Clay Hand (3 page)

“Two weeks later. He wrote that he was in Winston.”

“Do you have that letter?”

“It was only a card. I don’t know if I have it or not.”

“Weren’t you worried at not hearing from him?”

“I was worried. I have always worried about Dick. His work was dangerous.”

The sheriff studied the knuckle of his thumb a moment. “He was identified from a letter you wrote to him, you know, Mrs. Coffee. He wasn’t carrying any other identification at all.”

Margaret waited. She was about to say something, Phil thought, but changed her mind.

Fields went on quietly. “It wasn’t mailed in Chicago.”

“I know. After I learned he was in Winston, I wrote to him—that I would go to Cincinnati. I wrote to him again from there. I thought he might come. But he didn’t. I returned to Chicago.”

Margaret told it, her head up, her voice a little choked. It was the first Phil had known of such a trip.

“There’s a calendar there on the wall.” Fields pointed. “I wonder if you’d give me the exact dates you were in Cincinnati.”

“Why?”

“Routine information,” Fields said, explaining nothing.

Without looking at the calendar, Margaret said, “March third, fourth and fifth.”

“All right,” the sheriff said. “Just one or two more questions. Did you and your husband quarrel before he left?”

“We didn’t quarrel, really. The last couple of months at home Dick acted very strangely. He was depressed, almost morose, I’d say. He seldom spoke to me. He was away a great deal, and before he left he cleared out all his papers. He was drinking a great deal…”

“Dick wasn’t much of a drinker,” Phil said before he realized that he was contradicting her.

“You didn’t see him for a year,” she said. “How do you know the changes that might have come over him?”

“Have you any idea what made him that way?” the sheriff asked, ignoring their exchange.

“None.”

“Didn’t you try to find out, ma’am?”

“Yes, I tried. Over and over again. Whatever was wrong with him was beyond my power of healing.”

They were talking about someone he had never known, Phil thought. Dick Coffee was a healthy, aggressive guy, a good fellow with a fine mind and a keen wit. He was a crusader with a level head, something not altogether common.

The sheriff straightened up from where he had tilted his chair against the table. “All right, Mrs. Coffee. We don’t know much more about what your husband was doing here than you seem to. He got to know just about everybody in the town. He was here just short of six weeks. It takes a pretty good sort of person to get liked in that much time. In less time, in fact. Because in the last week or so, it turned out just the opposite. He did a lot of drinking, and you’re going to hear it come out at the inquest, so’s I might as well get you ready for it now: there was a lot of talk about him and a woman here. It may come out to be just talk. I hope that’s so.”

“How did he die?” Margaret said. “That’s what I want to know.”

“He died in a fall from a cliff out at the edge of town. He could have jumped, he could have been pushed, the way we figured it till now. Or it could just have been an accident. That happened some time Saturday night. The last person we know to of seen him was about three o’clock Saturday afternoon. A boy found him there early yesterday morning.”

The sheriff got up. Margaret sat a moment, tense and pale, her teeth cutting into her underlip. She looked up then, meeting Fields’ eyes. “What was the woman like?”

Fields’ mouth tightened downward a little. “You’ll see her at the inquest. Now Mrs. Krancow has fixed a room for you upstairs where you’ll be comfortable while you’re here. I’ll want to talk to you again later.”

“Where did Dick stay? I’d rather stay there, Sheriff.”

“I don’t think you better, ma’am.”

“Why not?”

“Well,” Fields said, putting his chair back, “to put it in the raw, the old lady doesn’t want you.”

A
S SOON AS HE
had taken Margaret’s luggage up to the room prepared for her, Phil went outdoors. Away from her, he might escape the nightmare feeling. He could smell the coal dust in the wind, and feel its grit against his skin. A few townspeople were on the street, huddled deeply in their overcoats and peering at him curiously as he passed….a barber shop and a hardware store, opening for the day, a frame house with two youngsters peeking at him through the picket railing. He called “hello!” to them, passing. Behind him, he heard them scramble into the house and slam the door.

He paused at McNamara’s Tavern. Looking over the half curtain, he saw Randy Nichols talking with the bartender. The reporter noticed him and waved him in.

“Pour another one, Mac,” Nichols said as Phil joined him.

