisle had stayed with the academic life so long and maybe why he changed colleges so often. “Relax, Prof,” I said. “I'm from Hollywood. I've stumbled across auditions before.”

“The point is,” Carlisle said, “John Whitehead isn't here.”

“I'm more interested in where he was on Sunday night.”

Carlisle gave his face a good long rubbing. When he'd finished, he said, “John was in Traynorville–at the Traynor farm. He went up that evening on the Interurban. I'm not sure why. He didn't get back here until dawn. He'd walked and hitchhiked the whole way down. He was in a terrible state, exhausted and frightened to death of something he'd seen at the farm.”

“Or done,” I said.

“I'll never believe that. I told you before that John is incapable of violence. Nothing I've seen since he arrived here in Indiana has changed my mind about that. Do you think I would have agreed to give him an alibi if I'd had the slightest doubt about his innocence?”

“Why did you agree to it?”

“To save him from the kind of small-town justice they have in places like Traynorville. The lock-up-the-stranger style of justice. You've seen what it's like up there. Tell me I'm wrong.”

I couldn't. I'd not only seen that kind of justice, I'd almost been a victim of it. “What scared Whitehead at the farm?”

“He never told me. He was too spent. He slept until noon. Then he barely had time to pull himself together before the police came to collect him for questioning in Traynorville. The next thing I heard, John had been hired by Carson Drury. I still can't make sense of that.”

“No one has,” I said.

I should have stopped by my father's apartment and borrowed a couch–or, better still, checked into a hotel under an assumed name. I was too tired to make even the short drive to Traynorville safely. But I'd left Paddy in a bad spot, so I pointed the Studebaker northeast.

I was also too tired to think, but that didn't stop me from kicking around the possibility that Whitehead was the murderer. It seemed a likely enough idea, now that I was beyond the range of Walter Carlisle's stubborn faith. He was remembering his friend as he'd been in New York in the thirties. The whole world had changed since then, and Whitehead with it. He was a broken man now, unable to get past the loss of Drury. And poor Hank Shepard was the sap who had taken Whitehead's place in Drury's affections. It had been an even worse career move than Shepard had thought.

The problem with the Whitehead solution was the weapon, the Liberator. How had Whitehead come to have it? He'd never been to the farm before the fateful night. He'd have had no reason to suspect a gun was even there. And he couldn't have searched the house even if he'd hoped to find a gun. Drury had already been there, dropped off by Faris before the unlucky accountant had spotted Whitehead. Then there was the question both Faris and Carlisle had raised: Why had Drury taken Whitehead back? Had Whitehead performed a service for Drury that night, with the job his reward? Or had Whitehead been telling Carlisle the truth when he'd said he'd seen something terrible at the farm? If so, had that something also been valuable?

I made it to the Roberts Hotel in one tired piece. The night shift desk clerk left his post and took me to the seventh floor himself. On our way up, I asked him if I'd missed any excitement.

He said, “It's been as quiet as a cemetery,” and then got embarrassed about it, maybe because he'd tied me in with Shepard or maybe because I looked as if I had one foot in the grave.

Paddy answered the door to Drury's suite in his undershirt and suit pants, one suspender on his shoulder and the other hanging down like an empty scabbard. He took one look at me and postponed his lecture. “Let's hear about it,” he said instead.

I gave him my report in a low voice, knowing that Drury was somewhere nearby. When I'd finished, Paddy said, “We'll chew it all over in the morning. There's a spare bed through that door over there. I'll wait up and watch for a while.”

“As long as you're going to be up,” I said, “how about making a call to California for me?”

“It's one a.m. in California. Your kids have been asleep for half an hour at least.”

“I want you to call one of your other operatives. Lange would be best; he could intimidate Khrushchev. Tell him to visit Dr. Petry, Drury's pill pusher.”

“What, yet tonight?”

“Yet tonight. Tell Lange to demand to see Drury's X rays. He can say he's a fraud investigator from RKO's insurance company. He can say anything as long as it throws a scare into the doctor.”

“What's this about?”

“A boy who ran away to join the circus,” I said and called it a day.

