The Autumn Dead

by Edward Gorman

  I wrapped my hand around my flashlight and proceeded through a house with accents of bricks and brass, with beams over the living room, and crown moldings everywhere. The furnishings ran to Early American but I don't mean the stuff you see in suburban furniture stores. I'm talking, among others things, two items of special note: fan-back Windsor chairs and a Chippendale mahogany slant-top desk, items antique hunter Donna would get goofy about. I'd always known that Larry Price had come from a wealthy family; I just hadn't known how wealthy.

  A sweeping staircase curved up into the darkness at the top of which two long narrow windows let in light.

  I moved as quietly as I could up the stairs. At the top I smelled perfume from the master bedroom that lay thirty feet away. An eighteenth-century walnut longcase clock tocked the time. I looked down the hall. Light from her flash shone in a room at the end of the hall, between door and jamb.

  The clock covered any noise my tiptoe steps might have made. I was going to go in fast and make no concessions just because she was female. I was going to trip the hell out of her.

  The door was open maybe three inches. I raised my foot to kick it in.

  But I didn't have to. She yanked it open for me.

  And then stood there with a very fancy silver-plated .45 in her hand and said, "You bastard. I should kill you right here."

  Chapter 17

  Five minutes later, me sitting on a couch in a den filled with the sort of leather-bound classics nobody ever actually read and enough leather furniture to please the richest lawyer in the land, she threw my wallet back at me.

  "Who the hell are you?" I said.

  She just shook her head and went over and sat very efficiently on a broad leather ottoman. Her bottle-blond hair was almost white against the black leather of her riding suit. For the first time, her helmet gone, I could see her face, the broad, lopsided mouth, the earnest blue eyes, the freckles that somehow made her seem younger than the lines around her mouth and eyes indicated she was.

  She put her head down, like an athlete who has just finished a long run, but the one time I squirmed to lift weight off one buttock and put it on the other, her head snapped up and she pointed the .45 in the approximate vicinity of my forehead.

  Then she put her head back down again and it was then I sensed it, that certain but special air the insane exude. I'd experienced it once while visiting a cop friend on a psych ward, felt it in the vivid stares that followed me with both fear and ferocity, in the curious inexplicable smiles some odd gesture would suddenly evoke. You feel sorry for them but they scare you, too—like a sick dog you come upon, wanting to help him, but fearful he might be rabid.

  She raised her head and said, "He killed Sonny. He was one of them, anyway."

  "What?"

  She spoke with the kind of fragile gentleness you associate with poor but honorable spinsters. "Isn't my English clear, Mr. Dwyer?"

  "What I guess you said is, 'He killed Sonny.'

  "That is in fact what I said, Mr. Dwyer."

  "Well, I've got a couple of questions about that."

  "Which are?"

  "First of all, who is the 'he' you're referring to, and second, who is Sonny?"

  The blue eyes grew grave. She sat there looking old suddenly, and tender too, and something like a chill worked down my back, and I felt afraid of her. It wasn't the gun, it was her simple flat connection to some truth I did not understand, the ageless mad truth of the fanatic.

  "You know who 'he' is, Mr. Dwyer, and you certainly know who Sonny is. That's why you want the suitcase. So you can sell it to the men who killed him."

  Then she very carefully got up and, even sensing what she was going to do, all I could do was sit and watch, fascinated as much as frightened.

  She got me just once, but it was a good clean hit with the butt of the .45 right on the edge of my jaw. The headache, which had waned, came back instantly. It was now joined by something very much like a toothache.

  I started to move, my male arrogance instinctively believing that I could simply grab her fragile wrist and throw her to the floor, but she had other ideas.

  She put the cold, oil-smelling weapon right to my temple and said, "I'm going to make you a deal, Mr. Dwyer."

  "What deal?" I wanted to sound hard, even harsh, giving her the impression that even though I had a mouth full of blood and the world's biggest ice-cream headache, I was still in charge here. I was a man, and dammit, men were always in charge of women, right? Even women with guns. Right?

