The Autumn Dead (7 page)

"Not for nothing. I got to see you."

"You should take a few pointers from Jack, Gary."

He put out his hand again. "Well, I'm going to try to
squeeze in a few more pages before dinner. Hope you'll
excuse me."

"I really would like to see some of your work."

"Sure, Jack." Then he sort of cuffed me on the arm and
left.

We watched him go inside. When he was gone, Susan
said, "He has a surprise coming."

"What?"

"The detective story he thought he burned. He set it on fire
in the fireplace, but I got most of it out. It's only singed."

"You've read it?"

"Not yet. But I know it'll be good. I'll send it in even if he
doesn't want me to. Am I being a bitch?"

I laughed. "Somehow, Susan, I can't imagine you ever
being a bitch."

"You always idealized me."

"I guess it's your eyes and your hands. They were always exceptional."

"Well, I can't tell you how nice it is to hear things like
that. If I didn't have to go get dinner, I'd ask you to keep
right on talking."

I said, "So you don't know anything about a suitcase?"

"No. She's never mentioned anything."

"And nobody's tried to break into your place?"

She said, "My God, no. Now you've really got me scared."

"I'd just keep everything locked up tight."

She looked a bit older now, her brow tense with worry. "What's going on, Jack?"

"I don't know."

"She really is in trouble, isn't she?"

"Yes. But as usual, she only gives you half the facts, so you can't be sure what's going on."

"She's my friend, as I said, but she can be a very frustrating woman."

"
Yeah, I seem to remember that."

"I felt so bad for you. You know, the way she treated you back then."

I smiled. "I appreciate that—but it was probably a good experience for me. Taught me about things."

"You know, I've never believed that. I think a part of you should stay naive and unhurt all your life. I've never understood why pain is supposed to be good for you."

I laughed. "Now that you mention it, neither do I. But you've been lucky. You've always had Gary, and he's always had you."

"
I'm sure we've both been tempted. Even up here. Among all the unfashionable Highlands people—" saying this with just the slightest sardonic touch—"adultery is the favorite. Until AIDS came along, most of my best friends were always having affairs while their husbands were at the factories. But there was so much pain—" She shook her head. "I suppose it's exciting—"

"Take my word for it, you haven't missed anything."

"Somehow I believe you."

She'd picked up the sheet again; smelled it. Dusk was a gauzy haze in which you could hear the suppertime laughter of children and the stern voices of TV anchormen enumerating the terrors of the day. Setting the sheet back, she said,
"
I'm glad you finally found some excuse to come up here."

"
Yeah, me, too."

"I always liked you. Is that okay to say?"

"That's wonderful to say."

Then the pain was back in her eyes.
"
We were going to the reunion tonight, but Gary backed out. The last few months . . ."
She shook her head. "Maybe you could take him out for
some beer some night. Cheer him up. I can't seem to do
it."

"I'd like that," I said, and I would, though I knew I'd
never do it. "I'd like that very much."

She stared at me then. "You've been lucky."

"Pretty much."

"You got out of the Highlands."

"It's not so bad."

"You know better.
"
She frowned.
"
He should've let me work. I could've helped us find a house somewhere else.
Living here—it does something to you. You know how it is here, Jack. I just keep thinking maybe he would really have turned out to be a writer if we hadn't lived here. You know?"

I kissed her on the cheek, caught the scent of the clean wash again, and left. "Maybe he'll be a writer yet."

She smiled. "You know what his problem is?"

"What?"

"
He isn't a boy anymore."

"He's nearly forty-three. He shouldn't be a boy."

"But he should still have some fun. He never has any fun. He just writes stories and tears them up and says they're not good enough."

I let her lean into me and we stood a moment, the air fresh with her laundry and the smell of new grass, and hamburgers grilling on the back porch next door.

"Can you believe we're twenty-five years older?" she said. "Sometimes it's scary, isn't it?"

"That's the right word for it, Susan. Scary."

I hugged her and listened for a time to the children in the dusk, their laughter like pure water, and then I went and got into my car and started back through the maze of streets. I had one other person I wanted to talk to about Karen, somebody I was not looking forward to seeing at all.

I was halfway there when I happened to glance in my rearview and found that not all my paranoia is unjustified.

Somebody in black leather on a black Honda cycle was accompanying me.

