Dead Guy's Stuff (6 page)

7

"Duncan was a lowlife. A slob. He was overweight, ate junk by the crate. You can tell by the bags and wrappers all over the house. Everybody who rented from him hated him, but lots of people hate their landlords. They don't kill them," Tim said, picking up another sandwich from the tray Nellie had set on the table.

Jane heard her father agreeing with Tim, but she could tell, even from her parents' bedroom where she was using the telephone, that Nellie's grunts and groans and monosyllabic responses meant that she heartily disagreed.

When Detective Oh picked up the phone and answered with his last name, Jane was prepared, greeted him with her own, and quickly got to the point.

"The thing about this body, this Gus, is that his finger was almost cut off," Jane said. "As convinced and convincing as they're trying to be, I just can't agree with the police here that he had a heart attack, then continued slicing a tomato or something and nearly cut off his own finger."

Jane had been so absorbed in the dangling finger that she forgot to be uncomfortable or embarrassed or whatever one should appropriately
be
when meeting a policeman over a dead body for the second time in a matter of months. Detective Munson, if surprised to see her again hovering over a corpse in Kankakee, did not show it. He didn't really show any emotion, observing Duncan's body from as much of a distance as he could professionally manage. Jane, although somewhat surprised at his apparent squeamishness— after all, he had chosen to be a police officer— could, in this particular case, understand it.

Gus Duncan was a hideous corpse.

No corpse could be beautiful. Living hard and dying young wouldn't guarantee it. Nor would a virtuous passing in one's sleep. No matter how peaceful the death, how pure the soul, spirit, or whatever your belief demanded to be pure, no death could come without extracting some type of toll.

Jane had been to enough wakes where she had heard friends and relatives murmur how beautiful in death someone looked, how natural. She had listened hard, with a great measure of hope, to nuns tell her that in death people met God and were at peace. And if it were all true— Jane's private jury remained locked on the subject— these ghostly souls might be as beautiful as anything Sister Kelly or Sister Galvin could imagine, but the shells they'd left behind, those empty bodies, were never pleasing to look at. It was only when animated with life, with breath and flowing blood, that a body made sense. Once that life stopped, the body was a bulky, badly designed container. Even the perfect features of an individual celebrated for his or her beauty— luscious lips, a perfectly straight and pert nose— looked silly and incongruous— faintly ridiculous add-ons to an oddly shaped package.

And Gus Duncan was never a beauty. Even Jane Wheel, celebrated among her own friends and colleagues for her blindness when it came to physical imperfections, had a difficult time looking objectively at Gus Duncan, alive or dead. Jane, self-educated and well-read even in youth, had her models of beauty formed by the masters. Not Titian or Rembrandt, but the cover girls of
Seventeen
and
Mademoiselle.
As shallow as any teenager, she curled or straightened, wore short or midi, went matte or shiny as the fashionist as dictated.

At college, though, her world changed. The people she found the most interesting, the most attractive, were those who shunned mirrors and makeup. She fell in love with the artsy crowd, the sensible shoes and flannel shirts who were committed to inner beauty and intellectual honesty. She fell into the arms of men who were among the uncombed and unwashed, who were far too busy talking and thinking, changing the world, to worry about holes in their sweaters or socks that matched. She shunned the pretty boys with wrinkle-free shirts and seamless faces and searched for character and bad boy scars. She swooned for brains.

She totally understood how Julia Roberts could marry Lyle Lovett.

As a producer of commercials, which she had been in her last career, she was famous for casting actors with unusual, out of the mainstream faces, ones who were remembered and believed because intelligence shone from their eyes. But even Jane, the nonjudgmental, had trouble looking at old Gus Duncan.

In life he had had the face of a fighter, a losing one: cauliflower ears, pouches, and scars on his cheeks and jowls. Pummeled and shapeless, his bulky form was usually poured into dirty nylon running pants and topped with a polyester print shirt stretched tight across his fat middle, the buttons straining. His eyes were small and piggy, his lips thin over stained and broken teeth. Jane, who could find character in the least likely places, turned her head when Duncan, who refused to accept checks in the mail or direct bank transfer– deposits, came into the EZ Way Inn on the first of every month to collect the rent.

Bruce Oh tried to grasp all the information Jane was giving him. An ugly and nasty man was dead. The police seemed to believe that he had had a heart attack, the profile was right for that, but Mrs. Wheel felt that it was certainly a murder. Why? Because of another finger. This one, not in a jar, but almost detached. Even though Gus Duncan and Mr. Bateman had no other links that she knew of, Mrs. Wheel wanted to investigate.

What would Oh tell a student who came to him with this passion for discovery? He would say, as he did now, with a small sigh, follow your instincts. If the police won't listen, find out what you can on your own. Then he added what he had never and would never add to an answer for a student, "I'll see if I can help you."

Jane returned to the living room, picked up a sandwich, tore off a corner, then replaced the rest of it on the tray. Tim knew she had gone off to call Oh and looked at her, waiting to hear Oh's take on the Duncan death.

