Come Back Dead (26 page)

Clark's right arm was pinned under him. I hit the right side of his head with the gun. It was a quick, desperate blow that had as much of my hand in it as gunmetal. All the same, it stunned him.

I hit him again with nothing but gun and told myself that I'd killed him.

43

Gustin and Paddy and Zimmerman, the sheriff's state police advisor, showed up soon after that. They found Nast still tied up and whimpering away in the shadow of the cabin, Clark lying where I'd left him, and me propped against a tree, covering Clark with my bloody forty-five.

I hadn't killed him after all. When I'd spotted his chest moving up and down in quick, shallow breaths, I'd pointed the gun at him and held it there. The fear that he might spring up like a jack-in-the-box and come for me again was the only thing that had kept me conscious.

“It's all right, Scotty,” Paddy said as he eased the gun from my hand. “We'll take it from here.”

He handed the gun to Gustin. The sheriff was nominally in charge, but as the youngest man still on his feet, it fell to him to trot back to the farmhouse to call for an ambulance. Before he left, he asked me for the short version of my story.

“Clark is Mark Traynor. He killed Shepard and Whitehead.” I didn't say why he'd killed them. I couldn't bring myself to drag in Linda. I'd have to, though, soon enough.

“What about him?” Gustin asked, gesturing to the spot where Nast was being worked on by Zimmerman.

My employer had already done that calculation. “Nast was Clark's insurance policy,” Paddy said. “As long as you were looking for Nast, you wouldn't be bothering about other suspects. Clark's been holding him since the night we broke up Nast's little party in the rail yard. Clark told us that Nast had run, but all the time he'd had him tucked away somewhere safe.”

Paddy interrupted his own lecture. “Mother of God, Scotty. Do you suppose Clark only agreed to help me track you down so he could put his hands on Nast before the sheriff did? And here I thought it was my winning personality.”

“I thought it was your straw hat,” I said, my cleverness making me dizzy.

Gustin left us after that. I had things to occupy me–spitting blood and counting my teeth–but Paddy was restless. He paced up and down the slope, burning up his latest cigar instead of smoking it. He wanted to read me the riot act now that he knew I wasn't at death's door, but he couldn't bring himself to start in. To help him let off steam, I asked him what he thought of Marvella Traynor.

“That one,” he said and spat out some Indiana dust. “She's a fine example of a type that has almost died away. And thank God for it. She's tough, I'll say that for her. She admitted to hiring Nast to burn the cross and even to supplying his thugs with their pointy costumes. Admitted it and snapped her fingers under our noses at the same time. It's her family's farm, after all, she said. She'd burn the whole shebang to the ground whenever she liked and to hell with us.

“For all the bluster, though, she had the wind up over something. Not over our visit but over something.”

“Her bedroom overlooks the terrace,” I said, remembering her frightened face in the window. “She might have seen her son kill Whitehead last night.”

“She might have at that,” Paddy said. “We were just getting to the Whitehead questions when the call came in about Drury.”

“Drury,” I repeated. “I guess I owe him an apology.”

“Save it,” Paddy said. “He's admitted that he was the one trying to scuttle his picture and that he faked his broken leg to put Shepard off his trail. So, in a way, he's responsible for all this mess. But he wouldn't tell us why he did it. He told me to ask you.”

I got to my feet and, with Paddy's aid, stayed there.

“Why did he do it, Scotty?”

“Because he isn't twenty-one anymore.”

When Gustin came back, he was leading three men dressed in white. Two of them carried a stretcher. The third and youngest carried a doctor's bag. He looked Nast and Clark over and sent Nast out first, with the two attendants doing the lugging and Zimmerman along in case Nast made a miracle recovery. On the second trip, Clark's trip, the kid doctor and Gustin helped carry the stretcher, with Paddy and me following along behind like a pair of hired mourners.

Gustin, who was the left rear support of the stretcher, said without turning his head, “Clark and Mark Traynor. I can't believe it, Elliott. Are you thinking the whole town knew about it and kept quiet?”

