Dead Guy's Stuff (5 page)

Rita, the German shepherd that had joined the household over the summer, perked up her ears just before Jane heard a knock at the door.

"Charley must have gotten out of his department dinner," Jane said, rising. She knew he had taken to knocking before entering so she wouldn't feel he was being too familiar, and she appreciated the respect. At the same time, though, it annoyed her that he couldn't just use his key and stop walking on eggshells. Then again, hadn't she laid the intricate eggshell parquetry herself?

Key or no key, it wasn't Charley. Even though he knew she adored forties tablecloths, complete with dancing fruit and jitterbugging knives and forks, Charley would not stand at the front door with a turquoise-and-red cowboy-print tablecloth over his head.

"I am the ghost of vintage hand-printed textiles. Treat me with vodka, or I will trick you with confusing machine reproductions."

"Timmy!" Jane hugged the wrapped figure. "What are you doing here?"

"Checking to see if you made your lucky five today," he said, shaking out and folding the tablecloth. "When you called me this morning, I was up in Kenosha at a monster sale, so I thought I'd pop in for sustenance on my way back to Kankakee. Who's here?"

Not waiting for an answer, Tim walked into the living room, saluted Nick, and raised an eyebrow at Detective Oh.

"Jane on another crime spree, Detective?" he asked, shaking Oh's hand.

"Hardly, Mr. Lowry. All quiet at your flower shop?"

"So quiet you'd hardly know I was in business. Kankakee is so provincial when it comes to shopping in places where bodies were found."

Tim took the drink Jane handed him and slumped into an overstuffed armchair.

"After the initial rush of customers who wanted to see how long a chalk outline really lasted— and they were all, of course, 'just looking'— my flower business has taken a turn for the worse." Tim sipped his drink. "However, in the perverse way of things, my antique sales and special orders have been through the roof."

"People might not want their wedding flowers tainted by murder, but an inlaid mahogany highboy chest that's tasted mystery only adds to the patina, yes?" asked Jane.

"Guess so. Got anything heartier than these cheese doodles? What's this?"

Nick, Jane, and Oh simultaneously shouted
no
as Tim reached for the jar.

Jane reached out protectively as Tim turned the jar in the lamplight. For her, the finger had ceased to be a freakish specimen and had taken on the personality of Bateman. He was, after all, a saloon keeper, and she knew something about them. She often bought photos and personal memorabilia around which she daydreamed and constructed whole lives from the spare parts she collected after the principals were gone. Should she feel less about an actual spare part?

"Tim, this is Bateman. Bateman, Tim," Jane said.

Tim struggled with what to say. He was neither appalled nor grossed out; he just knew he would never again have an opportunity like this. It was the perfect situation for the perfect smart-ass remark, and the pressure was overwhelming. He held up his free hand in mock protest.

"Jane, when I ask for
two
fingers of scotch, I mean
two
."

5

Jane didn't finish packing her car until after midnight. Tim and Nick had scrounged dinner, then disappeared upstairs to discuss Nick's summer with Charley digging for bones. Tim took his godfathering duties seriously. Even when Jane didn't need her best friend to help her solve mysteries or date an Eastlake chair or price a Monmouth stoneware elephant, he showed up with tickets to a concert or a ball game, charming Nick just the way he had charmed her when he sat down next to her in kindergarten.

"You look good in that color," he had said, seriously assessing her one-piece, romper-style playsuit, and a lifetime friendship had been born.

Jane packed the last box of Shangri-La napkins and coasters into the backseat, then thought better of it. She removed the box and took out just one coaster and a handful of napkins that had the name and address of the tavern and tucked them under her sun visor. She'd ask her dad if he'd ever heard of the place, if he'd ever met Bateman or Mary.

After Tim had arrived, Detective Oh had stayed for another half hour or so, explaining his private citizen status to Tim. When he got up to leave, he gestured to Bateman's finger, swimming in their midst.

"I will ask someone at the department to check if there was ever any open book on the Shangri-La, any assault charges filed by Bateman. The wedding photo is dated, so we have a time frame."

"But you said we can't date the finger," Nick said. Nick had engaged Oh in a discussion of dating dinosaur bones and was shocked that the finger couldn't be tagged and shelved with the same certainty.

"We can't exactly do a
when,
but we can probably do a
who
with that finger."

"How?" Nick and Jane had both asked.

"This finger still retains something very important," said Oh.

Jane paused to see if she would have to prompt him to tell them. He smiled ever so slightly. Jane realized he didn't explain further because he wanted to hear her speculate. Nick, too, looked at her for the answer. Jane looked at the finger, now the centerpiece of the cocktail tray. Tim looked up from his investigation of the cocktail picks. He had been rubbing and sniffing the plastic dice to make sure they were really Bakelite.

