The Autumn Dead (4 page)

And then she put her hand on mine and in a very different
way said again, "Jack."

T
he winding asphalt road got steep enough that I had to keep the Toyota in
second gear most of the way.

The sun was out now and the hills of pine and spruce were like a wall closing me off from the city behind. At one point I saw a deer come to the edge of the road and watch me with its delicate and frightened beauty.

After a few miles, country-style mailboxes began appearing on the left-hand side of the macadam, and then, up in the trees that seemed to touch the clouds themselves, you could see the sharp jut of the white stone condos, their Frank Lloyd Wright expanse of glass flashing gold in the sunlight.

I rolled down the window and enjoyed the odors, sweet pine and the tang of reasonably fresh water from a nearby creek and wild ginger and ginseng in the forest to the right.

When I saw the box reading GLENDON EVANS, I pulled the Toyota over to the side and parked and got out. At first all I wanted to do was walk a few feet up the asphalt and take in some more of spring's birthing sights, new grass already vivid green and cardinals and blue jays soaring in the air. I looked behind me, at the ragged silhouette of the city in the valley. This was an aerie up here, and Glendon Evans should consider himself damn lucky.

To reach the condo you had to walk eighty-some stone
steps set into a hill at about a sixty-degree angle so narrowly laid out that you could get slapped by overhanging spruce branches all the way up. A squirrel who apparently wanted to get himself adopted accompanied me from a three-foot distance all the way up.

The condo, as imposing as one of the gods of Easter Island, had been set into a piney hill and angled dramatically upward, so that no matter what angle you saw it from, you knew its owner was more powerful than you could ever be. There were three floors. Draperies were drawn on all the windows. The lower level was a two-stall garage. The doors were closed.

Spread across the flagstone patio in front of the place was a variety of lawn furniture, the good doctor apparently getting
ready for summer. A redwood picnic table, several lawn
chairs, and a gas grill big enough to handle the Bears looked ready for burgers and beer. Only the lonely wind, a bit chill and tart with pine, reminded me that it was still a little early for lawn furniture, and suddenly there was an air of desertion about the place, as if the people who lived here had fled for some mysterious and possibly terrible reason.

I took the key from my pocket again and tried the front door. No problem.

Then I walked into something not unlike a French country house, with raised oak paneling and a limestone fireplace and
Persian tugs and built-in bookcases and a leather couch as
elegant as a swan's neck. There was a Jim Dine print above the fireplace. The east wall was a fan-shaped window that
looked over the winding creek below, still silver with the last of spring's frost. The west wall was a cathedral window from which you could see an impenetrable forest that stretched all the way to a line of ragged hills above which the white tracks of jets now slowly disintegrated against the bright blue sky.

Looking around, I realized that I had made a mistake coming here. Maybe, after twenty-five years of living in places like this, Karen Lane could claim this world as her own, but I couldn't. I was as out of place here as an atheist in a church.

At the last I hadn't even taken her money, just agreed to
help her out of some misguided sense that she needed my help. But the condo said very different things to me—that where Karen Lane was concerned, I was the one who needed help, and that it was unlikely that I was here to get anything half as innocent as a suitcase full of "sentimental" things.

I went to the right into a kitchen that kept up the motif of gorgeous capitalistic excess.

Sunlight struck blond wood floors and bleached pine cabinets and a free-standing range that dominated the room. Above the sink, situated to the left of a white wall phone, was an outsize photograph of Karen, done in a mezzotint for dramatic effect. The reverence of the shot told me all I needed to know about the good doctor. He was hooked.

I went back to the living room and was just passing the winding metal staircase where it wound its way to the second level when something splatted on my forehead like a fat warm drop of summer rain.

I reached up and touched a finger to the wet spot on my skin. I brought my finger away and looked at it. There was no doubt at all what it was.

Suddenly I looked around the condo and saw not beautiful furniture of dashing design but all the places somebody with a gun could hide. The afternoon shadows seemed deep now, and I was self-conscious, as if I were being observed.

I took a few steps back and looked up to the second level. Lying even with the border of the carpeted floor was the back of a man's head. He was close to falling off the edge. His dark hair and the shape of his skull were all I could see. There was a bloody knot in the center of his head and it was from this that the blood dropped, tainting the soft gray carpet below.

I took a few deep breaths and wished I had brought my gun and then cursed myself for not bringing my gun and then cursed myself for cursing myself because there had been absolutely no reason I
should
have brought my gun. I'd come here to a psychiatrist's condo to retrieve a suitcase. Not exactly dangerous work.

I went up the winding steps for a closer look at the man. He wore a monogrammed blue silk dressing robe over a
pair of lighter blue cotton pajamas. The monogram read "GE." He wore expensive brown leather house slippers, new enough that you could see the brand name imprinted on the soles. He was maybe six feet and slender and his skin was the color of creamed coffee. But he was one of those black men whose features are as white as Richard Chamberlain's. He was probably my age, but there the similarity ended because he looked brighter and handsomer and, even unconscious, a lot better prepared to put his personal stamp on an impersonal world.