Paddy was guiding me with a hand on my upper arm. He clamped down on my arm now, his private signal for “Watch what you say.”

“I think the whole town was taken in, just as we were,” I said.

“But I knew Traynor–not well, but I knew him. Clark's nothing like him. I'm not talking about a face. I'm talking about the man I knew before the war.”

“What and who we knew before the war doesn't count these days,” I said. Paddy's grip tightened again, this time to keep me upright.

A shiny new county ambulance–a gift from Marvella, probably–had been backed up to the edge of the woods. The intern supervised the process of squeezing Clark in beside Nast. Then he turned to me.

“You can ride up front,” he said.

He kept a cigarette going in the corner of his mouth to make him look less like a choirboy. I moved the cigarette to the corner of my mouth–the unbruised corner.

“Thanks,” I said. “I'm staying put.”

“You can't stay here,” Paddy said. “There's talk of a big storm coming in. Besides, the doctor will want to look you over.”

“He'll want to hold me until a week from Tuesday. I'm picking Ella up at the station in twelve hours. After that, they can put me in an iron lung if they want.”

We worked out a compromise. The kid sent Gustin and Zimmerman ahead with the ambulance. He and Paddy and I followed in Linda's Studebaker, the doctor enjoying himself behind the wheel. When we arrived at the county hospital–a sprawling building that bore an ominous resemblance to Traynor House–the kid shone a light in my eyes, poked my ribs, and decorated my face with antiseptic and bits of tape. But he didn't admit me. When he'd finished, Paddy and I found a quiet visitors lounge and settled in to wait for word of Clark.

Paddy had been given instructions to keep me awake for an hour or two, so he told me stories of other visits he'd made to Indiana back when he and Peggy had been traveling the vaudeville circuit. I'd heard most of the stories before, some of them with different settings, but that didn't bother me. Paddy's strength as a composer lay in his variations, not in the tunes themselves.

As the afternoon gave way to evening, he grew restless. I knew he wanted to be working on what was left of the job, not nursing me. After a silence he said, “I couldn't help but notice that you didn't speak to motive when you were briefing the sheriff.”

“Couldn't you?” I asked.

“When you get cagey, it's always one of two things. Either you're being gallant toward a lady, or you're feeling sentimental about an ex-soldier.”

“How about Hollywood? Tory Beaumont thinks I'm mushy over the whole town.”

“A perceptive man, Mr. Beaumont. But as we're currently in the wilds of Indiana, I think we can eliminate that possibility. Which leaves the lady and the veteran. Clark's a veteran, to his cost, but the way you two went at each other today bespeaks no partiality. So it's a lady–Linda Traynor, if I'm not mistaken, the one who was giving you the googly eyes last night.”

I told him about Linda's arrangement with Shepard on the night of the first murder. While he listened, Paddy blew smoke rings, his usual perfect ones. They took on a pinkish hue as they floated past a west-facing window.

“Are you thinking Linda knows that Clark is her lost husband?” Paddy asked. “That she's known from the start?”

“How could she not know?” I said, giving words to the question I'd been asking myself since I'd left Traynor House.

A nurse came in and switched on the waiting room's overhead light. She looked at Paddy's cigar and sniffed. Then she looked at my face and stepped back.

“Expectant father,” Paddy said, patting me on the shoulder. “His wife went into the delivery room swinging.”

When the nurse had gone, Paddy said, “If Linda knows Clark's true identity, why did she arrange to meet Shepard at Riverbend, in her husband's domain, so to speak? Any other spot in the state would have been safer.”

I had to admit I didn't have the answer. “Maybe Shepard insisted. He can't have known about Clark.”

“I shudder to think of the moment he found out,” Paddy said without shuddering noticeably. “So Whitehead happened by in time to see the murder?”

“I think so. Don't ask me how he connected Clark with Mark Traynor. Maybe he overheard Clark identifying himself to Shepard.”

“I'm more interested in how Whitehead and Clark connected at the Traynor manse on the night Whitehead died. Any thoughts on that?”

