Clay Hand (10 page)

“It could.”

Phil had been intent on the examiner’s testimony. He had intended to watch the reaction of the various witnesses to it. Scanning their faces now, he saw that only Clauson seemed to respond to it. He was sitting forward, his eyes blinking rapidly.

An exchange of words between the sheriff and the coroner brought the request for an opinion on the state of health of the deceased.

“A bit run down, but nothing organically wrong with him.”

The medical examiner was excused then, and after a moment of consultation, the sheriff described his investigation of the scene. Toward the conclusion of his testimony, he said: “Now regards there being no sign of that ledge crumbling at all, I’ll tell you what we did yesterday. One of the deputies, the coroner and me took a hundred-seventy-pound weight of sand up there in a sack and shoved it off. The important thing that happened, there was quite a little cave-in of the ledge. It gave when the weight got about a foot from the edge.”

The jurors listened intently, but they showed no signs of comprehending his meaning. “Better tell us how you interpret that finding, Sheriff,” Handy said.

“Well, as I see it, that proves Coffee didn’t go right to the edge and jump.”

“You mean he didn’t commit suicide?” one of the jurors asked.

“I’m not saying that. I’m saying if he was running hard, he could of stepped clear of that ledge. It could of been an accident.”

“And yet we have witnesses who will show that he should have known that terrain inside and out,” Handy said.

“It could have been dark,” Fields said doggedly. “Even when it’s half dark, and kind of misty, those hills are deceiving. I’ve seen clouds up there I’d swear I could sit down on.”

“And yet your report shows Saturday to have been a clear, cold day,” the coroner said. “Thank you, Sheriff.” He looked at the jury. “Do you have any questions?”

A woman raised her hand. “Couldn’t he have been pushed off or thrown off?”

Fields shook his head. “Only a giant could have done it from a distance safe enough not to go off with him.”

At the word “giant” several people looked at Rebecca Glasgow. She raised her chin slightly, and Phil thought it was her first acknowledgment of the proceedings. Fields, seeing the look, added in some confusion: “A very strong person, maybe.” But he had planted the prejudice in spite of himself.

What was strange, Phil thought, was that the prejudice was against her and not her husband, who was at least her equal physically.

Handy slapped his hand on the table. “I want to remind the jury that you and I must be guided by what’s said here in this chair under oath, and not by hearsay outside the inquest. Mrs. Coffee, will you please come up?”

Margaret moved past Phil, and walked to the witness chair with an easy grace. She was very pale, and had been sparing in her use of lipstick. As Nichols would have put it, she looked the perfect widow. Mrs. O’Grady did not take her eyes from her. Glasgow watched her, too, showing his first real interest in the questioning. But then, as Phil looked around the room, he saw that all the men expressed more than casual interest.

“I realize this won’t be easy for you, Mrs. Coffee,” Handy said. “But you realize the need for it?”

“I want to help in any way I can.”

“Thank you. Will you tell us now the circumstances when your husband left Chicago?”

Margaret repeated the story substantially as she had given it to the sheriff.

“And you didn’t hear from him for two weeks?”

“That is correct.”

“Weren’t you worried?”

“Yes. Very worried. That was why I went to Cincinnati as soon as I got word. On some of his other assignments, if I were in a near-by town, he often came in to spend a few hours with me.”

“But this time he didn’t?”

“He did not answer my letters. If you had not found one of them, I should not even have been sure he received them.”

“Mrs. Coffee, why didn’t you come directly to Winston?”

“I wanted to leave him some choice in the matter of seeing me. Sometimes my oversolicitude embarrassed him.”

“I see,” Handy said. The expressions of the jurors indicated that they did not see at all. However, they nodded—to take the blame for their own ignorance, Phil thought. There was still no mention from Margaret that she thought Dick was leaving her. That had come out only in the unguarded moment with him the morning of their arrival.

“Now, Mrs. Coffee,” Handy continued, “I know you told the sheriff your husband did not tell you why he was in Winston. But knowing him and his work, you must have reached some idea of your own on why he was down here. Did you?”

Something about the question bothered Phil. Glancing at Nichols, he saw the reporter frown a little as he made a note.

