The Autumn Dead jd-5

by Edward Gorman

  On the other side of a glass wall, a chunky woman with a bad red dye job and arms as thick as a fullback's sat working over books. Occasionally she poked a fat finger at a calculator so hard you wondered if she had something against it.

  I knocked on the window. When she glanced up and saw me, she did not look happy.

  I pantomimed Can I Come In, the music too loud for me to be heard otherwise.

  She didn't pantomime. She just made a face.

  I went over to the door and opened it up and went inside.

  She said, "We don't get a lot of men here."

  "So I see."

  She picked up a package of Winston Lights, tamped one out, got it going, exhaled a long blue stream of smoke, and said, "So how can I help you?" She looked like Ethel Merman with a bad hangover. Her nametag said HI, I'M IRENE.

  "There's a woman who works here."

  The flesh around her eyes grew tight and her mouth got unpleasant again. "Yeah. So?"

  "So she drives a black Honda motorcycle and so I'd like to know who she is."

  "Why?"

  "Is that really any of your business?"

  "As a matter of fact, it is."

  "Now why would that be?"

  "Because she happens to be my best friend."

  "I see."

  "And I protect her."

  "'From my few experiences with her, I'd say she doesn't need a hell of a lot of protection."

  She had some more cigarette. "She's high-strung."

  "At least."

  She glared at me. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "It means I think she's probably clinical."

  She sighed. "She's had some problems, I'll admit. But now that her aunt's in the nursing home-" She allowed herself several cigarette hacks, then said, "Evelyn has spent some time in mental hospitals."

  "I see."

  "That doesn't mean she's crazy."

  "No," I said and meant it. "No, it doesn't."

  "Her aunt raised her; Evelyn's own mother died when she was six. And then there's what happened with Sonny. That's when all the trouble started. "

  "What trouble?"

  She jammed out one cigarette in a round red metal ashtray and promptly lit another. "You want a Coke?"

  "Sure. I'll get it for us. You want regular or Diet?"

  Given her weight problem, I figured she'd say Diet Coke.

  For the first time she smiled. "You want to learn something today?"

  "What?"

  "There are reports that show that people who drink diet pop actually gain weight instead of lose it."

  "So you want regular Coke."

  "Right," she said, "regular."

  So I went and got her a regular and me a Diet and could not help but look at least briefly at the wondrous backside of the little black woman conducting the class, and then I went back into the tiny office gray with smoke.

  "So what's with her aunt?"

  "Sonny dies," she said, slipping into present tense. "Her aunt doesn't believe anything the police say. She starts becoming obsessed."

  "What did the police say?"

  "Suicide."

  "They said he jumped off Pierce Point?"

  She looked surprised that I knew about Pierce Point.

  "Right."

  "Was there a note found?"

  "Suicide note?" Irene said.

  "Right."

  "No.''

  "Then why did the police assume it was suicide?"

  She shrugged. "They said he was despondent."

  "Did they say about what?"

  "No. But they said they checked with his teachers and the teachers all said he was despondent. Even the aunt had to admit that. He was usually an A student. He went to summer school between his junior and senior year so he could graduate early. But then he screwed it up."

  "Screwed up his grades?"

  "Yeah. He got Ds. In summer school you have to get at least Cs."

  "So how does Evelyn fit into all this?" Now I was talking in the present tense, too.

  "Evelyn is five years younger, right, a very pretty but very high-strung kid. Always had problems. Manic depression, actually. Well, when Sonny buys it, the aunt puts everything on Evelyn. She expects Evelyn not only to share the grief but to spend the rest of her life with her, too. The aunt has money, right, so the aunt builds Evelyn her own wing on the house and Evelyn is expected to stay there the rest of her life, right, and to get caught up in all her obsessions-her hypochondria (this woman has sent a dozen doctors screaming into the sunset), her paranoia about her investments (I mean most of the stockbrokers in this town would rather have gasoline enemas than deal with her), and with proving that Sonny was actually pushed off Pierce Point by persons unknown. So Evelyn, being none too stable herself, does in fact get caught up in all this. Very caught up. And in the process becomes sort of a half-ass detective, really going into Sonny's life and particularly into Sonny's life the summer between his junior and senior year." She stopped.

  "And?"

  "And to be honest, I don't know so much about lately."

  "Lately?"

  "The past few weeks."

  "You haven't seen her?"

  "Oh, I see her. But she's in one of her-moods." Her voice was an odd mixture of anger and sorrow. I liked her. She was tough in the way good people are tough. "I mean, I don't think we've split up or anything. She just gets-"

  "Kind of crazy."

  "Yeah, I guess it wouldn't be unfair to put it that way. Kind of crazy."

  I thought of how she'd said 'split up.' Obviously she wanted me to know they were lovers.

  "I wonder if you'd give me her address."

  "You gotta know I'm going to ask you why?"

  "Because I may be able to help her."

  "True blue?"

  "True blue. I may have a lead of sorts on Sonny."

  "Everything's in her aunt's name."

  "Huh?"

  "House, credit cards, even her Honda."

  "I see."

  "Just look up her aunt's name in the phone book and you'll have the address."