“Clark left us at the rail yard and went to the house. I don't know why. But he'd found out that Whitehead was blackmailing his brother as a way of getting back in with Drury. Did Drury tell you that he'd been pressured by Gilbert to take Whitehead back?”

“Yes,” Paddy said.

“Gilbert surely told his brother about it. So when Clark and Whitehead came together by accident outside the house, Clark eliminated a witness.”

Paddy snorted. It was another of his private codes, this one expressing skepticism. “The timing was tight enough when we thought it was Nast hotfooting it over to Traynor House alone to get his orders from the DAR's own Dragon Lady. Now we have to add in the time Clark spent dealing with Nast. I don't like it.”

“We know Clark got there somehow,” I said. “John Whitehead is dead.”

“My old logic teacher would have had something pointed to say about that construction–if I'd ever had a logic teacher.”

Before Paddy could come up with something pointed of his own, Zimmerman ducked his head into the room.

“There you are,” he said. “Clark's awake.” Then he was gone.

Paddy was on his feet almost as quickly. When I didn't jump to mine, he said, “Don't feel up to it?”

“No,” I said. This was one finish I didn't want to be in on.

Paddy understood. “What can be done for Mrs. Traynor, Sheriff Gustin will do. He's a good man. You don't mind my going, do you?” he added as he backed toward the door.

“No. There's no point in giving Zimmerman the inside track.”

They could hear Paddy's laugh down in reception. “My thought exactly. A pushy, interfering sort if ever I saw one. The poor sheriff's probably desperate for a disinterested opinion.”

He got as far as the doorway and stopped. “Here's something to think about if you start feeling drowsy. Why is Nast still alive?”

44

When I could no longer feel Paddy's footsteps through the worn linoleum of the waiting room floor, I got up and went in search of a drink of water. As I wandered, I chewed over my homework assignment. Why was Nast still alive? Why hadn't Clark killed him? He'd already murdered two men by the time he'd gotten Nast to his cabin. Why hadn't he made it three? If he'd murdered Nast and buried him in the woods, Gustin could have searched for him until doomsday and never found him. Nast would have been a permanent red herring, a second mask behind which Clark could have hidden until long after the town had lost interest in the deaths of two outsiders.

But Clark had kept Nast alive. Why? Was it because Nast hadn't threatened Linda, and Clark would only kill to protect her? Maybe. But that wasn't what Paddy was getting at. He was really asking: If Clark was unable to kill Nast, a man as worthless as they came, a man whose death would have covered Clark's tracks forever, was Clark capable of murdering anyone?

The answer that came to me was both fuzzy and concise: Clark hadn't killed Shepard and Whitehead; Mark Traynor had. Traynor was a personality Clark hadn't used since the war, one he might not remember all that clearly in his conscious mind. Linda had told me that Traynor would have reacted directly and decisively to counter a threat to his family. Traynor was the murderer. He'd risen up through the debris that was Clark whenever something had threatened Linda. Somehow, Nast hadn't inspired that same transformation.

An orderly directed me to a water fountain. Next to it was a lavatory. I went in and splashed water on my face, bandages and all. Then I looked up into the mirror over the sink.

The tap water was running down my face like a boiler room sweat. It made me think of the famous climax of one of Drury's lesser efforts,
The Gentleman from Macao
, the scene in the fun house where the detective looks into the mirror and sees the sweating murderer staring back.

It was a parallel to the Traynor case so tight that I must have had the movie in the back of my mind as I'd considered Paddy's question about Clark. I pictured Clark staring into a mirror at some moment of crisis and seeing his old face reassemble itself, seeing Mark Traynor appear, the man who would act decisively. The man who would kill.

The more I thought about it, the less exact the parallel to
The Gentleman from Macao
seemed. In his film, Drury had been playing with the idea of two personalities inhabiting the same mind, two different people in one body. Clark
was
Mark Traynor, however deeply he'd buried that secret. For Drury's movie to be the real key to the murders, Traynor would have had to come back as a hidden fragment of some other person–his brother Gilbert, say–someone so obsessed with Mark that he could have slipped into a mad dream of being Traynor and acted on his behalf. Acted to protect Linda. Linda.