"Of course," she said. "The finger still has a fingerprint."

Oh had rewarded her detection by allowing his slightly upturned lips to relax into an almost smile.

Jane turned off the garage light, went into the kitchen, and noticed that the finger was still on the chrome tray. She wrapped the jar in one of her tea towels and went back to the garage. She carefully wedged it into her glove compartment, already brimming with area street maps and file cards and crossword puzzle books. The street maps got her to where the sales were, the file cards enabled her to make her many lists, and the crossword puzzles, the most challenging
New York Times
collection she could find, helped her pass the hours she waited in the car for a sale to open. Now the finger, Bateman himself, would give Jane some company.

Tim was checking out her new pottery and books in the living room when she came in.

"Nick asleep?"

"Pretty close."

Tim opened an Alice and Jerry reader, slightly dog-eared but in better condition than so many old textbooks. After all the years they'd stayed in a classroom and all the grubby, sticky fingers that had paged the texts, anxious to see what Mother would say when she found out that her favorite vase had been knocked off the mantle by Jerry, it was a wonder that any of them had survived. Tim banged the covers shut so the dust flew up between them.

"Get enough to eat?" Jane asked, flopping onto the couch.

"Never at your house. Do you only rummage? Don't you ever shop in a grocery store?" Tim flopped down next to her.

"Not if I can help it. There was stuff in there though. Charley gets food."

"No Charley tonight?"

"He had a department dinner or party or something; then he's packing up to come here for a week while I'm in Kankakee."

"When you get done decorating the EZ Way, you can help me with a project. I've talked the alumni association at Mac into a Show House fund-raiser."

Jane was astonished that anyone from their old high school would agree to such a plan. Casino nights, pot lucks, silent auctions, bingo, even a talent show, maybe, but a Decorator Show House? In Kankakee? Who would they get to decorate? Whose house? Would they get anyone to pay to walk through it?

"I bought the old Gerber place. Cheap. My old condo had too many memories. Time for a new start; new project. Gerber's was a mess, and I was going to do it over before I moved in, soooo… I offered it for the Show House."

"You bought Eddie Gerber's house? On Cobb? You're going to live on Cobb Boulevard?"

"Yeah. The fund-raising committee agreed pretty much because I offered the house and put a little spin on what the designers can do. No one can spend more than five hundred dollars per room— it's got to be all flea market and rummage. Only exceptions are some appliances and the new master bedroom bed, which I was buying anyway. And the designers are all amateurs, too. People were fighting to do rooms."

"I had my first kiss in Eddie Gerber's basement."

"What a coincidence! I'm decorating the basement."

"On that ratty tweed couch next to the Ping-Pong table."

"I'll put up a plaque."

* * *

Charley joined them for breakfast. He dumped his briefcase and boxes of papers into the study and poured himself an extra large mug of coffee.

"I might have to sit on a committee next weekend, fill in for Beegle. Any chance you'll be home?" Charley asked Jane.

"I'd like to be back on Thursday. That'll give me time to do a lot at the EZ Way and do sales here on Friday morning. I have a bunch of packages to send out to Miriam, too."

Nick came in from the garage where he had been showing Tim his own collection of vintage bicycle parts.

"I'm almost ready to put it all together," said Nick, "just need another fender and maybe a better rear wheel. Tires shouldn't be any problem."

Tim nodded. "I bet I can find all that stuff in three sales. I've got the list," he said, patting his shirt pocket.

Jane gave Charley a kiss on the cheek and hugged Nick, reminding him of his weekly round of sports practices and guitar lessons. She reminded Charley that the calendar was on the inside cupboard door, and Charley nodded. He didn't remind her that he had filled out the calendar, and that he had always been better at keeping to the schedule than she had. Those reminders all seemed beside the point.

She was perky and happy and ready to hit the road. Charley kept asking himself what was so different about Jane now, but he couldn't put his finger on it. And he knew that until he could figure it out, he had no chance of putting their household back together.

"Don't forget to take care of Rita," Jane said, retying the bandana around the dog's neck.

"Like we could forget…," Charley stopped himself. He loved this dog. Why did he find himself speaking lines out of a script that cast him as the grumpy old husband? Especially now that Jane seemed, more and more, to be playing the ingenue?

More hugs, reminders, kisses, smiles, and Jane was ready to take off. Tim had already left, racing off with a quick promise to call her at her parents' house later.

