Come Back Dead (27 page)

45

I needn't have bothered questioning Gilbert about Clark's identity. Sheriff Gustin had already solved that mystery. He'd contacted the veteran's hospital in Indianapolis where Gilbert had found Clark after the war. The Traynor caretaker was Sergeant Walter Clark of Madison, Indiana, the man who had kept Lieutenant Mark Traynor's squad in line.

That discovery did nothing to increase the warmth of Gustin's greeting when he and his advisors arrived at Traynor House in the wake of the ambulance. Nor did Paddy's “Third time's a charm,” which he pronounced on the mansion steps as the still-unconscious Linda was carried down them. Even the ambulance driver and his assistant were looking at me critically. I should pull my next victims out now and save them a round trip, they seemed to be saying.

Gustin backed me one last time. He sent the ambulance off under Zimmerman's supervision and then marched up to Marvella Traynor's suite. The old woman and Greta had been hiding there throughout my cat-and-mouse with Linda.

Marvella was close to needing her precious hospital herself by the time we found her. She broke down immediately, confirming everything Gilbert had told me about Linda's attack on Whitehead and her attempt to force her way into Marvella's room.

We left Mrs. Traynor in the care of her private physician and her faithful maid. On the front porch of the mansion, Gustin lit a cigarette and offered me his pack. I turned it down.

“Why did Clark kidnap Nast?” the sheriff asked. “Why did he get himself involved?”

“For the very reason we guessed,” Paddy said, “to keep you off the track of the real murderer. We thought he was acting to protect himself, but it was really out of loyalty to his old lieutenant and the lieutenant's family.”

Or because, I thought, he was in love with his old lieutenant's wife. If so, Clark would never tell us, any more than he'd ever tell us what he'd seen at the farm on Sunday night. He'd let a hint of what he'd witnessed slip just before he jumped me. He said then that if I knew the truth of what had happened, I'd still be running.

“How could Mark Traynor have taken hold of his widow like that?” Gustin asked.

Paddy deferred on that question, but not to me. “God knows,” he said.

In the end, it was Carson Drury, and not God, who did the explaining. Drury was at the hospital when we got there, closeted with the doctors who were examining Linda. When the psychiatrist summoned from Indy arrived in the wee small hours, Drury talked his way into the consultation.

He was welcome to kibitz, as far as I was concerned. I stayed up until Gilbert was out of surgery and out of danger. Then I caught a couple of hours' sleep on a waiting room sofa. I'd left a wake-up call with a sympathetic nurse who had a little laugh in her voice that reminded me of Irene Dunne. She shook my shoulder at five and told me I'd better get up if I was going to meet my wife's train.

I heard Drury intoning as soon as I entered the hospital hallway. The sound led me to a consulting room where I found the director and Paddy and Gustin. Drury held center stage as usual, which is to say he was seated behind the room's only desk. Paddy and Gustin sat before him like a pair of patients steeled for bad news.

“Scotty,” Drury called to me. “I was about to brief the sheriff. I've just come from a talk with the psychiatrist they hustled up from the state capital, a nice young chap named Kronenburger.”

He'd slipped back into his stock tone of glib superiority. I wasn't the only one who noticed.

“Was this Kronenberger able to tell you why you're so anxious to ruin yourself?” Paddy asked.

“We didn't discuss my case,” Drury said. “I never will discuss it with a doctor. I'm an artist, after all. My problems are the raw materials of my art. I have to work them out for myself. With the occasional aid of an astute private eye, perhaps,” he added with a nod to me, “but in the main, by myself.”

He might have been trying to sound noble or heroic. He came off sounding lonely. I almost felt sorry for the guy. “What did the doctor say about Linda?” I asked.

“As I was telling the sheriff, Dr. Kronenburger supports your diagnosis, Scotty, the one that sent you out to Traynor House last evening.”

“That was no diagnosis,” I said. “That was a bad feeling.”

Drury nodded. “I had a similar feeling when I heard about your confrontation with Linda. Rodman, my deputy guardian, told me the details. It sounded to me then like we might be dealing with multiple personalities within the same individual.”

“I don't believe in the dead taking over the living,” Gustin said.

“No more do I,” Drury said, “nor in reincarnation. This is nothing like those things, though I dare say our great-grandparents might have mistaken Linda's illness for a possession or a haunting.”

“Just what illness are we talking about?” Paddy asked.

“Multiple personality syndrome. I encountered a description of it in a journal of abnormal psychology during the war. It fascinated me so much, I explored the idea in a film.”

“
The Gentleman from Macao
,” I said.

Drury nodded again. “Interest in the subject goes back much further than the war years, of course–as far back as the nineteenth century and the work of Pierre Janet. It's been a neglected area, in my opinion, but it remains legitimate.”

