Dead Guy's Stuff

by Sharon Fiffer

  Mrs. Wheel also had something to do with his experimental retirement from the police force this fall, although he would find it hard to say exactly what that something was. He suspected it had to do with her constant searching. Her hunt was for objects that he didn't care about, yes, but perhaps she looked for more, found more than the physical stuff that filled her house. That was what her eyes seemed to say. Although he had never said it, even to himself, he knew it was what he had read in her eyes that had sent him off on his current search.

  After the Balance case was ended, thanks in no small part to Mrs. Wheel herself, he had requested a leave of absence to devote himself to teaching. When his request was denied, he nodded, sat down at his desk for only five minutes, as long as it took him to type the letter, and tendered his resignation. He explained to Claire that he would be of more service in the classroom. She agreed, delighted that her husband would no longer be in the line of fire. He told her he also dreamed of writing a book about criminal detection.

  "More pyschology than science," he had told her, explaining that the book would have a limited appeal to real police, who wanted hard facts and better techniques… what, when, where. Oh just wanted to know why.

  "And occasionally how," he admitted, when she raised an eyebrow.

  "Why," he asked aloud now as he searched the refrigerator, "can't Claire keep lemon yogurt in the house?"

  Claire had left the house quietly at 4:00 A.M. for sales to replenish her antique stall, and he had uncharacteristically slept in. Taking his walk at ten-thirty had put him off balance, and now, trying to find his regular breakfast in the almost empty refrigerator set his teeth on edge. "She can find an eighteenth-century snuff bottle in someone's garage, but she can't locate the lemon yogurt at the Jewel," he muttered, knowing that he had no right to complain, now being on a flexible enough schedule himself to make the weekly trips to the grocery store. He straightened and took a deep meditative breath. Taking a small notebook out of the all-purpose kitchen drawer, he printed in precise letters, LEMON YOGURT.

  I will make a list and go to the grocery store. This is what semiretired professor-type husbands do, he promised silently and brewed himself a cup of Irish Breakfast tea in a nineteenth-century, paper-thin, bone china cup, discovered by his wife, no doubt, holding greasy nuts and bolts in someone's garage.

  * * *

  Reading over papers in his study, Oh almost let the answering machine pick up when the phone rang. Claire had suggested it as a kind of discipline.

  "You don't have to get the call. It's not a sergeant calling about a body, after all," she would say when he jumped to answer. "It's much more likely that it's someone who wants you to change your long-distance carrier."

  Habits die hard, Oh admitted to himself, and this time it might even be Claire, needing his help at a sale. Besides, what was the harm in hearing about a different long distance plan?

  "Oh," he answered.

  "Oh, hello," Jane said, and began laughing. "I mean, hello, Detective Oh. I didn't mean to be rude, I…"

  "My wife says I am very foolish to answer the phone that way. Work habit, I'm afraid. How are you, Mrs. Wheel?" asked Oh.

  "Caller ID?

  "Pardon?"

  "You knew it was me. Do you have caller ID, Detective?" Jane asked.

  Was Mrs. Wheel working for the telephone company now trying to sell Caller ID and get him to change his long distance service?

  "I knew you, Mrs. Wheel. No ID. You're well?"

  "Yes. You?" Jane asked.

  Both Jane and Oh felt the awkwardness of this call, but neither would be able to say why. There was nothing so tangible as a reason for it.

  This past summer, Oh had found Jane Wheel engaging, intriguing. She was never a serious suspect in her neighbor's murder, but she absorbed a kind of community guilt, an overwhelming sadness over the crime that drew him. She became inextricably linked in his mind as one more victim of the whole mess. He had asked her many times about the collecting, the picking she did; and at the time of the questioning, he believed it had helped him better understand Claire and her world. In fact he hadn't even been interested in that world until Mrs. Wheel had given it her particular spin.

