The Autumn Dead (26 page)

He took a handful of peanuts from the red plastic bowl in front of him and said, "So she blackmailed them?"

"She and her brother. Over the years. Never for a lot, a few thousand here, a few thousand there. Then her brother got greedy."

"'He took the suitcase. From Doctor Evans?"

"Right."

He paused. "You going to let me see it?"

"I don't think so."

He sighed. Put his hand on my shoulder. "Its evidence."

I put my head down and thought about what I'd found in the suitcase. The story for one thing, the story she told Gary Roberts she wanted him to "touch up" for her, the story that laid it all out. Terrible writing. Confession-magazine stuff crossed with the worst sort of Holly Golightly daydreams. But it told it all—the rape, the blackmail, the brother she'd helped drag through life.

But it wasn't the story I'd remember.

It was the clothes. In the Highlands there was a tradition, brought over from the old country, and officially frowned on by the priests, of being buried with any limbs of yours that you might have had amputated during your life. I knew of an old Highlands Irishman who kept the bones of his cancer-riddled leg for forty years till he died, then he instructed his son to throw it into the casket with him.

What Karen Lane had done was not unlike that.

She'd kept the clothes she'd worn the night of the rape. All these long years later the blood soaks were almost black and the torn cotton material faded. She'd even kept her underpants. They'd been in shreds. I'd never know now if she wanted them as evidence or if she wanted to be buried with them, the way some Highlanders would want to be. I'd never know now what to think of her. She would always remain just on the outer edge of understanding, unknowable.

"I better go call my old lady," Edelman said.

I laughed.

"Just wanted to see if you were paying attention."

"Wait till I tell your wife you referred to her as your 'old lady.'"

"I'm just talking the same way everybody else here does." I noticed he swayed slightly walking to the pay phone. I went back to my beer. I stared at all the stuff Malley sold behind the counter, combs, razor blades, breath spray, aspirin, potato chips, decongestants. He was turning the place into a 7-Eleven. Then I noticed his new hand-painted sign listing the prices for his most popular drinks, including 7 and 7s, wine coolers, pink ladies, and shell-and-shot. ("I get tired of being a frigging human menu," Malley always said.)

Then Edelman came back. "I told her I called her my 'old lady.'"

"She laugh?"

"Nope."

"You got problems, my friend."

"I told her you said it first."

"Thanks a lot."

He had some more beer and said, "One more thing bothers me."

"What?"

"Why did Karen hire you to get the suitcase?"

"Because she wanted to stop her brother from really putting the big arm on Forester and the other two. She planned to leave for Brazil next year and she wanted to put the last huge shot on them herself."

"Why Brazil?"

"It's where Holly went."

"Who's Holly?"

"Somebody who never existed, or shouldn't have, anyway."

"You're getting drunk," he said, wiggling a finger at me.

I smiled."So's your old lady."

I
spent the night at Donna's. We had popcorn and then we had underwear inspection and then we watched an "Early Bird" movie called
Curse of the Vampire
, which was actually sort of scary, and then it was dawn and we slept, one of those rare times when she let me sleep touching her (she likes me to have my side of the bed and her to have hers), and then we woke up because she had to go in to the office early and so I sat in bed while she took a shower and kind of scratched myself in various places and picked at myself in others and all the time something kept bothering me, really bothering me, but I couldn't think of what it was. And then I remembered Malley's sign from last night, the one listing all the drinks and prices, the one including pink ladies, and then I recalled what Karen Lane had said right before she died; "One of the pink ladies brought me my drink." And then I remembered something else, too, so I got up and found the phone book and looked up the name of the woman who'd been checking off names at the reunion dance that night, and we had a few words of this and that and then I asked her my question and she said, "Boy, that's a weird one," but she answered it nonetheless and I said thank you and hung up fast.

Donna was still in the shower as I washed my face and brushed my teeth.

She peeked out through the curtain and said, "God, Dwyer, you're going someplace without taking a shower?"

"I figure the world can take it if I can."

"Seriously, Dwyer, you look real intense."

I sighed. "Yeah. I guess I am."

"You going to tell me?"

"Tonight. Over dinner."

She started to yell at me but she was naked and in the shower and there wasn't much she could do.

I went down and got in my Toyota.

I
t was a watercolor day, china blue sky, plump white clouds, grass greener than grass had any right to be.

I pulled in the drive and, got out of the car and saw she was in back. There was laundry hanging on the line.

"Gosh, hi, Jack," she said.

"Hi.

"You probably came back for another whiff, didn't you?" She laughed. "You're getting addicted."

And I probably was. The laundry in the soft wind smelled fine and clean and made me want to be a little boy with my whole life ahead of me.

She said, "Gary was very relieved when he got home the night before. He said that everything was all right between you two." She wore a clean man's work shirt and jeans and her hair was pulled back in a soft chignon. She was everything I liked about working-class women.

