Dead Guy's Stuff (15 page)

Jane slapped her final coat of sealer over the collage she had created, then stepped back to admire it. The art and work of Elmira and Gus and Margaret and Bateman intersected and melded into a wallpaper of words and graphics, a grid of Palmer Method cursive and Royal Typewriter letters and hand colored United States maps. Next to a pale pink Tennessee was a recipe for grasshopper pie that was so scrumptious, Margaret noted in the margin, that she had seen Leo lick his plate when he thought she wasn't looking. Diagonally placed across an aqua Texas was a fortune that read "Happy thoughts will never slow you down." Jane wiped the glue off her hands with a rag from Tim's neatly packed and stored box of cleaning supplies and nodded in satisfaction. Every time Tim came to the pantry to fetch a tin of McCann's oatmeal or to get an extra water pitcher, he would read something fresh, read a new spelling word from one of Elmira's lists, find out what Bateman had paid for a case of Seagram's, or what Gus's fortune cookie had cautioned. Maybe he would even try Margaret's version of chipped beef on toast.

Jane checked her watch and was delighted to find it was only ten. She could rush over to Linnet Street and unpack a box or two, just to clear her head, before she talked to Don and Nellie. Packing up her supplies, she noticed she had hauled in the box with the used punchboards and flipped through them. The usual suspects, lots of cigarette boards and colorful prize boards that didn't name the specific prize. A few of them had their keys retaped to the back, but all were partially punched. She set out a few of them along the window ledge of the pantry and decided to leave them there until she saw them in daylight. Maybe she would get rid of them. Punched out they were worthless to collectors. Then again, punched out only meant that someone, maybe Jane herself, had gotten the thrills and chills of winning a box of chocolate-covered cherries off of that very board. Didn't they have an even richer story if they were used?

Jane found all the lights on at 801 Linnet, but nobody home. Tim's car wasn't out front, but the wooden shoeshine caddy that he used to carry rags and markers, sale tags, and inventory supplies still sat on the kitchen table. He had also begun to clean the kitchen, Jane noticed. At least now surfaces were wiped down, so they could lay out glasses, dishes, and knickknacks and check for cracks, crazing, and chipped rims.

Ten o'clock was right around Tim's dinnertime. He liked to keep a "European lifestyle" he'd told Jane in order to soften the corners of his "Kankakeean address." Jane hoped he'd bring back enough for her. The canned soup was ages ago. She found Duncan's fedora that she had worn earlier and put it on to keep the dust out of her hair.

She slit open the tape on a box marked "variety store invent." Inside were packages of paper coasters. Dainty little white paper circles rimmed in pink-and-gold scallops. Sealed packages of matching guest towels: a dozen in pink and gold, a dozen more in turquoise and gold.
Perfect for baby showers,
Jane thought,
but do people do baby shower decorations in vintage?
Of course they do, she could hear Miriam saying; they do everything…

Jane stopped and held her breath. Was that something in the basement? She heard it again, but this time it sounded like it was coming from the roof. Hail? She looked out the front door. Evenings were just beginning to get cool enough for jackets and sweaters. Tonight, with the breeze, she realized there was almost a shiver in the air. The old oak in the front yard swayed again in the sudden gust, and she heard the knocking, hard on the roof. Of course, it was midwestern September hail… acorns. They came down hard and clattered over the roof. Jane went back to the next box with the variety store marking. She wanted to find that Bakelite Tim had described. This carton, though, had old tape that had been in place so long, it had fused to the cardboard. She remembered that Tim had his box cutter in the basement and headed downstairs.

Jane had read enough Nancy Drew mysteries and seen enough of the scary movies that Charley and Nick loved to know she shouldn't go down into a dark, abandoned basement alone. This particular basement, though, was illuminated like a movie set, with Tim's brilliant work lights trained on every surface, lighting up every corner. He was no fan of spiders and critters himself, and they had long ago agreed not to tease each other about hearing mice or feeling something crawly. That's why Jane blithely ran down the steps and walked right over to the workshop table where she had last seen Tim ripping through cardboard. His cutter was right where he'd left it. Jane carefully retracted the blade, slipped the box cutter into her jean jacket pocket, and, out of habit, did the left-to-right, top-to-bottom scan of the basement room.

