Dead Guy's Stuff

by Sharon Fiffer

  On an open shelf over the sink, she carefully set out ten clear juice glasses, none of them exactly the same. They were all Hazel Atlas with the cute little H and A mark on the bottom, each in a different pattern but just close enough to be sparkling variations on a theme. She jotted down a reminder to get flowers for Sunday, so she could put tiny bunches of fresh daisies, stems trimmed down to size, in each Hazel Atlas, so there would be a row of flower-filled glasses over the sink. She was picturing it and humming to herself when Oh tapped at the back door.

  "How does someone commit suicide, then set herself up like that? Do you mean to tell me that she picked up that box and held it on her lap while she died?" Jane asked, not wasting anytime with small talk. She had put the shiny chrome kettle that she had just unpacked on to boil, hoping Oh didn't require tea more exotic than the Constant Comment that she had in her shopping bag.

  "I spoke with one of my new friends at the police department this morning," Oh said, accepting the tea gratefully. "Lilly Duff took several doses of penicillin, as much as she could get down, before she went into anaphylactic shock. She was highly allergic and knew it. She had made a phone call on her cell phone. Probably just before taking the pills."

  "But she was moved? I mean, someone set her up like that, with the box on her lap."

  "No. She probably sat down on one box and put the other one on her lap to hold herself there. Maybe she wanted something to hold onto?"

  "It seems odd, doesn't it?" Jane asked.

  Oh nodded. "But the police don't question the suicide. The phone call she made was to her brother. It was still on his machine when the police brought him home last night. She sounded distraught, said that she had found out something terrible. She said she couldn't live knowing it was true." Oh stopped to sip his tea and take a breath. "She told her brother she was so sorry to have to leave him alone."

  "But I heard the police talking about her head— trauma?"

  "Speculation at the scene. She had hit her head against the wall, sitting there, a kind of choking spasm, but it had nothing to do with the cause of death."

  "Are you satisfied with their explanation?" Jane asked. She found she needed to keep busy while she discussed this or she would keep seeing Lilly sitting up on that box, trying to tell her something, and she wouldn't be able to listen to what Oh was telling her.

  Earlier she had strung a small piece of clothesline across the top of the small window in the pantry and the matching window on the same wall outside of the pantry, opposite the kitchen table. She took out a shirt box and opened it, revealing colorful handkerchiefs, some trimmed in hand crochet, some embroidered, all relics of a day when every lady carried a hanky or two in her pocket book. Jane selected handkerchiefs seemingly at random and, folding a small triangle of cloth at the corner over the line, she attached them one by one with time-worn wooden clothes-pins. They made a triangle valence across the top of the window, adding color and movement to that side of the room.

  "Charming," Oh said, shaking his head in a kind of wonderment.

  Jane faced Oh, and he remembered that she had asked him a question. Was he satisfied with the police explanation? The first answer that came to mind was no since he was never satisfied with anyone's explanation except his own, and he hadn't been allowed to get close enough here to reach the explanation stage. However, he reminded himself, he was no longer a police officer. He was a consultant, a private investigator of sorts, and with the information he had gotten this morning, he was satisfied with the facts of Lilly Duff's death.

  "I believe she died as a result of an allergic reaction. I believe she took the penicillin voluntarily. Yes, I believe she committed suicide."

  "It's the way she was sitting that bothers me. Like she was using that box for a table. Or a lap desk…" Jane touched the letters still unread in her pocket. "Like a lap desk so she could read…"

  "Hey, Lucy, I'm home," Tim called out, as he entered the house through the front door. Jane had made him promise not to come in through the kitchen so the room would be a surprise. Other McFlea workers would be coming in and out all day putting the finishing touches on their rooms, readying the house for the opening. Jane wanted to hold onto the kitchen for as long as she could.

  "Don't come in; we'll come out," Jane said.

  "Lucy, what are you and Ethel up to in there?"