"Everything's fine," I said.

She watched me and I watched her back. We both knew what I was going to say. I looked at her brown eyes and remembered that in her First Communion photograph her hair had been done in perfect little ringlets. She was female in a way as soft and seductive as the smell of fresh laundry, in just that exact way, and I wanted to hold her as I'd held her the night before, when her son had walked in on us.

She started putting clothespins on a pink blouse. She had one clothespin in her fingers and one clothespin between her teeth.

"You not going to hang your pink waitress uniform?"

She stared at me. She took the clothespin from her mouth. "You figured it out." She sounded betrayed.

"Shit," I said. The waitresses that night had worn blue. Karen Lane had mentioned a "pink lady," meaning a waitress in pink. Susan sneaking in to poison her drink.

She said, "You know the funny thing?"

"What?"

"I still liked her." She smiled, and precisely that moment her eyes went silver-blue with tears. "I probably even loved her."' She put her hands out to me and I took them and felt the dampness and the roughness of laundry soap and then I slid my fingers further up to where the skin was soft and the down blond and the bones fragile as a poem.

And then I took her in my arms and let her cry and I thought of all the years I was holding here, pigtails and the mysteries of menstruation and prom gowns and hot crazed first sex and life that had borne life and the sad, silent wife she had become when Karen took away gray, failed Gary. And finally I thought of the frail frightened woman here now and I cupped the back of her head in my hand, the chignon coming softly apart, and I lifted her mouth to mine with what I hoped was reverence, and kissed her softly as I had never kissed her as boy or man, kissed her with a curious innocence as I'd always wanted to kiss her, her tears warm and salty now on lips teeth had nibbled on nervously, and I said, "You have a savings account?"

She said, "I've always wondered what it would be like to kiss you. When we used to square dance in sixth grade, I used to kiss my pillow every night and pretend it was you."

I smiled. "Did I kiss well?"

She laughed. "That's the nice thing about being in sixth grade. Everything's perfect."

I said, "I don't have to tell anybody."

"Oh, Jack. Of course you do."

"No, I don't. My friend Edelman the cop thinks that Chuck Lane killed his sister."

"But you'd know."

"I could live with it."

"No, you couldn't." She took my hand and put it to her face. Her tears were as tender, as my little boy's hands when he was a baby. She smiled. "You're too much of a guilty Catholic, and so am I."

"You won't like prison."

"No, I don't suppose I will."

"So let's give it a try, all right? A secret just between us?"

She sighed and reached out and touched the laundry and brought it to her nose like a bouquet. "She would have dumped him, of course. Probably after a month or so. If even that long." She started crying again. "He's all I have, Jack. He's all I have."

I took her shoulder. Turned her around. "Susan, listen. I really won't tell anybody. I really won't."

Then I saw the line of her gaze raise slightly as somebody came up behind me.

It was her son. The one who'd caught us embracing.

He saw his mother's tears. His hands became fists. He was a Highlands boy, same as me. "He hurting you, Ma?"

"No, honey," she said. "He isn't hurting me." Then she put out her hands for him to take. "Why don't you wait here with me while Jack goes inside to make a call?"

The kid started toward us.

"You sure?" I said.

She nodded. "I'm sure, Jack."

The kid went past me, hands still fists, sneer on his uncertain mouth, taking his mother's hands gently as I had.

"You got a great mom there, kid, you know that?"

He managed to grin a little bit and said, "Yeah, that's what I heard."

I looked at her a long time, the girl of her and the woman of her, and I said, "I'm going to write you a whole lot of letters and tell you a whole lot of things."

"I sure hope you're not kidding."

I had to clear my throat because I was getting bad. I said, "I'd never kid a woman like you, Susan. Never."

Then I went in and did it. Picked up a yellow wall phone in the kitchen and dialed the Fourth Precinct and asked for Edelman and after I'd told him he said, "It never turns out for shit, does it, kiddo?"

T
hat afternoon, getting ready for work at the Security company, I went to the back room and found Diaz dropping peanuts into his Pepsi, one of the more arcane rituals he practices, and tossed his knucks on the table to him.

"This some kind of trick?" he said.

"No." A few days ago I'd felt superior to Diaz and his appetites. Now I wasn't so sure.

I turned and started toward the front of the building. "Hey," he said. "I heard all about you on the radio. Shit, man, you wasted those guys."

I didn't say anything. There was nothing to say.

Diaz grinned. "You're a hero, man. You know that?"

"Yeah," I said, "that's what I am, Diaz. A hero."

Then I went back up front and talked to Bobby Lee and asked her if she would please tell me what Elvis had whispered to her on her recent trip to Graceland, the thing that had made her feel a whole lot better.

Because that was just what I needed this soft spring afternoon. I needed to feel a whole lot better.