Jane nodded. "He's on the case." She chewed the corner of sandwich that she planned to call dinner. "With me. He's on the case with me."

"There's no case, honey," Don said. "Duncan dropped dead. Probably had a feeling about it, and that's why he was going to give all of us the records and keys and stuff."

Nellie picked up the mangled sandwich Jane had torn apart, put it on a paper plate, and set it in front of Jane.

"Finish what you started; you're looking anemic," she said, then turned to Don and Tim. "She's right and you're both wrong."

"Look, I have another friend who just bought her place from Gus Duncan, and she hated him, too. She said when he came for rent, he had a hacking cough and told her he had congestive heart failure," Tim said.

"Yeah, he claimed to have lung cancer, too, last time he came in the EZ Way," said Don.

"Did he ever go to a doctor? Did he ever say a doctor told him that or was it just self-diagnosis? Besides, I'm not saying he couldn't have died of natural causes; he was a mess. I'm saying he didn't saw off his own finger." Jane looked at Nellie. "Is that what you think, too, Mom?"

It was so rare that Nellie ever agreed with or supported anything that Jane said, she actually felt a rush of warmth as her mother poked at the sandwich and gestured again for Jane to chew more and talk less.

"Nah, I just think people get what they deserve. That's God's way, ain't it? It's simple. Gus Duncan deserved to die a horrible death, begging and pleading for his life. That's what happened," Nellie said, brushing crumbs into her apron and walking them over to the garbage can. "He didn't deserve a fast and final heart attack." Nellie measured coffee into the pot for tomorrow morning. "And he didn't get one."

"Exactly who does your mother pray to?" Tim whispered.

"Some Catholics remain devout in spite of history— you know papal corruption and scandal— stuff like that. Mom's Catholic because of her admiration for the Spanish Inquisition," Jane whispered back.

"Nellie, that's just plain stupid," Don said. "Want me to show you in the paper all the horrible stuff that happens to people who don't deserve it? By your logic, every earthquake or flood that happens anywhere is to punish sinners."

Nellie raised an eyebrow. "Yeah?"

"Dad, Mom
does
think natural disasters come along to punish sinners," said Jane.

Jane was unpacking one of the Bateman/Shangri-La boxes she had brought in from her trunk. Her father said he vaguely remembered a tavern called the Shangri-La in Chicago. "I might have met him at one of the liquor dealer association meetings," Don had answered when Jane questioned him about Bateman. "Drunken brawls more than meetings if you ask me," Nellie had chimed in.

Jane took out one of her many prizes from the Bateman sale.

"Look, Dad," Jane said, holding up an unused punchboard, "it's Jackpot Charley."

Twenty-five cents a punch— 170 winners— proclaimed the red-and-yellow board. Tim reached his hands out.

"Don't touch the key; it's still sealed onto the back."

"Where the hell did you…?" Don started to ask.

Nellie shook her head and put her hands up as if warding off a hex, ignoring Jackpot Charley altogether. "I'll give you another reason that Gus died a terrible death," she said.

"I want this talk stopped. Finished." Don stood up quickly, bumping the sandwich tray. "Gus was a terrible man. He did terrible things. That doesn't mean he was killed," he said. "He died, that's all." Looking at Nellie, he added, "He might have deserved to die, but that's not how the world works and you know it. This isn't a cowboy movie where somebody needs killing and— " Don stopped, distracted by the punchboard that Tim was running his hand over.

"Dad," Jane said, softly, "what is it?"

"I don't want that thing in the house. Punchboards are illegal," Don said and left the room.

Nellie hurried over to the coffee table and picked up the spilled sandwiches, wiping up crumbs with an unused napkin. Tim raised an eyebrow, but kept quiet. Jane looked around the living room. It was meticulously neat. Early American furniture, all reproductions Jane was sad to note, traditionally placed. The few knickknacks that Nellie allowed, the ceramic Lord's Prayer planter and three vases that had come from Don's mother, were spotless, never having held a bouquet of flowers or a sprig of ivy. Nellie didn't like cut flowers. "They just die and make a mess": Her all-purpose gripe against most living things.

In the small unspectacular house that Nellie kept dust-free, airtight, and dimly lit with forty-watt bulbs, Jane suddenly could not catch her breath. She felt as if she had inhaled talcum, powdered sugar, ragweed. Something in this house had just given off microscopic particles that whirled through her system and made her cough and choke. She stood up and stepped out onto the front porch.

September was still summer in Illinois, but the nights were cool and clear. Stars shone, and Jane looked up, trying to count them so she would not think about the look she'd seen on her father's face. The anger and impatience she had seen before— the hatred for Gus Duncan had burned in his eyes many times— but the look he gave before he left the room was a new expression. She couldn't define it precisely; it was a mixture, an emotional cocktail made up of many parts: guilt, memory, pain. They were all there. What else? What was the base of this complex formula?

"Why is your dad so scared?" Tim asked, suddenly standing beside her.

