"I had my first kiss in Eddie Gerber's basement."
"What a coincidence! I'm decorating the basement."
"On that ratty tweed couch next to the Ping-Pong table."
"I'll put up a plaque."
* * *
Charley joined them for breakfast. He dumped his briefcase and boxes of papers into the study and poured himself an extra large mug of coffee.
"I might have to sit on a committee next weekend, fill in for Beegle. Any chance you'll be home?" Charley asked Jane.
"I'd like to be back on Thursday. That'll give me time to do a lot at the EZ Way and do sales here on Friday morning. I have a bunch of packages to send out to Miriam, too."
Nick came in from the garage where he had been showing Tim his own collection of vintage bicycle parts.
"I'm almost ready to put it all together," said Nick, "just need another fender and maybe a better rear wheel. Tires shouldn't be any problem."
Tim nodded. "I bet I can find all that stuff in three sales. I've got the list," he said, patting his shirt pocket.
Jane gave Charley a kiss on the cheek and hugged Nick, reminding him of his weekly round of sports practices and guitar lessons. She reminded Charley that the calendar was on the inside cupboard door, and Charley nodded. He didn't remind her that he had filled out the calendar, and that he had always been better at keeping to the schedule than she had. Those reminders all seemed beside the point.
She was perky and happy and ready to hit the road. Charley kept asking himself what was so different about Jane now, but he couldn't put his finger on it. And he knew that until he could figure it out, he had no chance of putting their household back together.
"Don't forget to take care of Rita," Jane said, retying the bandana around the dog's neck.
"Like we could forget…," Charley stopped himself. He loved this dog. Why did he find himself speaking lines out of a script that cast him as the grumpy old husband? Especially now that Jane seemed, more and more, to be playing the ingenue?
More hugs, reminders, kisses, smiles, and Jane was ready to take off. Tim had already left, racing off with a quick promise to call her at her parents' house later.
Jane, on the road, was daydreaming of Don and Nellie's tavern, trimmed out as a post-WWII hangout, swing music blaring from the jukebox. She saw the café curtains unfurling at the windows, a breeze wafting through the barroom. Napkins, anchored by sweating beer mugs, fluttered, then fell. The soft buzz and flutter of cards being shuffled and dealt, and a baseball game turned down to a low murmur provided the soundtrack. It was when she pictured Dot and Ollie, sitting at the bar in their bowling shirts, that she realized she was picturing the Shangri-La instead of the EZ Way Inn. That couple, twirling around behind the bar, enchanted with each other and making merry with the customers, wasn't Don and Nellie, it was Mary and Bateman. That damn Bateman, winking at her and waving his jaunty three-fingered salute. What was he trying to tell her?
6
"That son-of-bitch. I don't give a damn what anybody says, that guy's a son-of-a-bitch. He'd swindle his own mother, then sue her for fraud. I hate that son-of-a-bitch."
Jane came in through the kitchen door of the EZ Way Inn on the last son-of-a-bitch, but had heard her father's tirade in its entirety as she came in from her car. His voice had carried outside through the screen door and set her teeth on edge.
Don was a gentle man as well as a gentleman. He had always cautioned her never to use the word "hate." Kill 'em with kindness had been his motto, and he had tried to instill it in both Jane and her brother, Michael. She had only heard him use the word hate about one individual and that was his landlord, Gustavus Duncan.
Gus Duncan had been the thorn in her father's side for as long as Jane could remember. He owned several buildings in the Kankakee area, nothing fancy, but spots of property here and there. He collected rents from saloon keepers and restaurant owners and, Jane assumed, shopkeepers, barbers, any type of business tenant who wanted a small, unkempt storefront, badly managed by an absentee landlord. Gus would collect the rent on the first of the month, then disappear through one of the cracks in the plaster sure to appear in any of his properties every time a truck rumbled by or a clap of thunder shook the foundation. Gus did not employ a handyman, a plumber, a painter, or a carpenter. He rented out the shell of a building and promised nothing. Unless you considered his growled, "See you next month," a promise rather than a threat.
