Dead Guy's Stuff (4 page)

"Whew, that's Bakelite. Just like formaldehyde," she said, sniffing the air to get rid of the acrid smell.

"No, Mom, what's in
that
jar?" Nick asked, pointing to her left hand, his voice wavering.

"What's the matter, Nick?" She turned first to Nick, but both he and Charley were looking at the container. She held it up to the window above the sink, thumb on the bottom, middle finger on top, to see what was sloshing through the liquid in the glass.

"Move your hand, Jane, I— " Charley started, but cut himself off.

"Yuck," said Nick, clutching his stomach with both hands.

"Holy Toledo," said Jane, turning the glass in her hand, noting how much larger than her own was the finger floating in the jar.

3

Nick had turned pale as dough. He sat kneading his hands at the table, staring at his mother. He wanted to make a joke or laugh at someone else's attempt, but neither Jane nor Charley spoke.

Charley had taken the jar and turned it in the light of the window, studying the finger, which did its own slow float as Charley turned the glass. Jane shivered and recovered. This could not be a real finger. It was some kind of practical joke— a bit of a freak show in a bottle— that Bateman kept behind the bar as a sick little tease to play on a regular customer.

"It's not real, Nick, don't worry," Jane began, just as Charley nodded and said, "It's real, all right."

The finger, pasty white, almost blue in its whiteness, was perfectly preserved. Large, probably a man's second, third, or fourth finger— certainly not a thumb or pinkie— it took on a life of its own as Charley moved the jar: first beckoning, then turning away.

Jane did not want this to be the subject of Nick's nightmares or one more milestone in Nick's inevitable adult therapy sessions. She could hear some Freudian now.
Oh, yes, Mr. Wheel, was that before or after your mother brought home the finger in a jar?
No, she had to nip this morbidity in the bud.

"Let's not get too excited about this, I'll just call…," Jane said, then stopped. Who should she call?

Charley shrugged. "The police?" he offered.

"Yeah," Jane said, "they'll finally be able to solve that age-old criminal question, 'Where is Pointer?'"

Nick had his head down on the table and Jane saw his shoulders begin to shake.
Now I've done it,
she thought.
Turning the kitchen into a sideshow tent wasn't bad enough, I had to make the cheap joke.
Why did she always think turning things into laughs would work miracles.

When Nick looked up, however, she saw that this time, anyway, it had worked. Nick was laughing not crying, and shaking his head. "Shouldn't we finish unpacking before we call anybody? Maybe Ringman and Thumbkin are here, too."

"Where is Pointer? Where is Pointer?" Charley sang, slowly moving the jar from behind his back, bouncing and sloshing the finger until he held it in front of him.

"Here I am. Here I am," Jane and Nick joined in.

And for one golden moment, peering in on this cozy-late-Saturday-morning-early-afternoon-pancake-plates-still-on-the-table-Dad-and-son-still-in-flannels-and-socks tableau, anyone might have thought this was a Norman Rockwell painting of a perfect family scene.

Except of course, for the severed finger.

When the wholesome hilarity of the Wheel household had finally subsided, the coolest head among them prevailed.

"Call Detective Oh," said Nick, now able to actually hold the jar and study the finger himself. "He'll know what to do." Nick had heard the story of the Balance murder case over and over when he and his father returned from the summer dig. His neighborhood friends told several versions, and he had listened carefully to them all. Detective Oh, stopping by to tie up a few loose ends, had impressed him mightily by treating him as an adult, telling the story simply, answering his questions honestly.

Jane agreed. Calling Oh was a good idea, but first she wanted to unpack the rest of the boxes. Charley and Nick both hesitated. Eight more cartons were stacked in the kitchen, each one of them large enough to hold an even more gruesome surprise.

"Come on, guys, I glanced through most of the stuff at the house. One of these has ashtrays and coasters. There's lots of glassware… shot glasses, old-fashioneds, stuff like that. I want to run them through the dishwasher here before I take them down to Kankakee.

"And punchboards. One of these boxes has unused punchboards," Jane said, her eyes glazing over.

Charley knew the look and knew that Jane would not be dissuaded.

"I have to meet a student in fifteen minutes, and I'm dropping Nick off at the Y to play basketball," said Charley. "I'll come right back here after the meeting and help you, I promise, but you promise me to wait. Forty-five minutes tops. I don't want you doing this alone."

Nick had already run up to change. Charley was standing in the doorway, buttoning a clean but wrinkled shirt he had pulled out of his duffle.

Jane agreed immediately.

"Okay," she said, washing her hands and placing a dish towel over the celebrated jar.

