The Autumn Dead jd-5

by Edward Gorman

"He's forty-three years old. He lives in one of the suburbs. He's twenty pounds overweight, and no matter how hard he tries to diet, around eleven o'clock every night he sneaks down to the refrigerator where his wife has got this big sign that reads THINK BEFORE YOU EAT. Only he's so ravenous, he nearly rips the door off and then he just pigs out. Preferably on sweet stuff, but at this point he'll go for anything. He's disgusting to watch. You getting a picture?"

  "I'm getting a picture."

  "He goes to a Methodist church every Sunday but he nods off during the sermon. He wears Hush Puppies. During the sixties he got a college deferment so he didn't have to go to Nam but he didn't necessarily agree with all the people in the streets. But now this is the tricky part. He works for this corporation where their people are always getting fired. His boss is a real tyrant. Jim uses Valium and Maalox and Turns because inside he's a mess. He's losing his hair, and his erections aren't what they used to be, and even sending his only child to a state university is killing him financially. He's not shit, you seeing it?"

  "I'm seeing it." And I was. "He eats because he's secretly depressed, right?" It was like acting class, fun, exhilarating, and only faintly embarrassing.

  "Right."

  "And maybe he and his wife don't really communicate much anymore, right?"

  "Now you're flying, Jack."

  "And he always feels that his back is to the wall, and that even the wall's going to cave in on him, right?"

  "Exactly. And so, when First National gives him a home-equity loan, it's much more than just a loan-symbolically. Here's this fat guy in Hush Puppies who's this absolute piece of dust with his wife and with his boss-it's First National saying to this guy, Hey, we're your friend, pal. Other people may piss on you and spit on you and revile you with every dirty name imaginable-but not us, we're your friend, can you dig that-your friend? So what do we hear in his voice when he says, 'If it wasn't for that home-equity loan I got from First National, I wouldn't have been able to send Timmy to college'? What are we hearing, Jack?"

  The bastard nearly had me in tears. "We're hearing gratitude because somebody finally gives a damn about this poor sad son of a bitch."

  "That's exactly what we hear, Jack, and that's exactly what we want to hear from you. Gratitude. Because First National's your pal, your compadre, your best bud."

  We got it in one take.

  After the session, I went down the hall to the john and on the way I glanced out one of the few windows in the two-story facility to the parking lot where spring was struggling to paint everything green and crocus purple and crocus yellow and apple-blossom pink.

  She was at the back of the lot, between a Pizza 2-U van and a large blue Buick. She just sat there and I wondered if she ever got hot inside those black leathers and that inscrutable black helmet, and then I wondered if she wore them for reasons of safety or because she liked the melodramatic edge they gave her.

  But now it was time I found out not only who she was but what she wanted, so I went to the west end of the building and down the FIRE EXIT stairs and out the door. Being a cop got me in the habit of always carrying a ballpoint and a tablet that fit in the back pocket of my pants. I didn't need a gun right now. I needed the tablet.

  The outdoor smelled of sunlight and diesel fuel and flowers. I wanted to be fishing. I worked my way along a line of cars in the lot until I came even with where she was, six cars over. There was an old woman apparently waiting for somebody in the doctor's office next door. She observed the way I sort of crouched down as I moved. She frowned at me, not frightened in the least, but angry. She was probably going to turn me in.

  I came up from behind the Pizza 2-U van and stood four feet from the motorcycle.

  And then she turned, obviously sensing me somehow. She'd had her engine running, so it was no trouble to do a fairly exotic wheelie and get out of there. The bike reared like a bronc, the long and curving lines of the woman in leathers as one with the metal itself, and then it came screeching and roaring down in contact with the pavement again and shot off in between a maze of parked cars.

  There was no way I could catch her and I didn't intend to try.

  But now I had her license number, and for now that was the only thing in the world I needed.

