The Clay Hand

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  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.

  Chapter 5

  AN 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.”

  After a moment, Fields said: “The Cleveland and Mobile goes through Rockland.”

  “I know. I wondered why he didn’t stop at our place, too.”

  “He didn’t seem to be in such a hurry when he got here.”

  Phil said nothing. He lit his cigaret and flicked the dead match into the coal bucket.

  Fields went over to the wall bench and sat down, stretching his long legs in front of him. He wore boots laced up to the knees. “Tell me something about Coffee, about him, about his work, anything comes to your mind about him.”

  “He was the sort of guy who calculated his risks,” Phil said thoughtfully. “He wasn’t reckless. He wasn’t afraid to take a risk, but he measured the worth of what he was to get out of it. It’s just today I’ve heard he was drinking a lot. He never used to take anything but a glass of beer once in a while. As far as I can find out, he started drinking some time before Christmas. He began acting jealous of anyone Margaret paid any attention to then, too. Randy Nichols, the reporter covering this, told me that this morning.”

  “Any chance he might have been jealous of his wife?”

  “How do you mean?”

  Fields shrugged. “She looks like a woman who’d go over big in a crowd. Like you said, she’d take the center of things.”

  Phil shook his head. “The whole business about jealousy isn’t like Dick. He had too much on the ball himself. He had too much to do. There was nothing petty about him. He hadn’t the time or the nature for it.”

  “Did he do his work at home?”

  “Sometimes,” Phil said. He remembered the feeling he had in the living room when Margaret left him to pack, the sense of Dick’s already having been gone a long time. “I think the last work he did was a series called ‘What’s in a Book?’ It appeared in three installments in a magazine called The Scribe. It was an analysis of college textbooks. He did research for it on the West Coast last summer. I imagine he finished writing it along November sometime.”

  Fields took a notebook and pencil from the breast pocket of his leather jacket. “Give me the name of the place out West.”

  Phil gave it to him.

  “Was his wife out there with him?”

  “I imagine she was. She went most places with him.”

  “What else did he do?”

  “Before that, I think a piece on private investigators, then one on combustible exports down in Louisiana, then the disaster at Naperville, and a series on prison reforms—he was on the West Coast for that, too.”

  “Tell you what I wish you’d do,” Fields said. “Write ʼem all down for me, dates and all, if you can. I might never need it. But it always seems to me one thing in your life brings you to the next, and sometimes, something happening away back when you were a kid has the makings in it of how you’re going to die.” He got up and buttoned his jacket. “Was Coffe
e the kind of man—well, free and easy with women, would you say?”

  “No. I know that for a fact.”

  Fields pulled on his gloves and worked at the seams of them thoughtfully. “That’s the impression I got, too. I never saw him till he was gone. I’m up at Corteau, the county seat. But I know the people down here pretty well. I used to work in the mines till my lungs got bad. Been asking around about him—I just get the feeling there’s something wrong in this story.”

  “The girl involved,” Phil said. “What’s her story?”

  “You mean about her and him? She says it’s a lie. You see, Coffee used to do a lot of hiking through the hills over there. She has some goats she takes out grazing, and they’d meet there. Then he’d be down at the house a lot visiting the old man and her. The husband ain’t home much.”

  He started for the door, Phil following him. Fields looked back at the chicks. “If they don’t show up for them chickens, Ted, let me know,” he called to the station master. He held the door till Phil caught it. “Want to go see where he was killed? I got a half-hour.”

  Phil got into the car beside him. The sheriff started the motor by letting the car roll down an incline and then letting in the clutch. “Battery’s weak,” he explained. After a moment he added, “No it ain’t either. That’s just a doggone habit of mine.”

  As they drove along the highway, he gestured toward the white house Phil had seen from the station. It sat some distance back from the road. “That’s Clauson’s. He used to be a magician. Now he makes a living manufacturing all sorts of gadgets he sells to other magicians. They come from all over. You got no idea how many magicians there are in the country.

  “He’s a nice enough old coot, but he always stood out in the town like a wart on a little nose. Never comes into church, and maybe ten years back, when his wife died, he sent her up to Columbus to be cremated. That didn’t set well with the people here. What they don’t understand, they don’t like.”

  “How about the girl? Did she grow up here?”

  “I don’t think you’ll call her a girl after you see her. They came here when she was in high school. She was twice as smart as anybody. Tried to hide it, but she couldn’t hide that no more than she could hide the way she was growing—so doggoned tall and skinny she had to stand twice in the same place to see her shadow. Terrible shy. Got so she wouldn’t come into town without the old man. Just setting up in the hills there with the damned goats.

  “She was give up for an old maid before she got out of high school. Then a couple of years ago, she ups and marries this railroad fellow. Glasgow’s his name. He took a room there to be near his work—and I guess it just happened.”

  He turned off the road then and bumped a few feet over the rough field before stopping. “I guess we better walk it from here.”

  “What’s the husband like?” Phil asked.

  “He’s not the sociable kind either. But he comes around town once in a while. Has a drink of a Saturday night. He’s got a heavy kind of good looks, if you know what I mean—the kind women swallow a nitwit with. I ain’t saying he’s a nitwit. I don’t know. Like as not, he feels out of place with the old man and her. Best way I can describe them to you—they’re book people. And I don’t think the husband ever opened a book in his life except maybe a bank book.”

  “Do the Clausons have money?”

  “Well, they have their own house. I don’t think they got real money. I didn’t mean he married her for that.”

  “He married her,” Phil repeated.

