Edward Gorman - The Autumn Dead

"Gosh," she said. "I'm afraid it's impossible. You know, we really do try to be accommodating here at Windmere, but-" She was too plump and wore too much makeup, but still you could see the erotic twenty-year-old she'd probably been, the full lips especially knowing. But she mined any real human heat with the living brochure monotone of her voice. She shrugged and her breasts raised slightly against the fabric of her bra and the bra in turn against the fabric of her white uniform and it was one of those odd moments-sunlight on linoleum, the smell of floor wax, a robin on a window ledge-when the thought of sex should not have occurred at all but it did. Oh yes, it did. But her green eyes held no promise, and so my erection slunk away.

"Has my cousin been here?"

"Cousin?" she said.

I smiled my glad-hander smile. "I imagine you'd know my cousin. Rides a motorcycle."

Now she smiled, too. "Oh, Evelyn Dain."

"That's right. Evelyn Dain."

"No, she comes Mondays and Fridays." The green eyes were haughty a moment. "The hours everyone else does."

"I should talk to her, I guess. About Patti. See how things are going." Here I had to be careful. Careful and casual. "You wouldn't know where she works, would you? I seem to recall she changed jobs a while back."

The phone rang, helping me. If the nurse had any doubts about me, about who I might really be and what I might really be doing there, they were forgotten in the rush of answering the phone. "Damiano's Aerobics over on Third Avenue."

"Thanks," I said. "And say hi to Patti for me."

She smiled with those wonderful erotic lips-you imagined them the kind of lips sixteenth-century kings demanded in their whores-and then waved me off to take her phone call. After answering, she said, "I'll be glad to tell you about Windmere.” She was back to being a brochure.

"How's your head?" I asked Donna.

"Pretty good. As long as I don't move too fast. She really hit me. Where're you?"

"Phone booth across the street from an aerobics place out on Third Avenue."

"You're joining an aerobics class?"

"No, the woman who hit you. It's where she works."

"God," she said. "That's neat."

"What's that?"

"That you've found her already. I mean, you really are a good detective."

"All I did was run down a couple of things."

"But that's what's so neat, Dwyer. You run down a couple of things and bingo, you've got it."

"That's just the problem."

"What?"

"I don't know what I've got."

"How come?"

"Well, the motorcycle is registered to a Mrs. Slater who resides at the Windmere nursing home. I don't know what relation she has to this Evelyn Dain or why Evelyn Dain is following me or what any of this has to do with the suitcase that Karen Lane hired me to find."

"Yeah, God, it really is confusing, isn't it?"

"Yeah."

"So why're you doing it? I mean, why not just tell Edelman?"

"Because right now the police are saying that Karen Lane's death was an accident resulting from mixing alcohol and barbiturates. Which means they won't be pursuing things. Which means it's left to me, I guess."

"I wouldn't mind if you, you know, sort of paid her back for me."

"Who?"

"Evelyn Dain."

"Paid her back?"

"You know."

"You mean hit her?"

"Not hit her, exactly."

"What's 'exactly' mean?"

"You, know, sort of trip her or something."

"Trip her?"

"That wouldn't be so bad. She wouldn't get hurt but she'd get the point."

I laughed. "It would be a lot easier if you'd just look her up and hit her yourself."

Now she laughed. "Be serious. I've never hit anybody before, Dwyer, except my older sister Ellen, and the one time I did it my mother grounded me for the weekend and I had to miss the Herman's Hermits concert."

"You liked Herman's Hermits?"

"I admit he couldn't sing but he was cute."

"If I get half a chance, I'll trip her."

"But not hard, all right? Just kind of a, uh, regular trip, you know?"

"Right. One regular trip coming up."

"I miss you."

"I miss you, too."

So then I went into the Hardees across the street from the small concrete building with the three storefront windows, one of which belonged to a Penny Saver shopper, one to an appliance store, and the third to the aerobics place. Inside that window you could see maybe twenty women doing exercises as grueling as anything I'd ever done at the Academy.

Knowing what was ahead of me-a stakeout and a long one-I self-pitied myself into justifying a double-decker hamburger, fries, and a vanilla shake. Stakeouts demand a lot of energy.

Loaded down with a white bag smudgy with grease, I went back to my Toyota, turned on the FM to a call-in show where people were arguing about whether condom advertising should be permitted on the air (AIDS was rearranging the American way of life), and proceeded to sit there for the next four and a half hours, watching both the storefront and the gleaming black Honda motorcycle in the adjacent parking lot.

This was a neighborhood in transition. In my boyhood days this had been the best section of town you could live in if your parents were working class, Irish, Italian, and Czech mostly, and every day on the sunny walks proud men in dungarees strolled to work, black lunch pails smelling of bologna sandwiches dangling from one hand, and a local newspaper they loved to curse in the other. You dreamed Plymouth dreams in those days (it had been one of my old man's fondest fantasies to pull up in front of the family house in a new 1955 baby blue Plymouth) as you moved away from the Highlands down here and as you gradually began to realize that, thanks to government loans and your parents' frugality, you were going to be the first generation that got to go to college.

But I didn't know what kind of dreams they dreamed here now. Sixteen-year-old girls pushed strollers past my car now, and your first impression was that they were the infants' sisters but in fact they were the infants' mothers. Scruffy boys in black leather jackets with tattoos on their knuckles and a cigarette hack bothering their throats already came by, too, and old men who gave the air of just wandering. Old women clutching small bags of groceries hurried on looking scared. And bored cops, tired of all the bullshit-and, man, you just don't know how much bullshit beat-cops get laid on them day in, day out-watched it all, just wanting to get back to their tract homes and watch the Cubbies or watch their kids or watch their wives or watch any goddamn thing except this neighborhood get even meaner.

Dusk came and I had to take the risk of running into the Hardees can and emptying my bladder and running back out. I had a splotch on my crotch where, in my haste putting it back in, I'd dribbled. But the motorcycle was still there. The lurid neons at the Triple-X Theater down the street came on and then all the taverns lit up and this big annoying mechanical bear on top of a car wash started waving like King Kong to passing motorists. Several of them had the good sense to flip him the finger.

I watched the ladies and tried to figure out if the somewhat angular blonde leading the class was the woman I wanted. Possibly. But just as possibly she could be the manager, out of sight in some back office. My car stank of fried food. I wanted, in order, to talk to my seventeen-year-old son (who had started missing school lately, going through some kind of teenage funk), Donna, Glendon Evans (to question him more carefully about some of the things Karen Lane had said to him during their time of cohabitation), and Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk-poet whose books I'd been reading lately, to find out just how he'd managed to deal with all the craziness.

Then, around eight o'clock, my bottom very tired, my eyelids getting heavy, the women started filing out of the aerobics center. Their chatter was like bright birds on the soft night air and I liked listening to it. It was happy and human and hopeful, proud as they were of their workout and the good way they felt about themselves at this moment.