I remembered something else then: the moment outside Gustin's office when Whitehead had been brought in for questioning. Whitehead hadn't spoken to me. I'd thought at the time he hadn't recognized me. Now I could see him again as he stared right through me. His eyes were fixed on Linda.

I found I was squeezing the sink hard, twisting it in its mounts as I struggled to hold myself upright. Outside, the first rumbles of Paddy's storm were arriving. They made me think of Linda, too, the woman who thanked God for thunderstorms because they helped her put Traynorville and all its pressures into perspective. Because they helped her keep a grip on her sanity.

I was questioning my own sanity as I left the hospital and went out into the cool stillness that heralded the storm. The kid doctor had returned my keys to the Studebaker. I drove it into the approaching darkness.

The wind came first, changing the fading colors of the fields I passed as it laid over every leaf of every stalk of corn. As sleek as the Speedster was, the wind pressed it down and shoved it left and right as I followed the curves of the road. Then the rain came on like a wave, fat silver drops intermixed with tiny bits of hail. The hail skittered across the black pavement before me like a million dice thrown in a desperate attempt to make an incalculable point.

It was fully dark between lightning strikes by the time I reached Traynor House. There were no guards at the brick pylons. Either the storm had chased them away, or they'd realized there was nothing left to protect, that the Traynors had been stripped bare right under their noses.

The storm soaked me through during my short run from the drive to the porch. I was shivering as I pushed the front doorbell. There was no answering chime inside the house or the faintest reflection of a light. The power had to be out. I knocked on the door, making far less noise than the wind alone. Then I tried the knob. The door was unlocked.

I stepped into the foyer and forced the door closed behind me. I called hello, and Linda's voice answered me from the dark living room: “Scotty?”

She was sitting where I'd first seen her, on the sofa beneath the portrait of her husband. A well-timed flash of lightning gave me a vivid snapshot of the scene: the vast emptiness of the room; the portrait staring down; the woman sitting with her head bowed and her hands folded in her lap, her skirt carefully smoothed across her knees.

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

“The wind blew them away,” Linda said.

I sat down beside her. The lightning came and went again, and she saw my face. She started to reach out to touch it and then drew back her hand. “What happened?” she asked.

I didn't answer her. I was no longer sure what had happened, not at Clark's cabin, not anywhere in Traynorville. “I've come to ask you something, Linda.”

“Yes?”

“Where were you Sunday night?”

“I told you, I didn't go to the farm.”

“I know. I want to know what you did. Did you stay here?”

“Of course,” she said, but she was frightened.

“Do you remember staying here? Do you remember what you did?”

“I'm not sure. I must have fallen asleep. Why are you asking me, Scotty?”

“Is there any other time you can't account for?”

She was moving away from me, pressing herself into the corner of the sofa. I found her wrist and held it.

“What about the night Whitehead disappeared? What did you do after you left the dining room?”

“I went up to check on Marvella.”

“She didn't let you in, remember? What else did you do?”

“Nothing. I don't remember doing anything.” She drew the wrist I was holding close to her chest. “You're hurting me.”

“Did you go back to your room? Did you come back downstairs? Did you go out onto the terrace?”

She pulled her arm away from me with a force that caught me off guard. I lost my grip on her wrist, and she was gone, her running footsteps disappearing toward the foyer.

The lightning let me down then. I collided with the coffee table and then with a chair as I tried to follow her. By the time I reached the foyer, I could hear nothing but the steady drumming of the rain on the flags outside.

Then a door slammed somewhere over my head. I took the stairs two at a time, the ascent feeling like a rocket ride to my dizzy head. The door to Linda's room was closed but not locked. I pushed the door open and took its place in the doorway.

With no more lightning to dazzle them, my eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness. I took in the simple room–bed, bureau, nightstand–without spotting Linda. I did notice something I'd overlooked when I'd checked the room earlier in the day: a framed photo on the nightstand. It was another portrait of Traynor. I felt drawn to it for some reason. Instead of going off to search another room, I crossed to the side of the bed. Just as I picked up the heavy, metal frame, I heard a sound from the corner to my right.

