Dead Guy's Stuff

by Sharon Fiffer

  Jane leaned over his shoulder, breathing heavily. "It's not…?"

  Tim shook his head.

  They both sighed. Tim and Jane loved hotel silver and serving dishes. Both were mad to get silver from the Hotel Kankakee, long gone from downtown. Jane had managed to find six silver dessert bowls and one larger bowl, a salad, she and Tim had decided. Tim had hit the mother lode at one of his house sales. A former employee of the hotel, Mrs. Slagmore, had been offered much of the merchandise before it was auctioned, and she'd left it boxed and unmarked in her basement. Tim had trays, condiment servers, some silver utensils, and a tea service that Jane would dearly love to claim as soon as Tim acknowledged Duncan's murder. Its book value, however, was a good deal over twenty-five dollars.

  "It's hotel, though. Where did Gus…? The monogram is an L," Tim said.

  "L?" Jane asked, then smiled. "Pay dirt."

  "Yes, yes, yes. It's from the Lafayette Hotel, and there's tons of it." Tim performed a kind of jig around the box. Jane would have described it as an end-zone dance. He had the glee and the stomping feet of a player who had just scored a touchdown, but Tim was no running back. He was just a tall, handsome man with a taste for quality vintage table-ware and whose last name began with L. It was a touchdown and the extra point.

  Jane walked into the kitchen of Duncan's shanty number one and wasn't surprised to find it as dirty and garbage strewn as the one he had been living in. The quality of chaos was slightly different. Not as much abandoned as ransacked. In fact, as Jane scanned the room, left to right, top to bottom, just as she would at a house sale, she noticed the drawers had been pulled out and barely closed, with some linens still spilling out. Upper cupboards had been opened and the doors left hanging. The pattern of dust was disturbed, too. Fingers had trailed through the grime recently.

  "Have you been going through the kitchen?" Jane asked.

  "You get first crack at that. You need stuff for my place, right? I mean the McFlea," Tim said.

  "How were the doors secured? Regular deadbolt or were they padlocked?"

  "The back door, believe it or not, was open. I'm guessing Bill Crandall just left it for me. He didn't have real high hopes for the stuff."

  "Who?"

  "Duncan's nephew. He owns the places, but Duncan didn't want him messing around here while he still lived at 805. Told me that Uncle Gus was always eccentric and said he had to do some filing and packing, then Bill could do whatever he wanted. Burn the joints down, Bill said. That's what Gus always said. Just burn 'em."

  Maybe Gus had started to do some filing and packing in this kitchen.

  Jane forgot that she had come in to call Lilly, to try her at this other number, and instead, began going through boxes that had been stacked to the left of the back door. Maybe Gus had emptied some of those cupboards recently and boxed things to move. He had sold all his properties and given the shanties to his nephew. Maybe he was leaving town or at least leaving Linnet Street.

  "Tim!"

  Tim came in with a large white linen napkin, a large maroon L tastefully embroidered on its corner, tucked under his chin.

  Jane was crouched over a wooden crate, squatting in the picker's pose. Tim would have to tell her that pretty soon her knees were going to go. She was going to have to lift those boxes up to table height. After all, she wasn't a catcher who could go nine innings; she was a forty-something whose arthritis was hovering around the corner.

  Jane was holding a MORE SMOKES punchboard. Red, white, and blue graphics laid out the rules. Red tickets with numbers that ended in five won five packs of cigarettes. White tickets that ended in zero won five packs of cigarettes. Jane held it up to the dim light of the kitchen. Tim hadn't put any stands of lights here yet, but some sun came through the grimy streaks of the small window over the sink. When Jane held it up, Tim saw that this board had lost value. It had punches pushed out. Jane was twisting it and turning it in the light, looking at the pattern of holes.

  "What a pack rat! He saved old punchboards, I mean ones that were punched," Jane said, shaking her head.

  "Yeah, what a nut!" Tim said, laughing. "I'll just toss it."

  Tim tried to take it from Jane, but she gripped it firmly.

  "I'll put them in your car, pack rat," Tim said.

  "Ms. Pack Rat to you." Suddenly remembering Lilly's call, Jane dialed the number Tim had given her. An answering machine, male voice. Jane hung up.

