Dead Guy's Stuff

by Sharon Fiffer

  She preferred to explain it away as a need to find and replace the buttons her grandmother had let her play with when she was young, her only toy at Grandma's apartment. The wooden sewing box, filled with the beautiful buttons, had disappeared after her grandmother died. When Jane had come home from college and asked about it, Nellie had shrugged and said Grandma hadn't sewn a button in years. Jane knew from experience that it was all the explanation she would ever get.

  "Go ahead and laugh, boys," Jane said, "THE QUEEN is worth a pretty penny."

  "Where do you get those expressions, Mom? 'A pretty penny'?" Nick said, again trying to get Charley to join in on the teasing.

  "They're not all canning jars in here. Looks like some lab stuff, too." Charley pulled out a beaker and some glass measures. "Looks like Bateman might have brewed some of his own."

  "This is promising," Jane said, pulling out two jars with black screw-on lids. "These lids are Bakelite, I'm pretty sure." She walked over to the sink and ran hot water, preparing to dip the lids in and give them the sniff test.

  "What's in that jar?" Nick asked.

  Jane looked at the one in her right hand. "Markers, maybe? Little disks with numbers. Maybe they played bingo or something." Jane shook the jar and held it up to the light. She dipped the other lid into the hot running water and held it up to her nose.

  "Whew, that's Bakelite. Just like formaldehyde," she said, sniffing the air to get rid of the acrid smell.

  "No, Mom, what's in that jar?" Nick asked, pointing to her left hand, his voice wavering.

  "What's the matter, Nick?" She turned first to Nick, but both he and Charley were looking at the container. She held it up to the window above the sink, thumb on the bottom, middle finger on top, to see what was sloshing through the liquid in the glass.

  "Move your hand, Jane, I— " Charley started, but cut himself off.

  "Yuck," said Nick, clutching his stomach with both hands.

  "Holy Toledo," said Jane, turning the glass in her hand, noting how much larger than her own was the finger floating in the jar.

  3

  Nick had turned pale as dough. He sat kneading his hands at the table, staring at his mother. He wanted to make a joke or laugh at someone else's attempt, but neither Jane nor Charley spoke.

  Charley had taken the jar and turned it in the light of the window, studying the finger, which did its own slow float as Charley turned the glass. Jane shivered and recovered. This could not be a real finger. It was some kind of practical joke— a bit of a freak show in a bottle— that Bateman kept behind the bar as a sick little tease to play on a regular customer.

  "It's not real, Nick, don't worry," Jane began, just as Charley nodded and said, "It's real, all right."

  The finger, pasty white, almost blue in its whiteness, was perfectly preserved. Large, probably a man's second, third, or fourth finger— certainly not a thumb or pinkie— it took on a life of its own as Charley moved the jar: first beckoning, then turning away.

  Jane did not want this to be the subject of Nick's nightmares or one more milestone in Nick's inevitable adult therapy sessions. She could hear some Freudian now. Oh, yes, Mr. Wheel, was that before or after your mother brought home the finger in a jar? No, she had to nip this morbidity in the bud.

  "Let's not get too excited about this, I'll just call…," Jane said, then stopped. Who should she call?

  Charley shrugged. "The police?" he offered.

  "Yeah," Jane said, "they'll finally be able to solve that age-old criminal question, 'Where is Pointer?'"

  Nick had his head down on the table and Jane saw his shoulders begin to shake. Now I've done it, she thought. Turning the kitchen into a sideshow tent wasn't bad enough, I had to make the cheap joke. Why did she always think turning things into laughs would work miracles.

  When Nick looked up, however, she saw that this time, anyway, it had worked. Nick was laughing not crying, and shaking his head. "Shouldn't we finish unpacking before we call anybody? Maybe Ringman and Thumbkin are here, too."

  "Where is Pointer? Where is Pointer?" Charley sang, slowly moving the jar from behind his back, bouncing and sloshing the finger until he held it in front of him.

  "Here I am. Here I am," Jane and Nick joined in.