Margaret reminded the coroner that she had nothing to base the surmise on except her own feeling. Then she said: “My husband always felt the greatest work he could do was among the coal miners. He felt that Naperville was only a beginning…”

“You were with him at Naperville?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if you’d tell us something about how he went about that story.”

Margaret ran a finger over the buckle of her pocket-book. “He spent about four months on it. He went there himself as soon as word of the disaster came over the radio. He followed the rescue operations, and got to know some of the miners. He was there perhaps a week, talking to storekeepers, police, railway people, ministers. He came home for a while then, and worked there on the reports that had gone in on conditions in the mine, union reports, state and federal reports… Then he talked with the operators. After that I went back to Naperville with him, and we lived there for over a month. Again he talked with the townspeople. He would hang around the taverns where the men went. I went to a church benefit for the families… Does that answer your question?”

“Real well,” the coroner said. “Unless the jurors have any questions, you are excused.”

The jurors had no questions, and the next witness called was Howard Lempke, superintendent of the Number Three Colliery. He testified to having met Coffee twice.

“Suppose you tell us about it in your own words, Mr. Lempke.”

“The first time I met him was along about the middle of February. He’d been hanging around the tipple and the wash-shacks, talking to the men. One of the men reported it to me, and I had him brought up to the office. He asked for a job. You know we’ve been cutting down, and I had no work for him even if he was qualified. So I told him. That was all there was to it then. I didn’t even know who he was.”

Lempke shifted in the chair so that he was looking directly at one of the jurors. He spoke to him, pointing. “I think it was you asked if he might have fallen down a shaft in the mine and then been carried out. There’s no shafts over in that section. All surface work when they were working.”

“The second time you met Coffee?” Handy prompted.

“That was about two weeks ago. Two weeks Saturday. He came up to the house after supper and told me he thought there was gas in the mine. I told him that was ridiculous. We just got through putting in a whole new ventilation system. If there was gas at all, it was getting carried out before it had a chance to collect. I wasn’t thinking of the abandoned diggings then, of course. We’d have to shut down tomorrow if we was to try to keep them clear. I’m not sure we won’t have to shut down now if the men don’t go back…”

“Yes,” Handy interrupted. “But to get back to the deceased, did he give you the location of the gas?”

“No.”

“Did he give you any reason for his suspicion of it?”

“No. He just advised a check on it. If I wasn’t a cautious person, I’d have said right then he was a crackpot and let it go at that. But to be on the safe side, I called Fred Atkinson and asked him to come over and give us a clean bill on it. It was him decided we ought to go all the way through.”

“Meanwhile, Laughlin was dead, wasn’t he?” Handy said.

“That’s not our fault, Handy. He had no business there. We’re just responsible for the safety of the men on our payrolls.”

“All right,” the coroner said. “But it strikes me as queer, a death in the mines is out of my jurisdiction, but now you tell me it wasn’t your fault Laughlin died there.”

“That’s another issue entirely,” Lempke said. “I’m not the man to answer it, and I don’t think this is the place to discuss it.”

Handy looked at him a moment, and then excused him. It was, no doubt, an old and bitter issue between the county authorities and the mine operators. The next witness called was Fred Atkinson, state inspector of mines. He told of meeting Coffee at McNamara’s, and of talking with him. “He felt very bad about the old fellow who got lost down there. He blamed himself for his death. It seems he suspected the gas a day or two before he reported it, and felt that if he’d gone to Lempke right away, he might have prevented it.”

“Did he say why he hadn’t?”

Atkinson thought for a moment. “No, he didn’t. The way I figure it, maybe he saw the old man hanging around that old entry, and then maybe when he didn’t see him, he began to think about it. The funny thing is, I don’t know how he could have detected the gas without being down in the mine himself.”

There was a stir then among the men at the front of the room. This was the delicate ground of which Handy had spoken to the sheriff, Phil thought—strangers in the mines. Handy by-passed it immediately. “Mr. Atkinson, how did you happen to find out who the deceased was?”

