The Autumn Dead jd-5

by Edward Gorman

  The Autumn Dead

  ( Jack Dwyer - 5 )

  Edward Gorman

  Edward Gorman

  The Autumn Dead

  Night, the shadow of light, And life, the shadow of death.

  — ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

  Chapter 1

  I spent two hours that rainy Tuesday morning honoring my boss's request to explain to a chunky twenty-two-year-old Chicano kid named Diaz why he'd get canned if he ever again used the choke hold on anybody.

  "He was shoplifting, man," Diaz said.

  "Not exactly the same as shooting or raping somebody."

  "He looked dangerous."

  "He's forty-three years old and he gets early social security because he shakes so bad from injuries he picked up in Nam. I saw him, Diaz. The poor bastard's barely alive. He shoplifts because the boys in Washington cut vets' benefits. And in his present condition, he couldn't whip Madonna." I lost it then, just a bit. "We're rent-a-cops, Diaz. We're not mercenaries or whatever those guys are in those magazines you read. You understand?"

  Diaz has an annoying habit of snuffling phlegm up in his throat, then expectorating it into his empty Styrofoam coffee cup. I have to wait a few hours afterward before I can even think about eating again. He did it now and he kept his eyes on me all the time he was doing it. "I ain't gonna get wasted because of some weirdo creep, man. The boss don't let us carry iron, then he shouldn't have no objections when we use some force."

  Carry iron. Inside his head, Diaz, like too many other rent-a-cops who can't get jobs as real policemen, lives out scenes from grade-B action movies. Carry iron. How about just saying "go armed"? But Charles Bronson would never put it that way, now would he? "Sometimes you have to use force, but not on somebody who's barely alive, and not the choke hold. Unless it's life and death, and it's rarely life and death."

  He wiped his hands on the front of his uniform shirt. The American Security uniform is light blue with dark blue epaulets and fine gold buttons. It makes us look like cops who moonlight as bus drivers.

  "I put up with this shit for minimum wage, man," Diaz said. He might have been nice-looking if he lost twenty-five pounds and did something about his zits and smiled. I'd seen him smile only once in the three months he'd worked here. That was the time Hanrahan, another rent-a-cop, told about the time he'd busted a shoplifter's arm. Hanrahan and Diaz swapped issues of mercenary magazines. Diaz, inhaling a Winston, said now, "I should at least be able to have a little fun."

  He knew he'd really get me going with that one and I was all ready to let go, but then the intercomstarted crackling inthe small back room with the Pepsi machine and the sandwich machine and the trash barrel that gets emptied only when the well-fed cockroaches join hands and start dancing around it. Poker gets played a lot back there, and according to legend, a very beautiful rent-a-cop named Stephanie did it with a rent-a-cop named Ken right on the table. To me that tale sounds like something out of one of Diaz's magazines.

  "Dwyer?" Bobby Lee said.

  "Yes?"

  "Somebody here to see you."

  "Can hewait a bit?"

  "It isn't a he. It's a she." She explained this with a modest hint of disapproval. She and Donna have become good friends, and when Donna's not around, Bobby Lee acts as her surrogate home-room monitor.

  "She. She give her name?"

  "Yes. Karen Lane."

  So there you have it.

  I'm standing here in my para-bus driver uniform, forty-four years of age, ten pounds overweight, spending part of my time cuffing shoplifters and the other picking up small bits as an actor of dubious talent, not exactly what you'd call the American success story, and Karen Lane comes back into my life.

  Twenty-five years ago Karen Lane, who then bore an unnerving resemblance to Natalie Wood, had broken not only my heart but my bank account. Even though we were both from the same poor neighborhood, the Highlands, Karen had early on gotten used to the pleasures to be had merely by smiling. Rich boys had been lining up for her ever since she'd first strolled onto a playground; I had never been sure how I'd gotten in that line, even if it had been only for a few months.

  The odd thing was that no matter how many years passed, the stray thought came back once or twice a year that someday I'd run into her again, though of course in a lurid soap-opera fashion. I'd be an established actor by then and Karen would be this smiled-out hag with six kids and a husband who beat her as often as he had the strength left over from his job in the coal mines.

