Dead Guy's Stuff (11 page)

"Egg rolls. There were two old cartons of them in the refrigerator cut up in little pieces. There was a carton on the kitchen counter. Uncut," Munson said. "Lou Wong said he always cut food up real tiny. Had trouble swallowing. Duncan told Lou that he thought he had cancer, but he wasn't going to let the doctors make a penny off him."

"Did he?" asked Tim. He had come up behind Munson and stood so close behind him that Munson jumped forward into the kitchen counter.

"Did he what?" Munson shouted.

"Have cancer," Tim said.

"No. Blood pressure probably through the roof though. Enlarged heart. Thickened walls. Nephew says he was taking pills a year and a half ago when he saw him last. Made a big deal about taking Lasix; said he peed like a racehorse. We found his meds, and the coroner said he had taken them. His potassium level was up, so he had even taken the supplement, like you're supposed to with a diuretic."

"He smoked, too. Look at those ashtrays," Tim said.

Jane knew Tim wanted her to notice that he had dozens of Bakelite ashtrays, advertising businesses that hadn't operated in Kankakee for sixty years. She noticed.

She also noticed that there were a variety of cigarette brands that had been stubbed out in the various ashtrays. For a guy who was loyal enough to get takeout food from the same place every night, he was certainly fickle with cigarettes.

"So it's natural causes, Mrs. Wheel, plain and simple."

Jane could almost hear Detective Oh whisper in her ear. "It's never plain, and it's never simple."

She thanked Munson as he was getting into his car. Tim waggled his fingers and smiled a big goofy smile. She was going to have to talk with him about being a distraction. He was supposed to put Munson off balance, not lead her offtrack. She was pushing him toward the car when Munson rolled down his window and called out to her.

"When you see your dad, be sure to tell him it was natural causes. Nothing to worry about."

13

Jane entered through the EZ Way's kitchen door, but instead of walking straight through and stepping up into the bar, she took an immediate right into the backroom. It had been called the backroom forever, and it served as storage area, alternative office space, cooling-off room when someone started a friendly bar argument that threatened to escalate. The room contained a small desk and a twin bed wedged into the back corner, the head of it wedged under an alcove, dangerous to any regular customer whom Nellie had pushed in there to sleep one off who happened to be a fast and vertical riser. Don had put an old La-Z-Boy recliner into the other corner for his own catnaps, and Jane could draw from memory a map of the cigarette burns on its worn arms.

Jane didn't pay any attention to the room's furnishings now. She went directly to the metal cabinet on the west wall. Stacked neatly on the shelf were packages of light-bulbs. Forty watts, forty watts, forty watts, and finally, hidden behind the front two rows, a package of one-hundred-watt bulbs. Jane went over to the single light in the room, a hanging sconce over the desk, turned off the switch, and with a clean, dry bar towel protecting her hand, unscrewed the bulb and replaced the hot forty with a cool new hundred. When she switched the lamp back on, the room glowed. It still wasn't enough light for the size of the room, but after making do with so little, it was dazzling.

The backroom of the EZ Way Inn could be a dangerous place for Jane. She had spent hundreds of hours there as a child. After school, Don picked her up and brought her directly to the tavern, where he and Nellie were in the midst of the afternoon rush hour. Roper Stove had blown its afternoon whistle and assembly line workers— wasted after eight hours of screwing on doors, wiring ovens, welding on racks— crowded the bar, downing bottles of beers and glasses of draft as fast as they could. Jane, too, needed a little something after her long day at the desk pushing the pencil, coloring in the workbook, memorizing the capitals; and Nellie, tapping her foot and wiping her hands on her apron, would appear at the door of the backroom where Jane was sitting at the old wooden desk.

"Coconut cream," she'd say, wasting no time with small talk about life in the second grade, setting down a wedge of pie next to Jane's book bag. "Sold all the chocolate cream at lunch. Milk?"

Jane hesitated. She hated milk, but consented to drink it with desserts. Sometimes, though, if her mother was distracted enough, Jane could ask for Pepsi with her pie and get it.

"Come on, come on, I'm busy out there," Nellie said, looking toward the bar.

"Pepsi?" Jane asked.

Her mother often shrugged and dashed back to the bar, where she and Don opened, poured, served, wiped, collected, and made change as fast and as gracefully as any piece of choreography adult Jane had ever bought a ticket to see. If Nellie got too busy to bring the soda back to her right away, Jane would give up, go into the kitchen, and open one of the huge double doors of the institutionally sized refrigerator and pour herself a glass of milk. Then she would eat her pie, drink her milk, and settle in at the desk. If she had a library book with her, she squinted in the dim light and read happily for the two hours before her parents would be ready to leave. If she had forgotten a book, or if she only had a chapter or two left, she was forced to while away the afterschool hours creating some kind of backroom game.