"Too easy," said Charley. "I mean it, Jane. There could be something dangerous in there."

"What? What's dangerous? Even if I found a whole pickled hand, what's dangerous about that?" Jane asked.

Charley winced. Jane was smiling, calm and collected, and already breaking the tape on another box.
Had playing detective this summer changed her that much? Had he just not been paying attention to who she had become in the last few years?
He watched her run the knife under the cardboard flap and before he could stop himself, he said, "You'll dull the knife."

She looked up at him. His beautiful, smart, stubborn, probably-soon-to-be-ex-wife just looked at him, and he knew without a doubt that the last thing she wanted to hear from Charley, from her once exciting and risk-taking husband, Charley, was the predictable and pedantic advice he had been dispensing over the last several years. When had he, like the knife he didn't even care about protecting, become so dull, and when exactly did Jane begin to notice?

"Ready, Dad?"

Charley nodded and didn't even try to stop himself from saying "Be careful," as he walked out the door because it was what he felt and who he was and what he had to say.

He even added, "Please."

* * *

Jane was careful. She only cut herself twice on cardboard as she opened the cartons that Mary Bateman had carefully packed away. The more glasses she unwrapped, the more towels she unfolded and refolded, the more old calendars and desk blotters she sorted through, the more she speculated about Mary herself. Dot and Ollie had told her that Mary had spent almost every evening at the Shangri-La, drinking a Tom Collins or an old-fashioned, and waiting for Bateman to close up.

"Not when Cindy was little, Ollie. She stayed home then," said Dot.

"That's true," Ollie agreed, then added loyally, "Mary was a good mother."

Jane asked the friends what happened to the daughter. The granddaughter, Susan, the nurse, was calling the shots on the house sale and Mary's move to an assisted-living facility, but Jane had heard nothing about the daughter's role in all of it.

Dot and Ollie both shook their heads.

"Gone," Dot whispered.

"Cindy and her husband got into a car accident when Susan was twelve," Ollie said.

"Thirteen," said Dot.

"Susan came and lived with Mary then, and they just took real good care of each other, I think," said Ollie. "Bateman had already passed, and I don't think Mary could have taken it, losing everybody like that, if Susan hadn't come to live here."

Jane wondered what it was like for Mary and Susan, living in that house, taking care of each other. Ollie had said Susan never went down to the basement, didn't want to see anything that reminded her of the Shangri-La.

"Wouldn't Susan have been too young to remember the place? I mean, too young for bad memories?" Jane had asked.

"Wasn't that," Ollie said. "Didn't and still doesn't approve of drinking. The car accident when her mom and dad were killed, it involved alcohol. Susan was old enough to remember and cling to it. Never forgave the drinking."

Jane carried the glasses she planned to ship to Miriam out to her shelves in the garage. She could repack them later. Jane heard a car turn into the driveway and opened the door to greet and draft Charley to help, but a strange car sat in the driveway, a big silver Oldsmobile or Buick or whatever make the current "Dad" or "Grandpa" drove— cars weren't one of her specialties. Two men were in the front seat, and the passenger leaned out with a newspaper in his hand.

"This 2303 Thayer?" he asked.

"No, you're four blocks south," she said.

"You having a sale, too?" the driver asked.

Jane shook her head and smiled. They saluted and backed out. Jane's racks of goods in the garage, her boxes and packing material, might lead anyone on this sunny autumn Saturday to assume she was in the garage-sale business. She smiled to herself. She felt so right with the world when like-minded souls crossed her path. Those guys, like her, were just out on the hunt. She immediately wished them good sale karma. May they find the perfect… what did they look like they wanted? One wore a baseball cap; one had a tiny stub of a ponytail. Driving a big-old-dad-car-four-door sedan complete with a college decal on the back window. Vintage record albums, she guessed, or maybe old radios?

She waved to them as they drove away down the alley. They were all members of the club. It was only when one of the neighbors watched her unload her trunk and asked in that bone-chillingly polite voice, "Been to another sale, Jane?" that she felt alone in the world, embarrassed by her passion.

She carried the cartons with punchboards and photographs and signs out to the van. She was going to Kankakee tomorrow, and she might as well bring everything she could carry. The EZ Way Inn was going to dazzle. It was going to be the quintessential neighborhood tavern, a tavern among taverns.

* * *

Charley and Nick were late. When Jane checked her watch, she saw she had been working for an hour and a half. Nick had probably roped his father into playing ball with them, and they'd stay until open gym time was over. They could be another hour or two.

