"I'm not sure there was any rhyme or reason to what Gus saved or kept, and he could have scuffled around through the dirt himself looking for things. The place didn't look ransacked, more like, I don't know…," Jane said, "like whoever searched didn't know what he or she was looking for. Or even if…"
"If?" Munson and Tim both asked.
"If they knew there was something to find. It was more like someone was just looking around, casually, maybe," Jane said.
"Just browsing, perhaps?"
Munson and Tim looked past Jane in surprise at the questioner. Jane turned around, quite pleased to see former detective Bruce Oh.
"Yes, Detective Oh, just browsing," Jane said.
Munson glared at the uniformed officer stationed at the door, hoping that his cold-eyed stare would convey the message that Oh should not have been permitted into the house. This particular house on Linnet, 801 Linnet, to be precise, was now taped off, officially an investigation site, and Bruce Oh was no longer an official investigator. Munson had gone along with his request to revisit the Duncan house out of a kind of collegiality; but since Oh was no longer a member of any police department, Munson felt his collegiality did not have to extend very far. In fact, he decided, it was over.
"You're going to have to wait out there, Oh, behind the lines."
"Of course," Oh said, evenly and cordially. Jane watched him glide out the door, thinking that if he had been wearing a hat, he would have tipped it.
Jane, she realized several minutes later, was herself still wearing the hat she had found in the house. Tim asked her about it as they walked toward the street where Bruce Oh stood between their parked cars. He neither leaned nor slouched, and Jane found herself admiring his posture. She, on the other hand, could not stand straight. She leaned against Tim as they walked out, overcome with fatigue. She was so tired, in fact, that she forgot to ask Detective Oh— retired he may be, but he would remain detective to her— what he was doing long past midnight on Linnet Street in Kankakee, Illinois.
"Is there a restaurant open where we might have coffee or tea, Mrs. Wheel?" asked Oh. "You, too, Mr. Lowry, if you're free."
Jane stood straighter. Coffee would revive her. She had, after all, just found the body of a murdered woman, a woman she had known since their high school days. She really didn't want to go home to Don and Nellie's quite yet.
"Pinks," Tim and Jane both said at once.
Jane and Tim were of one mind on many things. They agreed that really good American art pottery was best displayed one piece at a time. A simple, dark green arts and crafts vase, alone on a mantel, could tell you the story of the house as soon as you walked into the room. The cheap stuff, the colorful flowerpots that were bought by the boatload at five-and-ten-cent stores in the thirties and forties, looked best huddled together in groups, holding on tightly to their sweet nostalgia by clustering. They agreed that boxes sealed in an attic were better than boxes sealed in a basement, although treasures and duds could be found in both. They usually preferred red wine to white, but always preferred vodka to wine. They differed strongly, however, on the matter of what to order at Pinks.
Pinks Café was in a ramshackle building perched on the bank of the Kankakee River, nestled close to the Schuyler Avenue Bridge. The back of the tiny restaurant was supported, one hoped, by a kind of stilt arrangement that made the floor almost even, although if you walked in the front door you stayed on level ground, and if you exited through the back, you climbed down thirty stairs. The original Mr. Pink, who had passed into legend years ago, was rumored to ask first-time customers whom he disliked for one reason or another to please exit by the back door because he was locking up the front. Then he and the waitress, Aggie, and any other regulars left in the joint listened to hear if they clattered and bounced down the wooden steps and stopped before rolling into the Kankakee River. Don and Nellie loved to tell Mr. Pink stories, Nellie with a kind of gleeful malice, and Don with a rueful longing for less litigious days.
"They'd sue him now," Don always added at the end of a Mr. Pink tale, as if that were the only problematic aspect to the story.
Tim insisted that the only thing to order at Pinks was coffee and pastries. He did not trust the grill, the pans, the refrigeration, or the food purveyors. Jane checked her concerned-mother-nutrition-label-reading self at the door and recommended the American fries.
