Dead Guy's Stuff (14 page)

Jane and Tim had made a schedule. They would work at the McFlea after a dinner break; then if they weren't too tired, they'd come back and continue going through the shanties. Tim brought lights over to 803, but didn't set them up. They'd be lucky to finish 801 by tomorrow. These cottages were small, but densely packed. Tim thought this one, 801, had the most paper ephemera. Old calendars, maps, Jane's kind of stuff. No. 803 had more restaurant wares, cases of cards and dice, cartons of 78-rpm records, all the basement leavings of a saloon that might have gone bust in the forties or fifties. Jane and Tim were both high and giddy on old-stuff fumes, the dust and must of their addiction.

"What about 805? Gus's place?" Jane asked. "Have you been through there?"

"Bill doesn't own that one," Tim said, "yet. He's the only relative though. He will."

"Yeah, but have you been through it?"

"I checked to see if the keys fit. I had a feeling since 801 and 803 were the same lock, he'd just keep it easy on himself," Tim said.

"And?"

"The keys fit," said Tim, "and yeah, I skimmed it."

"And?"

"Nothing, really. It was all his living stuff, you know? Big, ugly clothes. A pretty raunchy video collection. Stuff like that. Seems like everything we'd be interested in is in these two."

"Except that kitchen set?" asked Jane.

"Right. There is some furniture and the television. That kind of everyday junk."

Jane and Tim worked together for another hour, methodically writing down what they found, sorting stuff in piles. Jane was humming loudly, lips occasionally moving trying to find words to a song. Tim patted his wallet pocket rhythmically.

Jane offered to tackle one of the two small bedrooms, while Tim started on the basement. He gave himself a spritz of his inhaler— his "career-related" asthma flared most frequently in basements, but he was unable to resist them. Jane put on the paper mask, since the closets promised clouds of dust every time she pushed a hanger farther along the bending wooden pole.

There were a few items of clothing that Jane knew would interest Tim. Two gorgeous wool coats with enormous Bakelite buttons. The wool was miraculously moth hole free. Jane wasn't sure what had spared these garments. She opened men's hatboxes marked DOBBS and found three felt fedoras. She placed a gray one on her head and bent the brim down in what she hoped was provocative Raymond Chandler style.

"Jane! Jane!" Tim called.

Tim had set up an additional bank of lights in the basement. It made it look much more like a stage set than an actual living space. An old farm table with a white porcelain top and a sweet little narrow drawer held three boxes that Tim asked her to dip into first.

"This is a sample of the kind of stuff Gus was sitting on."

Jane lifted out photograph albums, autograph books, and high school yearbooks. These could have belonged to the original owner of this little house or to any number of people whose property Gus had descended upon. Turn-of the-century photos of families, their gatherings and special events, and Kankakee buildings were in excellent condition. An autograph book held good luck messages and poems, all addressed to Darling Minna. Jane began reading, but Tim told her to keep going. His goofy smile told her that he had left something in the bottom he wanted her to find.

It was a photograph. Inside the oak frame, the black-and-white print measured ten by twenty-four. It was a large group of people posing outdoors. Were they in a parking lot? Some scrubby trees in the background were leafless, but there was no snow on the ground. The coats and hats looked more late fall than early spring. November? The photo might have been taken from the top of a ladder since it seemed to look down on those standing in front of a ramshackle building almost hidden by the group. A car was parked to the right of the group. It looked like a Cadillac, 1944, '45?

Tim bounced up and down on his toes. He waited for Jane to recognize the photograph or someone in it. She was enjoying his excitement as much as she was the photograph. It had all of her requirements: crisp black-and-white quality; a large group of individuals; clear shots of faces, even if they were too far away for great detail, a few goofy mugs; a man trying to kiss a woman who seemed to be squirming away. A lot of stories here. Maybe the best story, though, the story Tim knew she'd find the most interesting, was the one being told by Gus Duncan. Only slightly thinner but more jolly than sloppy, a big cigar chomped in his teeth with his huge arms fanned out embracing two smiling, fresh-faced kids in their twenties, thirties at most. Gus, wearing the same gray fedora Jane now wore on her head, looked like he was giving the world to these two young people who were happy to get it. The smiling man and woman, snugly wrapped in Gus Duncan's large embrace, were looking straight into the camera. Jane pushed the hat back on her head with one finger to the brim and let out a low whistle: Don and Nellie.

