The Autumn Dead (14 page)

"Thanks," I said. "And say hi to Patti for me."

She smiled with those wonderful erotic lips—you imagined them the kind of lips sixteenth-century kings demanded in their whores—and then waved me off to take her phone call. After answering, she said, "I'll be glad to tell you about Windmere.” She was back to being a brochure.

"H
ow's your head?" I asked Donna.

"Pretty good.
As long as I don't move too fast. She really hit me. Where're
you?"

"Phone booth across the street from an aerobics place out
on Third Avenue."

"Y
ou're joining an aerobics class?"

"
No, the woman who hit you. It's where she works."

"God," she said. "That's neat."

"What's that?"

"That you've found her already. I mean, you really are a
good detective."

"
All I did was run down a couple of things."

"But that's what's so neat, Dwyer. You run down a couple of things and bingo, you've got it."

"
That's just the problem."

"What?"

"
I don't know what I've got."

"How come?"

"
Well, the motorcycle is registered to a Mrs. Slater who
resides at the Windmere nursing home. I don't know what relation she has to this Evelyn Dain or why Evelyn Dain is following me or what any of this has to do with the suitcase that Karen Lane hired me to find."

"Yeah, God, it really is confusing, isn't it?"

"Yeah."

"So why're you doing it? I mean, why not just tell
Edelman?"

"Because right now the police are saying that Karen Lane's
death was an accident resulting from mixing alcohol and
barbiturates. Which means they won't be pursuing things.
Which means it's left to me, I guess."

"I wouldn't mind if you, you know, sort of paid her back
for me."

"Who?"

"Evelyn Dain."

"Paid her back?"

"You know."

"You mean hit her?"

"Not hit her, exactly."

"What's 'exactly' mean?"

"You, know, sort of trip her or something."

"Trip her?"

"That wouldn't be so bad. She wouldn't get hurt but she'd
get the point."

I laughed. "It would be a lot easier if you'd just look her
up and hit her yourself."
 

Now she laughed. "Be serious. I've never hit anybody before, Dwyer, except my older sister Ellen, and the one time I did it my mother grounded me for the weekend and I had to miss the Herman's Hermits concert."

"You liked Herman's Hermits?"

"I admit he couldn't sing but he was cute."

"If I get half a chance, I'll trip her."

"But not hard, all right? Just kind of a, uh, regular trip, you know?"

"Right. One regular trip coming up."

"I miss you."

"I miss you, too."

So then I went into the Hardees across the street from the small concrete building with the three storefront windows, one of which belonged to a Penny Saver shopper, one to an appliance store, and the third to the aerobics place. Inside that window you could see maybe twenty women doing exercises as grueling as anything I'd ever done at the Academy.

Knowing what was ahead of me—a stakeout and a long one—I self-pitied myself into justifying a double-decker hamburger, fries, and a vanilla shake. Stakeouts demand a lot of energy.

Loaded down with a white bag smudgy with grease, I went back to my Toyota, turned on the FM to a call-in show where people were arguing about whether condom advertising should be permitted on the air (AIDS was rearranging the American way of life), and proceeded to sit there for the next four and a half hours, watching both the storefront and the gleaming black Honda motorcycle in the adjacent parking lot.

This was a neighborhood in transition. In my boyhood days this had been the best section of town you could live in if your parents were working class, Irish, Italian, and Czech mostly, and every day on the sunny walks proud men in dungarees strolled to work, black lunch pails smelling of bologna sandwiches dangling from one hand, and a local newspaper they loved to curse in the other. You dreamed Plymouth dreams in those days (it had been one of my old man's fondest fantasies to pull up in front of the family house in a new 1955 baby blue Plymouth) as you moved away from the Highlands down here and as you gradually began to realize that, thanks to government loans and your parents' frugality, you were going to be the first generation that got to go to college.

But I didn't know what kind of dreams they dreamed here now. Sixteen-year-old girls pushed strollers past my car now, and your first impression was that they were the infants' sisters but in fact they were the infants' mothers. Scruffy boys in black leather jackets with tattoos on their knuckles and a cigarette hack bothering their throats already came by, too, and old men who gave the air of just wandering. Old women clutching small bags of groceries hurried on looking scared. And bored cops, tired of all the bullshit—and, man, you just don't know how much bullshit beat-cops get laid on them day in, day out—watched it all, just wanting to get back to their tract homes and watch the Cubbies or watch their kids or watch their wives or watch any goddamn thing except this neighborhood get even meaner.

Dusk came and I had to take the risk of running into the Hardees can and emptying my bladder and running back out. I had a splotch on my crotch where, in my haste putting it back in, I'd dribbled. But the motorcycle was still there. The lurid neons at the Triple-X Theater down the street came on and then all the taverns lit up and this big annoying mechanica
l bear on top of a car wash started waving like King Kong to passing motorists. Several of them had the good sense to flip him the finger.

