Edward Gorman - The Autumn Dead

I pulled my car into the half-empty lot of a place called The Nook (needless to say, regulars called it The Nookie), and walked behind a couple of men with black lunch pails through the front door, smelling the silty residue from the hog kill. The air smells and feels a certain way when cows are killed. Hog kills fill the air with textures and odors all their own.

The interior, long bar on the left wall, three bumper pool tables down the center, booths and pinball games to the left, got rid of the hog odor anyway, replacing it with beer, cigarette smoke, microwave pizza, sweat, and perfume. The perpetually turning BUDWEISER sign hanging over the cash register and the wide space-age-model Seeburg jukebox (drop in two quarters and it would take you to Pluto, and play you a couple of Hank Williams, Jr., tunes along the way) and the pinball games with their busty ladies and the discreet little red plastic electric candles in the booths gave the long, low, dark place most of its light. The mood was jovial now-the men buying paycheck rounds of shots-and-beer and the women treated with outsize courtesy-but by nine it would all change and there would be at least a few fistfights, savage ones. Back in my police days, I'd come into dozens of places like this one and seen enough blood to rival the killing floor where many of these men worked-eyes hooked out with thumbs, throats ripped open with broken beer bottles, noses smashed in with working-shoe heels, and women slapped so hard and so long that their faces were swollen beyond recognition. But it was the women who were the most curious of all, because when you tried to arrest the husbands or boyfriends who'd done this to them, the women would jump on you, physically try to stop you from dragging their men to the curb and the car. It was as if they understood how miserable the lives of their men were and therefore forgave them nearly any atrocity.

I ordered a shell and had some beer nuts and looked around to see if I could see Chuck Lane, and when I didn't see him said to the bartender, whose arms were so thick with tattoos they looked like some kind of shimmering snakeskin, "You seen Chuck?"

"So who wants to know?"

"Friend of his sister's."

He shot me a smirk. "His sister's got a lot of friends."' He put a fat left finger to his right nostril and snuffled like a cokehead in need. He was short and meaty with sideburns of a length and width I hadn't seen since 1967. His teeth were dirty little stubs. He had a blue gaze that combined malice and stupidity with chilling ease. If Richard Speck had a brother, this guy was it. "Rich ones, too, from what I hear. And you don't look like no rich one."

I sighed. "I just want to see Chuck. It's important. So if he's here, I'd appreciate it if you'd let him know that Jack Dwyer wants to talk to him."

"It worth five to you?"

"That's only in movies. Just call Chuck."

"I need some grease to do it because I got to walk all the way down the basement stairs. The intercom's on the blink."

"Consider it good exercise."

"I got an inflamed prostate. It hurts to walk."

"Goddamn, are you serious? You're going to make me pay you five bucks to go get Chuck?"

"Yeah."

"Why don't I just go down there myself?"

"He won't let you in unless you know the password. He's got, you know, bill collectors and like that after him."

"So I have to give you five bucks to go get him?"

"I ain't kiddin' you about the prostate."' And with that he produced a brown prescription bottle and rattled it at me like some voodoo icon. "This is a legit prescription right from the doc." He kind of grabbed his crotch and frowned. "It's like I got this baseball between my legs and it's real hard to move."

So I laid five on the bar.

"Tell you what. While you're waitin’, you have another shell and it'll be on Kenny."'

"Who's Kenny?"

"Me.''

"Oh, yeah. Thanks."

So Kenny, whose very theatrical walk reminded me of Charles Laughton as the Hunchback of Notre Dame, asked a biker-like guy two stools down from mine, "You watch the register for me, Mike?"

"Anybody touches that sumbitch," Mike said, showing a gloved fist the size of a baseball mitt, "he's dead meat."

I had to make sure to bring Donna here next time we kind of wanted to relax and enjoy a quiet evening.

"So you're looking for Karen."

"Right."

"Mind if I ask why?"

"Yeah, I do mind."'

He shook his head. "You still don't like me, do you, Dwyer?"'

I sighed. "It doesn't matter, Chuck."

"'You think because I live down here, I don't have any pride?"

I looked around. His "apartment" was one big room with imitation knotty pine walls and the sort of furniture you find at garage sales. There was an aged Ziv black-and-white TV with enough aluminum foil on the rabbit ears to cook several steaks in. There was a multicolored throw rug, meant to resemble a hooked rug, and you could see stiff patches where somebody had spilled things or thrown up.

This was about where you would expect to find Chuck Lane twenty-five years later. "Luckless" was the word for him. He'd been born with a clubfoot, and when he walked the movement was so violent and awkward, you forgave him any sin because you could gauge the physical pain and humiliation he felt just trying to get down the street. But there was a lot to forgive him for. He was a thief-in eighth grade, he'd taken my baseball glove, and I had yet to forget it-and he'd always played on the fringes of real crime, doing favors for punks who enjoyed brief power with hot-car rings or shoplifting rings or by hiring out to smash up people who owed money or who were plugging their private parts into places they didn't belong. In the early sixties Chuck had distinguished himself by trying to give his girlfriend an abortion in the back seat of his car with a coat hanger and a great deal of stupidity. She'd bled to death all over the seat covers and the floor,Chuck frozen in fear that he'd go to the slammer for murder. He didn't. He went to the slammer for manslaughter. When he got out, he came to work here at the tavern, which was owned by another man who lived on the periphery of law. But by this time in his life, Chuck wasn't more than a part-time bartender and occasional petty thief. He played a lot of poker. He wasn't any better at it than he was at anything else. During the days I'd gone out with Karen, I'd learned how much she'd loved him but also how much of a burden he was, always in need of money or a place to hide or, simply, comfort, his mental stability never having been the best.

Now he was in his forties and heavyset and shaggy with a reddish beard and the kind of colorful Saturday-night clothes that had gone out with leisure suits.

"Why're you looking for Karen?"

I sighed. "Chuck, I'm asking you a straightforward question. Do you know where Karen is?" I wanted to see her for a simple reason. To tell her how Glendon Evans was knocked unconscious, to get a simple, honest answer as to what was really in the suitcase.

"I ain't seen her."

"Right."

"I'm telling you the truth."

He got up from his overstuffed chair and crossed the room to get at a carton of Camels. I had to look away. I'd always felt ashamed of myself around him, ashamed, I guess, that my limbs were intact. He didn't deserve to be born crippled. Nobody did.

He tore open a new pack and said, "She in some kind of trouble or something?"

"You know anything about a suitcase?"

His sister's eyes stared at me. "Suitcase?"

"Right."

"Uh-uh."

He moved across the floor again. I looked away. "Still embarrasses you, don't it?"

"What?"

"My foot."

I didn't say anything.

"You always was that way, Dwyer." He laughed then and I didn't know why he laughed; all I knew was that he'd just shown me teeth badly in need of a dentist.