16

Don and Nellie never
went out.
They lived their daily lives
out.
Morning until night, they worked at the EZ Way Inn, a destination spot for many who wanted to go
out.
After work, when one of their erratic employees consented to show up for work at six— "Bartending doesn't exactly attract the most reliably career minded," Don had reminded Jane when she'd wept over their late arrivals, often nonarrivals, at school events— they'd stopped for dinner at a casual restaurant. That was not going
out
to dinner though; that was just getting something to eat on the way home.

They didn't attend movies or plays, go to concerts or art openings. They had no friends who asked them over for dinner or card games. Their euchre-playing friends were with them at the EZ Way every day. When they grabbed dinner at cafés where they knew the owners, who often sat down with them and joined them over coffee and pie, it was as close to a dinner party as they got. By the time Don and Nellie got home in the evening, their social energy was spent. They had smiled and laughed and kidded and prodded and coaxed and listened and advised quite enough, thank you. Don usually managed to read a section or two of the paper and exchange some "How was school?" niceties with Jane and Michael before he fell sound asleep in his recliner, blanketed with the sports pages.

Nellie, an undiagnosed manic-manic, managed to find laundry, dusting, and sweeping to do. Regularly, on a Tuesday or Wednesday night, while Don slept through the ten o'clock news, Jane would find her cleaning out the refrigerator, wiping shelves, and Windexing surfaces. Nothing was ever clean enough, finished enough for Nellie. Mornings she waited outside bedroom doors for all of them to hand her their pajamas so she could throw them in the washing machine before they all left the house for work and school. When Don, Jane, and Michael were all cigarette smokers, Nellie, an emphatic nonsmoker always, ran herself ragged emptying three separate ashtrays after each flick of a Tareyton, Marlboro, or Kent.

For all of their years in the saloon business, Don and Nellie had followed the same pattern. Work hard all day, come home and find comfort in quiet routine: Don in his recliner, Nellie running from corner to corner with a broom. So now, when Jane returned to her parents' home at six-thirty, she was shocked to find a note in Don's beautiful penmanship.

Janie, we've gone out. Be home around eleven.

Jane felt the up-to-the-minute frustration of cellular technology. It was the age of always being in touch. She had promised Nick she would always have her phone, turned on and at the ready, so if he needed her, she, or at least her voice, was available. Nick would always have that safety net. Jane, on the other hand, was in the transitional generation. Always worried that she would forget her phone and disappoint her son, always anxiety driven by her own parents who refused to get one. She could not reach them where they had gone
out
because they did not tell her where that might be; and since they did not ever go
out,
she could hardly make any sensible guesses. She could not call them on their cell phone because they believed that cell phones were a passing fad, a dangerous, expensive gimmick.

Where in God's name
were
they? Jane had spent time studying the photograph under Tim's gazillion-watt lightbulb and now badly wanted to turn that lamp on Don and Nellie and ask them what the hell was going on. Don had taught her to hate no one, to be kind to all, except for Gus Duncan. He had taught her that Gus Duncan was an enemy of the family, an evil, small toad of a man whom she and her brother, right along with Don and Nellie, could despise. It was one of their few family activities, this Gus Duncan hating, and now her completely dysfunctional family minus one function— the family hating of Gus Duncan— was revealed as a sham. They were completely dysfunctional because their family hatefest was based on a lie.

Where were they?

Jane, fuming, opened a can of soup and poured it into a pan. As she adjusted the low flame, she realized that Nick would starve to death in his grandparents' house. He and his friends were the soup-to-bowl-to-microwave generation. The small saucepan had been bypassed several years ago. Nellie believed microwaves were a fad, a gimmick just like cell phones and compact discs. Jane hadn't even broached the subject of DVD.