  Jane looked at Oh, who looked thoroughly puzzled.

  "It's from a television show," Jane explained, "Lucy and Ethel…"

  "Yes, I Love Lucy. I know. I was thinking about Lilly Duff's message to her brother. What evidence might she have found in the basement? Did Mr. Duncan have any files or records, anything in which she might have discovered… anything? Accounting books, records, old ledgers?"

  "Yes, there were boxes of that stuff. Duncan had records from old buildings he took over. Came from all over town."

  "Is that Detective Oh I hear in there?"

  "Yes, Timmy, we'll be out there in a minute," Jane said. She picked up the last of her empty boxes and stuck them on the back porch.

  Jane and Oh went into the living room. Two wing chairs had been placed by the fireplace, and Tim had piled one of them with slipcovers and hand-knit throws. Jane eyed a beautiful green chenille that was just one of the pieces Tim had told her Karen Hack, the woman in charge of the living room, had gotten at a rummage sale for end-of the-day prices. She had filled a plastic garbage bag during the last hour at Saint Stan's and paid two dollars for the entire stack on the chair. She had laundered them and ironed the slipcovers and now was ready to remake the ten-dollar chairs. Jane was mightily impressed. The room wasn't necessarily her taste— a little too symmetrical and traditional— but it was clean and comfortable and fairly chic. The oak-framed mirror over the old sofa was a great touch. Karen had also found some great vases that she was planning to fill with flowers, and Jane knew the room would look like it had cost a fortune. The flowers, purchased from Tim's store, would be the most expensive accessories in the whole space.

  "What was in the boxes in the basement, Tim, where Lilly… you heard, right?"

  "Suicide? Yes, I heard. Bobby called me this morning. Wanted to know if I knew what the status of the house was, whether or not I'd be going back in today."

  Jane checked her watch and realized that she needed to call Evanston and leave a message on the machine for Nick. She wanted to wish him good luck in the soccer tournament and hadn't gotten home to her parents' last night in time to do it. What was she supposed to say? Mom meant to call, but another one of those pesky dead bodies turned up. She should fill Charley in, too, but she was feeling guilty somehow, like she was responsible for Lilly. Maybe, she thought, when you find a body, it makes you the one who's supposed to discover the truth about what happened. Like if you saved a life, you were responsible for the person. God, she was starting to think like one of the fortune cookies she had used to paper the pantry wall last night. Jane left her message, then sat down with Oh and Tim to go over what she didn't know about the crimes that hadn't been committed.

  "If the police think Lilly committed suicide, they'll never reopen their investigation of Gus Duncan's death. We're back to square one on that."

  Tim looked at her, his face expressionless. "We? Who's we?"

  "You said last night that you believed me, that I was right all along about Gus."

  "I thought Lilly had been murdered. That made me believe that Gus had been, too. You know it follows you around in multiples, so I figured those little crime-dog instincts that you've been honing were right on. But now…" Tim let his voice trail off.

  "You don't want to believe anybody's been murdered so you can get back into those shanties and inventory the stuff," Jane said.

  "I believe that Gus Duncan's death was…," Oh hesitated, choosing his words carefully, "more complicated."

  Jane tried not to let her delight show. It was, after all, murder they were discussing on this lovely autumn morning. But she had to know what had persuaded Detective O
h that Duncan might not have died of natural causes.

  "It's my experience that when someone hires an investigator to look into the circumstances of someone's death, there's a good reason to believe that there are, or were, circumstances," said Oh. "And I have been hired."

  A tinny cellular ring sounded. Not "La Cucaracha," so it wasn't Jane's phone. Not "Hernando's Hideaway," so it wasn't Tim's. A straightforward two-note ring. Detective Oh nodded and looked at his watch. His client, he explained, was most punctual and had told him to expect a call that morning. He pulled the phone from his pocket and answered on the second ring.

