Dead Guy's Stuff (16 page)

Jane picked at her American fries, but felt squeamish about exploring her "mess." Tim raised an "I told you so eyebrow" but mercifully didn't tease her. She wanted to move beyond the almost-crying stage every time she discussed a case with Detective Oh.

Detective Oh was puzzling over his coffee cup. Aggie's granddaughter had brought him coffee as Tim had predicted but had also placed a generic-brand tea bag on the saucer.

"I can't imagine how this would taste, but I somehow want to use it to show my appreciation," said Oh. "What can that possibly mean?"

"You've become a Kankakeean, Oh," said Tim. "Confused because, like, 'What am I doing here?' is the main thought that buzzes through your head. Guilty because the second most common thought is 'I could be doing something better with my life.' Third and most important, grateful that you're in a place where, screwy as it might be, people try to do the right thing, try to make you as happy as they think you should be."

Jane had taken out her small notepad, the one where she kept her Lucky Fives along with her notes from Miriam. She wanted to clear her head by making a list; she just wasn't sure what information she could codify.

"There was no blood," she said, closing her eyes, imagining the scene in the shanty basement. "Her face was contorted, twisted, turned away, like she had looked at something she didn't want to see. I knew Lilly was dead right away," Jane said.

"It's really quite clear, the difference between life and death. Breath animates, doesn't just make the chest rise and fall. It quivers the eyelids, it pulses under the skin, it warms a body, all things visible to those with eyes that see. Your eyes, Mrs. Wheel. I'm sorry to remind you, also, that this isn't your first dead body."

"So how will we find out cause of death? Wait for the papers? Munson won't be calling us with news we can use," said Tim.

"I'll make a few calls," said Oh.

"Mrs. Bateman? Mary?" Jane asked. "You started to say…"

"I went to see her, told her I was working privately on an old case, and wondered if she remembered or could supply me with any information about Mr. Bateman's gambling charge," Oh said. "Strictly confidential, of course."

"She was quite forthcoming and yet…" Oh stopped, and tapped his finger against the thick rim of his coffee cup.

"Yes?" Jane asked.

"I felt like she wanted me to walk away and think exactly that. That she was forthcoming. I realized, as I drove away, that I'd gained no new knowledge from our conversation," Oh said. "For example, she told me that Bateman had been in jail for only a few months, then got released because of a loophole his lawyer had found in the case. When I asked if he was guilty of running gambling, she said Bateman did the same things that all the other saloon keepers did, he was just honest about it."

"I like an honest gambler," said Tim. "Honest, crooked."

"Better than crooked, crooked," said Jane.

Their waitress came and refilled their cups, hesitating a moment as she held the pot over Oh's cup with the unwrapped, but unused, tea bag on the saucer. He shook his head and covered the cup with his hand. She nodded, seeming to indicate that an understanding had been reached.

"So what did you learn?" asked Jane.

"Hey, Nancy Drew, you're not listening. The good detective said he didn't learn anything from Mary Bateman," said Tim, yawning and stretching.

"Learned nothing
from the conversation,
" Jane said. "You must have learned something, Detective Oh. The leaves are beautiful along the Kankakee River in the fall, but peak color comes in a few weeks. Pinks is a quaint and unusual restaurant, but it hasn't been reviewed favorably in a Chicago paper. And the McFlea Showhouse doesn't open until Sunday, so…"

"It was the way the women all sat and held their hands when we talked. I remember learning long ago that children of a certain era who went to parish schools, Catholic schools, often formed the habit of folding their hands when sitting and listening because the nuns had taught them to do it at their desks from an early age. Like you are doing, Mrs. Wheel," Oh said.

Jane leaned forward over her folded hands and nodded. Tim smirked and shook his head slightly, quietly unfolding his own hands that were resting just like Jane's in his lap under the table.

"The women… Dot and Ollie were there?" asked Jane.

Oh nodded.