  Jane had found the kind of listener in Detective Oh that she hadn't even known she craved. She had stopped chattering to Charley years ago, not because he had shown any kind of disinterest, but because she sensed that it wearied him. He had seen her enthusiasm, her spark, her youth, and now he was comfortable with tucking it away and filing it under memory. He didn't really want to hear about McCoy flowerpots anymore. He didn't believe there was that much more to say. Oh, on the other hand, wanted to know everything. Yes, he might have been hoping she'd incriminate herself as a murderer, but nonetheless, a good listener is a good listener.

  They each tried to break through the stilted greetings and pleasantries.

  "No more bodies, I hope," said Oh, trying to sound like he was joking, but realizing as he heard himself that he never sounded like he was joking.

  "I'm not calling about a body," Jane said at the same time, then added, "just a body part."

  Both waited for the other to speak. Neither wanted that embarrassing, out-of-synch double-talk again.

  "How about coming over for a drink, and I'll show you?" asked Jane, unable to hold out as long as Oh. A good listener, all right, he could listen harder and longer than anyone she had ever met.

  "Yes, that would be fine. And what is it you will show me again?"

  "My body part," Jane said.

  "Oh," he said.

  "I know," Jane said. "I'll just see you at five."

  * * *

  Jane turned the cocktail shaker over and let it drip dry on a feed sack towel. She rinsed four glasses, dried them, and placed them on the matching tray. The glasses, shaker, and tray were part of a bar set that she had kept on her dining room sideboard for two years, admiring it every time she looked its way. Periodically she promised Miriam that she would pack it up and send it to her for a customer who would pay handsomely for this chrome-and-Bakelite martini set, the Chase manufacturing mark firmly engraved on the underside of the tray.

  "Don't take forever," Miriam cautioned. "This Cosmopolitan craze will burn itself out when one of these newfangled hipsters gets cirrhosis and writes about it in a self help magazine. Got to sell these puppies while they're hot."

  Jane agreed that it was only a matter of time before the cranberry juice and designer vodka craze went down in flames. She had never been able to order a pink drink herself. If she even considered it, in her head she could see an entire row of EZ Way Inn customers shaking their heads and smirking. Still, she couldn't wrap up this bar set for Miriam. Not yet. Maybe she would never follow the Cosmo crowd, but she did love martinis. The shape of the glass, the whole "shaken not stirred" aura of them. Maybe the customers at the EZ Way Inn didn't drink them— the closest they got to a mixed drink was a shot and a beer— but when she went out to dinner with her parents after their long day of pulling draft beers and ladling soup, Don always ordered a martini, dry and straight up. Solemnly he handed Jane one of the olives, while Nellie shook her head and scowled over a cup of black coffee, her cocktail of choice. Don's martinis were made with Tanqueray gin and a whisper of vermouth. Jane made her own with vodka, Grey Goose or Ketel One, and merely nodded at the vermouth bottle she kept in a cupboard; but she, too, like Don, skewered olives onto a toothpick and smiled at the glass before her first sip.

  "I don't even know if Detective Oh drinks," she said more to herself than to Nick, who was watching her try to stuff blue cheese into olives, the contemporary version of a task of Sisyphus.

  "Where," asked Nick, "would someone get the idea to take awful-tasting things and stuff them with awful-smelling stuff? I mean it's crazy to think about eating them, but it's even crazier to think someone got the idea in the first place."

  "Yeah, like artichokes," said Jane.

  Nick stared at her. He was used to his mother's respon
ses and their circuitous routes back to his own comments, but he didn't follow this one.

  "I mean, whoever looked at an artichoke and thought it would be or could be edible? Who went to the bother of figuring out all the methodology?" said Jane, stabbing small skewer stopped with Bakelite dice through the olives.

  Detective Oh, as it turned out, did like an occasional martini and seemed pleased at the arrangement of vintage cocktail collectibles laid out on the table. He appreciated the clean design of the shaker and glasses, the whimsy of the olives, the tang of the cheese straws, and the irony of the centerpiece— a finger floating in its own little preservative of choice.

