The Autumn Dead

Chapter 6

The highlands has a shopping district of four blocks, stores that even back in the forties looked old, two-story brick jobs mostly, with the names of their original owners carved in fancy cursive somewhere near the roof, the names running to Czech and Irish, with the polysyllables of an occasional Italian name also being included. Growing up, I'd come here with my parents to shop for groceries or to buy something from the hardware store or the auto-parts store or to get a shirt from the secondhand store (when you really had dough you went to Penney's), but shopping centers had killed all that off now-you drove out to one of five malls on this side of town that had taken the place of the merchants who had settled and helped build this area since as far back as 1849, when six thousand people migrated up here from the Virginias. Now you didn't have merchants, you had tavern-owners. That's all that was left now, bars advertising naked women and country-Western music and big-screen Bears games, with a store that sold fancy cowboy clothes or a concrete lot filled with the sad hulks of used cars thrown in to serve the workingmen who bring their paychecks and their beaten hopes down here. When you come here at night, it's not so bad, with workers from the slaughterhouse a mile away and their Czech girlfriends wandering from tavern to tavern like people out of a John Steinbeck novel. But in the daylight you see how everything needs paint and how the walks are cracked, and you see all the names spray-painted on the sides of the taverns, lurid reds and blacks and green on whitewashed surfaces; KILL QUEERS! NIGGERS SUCK! MEXES STAY OUT!

I pulled my car into the half-empty lot of a place called The Nook (needless to say, regulars called it The Nookie), and walked behind a couple of men with black lunch pails through the front door, smelling the silty residue from the hog kill. The air smells and feels a certain way when cows are killed. Hog kills fill the air with textures and odors all their own.

The interior, long bar on the left wall, three bumper pool tables down the center, booths and pinball games to the left, got rid of the hog odor anyway, replacing it with beer, cigarette smoke, microwave pizza, sweat, and perfume. The perpetually turning BUDWEISER sign hanging over the cash register and the wide space-age-model Seeburg jukebox (drop in two quarters and it would take you to Pluto, and play you a couple of Hank Williams, Jr., tunes along the way) and the pinball games with their busty ladies and the discreet little red plastic electric candles in the booths gave the long, low, dark place most of its light. The mood was jovial now-the men buying paycheck rounds of shots-and-beer and the women treated with outsize courtesy-but by nine it would all change and there would be at least a few fistfights, savage ones. Back in my police days, I'd come into dozens of places like this one and seen enough blood to rival the killing floor where many of these men worked-eyes hooked out with thumbs, throats ripped open with broken beer bottles, noses smashed in with working-shoe heels, and women slapped so hard and so long that their faces were swollen beyond recognition. But it was the women who were the most curious of all, because when you tried to arrest the husbands or boyfriends who'd done this to them, the women would jump on you, physically try to stop you from dragging their men to the curb and the car. It was as if they understood how miserable the lives of their men were and therefore forgave them nearly any atrocity.

I ordered a shell and had some beer nuts and looked around to see if I could see Chuck Lane, and when I didn't see him said to the bartender, whose arms were so thick with tattoos they looked like some kind of shimmering snakeskin, "You seen Chuck?"

"So who wants to know?"

"Friend of his sister's."

He shot me a smirk. "His sister's got a lot of friends."' He put a fat left finger to his right nostril and snuffled like a cokehead in need. He was short and meaty with sideburns of a length and width I hadn't seen since 1967. His teeth were dirty little stubs. He had a blue gaze that combined malice and stupidity with chilling ease. If Richard Speck had a brother, this guy was it. "Rich ones, too, from what I hear. And you don't look like no rich one."

I sighed. "I just want to see Chuck. It's important. So if he's here, I'd appreciate it if you'd let him know that Jack Dwyer wants to talk to him."

"It worth five to you?"

"That's only in movies. Just call Chuck."

"I need some grease to do it because I got to walk all the way down the basement stairs. The intercom's on the blink."