"And as we chatted, all three of the women sat with their hands held just so," Oh said, demonstrating. He held his hands in front of him, palms facing up, his right hand on top of the left. He wrapped the fingers of his left hand around his right pointer, holding on to it for dear life. "They held their hands so, and Mary and Dorothy, Dot, rocked back and forth slightly, like this." Oh rocked back and forth almost imperceptibly, the barest of movements.

Jane and Tim both imitated the position and began rocking.

"Protecting those hands, those fingers," Tim said.

"Yes," said Jane, "but from whom?"

18

Jane tiptoed through the dining room and into the kitchen. She had seen Nellie's shoes placed in their usual spot by the door, Don's hat hung on a peg inside the coat closet. They had returned from wherever they had been, their mysterious evening "out."

On the kitchen table, the group photograph taken in front of the EZ Way Inn was still propped against the wall. Nothing was disturbed around the picture. The basket heaped with plastic flowers and fruit was still dead center, the cloth still smooth and unlined covering the round, wooden table. A nightlight was plugged in over the kitchen counter that gave off just enough glow to show Jane that the room remained untouched. But was it untouched? Or had it been Nellified?

Nellie had the ghostly knack of living and working on the surface of a space. She walked through a room and ashtrays were emptied, candy in dishes rearranged to look untouched, pictures were straightened on walls, the nap of a carpet lay redirected and aligned. She left the neat and clean aura of the unlived-in. Years ago when Jane came home alone to an empty perfect house after school, she could calm her fears by standing stone still inside the front door, sweeping the room with her eyes, making sure nothing was out of place. That would mean she was alone— no mysterious strangers lurked behind curtains or closet doors.

Nellification gave Jane a measure by which to assess her safety, her security in a space, but it also rendered the same room sterile, untouched, lonely. Jane remembered too many after-school hours sitting perfectly still, trying not to disturb the objects in the living room. The television tuned to something noisy, a Three Stooges rerun or a loud cartoon, for company, for the sound of voices, even if they belonged to Moe and Curly or a jabbering rabbit and duck. Jane read books and did her home work in her dad's recliner, parked in front of the television, the lamp turned on to its brightest setting, a frivolous 75 watts that Don demanded for reading the newspaper, and Nellie grudgingly allowed. Before her parents picked her up for dinner, Jane repacked her books, smoothed out the pillow in her dad's chair, and straightened the throw rugby the door. Still, she had left a trail. A napkin she had used to clean her glasses was half out of the garbage can, the dishtowel she had dried her juice glass with was unevenly folded. The drawn curtains were slightly in disarray where Jane had pinched them back to peek out at the world.

Nellie walked in the house and went right to the offending objects, straightening, smoothing, stowing, and poof! The room, the house, within five minutes of her arrival, was Nellified.

Is that what happened this night? Had Don and Nellie come into the kitchen, gasped at the photograph, sat and studied it, wringing their hands? Had Don called for a pot of coffee and a cookie to dunk in it while he sat and named all the people? Had Nellie pointed to a few figures herself, spoken disparagingly of whomever she recognized?

Then, after yawning and surmising that Jane would be back late, imagining her lost digging through dusty boxes with Tim, they would rise to go to bed. Nellie would clean their fingerprints off the glass of the photo and replace it just so. She'd wipe Don's cookie crumbs off the table, smooth the heavy plastic tablecloth. She'd clean and put away their dishes, then fill the coffeemaker's reservoir with water for the morning. All would be tidied and untouched— Nellified so Jane would not know if her parents had walked straight through the kitchen and to the bedroom or if they had played out the late-night scenario she had just imagined.

* * *

Jane slept badly. She barely dozed, then woke every thirty or forty minutes to remember Lilly, sitting on top of the boxes in the basement.
She wants to tell me something,
Jane thought, the way one thinks in a dream… absolute clarity one second, a fuzzy haze the next. Lilly seemed to beckon with one hand, point to something. What she pointed to was unclear. The box? Something inside the box that held her body against the wall? At 5:30 A.M., Jane gave up. She rose and wrapped herself in her mother's old chenille robe. In the kitchen, she pushed the button on the coffeemaker and sat down with pencil and paper, ready to make a list, take notes. Anything to clear her mind.

