The Autumn Dead

Chapter 9

Donna wasn’t there.

She has an apartment building you can get into only if someone inside buzzes you in. I buzzed several times. Nothing.

I walked out to the parking lot and watched the moon and thought about Karen Lane, alternating between absolute certainty that what had happened to her had been coincidental-stroke, aneurysm, as Bill Lynott had suggested-and knowing with equal certainty that she'd somehow been murdered.

"Hello," said a couple walking past me from their car. They were both stockbrokers and both wore gray flannel suits, and both drove Datsun Zs and smoked Merits and belonged to health clubs and vacationed in Aspen and subscribed to the Book-of-the-Month Club. I knew all this because Donna had profiled them for Ad World as typical age-thirty-five consumers. The odd thing was, they even looked alike in a certain way, blond and blue-eyed, friendly in an almost ingenuous way. Their name was Burkett and I sort of liked them.

"Hello," I said. Then, "Say, would you let me into the building?"

"Sure," Todd Burkett said. "Is everything all right?"

"I think maybe Donna's just taking a shower or something. I was supposed to meet her here but there's no answer."

"Come on," Mary Anne Burkett said.

So we went up to one of the nine dark brick buildings piled against small mountains of pine and fine green grass that stretched along a river made silver by moonlight. As Ad World became more successful, Donna's apartments became fancier.

"We're having some stir-fry and white wine," Mary Anne said as we walked up the wide dramatic staircase leading to the second level. "Would you care to join us?"

"Then we're going to watch Cape Fear on the VHS. Have you ever seen it?"

"Yes," I said.

"Isn't Gregory Peck wonderful?" Mary Anne said.

Then I realized that no matter how much I liked them, there was some spiritual demarcation line that would always divide us. The picture belonged-cigars, boxer shorts, cheap straw fedora and all-to Robert Mitchum. Peck is in fact a cypher, little more than a symbol of all that is right with Suburbia. Ethically, he's admirable as hell. Dramatically, he's as bland as an eighth-grade history teacher at a Fourth-of-July ceremony.

"No, thanks. But maybe some other time."

"Peck is really fantastic."

"Yeah, I know."

So they went to their woks and their Water Piks and their copy of Cape Fear and I went down to Donna's and knocked on the door.

I put my ear to the door the way private investigators who specialize in adultery always do. I heard all the sounds an apartment is supposed to make, the vague electronic buzz and crackle and hum that signify that all appliances are alive and doing well. But I heard nothing else.

Then down the hall I heard conversation and turned to see the Burketts talking to Candy James, a TV weather woman who lived in the apartment at the end of the hall. Candy was trying to get herself going in theater, too, and so we'd always just naturally gotten along. "Hi, Jack."

"'Hi."

"I saw Donna leave a few hours ago. She said she was going over to your place."

But then she was supposed to come back here. "You didn't hear her come back?"

Candy, who is small and cute, with a curly cap of black hair and a smile that can melt metal, said, "No, I don't think so, anyway. You think something's wrong?"

"Probably not. I'm just kind of curious is all."

"Well, I've got a key. We swap keys in case we get locked out. You want it?''

"Great."

A minute later I had the key and went in and looked around and found nothing. As usual, the place was a tribute to work but not to tidiness, there being enough books and magazines stacked on the floors and on tables and on chairs to open a branch library. Unfortunately buried beneath all the Ad World research material were such gems as a drop-leaf harvest table with matching bird-cage Windsor chairs and a cast-iron mantel that she'd found in the city dump.

Her bed hadn't been made, there was yellow egg crust on the face of a green plate next to the microwave, the Crest tube in the bathroom looked as if it had been thrown into a trash compactor, then somehow lifted back out again (she has these killer moments of frugality).

Something was wrong. She is prompt, neurotically so, and if she said she'd meet me here, then she'd be here.

But she wasn't.

I went to the phone and stared out of the window at the silhouettes of the pines jagged against the night sky, their tips white in the moonlight. I let the phone ring at my place at least twenty times. Then I tried the offices of Ad World and got nothing and then I tried the number of her assistant, Jill, and got nothing there, either.

One thing about being paranoid is that you keep playing all these alternate scenarios out in your mind. The What-If game. I could reasonably assume she'd gone to my place. But that's all I could reasonably assume. Had she left there? If she hadn't, why wasn't she answering the phone? And that's when my paranoia kicked in and formed mental images of somebody on a black motorcycle, a Honda it was, and God alone knew what this person wanted. Or was capable of. I thought of Karen and how she had looked there at the last and then Karen's face became Donna's and something hard formed in the bottom of my stomach and I had one of those twitching spasms I used to get on the force just before I had to do something that scared me.

A rusted-out five-year-old Toyota is not necessarily built for speed, but I did a very slick job of setting a few Indy records on the way to my apartment.