  "I won't kill your girlfriend if you get the suitcase and bring it to me at ten o'clock tomorrow night. I'll phone you where I want you to bring it. Do you understand me?"

  I started to snarl something about what I'd do if she so much as looked at Donna again, but for the second time that night, the tall, slender woman in the black motorcycle leathers caught me fast and cracking sharp across the back of the head.

  This time I fell into the darkness with something like relief. My head was starting to ache intolerably and I was tired and confused and at least a little bit afraid of what I saw in her blue eyes, the same thing I'd seen one night ten years earlier when a young mother had put an ice pick through the eyes of her infant and then waited patiently for the policeman she'd summoned. I had been that policeman.

  Chapter 18

  The next morning I woke with Donna sitting on the edge of my bed in a royal blue belted robe and her beautiful wild red hair fresh from the shower. I was in her bed in her apartment, where I'd come in a stupor not unlike drunkenness after leaving Larry Price's house, where the woman in black had knocked me out not once but twice.

  "How're you feeling?"

  "Better than I should, probably," I said.

  "This should help."

  I sat up in bed like an invalid and she set the tray across my lap. There were two lovely eggs over easy on a pink plate. And two lovely pieces of delicately buttered toast. And three lovely orange slices. And a lovely steaming cup of coffee. And two round little white tablets that unfortunately were not half as lovely as the other things on the plate.

  "Aspirin," she said. "I figured you'd need them." She bent over and gave me a soft kiss and I just held her there momentarily, knowing her for the prize she was.

  "Thanks," I said.

  Her bedroom was a woman's room, with yellow walls and canopied bed, and outsize stuffed animals, one I like especially, a plump bear with oddly forlorn eyes and a little red cap. He sat in the corner, his arms forever spread in greeting, watching me eat, which I did with boot-camp hunger.

  "Man," I said.

  "Taste good?"

  "Tastes great."

  "Boy, I love to watch you eat."

  "I thought you said I needed to lose ten pounds."

  "You do. But I still love to watch you eat. It just makes me feel—secure somehow."

  She leaned over and gave me a kiss again and then she said, "May I tell you something?"

  "Sure," I said, wiping up egg yolk with the last piece of toast. I let my gaze lie on the windows, blue with cloudless spring sky. A jay flitted past the window and perched on a branch just blooming. The window was partly opened. I thought of how fresh laundry smelled in the breeze.

  "That woman's threats last night?"

  "Yes."

  "I'm scared, Dwyer."

  I put my hand out and brought her over to me. She sat on the edge of the bed. She smelled of perfume, bath soap, and clean skin. She smelled wonderful.

  "I want you to go to Joanna's for a few days," I said.

  "What?"

  "Please."

  "Joanna? You think I could handle it for a few days? All those heartbreak stories?"

  Joanna was a news writer at a TV station, a woman gifted not only with talent but great looks that did not seem to do her much good with men. She was perpetually heartbroken.

  "I really wish you'd call her," I said.

  "What about you?"

  "I'll stay at my place. I'll be all right."

&
nbsp; She touched my head. "Dwyer, she's mean. So far she's knocked out three people, and from what you say, she's not hinged quite right."

  "I know." Then I smiled. "All the more reason for you to stay at Joanna's. You've got the magazine done for the month. You can just sort of hole up. What I'd like you to do is pack a bag now and leave. And watch your rearview very carefully."

  "Make sure nobody is following?"

  "Right."

  "God, people really do do that, don't they? I mean, it's not just in detective movies, is it?"

  "No, it isn't."

  "What're you going to do?"

  "Check the calls on my answering service. Then I'm not sure."

  She picked up the tray. "Did you really like it?" She's very insecure about her cooking, probably because her former husband Chad was always criticizing her for her lack of culinary imagination and, by implication, her lack of culinary skills.

  "Honey, it was great, and it was sweet. It was very sweet."