  Tim loaded up the punchboards and several other boxes of kitchenware that Jane wanted to go through at Don and Nellie's. It would be impossible to wash things clean enough in this filthy kitchen to see what they were, to judge their condition. Jane had found some iced tea spoons with Bakelite handles that were charming and pristine, never removed from their box; but for the most part, Gus Duncan's stuff had sat under cobwebs and greasy dust for decades. Jane knew her mother would holler when she saw the dirty boxes hauled in, but Jane also knew the deep satisfaction it would give Nellie to help her daughter clean the stuff. Nellie might not want to accumulate, but she dearly loved to sanitize. Tim was still trying to decide whether they should try to clean one of the shanties well enough to have the sale inside.

  The McFlea preview was this weekend; then he turned it over to the ticket takers and tour guides. He could be ready for the shanty sale in two weeks if Jane would help, or so he said. He was toying with setting up a tent in the yard. Both he and Jane were willing to plow through old musty basements and attics, pick their way through rusted hardware and moldy Tupperware, but Tim wasn't sure he could convince Kankakeeans— and the Chicago dealers he might be able to draw if he found anything interesting— into Duncan's caves.

  Bill Crandall poked his head in briefly. He shook Jane's plastic-gloved hand, and Jane offered him a pair for his own use. He declined, saying he didn't plan on going through any of his uncle's trash. He just wanted top dollar for it.

  "Gus didn't strike me as a man who knew the value of anything he had. He just didn't want to get rid of stuff," Crandall said. He was a big man, too, although much fitter and trimmer than his uncle. There was some facial similarity, but where Duncan was dark-skinned and dark-haired, his nephew was fair and sandy-haired.

  "Gus Duncan Lite," Tim said, describing him as they watched him leave in his Jaguar.

  "Showy car," Jane said. "What's he do?"

  "Told me he was an entrepreneur like his uncle. Owns some properties downstate. Lives in Chicago, some south suburb. Doesn't look like he works with his hands," Tim said. "Did you notice his diamond pinky ring?"

  Jane nodded. She had also noticed that his fingernails, neatly and professionally manicured, she was sure, were in need of a touch-up. His white linen shirt was going to need some special attention, too. He might not want to borrow a pair of gloves to do it, but he had certainly been going through his uncle's trash.

  Jane made sure that Tim catalogued everything she packed into her car. She knew it all had to be accounted for before the sale. In addition to the kitchen kitsch she wanted to clean and examine, she took the old punchboards. There were at least thirty of them. And a file box full of random papers, old clippings of places for sale, foreclosures. Jane also took a bagful of yellowed sheets, old handwritten papers marked by Tim for trash. She could use the old papers for her McFlea project. Poking around in the bag she saw paper squiggles. Gus must have eaten the cookies that came with his takeout but hung on to the fortunes. Jane smiled— she could use those, too, in the pantry.

  Jane wanted to look over some of Gus's scratchings. Were those his rental agreements? On the backs of napkins and matchbooks? Maybe she could afford to keep a place here in Kankakee, store and sell her overflow, stay there when she was visiting her parents and Tim. She'd still live in Evanston with Nick and maybe Charley, if that worked out, if they got through this malaise or cold war or whatever it was they were suffering from. But she'd have this place, too. Maybe that was the key to a good marriage, a healthy family: separate houses. Some happily married couples had sepa
rate bedrooms. Some of her own friends and neighbors did, she knew. The bedroom, though, she liked sharing with Charley. That's the room that seemed too lonely as a permanent single. But the kitchen, the study, the living room? Those she might like to rule: alone.

  Jane and Tim had made a schedule. They would work at the McFlea after a dinner break; then if they weren't too tired, they'd come back and continue going through the shanties. Tim brought lights over to 803, but didn't set them up. They'd be lucky to finish 801 by tomorrow. These cottages were small, but densely packed. Tim thought this one, 801, had the most paper ephemera. Old calendars, maps, Jane's kind of stuff. No. 803 had more restaurant wares, cases of cards and dice, cartons of 78-rpm records, all the basement leavings of a saloon that might have gone bust in the forties or fifties. Jane and Tim were both high and giddy on old-stuff fumes, the dust and must of their addiction.