  Chapter 12

  The fourth precinct was built back in the 1930s, when the then-Mayor had an architect for a son-in-law. A bad architect for a sonin-law. Which explains why Number Four looks like a cheesy papier-mâché set for a film set in mythical Baghdad. Built of concrete, it seems to be all minarets and spires and gargoyles- fanciful touches indeed for people named Mike O'Reilly and Milo Czmchek and Rufus Washington.

  The interior of the Fourth resembles a big metro newspaper; desks butted up against each other, people running up and down the corridors between the desks, machines for coffee, sandwiches, pop, cigarettes, and newspapers lining the walls of the corridor leading to the rest rooms and the holding cells. Oh, yes, I should mention the para-bookmaking activities, too. At any given time, half the people in the Fourth, men and women alike, are laying down money on events of various descriptions, from the Cubs, Sox, Bears, to which local pols are finally going to get busted for (a) graft, (b) bestiality, or (c) general stupidity.

  Somewhere in the welter of all this-the windows open wide to the spring and the cops daydreaming like fourth graders anxious to be outdoors-sat six-two Martin Edelman, my best friend and former partner. Today he was modeling one of his four Sears suits, the blue number, and one of the white shirts whose collar was blood-spattered from his shave this morning. (Even with a safety razor, he can commit atrocities Jack the Ripper could not have even conceived.) He has the sad blue eyes of a rabbi who has seen far too much of the world's nonsense and pettiness and cruelty, but then there is his smile, which is curiously innocent and open, if only occasionally on view. His brown toupee was on slightly crooked, but I saw no point in telling him. It is always on crooked.

  A cop named Manning leaned in just as I started to put my hand on Edelman's shoulder. "You in for the Cubs?"

  "How much?" Edelman said.

  "Ten."

  "Jeeze."

  "Ten, Edelman. You won twenty last week. Maybe you'll win forty this week.

  Edelman, taking out his wallet, said, "The way you hustle people, Manning, you should be an insurance salesman."

  Manning said, "You forget, Martin. I was an insurance salesman."

  "Oh, yeah."

  "You got the Cubbies and two points," Manning said, and vanished.

  Edelman started to go back to his typewriter-he does very well with two fingers, very well-when I said, "Someday one of the TV stations is going to do a story on all the betting cops do."

  He turned around and showed me his smile. He always manages to make me feel as if seeing me is the most special thing that's happened to him in a week. And I always hope it is.

  "Dwyer, hey."

  "Hey, Martin."

  We shook hands and I just looked at him. In some odd way he's my brother, and I knew this the day we first met years ago back at the Academy when neither of us could shinny up a rope worth a damn. These days, we even share the same problems-we both need to do exactly the same things: lose ten to fifteen pounds, use a few more quarts of Visine a week, and try to convince ourselves that the sky is not going to fall in within the next twenty minutes.

  "You hear Manning? I won forty last week." He sounded young saying it and it made me feel good.

  "So what did you do with it?"

  "You really want to know?"

  "Yeah."

  "Bought Parkhurst from Number Three a lunch I've owed him for a while, got some new Odor Eaters, bought a new band for my Timex, and then gave the rest of it to my son for a ball glove."

  "Nothing's changed."

  "Huh?"

  "All the excitement."

  He laughed. "Asshole." Then he picked up a pink phone slip and said, "I got a note this morning that you were going to be calling me about an autopsy."


  "Right."

  "Well, I've got some preliminary results." His fingers searched through several layers of paper and then he came up with it. "This is just what I took over the phone. You read my writing okay?"

  "I'll try." Edelman's handwriting is a form of communication that would stump even the people who translate cuneiform.

  So I looked at it and said, "Natural causes?"

  "Yeah. You think it was going to be something else."

  "I had some suspicions along those lines."

  "Sorry."

  "Librium and alcohol."

  "Kills a lot of people."

  "They going to rule it a suicide?"

  He shrugged. "You know how it goes. Most of the time they try to spare the families and just say 'natural causes.' From what I gather, there was no note and the officer's report said you didn't find her particularly upset or depressed."

  "I guess not."

  "Sorry."

  "Yeah."