  "It seems logical that the finger belonged to Mr. Bateman," said Oh, handing Jane back the photograph of the family.

  Jane and Nick waited, but Detective Oh did not continue.

  "That's all?" Jane asked.

  Oh held up one of the delicate cheese straws, nodded, and took a tentative bite.

  "Shouldn't we check it out? See how old it is or something? So we can tell if it was Bateman's?" asked Nick.

  "I'm afraid that two months in formaldehyde would have the same effect as two years— or two dozen. There's no way to date it."

  Oh noted Nick's disappointment and added, "Of course, if there was any evidence of a crime or an old police report, maybe this finger could shed some…"

  Rita, the German shepherd that had joined the household over the summer, perked up her ears just before Jane heard a knock at the door.

  "Charley must have gotten out of his department dinner," Jane said, rising. She knew he had taken to knocking before entering so she wouldn't feel he was being too familiar, and she appreciated the respect. At the same time, though, it annoyed her that he couldn't just use his key and stop walking on eggshells. Then again, hadn't she laid the intricate eggshell parquetry herself?

  Key or no key, it wasn't Charley. Even though he knew she adored forties tablecloths, complete with dancing fruit and jitterbugging knives and forks, Charley would not stand at the front door with a turquoise-and-red cowboy-print tablecloth over his head.

  "I am the ghost of vintage hand-printed textiles. Treat me with vodka, or I will trick you with confusing machine reproductions."

  "Timmy!" Jane hugged the wrapped figure. "What are you doing here?"

  "Checking to see if you made your lucky five today," he said, shaking out and folding the tablecloth. "When you called me this morning, I was up in Kenosha at a monster sale, so I thought I'd pop in for sustenance on my way back to Kankakee. Who's here?"

  Not waiting for an answer, Tim walked into the living room, saluted Nick, and raised an eyebrow at Detective Oh.

  "Jane on another crime spree, Detective?" he asked, shaking Oh's hand.

  "Hardly, Mr. Lowry. All quiet at your flower shop?"

  "So quiet you'd hardly know I was in business. Kankakee is so provincial when it comes to shopping in places where bodies were found."

  Tim took the drink Jane handed him and slumped into an overstuffed armchair.

  "After the initial rush of customers who wanted to see how long a chalk outline really lasted— and they were all, of course, 'just looking'— my flower business has taken a turn for the worse." Tim sipped his drink. "However, in the perverse way of things, my antique sales and special orders have been through the roof."

  "People might not want their wedding flowers tainted by murder, but an inlaid mahogany highboy chest that's tasted mystery only adds to the patina, yes?" asked Jane.

  "Guess so. Got anything heartier than these cheese doodles? What's this?"

  Nick, Jane, and Oh simultaneously shouted no as Tim reached for the jar.

  Jane reached out protectively as Tim turned the jar in the lamplight. For her, the finger had ceased to be a freakish specimen and had taken on the personality of Bateman. He was, after all, a saloon keeper, and she knew something about them. She often bought photos and personal memorabilia around which she daydreamed and constructed whole lives from the spare parts she collected after the principals were gone. Should she feel less about an actual spare part?

  "Tim, this is Bateman. Bateman, Tim," Jane said.

  Tim struggled with what to say. He was neither appalled nor grossed out; he just knew he would never again have an opportunity like this. It was the perfect situation for the perfect smart-ass remark, and the pressure was overwhelming. He held up his free hand in mock protest.

  "Jane, when I ask for two fingers of scotch, I mean two."

  5

  Jane didn't finish packing her car until after midnight. Tim and Nick had scrounged dinner, then disappeared upstairs to discuss Nick's summer with Charley digging for bones. Tim took his godfathering duties seriously. Even when Jane didn't need her best friend to help her solve mysteries or date an Eastlake chair or price a Monmouth stoneware elephant, he showed up with tickets to a concert or a ball game, charming Nick just the way he had charmed her when he sat down next to her in kindergarten.

