Edward Gorman - The Autumn Dead

"Ambulance," was all I could say, scarcely able to speak at all.

The overhead lights were on now and the magic was gone; you could see how old the floor was, and how beaten up the bleachers, and how cracked the tall windows. It was not the Stairway to the Stars of countless proms, after all. It was just a gym in a school more than half a century old and now in ill repair because the diocese saw no future in the Highlands. Nobody ever had.

She looked comic herself now, fake, the way the dancers had, fake gray tint in their hair, fake bellies, fake wrinkles and jowls and rheumy eyes, but what she was putting on was even more alarming because she was imitating death itself, like some phantom beauty from a Poe poem, but without the flutter of an eyelid or warm breath in her nostrils, not the faintest flicker in wrist or neck.

"Ambulance!" I shouted again, and this time I heard how ragged and desperate my voice had become and saw in the eyes of those encircling me a modicum of pity and a modicum of fear-both of her death and of the potential rage in my voice.

The priest, young as a rookie ballplayer, yet shorn of the grace that comes with age, knelt down beside me and said, "Maybe I'd best say some prayers with her." He didn't say "Last rites." He didn't need to. He produced a black rosary and began saying a "Hail Mary" and an "Our Father" and then a woman somewhere sobbed and for the first time I realized that the music had stopped, and that in the gym now there was just the rush and roar of time itself and nothing more, nothing more at all.

"You were the man dancing with her?"

"Yes."

"Can we talk a minute?"

"Sure."

Forty-five minutes had passed since the dance had ground to a nightmare halt, all motion seeming to be slowed down for a time, faces ripped open with tears and fear and the bafflement only death can inspire.

A white box of an ambulance sat with its doors open near the west entrance. The three people from the coroner's office had finished with her now, and two attendants in white, both with potbellies and hippie beards and eyes that had gazed on death perhaps too many times, had put her inside a black body bag, which was in turn put on a gurney that was now being loaded inside the well-lit confines.

Fanned around the ambulance were three hundred people from the dance. Many of the women had their husbands' coats draped over their shoulders. While the women were given to tears and occasional whispers, the men seemed doomed to an odd silence, gazing at the ambulance as if it explained some long-sought answer to a puzzle. There was a great deal of booze, punch from the bowl, Scotch in pint bottles, gin and vodka in flasks, beer in cans and big clear plastic cups. They'd been ready for a night when alcohol would set them free; now all alcohol could do was tranquilize them. Technically, there was a city ordinance against drinking out here, but none of the cops in the three white squad cars said anything. They just moved through the chill night, the stars clear and white in the dark blue sky, the scent of fir and pine and new grass contrasting with the smell of medicine and mortality coming from the ambulance.

"You're Dwyer, right?"

"Right."

"Used to be on the force?"

"Right."

"Thought so." He offered me a Camel filter. I shook my head. "I'm Bill Lynott, Benny McGuane's cousin."

"Oh. Right."

Benny McGuane was a sergeant in the Fourth Precinct and we'd been buddies back in our first years of directing traffic and chastising husbands who kept wanting to break the bones of their cowering little wives. In those days, that was all the law would let you do, chastise them. Maybe that's why Benny drank so much and maybe that's why he'd had such fragile success with AA, on and off the program every few months or so.

"How's he doing?" I said.

"Much better."

"Good."

"Think it's really going to work for him this time."

"He's a good man."

"He is that." He had some of his Camel filter, standing there next to me, his face like a psychedelic phantasm of the sixties, alternately red and blue in the whipping lights of emergency vehicles. He exhaled. "Shitty thing to happen at a reunion."

"Yes."

"You know her?"

"For a long time."

"You have any reason to think there was any foul play involved?"

"I don't think so."

He looked at me carefully. He had one those fleshy Irish faces you associate with monsignors whose secret passion is chocolate cake. "You don't sound sure."

There was the matter of the suitcase she'd wanted me to find. The matter of Dr. Glendon Evans being beaten up. The matter of her argument with Larry Price in the alley. The matter of somebody on a black Honda motorcycle following me around. "I guess I can't be sure."

"Any particular reason?"

"She was a woman who had a lot of friends and a lot of enemies."

"I just got a quick look at her. Damn good-looking woman."

"She was that, all right."

"You think I should call for a plainclothes unit?"

I thought about that one, too, and then I said, "I guess all we can do now is wait for the autopsy."

"That's twenty-four hours minimum."

"I know."

"If anything did happen here, aside from natural causes, I mean, that's a damn long wait. You familiar with poisoning victims?"

This kid was good. He must be taking all the night school courses available. That's one way you can divide cops these days. The men and women who put in their nighttime at the community colleges know a lot more than my generation of beat-pounders ever did.

"Somewhat."

"She look like she might have been poisoned?"

"You familiar with aneurysms?"

I shrugged. "Not really."

"Did she just slip into unconsciousness?"

"I guess. I'm not really sure. I mean, at first I thought she was just getting drunk."

"It might have been a stroke."

"Or a heart attack."

He sighed. "My old man always said not to count on anything and he was right." He snapped his fingers. "You can go just like that."

I was listening to him, sharing in his sense of how fragile our hold on living was, when out near the alley, next to a long silver Mercedes Benz sedan, I saw Larry Price grab a short, fleshy man and shake a fist at him. A tall, white-haired man with a Saint-Tropez tan and an arrogance that was probably radioactive stood nearby, watching. His name was Ted Forester. He was the man Glendon Evans had told me Karen was having an affair with. The man getting pushed around was a forlorn little guy named David Haskins. In high school the trio had been inseparable, though Haskins had always been little more than an adjunct, an early version of a gopher. Then, abruptly, Forester opened up the rear door of the Mercedes and Price pushed Haskins inside. A lot of people were watching all this, including Benny McGuane's cousin.

"What do you suppose that's all about?"

"I don't know," I said.

"Think I'll go find out."

By this time, Forester was in the car and behind the wheel. The headlights came on like eyes and the car surged forward. Bill Lynott put himself in front of the silver car, daring it to run him over.

He went over to the driver's side. I edged closer, so I could hear.

"What's the trouble here?"

"No trouble." Ted Forester was obviously not used to answering the questions of some cop, of the uniformed variety yet.

"Why did you push that man into the car?"

"To be exact, Officer, I didn't push him into the car. My friend Larry Price pushed him into the car. And he did so because David Haskins, the man who is now snoring soundly in the back seat, got very drunk and obnoxious tonight. If, that is, it's any of your business."

"I'd like to see your license, please."