  "What about 805? Gus's place?" Jane asked. "Have you been through there?"

  "Bill doesn't own that one," Tim said, "yet. He's the only relative though. He will."

  "Yeah, but have you been through it?"

  "I checked to see if the keys fit. I had a feeling since 801 and 803 were the same lock, he'd just keep it easy on himself," Tim said.

  "And?"

  "The keys fit," said Tim, "and yeah, I skimmed it."

  "And?"

  "Nothing, really. It was all his living stuff, you know? Big, ugly clothes. A pretty raunchy video collection. Stuff like that. Seems like everything we'd be interested in is in these two."

  "Except that kitchen set?" asked Jane.

  "Right. There is some furniture and the television. That kind of everyday junk."

  Jane and Tim worked together for another hour, methodically writing down what they found, sorting stuff in piles. Jane was humming loudly, lips occasionally moving trying to find words to a song. Tim patted his wallet pocket rhythmically.

  Jane offered to tackle one of the two small bedrooms, while Tim started on the basement. He gave himself a spritz of his inhaler— his "career-related" asthma flared most frequently in basements, but he was unable to resist them. Jane put on the paper mask, since the closets promised clouds of dust every time she pushed a hanger farther along the bending wooden pole.

  There were a few items of clothing that Jane knew would interest Tim. Two gorgeous wool coats with enormous Bakelite buttons. The wool was miraculously moth hole free. Jane wasn't sure what had spared these garments. She opened men's hatboxes marked DOBBS and found three felt fedoras. She placed a gray one on her head and bent the brim down in what she hoped was provocative Raymond Chandler style.

  "Jane! Jane!" Tim called.

  Tim had set up an additional bank of lights in the basement. It made it look much more like a stage set than an actual living space. An old farm table with a white porcelain top and a sweet little narrow drawer held three boxes that Tim asked her to dip into first.

  "This is a sample of the kind of stuff Gus was sitting on."

  Jane lifted out photograph albums, autograph books, and high school yearbooks. These could have belonged to the original owner of this little house or to any number of people whose property Gus had descended upon. Turn-of the-century photos of families, their gatherings and special events, and Kankakee buildings were in excellent condition. An autograph book held good luck messages and poems, all addressed to Darling Minna. Jane began reading, but Tim told her to keep going. His goofy smile told her that he had left something in the bottom he wanted her to find.

  It was a photograph. Inside the oak frame, the black-and-white print measured ten by twenty-four. It was a large group of people posing outdoors. Were they in a parking lot? Some scrubby trees in the background were leafless, but there was no snow on the ground. The coats and hats looked more late fall than early spring. November? The photo might have been taken from the top of a ladder since it seemed to look down on those standing in front of a ramshackle building almost hidden by the group. A car was parked to the right of the group. It looked like a Cadillac, 1944, '45?

  Tim bounced up and down on his toes. He waited for Jane to recognize the photograph or someone in it. She was enjoying his excitement as much as she was the photograph. It had all of her requirements: crisp black-and-white quality; a large group of individuals; clear shots of faces, even if they were too far away for great detail, a few goofy mugs; a man trying to kiss a woman who seemed to be squirming away. A lot of stories here. Maybe the best story, though, the story Tim knew she'd find the most interesting, was the one being told by Gus Duncan. Only slightly thinner but more jolly than sloppy, a big cigar chomped in his teeth with his huge arms fanned out embracing two smiling, fresh-faced kids in their twenties, thirties at most. Gus, wearing the same gray fedora Jane now wore on her head, looked like he was giving the world to these two young people who were happy to get it. The smiling man and woman, snugly wrapped in Gus Duncan's large embrace, were looking straight into the camera. Jane pushed the hat back on her head with one finger to the brim and let out a low whistle: Don and Nellie.

  16

  Don and Nellie never went out. They lived their daily lives out. Morning until night, they worked at the EZ Way Inn, a destination spot for many who wanted to go out. After work, when one of their erratic employees consented to show up for work at six— "Bartending doesn't exactly attract the most reliably career minded," Don had reminded Jane when she'd wept over their late arrivals, often nonarrivals, at school events— they'd stopped for dinner at a casual restaurant. That was not going out to dinner though; that was just getting something to eat on the way home.