  And for one golden moment, peering in on this cozy-late-Saturday-morning-early-afternoon-pancake-plates-still-on-the-table-Dad-and-son-still-in-flannels-and-socks tableau, anyone might have thought this was a Norman Rockwell painting of a perfect family scene.

  Except of course, for the severed finger.

  When the wholesome hilarity of the Wheel household had finally subsided, the coolest head among them prevailed.

  "Call Detective Oh," said Nick, now able to actually hold the jar and study the finger himself. "He'll know what to do." Nick had heard the story of the Balance murder case over and over when he and his father returned from the summer dig. His neighborhood friends told several versions, and he had listened carefully to them all. Detective Oh, stopping by to tie up a few loose ends, had impressed him mightily by treating him as an adult, telling the story simply, answering his questions honestly.

  Jane agreed. Calling Oh was a good idea, but first she wanted to unpack the rest of the boxes. Charley and Nick both hesitated. Eight more cartons were stacked in the kitchen, each one of them large enough to hold an even more gruesome surprise.

  "Come on, guys, I glanced through most of the stuff at the house. One of these has ashtrays and coasters. There's lots of glassware… shot glasses, old-fashioneds, stuff like that. I want to run them through the dishwasher here before I take them down to Kankakee.

  "And punchboards. One of these boxes has unused punchboards," Jane said, her eyes glazing over.

  Charley knew the look and knew that Jane would not be dissuaded.

  "I have to meet a student in fifteen minutes, and I'm dropping Nick off at the Y to play basketball," said Charley. "I'll come right back here after the meeting and help you, I promise, but you promise me to wait. Forty-five minutes tops. I don't want you doing this alone."

  Nick had already run up to change. Charley was standing in the doorway, buttoning a clean but wrinkled shirt he had pulled out of his duffle.

  Jane agreed immediately.

  "Okay," she said, washing her hands and placing a dish towel over the celebrated jar.

  "Too easy," said Charley. "I mean it, Jane. There could be something dangerous in there."

  "What? What's dangerous? Even if I found a whole pickled hand, what's dangerous about that?" Jane asked.

  Charley winced. Jane was smiling, calm and collected, and already breaking the tape on another box. Had playing detective this summer changed her that much? Had he just not been paying attention to who she had become in the last few years? He watched her run the knife under the cardboard flap and before he could stop himself, he said, "You'll dull the knife."

  She looked up at him. His beautiful, smart, stubborn, probably-soon-to-be-ex-wife just looked at him, and he knew without a doubt that the last thing she wanted to hear from Charley, from her once exciting and risk-taking husband, Charley, was the predictable and pedantic advice he had been dispensing over the last several years. When had he, like the knife he didn't even care about protecting, become so dull, and when exactly did Jane begin to notice?

  "Ready, Dad?"

  Charley nodded and didn't even try to stop himself from saying "Be careful," as he walked out the door because it was what he felt and who he was and what he had to say.

  He even added, "Please."

  * * *

  Jane was careful. She only cut herself twice on cardboard as she opened the cartons that Mary Bateman had carefully packed away. The more glasses she unwrapped, the more towels she unfolded and refolded, the more old calendars and desk blotters she sorted through, the more she speculated about Mary herself. Dot and Ollie had told her that Mary had spent almost every evening at the Shangri-La, drinking a Tom Collins or an old-fashioned, and waiting for Bateman to close up.r />
  "Not when Cindy was little, Ollie. She stayed home then," said Dot.

  "That's true," Ollie agreed, then added loyally, "Mary was a good mother."

  Jane asked the friends what happened to the daughter. The granddaughter, Susan, the nurse, was calling the shots on the house sale and Mary's move to an assisted-living facility, but Jane had heard nothing about the daughter's role in all of it.

  Dot and Ollie both shook their heads.

  "Gone," Dot whispered.

  "Cindy and her husband got into a car accident when Susan was twelve," Ollie said.

  "Thirteen," said Dot.

