The Autumn Dead (11 page)

"
Your license, please."

"Why?"

"Because I have the legal authority to ask to see it and because I
am
asking to see it."

It was at this point that Ted Forester's eyes fell on mine and he frowned immediately. He glanced over at Larry Price, who nodded to him. I wondered if they were going to come after me in their big silver Mercedes. Then I wondered why they'd want to come after me in their big silver Mercedes.

Forester, tall, trim, handsome in the way of a bank president from central casting, took out a long slender wallet and opened it up like a diplomat presenting his credentials.

Billy Lynott, playing it out, took the wallet and shone his flash on the license and studied it as if he were going to be given a pop quiz on it.

Then he handed it back.

"All right, Mr. Forester," he said. "Just be sure to drive carefully."

Forester glowered at him and then at me again and then the Mercedes pulled out of the lot, Larry Price's eyes on me like lasers in the gloom.

"Asshole," Bill Lynott said when he came back to me. "He always was."

"Maybe I should have made him walk the line."

"He probably would have sued you."

"Yeah, he's the kind all right."

The ambulance attendants were closing the back doors and coming around to get in the cab.

For a moment I felt her in my arms again, the warmth of her flesh, the lovely smell of her hair, the unknowable mysteries of her gaze. I'd loved her and hated her and been afraid of her, but after it all, she'd still been the little girl I'd first met in kindergarten, shared a nap-time blanket with, watched grow into the beauty among the weeds and screams of the Highlands. Then I thought of the suitcase again. What was in it she'd wanted so badly? What was in it that somebody would beat up Glendon Evans for?

"Maybe you should get out of here," Billy Lynott said.

"Yeah. Maybe I should."

"I mean, if downtown wants to get a hold of you, they'll just give you a call."

"Right."

He put a hand on my shoulder. "I'll say 'hi' to Benny for you."

Suddenly, ridiculously, I wanted to see Benny again, have a beer or four with him, shoot some pool, speculate on women and the Cubs and why Democrats just always seemed better than Republicans. I didn't want to be nearing forty-five.

"Yeah," I said,
"
if downtown wants me, they can give me a call tomorrow."

I went and got in my Toyota and got out of there.

D
onna wasn't there.

She has an apartment building you can get into only if someone inside buzzes you in. I buzzed several times. Nothing.

I walked out to the parking lot and watched the moon and thought about Karen Lane, alternating between absolute certainty that what had happened to her had been coincidental—stroke, aneurysm, as Bill Lynott had suggested—and knowing with equal certainty that she'd somehow been murdered.

"
Hello,
"
said a couple walking past me from their car. They were both stockbrokers and both wore gray flannel suits, and both drove Datsun Zs and smoked Merits and belonged to health clubs and vacationed in Aspen and subscribed to the Book-of-the-Month Club. I knew all this because Donna had profiled them for
Ad World
as typical age-thirty-five consumers. The odd thing was, they even looked alike in a certain way, blond and blue-eyed, friendly in an almost ingenuous way. Their name was Burkett and I sort of liked them.

"Hello," I said. Then, "Say, would you let me into the building?"

"Sure," Todd Burkett said.
"
Is everything all right?"

"I think maybe Donna's just taking a shower or something. I was supposed to meet her here but there's no answer."

"Come on," Mary Anne Burkett said.

So we went up to one of the nine dark brick buildings piled against small mountains of pine and fine green grass that stretched along a river made silver by moonlight. As
Ad
World
became more successful, Donna's apartments became fancier.

"We're having some stir-fry and white wine," Mary Anne said as we walked up the wide dramatic staircase leading to the second level. "Would you care to join us?"

"Then we're going to watch
Cape Fear
on the VHS. Have you ever seen it?"

"Yes," I said.

"Isn't Gregory Peck wonderful?" Mary Anne said.

Then I realized that no matter how much I liked them, there was some spiritual demarcation line that would always divide us. The picture belonged—cigars, boxer shorts, cheap straw fedora and all—to Robert Mitchum. Peck is in fact a cypher, little more than a symbol of all that is right with Suburbia. Ethically, he's admirable as hell. Dramatically, he's as bland as an eighth-grade history teacher at a Fourth-of-July ceremony.

"
No, thanks. But maybe some other time."

"Peck is really fantastic."

"Yeah, I know."

So they went to their woks and their Water Piks and their
copy of
Cape Fear
and I went down to Donna's and knocked on the door.

I put my ear to the door the way private investigators who specialize in adultery always do. I heard all the sounds an apartment is supposed to make, the vague electronic buzz and crackle and hum that signify that all appliances are alive and doing well. But I heard nothing else.

Then down the hall I heard conversation and turned to see the Burketts talking to Candy James, a TV weather woman who lived in the apartment at the end of the hall. Candy was trying to get herself going in theater, too, and so we'd always just naturally gotten along. "Hi, Jack."

"'Hi."

"I saw Donna leave a few hours ago. She said she was going over to your place."