I couldn't escape Traynorville, not even in my dreams. They were a reworking of my day, with the episodes and the players jumbled. I was in the rail yard again, being menaced–ineffectually–by Whitehead. Then I was in Gilbert's office to collect the Liberator. The man behind the sleek desk, who pulled the gun from its hiding place and pointed it at my chest, was Gilbert's dead brother, Mark. Before he could shoot me, I was in Carlisle's house, pointing to the incriminating wineglasses. The professor stepped aside to reveal his latest conquest, Linda Traynor.

I awoke with Paddy shaking my shoulder. “Sorry, Scotty. I let you sleep as long as I could. We just got a call from Gustin. He's finally found John Piers Whitehead.”

“Safe?”

“For good and all. They pulled him out of the local river at a spot called Victory Park. Drury and I are headed there now. Follow us when you can.”

39

I was surprised to find my bag packed and standing at the foot of my bed, next to a breakfast tray. A Traynor footman had brought the case over at dawn, Paddy told me as he left. Gilbert had wasted no time in severing his last tie to Carson Drury's hired man.

Thirty minutes after Paddy wheeled Drury out, I pulled the Studebaker into the gravel lot of Victory Park. It was a little stretch of sycamore trees and concrete picnic tables on the bank of the White River a mile out of town. A limestone marker at the gate dedicated the park to the “Men and Women of the Armed Forces, 1941 to 1945.” The marker was mossy with age.

I felt a little mossy myself. I'd gotten all of four hours' sleep and five minutes in the shower, but I'd done better than Gustin. I found the sheriff by the bank of the river, looking like the before picture in an ad for nerve tonic. He and Paddy were inspecting an outcropping of land on which stood a particularly brave sycamore. The current, eating away at the little peninsula, had exposed the stone underneath the soil and the roots of the tree, creating miniature caves that collected the debris of the river. Gustin was explaining to Paddy how the snag had collected Whitehead.

“I had some men out on the river before dawn. They found the body here about nine o'clock. They'd been past this spot earlier, but they'd missed him in the darkness–if he'd made it this far by then.”

Gustin lost his balance climbing back up the bank. Paddy caught him at the last second and hauled him up one-handed.

“Thanks. It'd serve me right to fall in the damn river. It would have served me right if the river had washed Mr. Whitehead up to my door. That's where his death should be laid,” he said, addressing me now. “If I'd gotten myself out to Traynor House last night when you'd told me to, he'd still be alive.”

“How did he die?” I asked.

“We're guessing it was a cracked skull,” Paddy said. “Or drowning brought on by a cracked skull.”

“He wandered out of Traynor House and into the arms of that maniac Nast,” Gustin said. “That's how he died. Nast killed him–maybe just to keep him from calling out–and dumped him in the river at the edge of the property. The body drifted down this far before it caught.”

“It could have been an accident,” I said by way of consoling him. “The terrace behind the house is a good thirty feet above the water. Whitehead could have wandered out to be sick, fallen in, and hit his head. The river's lined with stone.”

“Thanks for trying,” Gustin said. “But I'm through looking the other way. It was murder and it was my fault. There were the marks of two heavy blows on his head. One on the front and one on the back. You can't fall once and bash both sides of your skull. I'd show you the marks, but I already sent the body to O'Connor's.”

“Drury's there now making the formal identification,” Paddy said. “He has a deputy along to push his chair, but I'd feel better if one of us was on hand.”

Meaning me. Paddy elaborated as we walked to the parking lot: “Sheriff Gustin is going to pay a call on Marvella Traynor. I've offered to keep him company. Ever since you described the lady to me, I've been wanting to discuss Irish immigration with her.”

“I want to be there, too,” I said. “I've earned a ticket.”

“You have,” Paddy said. “But we're unlikely to sneak up on her if you're along.”

“Don't worry,” Gustin told me. “I won't be standing there with my hat in my hand. I've had enough of this job and enough of the Traynors. I'm getting the truth today if I have to take that place apart brick by brick.”

I got to O'Connor's in time to help Drury's new bodyguard manhandle the director and his wheelchair down the front steps. The bodyguard was the tall, thin deputy who had been hanging around on the edge of the case since the cross burning. In a movie, a character like that might suddenly reveal a secret identity, that of FBI agent or chief inspector of the Yard. I wanted to give the deputy a chance to unburden himself, so I asked him his name.