  "You don't believe it?"

  "I'm not sure yet." Then I remembered the tablet in my back pocket. "How about running a number for me?"

  "This got anything to do with Karen Lane?"

  "Probably."

  "Probably." He smiled. "Probably." He held out his hand and tore off the sheet of paper with the number on it and then turned around and picked up the phone.

  While we were waiting, he said, "I assume if there's anything of interest in this for the police, you'll let us know right away."

  "Of course."

  "Why don't I believe you?" he said and started doodling on a lined pad. The phone still cupped to his ear, he said, "You and Donna set a date yet?"

  "Not yet."

  "I read this article on stress the other day. In the paper."

  "I read it, too." Edelman wants me to get married.

  "Married people have less stress," he said. And then into the phone, "Okay, ready."

  He wrote it down, name and address, and then hung up and handed me the paper. "So how about it?"

  "How about what?"

  "She's a wonderful woman and I can tell just by looking at her that she wants to get married."

  I straightened his toupee for him and said, "We'll call you the minute we decide, Edelman. The minute."

  I turned to leave and he said, "That license number I ran through for you. You into anything I should know about?"

  "Not yet, Martin. Not yet."

  Then I left the station and went to look up a Mrs. Patti Slater.

  Chapter 13

  You might mistake the Windmere home for one of those piss-elegant motels all gussied up to resemble a seventeenth-century manor house. It isn't, of course, it's an old folks' home, or whatever it is we're calling people over seventy these days. The grounds revealed a great deal of brick and concrete and very little foliage or trees or grass. The east windows looked out on a parking lot and the west on the brick face of a natural-wood doctor's complex and the north windows on a vacant lot with a big FOR SALE sign. Grim, when you considered that many of the people herein had come here to die. Probably even daytime television was preferable to staring out a window that only revealed either other buildings or dinosaur-like semis chugging up the broad avenue outside.

  The reception area continued the motel motif, a long waist-high counter running across most of a big, carpeted room that contained enough fake wood furniture and Starving Artist paintings to send the owners of Holiday Inn into sinful ecstasy.

  Seated in one of the chairs was a palsied old lady whose twisted hands rested on a black cane and whose aged eyes stared mournfully at the death the chipper people who'd brought her here were trying cheerfully to deny to her. She wore a prim dark suit with a large brooch at the throat of her prim white blouse.

  "She'll love it here," said a plump woman with hair tinted a color God had never invented. She wore a white nurse's uniform and smiled with formidable dentures.

  "Did you hear that, Mother?" shouted a thin man with rimless glasses and a bald head. He wore a blue jogging suit and white Reeboks. The woman with him, presumably his wife, was dressed similarly. Were they going to head right for the track, as soon as they'd dumped the old lady off?

  "We believe in keeping people active, that's one thing that makes Windmere so special," said the nurse, sounding like a living brochure. "We have a Jacuzzi and we play bingo four nights a week, and the community theater sends singers over several afternoons a month."

  But the old lady wasn't going to be kidded. She clung to her cane as if it were life itself and stared down the hole they were about to push her in. I wanted to go over and sit next to her and put my 'arm around her and say something comforting, but what would I say when it came right down to it? That I was sorry she was pushing off, that I didn't want her to push off, that I hoped her son and daughter-in-law tripped all over their Reeboks?

  "I'll get Ken," the nurse said.

  Ken proved to look like a member of the Chicago Bears blitz circa mid-sixties. He wore a white T-shirt and white ducks and white socks and white canvas shoes and his gray hair was burr-cut and he'd shaved his fleshy face so smoothly it was as pink as a baby's. He had eyes like lasers and biceps you could rest refrigerators on. He also surprised the hell out of me by making the old lady not only look up for the first time but actually smile. He extended his arm and said, "Is this my date for the evening?"

  "Don't I wish," the old lady said, and her voice cracked in real laughter.

