“You figure we’re heading into a battle zone?”
“I haven’t a clue where we’re heading,” he said, looking upward again. “And I have the feeling I wouldn’t like it if I did know.”
“I’ll watch your back,” I said.
Shepard stuck out his big, soft hand. “Thanks, pally.”
We traveled by day coach from Chicago to Traynorville, sitting in facing seats with Drury’s plastered leg acting as our fourth. Drury was disguised almost as effectively as his leg. He wore Shepard’s hat, my dark glasses, and his own two-day growth of beard. Not that you could see any of that. His first line of defense was a Chicago Tribune, unfolded to its full size.
Meanwhile, Shepard and I relaxed in our anonymity, meeting people’s eyes and, in my case, even saying hello.
“You don’t know all these people, do you?” Shepard asked as our car filled up at South Bend.
“Hoosiers still say hello,” I said. “They don’t have to know you.”
“Probably leave their chicken coops unlocked at night, too,” Shepard said, amazed. He leaned past Drury to peer out the window. “It’s flat, too. Flatter than the beers of yesterday.”
“Hank’s that rare thing,” Drury said, lowering his paper to half-mast. “The native of California. Only the northern half of Indiana is really flat, Hank. All its irregularities were pushed down into southern Indiana by a glacier about a million years ago.”
Shepard looked to me for confirmation. “Before my time,” I said.
Thanks to his radio work, Drury’s voice was easily as famous as his face. His brief geology lecture had attracted the attention of several of our near neighbors in the coach. Drury noticed this and buried himself in his paper again.
It was Shepard’s turn to chuckle. “Carson’s that unrare thing,” he said to me unsoftly. “The celebrity who’s afraid of his fans.”
Fortunately for Drury, our fellow passengers were as polite as they were friendly. No one bothered the great man during the ride to Traynorville, a ride that felt slow and bumpy after the Super Chief. They didn’t even make a fuss at the Traynorville station, where the process of unloading the director turned into a small circus. Drury’s wheelchair had traveled in the baggage car, and it was waiting on the platform when we finally got him down the narrow stairs of the day coach.
“I have it on good authority,” Drury said as he settled himself, “that this is the very chair Lionel Barrymore used in Young Dr. Kildare.”
The chair was old enough to have been Barrymore’s, or Dr. Gillespie’s. It was a huge wooden model with wheels like an antique bicycle’s. They were arranged like a high-wheeler’s, too, with the big ones in front and the little ones behind.
Drury noted my inspection. “I don’t trust the modern practice of putting the little wheels up front. Has to be inherently unstable. The big wheels should always lead the way.”
“He’s stating his personal philosophy,” Shepard joked, but absently. He’d spotted Gilbert Traynor at the far end of the platform, and he was waving to him. “I didn’t expect Andy Hardy to come after us himself.”
I had, but I’d been wrong about something else. Traynor had seemed ill at ease in Hollywood, unsure of himself and his ground. I’d expected him to be changed for the better by his return to his natural habitat, relaxed and confident if not downright arrogant. But it hadn’t happened.
None of the platform workers knuckled their foreheads to Traynor as he crossed to us or even seemed to notice him. I might not have myself without Shepard’s help. Traynor had been dapper if slight in his tuxedo, but now, in a too-flashy sports coat and baggy trousers, he just looked undersized–an undersized man on the far side of young who wasn’t particularly happy to see us. He had the look of a guy who had awakened after a hard night’s drinking and found a stranger in his bed. Three strangers, in fact.
If Drury was put out by the absence of a brass band, he didn’t let it show. He wrung Traynor’s hand, shaking a little life into him in the process.
“Welcome to Culver City east,” Traynor said, smiling thinly. “I’ve arranged for you to stay at our farm, Riverbend. You’ll have plenty of privacy, and there’s a room in the barn that would be perfect for your editing.”
“What’s there to edit?” I asked.
“The Imperial Albertsons,” Drury said. “Gilbert was nice enough to fly the negative out while we three provided a diversion by taking the train. Did I forget to mention that part of the plan?”
