The Autumn Dead jd-5

by Edward Gorman

  And I still didn't see Karen Lane, though, according to various people I asked, I was drawing close-she'd just been seen on the dance floor, or at the bar, or out the back door, where a few people stood by the garage where the monsignor had parked his infamous black '57 Dodge (the primo fantasy of the time having been making out with your girl in its back seat). Joints and wine were being passed around among people who seemed almost fanatical in their laughter and who seemed to remember details of twenty-five years ago that I'd forgotten entirely.

  I asked a man I recognized as a lawyer if he'd seen Karen Lane. He said, "Seen her? Hell, man, she's so gorgeous, I fell in love with her." Then he nodded to the alley behind. "I think she went out there with Larry Price."

  I stood there and stared at him and time was a trap of spider-webbing I couldn't escape. Even after a quarter century, her being with Larry Price had the power to enrage me.

  I pushed past the partiers and on out to the alley where a block-long of sagging garages, probably new about the time Henry Ford was rolling his first Model T off the assembly line, stood like wooden gravestones in the moonlight. They smelled of old wood and car oil and moist earth.

  I looked up and down the long shadows and saw nothing. I was about to turn around and go back to the party when I heard the unmistakable moan.

  Two garages away.

  My stomach became fiery with pain and I felt the blind, unreasoning impulse of jealousy.

  I wanted to turn around and go back to the school, and as I started to move toward the monsignor's garage again, I heard the slap, sharp as a gunshot.

  Then in the soft night I heard Karen say, "Leave, Larry. Please."

  "I'm not finished."

  "But I'm finished, Larry, and I have been for a long time."

  "I'm sick of that goddamn tale of yours, Karen. You know that? It goddamn happened and it's goddamn over and nothing can goddamn be done about it."

  "Please, Larry."

  "Bitch."

  Then he slapped her a clean slap, probably more harmful emotionally than physically. "Bitch."

  He came out of one of the garages down in the shadows and looked around as if an assassin might be waiting for him. He had changed very little-six feet, blond, attentive to his tan and his teeth. He sold BMW's and Volvos, mostly during long lunches at the Reynolds Country Club.

  He was drunk enough that he leaned perilously forward as he moved. He almost bumped into me before he saw me. "Hey-"

  And I dropped him. For a variety of reasons, only one even remotely noble-because he'd slapped her. The second was because he'd beaten me in high school, and the third because I was frustrated with the lies Karen had been telling me and I'd had just enough vodka-laced punch to work up a mean floating edge.

  "God," he said, feeling his jaw and shaking his head.

  By now, she was out in the moon shadows, staring down at him. "What happened?"

  "He slapped you, didn't he?"

  She glanced sharply at me. "What are you doing here, Jack?"

  "Looking for you."

  "Did you get the suitcase?"

  "We need to talk about that, Karen. We need to talk very long and very hard about that."

  If she hadn't screamed, I might not have seen him lunge at me.

  I got him a hard clean shot in the stomach and then clubbed his temple with the side of my fist. He dropped to his knees and started vomiting.

  "I can't watch this," she said, starting to pace in hysterical little circles. In her blue jersey jumper and white beads, she resembled a society woman who has just been informed that the entire family fortune has been embezzled.

  Then, gathering herself, she went over to him and said, "Are you all right, Larry?"

  "What the hell you doing with him?"

  "He's helping me find something."

  "What?"

  "It needn't concern you." She sounded as prim as a schoolmarm. "I merely asked if you were all right."

  But now he didn't pay any attention to her. He struggled to his feet, leaning back a bit from the booze. He was more sober now. Losing some blood and throwing up can occasionally work wonders.

  "You think you're going to get away with this, Dwyer, you're really crazy. Really crazy." Then he turned on her and said, "You too, bitch. You too."

  He left.

  He walked bowlegged the way Oliver Hardy had in Way Out West. He wanted to walk mean because he was a basically mean guy and booze only enhanced his anger. But right now all he could do was look like Oliver Hardy and it didn't scare me and it didn't impress me and I'd already decided that if he came back, I was going to put a few more fists into him.