  Fields smiled a little. “I guess the old man would put it the other way around—her marrying him. You can get a point of view in spite of all kinds of resolutions, can’t you?”

  “Without half trying,” Phil said.

  They got out of the car and started across the rough terrain on foot. All around the hills rose and fell like large carbuncles on the earth, one after another until one was lost in the low-hanging clouds. They passed an abandoned mine tipple, the timber about it gray-black and decaying. Phil noticed that the immediate hills were slag heaps from ancient diggings. Patches of frozen moss showed where nature had tried to reclaim them. In another hundred years, she would succeed.

  As they picked their way among them, the giant cliff was rising abruptly to their right. The wall receded in the middle so that the upper part was no more than a shelf. The sheriff stopped and squinted up at the ledge. Phil followed his eyes. They were almost beneath the crest several hundred feet above them. The wind whistled forlornly through the cavern, and Phil shivered. Without seeming to see him, the sheriff took a flask from his pocket and offered it.

  “Thanks, but I don’t think I need it.”

  “Here’s where he was found,” Fields said. He pointed to an area marked off with chalk. “We’ll have the medical examiner’s word for sure at the inquest on whether he died in the fall.”

  “Have you any reason to doubt it?”

  “No, I guess not, except I’m a suspicious man. If you wanted to make it look like a man died in a fall, this’d be the place to leave him. The hell of it is, when the youngster found him and got word to Krancow—he’s the constable here, too, you know—well, when he got word, he came out here with Doc Turpel, and when they were sure he was dead, they took him back to the parlor. They went up to Mrs. O’Grady’s then, and she near killed them with abuse. It wasn’t till along in the afternoon they called me and the coroner. I had to put my gun in her face to get in and up to his room. I got the letter from his wife there, and with the help of the Cincinnati police, got word to her.”

  “Didn’t they know enough to call you before moving him?”

  “Well, the fact is, he’d been seen out here in the hills so much—and he was warned about this cliff—they should have called me, but they didn’t.”

  A crow was cawing above them. Phil looked up to see it swoop over the top of the ledge and down out of sight beyond them in the cavern. The sudden ceasing of its cry brought a vast stillness.

  “What about the men out at one of the mines?” Phil said. “Is there a connection?”

  “There’s a connection. How strong, I don’t know. A fellow died from gas poisoning in the abandoned diggings two weeks ago. He had no business there. But it was Coffee suspected the gas, and reported it. When the inspectors went through to check, Laughlin was dead.”

  “Was Dick ever in the mines here?”

  “Not that I know of yet. He tried to get work in them once, though.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “As a laborer. He wasn’t here long, then. Nobody knew who he was. I mean nobody knew about that Naperville story of his then. It was one of the inspectors recognized him.”

  The crow flew up again, silent, for it was carrying something white in its beak.

  “What do you suppose that bird picked up?” Fields said, watching it disappear into the hills. They started toward the end of the cavern from which it had flown. “This Number Three Colliery is one of the oldest mines in the country. There’s miles of roads down there, two levels. There’s just one section working now. Them blasting in it’s supposed to have kicked the gas back in the old diggings. They’ve got good ventilation where they’re working now. But when word got round who Coffee was, and Laughlin and all, the men went out just to be sure. The big boys were sore as hell.”

  “Sore enough to do something about it?”

  “I don’t know. We haven’t had anything like that around here for a long time.”

  Near the end of the cavern the face of the cliff seemed hollowed out, somewhat like a large shell. On the floor they discovered what it was the bird had flown off with—a cigaret butt. Several of them had been stomped out there. Fields squatted down and touched them with his pencil. “Homemade ones,” he said. He scooped them into an envelope and put them in his pocket.

  When he straightened up he asked: “When did you have your first cigaret, McGovern?”

  “When I was about twelve.”

 
“Where did you go to do it?”

  “Out by the river at home.”

  Fields nodded. “Well, one thing. I think we know what Nat Watkins was doing out here when he found Coffee.” He looked at his watch. “They’ll be letting out school for recess soon. I think I’ll stop by and see the boy. The way I figure it, he swiped cigarets from his father and came out here to smoke them. Coming often enough, he might have seen something.” As they walked back through the shadow of the crag, Phil looked up at it once more. “Any foot marks or the like up there?”

  “No more than if only a bird’s wing touched it. The ground’s hard as nails.”

  On the way back to town, Fields asked where he intended staying while he was in Winston.

  “I’d like to get in where Dick stayed,” Phil said.

  “She’s a terrible woman, McGovern—like an old eagle that can’t fly with its wings crippled. She’s full of arthritis and venom. But I got the best picture of Coffee from her. It’d be the place for you if you can get in.”

  “Did she like Dick?”

  “As much as she’s going to like anybody in this world.”

  “But not his wife.”

  “I’ll take you up there now if you like. I’ve got to gather his things… No, not his wife. But if there’s anything she likes less than men, it’s women. I don’t think you’ll meet her like in a long time again.”

  Chapter 6

  TURNING LEFT AT LAVERY’S General Store and passing a few buildings they were outside Winston proper again. The sheriff nodded ahead. “There’s the place yonder.”

  The house, a half-mile’s distance from them, was a Toonerville sort of place, Phil thought—a rambling building of two stories that had been added onto at least twice after the original building had been put up. It was halfway up a hill, and the yard was scattered with outbuildings, all of them connected with the house by board walks, those, he imagined, for the convenience of a woman who made the rounds of them with difficulty. The grass had been uncut in the summer, or for many summers, and was now flattened with frost. In the front yard, the apple trees were bleak and arthritic-looking themselves.