Jane was going through the last of the boxes. Photographs, plaques, small bulletin boards with scores and newspaper clippings still pinned on were wrapped carefully in newspapers. Jane smoothed out a sports page from the
Chicago Sun-Times,
July 7, 1969. "Cubs Going All The Way?" asked one of the headlines. Had the Cubs actually been winners that summer? Maybe the newspaper itself was valuable.

What did Dot and Ollie say about this stuff? They said Bateman had been gone thirty years. Did Mary close up the place and pack it away, or did Bateman retire and pack up and drop dead? Who tucked all of this away so carefully?

Jane looked at the photograph she had just uncovered: a wedding picture. Standing in front of the Shangri-La, the neon sign just above their shoulders, were four adults. The bride and groom were smiling for the photographer, their arms around each other. Mary stood next to the bride, a younger version of herself, who had to be Cindy, her daughter. Jane assumed the balding man with the paunch and cigar clamped between his teeth was Bateman. He had one arm squeezed around the groom's neck in a mock headlock. Bateman's son-in-law, a long-haired, loose-limbed boy wearing, not a tux, but a shiny suit with wide lapels and no tie, looked a little scared. Cindy wasn't wearing a traditional wedding gown, more of a lace minidress, a tablecloth with a thin velvet belt around the waist, and carrying a bouquet of what looked to be roses and daisies. The groom's hand was clasped around the bride's, so it looked like they were both clinging to the flowers. Bateman was waving with his free hand and winking at the camera.

A happy, smiling family, celebrating a joyous occasion. Jane fought an urge to wave back to Bateman, to shake her finger at him, warning him about what was coming.

"Enjoy these years, Bateman," she'd say if he could hear. "Hug your daughter and say wonderful things to her. Be really kind to Mary. Make it last."

But Jane, looking harder at Bateman, thought maybe he didn't need warnings at all. He looked like a man who already knew what was coming.

"Don't worry about me, baby," he'd probably say right back. "I know what's what in the world." Then he'd wink and wave those three fingers at her, only three. Bateman wore a slightly stained bandage covering most of his hand, especially padded and bulky in the place where number four, his pointer, used to be.

4

Bruce Oh, until three weeks ago Police Det. Bruce Oh, had just come in from his morning constitutional. He'd gotten a late start and instead of seeing the sun rise, he contended with seeing every neighbor that he usually avoided by walking at 4:45 A.M. each day. He treasured his morning solitude and silence, what he called the rare and blessed anonymity of the hour before daylight.

This reverence for morning peace did not mean he was antisocial. At a party or picnic, he was proud of his camaraderie. That was the place for it, he thought, and he was a man who believed in a time and place for everything. He had a talent for remembering names and details; and at the Fourth of July block parties, he was a hit because he remembered the food likes and dislikes of almost everyone.

Efficiently handling the grilling tools, he'd smile at Mrs. Miller from down the block and say, "Not just well done… very well done, right?" and she would walk away with a charred square of meat formerly known as ground sirloin and wish that her late husband had been so thoughtful.

Oh also remembered what sports each child on the block participated in. Shin guards and baseball gloves usually provided clues, but nonetheless, parents seemed amazed that Detective Oh would ask if Little Jason had an RBI as Little Jason walked into the house, smiling and swinging his bat. If, on the other hand, Little Jason charged ahead, banging the front porch door, leaving his dad to carry the equipment, Oh would shake his head and shrug his shoulders, as if to commiserate with the family over the tough loss.

"People," Oh— now wearing the hat of a professor three days a week— would say to his class, "are never aware of what they reveal in their clothing, their walk, their choice of car. It is never a mistake to take note of the obvious. If we did not note what is in front of us, how would we notice when it is taken away? Hidden? Noticing the everyday becomes your baseline, your gauge for the extraordinary in human behavior."

Oh's students were never bored. His classes had waiting lists and had been written up as student favorites in campus publications. "It's like being in that show
Kung Fu
— he gives you this David Carradine nugget of wisdom and then just moves on. The only thing missing is him calling you grasshopper, which I really wish he would do just once," gushed a freshman girl who was quoted in one of the articles.

Because he loved to teach, he taught courses in criminal psychology and criminal detection at a few different Chicago-area universities. Oh didn't need the income. Because his investigative insights were much in demand by lawyers and insurance companies, he discovered that consulting fees easily paid the mortgage and monthly bills. His wife Claire's surprisingly successful antique business paid for any extras they might require, and the two of them required very little.