It was small, not nearly the nooks and crannies that had presented themselves to Jane in most of the smaller Chicago estate sales she liked. Those little bungalows had deceptively large and full basements. This one was small and stacked with boxes, fairly well marked as Tim had said. On the floor was a packet of handwritten letters. Ten, maybe twelve were tied together, with a few that had come loose splayed out. Which box had they fallen from? Jane wanted to keep these things together— maybe she'd find a whole box of correspondence that she could take home and read in bed. First she had to figure out which carton they belonged in. She stuck the letters in the pocket of her overalls while she studied the storage area.

Reading left to right, she recognized a lot of the markings on the boxes as tavern suppliers, the boxes probably coming intact from underneath one of the businesses Gus had snatched up when it failed. Across the empty cartons that Gus had reused for packing papers and books and pots and pans, Jane read a history of bottled beer: Pabst, Drewery's, Schlitz, Hamm's, Lilly.

Lilly. She was sitting on a stack of three boxes, her head against the wall. Another full box was on her lap. It held her there, seated among the carefully packed and taped cartons. Poor Lilly. Right in the middle of all this dead guy stuff, a dead girl.

17

"Stop scowling at me."

"I'm not scowling," Tim said. He wrinkled his forehead and scrunched up his eyes.

"You are most definitely scowling," Jane said

"No, I am not." He concentrated on furrowing his brow. He willed the corners of his mouth to turn down.

"But…" he said, ordering his entire face to give in to gravity.

"What?" Jane asked. "It's not my fault."

"Oh no, it's not your fault. Not at all," Tim said, walking away from her, then turning back. "I call you in as a partner on one of the most interesting sales I've had in months. Oddly enough, the last time you found a body for me at my workplace, I lost a little business; and now, when people are starting to forget, I get two housefuls of untouched buried treasure and you come along and find Lilly Duff dead with a box of Bakelite on her lap. A box of Bakelite, I might add, that we can no longer touch."

"I was your partner on this?" Jane asked, her eyes wide.

"You've been trying to turn the shanties into a crime scene for days," Tim said, boiling over. "Are you happy now?"

Detective Munson stepped in front of Jane and Tim with what might or might not be a smile on his face. It was one of those all-purpose expressions, a kind of do-it-yourself grin-grimace that allowed a great deal of range in the interpretation.

"Why would anyone be happy to see a pretty young woman murdered, Mr. Lowry?" Munson asked.

Jane knew that even though Munson didn't exactly emphasize the word
woman
, Tim would hear it that way, interpret it as a vague accusation, as if any time a
woman
was a victim, a gay man might be the logical suspect. She wanted to jump in, but Tim beat her by a mile.

"Look, Detective, I am very upset. Lilly Duff was a friend of mine. She and I were working together on our high school fund-raiser together. I am upset that she is dead. I'm also upset that she is dead here, on my work site," Tim said. He took a breath, which made him sound almost apologetic. "I made that sarcastic, rude, and thoughtless comment about being happy to Jane because…" Tim stopped and considered. "Because it's always been very hard for me to admit to my friend, Jane, that she was right and I was wrong."

Jane put her arms around Tim, and they held on to each other tightly while Munson tried to get their full attention.

"Right and wrong?"

"Jane said all along that Gus Duncan was murdered, and none of us would believe her," Tim said. "I'm sorry, dear," he whispered to Jane.

"I forgive you, partner," Jane whispered back.

Tim winced. He knew he would pay dearly for letting that "partner" remark slip.

"We're investigating Lilly Duff right now, not Duncan," Munson said. When both Jane and Tim began to speak at once, he added, "Not yet, anyway."

Jane gave her statement. She'd thought she had heard something somewhere in the house, dismissed it, and gone on working. When she heard acorns on the roof, she was sure that they accounted for the noise and thought nothing of going into the basement to fetch Tim's box cutter. She did tell the police her first impression of the shanties from the afternoon— that she had thought that 801 and 803 had been searched, at least cursorily, because a few of the boxes were unsealed, she could see paths cut through the dust, but…

"What, Mrs. Wheel?" Munson had prompted, sounding interested for the first time.

"I'm not sure there was any rhyme or reason to what Gus saved or kept, and he could have scuffled around through the dirt himself looking for things. The place didn't look ransacked, more like, I don't know…," Jane said, "like whoever searched didn't know what he or she was looking for. Or even if…"

"If?" Munson and Tim both asked.