"Consider it good exercise."

"I got an inflamed prostate. It hurts to walk."

"Goddamn, are you serious? You're going to make me pay you five bucks to go get Chuck?"

"Yeah."

"Why don't I just go down there myself?"

"He won't let you in unless you know the password. He's got, you know, bill collectors and like that after him."

"So I have to give you five bucks to go get him?"

"I ain't kiddin' you about the prostate."' And with that he produced a brown prescription bottle and rattled it at me like some voodoo icon. "This is a legit prescription right from the doc." He kind of grabbed his crotch and frowned. "It's like I got this baseball between my legs and it's real hard to move."

So I laid five on the bar.

"Tell you what. While you're waitin’, you have another shell and it'll be on Kenny."'

"Who's Kenny?"

"Me.''

"Oh, yeah. Thanks."

So Kenny, whose very theatrical walk reminded me of Charles Laughton as the Hunchback of Notre Dame, asked a biker-like guy two stools down from mine, "You watch the register for me, Mike?"

"Anybody touches that sumbitch," Mike said, showing a gloved fist the size of a baseball mitt, "he's dead meat."

I had to make sure to bring Donna here next time we kind of wanted to relax and enjoy a quiet evening.

"So you're looking for Karen."

"Right."

"Mind if I ask why?"

"Yeah, I do mind."'

He shook his head. "You still don't like me, do you, Dwyer?"'

I sighed. "It doesn't matter, Chuck."

"'You think because I live down here, I don't have any pride?"

I looked around. His "apartment" was one big room with imitation knotty pine walls and the sort of furniture you find at garage sales. There was an aged Ziv black-and-white TV with enough aluminum foil on the rabbit ears to cook several steaks in. There was a multicolored throw rug, meant to resemble a hooked rug, and you could see stiff patches where somebody had spilled things or thrown up.

This was about where you would expect to find Chuck Lane twenty-five years later. "Luckless" was the word for him. He'd been born with a clubfoot, and when he walked the movement was so violent and awkward, you forgave him any sin because you could gauge the physical pain and humiliation he felt just trying to get down the street. But there was a lot to forgive him for. He was a thief-in eighth grade, he'd taken my baseball glove, and I had yet to forget it-and he'd always played on the fringes of real crime, doing favors for punks who enjoyed brief power with hot-car rings or shoplifting rings or by hiring out to smash up people who owed money or who were plugging their private parts into places they didn't belong. In the early sixties Chuck had distinguished himself by trying to give his girlfriend an abortion in the back seat of his car with a coat hanger and a great deal of stupidity. She'd bled to death all over the seat covers and the floor,Chuck frozen in fear that he'd go to the slammer for murder. He didn't. He went to the slammer for manslaughter. When he got out, he came to work here at the tavern, which was owned by another man who lived on the periphery of law. But by this time in his life, Chuck wasn't more than a part-time bartender and occasional petty thief. He played a lot of poker. He wasn't any better at it than he was at anything else. During the days I'd gone out with Karen, I'd learned how much she'd loved him but also how much of a burden he was, always in need of money or a place to hide or, simply, comfort, his mental stability never having been the best.

Now he was in his forties and heavyset and shaggy with a reddish beard and the kind of colorful Saturday-night clothes that had gone out with leisure suits.

"Why're you looking for Karen?"

I sighed. "Chuck, I'm asking you a straightforward question. Do you know where Karen is?" I wanted to see her for a simple reason. To tell her how Glendon Evans was knocked unconscious, to get a simple, honest answer as to what was really in the suitcase.

"I ain't seen her."

"Right."

"I'm telling you the truth."

He got up from his overstuffed chair and crossed the room to get at a carton of Camels. I had to look away. I'd always felt ashamed of myself around him, ashamed, I guess, that my limbs were intact. He didn't deserve to be born crippled. Nobody did.

He tore open a new pack and said, "She in some kind of trouble or something?"

"You know anything about a suitcase?"