Would Charley's professional heirs dig around a Don and Nellie site someday and hold a battered saucepan, waving it in the air speculating on its use? Too small for the cassoulet and bouillabaisse that archived, turn-of-the-century
Gourmet
magazines would suggest home cooks were preparing. Jane tasted the minestrone and wondered for the thousandth time how her parents could tolerate oversalted canned soups at home when Nellie had made giant pots of perfectly seasoned chowders and soups from scratch at the tavern. Jane, since childhood, had asked why "home cooking" was reserved for the EZ Way Inn. Nellie, having suffered from irony deficiency since birth, suggested Jane try one of the many frozen dinners she and Don squirreled away if she did not want canned soup.

Jane ate her dinner out of the pan, standing at the sink, listening for a car, a groan of the garage door being raised, but all was quiet. Don's note had said eleven, but still, she listened. The kitchen clock, a nonvintage, boring eighties, serviceable tool hummed as the second hand circled. Nellie's African violets were blooming, as usual, on the windowsill. Nellie had always claimed that she did nothing special, but somehow these plants always performed magnificently for her. Jane noticed that Nellie had elevated two of the small plastic pots on a brick, a soft dark red with rounded corners. Jane picked it up and read, KINGSLEY PAVERS. Must have been a company here in town or nearby because she had seen a pile of the same old bricks in back of 801 Linnet Street, piled by the crumbling back porch.

Where were Don and Nellie?

Jane had promised Tim she'd meet him at the Gerber place. She already had the pantry "wallpaper" packed in her car. It would be such a lovely surprise for Tim. Even though he would redo most of the decor she and others brought to the McFlea, she had a feeling he would love the pantry.

A pile of bricks? A brick in the window?

"A brick through the window," Jane said, finding the right preposition. "Damn it."

Don and Nellie had gotten used to paying off Gus, their neighborhood blackmailer. They accepted being blackmailed as if it was some kind of penance they were supposed to pay. Aggravating, annoying, but harmless in any real sense. What if someone, a new generation of blackmailer, had decided he could take over Gus's business and make it more lucrative? Maybe this wouldn't be your run-of-the-mill Kankakee entrepreneur like Gus, but someone who could be harmful? Someone who threw bricks through windows? Someone who murdered Gus and tried to cut off his finger?

Where were her parents?

Jane opened her notebook. She flipped through her lists for estate sales, her "Lucky Fives," the shopping game she had invented for herself, and looked at her list of phone numbers and calls she had to return.

She dialed Oh's number from memory and wasn't surprised to get his voice mail. If he were available, she was sure he would have called her back by now. As she was trying to compose a concise message, she was surprised by a hesitation after the rote "Please leave a message," and then, "If this is Mrs. Wheel calling… I am at work in your area and will contact you. I have news about your… um… canned goods."

* * *

And what is my
area
? Jane asked herself. The land of conjecture and guesswork? Oh remembered that she couldn't retrieve her cell phone voice mail, bless his heart, but he still hadn't totally given up on her. He was even rather poetic and diplomatic in referring to her noncase. Jane's "canned goods" did not refer to the soup, she knew, but to Bateman's finger. She had not forgotten about it, sloshing away in her glove compartment. Perhaps Oh had finally found some kind of assault complaint, something that would link… Link what? Did Jane really think Bateman's finger would point to Gus Duncan's murderer? No, of course not. Bateman's finger was a curiosity— something that stirred her interest in finding the whole story. Duncan's hacked finger was something else— a message that signaled that his heart didn't just stop on its own. So if nothing linked them, why couldn't Jane shake the feeling that Bateman and Gus were somehow tied together? What was this brotherhood that Jane felt but couldn't prove?

Jane drove to the McFlea and unpacked everything she needed to start on the pantry. She left her phone within three feet of where she was working, since she had left a message in large block letters for her parents to call her as soon as they arrived home. Detective Oh had received the same message from her on his machine, "Please call me immediately."

