Clay Hand (17 page)

“Hello, Jerry,” Fields said, getting out of the car. “How’s business?”

“Keeping body and soul together. That’s about all.”

“Is it all the trips up to Corteau that make you a living?”

Whelan screwed up his face. “I’m to Corteau no more than a time or two in a month.”

“What for?”

“Taking them in the big houses up there for a lark,” he nodded toward the one prosperous street in Winston. “The things I could tell you on them if I was loose in the mouth.” Fields showed scant interest. “And I’m sent up for a wreath of flowers when there’s a funeral.”

“What gave you the notion of having Coffee dig Laughlin’s grave, Jerry?”

“I told you that yesterday. It just come to me seeing him standing around. I says to myself: it’s a shame to see him idle when it takes so little to keep him busy. So I says to him, ‘There’s a gravedigger’s grave to be dug at the parish.’ It was him took me up on it. He could as leave let it lay as a joke. I don’t know what you’re persecuting me for, Sheriff. I’m an easy man, free with my tongue some of the time. But there’s no harm in me at all.”

Fields heard him out, and it seemed to Phil that Whelan could go on for hours making talk about nothing. The sheriff was looking over the taxi as though appraising its worth. “Jerry, how did you ever gather enough money in a piece to buy the cab?”

“I’ve had it three years and it wasn’t new then,” Whelan said. He was surly now. He jerked his head in Phil’s direction. “He’s put you up to this, sucking in with the old woman.”

Fields did not look at him. He squatted down and examined the tires. “Is Anna paying it off to her in wages?”

“What if she is? Isn’t a daughter meant to be helping out her poor da, and him with a string of others to bring up behind her?”

Fields touched the car wheel with his toe. “You don’t take much better care of it than you do of them, do you, Jerry? Did Anna tell you about Coffee and Mrs. Glasgow?”

“She told the mother, and the mother told me.”

She would not be very likely to tell him anything, Phil thought.

“Did you know Kevin at all, Jerry?”

“Laughlin?” Whelan shrugged, although there was no easiness in his face. “The way you get to know most of the people when you’re a sociable sort. From seeing him round.”

“Around where?”

“I told you all this. The church. And I often seen him roaming around the tracks over to back of the hills. I’d see him go by when I was sitting here at the station.”

Fields nodded. “Do you know Glasgow?”

“To pass the time of day with. I seen him of a Saturday night around town, and coming and going from his work there by the tracks. He’s not a bad sort. A queer duck to get mixed up with the likes of them, though.” He glanced at Phil then, remembering probably their words on the subject in the widow’s kitchen. “Not that I’ve anything against them,” he added.

“I’m glad to hear that, Jerry,” the sheriff said. “I hope you’ll keep playing that tune for as long as we’ve the trouble around us here.”

He got into the car and Whelan came to the window. “I’ll play it as if it was a flute. And Mr. Fields, Sheriff—if there’s any traveling to be done between here and the county seat—I’ve a reliable service. And there must be an allowance for that in the county budget. You shouldn’t be running yourself all the time and me sitting here expanding my backside.”

“I’ll remember it, Jerry,” he said, starting the motor. As they drove away from the station, he glanced at him through the rear-view mirror. They went on to Krancow’s in silence.

In his office there, Fields took the piece of string he had picked up in the mine from his pocket and tested it again. He reached for the phone then and called Doctor Turpel. From their conversation, Phil gathered that Turpel was on a retainer for the mines and had examined Laughlin. Fields made an appointment to see him a few minutes later. When he hung up, he swung around in the chair. “You see, McGovern, him marking that room—well, whatever he intended that for, it was marking off the place a man could die. Why didn’t he tell Lempke he marked it?”

“Two thoughts come to me on that,” Phil said. “Either somebody else marked it, or Dick marked it for Laughlin. Nobody would see that unless he was looking for it.”

“That’s a fact,” Fields said. “When they marked the room with that chalk cross they didn’t see it.” He took the phone again and dictated a telegram to the Cleveland and Mobile Railway office, asking complete information on Norman Glasgow. Listening to Fields, Phil recalled his visit of the night before to the Clausons, and the magician’s telling him of the devices he made and sold. Could that not be a blind? That Clauson should be mixed up in any way in bootlegging seemed incredible. But if it were so, that was how it was meant to look. The more he thought about it, the more of a point Clauson seemed to have made of showing him the product of his work. He described the incident to the sheriff.

