Jane ate her dinner out of the pan, standing at the sink, listening for a car, a groan of the garage door being raised, but all was quiet. Don's note had said eleven, but still, she listened. The kitchen clock, a nonvintage, boring eighties, serviceable tool hummed as the second hand circled. Nellie's African violets were blooming, as usual, on the windowsill. Nellie had always claimed that she did nothing special, but somehow these plants always performed magnificently for her. Jane noticed that Nellie had elevated two of the small plastic pots on a brick, a soft dark red with rounded corners. Jane picked it up and read, KINGSLEY PAVERS. Must have been a company here in town or nearby because she had seen a pile of the same old bricks in back of 801 Linnet Street, piled by the crumbling back porch.
Where were Don and Nellie?
Jane had promised Tim she'd meet him at the Gerber place. She already had the pantry "wallpaper" packed in her car. It would be such a lovely surprise for Tim. Even though he would redo most of the decor she and others brought to the McFlea, she had a feeling he would love the pantry.
A pile of bricks? A brick in the window?
"A brick through the window," Jane said, finding the right preposition. "Damn it."
Don and Nellie had gotten used to paying off Gus, their neighborhood blackmailer. They accepted being blackmailed as if it was some kind of penance they were supposed to pay. Aggravating, annoying, but harmless in any real sense. What if someone, a new generation of blackmailer, had decided he could take over Gus's business and make it more lucrative? Maybe this wouldn't be your run-of-the-mill Kankakee entrepreneur like Gus, but someone who could be harmful? Someone who threw bricks through windows? Someone who murdered Gus and tried to cut off his finger?
Where were her parents?
Jane opened her notebook. She flipped through her lists for estate sales, her "Lucky Fives," the shopping game she had invented for herself, and looked at her list of phone numbers and calls she had to return.
She dialed Oh's number from memory and wasn't surprised to get his voice mail. If he were available, she was sure he would have called her back by now. As she was trying to compose a concise message, she was surprised by a hesitation after the rote "Please leave a message," and then, "If this is Mrs. Wheel calling… I am at work in your area and will contact you. I have news about your… um… canned goods."
* * *
And what is my area? Jane asked herself. The land of conjecture and guesswork? Oh remembered that she couldn't retrieve her cell phone voice mail, bless his heart, but he still hadn't totally given up on her. He was even rather poetic and diplomatic in referring to her noncase. Jane's "canned goods" did not refer to the soup, she knew, but to Bateman's finger. She had not forgotten about it, sloshing away in her glove compartment. Perhaps Oh had finally found some kind of assault complaint, something that would link… Link what? Did Jane really think Bateman's finger would point to Gus Duncan's murderer? No, of course not. Bateman's finger was a curiosity— something that stirred her interest in finding the whole story. Duncan's hacked finger was something else— a message that signaled that his heart didn't just stop on its own. So if nothing linked them, why couldn't Jane shake the feeling that Bateman and Gus were somehow tied together? What was this brotherhood that Jane felt but couldn't prove?
Jane drove to the McFlea and unpacked everything she needed to start on the pantry. She left her phone within three feet of where she was working, since she had left a message in large block letters for her parents to call her as soon as they arrived home. Detective Oh had received the same message from her on his machine, "Please call me immediately."
Jane had already asked the painters to prep the built-in pantry shelves, which they had done beautifully. They had expected her to stencil or sponge on a design, possibly do a trompe l'oeil of canned goods and boxes on the back of one of the shelves à la Home & Garden Television do-it-yourselfer shows. "It was all the rage," they had told her. She only smiled at their guesses and warned Tim that he could not see it until it was finished.
She unpacked the boxes of fragile yellow-and-cream sheets of paper. She put Elmira Selfridge's schoolwork, her spelling tests and history notes, into one pile. She hadn't been able to answer anyone before about why she'd bought them, but now she knew.
Wallpaper. The childish block printing and the cursive handwriting practice sheets created spectacular graphics. Elmira's report cards and drawings told a child-size life story.
