Edward Gorman - The Autumn Dead

"You know how I see Jim-this guy you're playing?" he said.

"Uh-uh."

"Close your eyes. I'm going to paint you a picture."

"All right." I closed my eyes.

"He's forty-three years old. He lives in one of the suburbs. He's twenty pounds overweight, and no matter how hard he tries to diet, around eleven o'clock every night he sneaks down to the refrigerator where his wife has got this big sign that reads THINK BEFORE YOU EAT. Only he's so ravenous, he nearly rips the door off and then he just pigs out. Preferably on sweet stuff, but at this point he'll go for anything. He's disgusting to watch. You getting a picture?"

"I'm getting a picture."

"He goes to a Methodist church every Sunday but he nods off during the sermon. He wears Hush Puppies. During the sixties he got a college deferment so he didn't have to go to Nam but he didn't necessarily agree with all the people in the streets. But now this is the tricky part. He works for this corporation where their people are always getting fired. His boss is a real tyrant. Jim uses Valium and Maalox and Turns because inside he's a mess. He's losing his hair, and his erections aren't what they used to be, and even sending his only child to a state university is killing him financially. He's not shit, you seeing it?"

"I'm seeing it." And I was. "He eats because he's secretly depressed, right?" It was like acting class, fun, exhilarating, and only faintly embarrassing.

"Right."

"And maybe he and his wife don't really communicate much anymore, right?"

"Now you're flying, Jack."

"And he always feels that his back is to the wall, and that even the wall's going to cave in on him, right?"

"Exactly. And so, when First National gives him a home-equity loan, it's much more than just a loan-symbolically. Here's this fat guy in Hush Puppies who's this absolute piece of dust with his wife and with his boss-it's First National saying to this guy, Hey, we're your friend, pal. Other people may piss on you and spit on you and revile you with every dirty name imaginable-but not us, we're your friend, can you dig that-your friend? So what do we hear in his voice when he says, 'If it wasn't for that home-equity loan I got from First National, I wouldn't have been able to send Timmy to college'? What are we hearing, Jack?"

The bastard nearly had me in tears. "We're hearing gratitude because somebody finally gives a damn about this poor sad son of a bitch."

"That's exactly what we hear, Jack, and that's exactly what we want to hear from you. Gratitude. Because First National's your pal, your compadre, your best bud."

We got it in one take.

After the session, I went down the hall to the john and on the way I glanced out one of the few windows in the two-story facility to the parking lot where spring was struggling to paint everything green and crocus purple and crocus yellow and apple-blossom pink.

She was at the back of the lot, between a Pizza 2-U van and a large blue Buick. She just sat there and I wondered if she ever got hot inside those black leathers and that inscrutable black helmet, and then I wondered if she wore them for reasons of safety or because she liked the melodramatic edge they gave her.

But now it was time I found out not only who she was but what she wanted, so I went to the west end of the building and down the FIRE EXIT stairs and out the door. Being a cop got me in the habit of always carrying a ballpoint and a tablet that fit in the back pocket of my pants. I didn't need a gun right now. I needed the tablet.

The outdoor smelled of sunlight and diesel fuel and flowers. I wanted to be fishing. I worked my way along a line of cars in the lot until I came even with where she was, six cars over. There was an old woman apparently waiting for somebody in the doctor's office next door. She observed the way I sort of crouched down as I moved. She frowned at me, not frightened in the least, but angry. She was probably going to turn me in.

I came up from behind the Pizza 2-U van and stood four feet from the motorcycle.

And then she turned, obviously sensing me somehow. She'd had her engine running, so it was no trouble to do a fairly exotic wheelie and get out of there. The bike reared like a bronc, the long and curving lines of the woman in leathers as one with the metal itself, and then it came screeching and roaring down in contact with the pavement again and shot off in between a maze of parked cars.

There was no way I could catch her and I didn't intend to try.

But now I had her license number, and for now that was the only thing in the world I needed.

The fourth precinct was built back in the 1930s, when the then-Mayor had an architect for a son-in-law. A bad architect for a sonin-law. Which explains why Number Four looks like a cheesy papier-mâché set for a film set in mythical Baghdad. Built of concrete, it seems to be all minarets and spires and gargoyles- fanciful touches indeed for people named Mike O'Reilly and Milo Czmchek and Rufus Washington.

The interior of the Fourth resembles a big metro newspaper; desks butted up against each other, people running up and down the corridors between the desks, machines for coffee, sandwiches, pop, cigarettes, and newspapers lining the walls of the corridor leading to the rest rooms and the holding cells. Oh, yes, I should mention the para-bookmaking activities, too. At any given time, half the people in the Fourth, men and women alike, are laying down money on events of various descriptions, from the Cubs, Sox, Bears, to which local pols are finally going to get busted for (a) graft, (b) bestiality, or (c) general stupidity.

Somewhere in the welter of all this-the windows open wide to the spring and the cops daydreaming like fourth graders anxious to be outdoors-sat six-two Martin Edelman, my best friend and former partner. Today he was modeling one of his four Sears suits, the blue number, and one of the white shirts whose collar was blood-spattered from his shave this morning. (Even with a safety razor, he can commit atrocities Jack the Ripper could not have even conceived.) He has the sad blue eyes of a rabbi who has seen far too much of the world's nonsense and pettiness and cruelty, but then there is his smile, which is curiously innocent and open, if only occasionally on view. His brown toupee was on slightly crooked, but I saw no point in telling him. It is always on crooked.

A cop named Manning leaned in just as I started to put my hand on Edelman's shoulder. "You in for the Cubs?"

"How much?" Edelman said.

"Ten."

"Jeeze."

"Ten, Edelman. You won twenty last week. Maybe you'll win forty this week.

Edelman, taking out his wallet, said, "The way you hustle people, Manning, you should be an insurance salesman."

Manning said, "You forget, Martin. I was an insurance salesman."

"Oh, yeah."

"You got the Cubbies and two points," Manning said, and vanished.

Edelman started to go back to his typewriter-he does very well with two fingers, very well-when I said, "Someday one of the TV stations is going to do a story on all the betting cops do."

He turned around and showed me his smile. He always manages to make me feel as if seeing me is the most special thing that's happened to him in a week. And I always hope it is.

"Dwyer, hey."

"Hey, Martin."

We shook hands and I just looked at him. In some odd way he's my brother, and I knew this the day we first met years ago back at the Academy when neither of us could shinny up a rope worth a damn. These days, we even share the same problems-we both need to do exactly the same things: lose ten to fifteen pounds, use a few more quarts of Visine a week, and try to convince ourselves that the sky is not going to fall in within the next twenty minutes.