I watched the ladies and tried to figure out if the somewhat angular blonde leading the class was the woman I wanted. Possibly. But just as possibly she could be the manager, out of sight in some back office. My car stank of fried food. I wanted, in order, to talk to my seventeen-year-old son (who had started missing school lately, going through some kind of teenage funk), Donna, Glendon Evans (to question him more carefully about some of the things Karen Lane had said to him during their time of cohabitation), and Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk-poet whose books I'd been reading lately, to find out just how he'd managed to deal with all the craziness.

Then, around eight o'clock, my bottom very tired, my eyelids getting heavy, the women started filing out of the aerobics center. Their chatter was like bright birds on the soft night air and I liked listening to it. It was happy and human and hopeful, proud as they were of their workout and the good way they felt about themselves at this moment.

Then the lights inside the aerobic center went out.

I sat up straight and turned on my engine.

Then I sat there for twenty minutes, wasting a couple dollars' worth of gas.

Being a paranoid, I began to wonder if she had seen my car and simply gone out the back door, leaving her bike so I'd sit here all night like a very, stupid rent-a-cop watching it.

Around eight thirty-five, she came out.

I still couldn't get a good look at her because she was back in her leathers again. She even had the helmet on. She looked like a super-heroine in a comic book.

Without looking around, without hesitating, she went over to the parking lot, mounted the bike with a physical economy that spoke of the condition she was in, and then, moments later, took off.

I took off after her, having no idea whatsoever where she was going.

T
he old money built their homes east, on
hills that formed a ragged timberline back when
the only certain means of transportation other than walking had been the Conestoga wagon. They built east and they built big and they built conservative, brick and stone and wood, hammered and chiseled and curved to imitate the Victorian style. It was through this section of hills she led me, dips steep as roller coasters, peaks from which you could see the electric sprawl of the city beneath. Occasionally a timid deer came to the edge of the road, then disappeared, frightened, back into the pine and hardwood acres posted NO HUNTING. There were gates in the gloom, big iron gates, usually painted black, beyond which lay curving asphalt roads and then the houses themselves. Forty-five minutes had gone by. The temperature had dropped ten degrees, from early spring to late winter. The one thing the Toyota did well, besides rusting, I mean, was kick out heat. I was snug as a baby in the womb. I just didn't know where the hell she was taking me. Two thoughts kept crisscrossing: Was she aware of me and simply driving me around and around or did she just like to go for rides after work, the way I sometimes did?

Then she veered southeast, and we came into the section new money had built, lying below us in grassy foothills. From up here you could see down into their backyards with
their inevitable swimming pools and inevitable tennis courts and inevitable sprawling flagstone patios. The style of the houses changed from Victorian to everything from French Provincial to Colonial to Mediterranean. In the night now they seemed to glow with prosperity, gods perched above the moaning masses below. You could hear dogs bark in the darkness and you knew they would not be pretty collies or cute Scotties. They'd be Dobermans or maybe even (this was the fashion this season) pit bulls. These days, with people standing in cheese lines two blocks down from where factories stood unused, these days the gods had damned well better g
et themselves some protection.

I kept a city block behind her, but even so she pulled off the road so abruptly, I nearly had to put the car into the ditch. I cut the lights. Waited.

She'd cut her own lights. For a time I couldn't pick her out in the starry blackness.

I felt awkward, foolish, trapped. Apparently she'd been on to me all along and was now waiting for me to make my own move. Turn around and go back the other way? Stroll up to her and ask her just who the hell she was and why she'd knocked out my girlfriend and most likely a shrink named Evans?

At first I couldn't tell if my eyes were only playing tricks or if she had actually just done what she'd seemed to.

Left her black Honda and started walking down the road.

I reached up and popped the lid off the dome light and then thumbed out the bulb. I didn't want my car to light up when I eased out of it.

I put one foot down on the road and smelled the chill piney night and then put a second foot down and watched the way rolling cumulus clouds covered the quarter moon. She was ahead of me somewhere, walking. But where? And why?

I went after her, keeping to the side of the road, where even the gods had to put up with empty beer cans and Hershey wrappers and Merit packages soggy with dew.

On my right the pines were solid, broken only occasionally by small clearings of grass, still dead and brown. The left held two homes set very far back, little more than lights
glimpsed through the hardwoods. Hearing a car behind me, I turned my head to the left so the driver couldn't see my face. He turned into the opposite drive, a chunky silhouette in a red BMW.

Then I saw her.

She was crawling up the face of two steep iron gates with the acumen of a monkey showing off for Sunday-afternoon visitors. She was so good at it, I just stood and watched her, forgetting for a moment why I was here in the first place. In her black leathers, she was hard to see. Then she dropped down on the other side of the gate, her body making a small sound as it touched the asphalt, and then she vanished.

I walked the rest of the way over to the iron gates. The estate was surrounded by a large stone wall. Schlepping up the gates was probably easier than going over the stone wall. Just behind me was a country-style mailbox. I went over and hauled out my flash and looked to see the name.

I stood there a moment and contemplated what the hell it could mean. Things had come abruptly together here. Yet, at the same time, nothing had come together at all.