He’d forgotten to mention it to Paddy, too, or I’d never have been sent alone to guard two targets, the film and its director. Shepard passed me a suitcase. “Get used to the feeling, pally,” he said.
Traynor had brought along an appropriate vehicle, a wooden-sided station wagon. It wasn’t a new one, but it was impeccably maintained. On each varnished door, a familiar symbol was painted: the blue winged T of the Traynor Automobile Company.
On our way to the farm–Drury seated sideways on the backseat and Traynor, Shepard, and I jammed into the front–our host gave us the nickel tour. A nickel’s worth was all there was to Traynorville. It was a county seat, but a small one, its business district not much larger than the courthouse square. The square was something of a community attic, as it was decorated with the castoffs of several wars. I spotted a World War I artillery piece, a French Seventy-five. Shepard was more interested in the exhibit on the next corner, a VI flying bomb mounted on a concrete pedestal.
“Don’t get many English tourists here, I see,” he said.
Beyond the square, the residential neighborhoods turned modest in a hurry. Traynor pointed out exceptions to this rule, Victorian survivors he thought might interest Drury. One of the old mansions did. Drury had Traynor drive by it several times.
“That belonged to my great-uncle,” Traynor said, “my mother’s uncle. I’m sure the current owners would welcome the chance to be involved with your film.”
The old house was currently a funeral parlor. Shepard noted its sign between discreet sips from his flask. “If things turn sour,” he whispered to me, “they can bury the damn negative.”
Out loud he asked, “Where’s this factory of yours, Gilbert?”
“It’s on the west side of town, west of the rail yard. We have to head east to get to Riverbend.”
Instead of explaining our hurry, he launched into a description of the farm. He ended it by saying, “It’s the original Traynor homestead, settled by my great-grandfather in 1852.”
“What did he build?” Shepard asked.
“Nothing but his own life. The Traynors weren’t manufacturers then. My grandfather got that started. He founded a coach works. Later, with my father’s help, he turned it into an automobile company. Grandfather kept the old homestead, though. I think he honestly believed there’d be some call for a Traynor museum someday. Something along the lines of what Henry Ford did in Dearborn. Grandfather hated Ford, but he would have loved to have had his success. Anyway, we’ve held on to the shrine and kept it up. But nobody actually lives there. Nobody except Clark, the caretaker.
“I should tell you about Clark before you see him–meet him, I should say. He’s a disabled veteran, not that he’s really very disabled. He can outwork most of the able-bodied men we employ at the works. But he does have a stiff leg and an arm he can’t raise above his shoulder. He was busted up pretty badly in Europe. Blown up and sewn back together again. And he was disfigured. That’s really what I’ve been trying to say. That’s the worst part for Clark. The doctors weren’t able to give him back much of his face.
“He ended up in a VA hospital down in Indianapolis. We advertised for a caretaker after the war, and he applied. I was feeling sentimental about veterans at the time because of a loss my family had suffered, so I insisted we take Clark on. It’s worked out about as well as it could have, I guess. We needed the help, and he needed a place to be aw
ay from people.”
“What will Mr. Clark think of us?” Drury asked.
“He won’t bother you. He has his own cabin back on the wooded part of the property. You probably won’t see much of him, unless something goes wrong at the main house.”
“Count on us becoming old friends in no time,” Shepard said.
15
Clark was waiting for us at Riverbend. The property’s name was painted on an elegant colonial sign at the end of a long gravel drive. The farmhouse at the other end of the drive wasn’t elegant or colonial. It was a simple white-frame model whose front porch was as wide and almost as deep as the building behind it. I’d seen hundreds of farmhouses like it growing up, but none that had glowed like this one. The windows had certainly been washed that morning, and the white paint around them shone just as brightly in the afternoon sun.
The property was framed by fields of corn that ran all the way to the road, giving the front yard the look of a green alley. There wasn’t a dandelion visible in that gently rising lawn or a dead branch in the giant tulip poplars that stood on either side of the porch. Beyond the rightmost tree and across a gravel courtyard was the main outbuilding, a barn. It was a dark, unweathered red with white trim, and its highest gable bore the date 1852. Traynor had said it himself: The place was a museum without customers.