  "That wasn't necessary."

  "Sure it was," I said.

  "You don't understand the situation here."

  "I understand that Larry Price is a jerk and always has been."

  "But that's all you understand."

  "I met Dr. Evans."

  Her eyes narrowed. "He was there when you went into the apartment?"

  "He was there all right. Unconscious."

  "What?"

  "And bleeding."

  She sighed. Shook her head. "So he did try?"

  "Try what?"

  "Suicide."

  "Sorry."

  "What?"

  "Somebody hit him across the back of the head. Very hard. And several times. Guess what they were looking for."

  "His money, probably. Some junkie or something."

  "God, you're just going to keep it up, aren't you?"

  "Keep what up? What are you talking about?"

  "Keep up this guise that there's something very innocent in the suitcase and that you just kind of want it back for old times' sake. Are you dealing drugs?"

  "My God, what kind of person do you think I am?"

  "Did you do some jewelry salesman out of his ruby collection?"

  "I don't want to hear any more."

  "Somebody wants whatever's in that suitcase badly enough to risk B and E and assault with a deadly weapon. Those are heavy raps. “I grabbed her by the shoulder-thinking that Glendon Evans had told me he'd hit her-and I dug my thumb and forefinger into her gentle and wonderful flesh. “You owe it to me, Karen."

  "What?"

  "The truth."

  She laughed without seeming at all amused. "Oh, I wish I knew the truth, Jack. How I wish I knew the truth."

  But I was in no mood for philosophy. "What's in the suitcase?"

  "Would you make me a promise?"

  "What?"

  "If we went back into the gym and danced the slow dance medley, would you promise not to step on my feet?"

  "Don't try to buy me off, Karen. I want to know what the hell's going on. You're in trouble, whether you know it or not."

  "You used to be a terrible dancer, Jack, and for some reason I suspect you still are." She leaned up and kissed my cheek and I felt blessed and cursed at the same time. "But then you're cute and you're sincere, and sometimes those things are even more important than the social graces."

  "Have you always been this superficial?"

  "No," she said, and there was an almost startling melancholy in her voice. "No, Jack, I've had to work at it. I really have."

  Then she took my arm and led me back inside the gym where in tenth grade she'd given me a lingering public kiss right there on the dance floor. Robert Mitchum had nothing on me.

  So we started dancing, a little formally at first, as the band went through some Connie Francis numbers and then some Johnny Mathis numbers and then some Teddy Bear numbers, and I started looking around the shadows of the gym at the joke being played out before me.

  Here were the kids I'd made my First Communion with and played baseball with and walked home from school with along the railroad tracks that smelled of grease and swapped comics with (Batman was always worth two of anything else) and watched change from little girls into big girls with powers both wonderful and terrible over me and little boys into half-men with a hatred that could only come from gr
owing up in the Highlands-but whatever else we'd been, we'd been young and it had all been ahead of us-the great promise of money and achievement and sex, God yes, sex. But these people were trying to trick me now, they'd gone to some theatrical costume shop and gotten gray for their hair and padding for their bellies and rubber to create jowls, these very same people in my First Communion photo.

  "You scared?" she said.

  But I'd been lost in my thoughts and all I could give her was a dumb expression. "What?"

  "Are you afraid?"

  "Of what?"

  "Look around."

  "That's what I'm doing."

  "In twenty years a lot of these people will be dead. Maybe even us."

  "I know."

  "It went so fast."

  I was getting one of those seventh-grade erections, the kind you get but don't really want because it's embarrassing and you don't really know what to do with it. I was getting a seventh-grade erection there dancing in the darkness of our middle age.

  "Why don't we go back to your apartment and go to bed?" she said. Her voice was curiously slowed. I wanted to attribute this to the incredible sexual sway I held over women but somehow I didn't think so.

  I said, "You're drunk."

