The Autumn Dead

by Edward Gorman

  Now she smiled, too. "Oh, Evelyn Dain."

  "That's right. Evelyn Dain."

  "No, she comes Mondays and Fridays." The green eyes were haughty a moment. "The hours everyone else does."

  "I should talk to her, I guess. About Patti. See how things are going." Here I had to be careful. Careful and casual. "You wouldn't know where she works, would you? I seem to recall she changed jobs a while back."

  The phone rang, helping me. If the nurse had any doubts about me, about who I might really be and what I might really be doing there, they were forgotten in the rush of answering the phone. "Damiano's Aerobics over on Third Avenue."

  "Thanks," I said. "And say hi to Patti for me."

  She smiled with those wonderful erotic lips—you imagined them the kind of lips sixteenth-century kings demanded in their whores—and then waved me off to take her phone call. After answering, she said, "I'll be glad to tell you about Windmere.” She was back to being a brochure.

  Chapter 14

  "How's your head?" I asked Donna.

  "Pretty good. As long as I don't move too fast. She really hit me. Where're you?"

  "Phone booth across the street from an aerobics place out on Third Avenue."

  "You're joining an aerobics class?"

  "No, the woman who hit you. It's where she works."

  "God," she said. "That's neat."

  "What's that?"

  "That you've found her already. I mean, you really are a good detective."

  "All I did was run down a couple of things."

  "But that's what's so neat, Dwyer. You run down a couple of things and bingo, you've got it."

  "That's just the problem."

  "What?"

  "I don't know what I've got."

  "How come?"

  "Well, the motorcycle is registered to a Mrs. Slater who resides at the Windmere nursing home. I don't know what relation she has to this Evelyn Dain or why Evelyn Dain is following me or what any of this has to do with the suitcase that Karen Lane hired me to find."

  "Yeah, God, it really is confusing, isn't it?"

  "Yeah."

  "So why're you doing it? I mean, why not just tell Edelman?"

  "Because right now the police are saying that Karen Lane's death was an accident resulting from mixing alcohol and barbiturates. Which means they won't be pursuing things. Which means it's left to me, I guess."

  "I wouldn't mind if you, you know, sort of paid her back for me."

  "Who?"

  "Evelyn Dain."

  "Paid her back?"

  "You know."

  "You mean hit her?"

  "Not hit her, exactly."

  "What's 'exactly' mean?"

  "You, know, sort of trip her or something."

  "Trip her?"

  "That wouldn't be so bad. She wouldn't get hurt but she'd get the point."

  I laughed. "It would be a lot easier if you'd just look her up and hit her yourself."

  Now she laughed. "Be serious. I've never hit anybody before, Dwyer, except my older sister Ellen, and the one time I did it my mother grounded me for the weekend and I had to miss the Herman's Hermits concert."

  "You liked Herman's Hermits?"

  "I admit he couldn't sing but he was cute."

  "If I get half a chance, I'll trip her."

  "But not hard, all right? Just kind of a, uh, regular trip, you know?"

  "Right. One regular trip coming up."

  "I miss you."

  "I miss you, too."

  So then I went into the Hardees across the street from the small concrete building with the three storefront windows, one of which belonged to a Penny Saver shopper, one to an appliance store, and the third to the aerobics place. Inside that window you could see maybe twenty women doing exercises as grueling as anything I'd ever done at the Academy.

  Knowing what was ahead of me—a stakeout and a long one—I self-pitied myself into justifying a double-decker hamburger, fries, and a vanilla shake. Stakeouts demand a lot of energy.

  Loaded down with a white bag smudgy with grease, I went back to my Toyota, turned on the FM to a call-in show where people were arguing about whether condom advertising should be permitted on the air (AIDS was rearranging the American way of life), and proceeded to sit there for the next four and a half hours, watching both the storefront and the gleaming black Honda motorcycle in the adjacent parking lot.