Jane, on the road, was daydreaming of Don and Nellie's tavern, trimmed out as a post-WWII hangout, swing music blaring from the jukebox. She saw the café curtains unfurling at the windows, a breeze wafting through the barroom. Napkins, anchored by sweating beer mugs, fluttered, then fell. The soft buzz and flutter of cards being shuffled and dealt, and a baseball game turned down to a low murmur provided the soundtrack. It was when she pictured Dot and Ollie, sitting at the bar in their bowling shirts, that she realized she was picturing the Shangri-La instead of the EZ Way Inn. That couple, twirling around behind the bar, enchanted with each other and making merry with the customers, wasn't Don and Nellie, it was Mary and Bateman. That damn Bateman, winking at her and waving his jaunty three-fingered salute. What was he trying to tell her?

6

"That son-of-bitch. I don't give a damn what anybody says, that guy's a son-of-a-bitch. He'd swindle his own mother, then sue her for fraud. I hate that son-of-a-bitch."

Jane came in through the kitchen door of the EZ Way Inn on the last son-of-a-bitch, but had heard her father's tirade in its entirety as she came in from her car. His voice had carried outside through the screen door and set her teeth on edge.

Don was a gentle man as well as a gentleman. He had always cautioned her never to use the word "hate." Kill 'em with kindness had been his motto, and he had tried to instill it in both Jane and her brother, Michael. She had only heard him use the word hate about one individual and that was his landlord, Gustavus Duncan.

Gus Duncan had been the thorn in her father's side for as long as Jane could remember. He owned several buildings in the Kankakee area, nothing fancy, but spots of property here and there. He collected rents from saloon keepers and restaurant owners and, Jane assumed, shopkeepers, barbers, any type of business tenant who wanted a small, unkempt storefront, badly managed by an absentee landlord. Gus would collect the rent on the first of the month, then disappear through one of the cracks in the plaster sure to appear in any of his properties every time a truck rumbled by or a clap of thunder shook the foundation. Gus did not employ a handyman, a plumber, a painter, or a carpenter. He rented out the shell of a building and promised nothing. Unless you considered his growled, "See you next month," a promise rather than a threat.

Don had treated the EZ Way like some kind of semi-precious gemstone. A stone, that although rough and ordinary on the outside, could be polished into luminescence on the inside.
An agate,
Jane thought,
or maybe more of a geode, bumpy and dirty on the outside, cracked open to reveal a sparkling world of wonder.

Some might not see it. The massive oak bar, cleaned and polished daily to a warm glow. Nellie's café curtains in a cheery print adorning the spotless windows. The top of the line paneling on the walls of the small excuse for a dining room connected to the bar area. But Jane never failed to see the shimmer and shine of her parents' loving care of this ramshackle old building. Her brother, Michael, had once remarked that their parents took better care of the EZ Way than they did of them, but Jane had shushed him.

"It's their work," she told him. "It's what they have to be proud of." Michael, only twelve at the time, looked up at his adored older sister, clearly puzzled. "Shouldn't they be proud of us?"

Don was still muttering under his breath when Jane came in and faced him. "Daddy, aren't we supposed to avoid the H-word? I wasn't allowed to hate anyone," Jane said, setting down two bags that she had carried in and putting her arm on her father's shoulder.

"It's okay to hate one person. Just pick out one guy and concentrate on hating him so purely that you don't have any left to spill over on the rest of your life," Don said. "In fact, it's okay for everyone to hate Gus Duncan. He can be the one person in the world that everyone hates."

Don moved around behind the bar to get a glass of water. Jane looked at Nellie.

"Mom? A clue?"

"Gus called a meeting and didn't show up. Who cares? Papers are signed. Nobody can get out of it," Nellie said, shrugging. "I don't know what he's so mad about."

"The guy has jerked everyone around for fifty years, and he's still doing it."

Through a combination of her father's rants and raves and her mother's shrugs and grunts, Jane figured out that Gus Duncan had scheduled a meeting with all of the former tenants turned owners, ostensibly to give out any extra keys or paperwork he had in his files. He had, apparently, offered to buy everyone breakfast at Pinks Café, the kind of uncharacteristically generous gesture that Nellie hadn't trusted in the first place.

"Don't know what he's all excited about," she said, pointing her elbow at her husband. "Gus hasn't picked up a check for fifty years; he ain't going to start now."

"Gus still live in the shanty?" Jane asked.

Gus lived in a four-room house, made of the same tar-paper-and-trash construction that the EZ Way Inn boasted, about three blocks away. He owned three identical houses— called the shanties by everyone in town— on the same block; and even though his rental properties must have made him a wealthy man, he had never moved away or traded up. He bought bars and shops, one by one, on the west side of town, usually from desperate sellers, and added to his seedy little empire, never changing his own address, his surly manners, or his dirty clothes.