  So Ken led her off. Son and daughter-in-law signed some papers and started to leave and then the daughter-in-law turned back once to the hall where the old lady had disappeared on Ken's arm and then looked around and said, "You really think this is the right thing, David?"

  "Honey, we have to be realistic."

  Then she nodded and glanced down at her Reeboks and then they were gone, leaving his mother to the dubious balm of amateur entertainers and bingo.

  I went over to the nurse. "I'd like to see Mrs. Slater, please."

  She was now behind the counter and doing some very deft things with a computer keyboard.

  She looked at me. "It's Wednesday."

  "Yes, isn't it?"

  "Visiting afternoons are Monday, and Friday."

  So I went into one of my routines. I put out my hand and she didn't really have any choice but to take it and I said, "I'm Frank Evans and I'm her nephew from Omaha. I sell plumbing supplies and I was just driving through the city, so I thought I'd stop and say hi to her."

  Not that I understood any of this, of course, why a black Honda motorcycle that could do maybe 150 miles per hour flat-out would be registered to a woman in a nursing home.

  "Gosh," the woman said.

  "What?"

  "It'd really be a hassle."

  "Really?"

  "Yes. I mean, well, people aren't always ready to be shown at the drop of a hat."

  "Shown" being the operative word here. I had the impression that they lined them up in their wheelchairs and hosed them off to get rid of the stench, then brought in an industrial waxer to shine pallor and wheelchair alike. Then they shot them up with enough Thorazine to make Charles Manson mellow for the rest of his life. And then they brought in the guests and moved them along quickly, the way you got moved along quickly in an art gallery where an especially popular artist was being shown, and the visitors got to see how clean and shiny and docile their parents looked and so the most wonderful thing of all happened. They could jump back in their Volvos, throw in some Barry Manilow tapes, and drive back to suburbia without feeling even 1.4 percent guilty.

  "Gosh," she said. "I'm afraid it's impossible. You know, we really do try to be accommodating here at Windmere, but-" She was too plump and wore too much makeup, but still you could see the erotic twenty-year-old she'd probably been, the full lips especially knowing. But she mined any real human heat with the living brochure monotone of her voice. She shrugged and her breasts raised slightly against the fabric of her bra and the bra in turn against the fabric of her
white uniform and it was one of those odd moments-sunlight on linoleum, the smell of floor wax, a robin on a window ledge-when the thought of sex should not have occurred at all but it did. Oh yes, it did. But her green eyes held no promise, and so my erection slunk away.

  "Has my cousin been here?"

  "Cousin?" she said.

  I smiled my glad-hander smile. "I imagine you'd know my cousin. Rides a motorcycle."

  Now she smiled, too. "Oh, Evelyn Dain."

  "That's right. Evelyn Dain."

  "No, she comes Mondays and Fridays." The green eyes were haughty a moment. "The hours everyone else does."

  "I should talk to her, I guess. About Patti. See how things are going." Here I had to be careful. Careful and casual. "You wouldn't know where she works, would you? I seem to recall she changed jobs a while back."

  The phone rang, helping me. If the nurse had any doubts about me, about who I might really be and what I might really be doing there, they were forgotten in the rush of answering the phone. "Damiano's Aerobics over on Third Avenue."

  "Thanks," I said. "And say hi to Patti for me."

  She smiled with those wonderful erotic lips-you imagined them the kind of lips sixteenth-century kings demanded in their whores-and then waved me off to take her phone call. After answering, she said, "I'll be glad to tell you about Windmere.” She was back to being a brochure.

  Chapter 14

  "How's your head?" I asked Donna.

  "Pretty good. As long as I don't move too fast. She really hit me. Where're you?"

  "Phone booth across the street from an aerobics place out on Third Avenue."

  "You're joining an aerobics class?"

  "No, the woman who hit you. It's where she works."

  "God," she said. "That's neat."

  "What's that?"

  "That you've found her already. I mean, you really are a good detective."

  "All I did was run down a couple of things."

  "But that's what's so neat, Dwyer. You run down a couple of things and bingo, you've got it."

  "That's just the problem."