  This was a neighborhood in transition. In my boyhood days this had been the best section of town you could live in if your parents were working class, Irish, Italian, and Czech mostly, and every day on the sunny walks proud men in dungarees strolled to work, black lunch pails smelling of bologna sandwiches dangling from one hand, and a local newspaper they loved to curse in the other. You dreamed Plymouth dreams in those days (it had been one of my old man's fondest fantasies to pull up in front of the family house in a new 1955 baby blue Plymouth) as you moved away from the Highlands down here and as you gradually began to realize that, thanks to government loans and your parents' frugality, you were going to be the first generation that got to go to college.

  But I didn't know what kind of dreams they dreamed here now. Sixteen-year-old girls pushed strollers past my car now, and your first impression was that they were the infants' sisters but in fact they were the infants' mothers. Scruffy boys in black leather jackets with tattoos on their knuckles and a cigarette hack bothering their throats already came by, too, and old men who gave the air of just wandering. Old women clutching small bags of groceries hurried on looking scared. And bored cops, tired of all the bullshit—and, man, you just don't know how much bullshit beat-cops get laid on them day in, day out—watched it all, just wanting to get back to their tract homes and watch the Cubbies or watch their kids or watch their wives or watch any goddamn thing except this neighborhood get even meaner.

  Dusk came and I had to take the risk of running into the Hardees can and emptying my bladder and running back out. I had a splotch on my crotch where, in my haste putting it back in, I'd dribbled. But the motorcycle was still there. The lurid neons at the Triple-X Theater down the street came on and then all the taverns lit up and this big annoying mechanical bear on top of a car wash started waving like King Kong to passing motorists. Several of them had the good sense to flip him the finger.

  I watched the ladies and tried to figure out if the somewhat angular blonde leading the class was the woman I wanted. Possibly. But just as possibly she could be the manager, out of sight in some back office. My car stank of fried food. I wanted, in order, to talk to my seventeen-year-old son (who had started missing school lately, going through some kind of teenage funk), Donna, Glendon Evans (to question him more carefully about some of the things Karen Lane had said to him during their time of cohabitation), and Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk-poet whose books I'd been reading lately, to find out just how he'd managed to deal with all the craziness.

  Then, around eight o'clock, my bottom very tired, my eyelids getting heavy, the women started filing out of the aerobics center. Their chatter was like bright birds on the soft night air and I liked listening to it. It was happy and human and hopeful, proud as they were of their workout and the good way they felt about themselves at this moment.

  Then the lights inside the aerobic center went out.

  I sat up straight and turned on my engine.

  Then I sat there for twenty minutes, wasting a couple dollars' worth of gas.

  Being a paranoid, I began to wonder if she had seen my car and simply gone out the back door, leaving her bike so I'd sit here all night like a very, stupid rent-a-cop watching it.

  Around eight thirty-five, she came out.

  I still couldn't get a good look at her because she was back in her leathers again. She even had the helmet on. She looked like a super-heroine in a comic book.

  Without looking around, without hesitating, she went over to the parking lot, mounted the bike with a physical economy that spoke of the condition she was in, and then, moments lat
er, took off.

  I took off after her, having no idea whatsoever where she was going.

  Chapter 15

  The old money built their homes east, on hills that formed a ragged timberline back when the only certain means of transportation other than walking had been the Conestoga wagon. They built east and they built big and they built conservative, brick and stone and wood, hammered and chiseled and curved to imitate the Victorian style. It was through this section of hills she led me, dips steep as roller coasters, peaks from which you could see the electric sprawl of the city beneath. Occasionally a timid deer came to the edge of the road, then disappeared, frightened, back into the pine and hardwood acres posted NO HUNTING. There were gates in the gloom, big iron gates, usually painted black, beyond which lay curving asphalt roads and then the houses themselves. Forty-five minutes had gone by. The temperature had dropped ten degrees, from early spring to late winter. The one thing the Toyota did well, besides rusting, I mean, was kick out heat. I was snug as a baby in the womb. I just didn't know where the hell she was taking me. Two thoughts kept crisscrossing: Was she aware of me and simply driving me around and around or did she just like to go for rides after work, the way I sometimes did?

