The Autumn Dead (21 page)

In fact, I had.

Her name had been Karen Lane.

I thanked Irene and left.

I
called American Security to see if they'd need me tonight (supposedly we work
four
 
nights on, thr
ee off, like firemen in some cities). They didn't. Next I called Donna, told her about my last three conversations.

"So this Sonny Howard was a friend of Forester and Price and Haskins and you think there's a possibility that Karen Lane killed him."

"A few people seem to think so."

"But why would she have killed him?"

"That's why I'm going to look up Evelyn."

"Then who killed Karen Lane?"

"If I knew, I'd call Edelman."

She sighed. "Boy, Dwyer."

"Come on."

"What?"

"You're trying to make me feel guilty about not taking you along."

"Am I succeeding?"

"No, because Evelyn is somewhere on the loose and she's not quite hinged properly."

"So I noticed."

"So what are you and Joanna doing?"

"Well,
Bringing Up Baby
is on PBS, so I guess we're going to watch that."

"You don't like Katharine Hepburn."

"I just can't get past all her mannerisms."

"Then concentrate on Cary Grant."

"I'd rather concentrate on you."

"You can't go."

"Boy, that's pretty cynical, Dwyer. Thinking I'd only compare you to Cary Grant because I wanted to go along."

"Right."

"It's a good thing I'm not sensitive."

"Bye, hon."

"Please, can't I?"

"Bye."

"Please?"

T
he three-story gabled house sat on a shelf of land dense with elm, maple, and spruce. A gravel road led up to it. A ring-necked pheasant ambled in front of my headlights and gave me a dirty look. I hit the brakes, the Toyota nearly doing a wheelie. The pheasant did not seem impressed. He didn't speed up at all. He just continued walking his way across the gravel drive and into the night.

I sat there, B.B. King loud suddenly on the FM jazz station I was tuned to, wailing very lonely there on the spring night, a night cold enough for a winter coat. I was still mad at the pheasant, or whatever feeling is supposed to be appropriate to a pheasant who has pissed you off (I guess I wanted to have a talk with him about traffic safety, you know—about looking both directions before you cross any thoroughfare, gravel drives included), and it was while I sat there kind of scanning the underbrush in the wash of my headlights that I saw the black glint.

At first it registered as nothing more ominous than something black and something metal and something shiny glimpsed through the dead brown spring weeds.

But after a few seconds I knew what it would be. What it was.

A black Honda motorcycle.

I clicked off the radio and suddenly the night silence was a roar of distant dogs and trains.

I got out, but at first I didn't go anywhere. I took a piece of Doublemint out of my pocket and folded it over and put it in my mouth and I stared up at the big house. It was exactly the kind of place my old man always had dreamed of, here on several acres of its own land, enough maybe to plant some corn and tomatoes and carrots and green beans on a plot in the back to convince yourself you were really still a farmer the way all the Dwyers only two generations ago had been, and say "screw it" to all the burdens of city life. But watching the house now, I recalled how it hadn't worked out for him, not at all, how he'd ended up owing $700 on a six-year-old Pontiac whose transmission had never worked right, and how the closest he ever came to the country was the cemetery where he got planted.

I heard a moan.

I had put it off as long as I could, and now I couldn't put it off any longer. I had to go over there and see what I'd find.

This had happened to me a few times on the force, when I'd let somebody else have first peek at somebody badly injured or dead. But now first peek belonged to me.

When I saw her I thought again of Karen and how she'd looked there at the last in my arms and I thought of my father there in his hospital bed and I thought of a wino I'd seen beaten by a couple teenagers, I just remembered the eyes and the fear that gave way to a curious kind of peace, some secret they knew just before pushing off, some secret you only got to understand when you were once and for all going to push off.

I knelt down next to her there in the weeds. She wore, as always, her leathers. Now the torso part was sticky with red. Somebody had shot her in the chest. The blood was like a bad kitchen spill, splotchy and gooey. It was warm and smelled. I got my hand under her blond hair the color and texture of straw. Her blue eyes watched me all this time. The fear was giving way, fast. In a couple of minutes she was going to know the secret everybody from St. Thomas Aquinas to Howard Hughes had wanted to know.

"Evelyn, I need you to answer one question."

Just watching me.

"You've been following Karen, trying to get some proof that she killed Sonny."

Faintly, a nod.

"Did you kill Karen?"

Shaking her head. Then blood began bubbling in the corner of her mouth. I closed my eyes.

Then she cried out, "Sonny!" And now it was my turn to watch her, watch the secret come into her eyes, and feel her start to go easy in my grasp.

I said an "Our Father" for her, not knowing exactly what else to do, just an "Our Father" silent to myself, as a train rattled through the night in the pass above, and a dog barked at a passing car somewhere down the road.