  They didn't attend movies or plays, go to concerts or art openings. They had no friends who asked them over for dinner or card games. Their euchre-playing friends were with them at the EZ Way every day. When they grabbed dinner at cafés where they knew the owners, who often sat down with them and joined them over coffee and pie, it was as close to a dinner party as they got. By the time Don and Nellie got home in the evening, their social energy was spent. They had smiled and laughed and kidded and prodded and coaxed and listened and advised quite enough, thank you. Don usually managed to read a section or two of the paper and exchange some "How was school?" niceties with Jane and Michael before he fell sound asleep in his recliner, blanketed with the sports pages.

  Nellie, an undiagnosed manic-manic, managed to find laundry, dusting, and sweeping to do. Regularly, on a Tuesday or Wednesday night, while Don slept through the ten o'clock news, Jane would find her cleaning out the refrigerator, wiping shelves, and Windexing surfaces. Nothing was ever clean enough, finished enough for Nellie. Mornings she waited outside bedroom doors for all of them to hand her their pajamas so she could throw them in the washing machine before they all left the house for work and school. When Don, Jane, and Michael were all cigarette smokers, Nellie, an emphatic nonsmoker always, ran herself ragged emptying three separate ashtrays after each flick of a Tareyton, Marlboro, or Kent.

  For all of their years in the saloon business, Don and Nellie had followed the same pattern. Work hard all day, come home and find comfort in quiet routine: Don in his recliner, Nellie running from corner to corner with a broom. So now, when Jane returned to her parents' home at six-thirty, she was shocked to find a note in Don's beautiful penmanship.

  Janie, we've gone out. Be home around eleven.

  Jane felt the up-to-the-minute frustration of cellular technology. It was the age of always being in touch. She had promised Nick she would always have her phone, turned on and at the ready, so if he needed her, she, or at least her voice, was available. Nick would always have that safety net. Jane, on the other hand, was in the transitional generation. Always worried that she would forget her phone and disappoint her son, always anxiety driven by her own parents who refused to get one. She could not reach them where they had gone out because they did not tell her where that might be; and since they did not ever go out, she could hardly make any sensible guesses. She could not call them on their cell phone because t
hey believed that cell phones were a passing fad, a dangerous, expensive gimmick.

  Where in God's name were they? Jane had spent time studying the photograph under Tim's gazillion-watt lightbulb and now badly wanted to turn that lamp on Don and Nellie and ask them what the hell was going on. Don had taught her to hate no one, to be kind to all, except for Gus Duncan. He had taught her that Gus Duncan was an enemy of the family, an evil, small toad of a man whom she and her brother, right along with Don and Nellie, could despise. It was one of their few family activities, this Gus Duncan hating, and now her completely dysfunctional family minus one function— the family hating of Gus Duncan— was revealed as a sham. They were completely dysfunctional because their family hatefest was based on a lie.

  Where were they?

  Jane, fuming, opened a can of soup and poured it into a pan. As she adjusted the low flame, she realized that Nick would starve to death in his grandparents' house. He and his friends were the soup-to-bowl-to-microwave generation. The small saucepan had been bypassed several years ago. Nellie believed microwaves were a fad, a gimmick just like cell phones and compact discs. Jane hadn't even broached the subject of DVD.

  Would Charley's professional heirs dig around a Don and Nellie site someday and hold a battered saucepan, waving it in the air speculating on its use? Too small for the cassoulet and bouillabaisse that archived, turn-of-the-century Gourmet magazines would suggest home cooks were preparing. Jane tasted the minestrone and wondered for the thousandth time how her parents could tolerate oversalted canned soups at home when Nellie had made giant pots of perfectly seasoned chowders and soups from scratch at the tavern. Jane, since childhood, had asked why "home cooking" was reserved for the EZ Way Inn. Nellie, having suffered from irony deficiency since birth, suggested Jane try one of the many frozen dinners she and Don squirreled away if she did not want canned soup.