  So there you have it.

  She doesn't have the grace to wait till you're living in Hollywood and hanging around with Jimmy Garner and Bob Redford, uh-uh, she comes back some rainy Tuesday morning when you're chewing out some fleshy bullyboy who enjoys choking some poor vet who has to resort to stealing because he's broke.

  "You look weird, man," Diaz said.

  "Huh?"

  "Weird. Your face."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah." He nodded to the intercom. 'This lady, this Karen Lane broad, she must be special, huh?"

  "Not the way you mean."

  "Bitch, huh?"

  I shrugged. "Used to be. Maybe she's changed."

  "I knew a bitch once." He made a fist. Showed it to me the way most men would show you pictures of their babies. "She answered to Papa." He always called his fist Papa.

  "Diaz," I said, but what was the use?

  "What?"

  "I know your situation."

  "What situation?"

  "Your home situation, asshole."

  "Oh, yeah."

  "Your mother couldn't get by without your paycheck. And this would be the third job you've lost in six months. So cool it with the JohnWayne crap, all right?"

  I was starting to feel sorry for him-his life wasn't without frustration, he had six brothers and sisters still of school age, and a mother too haggard to work and a father who had died of heart disease three months ago-but it was dangerous to feel sorry for Diaz because he'd kill you with your pity. He'd put you to the wall with your pity.

  I said, "You get the impulse to put the choke hold on somebody, try to think of your mother, okay?"

  "What you think I am, man, some kind of fruit?"

  I sighed and shook my head.

  He picked up his Styrofoam coffee and snuffled some phlegm into it. Then he held the cup out to me. "You thirsty, man?"

  On the way down the hall, Robbins, the boss, stopped me. He's a big man, six-five, and the proud possessor of the world's largest collection of clip-on neckties. "Holy moley, Dwyer." He still says that. Holy moley.

  "What?"

  "That babe."

  "Oh, yeah."

  He smiled. He'd just gotten a haircut and there were white wiry flecks of hair all over his shoulders. He smelled of the kind of sweet hair tonic my father's barber had always used on all the working guys. Sweet enough to kill a chocolate urge. "Oh, yeah." Real casual like. He jabbed at my chest with a plump finger. "Donna's gonna kick your ass when she finds out."

  "Robbins, honest, I haven't seen this woman in twenty-five years."

  "Right," he said and winked. He had a wink like my uncle Phil, whom I once saw trying to peek in the women's john at a family reunion. He winked because he likes me and considers us friends, and I like him fine and I consider him a friend, too, if only because we are the only people in the agency who've actually been real cops. "You should keep me filled in on this stuff, Dwyer." Then he put a Tiparillo in his mouth and strolled off down the hail to his office.

  All his talk about how good-looking Karen Lane was caused me to lean into the john, grind a comb through hair getting steely with gray, and make sure my teeth didn't have samples of my breakfast still stuck in the cracks. I stood there and loo
ked at myself and then shrugged. I wasn't magically going to get any better looking.

  So I went out to the lobby where Robbins, for reasons I've never actually understood, has arrayed blown-up black-and-white photos of criminals ranging from Jesse James to a guy he calls Lefty Dalwoski, who, he claims, was such a despicable bastard that he not only shot a nun but shot her in the back. "Christ," he always said, "at least if he'd shot her in the front, she'd have had a chance." What chance? To draw her Magnum? What order of nuns go armed-the Sisters of the Holy Luger?

  In addition to the rogues gallery, there is enough cheap furniture to fill a small house: two coffee tables, four overstuffed chairs (one of which is honest-to-God paisley), and a lime-green couch that looks as if a pyromaniac used to work it over with cigarettes right after the kitties got done using it as a litter box. Robbins used to be in the loan-collection business, and what he couldn't get in cash, he took in furniture. "You need anything," he always says, "let me know. I got this warehouse full of shit." And shit it was, too.