The director studied the desktop before him for a moment, composing his big scene. “It may interest you gentlemen to know that Linda created imaginary friends as a child.”

“So does my little boy,” Gustin said.

“So did I,” Drury said. “As a creative solution to the odd lonely moment, there's nothing wrong with it. But if an imaginative child who's too young to have a firmly established sense of identity uses the same trick to deal with some traumatic event or unbearable situation, it may be the first step toward fragmentation.”

Gustin was passing a hand back and forth across his bristly head. The hand stopped halfway through a pass and grabbed hold. “You're losing me,” he said.

“Linda's mother died when Linda was very young,” Drury said. “Linda saw it happen. You didn't know that, Sheriff, I'm sure. Did you, Scotty?”

“Yes,” I said. “Her mother stepped in front of a truck. Gilbert told me about it.”

“I heard of it from another source,” Drury said, “a little girl named Annie.”

“Who is she?” Paddy asked.

“Linda's childhood friend,” I said.

“Yes,” Drury said, “the first personality Linda created to cope with an unbearable situation. Dr. Kronenburger introduced me to Annie around three this morning. She's doing all Linda's talking at the moment. Annie has helped Linda before. Years ago she absorbed the loss of Linda's mother, so Linda wouldn't have to. That's why Linda created her. She couldn't deal with the pain, so she split part of herself off and delegated her pain to the fragment, to this other personality, this alter ego.”

I found myself missing Hollywood at that moment, and the little, sordid jobs that Paddy and I often did. They were clean and simple compared with this. Gustin seemed to feel the same way about it. His stolid features were drawn like those of a man whose arm is being twisted. Drury kept talking.

“And, if it works when you're a child, chances are you'll use it again as an adult when the world hurts too much. The more pain you have, the more allies you'll summon up.” The four of us sat for a moment before Paddy spoke.

“Are there others?” he asked. “Besides Traynor, I mean.”

“At least one other. She hasn't a name of her own, but I suspect that one of you has met her. She's a personality Linda created to deal with the pressure of being the town's most famous war widow and with the tension that arose when a still young woman tried to suppress her very natural sexual desires because of her mother-in-law's expectations or her own loyalty to her dead husband–or both.

“This fourth personality exists to express the sexual side of Linda. I haven't met her yet, but I heard about her from Eric Faris. He and I briefly shared a cell yesterday afternoon after he was driven up from Indianapolis.

“As I said, I think Mr. Elliott has met this sexually aggressive personality, too. I won't ask him to confirm or deny it. I wouldn't want him to violate his Hollywood operative code of honor. If you did meet her, Scotty, you're lucky to be alive. I believe she was the personality who responded to Hank Shepard's overtures.”

“But Linda knew about that,” I said. “She knew she'd agreed to meet Shepard. How could she be taken over by this alter ego and still have a memory of what happened?”

Drury shrugged. “There are varying levels of awareness and control between the primary and secondary personalities. Linda could have been aware of the influences or actions of one of her personalities and been completely oblivious to another's. I think Kronenburger or whoever takes up the case will find that Linda knows nothing of the Mark personality but that Mark has access to her thoughts and memories. He knew all about the date with Shepard, for example. He even knew where to find that very interesting gun, because Linda had once seen it in the farmhouse. He must have collected it just before Faris brought me home, which means I narrowly missed making his acquaintance myself.”

Gustin was pulling at his hair again. “Are you saying Mrs. Traynor whipped this Mark personality up just because Shepard propositioned her?”

“No. I side with the theorists who believe that these alter egos always begin as friends, that their initial functions are always positive. They can later become destructive, even self-destructive or homicidal, but they come into being to effect some good. I believe her Mark Traynor personality has been functioning for some time, perhaps only in the background, perhaps as a response to the stress of her position at the Traynor plant.”

“Linda told me she was in the habit of asking Mark for advice,” I said. “She made it sound like a game she played with herself.”

“That may be how it seemed to her,” Drury said. “In actuality, her personality was fragmenting again. When Gilbert added to the stress she was already under by using me to disrupt the delicate equilibrium of his family, the shadowy Mark Traynor personality stepped to the forefront. He took control to counter the activities of Linda's sexual personality–to counter them violently by shooting poor Hank and trying to set fire to the barn.”

I'd forgotten about Traynor's–Linda's–attempt to burn the barn. I remembered her telling me about the wartime barn burnings, acts of retribution against philandering men. They'd occurred just after word had come about Mark Traynor's death, Linda had said, during the period when she'd been in shock. I wondered now if those burnings hadn't signaled Traynor's rebirth as a fragment of Linda's mind. When she'd set fire to the Riverbend barn, had she been reenacting a memory of those old crimes?

I didn't ask the question aloud. Gustin was loaded past the breaking point already. His head was bowed, and his big frame was sagging forward in his chair.

