Edward Gorman - The Autumn Dead

"And?"

"And to be honest, I don't know so much about lately."

"Lately?"

"The past few weeks."

"You haven't seen her?"

"Oh, I see her. But she's in one of her-moods." Her voice was an odd mixture of anger and sorrow. I liked her. She was tough in the way good people are tough. "I mean, I don't think we've split up or anything. She just gets-"

"Kind of crazy."

"Yeah, I guess it wouldn't be unfair to put it that way. Kind of crazy."

I thought of how she'd said 'split up.' Obviously she wanted me to know they were lovers.

"I wonder if you'd give me her address."

"You gotta know I'm going to ask you why?"

"Because I may be able to help her."

"True blue?"

"True blue. I may have a lead of sorts on Sonny."

"Everything's in her aunt's name."

"Huh?"

"House, credit cards, even her Honda."

"I see."

"Just look up her aunt's name in the phone book and you'll have the address."

"Thanks."

"She was supposed to be here tonight but she didn't show up. Didn't phone or anything. That's why I had to pull Mimsy in."

Now I wanted to leave and she still wanted to talk.

She said, "I guess there's one thing I should tell you."

"What's that?"

"She can get kind of violent."

I thought of what she'd done to Donna and to Glendon Evans. Not to mention me. I said, "Yeah, I've heard rumors to that effect."

"But even if she did hurt you, she wouldn't mean to."

I smiled. "I'm sure that would make me feel a lot better."

She laughed and went into another cigarette hack and said, "She's great at apologies. I guess that's what I'm really trying to say. She does these terrible things-anybody else I would have left years ago-but she's got this fantastic way of apologizing. You ever know anybody like that?"

In fact, I had.

Her name had been Karen Lane.

I thanked Irene and left.

Icalled American Security to see if they'd need me tonight (supposedly we work four nights on, three off, like firemen in some cities). They didn't. Next I called Donna, told her about my last three conversations.

"So this Sonny Howard was a friend of Forester and Price and Haskins and you think there's a possibility that Karen Lane killed him."

"A few people seem to think so."

"But why would she have killed him?"

"That's why I'm going to look up Evelyn."

"Then who killed Karen Lane?"

"If I knew, I'd call Edelman."

She sighed. "Boy, Dwyer."

"Come on."

"What?"

"You're trying to make me feel guilty about not taking you along."

"Am I succeeding?"

"No, because Evelyn is somewhere on the loose and she's not quite hinged properly."

"So I noticed."

"So what are you and Joanna doing?"

"Well, Bringing Up Baby is on PBS, so I guess we're going to watch that."

"You don't like Katharine Hepburn."

"I just can't get past all her mannerisms."

"Then concentrate on Cary Grant."

"I'd rather concentrate on you."

"You can't go."

"Boy, that's pretty cynical, Dwyer. Thinking I'd only compare you to Cary Grant because I wanted to go along."

"Right."

"It's a good thing I'm not sensitive."

"Bye, hon."

"Please, can't I?"

"Bye."

"Please?"

The three-story gabled house sat on a shelf of land dense with elm, maple, and spruce. A gravel road led up to it. A ring-necked pheasant ambled in front of my headlights and gave me a dirty look. I hit the brakes, the Toyota nearly doing a wheelie. The pheasant did not seem impressed. He didn't speed up at all. He just continued walking his way across the gravel drive and into the night.

I sat there, B.B. King loud suddenly on the FM jazz station I was tuned to, wailing very lonely there on the spring night, a night cold enough for a winter coat. I was still mad at the pheasant, or whatever feeling is supposed to be appropriate to a pheasant who has pissed you off (I guess I wanted to have a talk with him about traffic safety, you know-about looking both directions before you cross any thoroughfare, gravel drives included), and it was while I sat there kind of scanning the underbrush in the wash of my headlights that I saw the black glint.

At first it registered as nothing more ominous than something black and something metal and something shiny glimpsed through the dead brown spring weeds.

But after a few seconds I knew what it would be. What it was.

A black Honda motorcycle.

I clicked off the radio and suddenly the night silence was a roar of distant dogs and trains.

I got out, but at first I didn't go anywhere. I took a piece of Doublemint out of my pocket and folded it over and put it in my mouth and I stared up at the big house. It was exactly the kind of place my old man always had dreamed of, here on several acres of its own land, enough maybe to plant some corn and tomatoes and carrots and green beans on a plot in the back to convince yourself you were really still a farmer the way all the Dwyers only two generations ago had been, and say "screw it" to all the burdens of city life. But watching the house now, I recalled how it hadn't worked out for him, not at all, how he'd ended up owing $700 on a six-year-old Pontiac whose transmission had never worked right, and how the closest he ever came to the country was the cemetery where he got planted.

I heard a moan.

I had put it off as long as I could, and now I couldn't put it off any longer. I had to go over there and see what I'd find.

This had happened to me a few times on the force, when I'd let somebody else have first peek at somebody badly injured or dead. But now first peek belonged to me.

When I saw her I thought again of Karen and how she'd looked there at the last in my arms and I thought of my father there in his hospital bed and I thought of a wino I'd seen beaten by a couple teenagers, I just remembered the eyes and the fear that gave way to a curious kind of peace, some secret they knew just before pushing off, some secret you only got to understand when you were once and for all going to push off.

I knelt down next to her there in the weeds. She wore, as always, her leathers. Now the torso part was sticky with red. Somebody had shot her in the chest. The blood was like a bad kitchen spill, splotchy and gooey. It was warm and smelled. I got my hand under her blond hair the color and texture of straw. Her blue eyes watched me all this time. The fear was giving way, fast. In a couple of minutes she was going to know the secret everybody from St. Thomas Aquinas to Howard Hughes had wanted to know.

"Evelyn, I need you to answer one question."

Just watching me.

"You've been following Karen, trying to get some proof that she killed Sonny."

Faintly, a nod.

"Did you kill Karen?"

Shaking her head. Then blood began bubbling in the corner of her mouth. I closed my eyes.

Then she cried out, "Sonny!" And now it was my turn to watch her, watch the secret come into her eyes, and feel her start to go easy in my grasp.

I said an "Our Father" for her, not knowing exactly what else to do, just an "Our Father" silent to myself, as a train rattled through the night in the pass above, and a dog barked at a passing car somewhere down the road.

I checked her neck, her wrist, and then put my head to that part of her chest not soaked in blood. She had pushed off, no doubt about it. I took her hand and stared at her face there, lit by my flashlight, at the freckles, the forlorn mouth; and for the first time I was curious about her-what her favorite foods had been, what sort of music she'd liked, what her laugh might have sounded like on a summer afternoon. There is an Indian sect that believes you can see a person's soul leaving the body if you watch out of the corner of your eye. I watched out of the corner of my eye, but I didn't see anything. Maybe it was gone already; or maybe it was just waiting for me to leave before it rose, shimmering and transcendent; or maybe, the worst thought of all, there is no soul-maybe the body I stared down at was no different from the body of a rabbit or cat you saw on a dusty roadside, filthy in death and useful only to those who relish the taste of carrion. Maybe that was the secret, and if it was, I didn't want to know. I didn't want to know it at all.