Had Lilly visited her in the night because Jane had put the discovery of her body on some kind of time delay? She couldn't think about it when it happened; her brain was already in the process of filing away too many pieces of information, too many disconnected images, literally. Bateman's severed finger, Duncan's body with another
almost
severed finger, and now, poor Lilly. Jane, with her fuzzy morning brain, tried to organize her thoughts but kept coming back to the same paradox. The two men with their unconnected fingers were connected in their disconnection. Lilly, on the other hand,
no pun intended,
Jane silently told herself, was intact. Dead, yes. Had she been hit in the head? No blood that Jane saw, but she thought she had heard one of the police officers speculating. No mutilation of the body though, no mangling of hands or fingers.

Lilly had probably been dead less than an hour, perhaps less than thirty minutes, according to the eavesdropping Jane had done at the scene.

"Whoever killed Lilly," Jane said aloud, drawing on her notepad, "was in the basement when I came in the house." She held her pen poised over the face of the dog she had just sketched. "The noise was the murderer… maybe propping her up then leaving by the basement door."

She remembered that pile of bricks by the door. They would have been in the way. As the door opened, it would have moved them, pushed them aside. One might have tumbled down from the top of the stack. Jane wrote down Lilly's name and underneath, printed, BRICKS? The one thrown through the EZ Way Inn was a Kingsley Paver. That was the name stamped on its face. She would check the bricks in the basement of 801 today. If she could get into the basement. If not, would her parents report their act of vandalism so she could get Munson to recognize the importance of connecting those bricks? She would also find out what caused Lilly's death. One of those bricks?

"You sick?"

Jane jumped in her chair and stifled a scream.

Nellie had been sneaking up behind her for over forty years, and yet it still spooked her. Her mother was as silent as a baby breathing, and when she appeared at your side or behind your back, she always spoke as if you had been enmeshed in conversation for hours. "In medias Nellie," she and her brother, Michael, had always said. Every conversation with their mother began somewhere in the middle.

"You scared me, Mom," Jane said.

"Yeah?" asked Nellie, sounding not at all displeased.

Nellie poured Jane and herself a cup of coffee. She opened a package of chocolate doughnuts, the kind Jane knew Don and Nellie sold off the bread rack at the EZ Way Inn, the kind that were encased in a hard shell of chocolate, the kind that no one she knew ate anymore. They were the vintage items of the breakfast pastry world. Jane selected one from the box and dunked it in her coffee. It was as different from a bakery croissant, a fancy food store muffin, or a meltingly delicious Krispy Kreme as it could be. It was high in fat (and all the wrong kinds of fat, too), full of chemical preservatives (that gave it a shelf life akin to a Twinkie), and unappetizing in its hard, brown shell (surely containing more carnuba wax than chocolate).

Jane ate her first one in three bites and took a second.

"Where were you last night?"

"Out," Nellie said.

"Yeah?" Jane asked, trying to match her mother in minimalism and attitude.

"We had a meeting, that's all," Nellie said. "What about you? You and Tim find any good junk?"

Nellie had tipped her hand. It had only happened a few times in Jane's company in Jane's lifetime. If Nellie asked her a question, tried to change the subject, deflect her daughter's inquiries, Jane was as close to breaking into the vault of Nellie's memories and secrets as she had ever been.

"I'm going to get to the bottom of all of this, Mom," Jane said softly. "Why don't you tell me about it yourself?"

"I already told you I killed Gus Duncan. Isn't confessing to murder enough for you?"

"Mom," Jane said, "you know…"

"I know, I know. Just because I want to be the one who killed him, doesn't mean I get the title."

"Well, Nellie, maybe not the title you wanted, but if you mean literally, we got that. The title to the building, I mean," Don said, padding into the kitchen dressed in a plaid wool robe and brown, fur-lined slippers. "Morning, honey. Save me a doughnut?"

Jane waited until her father had gotten his coffee and sat down at the round table with them. Nellie started to jump up and get a rag to wipe up the small circle of liquid that had splashed out when Don set his cup and saucer down, but he put his hand over her arm.