"If you have any of the 'messes,' which are just scrambled omelets, you get the potatoes and heavenly buttered toast," Jane said, feeling guilty about being hungry— hadn't she just found Lilly after all— but being ravenous nonetheless.
"I'm surprised you have, here in Kankakee, a restaurant that stays open so late," said Detective Oh.
"That's the beauty of Pinks," said Jane. "It just opened."
"It's an all-night diner," Tim explained, "but just all night."
"Midnight to 8:00 A.M. or so," said Jane.
Pinks had been a godsend to high schoolers for years. In a town where "There's nothing to do" is the nightly battle cry, Pinks was the place to be. After movies, parties, late-night golf course drinking bouts, illicit road trips, and romantic rendezvous at the boat docks, everyone showed up at Pinks. There, the teenagers mingled with representatives of every stratification of Kankakee society. The late shift factory workers, the drunken bar closers, the bartenders who had overserved them, the businessmen who had worked overtime to avoid their families. Those night timers arrived late and tired, but just hungry enough to brave a Pinks Mess, three eggs scrambled with cheese and whatever vegetables, fruit, condiments the cook felt like adding. Cries of, "I got olives!" were usually echoed by someone else at another booth, "I got raisins," who was answered with, "You'd better hope they're raisins," which grossed everybody out for about a second before they continued shoveling in eggs and bacon and buttered white toast.
"Yeah?" asked Bonnie, Aggie's granddaughter, as she held her pencil poised over pad and listened to Detective Oh order whole wheat toast and a cup of tea.
"That's all," he answered.
"Yeah?" she answered again, shaking her head at Tim and Jane.
"She'll bring you white toast and coffee," Tim said. "Don't take it personally."
Jane found it charming that Detective Oh built a small tower with shrink-wrapped jelly containers as he told them what had brought him to Kankakee.
"I visited Mrs. Bateman," he began, but Jane interrupted him. She put her hand over Tim's and nodded toward the door. Tim turned to look and whistled softly.
Lilly Duff's brother, Bobby, had just walked in the door with two other men. Jane thought they looked familiar and realized they were probably Bobby's friends from high school, guys she'd probably known back then, too. None of them had aged well. They all seemed to have had more than a few drinks, and they kept bumping up against each other as they staked out a table of high school girls, preparing to intimidate them and get their booth before the girls were even served their food. It was an old Pinks routine— the pecking order of customers— and no one in management interfered. "If you can't stand the grease fire get out of the kitchen" was their motto. High schoolers were lousy tippers anyway, and drunken factory workers often mistook twenties for tens.
Bobby leered over the shoulder of one of the girls, mumbling and making small talk. It didn't take long before the blonde across the table stood up and told the others they were welcome to stay, but she was taking her car and leaving. They followed like lambs, passengers after driver, and exited. Remarkably, Bobby and his friends grew immediately sober and less clumsy and took over the table. Jane spotted one of them grab the five-dollar bill that one of the girls had thrown down in guilty haste as they left.
"He can't possibly know," Tim said.
Jane shook her head. She found herself completely detached from Lilly Duff and her apparent murder. She was thinking of it now as information, something she knew that thirty-seven-year-old Bobby Duff didn't know, would soon be told, and that would change his life forever. She remembered Li
lly and Bobby as kids, the other saloon keeper children at her school. Bobby was wild, just as Lilly had been, but they were always sweet together. Jane could remember Lilly threatening some boy in Jane's class, two years older, who had made fun of Bobby tagging along behind her. They were scrappy and loyal. Bobby, Tim had told Jane, was helping Lilly run their folks' place. He, too, had gone into debt to buy it from Gus Duncan. He, too, had been stood up like Don and Nellie on the day of the "final paperwork." Perhaps, he, too, was being blackmailed. Jane realized, in those few seconds as she watched Bobby's face, two things: One, having the kind of power she had now over Bobby, her knowledge that his sister was dead, murdered in a basement on Linnet Street— knowledge that would change his life, would gray his hair, would line his handsome face— felt like the opposite of power, and two, Bobby would be asked if he had an alibi for the time of his sister's death. Jane no longer felt like she could eat a Pinks Special Mess.