“Rodman,” he said, without adding “Texas Rangers” or “Northwest Mounted Police” or anything else.

“Rodman,” Drury repeated and then paused to collect his thoughts. He was uncollected in general, sitting slumped in his chair with his dark suit in disarray and his black hair in his eyes. He'd gone from looking thin and fit to gaunt and tired overnight.

“Rodman,” he said again after a moment. “I forgot to tell Mr. O'Connor something. I insist on John's being treated decently. I don't want anything of potter's field about his arrangements. I'll be responsible for the bill. Would you mind going back and telling him that?”

Rodman loped off, leaving Drury and me standing in the sun. The day was already very warm and very humid. I wheeled the antique chair into the thin shade of a honey locust tree.

“Thanks, Scotty,” Drury said. “Might I have one of your cigarettes?”

I gave him a Lucky and a light. He thanked me again and added, “You ought to find somewhere else to be. My assistants have suddenly become marked men.”

“I'll take my chances.”

He squeezed my forearm briefly. “Poor John. Of all the indignities he's had to undergo these last few years, this might be the worst–ending up in the basement of a tank town mortuary, being examined by a horse doctor who somehow got himself appointed coroner.”

“It's not bothering Whitehead any,” I said.

“I know. It's bothering me. As long as I'm being honest, I should admit that what's happening here isn't really a new phenomenon. My assistants have always been marked men–not marked for murder but for frustration and mediocrity. I certainly didn't make Hank Shepard's life a song, and he fared better than John.

“What is it, do you suppose, Scotty? What makes me such a lodestone of bad luck?”

“I don't know.”

“John thought it was a curse connected with
First Citizen
. I remember the night he first mentioned the idea. We'd just finished shooting the picture. It was very late, or rather very early, and the two of us were in an editing room working on the opening shot. You remember it–the tracking shot of the movie studio our D. W. Griffith character had built for himself in upstate New York when he thought he was bigger than Hollywood. The model we used was based on Griffith's own studio in Mamaroneck, on the studio as it had been after Griffith had failed and taken to the bottle, a boarded-up place, dark and haunted.”

“It was a great opening,” I said.

“Yes,” Drury said. “It was powerful and uncompromising. John didn't like it. He called it heartless. I remember him asking me if I wasn't afraid that our unfeeling dismissal of Griffith's life wasn't an invitation to the fates to revenge Griffith by visiting the same kind of failure on us.”

I felt the sweat under my shirt turn cold. Drury, who'd been watching my eyes, nodded in agreement.

“I laughed at the idea, at John. I'd already begun to think of him as a fool, a hopelessly out-of-date fool.

“But it all came true,” Drury said, his voice flat for once. “It happened just that way. John became a drunkard no one would employ, and I became a has-been genius, someone everybody stole from and no one respected, someone who couldn't touch the hem of his first triumph. I became a man doomed to live on like Griffith, for decades after his welcome ran out. At least poor John has been spared another day of that.”

Rodman rejoined us, ending Drury's reminiscences. We drove back to the Roberts, Drury in Rodman's cruiser and the Speedster and I trailing behind. We snuck Drury in through the loading dock, as Paddy and I had done the night before. I left the deputy and the director at the freight elevator with instructions to meet me on two. Then I made my way through the hotel's kitchen and dining room and out into the lobby to order up Drury's personal elevator.

The kid at the controls saw me coming and pointed to the desk behind me. The hotel manager was there, waving me over. Gilbert Traynor had cut off our credit, I thought, and I was going to hear the bad news. I sent the elevator up after Drury and Rodman, and crossed to the desk.

“A party is waiting to see you in the lounge,” the manager said, his pencil-line moustache twitching like a wren's tail as he spoke. “A lady.”

For a happy minute I let myself believe it was Ella, in a day early because the engineer had known a shortcut. The hope had flickered out by the time I reached the bar. It was almost empty, as befit a small-town bar at noon. The out-of-town reporters were all at Victory Park, I told myself, picnicking on John Piers Whitehead's sorry end.

The mystery woman was seated at a booth in the far corner. She was wearing a black dress, a flat, broad-brimmed hat, also black, and very dark glasses with harlequin frames. I recognized Linda despite the disguise, as the discreet hotel manager surely had. Any of the locals would have known her, a small part of the large price she paid for being a Traynor, so the glasses had to be for the reporters.