  "Thanks for saying that."

  "It's the truth."

  Water ran in the kitchen sink; then the bathroom door closed; then the hair drier erupted. I phoned my service. This was my day off at American Security, so my first dread was that there'd be a message saying somebody hadn't shown up so would I please come in. Fortunately, no. The only message came from a Dr. Allan Cummings. I wrote his number down and thanked the woman picking up the calls this morning. Just before we hung up, she said, "I saw one of your commercials on the tube last night. You did a good job."

  "Thanks."

  "Oh, that doctor who called?"

  "Yes."

  "He sounded real—uptight or something."

  "Thanks."

  "Sure."

  We hung up. I dialed Dr. Cummings' number. These days, getting through directly to a doctor is nearly as unlikely as winning a lottery. So I was surprised when a baritone male voice said, "Dr. Cummings here." He must have given me a direct number.

  "Doctor, my name is Jack Dwyer."

  "Oh yes, Mr. Dwyer, thanks for returning my call." He sounded nervous.

  Then he stopped talking. I sensed hesitation.

  "What can I do for you, Doctor?"

  "Well, I was wondering if we might talk a few minutes."

  "Of course."

  "What I have reference to, Mr. Dwyer, is the story in the newspaper this morning."

  "I see."

  "The one about Karen Lane dying of an accidental overdose of Librium and alcohol."

  "Yes."

  "Well, the story said that you were with her at the time of her death and that you were a former policeman, so I thought I would tell you something that might be pertinent."

  "What's that, Doctor?"

  "Karen Lane was my patient for several years. I'm a medical doctor, not a psychiatrist, but for some of my patients who tend to get depressed or overanxious, I prescribe various kinds of tranquilizers or antidepressants."

  "I see."

  "The point I'm trying to make here, Mr. Dwyer, is that I once prescribed Librium for her."

  "And?"

  "And she had an allergic reaction to it. Welts appeared on her tongue and her throat got very red and sore."

  I threw my feet over the side of the bed. It was one of the moments I wanted a cigarette. "So what are you saying?"

  "I'm not sure what I'm saying, Mr. Dwyer. I wish I could say absolutely that Karen Lane would never take Librium, but sometimes, as we get older, our allergies change. We begin to tolerate things we once couldn't tolerate—and vice versa."

  "When was the last time you saw her, Doctor?"

  "Oh, five or six years ago. She moved from the city, and when she came back she apparently found another doctor."

  "So the sensible thing for me to do would be to find who her doctor is currently and to see what sort of medication he was prescribing for her, right?"

  "That seems sensible to me."

  But I knew who her current doctor was. And I also knew the vested interest he had in keeping Karen Lane his own. For the first time I started considering Dr. Glendon Evans a murder suspect.

  "I really appreciate this, Doctor."

  "Of course." A pause again. "Karen was a very striking woman."

  "Yes, she was."

  "I—" He stopped talking again and in his silence I could hear that he'd been smitten, too. "We went out a few times."

  "I see."

  "I'm afraid I was married and I'm afraid it got messy for everybody concerned."

  This was the part where circumstances forced me to be a surrogate priest. I never much cared for the role. "I was afraid that if I went to the police with this, I'd get dragged into the papers myself and it would bring up some bad memories for my wife."

  "I see."

  "So if my name could be left out—"

  "Of course."

  "My wife and I have a much better marriage now." I made careful note of the fact that he didn't say "good marriage." Only "much better." His sadness got to me and I wanted to say the right soothing thing, but I didn't know what that would be.

  "It was very good of you to call."

  "I felt I owed it to Karen."

  "Thank you, Doctor."

  As I was hanging up, Donna appeared, leaning model-fashion against the doorjamb, imposing in a dark blue cashmere sweater, designer jeans, and short leather boots, her red hair wild as mountain water down her shoulders.

  "Well, I guess I'm ready." She sounded like a little girl who was being sent off, much against her will, to a summer camp run by bona fide ogres.