"If they knew there
was
something to find. It was more like someone was just looking around, casually, maybe," Jane said.

"Just browsing, perhaps?"

Munson and Tim looked past Jane in surprise at the questioner. Jane turned around, quite pleased to see former detective Bruce Oh.

"Yes, Detective Oh, just browsing," Jane said.

Munson glared at the uniformed officer stationed at the door, hoping that his cold-eyed stare would convey the message that Oh should not have been permitted into the house. This particular house on Linnet, 801 Linnet, to be precise, was now taped off, officially an investigation site, and Bruce Oh was no longer an official investigator. Munson had gone along with his request to revisit the Duncan house out of a kind of collegiality; but since Oh was no longer a member of any police department, Munson felt his collegiality did not have to extend very far. In fact, he decided, it was over.

"You're going to have to wait out there, Oh, behind the lines."

"Of course," Oh said, evenly and cordially. Jane watched him glide out the door, thinking that if he had been wearing a hat, he would have tipped it.

Jane, she realized several minutes later, was herself still wearing the hat she had found in the house. Tim asked her about it as they walked toward the street where Bruce Oh stood between their parked cars. He neither leaned nor slouched, and Jane found herself admiring his posture. She, on the other hand, could not stand straight. She leaned against Tim as they walked out, overcome with fatigue. She was so tired, in fact, that she forgot to ask Detective Oh— retired he may be, but he would remain detective to her— what he was doing long past midnight on Linnet Street in Kankakee, Illinois.

"Is there a restaurant open where we might have coffee or tea, Mrs. Wheel?" asked Oh. "You, too, Mr. Lowry, if you're free."

Jane stood straighter. Coffee would revive her. She had, after all, just found the body of a murdered woman, a woman she had known since their high school days. She really didn't want to go home to Don and Nellie's quite yet.

"Pinks," Tim and Jane both said at once.

Jane and Tim were of one mind on many things. They agreed that really good American art pottery was best displayed one piece at a time. A simple, dark green arts and crafts vase, alone on a mantel, could tell you the story of the house as soon as you walked into the room. The cheap stuff, the colorful flowerpots that were bought by the boatload at five-and-ten-cent stores in the thirties and forties, looked best huddled together in groups, holding on tightly to their sweet nostalgia by clustering. They agreed that boxes sealed in an attic were better than boxes sealed in a basement, although treasures and duds could be found in both. They usually preferred red wine to white, but always preferred vodka to wine. They differed strongly, however, on the matter of what to order at Pinks.

Pinks Café was in a ramshackle building perched on the bank of the Kankakee River, nestled close to the Schuyler Avenue Bridge. The back of the tiny restaurant was supported, one hoped, by a kind of stilt arrangement that made the floor almost even, although if you walked in the front door you stayed on level ground, and if you exited through the back, you climbed down thirty stairs. The original Mr. Pink, who had passed into legend years ago, was rumored to ask first-time customers whom he disliked for one reason or another to please exit by the back door because he was locking up the front. Then he and the waitress, Aggie, and any other regulars left in the joint listened to hear if they clattered and bounced down the wooden steps and stopped before rolling into the Kankakee River. Don and Nellie loved to tell Mr. Pink stories, Nellie with a kind of gleeful malice, and Don with a rueful longing for less litigious days.

"They'd sue him now," Don always added at the end of a Mr. Pink tale, as if that were the only problematic aspect to the story.

Tim insisted that the only thing to order at Pinks was coffee and pastries. He did not trust the grill, the pans, the refrigeration, or the food purveyors. Jane checked her concerned-mother-nutrition-label-reading self at the door and recommended the American fries.

"If you have any of the 'messes,' which are just scrambled omelets, you get the potatoes and heavenly buttered toast," Jane said, feeling guilty about being hungry—
hadn't she just found Lilly after all
— but being ravenous nonetheless.

"I'm surprised you have, here in Kankakee, a restaurant that stays open so late," said Detective Oh.

"That's the beauty of Pinks," said Jane. "It just opened."

"It's an all-night diner," Tim explained, "but just all night."

"Midnight to 8:00 A.M. or so," said Jane.