Jane had already asked the painters to prep the built-in pantry shelves, which they had done beautifully. They had expected her to stencil or sponge on a design, possibly do a trompe l'oeil of canned goods and boxes on the back of one of the shelves à la
Home & Garden Television
do-it-yourselfer shows. "It was all the rage," they had told her. She only smiled at their guesses and warned Tim that he could not see it until it was finished.

She unpacked the boxes of fragile yellow-and-cream sheets of paper. She put Elmira Selfridge's schoolwork, her spelling tests and history notes, into one pile. She hadn't been able to answer anyone before about why she'd bought them, but now she knew.

Wallpaper. The childish block printing and the cursive handwriting practice sheets created spectacular graphics. Elmira's report cards and drawings told a child-size life story.

Jane made another pile with papers from the Shangri-La. She had left the bound ledgers for her dad to study and exclaim over, but there had been boxes of loose sheets, lists of names, customers' tabs, receipts, whiskey orders. Although all the pages were intact, they were aged just enough. Old typewriter fonts made, not by a computer program, but by a quirky old manual Smith Corona, the letters signed in Bateman's spidery handwriting. Some loose labels and paper coasters. The old letterheads and logos had a kind of simple beauty that thrilled Jane, though she couldn't explain why.

She had the box and bags from Gus Duncan's basement that Tim had been ready to toss out. Loose pages that Gus had scribbled names and numbers on mixed with the old newpaper clippings of public property auctions. These had all been in a moldy Monopoly game box they had opened in the basement. Tim had thrown it in with the box of spent punchboards that he figured had little value to anyone except Jane. Tim wanted hers, the boards she had found intact at Bateman's. The papers were dry enough to use, and Jane fanned them out looking for some bits and pieces that would go into her collage. The cookie fortunes were especially charming. She tried to imagine Gus holding, "You will soon be crossing the great waters" in his meaty paws. Jane wondered if that fortune had been recent. Gus had certainly crossed over. Could he have prevented it if he had taken this little slip with its micelike typewriting seriously? Gus had tiny handwriting, too, Jane noticed, looking at some of the other scraps in the bag. "Meeting at 2. Bring title." These little messages would fit neatly inside cookies, too.

Jane had a box of handwritten recipe cards that she had bought in a wooden box from the estate of an elderly Margaret Mann. Margaret had scribbled lovely notations in the margins about who had liked the confetti Jell-O salad and how many helpings of creamed peas Elmer had eaten over his potatoes. Jane had actually tried some of Margaret's more outrageous recipes, the mock apple pie out of Ritz crackers and the chicken à la king. Nick and Charley had asked for seconds, but when Jane, in her excitement, showed them the actual recipe card and Margaret's notes about who had attended her luncheon, they both lost their appetites.

"A whole stick of butter?" Charley asked, clutching his chest.

"What's heavy cream?" wailed health-conscious Nick.

They failed to see the poetry of Margaret's guest list, nor did they appreciate the historical significance of high-fat cooking.

Jane had promised to finish the pantry and kitchen in two days, which would have been impossible if she hadn't had all the makings of the room waiting in bags and boxes. The Buffalo China she had been collecting would look great on these open shelves. An old toaster and fifties blender… an original with the ribbed-glass container and one speed, the only one necessary to make creamy, chocolate milkshakes. She had packed up all her doubles of colorful Hall ball jugs that would line up across the top of the hutch. Her only task besides unpacking and arranging, most of which she had already finished in her head, was to decoupage these shelves.

She spread the tacky glue and began slapping up the scraps of handwriting, the formal letterheads with their deco graphics. She worked quickly, trying not to take too seriously the order of words, the non-sense she was making. Later she would go over it and find the coincidental jokes that the overlapping pages made, the profound absurdities that the disjointed words created.

Tim was going to work at the shanties until late, waiting for her before he went through all the boxes. He had promised. Now she was torn. Should she go back to Linnet Street and lose herself in the disparate boxes Gus had accumulated? Or should she be at home waiting for her parents, sitting with the photograph in her lap, waiting for them to break down and confess… confess what?