Oh much preferred the spare and lean style of living. That included minimal household decorating. Although he appreciated the many old, ornate pieces that his wife placed in front of him, he preferred to admire and learn from objects when they were safely ensconced in a glass case at a museum. Or when they were tagged and laid out on an examining room table in a murder investigation. When Claire complained that Oh only liked objects when they were clues, he smoothly pointed out to her that she only liked objects that were mysteries: old and abandoned.

Claire protested then that her art history background made her much more of a scholar in her pursuits and her M.B.A. made her a crack businesswoman, and he conceded both points. It was Mrs. Jane Wheel who adopted the orphaned objects, after all. His wife quite easily let go of her finds, her steady profit based on a constant buying and selling process. Jane Wheel, whom he had spent so much time studying when investigating her neighbor's murder, had told him that she was still learning how to let go. It was Mrs. Wheel who loved the forgotten and found meaning in the lost.

Mrs. Wheel also had something to do with his experimental retirement from the police force this fall, although he would find it hard to say exactly what that something was. He suspected it had to do with her constant searching. Her hunt was for objects that he didn't care about, yes, but perhaps she looked for more, found more than the physical stuff that filled her house. That was what her eyes seemed to say. Although he had never said it, even to himself, he knew it was what he had read in her eyes that had sent him off on his current search.

After the Balance case was ended, thanks in no small part to Mrs. Wheel herself, he had requested a leave of absence to devote himself to teaching. When his request was denied, he nodded, sat down at his desk for only five minutes, as long as it took him to type the letter, and tendered his resignation. He explained to Claire that he would be of more service in the classroom. She agreed, delighted that her husband would no longer be in the line of fire. He told her he also dreamed of writing a book about criminal detection.

"More pyschology than science," he had told her, explaining that the book would have a limited appeal to real police, who wanted hard facts and better techniques… what, when, where. Oh just wanted to know why.

"And occasionally how," he admitted, when she raised an eyebrow.

"Why," he asked aloud now as he searched the refrigerator, "can't Claire keep lemon yogurt in the house?"

Claire had left the house quietly at 4:00 A.M. for sales to replenish her antique stall, and he had uncharacteristically slept in. Taking his walk at ten-thirty had put him off balance, and now, trying to find his regular breakfast in the almost empty refrigerator set his teeth on edge. "She can find an eighteenth-century snuff bottle in someone's garage, but she can't locate the lemon yogurt at the Jewel," he muttered, knowing that he had no right to complain, now being on a flexible enough schedule himself to make the weekly trips to the grocery store. He straightened and took a deep meditative breath. Taking a small notebook out of the all-purpose kitchen drawer, he printed in precise letters, LEMON YOGURT.

I will make a list and go to the grocery store. This is what semiretired professor-type husbands do,
he promised silently and brewed himself a cup of Irish Breakfast tea in a nineteenth-century, paper-thin, bone china cup, discovered by his wife, no doubt, holding greasy nuts and bolts in someone's garage.

* * *

Reading over papers in his study, Oh almost let the answering machine pick up when the phone rang. Claire had suggested it as a kind of discipline.

"You don't have to get the call. It's not a sergeant calling about a body, after all," she would say when he jumped to answer. "It's much more likely that it's someone who wants you to change your long-distance carrier."

Habits die hard, Oh admitted to himself, and this time it might even be Claire, needing his help at a sale. Besides, what was the harm in hearing about a different long distance plan?

"Oh," he answered.

"Oh, hello," Jane said, and began laughing. "I mean, hello, Detective Oh. I didn't mean to be rude, I…"

"My wife says I am very foolish to answer the phone that way. Work habit, I'm afraid. How are you, Mrs. Wheel?" asked Oh.

"Caller ID?

"Pardon?"

"You knew it was me. Do you have caller ID, Detective?" Jane asked.

Was Mrs. Wheel working for the telephone company now trying to sell Caller ID and get him to change his long distance service?

"I knew you, Mrs. Wheel. No ID. You're well?"

"Yes. You?" Jane asked.

Both Jane and Oh felt the awkwardness of this call, but neither would be able to say why. There was nothing so tangible as a reason for it.

This past summer, Oh had found Jane Wheel engaging, intriguing. She was never a serious suspect in her neighbor's murder, but she absorbed a kind of community guilt, an overwhelming sadness over the crime that drew him. She became inextricably linked in his mind as one more victim of the whole mess. He had asked her many times about the collecting, the picking she did; and at the time of the questioning, he believed it had helped him better understand Claire and her world. In fact he hadn't even been interested in that world until Mrs. Wheel had given it her particular spin.