“That fits as well as anything else,” Fields said. “Maybe a little better. I ain’t seen any evidence of the bootleg stuff here—not that I’ve done much looking so far—but people drinking it do crazy things. It comes out. It’d be a lot safer to sell it a ways from where it’s made…” He shrugged. “It’s possible.”

“Clauson mentioned someone by the name of Martin Shaw being there from Zanesville the day Dick first called.”

Fields wrote down the name. “I don’t think there’s a question of him being a magician…but that’d be a nice sideline.” He squinted up at him from the notebook. “Not that I believe it any more than you do. But it can’t hurt to check.”

“How long ago was the still used?”

“There’s nothing down there now. But that hose is in pretty good shape. I’d say a month, put or take a week.” Fields got up and looked at his watch. “Did you ever write down Coffee’s history for me?”

“No. I’ll do it now.”

“What I’d rather you did—go up to Corteau. They’d have them things in the library, wouldn’t they?”

Phil nodded.

“I’ll give you a note to the librarian so you can take them out. I want everything he wrote. And as long as the wife’s here, you might get her to help you. I want to know how long he stayed places, if she was with him …anything you think might be interesting.”

“How much shall I tell Margaret?”

“Don’t you trust her? How much can you tell her, anyway?”

“Not much,” Phil admitted. “She wanted to go home before the inquest. In the middle of it she changed her mind. She made friends with Mrs. O’Grady. Why?”

Fields leaned toward him, his face almost in his. “For the same reason maybe she was making such good friends with you that morning you took her out by the cliff?”

Phil met his eyes, but he could feel the color rising to his face. “That was my fault, Sheriff.”

Fields leaned back and picked up the transcript of the inquest proceedings. “Maybe I couldn’t see so good, but I’ve always had the notion a kiss takes cooperation. You might think about you being the reason she’s hanging around Winston.”

P
HIL THOUGHT ABOUT IT
. But somehow he could not make it fit the situation. And yet Margaret always bridled at his censure. If she did not give a damn she might well have let it pass. She had slapped him down the night before for it. That had been the trouble between them even before Dick’s death. They had been baiting one another—resisting one another—that was what it amounted to in his case at least. And Fields was right. The kiss was—a kiss.

While he waited for her to dress to go to Corteau with him, he thought back over these days with her, and began to speculate on what might have happened had he not been sent to Chicago to cover the basketball tournament. Would she have come to Winston alone? Or would she have called on someone else? Who?

As they drove to Corteau, he asked her.

“I’d have come alone,” she said. “I might have wired you or called you.”

“Why?”

“Because I needed you.”

“I haven’t been much help.”

“That’s because you’re afraid of me, Phil. You’ve always been afraid of me from the day we first shook hands in New York.”

“You know the reason for that, Margaret.” He did not take his eyes from the road.

“Because I was Dick’s wife?”

“That usually means hands off, you know.”

“Don’t try to be funny, Phil. It doesn’t fit.”

“A lot of things don’t fit, Margaret. I’ve told you before, I’m no sophisticate. Something happened to me the first time I saw you. I’ve told myself a thousand times since that I’m a damned fool. But there it is. I’ve never gotten over it. I thought I was cured once. I made the mistake of introducing Eleanor to you. She was smarter than I was, because she knew immediately. I think that was why she called it off although she didn’t say so.”

“Do you still feel that way, Phil?”

“I don’t know.”

Although he did not look at her, he saw her chin go up and he imagined the color flaming in her face.

“Shall I tell you something about yourself, Phil McGovern? You’re a coward. I’ve always thought it was the fine moral stuff in you. The discretion. I admired it. I was wrong. You got a nice, narrow bringing up, and you’re afraid to stray out of the lane.”

It was strange, he thought, that her words did not anger him. If they were the truth it would have angered him. There was an element of truth in them. “Perhaps it’s that,” he said. “But maybe it’s my instinct toward self-preservation.”

“You think I destroyed Dick. Is that it?”

“I don’t know. Something did. Why did you change your mind about leaving Winston, Margaret?”

“You’re a fool as well as a coward, Phil.”

He glanced at her then, and found the full wide beauty of her eyes on him. The car wavered on the highway, the right wheels slipping off the macadam onto the gravel. He pulled it back.