  "You ready?"

  "I guess," ' she said. "But you're not." Then she smiled. "God, Dwyer, I really think we should start sort of a kitty so you can get yourself some new underwear and socks."

  "Thanks."

  "You're nearly forty-five."

  "Gee, don't I like being reminded of that."

  "And all your underwear and socks have holes in them. Like a kid."

  "They're clean, though."

  "That's true. They are clean. But—"

  So I went over and grabbed her and yanked her back to the bed and she said, "I just got dressed."

  And I said, "I think we should have some general underwear inspection here. I just want to make sure that you're not being hypocritical. How do I know your underwear isn't in rags?"

  "Dwyer, you really are nuts, you know that?"

  But she relented and let me inspect her underwear anyway.

  Chapter 19

  "The name Sonny mean anything to you?"

  "It's the name of a song."

  "Yeah," I said.

  "There was Sonny Liston."

  "Right."

  "And Sonny and Cher."

  "Uh-huh."

  "And Sonny James."

  "Who?"

  "Country-Western singer."

  "Oh."

  "Don't give me your crap about country-Western singers."

  "All right."

  It was one-thirty in the afternoon in Malley's Tavern on the Eighth Avenue side of the Highlands. The place smelled of beer, disinfectant, and peanuts. Strong warm sunlight brightened the aged wooden floor. Bob Malley, paunchy, bearded, wrapped around with the spotless white apron that is his pride, stood behind the bar he owned and idly flipped a quarter, checking heads or tails every time it came down. I imagine he does this as often as five hundred times a day. Some people find this the kind of minor social irritation that can turn nuns into psychopaths. But I'm used to it. Though he was a grade ahead of me, Malley and I have been friends since, respectively, first and second grade. I've seen him flip quarters probably twenty million times by now.

  Ordinarily I come in three afternoons a week. Today I had two reasons to be there. To say hello and to ask for information. Malley remembers our school days with the reverence of Thornton Wilder recalling an autumn afternoon in New England.

  "Sonny Tufts," I said.

  "Oh. Yeah. Sonny Tufts. You want another shell?"

  "Nah.
r />   He grinned. "Donna's a good influence on you, Dwyer. You've cut your drinking in half since you met her. So when's the date?"

  "We fornicate without benefit of clergy, Malley. We have no plans to get married. We're not ashamed. She's not even Catholic."

  "That's my only reservation about her."

  "Right."

  "So what's with this Sonny jazz?"

  I told him about the woman in the black leather and how she'd mentioned Sonny.

  "And you were in Larry Price's house?"

  "Yeah," I said.

  "Then she probably meant Sonny Howard."

  "Who?"

  "Sonny Howard. Summer of our senior year. Remember we went to summer school so we could take a lighter load during the regular year?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well, he went to summer school, too. Except he hung around with Price and Forester and Haskins. Then he killed himself."

  He tossed it away so casually it almost went right by me, like doing a bad double-take shtick. Then, "What?"

  "He killed himself. Don't you remember? He jumped off Pierce Point."

  "Give me another shell."

  "I thought you didn't want one." He smiled and got me another shell.

  "Tell me some more about him."

  "Don't know much more about him," Malley said, setting down my beer.

  "Why don't I remember him?"

  "Probably tried to forget him."

  "Why?"

  "He sort of hung around Karen Lane. That's when you were chasing rich chicks and trying to forget all about her."

  "He knew Karen Lane?"

  "I don't think they were getting it on or anything—I mean, I don't think she put out very much when you came right down to it—but I remember toward the end of the summer they were together a lot."

  "Why were people so sure he killed himself? I mean, Pierce Point, you could fall off real easy.

  "There was a witness."

  "Who?"

  "You're being a cop again. Ease off, okay? I'm not especially fond of cops."

  "So you've told me."

  "Witness, I don't know, seems it was David Haskins."

  "You're kidding?"

  "You asked me. Why would I kid you?"