Linda must have been afraid I wouldn't see past the cheaters. She'd resorted to a private signal, the equivalent of a carnation in her lapel. It was a Gibson, set on the table before her and untouched. I got the bartender's attention and pointed to the drink as I sat down.

Linda removed her sunglasses before she spoke. Her almond-shaped eyes were sunken and dull. “Hello, Scotty.”

I took her gloved hand. “You look all in.”

“Who isn't today? I came when I heard there had been a … second death. I tried the courthouse first, but the sheriff wasn't there.”

“You must have missed him somehow on the road. He's at Traynor House, questioning your mother-in-law.”

“If he got in to see her,” Linda said. “She hasn't let me inside her room, not after dinner last night or later, when you'd all gone. Gilbert managed to have an interview with his mother this morning, but he wouldn't talk to me about it. He did tell me about the Liberator from the farmhouse being the murder weapon. I should have thought of that myself. I've seen it out there.”

It was natural enough for the head of the Traynor Company to know about the Liberator. And I remembered then that she'd been old man Traynor's right hand during the war when the gun had been made.

Linda was still discussing her brother-in-law. “Something about that gun seemed to terrify Gilbert. I'm worried about him. He's always useless in a crisis, but this morning he seemed to be in a daze. I think he was already drunk.”

She looked down at her own drink and pushed it away. “Tell me about this new killing, Scotty.”

I told her how Whitehead had probably died and where he'd been found. “Gustin thinks he met up with Nast while he was wandering your grounds last night. If the sheriff's right, Nast killed him to eliminate a witness or just because he had time on his hands. Then he dumped the body in the river.”

The bartender brought my drink. When he was out of range, I said, “Is Marvella hiding Nast?”

“No,” Linda said. “I don't think so. She hasn't been out of her room since Drury and Whitehead arrived for dinner last night, which was hours before Nast could have gotten there. Besides, it wouldn't be like her. She'd use a man like Nast, but she wouldn't condescend to help him.”

“She would to save herself from a murder charge.”

“Marvella couldn't have been involved in that, Scotty. She doesn't have the backbone. None of her kind does. They had it bred out of them.”

“Marvella thinks the Pallisers were fighters.”

Linda almost smiled. “Some fighters. When their world was threatened by immigrants who spoke with the wrong accents and went to the wrong churches, what did they do? They dressed up like hobgoblins and tried to scare them away. They used fear because they were so familiar with it. They were frightened by every new thing that came along. Marvella's the most frightened of the lot because she's the only one left, except maybe for Gilbert. He's having a hard time choosing a side.”

“What side would Mark have chosen? His mother remembers him as a Palliser in the rough.”

“She's wrong there, too. Mark really was a fighter. If anything had threatened something or someone he loved, he'd have dealt with it directly and finally. He wouldn't have wished it away like the Pallisers. Like Marvella.”

“She doesn't have to have ordered the murders to be involved,” I said. “Drury thinks she lost control of Nast, and the murders are the result.”

Linda leaned back slowly, until her shoulders rested against the padded wall of the booth. “He may be right. I've had the feeling for a while that things were out of control, that events were directing themselves. It has frightened me as much as the twentieth century frightened the Pallisers.”

She didn't sound frightened as much as dreamy and distant. “Why?” I asked.

“I've only gotten through the last ten years by keeping myself under the kind of rigid control Marvella likes to exercise over her whole world. Now I can feel all the control slipping away, mine and Marvella's. I don't like it, Scotty. I don't like the idea that forces I can't see or understand are pulling my strings. It's even scarier to think that I might have set those forces in motion myself.”

“How?”

“I don't know. I know I arranged to see Hank Shepard, and he died.”

“There's no connection.”

“None that we can see. But I have a feeling that there are connections we can't see–like the one between my decision to withhold my evidence about the night Shepard died and this new killing. I've a feeling I've set something going that's ricocheting around in the darkness still.”

I pushed her drink back into her hand. “Gustin thinks Whitehead's death was his fault because he didn't take off after Nast. Drury thinks he brought it on by making a film about D. W. Griffith. They're both just imagining things, like you are. You're all imagining too much.”