She sometimes lay on the daybed and just dreamed, imagining herself as a nightclub singer, a movie star, a homesteader in the Old West, all of which she wanted to be when she grew up. Other times she kicked back in Don's La-Z-Boy and sketched the EZ Way Inn customers on one of the dozen scratch pads Don kept in the old desk drawers. Her father was sure she'd grow up to be an artist.

"Looks just like Chuck," he'd say to Nellie, showing her one of Jane's portraits. "Look how she puts in every hair in his crewcut."

The backroom was dangerous to the adult Jane because she crossed the threshold and became the second grader again, lonely and hungry. Jane the pessimist, a shy sad-sack, the fatalistic Eeyore. Or, as Tim was fond of pointing out, she was in equal danger of becoming the giddy, deliriously happy Jane— the lucky girl whose mother handed her pie and Pepsi and gave her time and space to let her imagination guide her through the barely navigable waters of elementary school.

Independence and neglect were doled out to Jane in equal measure, she supposed, and it was up to her what she chose to look back on as her childhood. Wasn't it? Right now, Jane was not thinking about pie or fantasizing on the day bed or coloring in a map of the United States. Jane was concentrating on getting enough light over the desk so she could see into her father's eyes when she asked him the question.

The question? Who was she kidding? She had a battery of them. But the one she would start with would be this. "Why, if you were so sure that Gus Duncan died of a heart attack, did you call Munson this morning to confirm that the investigation had turned up nothing suspicious?"

Once she got him to leave the whiskey orders on the bar and come into the backroom, Jane found the question wasn't so easy to put to him.

"Hey, what'd you do back here, honey? I can see, for god's sake," Don said, looking around in a kind of wonder. "There's that case of matches. I told Barney they hadn't come with the rest of the order."

Don began looking through the other boxes stacked next to his chair and muttering about Nellie and her goddamn low-wattage lightbulb fetish. "She had a twenty-five watt in here until a month ago. I finally told her they didn't make them anymore. She'd have to go forty. This one'll probably blind her."

"She keeps one package of a hundreds back here, Daddy," Jane said. "I made her start when I was in the eighth grade so I could see to do my homework."

Jane showed him the package in the back of the cabinet.

"I'll be damned," he said, stroking his chin. He grinned, his whole face lighting up. "Think she's got any other secrets?"

Jane paused and swallowed hard. "I think you do."

Don sat down in his recliner and held his hands out, palms up. "A few. But I don't think they're very important anymore."

Jane wanted to say, "Because Gus Duncan is dead?" But the words stuck in her throat. This wasn't some bit player in a film noir. She wasn't living out her movie-star fantasy as a Humphrey Bogart Sam Spade. This wasn't Sydney Green-street, for god's sake. This was her dad, easygoing, honest, all-around-nice-guy Don, the man who wouldn't let her use the word "hate" as in "I hate my teacher." He said it was just as bad as any swear word, and he never wanted to hear her say it. "Kill 'em with kindness," he always told her when she'd complain about cliquey girls and nasty boys. And now Jane, with some girl detective fantasy playing in her head, was going to grill her own father under a hundred-watt lightbulb in the backroom of the EZ Way Inn to get him to confess to the murder of Gus Duncan, the only man he'd ever said it was okay to hate?

"Daddy, the night Gus Duncan died, did you…?" Jane began.

"For Christ's sake, Jane, get that look off your face. You look like you seen a goddamn ghost. Your father didn't kill Gus Duncan," Nellie said from the doorway. "He just wanted to."

Jane hadn't heard her mother at the door, but that wasn't surprising. Her brother, Michael, her father, and she had always maintained that Nellie wore silencers on her shoes. She was always appearing behind them or at their bedroom doors, catching them doing something embarassing and silly.

"Mom, I never said Dad…," Jane started at the same time Don began. "Nellie, this is between…"

Nellie stopped them both. "I killed Gus Duncan."

* * *

Jane wanted very badly to faint, swoon, actually. She felt this was the proper moment for it if there ever was one. She at least must have looked like she was going to fall because her dad jumped up and guided her into the La-Z-Boy.

"Nellie, what the hell's the matter with you?" asked Don.

Nellie gave a tight, satisfied smile.