46

I'd heard that Drury had had his cast cut off, but it still surprised me when he stood up. The novelty of the action seemed to increase his already impressive height. Or maybe my time in Traynorville had worn me down. I was feeling smaller and older.

“When you looked in just now,” Drury asked me, “were you on your way to the Roberts?”

“Just to change my tie,” I said. “I have a date at the train station.”

“Let's walk to the hotel together. I want to exercise this leg.”

We left Paddy and Gustin in the consulting room and crossed the empty hallway to the elevator, Drury limping slightly and supporting his weight with a cane. It was an elegant cane, of course, a long ebony stick with a silver handle. He'd probably traded his wheelchair for it at some Traynorville antique shop. He used the cane to press the elevator's call button and then to open our last conversation as we rode the car down.

“This stick is not a prop, Scotty, I assure you. You wouldn't believe how stiff my ankle and knee are after my short time in that cast. Which only serves me right, as you're probably thinking.

“I hope you're letting me off that lightly, Scotty. I hope we can part friends. I made a clean breast of things to your boss; did he tell you? I told him how you'd uncovered my sordid little plot against my own best self. It helped to say it to Maguire, the least sympathetic audience I could find, but it only helped a little. I'll never forgive myself over what befell Hank and John.”

Outside, the sun was a gray possibility in the eastern sky, and the air was almost cool. Drury paused to light one of his expensive cigars. Then he struck out for the Roberts. He set a pace that was hard for me to match, but then, he only had two stiff joints to worry him, not to mention two ghosts to prod him along.

To help him with those, I said, “Shepard and Whitehead had a lot more to do with what happened than you. Shepard couldn't keep his hands off Linda, and Whitehead turned blackmailer. He must have seen Linda on the terrace when the two of you were waiting for Gilbert in the dining room. She went out there from the library or some other room, and you missed her because your back was to the doors. Whitehead went looking for trouble and found it. Any responsibility left over belongs to Gilbert.”

“The unhappy little guy,” Drury said. “I must say, it isn't very flattering to be considered a modern dress Jonah.” Being Drury, he sounded flattered about it anyway. “Tell me, was his plan really to inject me into this town like a mystery virus just to see what symptoms would break out?”

“He didn't have a plan,” I said, repeating Gilbert's own lament. “Just a sincere contempt for his life. I don't think he meant to hurt anyone, least of all Linda.”

We finished our walk to the Roberts without speaking. An old man in gray overalls was using a hose to wet down the sidewalk in front of the hotel. Drury stopped to let him finish.

“Will you stay to help Linda?” I asked.

“Me? No. I doubt I'd be welcome. I'm no healer in any case. I'm an egotistical artist. I'm interested in Linda Traynor's problems only because they're grist for my mill. All night new conceptions have been storming my brain. What do you think of a production of
Hamlet
in which the same actor plays the prince and the prince's dead father? Or how about a
Macbeth
in which a single person plays both Lady Macbeth and her homicidal husband? Do you think that could work?”

“Depends on how you look in drag.” I thought he was trying to get one last rise out of me, and I didn't want to give him the satisfaction. “I think you hung around last night because you wanted to help,” I said. “I think for once you were looking beyond yourself and your goddamn brilliant conceptions.”

Drury would only grin and shrug.

“So you're going back to California?” I asked.

“No. There's nothing waiting for me there but bill collectors. My Eden belongs to Ralph Lockard now, fair and square. I'm almost relieved in a way. That estate was my last tie to my fatal success. With that link broken, perhaps I'll finally be able to move on.”

“Move on where?”

“I've been offered a chance to direct a film in Europe. The financing is shaky, but I'm used to that. If it should fall through, I can always look up the Banfi Family Circus.”

His laugh ended in a sigh. “I'll miss having Hank around. What do you say, Scotty? Would you like to take his place?”

“No, thanks. I'd like my nice quiet life back.”

Drury laughed again. “I wish more people felt as you do. I'm afraid an increasing number of our fellow citizens are anxious to repeat Gilbert Traynor's mistake. We're far enough from the wars now, your war and Korea, for people to begin to take their peace and quiet for granted. I sense a general and growing desire to throw babies out with the bathwater, to change things for the sake of changing them or with the arrogant assumption that we can disregard the lessons of the past. Poor Gilbert's learned what a fragile thing our illusion of order is and what a persistent influence the past can be. I sense that the country, perhaps the world, is poised on the edge of the same hard lessons.”

“I hope you're wrong,” I said.

“I'm wrong a remarkable number of times,” Drury said. “For a genius, that is.”

He started to drop his cigar on the sidewalk, caught the eye of the old man winding up his hose, and flicked the butt into the gutter.

“But if I'm right, if we are on the brink of a national version of Gilbert's experiment, you'll think of me often. Every day will remind you of the time you rode shotgun on the Carson Drury roller coaster!”