  "Susan came and lived with Mary then, and they just took real good care of each other, I think," said Ollie. "Bateman had already passed, and I don't think Mary could have taken it, losing everybody like that, if Susan hadn't come to live here."

  Jane wondered what it was like for Mary and Susan, living in that house, taking care of each other. Ollie had said Susan never went down to the basement, didn't want to see anything that reminded her of the Shangri-La.

  "Wouldn't Susan have been too young to remember the place? I mean, too young for bad memories?" Jane had asked.

  "Wasn't that," Ollie said. "Didn't and still doesn't approve of drinking. The car accident when her mom and dad were killed, it involved alcohol. Susan was old enough to remember and cling to it. Never forgave the drinking."

  Jane carried the glasses she planned to ship to Miriam out to her shelves in the garage. She could repack them later. Jane heard a car turn into the driveway and opened the door to greet and draft Charley to help, but a strange car sat in the driveway, a big silver Oldsmobile or Buick or whatever make the current "Dad" or "Grandpa" drove— cars weren't one of her specialties. Two men were in the front seat, and the passenger leaned out with a newspaper in his hand.

  "This 2303 Thayer?" he asked.

  "No, you're four blocks south," she said.

  "You having a sale, too?" the driver asked.

  Jane shook her head and smiled. They saluted and backed out. Jane's racks of goods in the garage, her boxes and packing material, might lead anyone on this sunny autumn Saturday to assume she was in the garage-sale business. She smiled to herself. She felt so right with the world when like-minded souls crossed her path. Those guys, like her, were just out on the hunt. She immediately wished them good sale karma. May they find the perfect… what did they look like they wanted? One wore a baseball cap; one had a tiny stub of a ponytail. Driving a big-old-dad-car-four-door sedan complete with a college decal on the back window. Vintage record albums, she guessed, or maybe old radios?

  She waved to them as they drove away down the alley. They were all members of the club. It was only when one of the neighbors watched her unload her trunk and asked in that bone-chillingly polite voice, "Been to another sale, Jane?" that she felt alone in the world, embarrassed by her passion.

  She carried the cartons with punchboards and photographs and signs out to the van. She was going to Kankakee tomorrow, and she might as well bring everything she could carry. The EZ Way Inn was going to dazzle. It was going to be the quintessential neighborhood tavern, a tavern among taverns.

  * * *

  Charley and Nick were late. When Jane checked her watch, she saw she had been working for an hour and a half. Nick had probably roped his father into playing ball with them, and they'd stay until open gym time was over. They could be another hour or two.

  Jane was going through the last of the boxes. Photographs, plaques, small bulletin boards with scores and newspaper clippings still pinned on were wrapped carefully in newspapers. Jane smoothed out a sports page from the Chicago Sun-Times, July 7, 1969. "Cubs Going All The Way?" asked one of the headlines. Had the Cubs actually been winners that summer? Maybe the newspaper itself was valuable.

  What did Dot and Ollie say about this stuff? They said Bateman had been gone thirty years. Did Mary close up the place and pack it away, or did Bateman retire and pack up and drop dead? Who tucked all of this away so carefully?

  Jane looked at the photograph she had just uncovered: a wedding picture. Standing in front of the Shangri-La, the neon sign just above their shoulders, were four adults. The bride and groom were smiling for the photographer, their arms around each other. Mary stood next to the bride, a younger version of herself, who had to be Cindy, her daughter. Jane assumed the balding man with the paunch and cigar clamped between his teeth was Bateman. He had one arm squeezed around the groom's neck in a mock headlock. Bateman's son-in-law, a long-haired, loose-limbed boy wearing, not a tux, but a shiny suit with wide lapels and no tie, looked a little scared. Cindy wasn't wearing a traditional wedding gown, more of a lace minidress, a tablecloth with a thin velvet belt around the waist, and carrying a bouquet of what looked to be roses and daisies. The groom's hand was clasped around the bride's, so it looked like they were both clinging to the flowers. Bateman was waving with his free hand and winking at the camera.