Don went into the bar and got Jane a glass of ice water and double-checked the front door to make sure it was locked. The grand reopening wasn't for a few days, but that didn't mean that the regulars failed to show up. In fact, Don and Nellie had welcomed customers in every day, serving them a bottle or glass while carpenters hammered or while Nellie hung curtains. Nellie hadn't seen any reason to close in the first place.

"Nobody's going to notice anything anyway," she had said, when Don had hung the CLOSED FOR TWO WEEKS OR SO sign on the front door.

"For Christ's sake, Nellie, look how you upset Janie." Don took his daughter's hand and wrapped it around the water glass.

Nellie had stayed in the doorway. She generally wore pants now with elastic waists and comfortable pastel sweatshirts; but as Jane watched her there, she pictured her in one of her fifties shirtwaist print dresses, a belt around her tiny waist, and an apron to wipe her hands on. Jane half expected her to offer her a piece of cream pie. After she had swallowed some water and handed the glass back to her father, she found her voice.

"You did not," she said.

Okay, so it wasn't a rebuttal worthy of the shocker that had prompted it, but it was the best she could muster.

"You and your dad don't think I can do anything. Just because I didn't have an education and don't read books doesn't mean I'm helpless, for Christ's sake."

Jane looked at her father. He could sometimes help with translation; but he, too, was at a loss to see where exactly someone could jump into this conversation.

"I went over there right after you did, Don. I saw you come out and I went in. Gus was in the kitchen laughing his ugly head off. Didn't even look surprised to see me. Just kept laughing. Then he waved that knife at me and said he'd tell me the same thing he'd told you— that he was selling us the building 'cause he could still own us, us and all the others. So I went right up to that ugly face of his and told him I'd cut his…" Nellie hesitated for the first time, looking at Jane, seeming to decide whether or not Jane was old enough to hear what she had said to Gus Duncan.

"I said I'd hurt him really badly if he tried any more bullshit. We'd had enough. It was over and done. His face turned bright red, and the veins on his neck looked like they were going to explode. I walked out, but I knew I'd taken care of him. Next thing you know, you two are telling me he's dead. And now I'm telling you," she said proudly, "that I killed him."

Nellie blinked and looked around the room. "Why the hell's it so bright in here?"

Jane smiled and shrugged.

Nellie grunted and picked up the towel on the desk to protect her hand. She unscrewed the lightbulb and picked up the forty watt that Jane had left there. In the moment in which the backroom went dark, they heard a thud, breaking of glass, and another thud in the front of the EZ Way. Nellie, then Jane, then Don ran into the barroom and saw the front window broken, jagged glass now framing the neon DON AND NELLIE'S that hung independently in the window. A brick lay on the floor, and Jane picked it up, untaping the paper wrapped around it.

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID. I KNOW WHERE THE

BODIES ARE BURIED. SAME MONEY.

SAME TIME. SAME PLACE.

"Call Jimmy," Nellie said, getting a broom.

Don nodded, sighing and shaking his head.

Jane's heart was racing. "Mom, why don't you ask him to send Munson over, too? This probably has to do with the Duncan case, right?"

Both Don and Nellie stared at her.

"Jimmy sells glass. He'll get someone over to fix the window," Don said. "He'll get someone over here right away."

"Mom, you have to call the police. Somebody's trying to blackmail you, and you didn't do anything," said Jane. "Just because you tried to put a voodoo scare into Duncan doesn't mean you killed him."

"Oh, yeah?" Nellie said. "I killed him all right. I scared the daylights out of him."

"Okay, Mom, okay. If it means something to you to be a murderer, by all means, you can take the credit for it. But no one can blackmail you for it," said Jane, holding the dustpan for her mother.

"Yeah, I know. Move the pan, hold it flat," said Nellie.

"So call the police, Dad."

"No, honey, not just yet," Don said.

What was going on here? Jane had gone through a lot of ups and downs with Don and Nellie over the years, but this might be the strangest stretch of roller-coaster track yet. First she'd worried that Don had killed Duncan. He had certainly worried enough about the police investigation of Duncan's death to ask Munson about it behind Jane's back. Then Nellie confessed, bragged about scaring him to death, which under some circumstances Jane might believe was possible. Her mother was a force of nature, after all. But now they were both totally unfazed by an unknown blackmailer who had flung a brick through their newly installed front window. And what was the brick thrower planning to blackmail them over since as far as Jane could tell, no one present had killed anyone?

"Relax, Janie," Don said, after he had arranged for the window repair. "I was worried that it might get complicated if the police knew I had gone to see Duncan. I just asked Munson to let me know what they found out, if it was natural and all," Don said, "which I was sure it was. I didn't even know about your mother going over there. Which was really stupid, Nellie," he added.