T
he highlands has a shopping district of four b
locks, stores that even back in the forties looked
old, two-story brick jobs mostly, with the names of their original owners carved in fancy cursive somewhere near the roof, the names running to Czech and Irish, with the polysyllables of an occasional Italian name also being included. Growing up, I'd come here with my parents to shop for groceries or to buy something from the hardware store or the auto-parts store or to get a shirt from the secondhand store (when you really had dough you went to Penney's), but shopping centers had killed all that off now—you drove out to one of five malls on this side of town that had taken the place of the merchants who had settled and helped build this area since as far back as 1849, when six thousand people migrated up here from the Virginias. Now you didn't have merchants, you had tavern-owners. That's all that was left now, bars advertising naked women and country-Western music and big-screen Bears games, with a store that sold fancy cowboy clothes or a concrete lot filled with the sad hulks of used cars thrown in to serve the workingmen who bring their paychecks and their beaten hopes down here. When you come here at night, it's not so bad, with workers from the slaughterhouse a mile away and their Czech girlfriends wandering from tavern to tavern like people out of a John Steinbeck novel. But in the
daylight you see how everything needs paint and how the walks are cracked, and you see all the names spray-painted on the sides of the taverns, lurid reds and blacks and green on whitewashed surfaces; KILL QUEERS! NIGGERS SUCK! MEXES STAY OUT!

I pulled my car into the half-empty lot of a place called The Nook (needless to say, regulars called it The Nookie), and walked behind a couple of men with black lunch pails through the front door, smelling the silty residue from the hog kill. The air smells and feels a certain way when cows are killed. Hog kills fill the air with textures and odors all their own.

The interior, long bar on the left wall, three bumper pool tables down the center, booths and pinball games to the left, got rid of the hog odor anyway, replacing it with beer, cigarette smoke, microwave pizza, sweat, and perfume. The perpetually turning BUDWEISER sign hanging over the cash register and the wide space-age-model Seeburg jukebox (drop in two quarters and it would take you to Pluto, and play you a couple of Hank Williams, Jr., tunes along the way) and the pinball games with their busty ladies and the discreet little red plastic electric candles in the booths gave the long, low, dark place most of its light. The mood was jovial now—the men buying paycheck rounds of shots-and-beer and the women treated with outsize courtesy—but by nine it would all change and there would be at least a few fistfights, savage ones. Back in my police days, I'd come into dozens of places like this one and seen enough blood to rival the killing floor where many of these men worked—eyes hooked out with thumbs, throats ripped open with broken beer bottles, noses smashed in with working-shoe heels, and women slapped so hard and so long that their faces were swollen beyond recognition. But it was the women who were the most curious of all, because when you tried to arrest the husbands or boyfriends who'd done this to them, the women would jump on you, physically try to stop you from dragging their men to the curb and the car. It was as if they understood how miserable the lives of their men were and therefore forgave them nearly any atrocity.

I ordered a shell and had some beer nuts and looked around to see if I could see Chuck Lane, and when I didn't see him
said to the bartender, whose arms were so thick with tattoos they looked like some kind of shimmering snakeskin, "You seen Chuck?"

"So who wants to know?"

"Friend of his sister's."

He shot me a smirk. "His sister's got a lot of friends.
"'
He put a fat left finger to his right nostril and snuffled like a cokehead in need. He was short and meaty with sideburns of a length and width I hadn't seen since 1967. His teeth were dirty little stubs. He had a blue gaze that combined malice and stupidity with chilling ease. If Richard Speck had a brother, this guy was it. "Rich ones, too, from what I hear. And you don't look like no rich one."

I sighed. "I just want to see Chuck. It's important. So if he's here, I'd appreciate it if you'd let him know that Jack Dwyer wants to talk to him."

"It worth five to you?"

"That's only in movies. Just call Chuck."

"I need some grease to do it because I got to walk all the way down the basement stairs. The intercom's on the blink."

"Consider it good exercise.
"

"I got an inflamed prostate. It hurts to walk."

"Goddamn, are you serious? You're going to make me pay you five bucks to go get Chuck?"

"Yeah."

"Why don't I just go down there myself?"

"He won't let you in unless you know the password. He's got, you know, bill collectors and like that after him."

"So I have to give you five bucks to go get him?"

"I ain't kiddin' you about the prostate.
"'
And with that he produced a brown prescription bottle and rattled it at me like some voodoo icon. "This is a legit prescription right from the doc.
"
He kind of grabbed his crotch and frowned.
"
It's like I got this baseball between my legs and it's real hard to move."

So I laid five on the bar.

"Tell you what. While you're waitin', you have another shell and it'll be on Kenny.
"'

"Who's Kenny?"

"Me.''

"Oh, yeah. Thanks."

So Kenny, whose very theatrical walk reminded me of Charles Laughton as the Hunchback of Notre Dame, asked a biker-like guy two stools down from mine, "You watch the register for me, Mike?"

"Anybody touches that sumbitch," Mike said, showing a gloved fist the size of a baseball mitt, "he's dead meat."

I had to make sure to bring Donna here next time we kind of wanted to relax and enjoy a quiet evening.

"S
o you're looking for Karen."

"Right."

"Mind if I ask why?"

"Yeah, I do mind.
"'

He shook his head.
"
You still don't like me, do you, Dwyer?"
'

I sighed.
"
It doesn't matter, Chuck."

"
'You think because I live down here, I don't have any pride?"