Jane made another pile with papers from the Shangri-La. She had left the bound ledgers for her dad to study and exclaim over, but there had been boxes of loose sheets, lists of names, customers' tabs, receipts, whiskey orders. Although all the pages were intact, they were aged just enough. Old typewriter fonts made, not by a computer program, but by a quirky old manual Smith Corona, the letters signed in Bateman's spidery handwriting. Some loose labels and paper coasters. The old letterheads and logos had a kind of simple beauty that thrilled Jane, though she couldn't explain why.
She had the box and bags from Gus Duncan's basement that Tim had been ready to toss out. Loose pages that Gus had scribbled names and numbers on mixed with the old newpaper clippings of public property auctions. These had all been in a moldy Monopoly game box they had opened in the basement. Tim had thrown it in with the box of spent punchboards that he figured had little value to anyone except Jane. Tim wanted hers, the boards she had found intact at Bateman's. The papers were dry enough to use, and Jane fanned them out looking for some bits and pieces that would go into her collage. The cookie fortunes were especially charming. She tried to imagine Gus holding, "You will soon be crossing the great waters" in his meaty paws. Jane wondered if that fortune had been recent. Gus had certainly crossed over. Could he have prevented it if he had taken this little slip with its micelike typewriting seriously? Gus had tiny handwriting, too, Jane noticed, looking at some of the other scraps in the bag. "Meeting at 2. Bring title." These little messages would fit neatly inside cookies, too.
Jane had a box of handwritten recipe cards that she had bought in a wooden box from the estate of an elderly Margaret Mann. Margaret had scribbled lovely notations in the margins about who had liked the confetti Jell-O salad and how many helpings of creamed peas Elmer had eaten over his potatoes. Jane had actually tried some of Margaret's more outrageous recipes, the mock apple pie out of Ritz crackers and the chicken à la king. Nick and Charley had asked for seconds, but when Jane, in her excitement, showed them the actual recipe card and Margaret's notes about who had attended her luncheon, they both lost their appetites.
"A whole stick of butter?" Charley asked, clutching his chest.
"What's heavy cream?" wailed health-conscious Nick.
They failed to see the poetry of Margaret's guest list, nor did they appreciate the historical significance of high-fat cooking.
Jane had promised to finish the pantry and kitchen in two days, which would have been impossible if she hadn't had all the makings of the room waiting in bags and boxes. The Buffalo China she had been collecting would look great on these open shelves. An old toaster and fifties blender… an original with the ribbed-glass container and one speed, the only one necessary to make creamy, chocolate milkshakes. She had packed up all her doubles of colorful Hall ball jugs that would line up across the top of the hutch. Her only task besides unpacking and arranging, most of which she had already finished in her head, was to decoupage these shelves.
She spread the tacky glue and began slapping up the scraps of handwriting, the formal letterheads with their deco graphics. She worked quickly, trying not to take too seriously the order of words, the non-sense she was making. Later she would go over it and find the coincidental jokes that the overlapping pages made, the profound absurdities that the disjointed words created.
Tim was going to work at the shanties until late, waiting for her before he went through all the boxes. He had promised. Now she was torn. Should she go back to Linnet Street and lose herself in the disparate boxes Gus had accumulated? Or
should she be at home waiting for her parents, sitting with the photograph in her lap, waiting for them to break down and confess… confess what?
Jane slapped her final coat of sealer over the collage she had created, then stepped back to admire it. The art and work of Elmira and Gus and Margaret and Bateman intersected and melded into a wallpaper of words and graphics, a grid of Palmer Method cursive and Royal Typewriter letters and hand colored United States maps. Next to a pale pink Tennessee was a recipe for grasshopper pie that was so scrumptious, Margaret noted in the margin, that she had seen Leo lick his plate when he thought she wasn't looking. Diagonally placed across an aqua Texas was a fortune that read "Happy thoughts will never slow you down." Jane wiped the glue off her hands with a rag from Tim's neatly packed and stored box of cleaning supplies and nodded in satisfaction. Every time Tim came to the pantry to fetch a tin of McCann's oatmeal or to get an extra water pitcher, he would read something fresh, read a new spelling word from one of Elmira's lists, find out what Bateman had paid for a case of Seagram's, or what Gus's fortune cookie had cautioned. Maybe he would even try Margaret's version of chipped beef on toast.