The large red-faced man behind the bar was pouring a brand Phil had never heard of. His face was hard, although its flesh was soft, and when he looked up, his small blue eyes were needle-like. “There’s a terrible raw day out,” he said, rubbing away with his finger the solitary drop of whiskey he had spilled.

“It is,” Phil said. “What time did you get in, Randy?”

“With the dirty dawn. I got a midnight flight to Cincinnati. I caught the milk train over from there. How did she take it?”

“His death? How would anybody take it?”

“I didn’t mean that,” Nichols said. “Does she know what was going on down here?”

“Do you?” Phil asked irritably. He sipped the raw liquor and felt his empty stomach contract with it.

“I know what I hear,” Nichols said. “Doesn’t mean I like it. But I can listen.”

A card game was going on at a table in the back. Phil looked at his watch—nine o’clock in the morning. It was a part of the unreality that five men should sit in a silent card game, giving no recognition of time or man. “I’ve got to get something to eat,” he said. “I feel like I haven’t touched ground in a month.”

“You’ve just got one foot on the merry-go-round,” Nichols said. “Wait till the music starts!”

There was a mirror the length of the bar, reflecting the meager line of bottles, a cigar box, and the broad back of McNamara, his ears lopping away from his head like daffodils. It also caught the two men at the bar, an upright piano against the wall behind them, and above it, the bare-chested, arm-folded physique of John L. Sullivan.

“Just what have you heard?” Phil said.

“That the sheriff is grilling her husband on it,” Nichols said. “They’re trying to break down his alibi. He works on the Cleveland and Mobile, a brakeman. He checked in for work at four-forty-five that afternoon—claims he was on his way to Cleveland by five-thirty. The coal train gets sidetracked about twenty miles north, while the passenger goes through. They figure he could have clocked in all right, then dropped off and caught a ride on the passenger train as far as the switch a while later, getting on the job again without being missed.”

“Randy, does this business sound like Dick to you? You knew him pretty well.”

Nichols shook his head. “No. It doesn’t. But I’ll tell you, McGovern. I saw Coffee last Christmas, and he was a mess, a hell of a mess. Him and his wife came round to the Press Club. You couldn’t say a word, he didn’t flare up. One of the fellows made kind of a play for her—kidding, you know, a few drinks. And holy Joseph, I thought Dick was going to knock his teeth out.”

“How did she react?”

“The smile of Gioconda—all mother, and no wife, I thought. Just my impression, of course. She isn’t the motherly type.”

Phil emptied his glass, and McNamara had it refilled before he could stop him. “I hear he was drinking, too,” Phil said. “That’s out of character for him.”

McNamara picked that up. “Drinking?” he said. “That boy could lay a dozen in the aisle, and walk out with his hat straight.”

Phil looked at him, wondering if there was any reason to exaggerate. “Here?”

“Here where you’re standing till last week,” the barkeep said. “I flung him out when he came round with the old man on Friday night.” He leaned across the bar confidentially. “I’ve my reputation, you know. And me after recommending him to the widow, and her taking him in, the dear soul.”

The two children Phil had seen next door were nudging the window where the curtain parted. McNamara noticed them. “Get home out of here,” he roared, waving his big red fist at them. “It’s no place for children.” They fled. His bellowing could have been heard in the next county.

“Will you cut the palaver and bring us a drink, Mac,” one of the men shouted from the card table.

“Come and fetch it yourself. You’ve got me flat-footed with carting it to you.”

There was reality to it, after all, Phil thought. He looked at the tray McNamara set on the bar and watched him cover, glass by glass, a stenciled nude.

Nichols looked up at the picture of John L. Sullivan. “There seems to be an Irish element in the town.”

“Where isn’t there an Irish element?” Phil said.

“Well,” said Nichols, “they say it’s a little rare in Dublin these days.”

“Who’s the old man he said Dick was drinking with?” Phil asked.

Nichols turned his back on the bar and leaned his elbows on it. “Henry Clauson, an old-time magician, from what I’ve collected. It’s his daughter…”

His words were cut off with McNamara’s shout: “Are you coming for this or no? You’ll be belly-aching there’s no head on it.”

