Edward Gorman - The Autumn Dead

When I saw the box reading GLENDON EVANS, I pulled the Toyota over to the side and parked and got out. At first all I wanted to do was walk a few feet up the asphalt and take in some more of spring's birthing sights, new grass already vivid green and cardinals and blue jays soaring in the air. I looked behind me, at the ragged silhouette of the city in the valley. This was an aerie up here, and Glendon Evans should consider himself damn lucky.

To reach the condo you had to walk eighty-some stone steps set into a hill at about a sixty-degree angle so narrowly laid out that you could get slapped by overhanging spruce branches all the way up. A squirrel who apparently wanted to get himself adopted accompanied me from a three-foot distance all the way up.

The condo, as imposing as one of the gods of Easter Island, had been set into a piney hill and angled dramatically upward, so that no matter what angle you saw it from, you knew its owner was more powerful than you could ever be. There were three floors. Draperies were drawn on all the windows. The lower level was a two-stall garage. The doors were closed.

Spread across the flagstone patio in front of the place was a variety of lawn furniture, the good doctor apparently getting ready for summer. A redwood picnic table, several lawn chairs, and a gas grill big enough to handle the Bears looked ready for burgers and beer. Only the lonely wind, a bit chill and tart with pine, reminded me that it was still a little early for lawn furniture, and suddenly there was an air of desertion about the place, as if the people who lived here had fled for some mysterious and possibly terrible reason.

I took the key from my pocket again and tried the front door. No problem.

Then I walked into something not unlike a French country house, with raised oak paneling and a limestone fireplace and Persian tugs and built-in bookcases and a leather couch as elegant as a swan's neck. There was a Jim Dine print above the fireplace. The east wall was a fan-shaped window that looked over the winding creek below, still silver with the last of spring's frost. The west wall was a cathedral window from which you could see an impenetrable forest that stretched all the way to a line of ragged hills above which the white tracks of jets now slowly disintegrated against the bright blue sky.

Looking around, I realized that I had made a mistake coming here. Maybe, after twenty-five years of living in places like this, Karen Lane could claim this world as her own, but I couldn't. I was as out of place here as an atheist in a church.

At the last I hadn't even taken her money, just agreed to help her out of some misguided sense that she needed my help. But the condo said very different things to me-that where Karen Lane was concerned, I was the one who needed help, and that it was unlikely that I was here to get anything half as innocent as a suitcase full of "sentimental" things.

I went to the right into a kitchen that kept up the motif of gorgeous capitalistic excess.

Sunlight struck blond wood floors and bleached pine cabinets and a free-standing range that dominated the room. Above the sink, situated to the left of a white wall phone, was an outsize photograph of Karen, done in a mezzotint for dramatic effect. The reverence of the shot told me all I needed to know about the good doctor. He was hooked.

I went back to the living room and was just passing the winding metal staircase where it wound its way to the second level when something splatted on my forehead like a fat warm drop of summer rain.

I reached up and touched a finger to the wet spot on my skin. I brought my finger away and looked at it. There was no doubt at all what it was.

Suddenly I looked around the condo and saw not beautiful furniture of dashing design but all the places somebody with a gun could hide. The afternoon shadows seemed deep now, and I was self-conscious, as if I were being observed.

I took a few steps back and looked up to the second level. Lying even with the border of the carpeted floor was the back of a man's head. He was close to falling off the edge. His dark hair and the shape of his skull were all I could see. There was a bloody knot in the center of his head and it was from this that the blood dropped, tainting the soft gray carpet below.

I took a few deep breaths and wished I had brought my gun and then cursed myself for not bringing my gun and then cursed myself for cursing myself because there had been absolutely no reason I should have brought my gun. I'd come here to a psychiatrist's condo to retrieve a suitcase. Not exactly dangerous work.

I went up the winding steps for a closer look at the man. He wore a monogrammed blue silk dressing robe over a pair of lighter blue cotton pajamas. The monogram read "GE." He wore expensive brown leather house slippers, new enough that you could see the brand name imprinted on the soles. He was maybe six feet and slender and his skin was the color of creamed coffee. But he was one of those black men whose features are as white as Richard Chamberlain's. He was probably my age, but there the similarity ended because he looked brighter and handsomer and, even unconscious, a lot better prepared to put his personal stamp on an impersonal world.

I glanced quickly around the second level. This was an open area with another fan-shaped window to my right and a huge Matisse to the left. You could see dust motes tumble golden in the sunlight. The carpeting was the same light gray as downstairs, and it ran down a long hail with three oak doors on each side.

I lifted up his hand. His pulse was strong. I leaned down and looked closer at his wound. It was open to reveal pink flesh. It would most likely require a few stitches.

I went in search of a bathroom, which proved to be the second door down to the right. On the way I passed a room with a Jacuzzi and a master bedroom laid out to resemble a den where people only occasionally slept.

In the john-or should you call something composed of marble with a sunken bathtub big enough to hold Olympic tryouts a john? — I soaked a towel in warm water and then found some Bactine and Johnson amp; Johnson Band-Aids and then I filled a paper cup with water about the right temperature to drink.

I was halfway out the bathroom door when I thought about the few times I'd been knocked out back in my police days. I'd forgotten one important thing. I went back to the medicine cabinet, which I noted held any number of brown prescription bottles with Karen Lane's name on them. Among many others, the medicine included Librium and Xanax. Somewhere amid the prescriptions, I found some plain old Tylenol. I thumbed off the lid and knocked three of the white capsules into my hand. When I managed to get him awake, he was going to have a headache and he was going to appreciate these.

I was halfway down the hail, hands loaded with the towel and the Bactine and the Band-Aids and the drinking water and the Tylenol, when he staggered toward me and said, "If you move, I'm going to kill you. Do you understand me?"

"Yes," I said. "Yes, I do understand that."

And I did. He looked to be in pain. He also looked frightened and slightly crazed.

He held in his slender tan hand a fancy silver-plated .45, and I had no doubt at all that he would, for the slightest reason, use it.

"Now," he said, "I want you to lead the way downstairs. We're going to go to the kitchen and sit in the nook and you're going to answer questions, and if you do anything at all that seems suspicious, I'll shoot you right in the belly. All right?"

I hadn't realized till then how badly he was hyperventilating. Nor had I realized that he had begun to sob, his whole torso lunging with cries that seemed half grief and half frenzy.

Then he pitched forward face first and collapsed on the carpet soft and gray as a pigeon's breast.