But then she was supposed to come back here. "You didn't hear her come back?"

Candy, who is small and cute, with a curly cap of black hair and a smile that can melt metal, said, "No, I don't think so, anyway. You think something's wrong?"

"Probably not. I'm just kind of curious is all."

"Well, I've got a key. We swap keys in case we get locked out. You want it?''

"Great."

A minute later I had the key and went in and looked around and found nothing. As usual, the place was a tribute to work but not to tidiness, there being enough books and magazines stacked on the floors and on tables and on chairs to open a branch library. Unfortunately buried beneath all the
Ad World
research material were such gems as a drop-leaf harvest table with matching bird-cage Windsor chairs and a cast-iron mantel that she'd found in the city dump.

Her bed hadn't been made, there was yellow egg crust on the face of a green plate next to the microwave, the Crest tube in the bathroom looked as if it had been thrown into a trash compactor, then somehow lifted back out again (she has these killer moments of frugality).

Something was wrong. She is prompt, neurotically so, and if she said she'd meet me here, then she'd be here.

But she wasn't.

I went to the phone and stared out of the window at the silhouettes of the pines jagged against the night sky, their tips white in the moonlight. I let the phone ring at my place at least twenty times. Then I tried the offices of
Ad World
and got nothing and then I tried the number of her assistant, Jill, and got nothing there, either.

One thing about being paranoid is that you keep playing all these alternate scenarios out in your mind. The What-If game. I could reasonably assume she'd gone to my place. But that's all I could reasonably assume. Had she left there? If she hadn't, why wasn't she answering the phone? And that's when my paranoia kicked in and formed mental images of somebody on a black motorcycle, a Honda it was, and God alone knew what this person wanted. Or was capable of. I
thought of Karen and how she had looked there at the last and then Karen's face became Donna's and something hard formed in the bottom of my stomach and I had one of those twitching spasms I used to get on the force just before I had to do something that scared me.

A rusted-out five-year-old Toyota is not necessarily built for speed, but I did a very slick job of setting a few Indy records on the way to my apartment.

Y
ou find my place in the inner part of the
inner city, on a block where every house has
stucco siding and a fair majority of the people you pass on the cracked sidewalks are probably armed. Donna, determined to make my efficiency apartment more
"
livable," had come over one day armed with draperies and slipcovers she'd bought at Sears, bright and nubby materials they'd been too, but after half an hour she'd dropped to the floor in a kind of semi-yoga position and said, "There just isn't any way to decorate around water stains on the wall, Dwyer. There just isn't."

The vestibule smelled of bleach, marijuana, beer, and Chinese food (there's a take-out place a block away).

I went up the stairs two at a time, now having worked myself into one of those states of stress the magazines always say give you at the least hemorrhoids and at the worst cancer, and then I pushed my key into the gold Yale dead bolt (the only thing in the house that's less than eighty years old). And then, groping for the wall switch, I stared deep into shadow.

"Come in and close the door, okay?"

The table lamp, the one with the beer-stained lamp shade, clicked on and there she sat.

Donna. Editor of
Ad World.
Sitting in the corner of a couch
with a white bath towel pushed up against her head.
       

The towel was soaked with blood.

"God," I said. And for a moment that's all I could do. Just stand there and say over and over,
"
God.
"
Half the time it was a prayer, the other half it was a curse.

"So you opened the door and then what?"

"
So I opened the door and came in."

"And?"

"And nothing. I turned on the light and looked around and
I thought, Boy, Dwyer's really got to get out of this place. I
mean, I saw cockroaches again tonight. The size of Shet
lands, Dwyer."

"Forget the cockroaches. What happened next?"

"I picked out a shirt and jacket and pair of pants from your
closet."

"And then?"

"And then I went and used the biffy. Have you ever heard
of Tidi Bowl, Dwyer?"

"Donna, are you going to tell me or what?"

"How I got hit on the head?"

"Right."

"Well.''

"Why are you hesitating?"

"Because now that I think about it, I'm not sure I remember exactly.” She touched a hand to the back of her head, the
way Glendon Evans had earlier today. She wore a white
blouse and gray tweed jacket and designer jeans. She has red hair and green eyes, one of which strays to a small degree,
like Karen Black's (though I never mention Karen Black to her, Donna not thinking much of her acting), and she's one of those women who is very erotic in an almost offhanded way.

(The only time she ever tried to be overtly sexy was when she got a baby-doll nightie, and I sort of spoiled it for her because
her debut in the nightie coincided with Larry Holmes's title defense against Michael Spinks. She'd walked back and forth in front of the TV set about fifty times, so often I wondered if she wasn't doing some kind of aerobics, and finally she said, "Notice anything, Dwyer?" And all I'd said was, "Yeah, Larry looks old as shit." And then she'd walked out of the
room and come back in and said, "Notice anything now,
Dwyer?" She was completely naked.)

"You came out of the biffy," I said, leading her on like a
prosecuting attorney.