  "You look good in that color," he had said, seriously assessing her one-piece, romper-style playsuit, and a lifetime friendship had been born.

  Jane packed the last box of Shangri-La napkins and coasters into the backseat, then thought better of it. She removed the box and took out just one coaster and a handful of napkins that had the name and address of the tavern and tucked them under her sun visor. She'd ask her dad if he'd ever heard of the place, if he'd ever met Bateman or Mary.

  After Tim had arrived, Detective Oh had stayed for another half hour or so, explaining his private citizen status to Tim. When he got up to leave, he gestured to Bateman's finger, swimming in their midst.

  "I will ask someone at the department to check if there was ever any open book on the Shangri-La, any assault charges filed by Bateman. The wedding photo is dated, so we have a time frame."

  "But you said we can't date the finger," Nick said. Nick had engaged Oh in a discussion of dating dinosaur bones and was shocked that the finger couldn't be tagged and shelved with the same certainty.

  "We can't exactly do a when, but we can probably do a who with that finger."

  "How?" Nick and Jane had both asked.

  "This finger still retains something very important," said Oh.

  Jane paused to see if she would have to prompt him to tell them. He smiled ever so slightly. Jane realized he didn't explain further because he wanted to hear her speculate. Nick, too, looked at her for the answer. Jane looked at the finger, now the centerpiece of the cocktail tray. Tim looked up from his investigation of the cocktail picks. He had been rubbing and sniffing the plastic dice to make sure they were really Bakelite.

  "Of course," she said. "The finger still has a fingerprint."

  Oh had rewarded her detection by allowing his slightly upturned lips to relax into an almost smile.

  Jane turned off the garage light, went into the kitchen, and noticed that the finger was still on the chrome tray. She wrapped the jar in one of her tea towels and went back to the garage. She carefully wedged it into her glove compartment, already brimming with area street maps and file cards and crossword puzzle books. The street maps got her to where the sales were, the file cards enabled her to make her many lists, and the crossword puzzles, the most challenging New York Times collection she could find, helped her pass the hours she waited in the car for a sale to open. Now the finger, Bateman himself, would give Jane some company.

  Tim was checking out her new pottery and books in the living room when she came in.

  "Nick asleep?"

  "Pretty close."

  Tim opened an Alice and Jerry reader, slightly dog-eared but in better condition than so many old textbooks. After all the years they'd stayed in a classroom and all the grubby, sticky fingers that had paged the texts, anxious to see what Mother would say when she found out that her favorite vase had been knocked off the mantle by Jerry, it was a wonder that any of them had survived. Tim banged the covers shut so the dust flew up between them.

  "Get enough to eat
?" Jane asked, flopping onto the couch.

  "Never at your house. Do you only rummage? Don't you ever shop in a grocery store?" Tim flopped down next to her.

  "Not if I can help it. There was stuff in there though. Charley gets food."

  "No Charley tonight?"

  "He had a department dinner or party or something; then he's packing up to come here for a week while I'm in Kankakee."

  "When you get done decorating the EZ Way, you can help me with a project. I've talked the alumni association at Mac into a Show House fund-raiser."

  Jane was astonished that anyone from their old high school would agree to such a plan. Casino nights, pot lucks, silent auctions, bingo, even a talent show, maybe, but a Decorator Show House? In Kankakee? Who would they get to decorate? Whose house? Would they get anyone to pay to walk through it?

  "I bought the old Gerber place. Cheap. My old condo had too many memories. Time for a new start; new project. Gerber's was a mess, and I was going to do it over before I moved in, soooo… I offered it for the Show House."

  "You bought Eddie Gerber's house? On Cobb? You're going to live on Cobb Boulevard?"

  "Yeah. The fund-raising committee agreed pretty much because I offered the house and put a little spin on what the designers can do. No one can spend more than five hundred dollars per room— it's got to be all flea market and rummage. Only exceptions are some appliances and the new master bedroom bed, which I was buying anyway. And the designers are all amateurs, too. People were fighting to do rooms."