  "Thanks."

  "She was supposed to be here tonight but she didn't show up. Didn't phone or anything. That's why I had to pull Mimsy in."

  Now I wanted to leave and she still wanted to talk.

  She said, "I guess there's one thing I should tell you."

  "What's that?"

  "She can get kind of violent."

  I thought of what she'd done to Donna and to Glendon Evans. Not to mention me. I said, "Yeah, I've heard rumors to that effect."

  "But even if she did hurt you, she wouldn't mean to."

  I smiled. "I'm sure that would make me feel a lot better."

  She laughed and went into another cigarette hack and said, "She's great at apologies. I guess that's what I'm really trying to say. She does these terrible things-anybody else I would have left years ago-but she's got this fantastic way of apologizing. You ever know anybody like that?"

  In fact, I had.

  Her name had been Karen Lane.

  I thanked Irene and left.

  Chapter 26

  I called American Security to see if they'd need me tonight (supposedly we work four nights on, three off, like firemen in some cities). They didn't. Next I called Donna, told her about my last three conversations.

  "So this Sonny Howard was a friend of Forester and Price and Haskins and you think there's a possibility that Karen Lane killed him."

  "A few people seem to think so."

  "But why would she have killed him?"

  "That's why I'm going to look up Evelyn."

  "Then who killed Karen Lane?"

  "If I knew, I'd call Edelman."

  She sighed. "Boy, Dwyer."

  "Come on."

  "What?"

  "You're trying to make me feel guilty about not taking you along."

  "Am I succeeding?"

  "No, because Evelyn is somewhere on the loose and she's not quite hinged properly."


  "So I noticed."

  "So what are you and Joanna doing?"

  "Well, Bringing Up Baby is on PBS, so I guess we're going to watch that."

  "You don't like Katharine Hepburn."

  "I just can't get past all her mannerisms."

  "Then concentrate on Cary Grant."

  "I'd rather concentrate on you."

  "You can't go."

  "Boy, that's pretty cynical, Dwyer. Thinking I'd only compare you to Cary Grant because I wanted to go along."

  "Right."

  "It's a good thing I'm not sensitive."

  "Bye, hon."

  "Please, can't I?"

  "Bye."

  "Please?"

  The three-story gabled house sat on a shelf of land dense with elm, maple, and spruce. A gravel road led up to it. A ring-necked pheasant ambled in front of my headlights and gave me a dirty look. I hit the brakes, the Toyota nearly doing a wheelie. The pheasant did not seem impressed. He didn't speed up at all. He just continued walking his way across the gravel drive and into the night.

  I sat there, B.B. King loud suddenly on the FM jazz station I was tuned to, wailing very lonely there on the spring night, a night cold enough for a winter coat. I was still mad at the pheasant, or whatever feeling is supposed to be appropriate to a pheasant who has pissed you off (I guess I wanted to have a talk with him about traffic safety, you know-about looking both directions before you cross any thoroughfare, gravel drives included), and it was while I sat there kind of scanning the underbrush in the wash of my headlights that I saw the black glint.

  At first it registered as nothing more ominous than something black and something metal and something shiny glimpsed through the dead brown spring weeds.

  But after a few seconds I knew what it would be. What it was.

  A black Honda motorcycle.

  I clicked off the radio and suddenly the night silence was a roar of distant dogs and trains.

  I got out, but at first I didn't go anywhere. I took a piece of Doublemint out of my pocket and folded it over and put it in my mouth and I stared up at the big house. It was exactly the kind of place my old man always had dreamed of, here on several acres of its own land, enough maybe to plant some corn and tomatoes and carrots and green beans on a plot in the back to convince yourself you were really still a farmer the way all the Dwyers only two generations ago had been, and say "screw it" to all the burdens of city life. But watching the house now, I recalled how it hadn't worked out for him, not at all, how he'd ended up owing $700 on a six-year-old Pontiac whose transmission had never worked right, and how the closest he ever came to the country was the cemetery where he got planted.

  I heard a moan.

  I had put it off as long as I could, and now I couldn't put it off any longer. I had to go over there and see what I'd find.

  This had happened to me a few times on the force, when I'd let somebody else have first peek at somebody badly injured or dead. But now first peek belonged to me.

  When I saw her I thought again of Karen and how she'd looked there at the last in my arms and I thought of my father there in his hospital bed and I thought of a wino I'd seen beaten by a couple teenagers, I just remembered the eyes and the fear that gave way to a curious kind of peace, some secret they knew just before pushing off, some secret you only got to understand when you were once and for all going to push off.

  I knelt down next to her there in the weeds. She wore, as always, her leathers. Now the torso part was sticky with red. Somebody had shot her in the chest. The blood was like a bad kitchen spill, splotchy and gooey. It was warm and smelled. I got my hand under her blond hair the color and texture of straw. Her blue eyes watched me all this time. The fear was giving way, fast. In a couple of minutes she was going to know the secret everybody from St. Thomas Aquinas to Howard Hughes had wanted to know.

  "Evelyn, I need you to answer one question."

  Just watching me.

  "You've been following Karen, trying to get some proof that she killed Sonny."