  In the center of the reception area sits another one of Robbins' catches, a desk big enough to play Ping-Pong on. This he got from a banker who'd embezzled several hundred thousand for the sake of a nineteen-year-old teller who wore falsies on her breasts and braces on her teeth. Robbins got these details from the coroner. The banker, trapped, killed himself and the girl. The banker had owed a loan company money (go figure) and Robbins had been dispatched to collect it. As usual on debts he couldn't collect, he took furniture.

  Anyway, the desk is usually occupied by a woman whose breasts have inspired as many hours of conversation as the sins of Richard Nixon. Her name is Bobby Lee, and she is maybe forty (who would dare ask?) and she is the kind of woman who breaks into tears at the mere mention of Elvis Presley's name. Indeed, once a year she and her 1965 beehive hairdo and her mother and father drive in their motorhome to Graceland where, Bobby Lee claims, she once heard Elvis himself speak to her From Beyond The Grave. When she told me this, I asked, with at least a tad of condescension, "What did he say to you?" And she'd looked generally shocked. "God, Dwyer, that's personal. All I’ll say is that it made me feel much better." Anyway, Bobby Lee and I had not gotten along until the last year or so, mostly due to her previously having been the mistress of my former employer, an anal retentive who runs a security agency the way wardens run death rows. The man had dumped Bobby Lee and in so doing had sent her running back to her Baptist faith, which she now espoused with the fervor of Saint Paul in a debating contest. Having her heart broken had turned her not only religious but human, too, so when the guy fired her, I got her a job over here.

  Now she sat in the reception area and answered the phones and smoked enough Kool filters to give an entire stadium lung cancer and dispatched American Security people with the curt competence of old George Patton sending men into battle.

  But it wasn't Bobby Lee I was looking at now. It was this beautiful five-five woman with dazzling auburn hair touching the shoulders of her white cashmere sweater and her hands tucked gracefully into the pockets of her white pleated trousers. She was as tan as a travel poster and benumbing as the first moment you ever fell in love.

  As she raisedher clean blue gaze to mine, I realized that Karen Lane had managed the impossible. She not only looked as good as she had twenty-five years ago-she looked better.

  "Hi, Jack."

  "Hi."

  "I'll bet you're surprised to see me."

  "Not any more surprised than I'd be if the Pope called me for lunch."

  She laughed. She had a wonderful laugh. I wanted to dive in it and drown. "Still a smart-ass."

  Bobby Lee took the Kool from the corner of her mouth and said, "That's what his girlfriend Donna always says. What a smart-ass he is." She scowled at me.

  "Oh, so he has a girlfriend?" Karen said, picking up on the point Bobby Lee had wanted to make. She didn't take her beautiful eyes from me. Not for a moment.

  "Yes, he most certainly does."

  "Do you think she'd mind if I asked Jack to lunch?"

  And her eyes were still on mine.

  "I wouldn't think a real lady would need to ask a question like that,” Bobby Lee said and put her fake Fu Manchu fingernails to the keyboard, blocking us out with Zen mastery.

  And then Karen laughed again and for the first time let her eyes fall on Bobby Lee. "I'm sorry. I probably am coming on a little strong, aren't I? I'm actually here to see Jack on business."

  Bobby Lee of course said nothing. But she exhaled in such a way that you could see how each and every fiber in her T-shirt strained against the overabundance of her breasts. Her T-shirts always had pictures of country-music stars on them. Today Willy Nelson had the pleasure of being buoyed on her bust.

  "So how about it, Jack?" Karen Lane said. "Some lunch? On me?"

  I looked at Bobby Lee. "I better ask my mom here first."

  "Very funny," Bobby Lee said, then turned around again and started tapping on her Wang keyboard.

  So Karen Lane and I left the building and went down to the curb to get her car. It was new and it was dazzling white and it was every inch a Jaguar sedan.

  Chapter 2

  The nuns who'd taught us would not have been proud of her.