  A happy, smiling family, celebrating a joyous occasion. Jane fought an urge to wave back to Bateman, to shake her finger at him, warning him about what was coming.

  "Enjoy these years, Bateman," she'd say if he could hear. "Hug your daughter and say wonderful things to her. Be really kind to Mary. Make it last."

  But Jane, looking harder at Bateman, thought maybe he didn't need warnings at all. He looked like a man who already knew what was coming.

  "Don't worry about me, baby," he'd probably say right back. "I know what's what in the world." Then he'd wink and wave those three fingers at her, only three. Bateman wore a slightly stained bandage covering most of his hand, especially padded and bulky in the place where number four, his pointer, used to be.

  4

  Bruce Oh, until three weeks ago Police Det. Bruce Oh, had just come in from his morning constitutional. He'd gotten a late start and instead of seeing the sun rise, he contended with seeing every neighbor that he usually avoided by walking at 4:45 A.M. each day. He treasured his morning solitude and silence, what he called the rare and blessed anonymity of the hour before daylight.

  This reverence for morning peace did not mean he was antisocial. At a party or picnic, he was proud of his camaraderie. That was the place for it, he thought, and he was a man who believed in a time and place for everything. He had a talent for remembering names and details; and at the Fourth of July block parties, he was a hit because he remembered the food likes and dislikes of almost everyone.

  Efficiently handling the grilling tools, he'd smile at Mrs. Miller from down the block and say, "Not just well done… very well done, right?" and she would walk away with a charred square of meat formerly known as ground sirloin and wish that her late husband had been so thoughtful.

  Oh also remembered what sports each child on the block participated in. Shin guards and baseball gloves usually provided clues, but nonetheless, parents seemed amazed that Detective Oh would ask if Little Jason had an RBI as Little Jason walked into the house, smiling and swinging his bat. If, on the other hand, Little Jason charged ahead, banging the front porch door, leaving his dad to carry the equipment, Oh would shake his head and shrug his shoulders, as if to commiserate with the family over the tough loss.

  "People," Oh— now wearing the hat of a professor three days a week— would say to his class, "are never aware of what they reveal in their clothing, their walk, their choice of car. It is never a mistake to take note of the obvious. If we did not note what is in front of us, how would we notice when it is taken away? Hidden? Noticing the everyday becomes your baseline, your gauge for the extraordinary in human behavior."

  Oh's students were never bored. His classes had waiting lists and had been written up as student favorites in campus publications. "It's like being in that show Kung Fu— he gives you this David Carradine nugget of wisdom and then just moves on. The only thing missing is him calling you grasshopper, which I really wish he would do just once," gushed a freshman girl who was quoted in one of the articles.

  Because he loved
to teach, he taught courses in criminal psychology and criminal detection at a few different Chicago-area universities. Oh didn't need the income. Because his investigative insights were much in demand by lawyers and insurance companies, he discovered that consulting fees easily paid the mortgage and monthly bills. His wife Claire's surprisingly successful antique business paid for any extras they might require, and the two of them required very little.

  Oh much preferred the spare and lean style of living. That included minimal household decorating. Although he appreciated the many old, ornate pieces that his wife placed in front of him, he preferred to admire and learn from objects when they were safely ensconced in a glass case at a museum. Or when they were tagged and laid out on an examining room table in a murder investigation. When Claire complained that Oh only liked objects when they were clues, he smoothly pointed out to her that she only liked objects that were mysteries: old and abandoned.

  Claire protested then that her art history background made her much more of a scholar in her pursuits and her M.B.A. made her a crack businesswoman, and he conceded both points. It was Mrs. Jane Wheel who adopted the orphaned objects, after all. His wife quite easily let go of her finds, her steady profit based on a constant buying and selling process. Jane Wheel, whom he had spent so much time studying when investigating her neighbor's murder, had told him that she was still learning how to let go. It was Mrs. Wheel who loved the forgotten and found meaning in the lost.