  "No, I'm not. I only had two drinks tonight."

  "Something pretty potent?"

  "No, one of the pink ladies fixed me a Scotch and soda is all."

  "Pink ladies?"

  "Waitresses."

  "Ah." And true enough, I had seen waitresses buzzing around. "They must have had some kind of incredible effect on you."

  "Why?"

  "You sound groggy."

  "That's what's funny."

  "What?"

  "I sort of feel groggy, too."

  "You want to sit down?"

  "No, just hold me a little closer, will you?"

  I sighed, pulled her closer. "Karen, I want you to tell me about the suitcase."

  "Not now, all right?"

  And she put her face into my shoulder and we danced as I once dreamed we would dance, eyes closed, even the tinny music melodic and romantic, and I felt her eminent sexual presence but also her odd vulnerability, and I held her for the girl she'd been and the woman she was, and I let my lips find her cheek and felt her finger tender on the back of my neck.

  And for a time, moving just like that in the Shamrock gym, in unison with all the people in our First Communion picture, I forgot all about Dr. Evans and how he'd been knocked out and forgot all about a curious figure in black on a black Honda motorcycle and all about a suitcase that nobody seemed to possess but that somebody seemed to want very, very badly.

  I wasn't thinking of anything at all really, just floating on her perfume and the darkness and the music, and at first I was scarcely aware of how she began to slip from my arms to the floor.

  "Karen?" I said. "Karen?"

  People around us were looking and a few giggling, making the assumption she was drunk, but I didn't think so.

  She was dead weight in my arms. And that was exactly what I thought: dead weight.

  And then one of those quick bursts of panic, some sort of concussion, went off inside me and I heard myself shouting for lights up and for people to clear space and I knelt paramedic-style next to her feeling for pulse in neck and wrist, touching the tepid, sweaty skin of her body.

  I found no pulse.

  A priest and a fat man in a dinner jacket whom I recognized as our class president came running up and said, "What's wrong here?"

  "Ambulance," was all I could say, scarcely able to speak at all.

  The overhead lights were on now and the magic was gone; you could see how old the floor was, and how beaten up the bleachers, and how cracked the tall windows. It was not the Stairway to the Stars of countless proms, after all. It was just a gym in a school more than half a century old and now in ill repair because the diocese saw no future in the Highlands. Nobody ever had.

  She looked comic herself now, fake, the way the dancers had, fake gray tint in their hair, fake bellies, fake wrinkles and jowls and rheumy eyes, but what she was putting on was even more alarming because she was imitating death itself, like some phantom beauty from a Poe poem, but without the flutter of an eyelid or warm breath in her nostrils, not the faintest flicker in wrist or neck.

  "Ambulance!" I shouted again, and this time I heard how ragged and desperate my voice had become and saw in the eyes of those encircling me a modicum of pity and a modicum of fear-both of her death and of the potential rage in my voice.

  The priest, young as a rookie ballplayer, yet shorn of the grace that comes with age, knelt down beside me and said, "Maybe I'd best say some prayers with her." He didn't say "Last rites." He didn't need to. He produced a black rosary and began saying a "Hail Mary" and an "Our Father" and then a woman somewhere sobbed and for the first time I realized that the music had stopped, and that in the gym now there was just the rush and roar of time itself and nothing more, nothing more at all.

  Chapter 8

  "You were the man dancing with her?"

  "Yes."

  "Can we talk a minute?"

  "Sure."

  Forty-five minutes had passed since the dance had ground to a nightmare halt, all motion seeming to be slowed down for a time, faces ripped open with tears and fear and the bafflement only death can inspire.

  A white box of an ambulance sat with its doors open near the west entrance. The three people from the coroner's office had finished with her now, and two attendants in white, both with potbellies and hippie beards and eyes that had gazed on death perhaps too many times, had put her inside a black body bag, which was in turn put on a gurney that was now being loaded inside the well-lit confines.