I glanced quickly around the second level. This was an open area with another fan-shaped window to my right and a huge Matisse to the left. You could see dust motes tumble golden in the sunlight. The carpeting was the same light gray as downstairs, and it ran down a long hail with three oak doors on each side.

I lifted up his hand. His pulse was strong. I leaned down and looked closer at his wound. It was open to reveal pink flesh. It would most likely require a few stitches.

I went in search of a bathroom, which proved to be the second door down to the right. On the way I passed a room with a Jacuzzi and a master bedroom laid out to resemble a den where people only occasionally slept.

In the john—or should you call something composed of marble with a sunken bathtub big enough to hold Olympic tryouts a john?—I soaked a towel in warm water and then found some Bactine and Johnson & Johnson Band-Aids and then I filled a paper cup with water about the right temperature to drink.

I was halfway out the bathroom door when I thought about the few times I'd been knocked out back in my police days. I'd forgotten one important thing. I went back to the medicine cabinet, which I noted held any number of brown prescription bottles with Karen Lane's name on them. Among many others, the medicine included Librium and Xanax. Somewhere amid the prescriptions, I found some plain old Tylenol. I thumbed off the lid and knocked three of the white capsules into my hand. When I managed to get him awake, he was going to have a headache and he was going to appreciate these.

I was halfway down the hail, hands loaded with the towel and the Bactine and the Band-Aids and the drinking water and the Tylenol, when he staggered toward me and said,
"
If you move, I'm going to kill you. Do you understand me?"

"
Yes,
"
I said.
"
Yes, I do understand that."

And I did. He looked to be in pain. He also looked frightened and slightly crazed.

He held in his slender tan hand a fancy silver-plated
.45,
and I had no doubt at all that he would, for the slightest reason, use it.

"Now," he said, "I want you to lead the way downstairs. We're going to go to the kitchen and sit in the nook and you're going to answer questions, and if you do anything at all that seems suspicious, I'll shoot you right in the belly. All right?"

I hadn't realized till then how badly he was hyperventilating. Nor had I realized that he had begun to sob, his whole torso lunging with cries that seemed half grief and half frenzy.

Then he pitched forward face first and collapsed on the carpet soft and gray as a pigeon's breast.

The gun fell from his hand.

I wondered if I'd underestimated the severity of the head wound.

I wondered if Dr. Glendon Evans hadn't just fallen down dead right in front of my eyes.

I
n one of the kitchen cupboards I found a bottle of Wild Turkey. I poured a lot of it into the coffee I'd made us. Then I carried the cups over to the nook, on the wooden windowsill on which a jay sat, overcome with the soft breeze. Beyond were the hills of pine and the sky of watercolor blue.

"You feeling any better?" I asked him. I sat there and blew on my coffee, having overdone the heat in the microwave, and then I sat about staring at him again.

Twenty-five minutes had passed since I'd helped him downstairs and sat him up on one side of the breakfast-nook table. Twenty-five minutes and he had not uttered a single word. At first I wondered if he wasn't in some kind of shock, but his brown eyes registered all the appropriate emotions to my words, so shock was unlikely. I'd said a few things to irritate him just to see how he would respond, and he'd responded fine. Then I'd considered that maybe he thought I was the man who'd knocked him out, but now he'd know differently. Most burglars didn't put iodine and Band-Aids on the wounds they'd inflicted.

Glendon Evans sat there, a slender, handsome, successful-looking man who even in these circumstances gave off a scent of arrogance. He wasn't talking to me no matter what I said and I didn't know why.

I had some more coffee and then I said,
"
This is pretty ridiculous. Your not talking, I mean."

He sipped his coffee, set the delicate white china cup back down. Looked out the window.

I said, "Did they want the suitcase?"

This time when he faced me there was more than a hint of anxiety in his eyes.

"So it was the suitcase. You know what was in it?"

He went back to looking out the window. From some distant hill, a red kite had been sent up the air currents where it struggled with comic grace against the soft and invisible tides of spring.

"She told me it had sentimental stuff in it.” I paused. "She made it sound very innocent."

I went over and got the bottle and gave us each some more bourbon.

"How's your head?"

He turned and looked and, almost against his will, raised his shoulders in a tiny shrug.

I sat back down and said, "I wonder who's going to get pissed off first. You because you're sick of me talking or me because I'm sick of you not talking."

I congratulated myself on the cleverness of that line, feeling for sure this would open his mouth and get him going magpie-style, but all it produced was a wince and a touch of long fingers to the back of his head.

So I watched the kite for a while, how it angled left, then angled right, red against the light blue sky. It made me recall how warm even March winds were when you were ten and had your hand filled with kite string.

I said, "She did it to you, didn't she?" I knew he wasn't going to talk, so I just kept right on going. "She did it to me when I was twenty. I really thought I was going to marry her and all that stuff. At the time I was working in a supermarket for a dollar thirty-five an hour and spending a dollar twenty-seven on her. I bought myself a forty-nine Ford fastback and one night she gave me a crock about needing it to help her mother and you know what she did? She took a guy to the drive-in in it.
"
My laugh, bitter even after all these years, cracked like a shot in the aerie.

I poured us some more Wild Turkey. His body language—he was leaning forward now and his eyes started studying me—indicated he was getting interested.

He said, "Was that a true story?"