  Oh spoke only a few words. His client was doing most of the talking. Jane didn't think she would normally have pried into anyone's private phone conversation, but things were getting curiouser and curiouser around here, so she stood up to shake out one of the slipcovers and pretended to take a look at its condition. She stepped behind the couch where Oh was seated. In doing so, she couldn't help but notice as he tilted the phone away from his ear slightly to reach for a pencil on the coffee table that the caller number was still displayed. Jane might not have even registered that she was taking note of the number if it hadn't been such a familiar one. Kankakee area code, then the number. One she had dialed almost every day of her life.

  The EZ Way Inn.

  19

  Jane knew that the EZ Way Inn was not officially open. The grand reopening was scheduled to take place in a few days. That didn't mean, however, that Francis, the bread delivery man, and Gil, the retired Roper Stove foreman, weren't sitting at the bar right now having a late breakfast glass of beer. It also did not mean that any number of regulars and irregulars could not be sipping coffee or having a wake-up shot while Don and Nellie continued to scrub and polish and set up for their Monday opening. Jane's parents wouldn't think of actually closing the bar while the bar was closed.

  Even on Christmas and Thanksgiving, Don found a way to cajole Nellie into spending at least a few hours at the EZ Way Inn so Barney and Vince and Carp and Chef would have somewhere to go. One Thanksgiving, they actually brought Barney and Vince with them to Grandma's for dinner because Don and Nellie knew they had nowhere to eat turkey and watch a football game. Nellie's mother and father, Lithuanian immigrants whose hearts were much bigger than their house, did not seem to find it odd that Don and Nellie had brought in a few extras. More card players for after the meal; more hungry eaters to appreciate the Kugela.

  Because she knew there would be a few customers seated around the bar, because she knew anyone who walked in the front door of the tavern could round the corner into the dining room where the pay phone hung on the wall in the corner, Jane knew that seeing the EZ Way number displayed did not mean that Don and/or Nellie had hired Detective Oh.

  But wouldn't it be a huge stretch of even Jane's elastic imagination to believe it was someone else who had just happened to wander into the tavern to make a phone call?

  How would she approach the question with Oh? Was the relationship between a detective and client as inviolate as that of a doctor-patient, priest-confessor? She did not want to jeopardize the quasi-professional, almost friendship she was developing with Oh, but she had to know. As she was composing the question in her mind, delicate yet detailed, Tim spoke up.

  "So who's your client?" he asked, as Oh slipped his phone back into his pocket.

  "Bill Crandall, the nephew of Gus Duncan, the only relative," Oh said, turning to Jane. "He was calling from the EZ Way Inn. Says it's very near the shanties? Where we were last night? He wanted to know if I could expedite matters with the police. If he could get into the houses today."

  "Good question," said Tim. "I was wondering the same thing."

  Oh didn't think there would be any reason that the middle house, 803, would be closed off. He wasn't even sure 801 or 805 would be off-limits. Although technically suicide was a crime, the police probably finished there last night. But 803 would be open for sure. No dead body had turned up in that house.

  "Janie, maybe you ought to stay out of that one," said Tim.

  Jane gave him a frosty smile. She spoke, however, to Oh. "How did Bill Crandall know to hire you?"

  "I asked the same. He said he had known someone who had taken a course from me and also recognized my name from a story his uncle had sent him about the murder at Mr. Lowry's flower shop."

  "Yeah, what a marketing brainstorm that was. The bouquet business just boomed after that," Tim said. "Glad it worked for you, too."

  "One little quote in the paper hardly seems like a ringing endorsement for a private investigator, and you weren't even in business then," said Jane.

  "Yes," said Oh, "it seemed off to me. I did check out his friend's name, the one who took my class. There was such a person signed up for a summer seminar. He only came once or twice. I might have mentioned that I was thinking about beginning a consulting business."

  "Really odd. A long shot that he even knew you were taking private clients, and," Jane said, her voice a shade higher, "why would he hire someone in the first place? Gus Duncan died of natural causes; that's what everyone keeps telling me anyway."