Don had treated the EZ Way like some kind of semi-precious gemstone. A stone, that although rough and ordinary on the outside, could be polished into luminescence on the inside. An agate, Jane thought, or maybe more of a geode, bumpy and dirty on the outside, cracked open to reveal a sparkling world of wonder.
Some might not see it. The massive oak bar, cleaned and polished daily to a warm glow. Nellie's café curtains in a cheery print adorning the spotless windows. The top of the line paneling on the walls of the small excuse for a dining room connected to the bar area. But Jane never failed to see the shimmer and shine of her parents' loving care of this ramshackle old building. Her brother, Michael, had once remarked that their parents took better care of the EZ Way than they did of them, but Jane had shushed him.
"It's their work," she told him. "It's what they have to be proud of." Michael, only twelve at the time, looked up at his adored older sister, clearly puzzled. "Shouldn't they be proud of us?"
Don was still muttering under his breath when Jane came in and faced him. "Daddy, aren't we supposed to avoid the H-word? I wasn't allowed to hate anyone," Jane said, setting down two bags that she had carried in and putting her arm on her father's shoulder.
"It's okay to hate one person. Just pick out one guy and concentrate on hating him so purely that you don't have any left to spill over on the rest of your life," Don said. "In fact, it's okay for everyone to hate Gus Duncan. He can be the one person in the world that everyone hates."
Don moved around behind the bar to get a glass of water. Jane looked at Nellie.
"Mom? A clue?"
"Gus called a meeting and didn't show up. Who cares? Papers are signed. Nobody can get out of it," Nellie said, shrugging. "I don't know what he's so mad about."
"The guy has jerked everyone around for fifty years, and he's still doing it."
Through a combination of her father's rants and raves and her mother's shrugs and grunts, Jane figured out that Gus Duncan had scheduled a meeting with all of the former tenants turned owners, ostensibly to give out any extra keys or paperwork he had in his files. He had, apparently, offered to buy everyone breakfast at Pinks Café, the kind of uncharacteristically generous gesture that Nellie hadn't trusted in the first place.
"Don't know what he's all excited about," she said, pointing her elbow at her husband. "Gus hasn't picked up a check for fifty years; he ain't going to start now."
"Gus still live in the shanty?" Jane asked.
Gus lived in a four-room house, made of the same tar-paper-and-trash construction that the EZ Way Inn boasted, about three blocks away. He owned three identical houses— called the shanties by everyone in town— on the same block; and even though his rental properties must have made him a wealthy man, he had never moved away or traded up. He bought bars and shops, one by one, on the west side of town, usually from desperate sellers, and added to his seedy little empire, never changing his own address, his surly manners, or his dirty clothes.
Jane and her dad drove slowly over to shanty number one and parked in front. Duncan's fifteen-year-old truck sat outside. Jane shook her head and thought about a house sale at this place. She had always shunned the precautions that she noticed that some pickers took, but even she might don a mask and gloves to enter this one.
"I bet that son-of-a-bitch has mattresses stuffed with money in that rathole."
"Have you ever been inside?" Jane asked.
Her father stared at the house. Jane, too, looked at the broken outer door, the grime-streaked windows and torn screens. Everything about t
his eyesore screamed, "Get a tetanus shot!"
"Never."
Jane, made bold only by wanting to appear that way in front of her father, knocked loudly on the door. "Mr. Duncan? Gus?"
Don banged his fist on the door. "Duncan? Open the door."
Jane turned the latch on the screen, and the door fell aside. The house unlocked and all the windows open— was he inside, ignoring them?
"Could be in there drunk, I guess," said Don, quieter now.
"We'd better check," Jane said.