Jane checked her watch and was delighted to find it was only ten. She could rush over to Linnet Street and unpack a box or two, just to clear her head, before she talked to Don and Nellie. Packing up her supplies, she noticed she had hauled in the box with the used punchboards and flipped through them. The usual suspects, lots of cigarette boards and colorful prize boards that didn't name the specific prize. A few of them had their keys retaped to the back, but all were partially punched. She set out a few of them along the window ledge of the pantry and decided to leave them there until she saw them in daylight. Maybe she would get rid of them. Punched out they were worthless to collectors. Then again, punched out only meant that someone, maybe Jane herself, had gotten the thrills and chills of winning a box of chocolate-covered cherries off of that very board. Didn't they have an even richer story if they were used?
Jane found all the lights on at 801 Linnet, but nobody home. Tim's car wasn't out front, but the wooden shoeshine caddy that he used to carry rags and markers, sale tags, and inventory supplies still sat on the kitchen table. He had also begun to clean the kitchen, Jane noticed. At least now surfaces were wiped down, so they could lay out glasses, dishes, and knickknacks and check for cracks, crazing, and chipped rims.
Ten o'clock was right around Tim's dinnertime. He liked to keep a "European lifestyle" he'd told Jane in order to soften the corners of his "Kankakeean address." Jane hoped he'd bring back enough for her. The canned soup was ages ago. She found Duncan's fedora that she had worn earlier and put it on to keep the dust out of her hair.
She slit open the tape on a box marked "variety store invent." Inside were packages of paper coasters. Dainty little white paper circles rimmed in pink-and-gold scallops. Sealed packages of matching guest towels: a dozen in pink and gold, a dozen more in turquoise and gold. Perfect for baby showers, Jane thought, but do people do baby shower decorations in vintage? Of course they do, she could hear Miriam saying; they do everything…
Jane stopped and held her breath. Was that something in the basement? She heard it again, but this time it sounded like it was coming from the roof. Hail? She looked out the front door. Evenings were just beginning to get cool enough for jackets and sweaters. Tonight, with the breeze, she realized there was almost a shiver in the air. The old oak in the front yard swayed again in the sudden gust, and she heard the knocking, hard on the roof. Of course, it was midwestern September hail… acorns. They came down hard and clattered over the roof. Jane went back to the next box with the variety store marking. She wanted to find that Bakelite Tim had described. This carton, though, had old tape that had been in place so long, it had fused to the cardboard. She remembered that Tim had his box cutter in the basement and headed downstairs.
Jane had read enough Nancy Drew mysteries and seen enough of the scary movies that Charley and Nick loved to know she shouldn't go down into a dark, abandoned basement alone. This particular basement, though, was illuminated like a movie set, with Tim's brilliant work lights trained on every surface, lighting up every corner. He was no fan of spiders and critters himself, and they had long ago agreed not to tease each other about hearing mice or feeling something crawly. That's why Jane blithely ran down the steps and walked right over to the workshop table where she had last seen Tim ripping through cardboard. His cutter was right where he'd left it. Jane carefully retracted the blade, slipped the box cutter into her jean jacket pocket, and, out of habit, did the left-to-right, top-to-bottom scan of the basement room.