  Jane's phone began playing, and Tim snapped his fingers as if he held castanets.

  "Did you tell Nick to do this?" Jane said. "You know I don't know how to change it back to a normal ring."

  Charley's voice was calm, but Jane could tell by the way he began the call that something was wrong. He said her name twice, in that reassuring tone that he used to calm her whenever he had bad news.

  "Nick? What's happened to Nick?" Jane asked.

  "Nothing. He was at school; he doesn't even know what happened, and he's off to his soccer tournament and everything's fine with him."

  "You, Charley, are you okay? What's wrong?"

  "Fine, everybody's fine. It's just that someone broke in," Charley said. "We had a burglary."

  "Oh, no," said Jane. "Did they get…" Jane hesitated. Everything in her house was valuable to her, but what would a burglar see as a moneymaker? Could you fence hand-crocheted linens for enough to buy a fix? How much did mismatched Russell Wright cups and saucers fetch on the street? Bakelite bracelets, that's what they'd take. Those things went for a fortune on Ebay. Did burglars know how much they could get on Ebay? Did burglars own scanners?

  "They didn't touch my research, thank god. None of the samples from the dig were touched; none of my rare fossils in the bookcase. Not interested in my hard drive or disks at all," said Charley.

  "Of course…," Jane had been about to say, "not" but caught herself in time, "they wouldn't be smart enough to realize what you had there, Charley. Thank god for that."

  "But your stuff, Janie…"

  "The Bakelite, isn't it? Oh shit. I'm wearing my carved ring, and I have my red hoops in my suitcase, but they got the scalloped, butterscotch bracelets, didn't they? Oh god, the buttons. Did they get that wooden sewing box with the little Bakelite sewing kit and all the carved buttons? And the cookies? Oh god, I had at least two dozen big Bakelite cookies in there. And those two little carved acorns that were so sweet. And I had stuck that little candy tin with the realistics in it in that box, too. Why did I keep them all in one place? Damn, damn, damn!"

  Tim had jumped up and was standing next to Jane, his arm around her, trying to get the phone out of her hand. Oh looked from Jane to Tim, hopeful that one of them might soon remember to translate for him.

  Tim had taken the phone and was talking to Charley, while Jane held her head in her hands. Oh offered to make tea and she nodded, saying only that the house had been robbed and shaking her head.

  Tim grinned and told Charley he'd tell her, then rang off.

  Jane reached for the phone. "Wait! Why'd he hang up? What did he say? Why, in god's name, are you laughing?" Jane said, furious.

  "First of all, your buttons are fine. No jewelry taken, no buttons, no sewing paraphernalia from the guest room. It's just that everything downstairs and in the garage got thrown around. All the boxes in the
garage that were packed up for Miriam, everything on the shelves marked "current" got unpacked. A few pieces of pottery broke, but nothing too valuable by what Charley described to me. And it was all stuff you were sending, all garage stuff. It's just that everything's such a mess. All your suitcases, with the photographs, were emptied on the floor," Tim said, then started laughing. "I'm sorry, honey, I really am, but it sounds like your stuff really pissed them off."

  "What do you mean?"

  "No silver, no good electronics, no paintings, nothing really valuable," Tim said, then added, "At least, nothing of immediate recognizable value to the kind of jerks who would rob your house."

  "Why are you laughing at this?" Jane said, hurt, accepting a cup of tea from Oh.

  "I am truly sorry, but Charley said you sounded like Leo Liebling all over again."

  Jane tried to stay outraged and wounded, which she surely was, but when she heard the name Leo Liebling she couldn't stop herself from smiling.

  "Charley said to call him back in an hour or so, and he'd give you details; but in the meantime he was going to clean up as best he could, leave the true inventory of the garage to you, but I was supposed to just say 'Leo Liebling' everytime you started to get upset."