The museum’s custodian stood on the front porch, dressed in an undershirt and holding a saw that gleamed like a naked sword. To protect himself from the sun, Clark wore a ball cap with a long bill. It hadn’t kept his face from burning to about the same shade of red as the barn. At first glance his face seemed less disfigured than worn away. Traynor parked the wagon about twenty yards from the porch. From that distance I could just make out that Clark had a flat, featureless nose, no cheekbones to speak of, no eyebrows, and only a faint, uneven trace of lips, tightly drawn.
Clark stood in place while Shepard and I got Drury’s chair down from the roof of the wagon and loaded him into it. The caretaker didn’t offer to help, but he didn’t hide himself, either. I decided that he and Traynor together–or coincidentally–had hit upon the least painful way for the three of us to make Clark’s acquaintance: an extended period of stealing glances at him from a distance.
The saw in Clark’s hand and a toolbox at his feet were explained by a recent addition to the front porch steps. It was a ramp for Drury’s wheelchair, a long ramp with a very gradual incline. When Drury saw it, he thrust himself forward across the gravel, making a wide turn that brought him to the end of the ramp. With no more running start than that, he was able to ascend unaided to the porch.
“Perfect,” he said when he’d gotten there. “Absolutely first rate.” He extended his hand to the retreating Clark and held it out until Clark returned to take it. “Thanks for the ramp and for taking us in.”
Clark said nothing that I could hear. He didn’t have much time to reply before Drury wheeled his chair around and took off down the ramp. Shepard and I moved instinctively to head him off at the bottom, but he stopped in a shower of gravel without our help.
“Works going down, too,” Drury said. He craned his head around to address the caretaker, but Clark had disappeared inside the house.
Traynor was still standing by the station wagon. “I’ll help you with your bags,” he said from there. “Then I’ll let you settle in. The wagon’s for your use while you’re here.”
Drury wheeled himself back to the car. “Gilbert, if I start thanking you, I won’t know where to stop. So I won’t start. But I hope you know how I feel.”
We could all tell how Gilbert felt: uneasy. “I’ve a favor to ask,” he said. “My family would like to meet you. We’re having a little dinner tonight at our place, Traynor House. Nothing very formal. Just my mother and my sister-in-law. You’re all invited.” His voice trailed off on, “If you’re not too tired.”
“Can’t think of a nicer way to spend our first evening in Indiana,” Drury said.
I could have come up with a short list. Traynor, too, from the look of him. He glanced at Shepard and me almost pleadingly, and we chorused in with Drury. Traynor gave us directions and then took off in a low-slung Studebaker President Speedster. The coupé was sleek in outline and garish in color, a lime green over lemon yellow.
Shepard watched him go. “There’s a guy who fits right in around here, I don’t think.”
“No,” Drury said. “Poor Gilbert is definitely out of sync.”
I ad-libbed a line: “Is it just me, or did he seem less than thrilled about having us over tonight?”
“He’s uncomfortable, Scotty, that’s all. This whole town is a suit that Gilbert has outgrown. With our help, he’s going to cast it off.”
“And come out as what?” Shepard asked. “A butterfly?”
“A free man,” Drury, the model free man, replied. “In the meantime, it won’t kill us to spend some time with his family. In fact, it could help us. Out in Hollywood, Gilbert confided to me that beyond a certain point, his ability to invest in the picture will be dependent on the goodwill of his mother. He’s the president of the Traynor Company, but she’s still firmly seated on most of the Traynor money. So we have to make a good impression on the old lady, and Gilbert’s nervous about it.”
“Him and me both,” Shepard said.
We met the first requirement of a good impression by arriving on time. I drove the wagon through the front gate of Traynor House at five minutes to eight. There was no actual gate, just two slightly tapered brick pylons that might have supported one. All they were currently supporting was a pair of globe-shaped copper light fixtures, weathered green. The pylons were inset with ceramic tile in a geometric pattern. Drury had me stop the wagon so he could examine the tile.
