Edward Gorman - The Autumn Dead

Taking a deep breath, hefting my flashlight as a weapon the way cops do, I started toward the house. If she'd found a way in, I'd find a way in. And then I'd confront her and find out all the things I needed to know, and maybe then I'd stumble onto the suitcase Karen Lane had hired me to find.

I was halfway to the house when she hit me. She got me from behind and she got me clean and I don't think I even had time for one good obscenity before the back of my head seemed to crack open and before I automatically put my hands out to soften my collision with the ground.

The back of my head hurt and the front of my head hurt and the side of my head hurt. There was a terrible taste in my throat and I needed to pee. Badly. The way you do when you wake at 2 A.M. from a night's drinking. I lay in a cluster of dead leaves over which a sheen of frost sparkled silver in the moonlight. My hand, for no reason I could understand, clutched a brittle brown pine cone.

I began the careful process of getting up, trying to gauge if I'd been hit hard enough to suffer a concussion, and wondering vaguely where the closest emergency hospital was.

The first thing I did was take care of my bladder. I leaned my left hand against a hardwood for support and then let go, the yellow stream raising steam and making a hard constant noise on the last of autumn's leaves. Then I took out my handkerchief and began daubing it against the back of my head. There was only a small smudge of blood on the white fabric when I held it out for appraisal. Despite a headache, I did not seem to be hurt badly. My watch said nine-fifteen. I'd been out less than fifteen minutes.

In the west wing of the house, on the second floor, I saw the arc of a flashlight splash across a pinkish wall, and then go dark. She was inside now. Busy. I wasn't going to let her get off easily. Not at all. I thought of Donna's joke-couldn't I trip the lady in leather just a little bit? I was going to trip her a whole lot.

I moved awkwardly at first, staggering a bit like a stereotypical drunk, but gradually I got used to the headache and moved with a little less trouble. When I reached the front yard, which was defined by severe flattop hedges on both east and west ends, I went up to the oak front door and tried the knob.

Locked.

I put my ear to the door. Faintly I heard the hum and thrum of a house at rest but nothing else.

I went around to the rear, to the area between the garage and back door. It was cold and my head still hurt, but I was angry with her now and I was damn well going to get to express my anger.

I tried the knob on the back door. It turned easily. I went inside, up three steps covered with a rubber runner, and into one of those open kitchens with a huge butcher-block table like a sacrificial altar in the center, and pots and pans hanging from a suspension above. They gleamed in the moonlight falling golden through the mullioned windows. I smelled paprika and cocoa and coffee. I smelled thyme and mustard seed and basil. They were feminine smells and pleasant and I wanted to stand there for hours and float on them the way I used to float on marijuana. Contact high is the term I wanted, I think.

Upstairs she bumped a piece of furniture and it was loud as a truck overturning. She was searching for something, apparently, and apparently searching desperately.

I wrapped my hand around my flashlight and proceeded through a house with accents of bricks and brass, with beams over the living room, and crown moldings everywhere. The furnishings ran to Early American but I don't mean the stuff you see in suburban furniture stores. I'm talking, among others things, two items of special note: fan-back Windsor chairs and a Chippendale mahogany slant-top desk, items antique hunter Donna would get goofy about. I'd always known that Larry Price had come from a wealthy family; I just hadn't known how wealthy.

A sweeping staircase curved up into the darkness at the top of which two long narrow windows let in light.

I moved as quietly as I could up the stairs. At the top I smelled perfume from the master bedroom that lay thirty feet away. An eighteenth-century walnut longcase clock tocked the time. I looked down the hall. Light from her flash shone in a room at the end of the hall, between door and jamb.

The clock covered any noise my tiptoe steps might have made. I was going to go in fast and make no concessions just because she was female. I was going to trip the hell out of her.

The door was open maybe three inches. I raised my foot to kick it in.

But I didn't have to. She yanked it open for me.

And then stood there with a very fancy silver-plated.45 in her hand and said, "You bastard. I should kill you right here."

Five minutes later, me sitting on a couch in a den filled with the sort of leather-bound classics nobody ever actually read and enough leather furniture to please the richest lawyer in the land, she threw my wallet back at me.

"Who the hell are you?" I said.

She just shook her head and went over and sat very efficiently on a broad leather ottoman. Her bottle-blond hair was almost white against the black leather of her riding suit. For the first time, her helmet gone, I could see her face, the broad, lopsided mouth, the earnest blue eyes, the freckles that somehow made her seem younger than the lines around her mouth and eyes indicated she was.

She put her head down, like an athlete who has just finished a long run, but the one time I squirmed to lift weight off one buttock and put it on the other, her head snapped up and she pointed the.45 in the approximate vicinity of my forehead.

Then she put her head back down again and it was then I sensed it, that certain but special air the insane exude. I'd experienced it once while visiting a cop friend on a psych ward, felt it in the vivid stares that followed me with both fear and ferocity, in the curious inexplicable smiles some odd gesture would suddenly evoke. You feel sorry for them but they scare you, too-like a sick dog you come upon, wanting to help him, but fearful he might be rabid.

She raised her head and said, "He killed Sonny. He was one of them, anyway."

"What?"

She spoke with the kind of fragile gentleness you associate with poor but honorable spinsters. "Isn't my English clear, Mr. Dwyer?"

"What I guess you said is, 'He killed Sonny.'

"That is in fact what I said, Mr. Dwyer."

"Well, I've got a couple of questions about that."

"Which are?"

"First of all, who is the 'he' you're referring to, and second, who is Sonny?"

The blue eyes grew grave. She sat there looking old suddenly, and tender too, and something like a chill worked down my back, and I felt afraid of her. It wasn't the gun, it was her simple flat connection to some truth I did not understand, the ageless mad truth of the fanatic.

"You know who 'he' is, Mr. Dwyer, and you certainly know who Sonny is. That's why you want the suitcase. So you can sell it to the men who killed him."

Then she very carefully got up and, even sensing what she was going to do, all I could do was sit and watch, fascinated as much as frightened.

She got me just once, but it was a good clean hit with the butt of the.45 right on the edge of my jaw. The headache, which had waned, came back instantly. It was now joined by something very much like a toothache.

I started to move, my male arrogance instinctively believing that I could simply grab her fragile wrist and throw her to the floor, but she had other ideas.

She put the cold, oil-smelling weapon right to my temple and said, "I'm going to make you a deal, Mr. Dwyer."

"What deal?" I wanted to sound hard, even harsh, giving her the impression that even though I had a mouth full of blood and the world's biggest ice-cream headache, I was still in charge here. I was a man, and dammit, men were always in charge of women, right? Even women with guns. Right?