  On the way to the Harcourt, a restaurant I could afford to eat at only if I'd recently stuck up a 7-Eleven, she gave me some sense of what she'd been doing during the twenty-five years since we'd graduated from St. Michael's.

  There had been four husbands. She did not describe them in emotional terms-"great guy" or "wonderful lover" or "wife beater"-instead I got their occupations and some sense of their financial status.

  Number One was an "internist who lost a lot when the Market got soft in the early seventies." Two was an AFL linebacker who'd been "very content to take early retirement and start his own insurance agency in Decatur, Illinois." Three was curator of an art museum and he was "all inherited money the bulk of which he wouldn't come into until he turned fifty and he was only twenty-nine." Four was a communications magnate "who took a big gamble on buying up independent TV stations and then really lost big when cable came in."

  Then there were the places she'd lived: Los Angeles ("I've never felt lonelier"); Ft. Lauderdale ("If you've got enough money, you can pretend it's sixteenth-century Florence"); Denver ("No matter how rich they are there, they've all got cow shit on their shoes"); Paris ("No matter what they say to the contrary, their noses are much bigger than their cocks, believe me"); and New York ("From my window I could look over Central Park and I felt just like Holly Golightly.")

  It was when she said the last that I stopped her. "Can I ask you a question?"

  "Sure."

  "Is this on tape?"

  She laughed her wonderful laugh. "God, I really am talking a lot, aren't I?"

  "Then can I ask you another question?"

  "What?"

  "Who is Holly Golightly?"

  "Didn't you ever read Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote?"

  "I read In Cold Blood. It was great."

  She frowned. "I started it, but it was too depressing. But Breakfast at Tiffany's-you know, we were in high school when that came out and one Saturday I went downtown to the library to pick up a book and I chose that one because, frankly, I've never been much of a reader and because it was very thin and the type was very big and there was this really fascinating photograph of Capote on the back. And so I took it home and read it and it changed my life. It really did. I mean, it really inspired me. I wanted to be just like Holly Golightly. Then after graduation I took the two hundred dollars I'd saved from my summer job and went down to the bus depot and got a Greyhound and headed straight for New York. God, it was fantastic."

  And I heard then what I should have heard-and understood-back when I was twenty and hoping my frail hopes that she'd somehow fall in love with me: That something central was missing in her-my old man would have called it horse sense-that she was as giddy and unlikely and impossible as any tale ever
told in the pages of Modern Screen.

  But where most women gave up such dreams under the press of eight-to-five jobs or infants who demanded tits and taters or husbands who made it their business to crush every little hope their wives ever had-Karen Lane had had the sheer beauty and the sheer deranged gall to pursue her particular muses.

  That was why, even back in grade school, she'd scared me. She was some kind of combination of Audrey Hepburn and Benito Mussolini.

  Then we were sitting at a stoplight, a laundry truck on one side of us, a school bus on the other, and she leaned over and before I knew what was happening, she threw her arms around me and put her tongue, with the precision of a surgical instrument, right inside my mouth.

  I could tell when the light changed because the cars behind us started honking and the drivers yelling.

  She was soft and tasted great and I was trembling and feeling one of those erections you're only supposed to get when you're sixteen and every bit as daffy, at least at the moment, as she was.

  Then, bowing to the authority of horns and curses, she took herself away from me, and I felt as deserted as an orphan.

  But before she went back to driving, she patted me on the knee in an oddly cool, almost matronly way and said, "I know you're going to help me, Jack. I just know it."

  The east end of the Harcourt sits on a promontory over a lake lost that day in fog and rain. Somewhere in the distance big wooden workboats moved like massive prehistoric animals through haze that blanched everything of colors. Everything looked and felt gray on this March day.

  On this side of the vast curved window a waiter who seemed to have watched an awful lot of Charles Boyer movies was making a fool of himself over Karen while trying to keep up a French accent that was falling down like socks that had lost their elastic.

  "Ze braised fresh crab claws," he said and rolled his eyes the way he probably did during sex.

  "They sound wonderful. Just wonderful." And then she smiled over at me. "Don't they sound wonderful, Jack?"