One of the men shuffled up and got the tray. Phil noticed his hand was seamed with black, but the flesh itself looked clean. “This one’s on Billy,” he said.

McNamara nodded. He took a pencil and notebook from the backbar, and wet the pencil on his tongue before making the entry. “That’s your last on the tab, Billy, till you go back,” he called. “The old woman’ll be in after me if I let you over it.”

“Have they been out long?” Phil asked.

“They’ve been out at Number Three for two weeks. They’re scheduled to go back at twelve tonight, but I don’t think they’re going.”

“A strike?”

The barkeep smiled, his face a ruddy affability, but his sharp little eyes giving the lie to the smile. “A convenience,” he drawled.

Phil emptied his glass and went out in search of a restaurant.

A
N HOUR LATER HE
walked the length of the town, a gray, listless town, where things seemed to come in pairs—two churches, two bars, McNamara’s and the Sunnyside, so ironically named, and two populations, one of Slavic origin and the other Irish. Surrounding the town, the slag heaps blended into the hills until one seemed like another, and all of them like the humped backs of a hundred men who never looked to where the sun was. He stood at the railway station and stared down the solitary track to the south where it disappeared into the hills, and then to the north where the tracks splayed out into many sidings, some of them occupied now with empty coal cars. The smoke of an approaching engine heralded its coming around the side of a hill. He watched it bring a train of loaded cars, and switch then to the empties, backing them out of sight. He wondered if one of the men he saw at work there was the brakeman now under suspicion for the murder of Dick Coffee.

Ahead of him to the east, one white house lay by itself on a long plateau. Behind it lay the greatest hill of them all. It seemed as though it had been cleft in two, this side of it having been rolled away into the plateau. The remainder of it was like a giant wave still-photographed at the height of its rise. He was still looking at it when the sheriff drove up to the platform and got out of the car.

“That’s the place, all right,” Fields said.

Phil merely looked at him.

“McGovern. That’s the name, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“What did you say you do for a living?”

“I’m sports editor for the
Rockland Dispatch
.”

“I got a sister living in Rockland. A nice town. Come in the station here a minute. I’d like to talk to you.”

Phil followed him along the brick walk into the frame building. The minute they opened the door, the cheepings of a hundred baby chicks greeted them. The sheriff stood a moment, and then saw the boxes lined up against the wall behind the stove, the little beaks pecking at the air holes. Fields grinned broadly, his hard grim face dissolving in the sudden pleasure. He strode across the room and examined the boxes, holding a knuckle against an opening until one of the birds went to work on it.

Phil went to the stove and warmed his hands. The station master came out of his office, pulling on his coat. “Hello, Sam. They’re going to be pullets if Mike doesn’t come and get ʼem soon. Damn it, they need water.”

“Well, water them then,” the sheriff said.

“What do you want me to do, spit? We got no water here.”

“It’s a crying shame,” Fields said, straightening up.

“I just called him. He’ll be around.”

“Got anything for me?”

“Yeah. He bought his ticket through from Naperville.”

“Naperville,” Fields repeated, glancing toward Phil.

“Naperville to Cleveland to Winston,” the station master said.

“How long would it take him?”

“Day and a half, coming straight through.”

“Straight through is still a long way round, ain’t it?” Fields said. “All right, Ted. Much obliged.” He moved to Phil beside the stove.

“You know Coffee did a story on the Naperville disaster, don’t you?” Phil said.

Fields nodded. “Got a prize for it, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“McGovern, tell me something. Are you a friend of the wife’s or Coffee himself?”

“I’ve seen Margaret Coffee less than a dozen times. I went to school with Dick. We roomed together. We’ve been friends since.”

Fields touched a piece of coal with his toe, edging it under the stove. “Kind of convenient, you being in Chicago that way though.”

“I’ve told you what I was doing there.”

“In other words, you don’t care about her just for her sake?”

Phil took a cigaret from his pocket. “That wouldn’t be in the God’s truth either,” he said. “I’ve always found her very—exciting. I’ve probably been a little jealous of Dick. In a way, I’ve been jealous of her at times, too. Something happened to Dick when she was there—or maybe it was just that when she was with us, she was the center of interest. I never minded it then. But afterwards, I’d get the feeling of not having seen Dick at all.”