The living room, or main room or family room or whatever you'd call the space that the front door opened onto, was furnished with two filthy couches, their stuffing spilling onto the floor, and three broken chairs. A large television sat in one corner. It was on, tuned to a cable sports channel, the sound muted. The floor was littered with pizza delivery boxes, sandwich wrappers, and greasy brown paper bags. Slimy green-and-brown vegetation was piled on the floor by the couch. Aquarium plants? Jane cautiously approached and bent over to examine it.
"Guess Gus doesn't like lettuce and tomato on his sandwiches."
The smell inside the house was as horrible as it was indefinable. Spoiled food, yes, and unwashed clothes, naturally, but what gave the air its peculiar pungency, its nauseating weight?
Jane and her dad cautiously weaved through the room, picking up and replacing their feet carefully to avoid the debris on the floor.
Cats? Was it the smell of kitty litter? A dead or dying dog?
"Did Gus have any pets?"
"I don't think he was high enough on the food chain to actually care for another…" Following Jane through the kitchen door, Don let his voice drift off.
This was a stage set. Sam Shepard or David Mamet? Jane tried to remember what play she had seen in Chicago with John Malkovich throwing dishes and hurling plates and silverware. Any number of them, she guessed. This was the set for something that would involve half-wit brothers fighting over worthless property. Here was a prop master's dream of pots and pans and cans and boxes, stacked and balanced. A torn linoleum counter was covered with months, years of grease. Dirty cups, empty fifths of Jack Daniels, and prescription medicine bottles were shoved out of the way into wads of dirty paper towels to make a small work space by the sink.
Mismatched dishes, crusted with food and cigarette butts, covered nearly every surface and every inch of floor space. Jane pushed away old soup bowls with the toe of her canvas shoe, so glad she hadn't worn sandals or slides on this warm September day.
Who saw Gus first? Impossible to tell since Jane and her dad both inhaled sharply at the same time. A crumpled heap of dirty laundry in front of the sink? That's what Jane hoped for, but she knew better. Too solid and bulky a pile for just clothes. Although the light was dim, Jane saw that the shaggy, dark shape farthest from her feet was a head. Gus was curled on his side, and his head was tucked, chin to chest. She followed his profile, her eyes moving down his body and focusing on his hands. Palms were up, his hands cupped toward his face. A supplicating pose? Had his hands fallen open in prayer? A pitted, crusty, serrated knife lay next to him, as if he had dropped it there when he fell.
When she heard her dad heading out of the room, muttering something about calling the police, Jane took out her cell phone from her back pocket to call 911.
"Don't touch anything, Dad. I'll call on my phone." She heard her father come back and felt him touch her shoulder.
"Don't look at this anymore, honey. Come on," Don said.
"But…" Jane squatted down next to Duncan, holding her breath as tightly as she could. Removing a tiny credit card-shaped flashlight from her vest pocket, she shined it on Duncan's hands. They were slightly open, stiff, as if displaying some object, illustrating some point of conversation. The right hand, half-curled in death, seemed no longer human. Now it looked as if it were carved out of marble. The left hand, less sculpture, more flesh and blood, was not marble, merely carved. The left middle finger was pointing toward the thumb, not simply curved or angled toward it, actually turned on its side, lying flat against the palm, the dirty fingernail touching the pad of the thumb. A digital contortion that would have been impossible, as Jane kept proving by trying to get her own middle finger into the same pose, had Gus Duncan's left middle finger not been almost severed from the hand itself.
7
"Duncan was a lowlife. A slob. He was overweight, ate junk by the crate. You can tell by the bags and wrappers all over the house. Everybody who rented from him hated him, but lots of people hate their landlords. They don't kill them," Tim said, picking up another sandwich from the tray Nellie had set on the table.
Jane heard her father agreeing with Tim, but she could tell, even from her parents' bedroom where she was using the telephone, that Nellie's grunts and groans and monosyllabic responses meant that she heartily disagreed.
When Detective Oh picked up the phone and answered with his last name, Jane was prepared, greeted him with her own, and quickly got to the point.