There were only so many places people could be late at night in Kankakee if they weren't in their own homes and the bars were closed: the police station, the emergency room, and Pinks. Jane saw the police car park outside the front window. One uniformed officer, about the same age as Bobby Duff, came in and went straight to him, squeezed into the booth, and whispered something in his ear. Bobby got up immediately and left, clutching the cop's elbow.
Jane turned away from the window, thinking she didn't want to see the moment in the parking lot when the cop told Bobby, then turned back, surprised to find that she did want to see it, wanted to verify Bobby's expression, wanted to make sure she saw genuine grief and shock, and spotted no false horror, no faked sobs. But when she turned back, the police car was pulling onto the street with Bobby in the backseat.
Jane picked at her American fries, but felt squeamish about exploring her "mess." Tim raised an "I told you so eyebrow" but mercifully didn't tease her. She wanted to move beyond the almost-crying stage every time she discussed a case with Detective Oh.
Detective Oh was puzzling over his coffee cup. Aggie's granddaughter had brought him coffee as Tim had predicted but had also placed a generic-brand tea bag on the saucer.
"I can't imagine how this would taste, but I somehow want to use it to show my appreciation," said Oh. "What can that possibly mean?"
"You've become a Kankakeean, Oh," said Tim. "Confused because, like, 'What am I doing here?' is the main thought that buzzes through your head. Guilty because the second most common thought is 'I could be doing something better with my life.' Third and most important, grateful that you're in a place where, screwy as it might be, people try to do the right thing, try to make you as happy as they think you should be."
Jane had taken out her small notepad, the one where she kept her Lucky Fives along with her notes from Miriam. She wanted to clear her head by making a list; she just wasn't sure what information she could codify.
"There was no blood," she said, closing her eyes, imagining the scene in the shanty basement. "Her face was contorted, twisted, turned away, like she had looked at something she didn't want to see. I knew Lilly was dead right away," Jane said.
"It's really quite clear, the difference between life and death. Breath animates, doesn't just make the chest rise and fall. It quivers the eyelids, it pulses under the skin, it warms a body, all things visible to those with eyes that see. Your eyes, Mrs. Wheel. I'm sorry to remind you, also, that this isn't your first dead body."
"So how will we find out cause of death? Wait for the papers? Munson won't be calling us with news we can use," said Tim.
"I'll make a few calls," said Oh.
"Mrs. Bateman? Mary?" Jane asked. "You started to say…"
"I went to see her, told her I was working privately on an old case, and wondered if she remembered or could supply me with any information about Mr. Bateman's gambling charge," Oh said. "Strictly confidential, of course."
"She was quite forthcoming and yet…" Oh stopped, and tapped his finger against the thick rim of his coffee cup.
"Yes?" Jane asked.
"I felt like she wanted me to walk away and think exactly that. That she was forthcoming. I realized, as I drove away, that I'd gained no new knowledge from our conversation," Oh said. "For example, she told me that Bateman had been in jail for only a few months, then got released because of a loophole his lawyer had found in the case. When I asked if he was guilty of running gambling, she said Bateman did the same things that all the other saloon keepers did, he was just honest about it."
"I like an honest gambler," said Tim. "Honest, crooked."
"Better than crooked, crooked," said Jane.
Their waitress came and refilled their cups, hesitating a moment as she held the pot over Oh's cup with the unwrapped, but unused, tea bag on the saucer. He shook his head and covered the cup with his hand. She nodded, seeming to indicate that an understanding had been reached.
"So what did you learn?" asked Jane.
"Hey, Nancy Drew, you're not listening. The good detective said he didn't learn anything from Mary Bateman," said Tim, yawning and stretching.