  Then she veered southeast, and we came into the section new money had built, lying below us in grassy foothills. From up here you could see down into their backyards with their inevitable swimming pools and inevitable tennis courts and inevitable sprawling flagstone patios. The style of the houses changed from Victorian to everything from French Provincial to Colonial to Mediterranean. In the night now they seemed to glow with prosperity, gods perched above the moaning masses below. You could hear dogs bark in the darkness and you knew they would not be pretty collies or cute Scotties. They'd be Dobermans or maybe even (this was the fashion this season) pit bulls. These days, with people standing in cheese lines two blocks down from where factories stood unused, these days the gods had damned well better get themselves some protection.

  I kept a city block behind her, but even so she pulled off the road so abruptly, I nearly had to put the car into the ditch. I cut the lights. Waited.

  She'd cut her own lights. For a time I couldn't pick her out in the starry blackness.

  I felt awkward, foolish, trapped. Apparently she'd been on to me all along and was now waiting for me to make my own move. Turn around and go back the other way? Stroll up to her and ask her just who the hell she was and why she'd knocked out my girlfriend and most likely a shrink named Evans?

  At first I couldn't tell if my eyes were only playing tricks or if she had actually just done what she'd seemed to.

  Left her black Honda and started walking down the road.

  I reached up and popped the lid off the dome light and then thumbed out the bulb. I didn't want my car to light up when I eased out of it.

  I put one foot down on the road and smelled the chill piney night and then put a second foot down and watched the way rolling cumulus clouds covered the quarter moon. She was ahead of me somewhere, walking. But where? And why?

  I went after her, keeping to the side of the road, where even the gods had to put up with empty beer cans and Hershey wrappers and Merit packages soggy with dew.

  On my right the pines were solid, broken only occasionally by small clearings of grass, still dead and brown. The left held two homes set very far back, little more than lights glimpsed through the hardwoods. Hearing a car behind me, I turned my head to the left so the driver couldn't see my face. He turned into the opposite drive, a chunky silhouette in a red BMW.

  Then I saw her.

  She was crawling up the face of two steep iron gates with the acumen of a monkey showing off for Sunday-afternoon visitors. She was so good at it, I just stood and watched her, forgetting for a moment why I was here in the first place. In her black leathers, she was hard to see. Then she dropped down on the other side of the gate, her body making a small sound as it touched the asphalt, and then she vanished.

  I walked the rest of the way over to the iron gates. The estate was surrounded by a large stone wall. Schlepping up the gates was probably easier than going over the stone wall. Just behind me was a country-style mailbox. I went over and hauled out my flash and looked to see the name.

  I stood there a moment and contemplated what the hell it could mean. Things had come abruptly together here. Yet, at the same time, nothing had come together at all.

  The name on the mall box was LARRY PRICE, the same Larry Price who had been my high school classmate, the same Larry Price I'd gotten into a fight with during senior year, and the same Larry Price who had mysteriously been arguing with Karen Lane out in the alley the night she'd died.

  Why would the woman in black leathers be coming to see Larry Price?

  Another car swept past. I jumped into brush on the side of the intricately patterned iron gates. It hurtled on into the gloom.

  I put my hand to the rough surface of stone. In movies,guys are always vaulting over walls like this one—it couldn't have been much higher than seven feet—or shinnying up them with rope ladders. But unfortunately, I had never been able to list vaulting or shinnying among my useful skills.

  Hoping for blind luck, I went over to the gate and put my fingers through the bars and tried to see if they might not magically come apart and let me just sort of amble right on in. But there would be no ambling.

  There would be only vaulting or shinnying.

  So I put my right foot in the gate and proceeded to climb. I just hoped nobody was watching, especially the woman in black leathers. I had this image of her sitting somewhere in the bushes inside the estate laughing her shapely ass off.