"The thing about this body, this Gus, is that his finger was almost cut off," Jane said. "As convinced and convincing as they're trying to be, I just can't agree with the police here that he had a heart attack, then continued slicing a tomato or something and nearly cut off his own finger."
Jane had been so absorbed in the dangling finger that she forgot to be uncomfortable or embarrassed or whatever one should appropriately be when meeting a policeman over a dead body for the second time in a matter of months. Detective Munson, if surprised to see her again hovering over a corpse in Kankakee, did not show it. He didn't really show any emotion, observing Duncan's body from as much of a distance as he could professionally manage. Jane, although somewhat surprised at his apparent squeamishness— after all, he had chosen to be a police officer— could, in this particular case, understand it.
Gus Duncan was a hideous corpse.
No corpse could be beautiful. Living hard and dying young wouldn't guarantee it. Nor would a virtuous passing in one's sleep. No matter how peaceful the death, how pure the soul, spirit, or whatever your belief demanded to be pure, no death could come without extracting some type of toll.
Jane had been to enough wakes where she had heard friends and relatives murmur how beautiful in death someone looked, how natural. She had listened hard, with a great measure of hope, to nuns tell her that in death people met God and were at peace. And if it were all true— Jane's private jury remained locked on the subject— these ghostly souls might be as beautiful as anything Sister Kelly or Sister Galvin could imagine, but the shells they'd left behind, those empty bodies, were never pleasing to look at. It was only when animated with life, with breath and flowing blood, that a body made sense. Once that life stopped, the body was a bulky, badly designed container. Even the perfect features of an individual celebrated for his or her beauty— luscious lips, a perfectly straight and pert nose— looked silly and incongruous— faintly ridiculous add-ons to an oddly shaped package.
And Gus Duncan was never a beauty. Even Jane Wheel, celebrated among her own friends and colleagues for her blindness when it came to physical imperfections, had a difficult time looking objectively at Gus Duncan, alive or dead. Jane, self-educated and well-read even in youth, had her models of beauty formed by the masters. Not Titian or Rembrandt, but the cover girls of Seventeen and Mademoiselle. As shallow as any teenager, she curled or straightened, wore short or midi, went matte or shiny as the fashionist as dictated.
At college, though, her world changed. The people she found the most interesting, the most attractive, were those who shunned mirrors and makeup. She fell in love with the artsy crowd, the sensible shoes and flannel shirts who were committed to inner beauty and intellectual honesty. She fell into the arms of men who were among the uncombed and unwashed, who were far too busy talking and thinking, changing the world, to worry about holes in their sweaters or socks that matched. She shunned the pretty boys with wrinkle-free shirts and seamless faces and searched for character and bad boy sc
ars. She swooned for brains.
She totally understood how Julia Roberts could marry Lyle Lovett.
As a producer of commercials, which she had been in her last career, she was famous for casting actors with unusual, out of the mainstream faces, ones who were remembered and believed because intelligence shone from their eyes. But even Jane, the nonjudgmental, had trouble looking at old Gus Duncan.
In life he had had the face of a fighter, a losing one: cauliflower ears, pouches, and scars on his cheeks and jowls. Pummeled and shapeless, his bulky form was usually poured into dirty nylon running pants and topped with a polyester print shirt stretched tight across his fat middle, the buttons straining. His eyes were small and piggy, his lips thin over stained and broken teeth. Jane, who could find character in the least likely places, turned her head when Duncan, who refused to accept checks in the mail or direct bank transfer– deposits, came into the EZ Way Inn on the first of every month to collect the rent.
Bruce Oh tried to grasp all the information Jane was giving him. An ugly and nasty man was dead. The police seemed to believe that he had had a heart attack, the profile was right for that, but Mrs. Wheel felt that it was certainly a murder. Why? Because of another finger. This one, not in a jar, but almost detached. Even though Gus Duncan and Mr. Bateman had no other links that she knew of, Mrs. Wheel wanted to investigate.
Dead Guy's Stuff Page 6