Pinks had been a godsend to high schoolers for years. In a town where "There's nothing to do" is the nightly battle cry, Pinks was the place to be. After movies, parties, late-night golf course drinking bouts, illicit road trips, and romantic rendezvous at the boat docks, everyone showed up at Pinks. There, the teenagers mingled with representatives of every stratification of Kankakee society. The late shift factory workers, the drunken bar closers, the bartenders who had overserved them, the businessmen who had worked overtime to avoid their families. Those night timers arrived late and tired, but just hungry enough to brave a Pinks Mess, three eggs scrambled with cheese and whatever vegetables, fruit, condiments the cook felt like adding. Cries of, "I got olives!" were usually echoed by someone else at another booth, "I got raisins," who was answered with, "You'd better hope they're raisins," which grossed everybody out for about a second before they continued shoveling in eggs and bacon and buttered white toast.

"Yeah?" asked Bonnie, Aggie's granddaughter, as she held her pencil poised over pad and listened to Detective Oh order whole wheat toast and a cup of tea.

"That's all," he answered.

"Yeah?" she answered again, shaking her head at Tim and Jane.

"She'll bring you white toast and coffee," Tim said. "Don't take it personally."

Jane found it charming that Detective Oh built a small tower with shrink-wrapped jelly containers as he told them what had brought him to Kankakee.

"I visited Mrs. Bateman," he began, but Jane interrupted him. She put her hand over Tim's and nodded toward the door. Tim turned to look and whistled softly.

Lilly Duff's brother, Bobby, had just walked in the door with two other men. Jane thought they looked familiar and realized they were probably Bobby's friends from high school, guys she'd probably known back then, too. None of them had aged well. They all seemed to have had more than a few drinks, and they kept bumping up against each other as they staked out a table of high school girls, preparing to intimidate them and get their booth before the girls were even served their food. It was an old Pinks routine— the pecking order of customers— and no one in management interfered. "If you can't stand the grease fire get out of the kitchen" was their motto. High schoolers were lousy tippers anyway, and drunken factory workers often mistook twenties for tens.

Bobby leered over the shoulder of one of the girls, mumbling and making small talk. It didn't take long before the blonde across the table stood up and told the others they were welcome to stay, but she was taking her car and leaving. They followed like lambs, passengers after driver, and exited. Remarkably, Bobby and his friends grew immediately sober and less clumsy and took over the table. Jane spotted one of them grab the five-dollar bill that one of the girls had thrown down in guilty haste as they left.

"He can't possibly know," Tim said.

Jane shook her head. She found herself completely detached from Lilly Duff and her apparent murder. She was thinking of it now as information, something she knew that thirty-seven-year-old Bobby Duff didn't know, would soon be told, and that would change his life forever. She remembered Lilly and Bobby as kids, the other saloon keeper children at her school. Bobby was wild, just as Lilly had been, but they were always sweet together. Jane could remember Lilly threatening some boy in Jane's class, two years older, who had made fun of Bobby tagging along behind her. They were scrappy and loyal. Bobby, Tim had told Jane, was helping Lilly run their folks' place. He, too, had gone into debt to buy it from Gus Duncan. He, too, had been stood up like Don and Nellie on the day of the "final paperwork." Perhaps, he, too, was being blackmailed. Jane realized, in those few seconds as she watched Bobby's face, two things: One, having the kind of power she had now over Bobby, her knowledge that his sister was dead, murdered in a basement on Linnet Street— knowledge that would change his life, would gray his hair, would line his handsome face— felt like the opposite of power, and two, Bobby would be asked if he had an alibi for the time of his sister's death. Jane no longer felt like she could eat a Pinks Special Mess.

There were only so many places people could be late at night in Kankakee if they weren't in their own homes and the bars were closed: the police station, the emergency room, and Pinks. Jane saw the police car park outside the front window. One uniformed officer, about the same age as Bobby Duff, came in and went straight to him, squeezed into the booth, and whispered something in his ear. Bobby got up immediately and left, clutching the cop's elbow.

Jane turned away from the window, thinking she didn't want to see the moment in the parking lot when the cop told Bobby, then turned back, surprised to find that she did want to see it, wanted to verify Bobby's expression, wanted to make sure she saw genuine grief and shock, and spotted no false horror, no faked sobs. But when she turned back, the police car was pulling onto the street with Bobby in the backseat.