  It couldn't have taken longer than two or three hours to get over the gate and land—as in crash-landing—on the other side. All the way, between sweating, groaning, and cursing, I kept promising to enroll myself in some sort of mercenary school and learn how to do stuff like this. As a cop, the most strenuous thing I'd ever had to do was chase a car thief two blocks. He had done me the favor of being at Least fifty pounds overweight.

  I stood on the other side breathless and soaked, panting and cursing still. And then I looked around at the estate fanning out before me. The asphalt road wound up past steep copses of pines and then wound back again to grounds that displayed a gazebo almost luminescent in the moonlight and a tennis court canvas-covered for the cold months and a small hothouse appearing almost secretive, tucked as it was into a stand of hardwoods.

  The house, not as big as you might expect, was a garrison-style Colonial, two-stories, an off-yellow. To the west was a three-stall garage. All the doors were open. There were no cars. I glanced back at the house. Darkness. Stillness. Nobody home.

  But she was in there somewhere. My motorcycle rider.

  Taking a deep breath, hefting my flashlight as a weapon the way cops do, I started toward the house. If she'd found a way in, I'd find a way in. And then I'd confront her and find out all the things I needed to know, and maybe then I'd stumble onto the suitcase Karen Lane had hired me to find.

  I was halfway to the house when she hit me. She got me from behind and she got me clean and I don't think I even had time for one good obscenity before the back of my head seemed to crack open and before I automatically put my hands out to soften my collision with the ground.

  Chapter 16

  The back of my head hurt and the front of my head hurt and the side of my head hurt. There was a terrible taste in my throat and I needed to pee. Badly. The way you do when you wake at 2 A.M. from a night's drinking. I lay in a cluster of dead leaves over which a sheen of frost sparkled silver in the moonlight. My hand, for no reason I could understand, clutched a brittle brown pine cone.

  I began the careful process of getting up, trying to gauge if I'd been hit hard enough to suffer a concussion, and wondering vaguely where the closest emergency hospital was.

  The first thing I did was take care of my bladder. I leaned my left hand against a hardwood for support and then let go, the y
ellow stream raising steam and making a hard constant noise on the last of autumn's leaves. Then I took out my handkerchief and began daubing it against the back of my head. There was only a small smudge of blood on the white fabric when I held it out for appraisal. Despite a headache, I did not seem to be hurt badly. My watch said nine-fifteen. I'd been out less than fifteen minutes.

  In the west wing of the house, on the second floor, I saw the arc of a flashlight splash across a pinkish wall, and then go dark. She was inside now. Busy. I wasn't going to let her get off easily. Not at all. I thought of Donna's joke—couldn't I trip the lady in leather just a little bit? I was going to trip her a whole lot.

  I moved awkwardly at first, staggering a bit like a stereotypical drunk, but gradually I got used to the headache and moved with a little less trouble. When I reached the front yard, which was defined by severe flattop hedges on both east and west ends, I went up to the oak front door and tried the knob.

  Locked.

  I put my ear to the door. Faintly I heard the hum and thrum of a house at rest but nothing else.

  I went around to the rear, to the area between the garage and back door. It was cold and my head still hurt, but I was angry with her now and I was damn well going to get to express my anger.

  I tried the knob on the back door. It turned easily. I went inside, up three steps covered with a rubber runner, and into one of those open kitchens with a huge butcher-block table like a sacrificial altar in the center, and pots and pans hanging from a suspension above. They gleamed in the moonlight falling golden through the mullioned windows. I smelled paprika and cocoa and coffee. I smelled thyme and mustard seed and basil. They were feminine smells and pleasant and I wanted to stand there for hours and float on them the way I used to float on marijuana. Contact high is the term I wanted, I think.

  Upstairs she bumped a piece of furniture and it was loud as a truck overturning. She was searching for something, apparently, and apparently searching desperately.