“We got to talking about mine inspection, and inspectors who didn’t take their reports seriously themselves. He said that writing things down took the edge off it. Here it was on paper and nothing happened. You see, Coroner, that’s what happened in Naperville. The federal and state inspectors reported safety violations. They were duly noted at headquarters, and referred to the operators and union, but nothing was done about some of them. That disaster could have been prevented. Coffee’s point was that if one of the inspectors had taken his report to mean exactly what it said, he would have closed the mine up immediately, and let them open it up against his protest even if it meant his job. Listening to him talk about it, I knew who he was.”

Lempke was on his feet. “Mr. Handy, I don’t think this is the place for a discussion of Naperville. This is not Naperville. This is Winston. All you’re accomplishing here is making more trouble for us at Number Three. The men have been out two weeks now. Another week and they won’t be going back at all….”

“That’s twice you’ve intimidated us with that remark,” Handy said quietly. “We happen to know Mr. Coffee came here after stopping at Naperville again. Go on, Mr. Atkinson. Did you ask Coffee what he was doing here?”

“I asked him if he was doing a job on the mines here. ‘A fine job I’d be doing with Laughlin dead,’ he said. In other words, he didn’t tell me outright. But if you want an opinion I’ll give it to you.”

“Please do.”

“When Coffee did a job, he covered it from all angles. I’ve been particularly careful before certifying Number Three again, knowing he was here. I’ve talked to all parties involved, foremen, union reps, and the operators. Coffee didn’t once approach the operators, and he never took one side of a story without getting the other.”

The jury nodded an understanding of his logic. Then Handy prompted: “However, Mr. Atkinson, Mrs. Coffee has just told us her husband spent four months on his Naperville story. He was in Winston less than six weeks. It’s quite possible he was doing just one part of a job here when he died. Isn’t it?”

The jury nodded an understanding of that logic, too.

Atkinson agreed, and was then excused. Tom Lavery was called. He testified to Coffee’s many visits to the store. “He’d just sit around for hours, half nodding, maybe, but looking and listening. ‘Who’s that fellow?’ he’d say of a man coming in. ‘How long’s he been in the mines? Has he a family? How’s his health?’ He was a great one on health. And if you ladies excuse me,” Lavery nodded at the women jurors, “he was all the time watching the spittoon.”

The sheriff leaned across to Handy and spoke with him. Meanwhile at the back of the room, the few miners who had come among the curious were nodding and whispering among themselves. That part of Coffee’s behavior had an obvious explanation to them. Handy banged his hand on the table. “If you’ve something to say back there, boys, come up and say it where we can all hear it.”

One of them shuffled forward a few steps, and then getting a look from Lempke, halted.

“Come on, man,” Handy said impatiently. He turned to Lavery. “You’re excused temporarily. I’ll want you back in a minute.”

When the miner reached the table, he identified himself. “I’m Billy Riordon, sir—motorman in Number Three. All us boys were saying, sir, when it’s too long between sprinklings and the dust is rising, we’re all the time coughing up chunks that’d choke a horse. Mind sir, I’m not saying there’s the way it is now. But we take that as the meaning of Tom’s story.”

“Thank you, Riordon,” Handy said with more patience. “Did you ever talk with Coffee yourself?”

“I had a word or two with him, when he was out by the wash-house once, and a few more now and then by Mac’s place. He was a good sort of man, but sorely led on, the way…”

Handy interrupted. “What did you talk about with him?”

“The Number Three and the men working there, nothing special I remember.”

“Thank you, Riordon. You may go now.” He looked to the jury for confirmation of his dismissal.

The sheriff indicated that he wanted Lavery recalled.

“When was the last time you saw the deceased?” Handy asked.

Lavery hesitated in his answer. “I can’t rightly say. It was a day or two before his death. He no more than stopped for a package of tobacco, and scarcely a word to say. He wasn’t round much after Laughlin’s death, and no more sitting by the stove then. I thought to myself, hearing one thing and another, the heart was gone out of the man along with his reason, taking up with…”

Again Handy interrupted. “Was he in your place when he heard of Laughlin’s death?”

“No. But it was in my place Jerry Whelan suggested to him he dig the grave for the old man.”