  Fanned around the ambulance were three hundred people from the dance. Many of the women had their husbands' coats draped over their shoulders. While the women were given to tears and occasional whispers, the men seemed doomed to an odd silence, gazing at the ambulance as if it explained some long-sought answer to a puzzle. There was a great deal of booze, punch from the bowl, Scotch in pint bottles, gin and vodka in flasks, beer in cans and big clear plastic cups. They'd been ready for a night when alcohol would set them free; now all alcohol could do was tranquilize them. Technically, there was a city ordinance against drinking out here, but none of the cops in the three white squad cars said anything. They just moved through the chill night, the stars clear and white in the dark blue sky, the scent of fir and pine and new grass contrasting with the smell of medicine and mortality coming from the ambulance.

  "You're Dwyer, right?"

  "Right."

  "Used to be on the force?"

  "Right."

  "Thought so." He offered me a Camel filter. I shook my head. "I'm Bill Lynott, Benny McGuane's cousin."

  "Oh. Right."

  Benny McGuane was a sergeant in the Fourth Precinct and we'd been buddies back in our first years of directing traffic and chastising husbands who kept wanting to break the bones of their cowering little wives. In those days, that was all the law would let you do, chastise them. Maybe that's why Benny drank so much and maybe that's why he'd had such fragile success with AA, on and off the program every few months or so.

  "How's he doing?" I said.

  "Much better."

  "Good."

  "Think it's really going to work for him this time."

  "He's a good man."

  "He is that." He had some of his Camel filter, standing there next to me, his face like a psychedelic phantasm of the sixties, alternately red and blue in the whipping lights of emergency vehicles. He exhaled. "Shitty thing to happen at a reunion."

  "Yes."

  "You know her?"

  "For a long time."

  "You have any reason to think there was any foul play involved?"

  "I don't think so."

  He looked at me carefully. He had one those fleshy Irish faces you associate with monsignors whose secret passion is chocolate cake. "You don't sound sure."<
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  There was the matter of the suitcase she'd wanted me to find. The matter of Dr. Glendon Evans being beaten up. The matter of her argument with Larry Price in the alley. The matter of somebody on a black Honda motorcycle following me around. "I guess I can't be sure."

  "Any particular reason?"

  "She was a woman who had a lot of friends and a lot of enemies."

  "I just got a quick look at her. Damn good-looking woman."

  "She was that, all right."

  "You think I should call for a plainclothes unit?"

  I thought about that one, too, and then I said, "I guess all we can do now is wait for the autopsy."

  "That's twenty-four hours minimum."

  "I know."

  "If anything did happen here, aside from natural causes, I mean, that's a damn long wait. You familiar with poisoning victims?"

  This kid was good. He must be taking all the night school courses available. That's one way you can divide cops these days. The men and women who put in their nighttime at the community colleges know a lot more than my generation of beat-pounders ever did.

  "Somewhat."

  "She look like she might have been poisoned?"

  "You familiar with aneurysms?"

  I shrugged. "Not really."

  "Did she just slip into unconsciousness?"

  "I guess. I'm not really sure. I mean, at first I thought she was just getting drunk."

  "It might have been a stroke."

  "Or a heart attack."

  He sighed. "My old man always said not to count on anything and he was right." He snapped his fingers. "You can go just like that."

  I was listening to him, sharing in his sense of how fragile our hold on living was, when out near the alley, next to a long silver Mercedes Benz sedan, I saw Larry Price grab a short, fleshy man and shake a fist at him. A tall, white-haired man with a Saint-Tropez tan and an arrogance that was probably radioactive stood nearby, watching. His name was Ted Forester. He was the man Glendon Evans had told me Karen was having an affair with. The man getting pushed around was a forlorn little guy named David Haskins. In high school the trio had been inseparable, though Haskins had always been little more than an adjunct, an early version of a gopher. Then, abruptly, Forester opened up the rear door of the Mercedes and Price pushed Haskins inside. A lot of people were watching all this, including Benny McGuane's cousin.