Jane had found the kind of listener in Detective Oh that she hadn't even known she craved. She had stopped chattering to Charley years ago, not because he had shown any kind of disinterest, but because she sensed that it wearied him. He had seen her enthusiasm, her spark, her youth, and now he was comfortable with tucking it away and filing it under memory. He didn't really want to hear about McCoy flowerpots anymore. He didn't believe there was that much more to say. Oh, on the other hand, wanted to know everything. Yes, he might have been hoping she'd incriminate herself as a murderer, but nonetheless, a good listener is a good listener.

They each tried to break through the stilted greetings and pleasantries.

"No more bodies, I hope," said Oh, trying to sound like he was joking, but realizing as he heard himself that he never sounded like he was joking.

"I'm not calling about a body," Jane said at the same time, then added, "just a body part."

Both waited for the other to speak. Neither wanted that embarrassing, out-of-synch double-talk again.

"How about coming over for a drink, and I'll show you?" asked Jane, unable to hold out as long as Oh. A good listener, all right, he could listen harder and longer than anyone she had ever met.

"Yes, that would be fine. And what is it you will show me again?"

"My body part," Jane said.

"Oh," he said.

"I know," Jane said. "I'll just see you at five."

* * *

Jane turned the cocktail shaker over and let it drip dry on a feed sack towel. She rinsed four glasses, dried them, and placed them on the matching tray. The glasses, shaker, and tray were part of a bar set that she had kept on her dining room sideboard for two years, admiring it every time she looked its way. Periodically she promised Miriam that she would pack it up and send it to her for a customer who would pay handsomely for this chrome-and-Bakelite martini set, the Chase manufacturing mark firmly engraved on the underside of the tray.

"Don't take forever," Miriam cautioned. "This Cosmopolitan craze will burn itself out when one of these newfangled hipsters gets cirrhosis and writes about it in a self help magazine. Got to sell these puppies while they're hot."

Jane agreed that it was only a matter of time before the cranberry juice and designer vodka craze went down in flames. She had never been able to order a pink drink herself. If she even considered it, in her head she could see an entire row of EZ Way Inn customers shaking their heads and smirking. Still, she couldn't wrap up this bar set for Miriam. Not yet. Maybe she would never follow the Cosmo crowd, but she did love martinis. The shape of the glass, the whole "shaken not stirred" aura of them. Maybe the customers at the EZ Way Inn didn't drink them— the closest they got to a mixed drink was a shot and a beer— but when she went out to dinner with her parents after their long day of pulling draft beers and ladling soup, Don always ordered a martini, dry and straight up. Solemnly he handed Jane one of the olives, while Nellie shook her head and scowled over a cup of black coffee, her cocktail of choice. Don's martinis were made with Tanqueray gin and a whisper of vermouth. Jane made her own with vodka, Grey Goose or Ketel One, and merely nodded at the vermouth bottle she kept in a cupboard; but she, too, like Don, skewered olives onto a toothpick and smiled at the glass before her first sip.

"I don't even know if Detective Oh drinks," she said more to herself than to Nick, who was watching her try to stuff blue cheese into olives, the contemporary version of a task of Sisyphus.

"Where," asked Nick, "would someone get the idea to take awful-tasting things and stuff them with awful-smelling stuff? I mean it's crazy to think about eating them, but it's even crazier to think someone got the idea in the first place."

"Yeah, like artichokes," said Jane.

Nick stared at her. He was used to his mother's responses and their circuitous routes back to his own comments, but he didn't follow this one.

"I mean, whoever looked at an artichoke and thought it would be or could be edible? Who went to the bother of figuring out all the methodology?" said Jane, stabbing small skewer stopped with Bakelite dice through the olives.

Detective Oh, as it turned out, did like an occasional martini and seemed pleased at the arrangement of vintage cocktail collectibles laid out on the table. He appreciated the clean design of the shaker and glasses, the whimsy of the olives, the tang of the cheese straws, and the irony of the centerpiece— a finger floating in its own little preservative of choice.

"It seems logical that the finger belonged to Mr. Bateman," said Oh, handing Jane back the photograph of the family.

Jane and Nick waited, but Detective Oh did not continue.

"That's all?" Jane asked.

Oh held up one of the delicate cheese straws, nodded, and took a tentative bite.

"Shouldn't we check it out? See how old it is or something? So we can tell if it was Bateman's?" asked Nick.

"I'm afraid that two months in formaldehyde would have the same effect as two years— or two dozen. There's no way to date it."

Oh noted Nick's disappointment and added, "Of course, if there was any evidence of a crime or an old police report, maybe this finger could shed some…"