His sister's eyes stared at me. "Suitcase?"

"Right."

"Uh-uh."

He moved across the floor again. I looked away. "Still embarrasses you, don't it?"

"What?"

"My foot."

I didn't say anything.

"You always was that way, Dwyer." He laughed then and I didn't know why he laughed; all I knew was that he'd just shown me teeth badly in need of a dentist.

I wanted out of there, then. The mildew smell, the beer smell, the sagging single bed, the shabby clothes. I wondered what he dreamed of, what could possibly keep him going in these circumstances. There was not even a window to look out of. Only a few years ago he'd been a teenager, when there was always the hope that the cards would run good, but the cards hadn't run good at all for him.

"How about this suitcase?" he said.

"What about it?"

"What's in it?"

"I'm not sure."

"Why you want it?"

"Because I was hired to find it."

"But you don't know what's in it?"

"That's right, Chuck. I don't know what's in it."

He smiled.

"What's funny?"

"It's Karen, isn't it?"

"Karen?"

"Sure. This sounds like some kind of deal she'd get you involved in. Having you look for something but not telling you what it is exactly."

I glanced around. He had a poster of Farrah Fawcett in a swimsuit and a RE-ELECT REAGAN bumper sticker on the wall.

Sitting on a bureau was a travel brochure to sunny Arizona with an envelope that looked to contain an airline ticket.

"You ever think of moving out of this place?"

"It getting to you?"

"Sort of, I guess."

"Gets to me, too." He shrugged. "It's about all I can afford these days. After the Amway thing went to shit, I mean."

"You sold Amway?"

"Yeah. You ever go to any of their meetings?"

"Uh-uh."

"Man, they get you all het up. It's like going to one of them TV evangelists. One night I was watchin' the tube here and I was pretty gassed up on beer and this TV evangelist came on and I watched him, really watched him for the first time, and I'll be damned if I didn't stand up and pledge myself to Jesus, and I mean I had tears streamin' down my cheeks, and I wrote him out a check for one hundred dollars and staggered down to the post office and mailed it in. It was like this light was shining in my eyes, this real strong light, and for about an hour or so it was like I was on this high I'd never been on before, really whacked out, you know, better than drugs or sex or booze or anything." Then he stopped and sighed. "But then in the morning I got up and remembered what I'd done, sending the check in and all, and I remembered that I'd closed that account and that the check would bounce and-" He smoked some of his cigarette. "Anyway, Amway was like that for a while. I'd go to these meetings and get real psyched up, but then. ."

He let it drift off, the way so much in his life had drifted off.

The room was getting oppressive again.

"She's getting it together."

"Karen?" I said.

"Yeah. She dumped that spook."

Which almost caused me to smile, never understanding why one set of outcasts wants to put down another set of outcasts. Didn't he see that the same people who dismissed him as a clubfoot probably dismissed Glendon Evans for being black?

"But you don't know where she is?"

"Not really, man. She calls sometimes. I'll tell her you're looking for her."

"So you don't know anything about a suitcase?"

"Why you keep asking? I already said no. Jesus, man." He stubbed out his cigarette. "It's because of the baseball glove, isn't it?"

"Nah."

"Bullshit."

"Well."

"I take a crummy baseball glove thirty years ago and you still blame me."

I felt myself flush.

"People change, you know, Dwyer."

"I know." He had me feeling guilty. He had me feeling the way he wanted me to feel.

"I don't know from no suitcase, all right?"

"All right."

"And the next time you come down here, try not to look like you just walked into a leper colony, all right? Like you're going to get contaminated or something?"

I stood up. Held out my hand. "Good to see you, Chuck."

He got up and getting up was an effort and I averted my eyes and he saw me avert my eyes and then he shook my hand and said, "Being a gimp isn't so bad, Dwyer. It's other people thinking it's so bad that really gets to you, you know?"

I babbled. "Take it easy, Chuck."

"Right. That's how I always take it. Easy. I've got the charmed life, you know."