"Let it go, Nellie."

Nellie grunted and gave in. At least for the moment. She did take a paper napkin from its holder and mop up around his cup, but she remained seated.

Don gestured to the photograph with his doughnut. The three of them were seated in a half circle around it. Since the round table was pushed up against the wall to fit in this small square kitchen space, the picture was propped up like a fourth guest at breakfast.

"Find this in Duncan's house?" Don asked.

Jane thought it sounded like a statement rather than a question, and she nodded.

"We should have told you a long time ago," Don said, looking directly into his daughter's eyes. "It wasn't fair to keep…"

"Why the hell wasn't it fair?" Nellie asked, her own eyes blazing. "Kids got to know everything their parents do? Even when their parents do something stupid? I thought the point of raising kids was to make them smarter and better. Isn't that what you always said? Educate them and send them off into the world? Jane and Michael didn't need to carry this," she said. "We made
our
bed," Nellie added, hitting the
our
hard, "not theirs."

Don patted Nellie's arm. Jane noticed that he had kept it there when he restrained her from jumping up to clean. He took a deep breath and shook his head at Nellie and smiled slightly.

"But a picture's worth a thousand words, hon," he said gently. "We got to give Jane a few of our own words before she makes up her own."

Don began his story, punctuated by a few snorts and curse words from Nellie, while Jane kept eating doughnuts. She doodled through her entire scratch pad. It wasn't a shocking story, nor was it a particularly surprising one. It all made sense. Sort of. In a Kankakee, Don and Nellie kind of way.

Don had worked as a milkman, a railroad signalman, a farmhand, and a printer's assistant all before the age of twenty to help support his mother and an invalid stepfather who had lost everything in the Depression. Jane knew most of that part of her father's history. He had told her about the dogs who had chased him when he delivered the milk, about the empty bottle he kept in his back pocket as a weapon if he was attacked. As a little girl, she had traced the outline of the large, jagged scar on his ankle. It had been the illustration to the lecture on why she could not have a puppy. Rita, Jane's adopted German shepherd, was the first dog Don had allowed in his house, the first dog, he told Jane, he had ever viewed as a man's potential acquaintance. He would never admit to the possibility of a canine best friend.

Don's dreams of college and a professional life flew out the window when he had to quit high school to support his family, so he modified the dream. "If I could be my own boss," he always told Jane and Michael, "I knew I'd be a happy man." It didn't matter how hard he had to work, how many hours he had to put in, as long as at the end of the day, he had ownership.

"Gus came up to me at the bar of the Brown Jug, used to be over on East Avenue, one night and told me I could buy a tavern and have my own business," Don said. "Told me he could fix it for me."

"Just like that?" Jane asked. "How did you know him?"

"Everybody knew him," Don said. "I don't know how. He was just one of those guys who knew everybody and owned property and always had the money to buy a drink for himself and everybody else. I think he started in the candy and cigarette business, had a piece of the vending delivery service, something like that. Something that got him into every tavern and on the listening end of every conversation when somebody was in trouble or couldn't pay off a note. Gus was there to help or to lend or to give advice. Pretty soon after that, he'd be there to buy or to foreclose."

Don took out his pipe from the pocket of his robe. He had quit smoking cigarettes and tried to keep from lighting up anything in the house; but occasionally, Jane knew, he still indulged. Now he used the stem as a pointer, gesturing to the photograph.

"When that picture was taken, we had just signed the lease on the EZ Way Inn. Your mother and I had been married a few years and saved enough for that little house over on Calista. We put a down payment on that in the spring and by fall, Gus had found an opportunity for me, the EZ Way Inn. I'd own the business, but he'd keep the building. I'd pay him rent, but I'd be my own boss."

"Yeah," Nellie said, "'Cause a landlord never has any boss power over you."

"You liked the idea at the time, Nellie," Don said, without any anger or recrimination in his voice.

He was staring at the photograph, at their young images, full of hope and smiles, and seemed wistful but not bitter. None of this, Jane noticed, was being told in the hard voice he usually reserved for conversations about Gus Duncan.