I turned in time to see Linda step through the connecting door that led to her dead husband's room. She was pointing a gun at my chest. It looked like a toy gun, even in her small hand: the missing Liberator.

“Linda,” I said.

“Don't die with that whore's name on your lips,” she said, her voice flat and strange.

It was all I could do to keep from saying her name again. Instead I said something even more likely to get me shot. “You kept your appointment with Shepard.”

“
I
kept it. Not her. I took him by surprise.”

“You murdered him.”

“Punished him. For laying hands on my wife.”

I stepped backward into the nightstand. “Mark Traynor,” I said.

“You all thought I was dead.”

I hadn't in the end, for all the good it did me now. Linda was only a foot or two away from me–too close for me to count on her missing with the Liberator but close enough for me to knock the gun away with the photo I held. If I could find the strength to swing it.

“You all thought it was safe to move in,” Linda said. “It never will be safe.” She raised the gun a careful inch.

Before I could make my play, a voice behind her said, “Linda. Wait. It's Mark. I'm here now. I'm back.”

The speaker was standing in the hall doorway, where he was nothing more than a shape in the darkness. Linda backed away from me but kept the gun pointed my way.

“It's okay, Linda,” the shadow said. “It's okay. You can put the gun down. I'm back for good now, honey. I'm sorry I was away so long.”

“It's too late,” Linda said in the voice I knew. “Too damn late.”

The Liberator swung from me to the doorway. The figure there had time to say one more word before the gun roared out. He said, “Linda.”

I'd drawn back the heavy frame when Linda turned. I threw it as the muzzle flash lit the room. It caught Linda on the back of her head and dropped her.

I stooped over her long enough to check her pulse and collect her gun. Then I went out into the hallway.

I was expecting to find an escapee from the county hospital named Clark. The man lying flat on his back on the plush carpeting was Gilbert Traynor. He had a hole in his shoulder. It looked like a clean wound, the kind a soldier in combat would pay serious money for. A million dollars had been the going price in 1944.

Gilbert was thinking of the war himself. “Now what kind of soldier do you think I would have made?” he asked, his words as shaky as my hands.

The kind of soldier who got himself killed the first day, I thought. I said, “A good one.”

“Poor Linda,” Gilbert said. “Is she okay?”

I pressed my handkerchief against his shoulder. “I don't think she's badly hurt, if that's what you mean.”

“She killed Hank Shepard. John Whitehead, too. Whitehead saw her go into the barn on Sunday night. He heard the shot. That's what he blackmailed me with. I had to go along. I couldn't hand Linda over. I knew it wasn't her fault.”

“Save it,” I said. “I'll call an ambulance.”

“I have to tell you first. It was Mark. He's taken hold of her.”

“I know,” I said.

Gilbert didn't seem to hear me. “I don't understand it,” he said, “but it's true. Mark's the real killer. He clubbed Whitehead on the terrace. Mother saw the whole thing from her bedroom. Linda had gone out for air. Whitehead followed her and confronted her. He must have told her that he'd go to the police if she didn't give back Drury's money. He didn't know what he was dealing with.

“Linda struck him with a statue and pushed him into the river. Mother's been terrified ever since. She said that Linda tried to get into her room last night after you'd gone, that she claimed to be Mark come back to kill her.”

Gilbert's eyes were lolling in his head. I started to get up, but he grabbed my sleeve.

“It's my fault, too. Mine and Mark's. I was the one who did this to her. I tried to make it right. I tried to watch her as night came on. I didn't want it to happen again.”

He'd gone chalky, and his teeth were chattering. His time was running out, but I still wasted some of it asking a question: “Who is Clark?”

Gilbert's hand dropped away from my sleeve. “Clark?”

“He's not some soldier you took in because he happened to answer your ad for a caretaker.”

“No,” Gilbert said. “He's a soldier from my brother's squad. He was wounded the day Mark died. I traced him so I could hear about that. When I saw how things were for Clark, I offered him a job.”

“He's not your brother?”

“My brother? No. My brother's dead. At least he was.”