33

Business had picked up at Augie’s. A half-dozen men were spaced out around the bar, and two of the booths held couples. From a back room came the clack of pool balls. It was the last of the after-work crowd, I decided, lingering over their aperitifs.

I sat down at the bar and listened to the Gale Storm record playing on the jukebox until the man behind the bar noticed me. He was my friend with the Civil War sideburns, Augie himself. He broke off a conversation on the evils of fluoridated water and strolled over.

“Didn’t expect to see you back in here,” he said.

“Why not?”

“You didn’t finish your drink this afternoon. From what I could tell, your friend didn’t even start his.”

“We had to see a man about a train.”

“Make you another?”

“No, thanks.” I didn’t have a prayer of blending into the crowd holding a cocktail glass. “Draw me a beer.”

When he brought it back, I said, “You can do me a favor.”

“Is that right?” Augie asked. The question was a Hoosier standard, a way of keeping a conversation going without committing oneself.

“I’m looking for a man named Nast. He’s a foreman at the Traynor plant.”

“I know Nast.”

“I’m told he’s in here most evenings. Is he here tonight? I’d like to talk with him.”

“You said you wanted a favor. A favor would be warning you when Nast is coming so you could go the other way. He’s nobody you’d want to know.”

“Is that right?” I asked, to practice my blending in.

Augie didn’t think much of my technique. “That’s damn right,” he said. “He’s been a pain in this town’s butt since his dishonorable discharge from the Marines. Took a sailor’s eye out in a bar fight. After that he turned mean.”

“How’s he stayed clear of the law?”

“Friends in high places.”

The county had only one place that high. “He doesn’t sound like the Traynors’ type.”

“Let’s say they like him better than they like the United Auto Workers. Nast hired on at the Traynor plant during some big strike after the war. Started as a scab and worked his way down. There’s always some dirty job needs doing in a factory that big. Nast is what you might call the foreman of the dirty job detail.”

“A dirty job is just what I wanted to see Mr. Nast about.”

“You still want to see him?” Augie asked, speaking a little louder, as though he suspected that my hearing was bad.

“More than ever,” I said.

“Try the poolroom then. Wait a minute.” He took away my glass of beer and handed me a bottle of the same brand. “Nast used a broken bottle on that sailor. You might want to have your own along to even things up.”

I overtipped him and followed the sound of men laughing. It led me to a back room that duplicated the proportions of the pool table it held exactly. There was just enough room around the table–an old one with ivory inlays and woven leather pockets–for the players and their cues. Four men stood around the table, three in a group to my left and one across the table from my doorway. The loner was the only one holding a stick. He was using it to tell a story.

“Skeets was drunk,” the man said. “That’s all there was to it. He’d done everything to prove it except hit the floor with his chin. He should have gone home, but he wanted to play pool in the fanciest hall in Noblesville. You know the place–never a stray piece of lint on one of their tables. No sir. And each table lit by a big old fixture with a glass shade that some beer company gave ’em.”

The three-man audience made various noises to show that they knew the fancy Noblesville pool hall. I didn’t, but no one had taken any notice of me yet. Certainly not the speaker, a thin hatchet-face with a squint that was distributed unevenly between his dark eyes. I identified him from Clark’s description as the man I’d come to see. Clark’s information was verified by the storyteller himself. That is to say, I recognized Nast’s reedy voice. He was the leader of the cross burners, the man who had pronounced Carson Drury’s doom.

“The trouble started when old Skeets tried to make a shot behind his back,” Nast said. He acted it out, bending forward and placing his left hand on the felt of the table to form a bridge for the cue. His right hand was behind his back, but the cue it held was aimed at the ceiling. “He was too drunk to know where his stick was pointing, which was up. So he’s poking away with it and looking down at his left hand, sort of amazed, you know, that there’s no cue down there when he knows he came in with one.

“Meanwhile, the cue is banging the glass shade above the table.” He demonstrated on the green shade that hung over Augie’s table. From the look of the battered paper cone, it had heard the story before. “Whack, whack, whack. Skeets keeps banging that shade, all the time looking down at the table with a ‘What the hell?’ on his face.

“Across the room, the pantywaist they’ve got running the place starts yelling.” Nast made the half-step climb to a falsetto. “‘Take it away. Take that stick away from him. Take it away.’”

I was expecting a bigger finish, but that was all I got. The other listeners, who probably knew the story better than Nast, signaled the curtain by laughing wildly. Nast was pleased, until he finally got around to acknowledging me.

“Don’t strike you as funny?” he asked.

“Guess you had to be there,” I said.

“Who the hell are you?”

I drank some beer. “Don’t you recognize me?”

“No.”

“I must look different by torch light.”

That got a snicker out of the other three. Nast quashed it with a glance. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“If you have a minute, I’ll explain it.” I backed out of the doorway and sat down in the first booth I came to. Nast joined me after a moment, carrying his own beer bottle, an empty one.

“Buy you another?” I asked. “Or do you just keep that around for self-defense?”

Nast smiled. He had a complexion as ingrained with dirt as a mechanic’s fingertips and hair as black as Drury’s, thick and heavy with tonic–Wildroot, by the smell. “Somebody’s been talking about me.”

“That’s definitely the problem,” I said.

He raised his empty without looking away from me. Augie brought him another. I noticed that the bar owner was carrying his weighted club in his hip pocket.

When I reached for my wallet, Nast shook his head. “I run a tab. Whether I pay it or not is Augie’s lookout. You said something about a problem.”

“Word’s getting around about the cross burning at Riverbend. When it gets to the right ear, you’ll be in trouble. For starters, you’re going to lose your job.”

“You’re pissing in the wind, trying to scare me,” Nast said. “I’m not going to lose an hour’s pay.”

“Don’t count too much on the Traynors backing you. I don’t think you have the right one in your corner. And none of them is going to want any part of a murder charge.”

“Murder?” Nast asked, mixing curiosity with offended dignity.

“You ought to get somebody to read you a newspaper now and then. We had a guy killed at Riverbend the other night. It was two nights after you told us to leave town or else.”

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about you murdering a guy or being set up by someone to take the blame for the murder. My guess is somebody’s setting you up, you and your merry men.”

“Guess and be damned,” Nast said. “You can’t prove anything.”

“That’s where your men come in. There are too many of them. When they figure out that they’re accessories in a murder, one of them will come forward to tell what he knows. After that, they’ll be lining up to sing. This is an electric chair state.”

Nast took a drink, jerking the bottle up and down again so quickly that the beer foamed over and ran down his hand. He dried it on his shirt. “What’s your price?”

“I want the guy who shot Hank Shepard. If it wasn’t you, you’d better start talking. For starters, you can tell me who set up the cross burning and why.”

“I can’t afford to be seen jawing with you,” Nast said, glancing nervously around the bar.

I glanced, too, collecting a few hard looks for my trouble. Even the jukebox had turned against me. Hank Williams was crooning “Your Cheating Heart,” a song that brought Ella and Linda Traynor to mind simultaneously.

I blocked out both of them. “It’s me or the police,” I said. “Me and the police if I don’t like your answers.”

“I’ll talk to you,” Nast whispered, “but not here. Meet me in the rail yard west of town in half an hour.”

“The rail yard next to the Traynor works? Doesn’t sound like a neutral site.”

“You go there first and check it out if you don’t trust me. It’s a big open space with an old switching tower. I’ll meet you by the tower.”

“All right,” I said.

“I’ll yell something at you now, and you get up and leave, okay? I’ll say, ‘Go to hell,’ and you leave and I’ll follow.”

“Half an hour.”