The Autumn Dead (2 page)

In addition to the rogues gallery, there is enough cheap furniture to fill a small house: two coffee tables, four overstuffed chairs (one of which is honest-to-God paisley), and a lime-green couch that looks as if a pyromaniac used to work it over with cigarettes right after the kitties got done using it as a litter box. Robbins used to be in the loan-collection business, and what he couldn't get in cash, he took in furniture. "You need anything," he always says, "let me know. I got this warehouse full of shit." And shit it was, too.

In the center of the reception area sits another one of Robbins' catches, a desk big enough to play Ping-Pong on. This he got from a banker who'd embezzled several hundred thousand for the sake of a nineteen-year-old teller who wore falsies on her breasts and braces on her teeth. Robbins got
these details from the coroner. The banker, trapped, killed himself and the girl. The banker had owed a loan company money (go figure) and Robbins had been dispatched to collect it. As usual on debts he couldn't collect, he took furniture.

Anyway, the desk is usually occupied by a woman whose breasts have inspired as many hours of conversation as the sins of Richard Nixon. Her name is Bobby Lee, and she is maybe forty (who would dare ask?) and she is the kind of woman who breaks into tears at the mere mention of Elvis Presley's name. Indeed, once a year she and her
1965
beehive hairdo and her mother and father drive in their motorhome to Graceland where, Bobby Lee claims, she once heard Elvis himself speak to her From Beyond The Grave. When she told me this, I asked, with at least a tad of condescension, "What did he say to you?" And she'd looked generally shocked. "God, Dwyer, that's personal. All I'll say is that it made me feel much better.
"
Anyway, Bobby Lee and I had not gotten along until the last year or so, mostly due to her previously having been the mistress of my former employer, an anal retentive who runs a security agency the way wardens run death rows. The man had dumped Bobby Lee and in so doing had sent her running back to her Baptist faith, which she now espoused with the fervor of Saint Paul in a debating contest. Having her heart broken had turned her not only religious but human, too, so when the guy fired her, I got her a job over here.

Now she sat in the reception area and answered the phones and smoked enough Kool filters to give an entire stadium lung cancer and dispatched American Security people with the curt competence of old George Patton sending men into battle.

But it wasn't Bobby Lee I was looking at now. It was this beautiful five-five woman with dazzling auburn hair touching the shoulders of her white cashmere sweater and her hands tucked gracefully into the pockets of her white pleated trousers. She was as tan as a travel poster and benumbing as the first moment you ever fell in love.

As she
raised
her clean blue gaze to mine, I realized that Karen Lane had managed the impossible. She not only looked as good as she had twenty-five years ago—she looked better.

"Hi, Jack."

"Hi."

"I'll bet you're surprised to see me."

"Not any more surprised than I'd be if the Pope called me for lunch."

She laughed. She had a wonderful laugh. I wanted to dive in it and drown.
"
Still a smart-ass."

Bobby Lee took the Kool from the corner of her mouth and said, "That's what his girlfriend Donna always says. What a smart-ass he is.
"
She scowled at me.

"Oh, so he has a girlfriend?" Karen said, picking up on the point Bobby Lee had wanted to make. She didn't take her beautiful eyes from me. Not for a moment.

"Yes, he most certainly does."

"Do you think she'd mind if I asked Jack to lunch?"

And her eyes were still on mine.

"I wouldn't think a real lady would need to ask a question like that,” Bobby Lee said and put her fake Fu Manchu fingernails to the keyboard, blocking us out with Zen mastery.

And then Karen laughed again and for the first time let her eyes fall on Bobby Lee. "I'm sorry. I probably am coming on a little strong, aren't I? I'm actually here to see Jack on business."

Bobby Lee of course said nothing. But she exhaled in such a way that you could see how each and every fiber in her T-shirt strained against the overabundance of her breasts. Her T-shirts always had pictures of country-music stars on them. Today Willy Nelson had the pleasure of being buoyed on her bust.

"So how about it, Jack?" Karen Lane said. "Some lunch? On me?"

I looked at Bobby Lee. "I better ask my mom here first."

"Very funny," Bobby Lee said, then turned around again and started tapping on her Wang keyboard.

So Karen Lane and I left the building and went down to the curb to get her car. It was new and it was dazzling white and it was every inch a Jaguar sedan.

T
he nuns who'd taught us would not have been proud of her.

On the way to the Harcourt, a restaurant I could afford to eat at only if I'd recently stuck up a 7-Eleven, she gave me some sense of what she'd been doing during the twenty-five years since we'd graduated from St. Michael's.

There had been four husbands. She did not describe them in emotional terms—"great guy" or "wonderful lover" or "wife beater"—instead I got their occupations and some sense of their financial status.

Number One was an "internist who lost a lot when the Market got soft in the early seventies." Two was an AFL linebacker who'd been "very content to take early retirement and start his own insurance agency in Decatur, Illinois." Three was curator of an art museum and he was "all inherited money the bulk of which he wouldn't come into until he turned fifty and he was only twenty-nine." Four was a communications magnate "who took a big gamble on buying up independent TV stations and then really lost big when cable came in."