“You’re the Hoosier, Scotty. What does that design mean?”
“Money, straight ahead.”
The house was an imposing pile of the same tan brick as the pylons. It had a green tile roof and sprawling one-floor wings on each end of the main structure. During the short trip up the crescent drive to the front steps, Drury gave us a pocket lecture on the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright.
“Not a Wright house, obviously, but you can see the Prairie School touches. Many of the mediocrities who criticized Wright eventually adopted his ideas. That’s frequently how a genius does his most lasting work: not through his own creations, but in unofficial collaboration with his enemies.”
I waited for some wry response from Shepard on the autobiographical quality of Drury’s observation, but none came. The publicist had been quiet since we’d settled in at Riverbend–Drury in a first-floor sitting room converted to a bedroom and Shepard and I upstairs. Now he was positively grim. I checked Drury’s expression in the rearview mirror. He was perfectly composed, but eager, too. I’d seen the combination before on long-lost soundstages. It was the contained excitement of a well-prepared actor anxious to get on with his scene.
The front door was answered by a maid more formally dressed, in shiny black and starched white, than the three of us. She let us in as far as a paneled foyer. Directly before us, an extra-wide staircase rose to a landing and then split off in two different directions. Like Drury’s unlucky movie set, the landing was backed by a stained-glass window. This one was representational, a rolling green landscape across which an antique car was traveling. A Traynor Phaeton Six.
“Wonderful,” Drury said, by which I guessed he meant awful.
To our left was a large, brightly lit room. Gilbert Traynor was standing in its doorway, waiting for his cue. When Drury spotted him there, he crossed to us. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “Mother will be down in a minute. You’ll want a drink first. And you can meet Linda.”
He led us into a powder blue room decorated like a standard living room but big enough to handle a dance. In front of a limestone fireplace stood a conventional grouping of sofa and chairs so dwarfed by the
room’s proportions that they looked like a showroom display. A woman sat alone on the sofa. Oddly, she didn’t seem at all dwarfed by the room, or intimidated by the procession bearing down on her. She was wearing a dark red cocktail dress that came within an inch or so of being off the shoulder. Her dark lipstick matched the dress, as did the stones in her golden jewelry: necklace, earrings, and bracelet.
She was holding an unlit cigarette. Perhaps she’d been holding it for hours. Shepard was pushing Drury’s chair and Gilbert had his hands in his pockets, so I found my lighter and circled the low, gilt table, adding to my list of observations as I went. Her slightly slanted eyes were a mossy brown, her small nose was upturned, and her dark brown hair was pulled back, loosely on top and tightly on the sides, and gathered in a roll at the back of her long, slender neck.
Everything pretty much tallied until she thanked me for the light. Her voice was down-home Hoosier without a single rounded edge. If my rusty ear could be trusted, she was from that part of the state where Drury’s glacier had deposited all the hills.
I was surprised enough by that to miss my chance to introduce myself. Gilbert did the honors, billing me somewhere below Drury’s wheelchair. Linda Traynor wasn’t put off by the slight. She seemed genuinely impressed by Drury, and she gave Shepard a friendly smile. But her dark eyes kept stealing back to me. And I hadn’t even remembered to bring my pipe.
“I’ve made some martinis,” Gilbert said. “Can I interest anyone?”
“Put an onion in Elliott’s,” Shepard said. “He only drinks Gibsons.”
“Why,” Linda asked, “does substituting an onion on a toothpick for an olive on a toothpick give a glass of gin and vermouth a whole new name?”
She asked the question of me, but Drury fielded it: “It’s a tribute to Charles Dana Gibson, the famous illustrator. Years ago he ordered a martini at The Players Club in New York. The bartender was out of olives, so he snuck a pearl onion into Gibson’s glass. The innovation should have been named for the bartender–old Charley Connolly–but Gibson got the credit. Not that it matters. The olive fanciers have kept the Gibson a footnote.”
Come Back Dead Page 10