“Park the car, Phil, and let’s talk this out.”

“No, Margaret. Not now. There’ll be a time for it, but not now. First, there’s Dick.”

“First, there’s Dick, dead or alive,” she said. After a moment she added: “That was a horrible thing to say.”

Reason began to return to him. “When he left home this time he was through; wasn’t he? I could tell by the house. You didn’t expect him back. Do you remember suggesting that I invite you and him to Rockland that night? Why, Margaret?”

“I thought you might do something for him. He was changed, Phil. You know that now. You could see it in those fragments that he wrote.”

“What changed him? What happened between him and you?”

“Has it ever occurred to you that it happened between him and someone else?”

“No. That did not occur to me.”

“Between him and God, Phil, when it comes right down to it. The last four months of his life he was at war with himself, and I had no place in it. I had no place in his life at all.”

“Is that why you thought he had committed suicide?”

“That’s why I hoped he was in Winston,” she said not hearing him. “I hoped he was trying to find himself. Maybe he was. I don’t know if we’ll ever know that.”

Phil pulled himself up from where he had hunched over the steering wheel. He was suddenly tired beyond any weariness he could remember. Margaret and the priest—suicide. Mrs. O’Grady and himself—not suicide. The sheriff—murder?

“Why are we going to Corteau, Phil?”

He opened the car window for a moment. “To get copies of Dick’s work for the sheriff. He wants to read them.”

“Why?”

“Because he wants to know Dick as well as we do. And I’ll tell you, Margaret, before he’s through, he will. And he’ll span the difference between my friend and your husband.”

“If he does, Phil, you’re in for a great shock. It was my husband who died in Winston.”

At the librarian’s desk at Corteau, one after another of the publications in which Coffee’s articles appeared was brought to them. Margaret prompted where his memory failed him. Even so, he checked the
Readers’ Guide
back year by year to the first story on which Dick received a by-line. “It’s like living over a lifetime,” she whispered. Her fingers trembled as she touched the pages.

Phil signed for the magazines, and watched the librarian attach the slip to the sheriff’s order. In the car again, he took a pad and pencil from his pocket. “Fields wants to know on which of these stories you were with him,” he said.

“Why? There was nothing wrong with Dick when he was doing these.”

“He doesn’t think there was anything wrong with Dick in Winston. You were in Naperville…” He checked it and wrote down the date.

“I’m cold, Phil. Will you roll up the window, please?”

“Sorry. ‘I am growing cold here, even as the days grow warmer….’” He thought of the words and repeated them aloud. “Do you remember that in the notes, Margaret? How did it end? ‘…and loneliness makes desperate wooers of us?’ Why was he lonely, I wonder, when the voice of his beloved was always near him, skipping over hills?” He saw her grow pale and taut beside him. He continued talking quietly, as though it were to himself more than to her. “He wasn’t lonely in New Orleans, was he? That was on combustible exports. You were with him, weren’t you?” He laid the magazine aside.

“Yes.” Her voice was small and choked.

“And San Francisco. That was the bloody strike, the seamen. He wasn’t alone there either.”

“No.”

“And Los Angeles last summer? You were with him on the campuses?”

She nodded.

He checked it. “And three years ago, doing the prison story. Prisons are lonely places. But you were there beside him, weren’t you, Margaret?”

“Yes. I was there.”

“And in Detroit, the shirt organization.”

“I stayed at Ann Arbor. We were afraid.”

“Are you afraid now, Margaret?”

“What are you trying to do to me, Phil? Are you out of your mind?”

“No. Not at all. I’m just trying to figure out why Dick chose to be alone in Winston. New York on ‘How Private, Private Detectives?’ … That must have been nostalgic for you, Margaret. Dick couldn’t have been lonely there.”

“It doesn’t occur to you, Phil, to ask if I was ever lonely, does it? You don’t ask what it was like to sit in Ann Arbor and wait, to walk the floors of a hotel room, to see a hundred movies, scarcely caring whether it was one I had seen before—to sit in the same house with him those last weeks in Chicago, and be more alone than if he were in China.” She drew a long, shivering breath. “You’re as blind as they come, Phil. You’re like all the rest of the do-gooders. You canonize the dead and persecute the living. It makes the great average man of you.”