It was small, not nearly the nooks and crannies that had presented themselves to Jane in most of the smaller Chicago estate sales she liked. Those little bungalows had deceptively large and full basements. This one was small and stacked with boxes, fairly well marked as Tim had said. On the floor was a packet of handwritten letters. Ten, maybe twelve were tied together, with a few that had come loose splayed out. Which box had they fallen from? Jane wanted to keep these things together— maybe she'd find a whole box of correspondence that she could take home and read in bed. First she had to figure out which carton they belonged in. She stuck the letters in the pocket of her overalls while she studied the storage area.
Reading left to right, she recognized a lot of the markings on the boxes as tavern suppliers, the boxes probably coming intact from underneath one of the businesses Gus had snatched up when it failed. Across the empty cartons that Gus had reused for packing papers and books and pots and pans, Jane read a history of bottled beer: Pabst, Drewery's, Schlitz, Hamm's, Lilly.
Lilly. She was sitting on a stack of three boxes, her head against the wall. Another full box was on her lap. It held her there, seated among the carefully packed and taped cartons. Poor Lilly. Right in the middle of all this dead guy stuff, a dead girl.
17
"Stop scowling at me."
"I'm not scowling," Tim said. He wrinkled his forehead and scrunched up his eyes.
"You are most definitely scowling," Jane said
"No, I am not." He concentrated on furrowing his brow. He willed the corners of his mouth to turn down.
"But…" he said, ordering his entire face to give in to gravity.
"What?" Jane asked. "It's not my fault."
"Oh no, it's not your fault. Not at all," Tim said, walking away from her, then turning back. "I call you in as a partner on one of the most interesting sales I've had in months. Oddly enough, the last time you found a body for me at my workplace, I lost a little business; and now, when people are starting to forget, I get two housefuls of untouched buried treasure and you come along and find Lilly Duff dead with a box of Bakelite on her lap. A box of Bakelite, I might add, that we can no longer touch."
"I was your partner on this?" Jane asked, her eyes wide.
"You've been trying to turn the shanties into a crime scene for days," Tim said, boiling over. "Are you happy now?"
Detective Munson stepped in front of Jane and Tim with what might or might not be a smile on his face. It was one of those all-purpose expressions, a kind of do-it-yourself grin-grimace that allowed a great deal of range in the interpretation.
"Why would anyone be happy to see a pretty young woman murdered, Mr. Lowry?" Munson asked.
Jane knew that even though Munson didn't exactly emphasize the word woman, Tim would hear it that way, interpret it as a vague accusation, as if any time a woman was a victim, a gay man might be the logical suspect. She wanted to jump in, but Tim beat her by a mile.
"Look, Detective, I am very upset. Lilly Duff was a friend of mine. She and I were working together on our high school fund-raiser together. I am upset that she is dead. I'm also upset that she is dead here, on my work site," Tim said. He took a breath, which made him sound almost apologetic. "I made that sarcastic, rude, and thoughtless comment about being happy to Jane because…" Tim stopped and considered. "Because it's always been very hard for me to admit to my fr
iend, Jane, that she was right and I was wrong."
Jane put her arms around Tim, and they held on to each other tightly while Munson tried to get their full attention.
"Right and wrong?"
"Jane said all along that Gus Duncan was murdered, and none of us would believe her," Tim said. "I'm sorry, dear," he whispered to Jane.
"I forgive you, partner," Jane whispered back.
Tim winced. He knew he would pay dearly for letting that "partner" remark slip.
"We're investigating Lilly Duff right now, not Duncan," Munson said. When both Jane and Tim began to speak at once, he added, "Not yet, anyway."
Jane gave her statement. She'd thought she had heard something somewhere in the house, dismissed it, and gone on working. When she heard acorns on the roof, she was sure that they accounted for the noise and thought nothing of going into the basement to fetch Tim's box cutter. She did tell the police her first impression of the shanties from the afternoon— that she had thought that 801 and 803 had been searched, at least cursorily, because a few of the boxes were unsealed, she could see paths cut through the dust, but…
"What, Mrs. Wheel?" Munson had prompted, sounding interested for the first time.
Dead Guy's Stuff Page 15