I checked her neck, her wrist, and then put my head to that part of her chest not soaked in blood. She had pushed off, no doubt about it. I took her hand and stared at her face there, lit by my flashlight, at the freckles, the forlorn mouth; and for the first time I was curious about her—what her favorite foods had been, what sort of music she'd liked, what her laugh might have sounded like on a summer afternoon. There is an Indian sect that believes you can see a person's soul leaving the body if you watch out of the corner of your eye. I watched out of the corner of my eye, but I didn't see anything. Maybe it was gone already; or maybe it was just waiting for me to leave before it rose, shimmering and transcendent; or maybe, the worst thought of all, there is no soul—maybe the body I stared down at was no different from the body of a rabbit or cat you saw on a dusty roadside, filthy in death and useful only to those who relish the taste of carrion. Maybe that was the secret, and if it was, I didn't want to know. I didn't want to know it at all.

I turned out my light and left her there in the weeds and went on up the sloping gravel drive to the dark house.

I
tried my American Express card and when that didn't work I went over into the garage and got a screwdriver and tried that and that didn't work either, so I did what the real novice criminal does; I took off my jacket and wrapped it around my fist and then pushed my fist through the back-door window, the noise of smashing glass almost obscene in the stillness, and then I took the jacket off my hand and slid it back over my body and simply reached in through the broken window and undid the lock.

Inside, I went through a back porch that smelled of apple cider and lawn fertilizer. Then I went through a kitchen that smelled of the sort of food you fix in a wok. Then I went through a dining room big enough to give a major restaurant some problems. Moonlight shone softly through a line of long, narrow windows onto the ghostly white cloth covering the formal dining table and the built-in buffet. The living room had a soaring ceiling, a real Palladian window, and a fireplace above which hung a McKnight print. Evelyn may have suffered from mental problems; she certainly hadn't suffered from poverty.

I went up the stairs to my right, the sound of my footsteps lost in the deep-pile carpeting and the noise of the wind outside.

The second floor was every bit as impressive as the first. There was a master bedroom Tut would have envied, complete with a sunken bathtub big enough to hold swim tryouts in, and a den filled with forty years of Book-of-the-Month Club selections, all those oddments from curios like Jack Paar to the real stuff like William Faulkner.

The room where the boy had lived was easy enough to identify. There were a single bed, a bookcase with twenty-five cent paperbacks of Robert Heinlein, Jerry Sohl, Mickey Spillane, and several of the Dobie Gillis books. The closet contained chinos with little belt buckles in back, the kind that had been popular at the time he'd died in 1962, and the bureau drawers orderly stacks of white socks and jockey shorts. On the walls were posters of the Beach Boys (Brian looked to weigh about 100 pounds in those days) and Elvis with his sneer.

In other words, nothing useful.

Two doors down the hall my luck changed. What appeared to be nothing more than Evelyn's room with its Wedgwood blue curtains and matching bedspread and stuffed animals (a duck's eyes seemed to sparkle with intelligence, watching me) proved otherwise once I sat down at her desk.

Next to a Wang computer was a large reel-to-reel tape recorder that was patched into a phone system sitting next to it. I wondered what this was all about. I turned on the recorder, tiny amber lights haunting the darkness, and sat down and listened.

"You know who this is, don't you?" This was Evelyn's voice.

"I'm getting very goddamn tired of this."

"You're protecting that woman. It's time you came forward."

 
"I have to go now." Not until then had I realized whose voice it was. Ted Forester's.

"If you go, I'll phone the police."

A sigh. "How much money do you want?"

"You should know me better than that by now, Mr. Forester."

"I—I'm in no position to go to the police."

"You know she killed him."

"I really need to—"

"Why are you protecting her?" Anger had begun to edge into her voice.

"I'm not protecting her."

"Of course you are. All three of you are. And I won't let you anymore. I won't let you. You'll see." By now she was in tears, her own kind of dark psych-ward tears. There was rage but there was no power, she was drifting off into her madness and so she did the only thing she could. She hung up.

I let the tape roll and sat there in her room and felt sorry for her again, thinking of her freckles and her crazed eyes. She was one of those born truly luckless; not even money could put her life back together again.

The next conversation was with Larry Price. Predictably, he was not as diplomatic as Forester had been. He cursed her a lot and threatened her a lot and it was he, not she, who hung up.

Then came Dave Haskins. From the beginning, he sounded miserable. Over and over he said, "You don't understand what's going on here. We're not—" Then he stopped.

"You're not what?"

"I can't say. Ted and Larry would—"

"Hurt you?"

"Yes, God, don't you understand that? That's exactly what they'd do. They'd hurt me."

"She killed Sonny. And I'm taping all these conversations to turn over to the police. And—"

"If you want to talk to somebody, don't talk to me, all right? Ted and Larry are the ones—"

"I followed you the other day."

"What?"

"I followed you."

"Why?"

"I follow all of you. I follow everybody." She paused. "You almost went to the police, didn't you?"

He said nothing.

"Didn't you?"

Very softly: "Yes."

"You're getting tired of it, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"You're the only good one of the three. And I'm not just saying that. I've followed all of you and I've talked to you on the phone and I know that you're the only good one of the three. I know that. " She was going off again, and the rest of the conversation consisted mostly of her telling him how good he was and wouldn't he please go to the police. But all he said at the end, and obviously without any conviction, was "Give me a few days to think about it, all right? Please give me a few more days."