  Faintly, a nod.

  "Did you kill Karen?"

  Shaking her head. Then blood began bubbling in the corner of her mouth. I closed my eyes.

  Then she cried out, "Sonny!" And now it was my turn to watch her, watch the secret come into her eyes, and feel her start to go easy in my grasp.

  I said an "Our Father" for her, not knowing exactly what else to do, just an "Our Father" silent to myself, as a train rattled through the night in the pass above, and a dog barked at a passing car somewhere down the road.

  I checked her neck, her wrist, and then put my head to that part of her chest not soaked in blood. She had pushed off, no doubt about it. I took her hand and stared at her face there, lit by my flashlight, at the freckles, the forlorn mouth; and for the first time I was curious about her-what her favorite foods had been, what sort of music she'd liked, what her laugh might have sounded like on a summer afternoon. There is an Indian sect that believes you can see a person's soul leaving the body if you watch out of the corner of your eye. I watched out of the corner of my eye, but I didn't see anything. Maybe it was gone already; or maybe it was just waiting for me to leave before it rose, shimmering and transcendent; or maybe, the worst thought of all, there is no soul-maybe the body I stared down at was no different from the body of a rabbit or cat you saw on a dusty roadside, filthy in death and useful only to those who relish the taste of carrion. Maybe that was the secret, and if it was, I didn't want to know. I didn't want to know it at all.

  I turned out my light and left her there in the weeds and went on up the sloping gravel drive to the dark house.

  I tried my American Express card and when that didn't work I went over into the garage and got a screwdriver and tried that and that didn't work either, so I did what the real novice criminal does; I took off my jacket and wrapped it around my fist and then pushed my fist through the back-door window, the noise of smashing glass almost obscene in the stillness, and then I took the jacket off my hand and slid it back over my body and simply reached in through the broken window and undid the lock.

  Inside, I went through a back porch that smelled of apple cider and lawn fertilizer. Then I went through a kitchen that smelled of the sort of food you fix in a wok. Then I went through a dining room big enough to give a major restaurant some problems. Moonlight shone softly through a line of long, narrow windows onto the ghostly white cloth covering the formal dining table and the built-in buffet. The living room had a soaring ceiling, a real Palladian window, and a fireplace above which hung a McKnight print. Evelyn may have suffered from mental problems; she certainly hadn't suffered from poverty.

  I went up the stairs to my right, the sound of my footsteps lost in the deep-pile carpeting and the noise of the wind outside.

  The second floor was every bit as impressive as the first. There was a master bedroom Tut would have envied, complete with a sunken bathtub big enough to hold swim tryouts in, and a den filled with forty years of Book-of-the-Month Club selections, all those oddments from curios like Jack Paar to the real stuff like William Faulkner.

  The room where the boy had lived was easy enough to identify. There were a single bed, a bookcase with twenty-five cent paperbacks of Robert Heinlein, Jerry Sohl, Mickey Spillane, and several of the Dobie Gillis books. The closet contained chinos with little belt buckles in back, the kind that had been popular at the time he'd died in 1962, and the bureau drawers orderly stacks of white socks and jockey shorts. On the walls were posters of the Beach Boys (Brian looked to weigh about 100 pounds in those days) and Elvis with his sneer.

  In other words, nothing useful.

  Two doors down the hall my luck changed. What appeared to be nothing more than Evelyn's room with its Wedgwood blue curtains and matching bedspread and stuffed animals (a duck's eyes seemed to sparkle with intelligence, watching me) proved otherwise once I sat down at her desk.

  Next to a Wang computer was a large reel-to-reel tape recorder that was patched into a phon
e system sitting next to it. I wondered what this was all about. I turned on the recorder, tiny amber lights haunting the darkness, and sat down and listened.

  "You know who this is, don't you?" This was Evelyn's voice.

  "I'm getting very goddamn tired of this."

  "You're protecting that woman. It's time you came forward."

  "I have to go now." Not until then had I realized whose voice it was. Ted Forester's.

  "If you go, I'll phone the police."

  A sigh. "How much money do you want?"

  "You should know me better than that by now, Mr. Forester."

  "I–I'm in no position to go to the police."

  "You know she killed him."

  "I really need to-"

  "Why are you protecting her?" Anger had begun to edge into her voice.

  "I'm not protecting her."

  "Of course you are. All three of you are. And I won't let you anymore. I won't let you. You'll see." By now she was in tears, her own kind of dark psych-ward tears. There was rage but there was no power, she was drifting off into her madness and so she did the only thing she could. She hung up.

  I let the tape roll and sat there in her room and felt sorry for her again, thinking of her freckles and her crazed eyes. She was one of those born truly luckless; not even money could put her life back together again.

  The next conversation was with Larry Price. Predictably, he was not as diplomatic as Forester had been. He cursed her a lot and threatened her a lot and it was he, not she, who hung up.

  Then came Dave Haskins. From the beginning, he sounded miserable. Over and over he said, "You don't understand what's going on here. We're not-" Then he stopped.

  "You're not what?"

  "I can't say. Ted and Larry would-"

  "Hurt you?"