Then there were the places she'd lived: Los Angeles ("I've never felt lonelier"); Ft. Lauderdale ("If you've got enough money, you can pretend it's sixteenth-century Florence"); Denver ("No matter how rich they are there, they've all got cow shit on their shoes"); Paris ("No matter what they say to the contrary, their noses are much bigger than their cocks, believe me"); and New York ("From my window I could look over Central Park and I felt just like Holly Golightly.")

It was when she said the last that I stopped her. "Can I ask you a question?"

"Sure."

"Is this on tape?"

She laughed her wonderful laugh.
"
God, I really am talking a lot, aren't I?"

"
Then can I ask you another question?"

"What?"

"Who is Holly Golightly?"

"Didn't you ever read
Breakfast at Tiffany's
by Truman Capote?"

"
I read
In Cold Blood
. It was great."

She frowned.
"I started it,
but it was too depressing. But
Breakfast at Tiffany's
—
you
know, we were in high school when that came out and one Saturday I went downtown to the library to pick up a book and I chose that one because, frankly, I've never been much of a reader and because it was very thin and the type was very big and there was this really fascinating photograph of Capote on the back. And so I took it home and read it and it changed my life. It really did. I mean, it really inspired me. I wanted to be just like Holly Golightly. Then after graduation I took the two hundred dollars I'd saved from my summer job and went down to the bus depot and got a Greyhound and headed straight for New York. God, it was fantastic."

And I heard then what I should have heard—and understood—back when I was twenty and hoping my frail hopes that she'd somehow fall in love with me: That something central was missing in her—my old man would have called it horse sense—that she was as giddy and unlikely and impossible as any tale ever told in the pages of
Modern Screen.

But where most women gave up such dreams under the press of eight-to-five jobs or infants who demanded tits and taters or husbands who made it their business to crush every little hope their wives ever had—Karen Lane had had the sheer beauty and the sheer deranged gall to pursue her particular muses.

That was why, even back in grade school, she'd scared me. She was some kind of combination of Audrey Hepburn and Benito Mussolini.

Then we were sitting at a stoplight, a laundry truck on one side of us, a school bus on the other, and she leaned over and
before I knew what was happening, she threw her arms around me and put her tongue, with the precision of a surgical instrument, right inside my mouth.

I could tell when the light changed because the cars behind us started honking and the drivers yelling.

She was soft and tasted great and I was trembling and feeling one of those erections you're only supposed to get when you're sixteen and every bit as daffy, at least at the moment, as she was.

Then, bowing to the authority of horns and curses, she took herself away from me, and I felt as deserted as an orphan.

But before she went back to driving, she patted me on the knee in an oddly cool, almost matronly way and said, "I know you're going to help me, Jack. I just know it."

T
he east end of the Harcourt sits on a promontory over a lake lost that day in fog and rain. Somewhere in the distance
big wooden workboats moved like massive prehistoric animals through haze that blanched everything of colors. Everything looked and felt gray on this March day.

On this side of the vast curved window a waiter who seemed to have watched an awful lot of Charles Boyer mov
ies was making a fool of himself over Karen while trying to keep up a French accent that was falling down like socks that had lost their elastic.

"Ze braised fresh crab claws," he said and rolled his eyes the way he probably did during sex.

"
They sound wonderful. Just wonderful." And then she smiled over at me.
"
Don't they sound wonderful, Jack?"

"'Wonderful' isn't the word for it," I said.

"And ze sautéed fresh prawns with shredded ham and vegetables." He rolled his eyes again. I had decided that if he
managed to work "ooh-la-la" into the conversation, I was going to deck him.

While he finished flirting with Karen, I glanced around the Harcourt and knew again that my speed was Hardees. Here you sat on English walnut chairs and stared at paintings by Matisse (whom I happened to like in my uneducated way) and large blow-ups of Cartier-Bresson photographs (which I thought I could probably duplicate with my Polaroid) and ate with forks that weighed two and a half pounds and daubed goose-liver pâté off your lips with brilliant white napkins big enough to double as sheets.

When the waiter finally packed up his French accent and went away, Karen said, "You look uncomfortable."

I sighed. "Can I be honest?"

"Of course. Honesty is something I really value."

I tried not to be uncharitable, but I couldn't keep the hard cold trust-department way she'd assessed her husbands out of my mind. If that was her idea of honesty, then maybe I would have preferred her a bit dishonest.

"Your father," I said.

She looked perplexed. "What about him?"

"He lived in the Highlands, right?"

"Why, yes. Of course."

"The Highlands being the area in this city with the lowest per-capita income and the highest crime rate."

"What's the point, Jack?" Irritation had come into her voice.

"That's where your father was from and my father was from and that's where you're from and that's where I'm from."

"Would you please come to the point?"

"I'm ashamed of you, that's the point."

"What?" She sat back in her chair as if I'd just tried to slap her.

"You've bought into an awful lot of bullshit, you know that? New white Jaguars and measuring people by their bank accounts and indulging silly assholes like that waiter."

"Are you drunk?"

"No.''

"
Are you on drugs?"

"No.

"Then you have absolutely no right to speak to me that way."