"Learned nothing from the conversation," Jane said. "You must have learned something, Detective Oh. The leaves are beautiful along the Kankakee River in the fall, but peak color comes in a few weeks. Pinks is a quaint and unusual restaurant, but it hasn't been reviewed favorably in a Chicago paper. And the McFlea Showhouse doesn't open until Sunday, so…"
"It was the way the women all sat and held their hands when we talked. I remember learning long ago that children of a certain era who went to parish schools, Catholic schools, often formed the habit of folding their hands when sitting and listening because the nuns had taught them to do it at their desks from an early age. Like you are doing, Mrs. Wheel," Oh said.
Jane leaned forward over her folded hands and nodded. Tim smirked and shook his head slightly, quietly unfolding his own hands that were resting just like Jane's in his lap under the table.
"The women… Dot and Ollie were there?" asked Jane.
Oh nodded.
"And as we chatted, all three of the women sat with their hands held just so," Oh said, demonstrating. He held his hands in front of him, palms facing up, his right hand on top of the left. He wrapped the fingers of his left hand around his right pointer, holding on to it for dear life. "They held their hands so, and Mary and Dorothy, Dot, rocked back and forth slightly, like this." Oh rocked back and forth almost imperceptibly, the barest of movements.
Jane and Tim both imitated the position and began rocking.
"Protecting those hands, those fingers," Tim said.
"Yes," said Jane, "but from whom?"
18
Jane tiptoed through the dining room and into the kitchen. She had seen Nellie's shoes placed in their usual spot by the door, Don's hat hung on a peg inside the coat closet. They had returned from wherever they had been, their mysterious evening "out."
On the kitchen table, the group photograph taken in front of the EZ Way Inn was still propped against the wall. Nothing was disturbed around the picture. The basket heaped with plastic flowers and fruit was still dead center, the cloth still smooth and unlined covering the round, wooden table. A nightlight was plugged in over the kitchen counter that gave off just enough glow to show Jane that the room remained untouched. But was it untouched? Or had it been Nellified?
Nellie had the ghostly knack of living and working on the surface of a space. She walked through a room and ashtrays were emptied, candy in dishes rearranged to look untouched, pictures were straightened on walls, the nap of a carpet lay redirected and aligned. She left the neat and clean aura of the unlived-in. Years ago when Jane came home alone to an empty perfect house after school, she could calm her fears by standing stone still inside the front door, sweeping the room with her eyes, making sure nothing was out of place. That would mean she was alone— no mysterious strangers lurked behind curtains or closet doors.
Nellification gave Jane a measure by which to assess her safety, her security in a
space, but it also rendered the same room sterile, untouched, lonely. Jane remembered too many after-school hours sitting perfectly still, trying not to disturb the objects in the living room. The television tuned to something noisy, a Three Stooges rerun or a loud cartoon, for company, for the sound of voices, even if they belonged to Moe and Curly or a jabbering rabbit and duck. Jane read books and did her home work in her dad's recliner, parked in front of the television, the lamp turned on to its brightest setting, a frivolous 75 watts that Don demanded for reading the newspaper, and Nellie grudgingly allowed. Before her parents picked her up for dinner, Jane repacked her books, smoothed out the pillow in her dad's chair, and straightened the throw rugby the door. Still, she had left a trail. A napkin she had used to clean her glasses was half out of the garbage can, the dishtowel she had dried her juice glass with was unevenly folded. The drawn curtains were slightly in disarray where Jane had pinched them back to peek out at the world.
Nellie walked in the house and went right to the offending objects, straightening, smoothing, stowing, and poof! The room, the house, within five minutes of her arrival, was Nellified.
Is that what happened this night? Had Don and Nellie come into the kitchen, gasped at the photograph, sat and studied it, wringing their hands? Had Don called for a pot of coffee and a cookie to dunk in it while he sat and named all the people? Had Nellie pointed to a few figures herself, spoken disparagingly of whomever she recognized?
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