Jane and her dad drove slowly over to shanty number one and parked in front. Duncan's fifteen-year-old truck sat outside. Jane shook her head and thought about a house sale at this place. She had always shunned the precautions that she noticed that some pickers took, but even she might don a mask and gloves to enter this one.

"I bet that son-of-a-bitch has mattresses stuffed with money in that rathole."

"Have you ever been inside?" Jane asked.

Her father stared at the house. Jane, too, looked at the broken outer door, the grime-streaked windows and torn screens. Everything about this eyesore screamed, "
Get a tetanus shot!
"

"Never."

Jane, made bold only by wanting to appear that way in front of her father, knocked loudly on the door. "Mr. Duncan? Gus?"

Don banged his fist on the door. "Duncan? Open the door."

Jane turned the latch on the screen, and the door fell aside. The house unlocked and all the windows open— was he inside, ignoring them?

"Could be in there drunk, I guess," said Don, quieter now.

"We'd better check," Jane said.

The living room, or main room or family room or whatever you'd call the space that the front door opened onto, was furnished with two filthy couches, their stuffing spilling onto the floor, and three broken chairs. A large television sat in one corner. It was on, tuned to a cable sports channel, the sound muted. The floor was littered with pizza delivery boxes, sandwich wrappers, and greasy brown paper bags. Slimy green-and-brown vegetation was piled on the floor by the couch. Aquarium plants? Jane cautiously approached and bent over to examine it.

"Guess Gus doesn't like lettuce and tomato on his sandwiches."

The smell inside the house was as horrible as it was indefinable. Spoiled food, yes, and unwashed clothes, naturally, but what gave the air its peculiar pungency, its nauseating weight?

Jane and her dad cautiously weaved through the room, picking up and replacing their feet carefully to avoid the debris on the floor.

Cats? Was it the smell of kitty litter? A dead or dying dog?

"Did Gus have any pets?"

"I don't think he was high enough on the food chain to actually care for another…" Following Jane through the kitchen door, Don let his voice drift off.

This was a stage set. Sam Shepard or David Mamet? Jane tried to remember what play she had seen in Chicago with John Malkovich throwing dishes and hurling plates and silverware. Any number of them, she guessed. This was the set for something that would involve half-wit brothers fighting over worthless property. Here was a prop master's dream of pots and pans and cans and boxes, stacked and balanced. A torn linoleum counter was covered with months, years of grease. Dirty cups, empty fifths of Jack Daniels, and prescription medicine bottles were shoved out of the way into wads of dirty paper towels to make a small work space by the sink.

Mismatched dishes, crusted with food and cigarette butts, covered nearly every surface and every inch of floor space. Jane pushed away old soup bowls with the toe of her canvas shoe, so glad she hadn't worn sandals or slides on this warm September day.

Who saw Gus first? Impossible to tell since Jane and her dad both inhaled sharply at the same time. A crumpled heap of dirty laundry in front of the sink? That's what Jane hoped for, but she knew better. Too solid and bulky a pile for just clothes. Although the light was dim, Jane saw that the shaggy, dark shape farthest from her feet was a head. Gus was curled on his side, and his head was tucked, chin to chest. She followed his profile, her eyes moving down his body and focusing on his hands. Palms were up, his hands cupped toward his face. A supplicating pose? Had his hands fallen open in prayer? A pitted, crusty, serrated knife lay next to him, as if he had dropped it there when he fell.

When she heard her dad heading out of the room, muttering something about calling the police, Jane took out her cell phone from her back pocket to call 911.

"Don't touch anything, Dad. I'll call on my phone." She heard her father come back and felt him touch her shoulder.

"Don't look at this anymore, honey. Come on," Don said.

"But…" Jane squatted down next to Duncan, holding her breath as tightly as she could. Removing a tiny credit card-shaped flashlight from her vest pocket, she shined it on Duncan's hands. They were slightly open, stiff, as if displaying some object, illustrating some point of conversation. The right hand, half-curled in death, seemed no longer human. Now it looked as if it were carved out of marble. The left hand, less sculpture, more flesh and blood, was not marble, merely carved. The left middle finger was pointing toward the thumb, not simply curved or angled toward it, actually turned on its side, lying flat against the palm, the dirty fingernail touching the pad of the thumb. A digital contortion that would have been impossible, as Jane kept proving by trying to get her own middle finger into the same pose, had Gus Duncan's left middle finger not been almost severed from the hand itself.