Fear? Was that it?

8

The next morning, unloading boxes at the EZ Way Inn, Jane tried to bring up Gus Duncan. Don changed the subject. When he saw Jane pushing her finger unnaturally toward her thumb and showing her mother while Nellie was slicing onions and tomatoes in the kitchen, Don said quietly but firmly that he wanted to erase the image of Duncan from his mind.

"I hated the sight of that man alive, and I thought nothing was uglier than his mug when he showed up the first of every month; but now I've got to live with something even uglier," Don said, shaking his head. "Leave it, Janie."

Whatever Jane had seen in her dad's eyes the night before had passed into something else. Acceptance? Relief?

Don and Nellie allowed Jane to unpack most of the boxes from the Shangri-La. They stored funny cocktail napkins and coasters with outrageous cartoons, hung old calendars with vintage beer and whiskey ads, usually involving a woman in a bathing suit, and Don ran his hands over the old ledgers with "Shangri-La" printed neatly at the top. Those Jane knew they wouldn't keep forever, but wanted to hear her dad exclaim over the wholesale prices of thirty years ago.

Nellie vetoed the shot glasses with the black horse head profiles, protesting that they didn't match the plain ones they already used.

"Besides, the more glasses you have, the more you end up having to wash," Nellie said. "Sell those to Tim. He pays a lot of money for junk, too."

Don made it clear that he wanted no gambling paraphernalia. When Jane tried to point out that the punchboards and horse racing bar games were examples of fabulous vintage graphics, just for display, her dad had remained unmoved.

"Pack them up, honey, and take them home," Don said. "No gambling here."

"I don't see why he's so against this stuff. We had it around all the time when I was a kid," Jane said to Tim as they walked around the basement of the Gerber house, Tim's new project and site of the Bishop McNamara High School fund-raiser. He handed Jane a round metal compact and sent her to the other end of the room.

"Measure those windows, honey, while you're talking," Tim said, sketching out the room in his graph notebook.

Jane looked down at the object he had put in her hand. In the center of the green disk was a gray leverlike piece. She pulled up on it and realized it was a crank. "Oh," she said, realizing this wasn't a compact, but an old tape measure with a silky worn tape that pulled out from a substantial metal loop. When you finished measuring, you wound that center lever/crank, reeling in the tape. Ah, the satisfaction of it all. The weight and heft of the piece. The sheer impracticality of a heavy metal measuring tape over three inches in diameter. She wanted it badly.

"Can I have this?" she asked.

"If I say no, are you going to Malcolm it?"

Jane wished she had never told Tim about Malcolm Morgan, the sweet blond boy who had lived down the block when she was four. His parents were wealthy and indulgent and had furnished him with a playroom separate from his bedroom filled with every imaginable toy. Once, when Jane was playing there, she had found an old purple velvet ring box with a white pearlized button, which popped open the lid with a satisfying snap. Jane had never seen anything so marvelous. She could not stop rubbing the velvet, snapping the lid.

"Can I have it, Malcolm?" she'd asked.

Malcolm offered Jane toys daily— anything she enjoyed he told her she could have, but she had always said no. Nellie had told her to accept nothing.

"Mark my words, later they'll say you stole it," Nellie said, waving a paranoid finger.

But surely this old ring case was something she could accept. It wasn't even a toy. It was just an old thing that someone had accidentally tossed into the well-stocked toy chest.

Malcolm had looked at the ring box, then at Jane's desperate eyes.

"No-o-o, I don't think so," Malcolm said, shaking his head.

Jane's mouth had dropped open. He had blocks and animals and art supplies and every jack-in-the-box, building set, and game manufactured in the past ten years. He was a generous and kind boy. But Malcolm, even at five years old, understood desire and value.

Jane's deep brown eyes, filled with need, had raised the value of this throwaway to priceless.

"My mom gave it to me, and she might want it back. I better keep it."

At four o'clock when Jane left for home, she and Malcolm stopped making the clay animals for the zoo they were building and walked down the winding staircase of his enormous house. Jane said good-bye and thank you to both Malcolm and his housekeeper and quickly walked the two houses back to her own.

The purple velvet ring box pulsed in her pocket.

That night, sleepless, tossing and turning, she called out to Nellie, who came and stood stonily at her bedside.

"If you had a friend who took something from her friend because she really wanted it but knew she had to give it back because she felt sick, what would you tell her to do?"

Nellie stared at Jane for what seemed like hours. Under the blankets, Jane snapped the ring case open, then coughed to cover the soft popping sound.

"I would say that when I was playing with it, I put it in my pocket and forgot about it, and then I would hand it over," Nellie said, uncharacteristically smoothing back Jane's hair over her worried forehead.

"And I would do it tomorrow," Nellie added.

Jane repeated the well-rehearsed lines to Malcolm the next morning. He barely looked up from the clay zebra he was finishing.

"Oh, well, you can just have it, I guess I don't really want it anyway."

Tim loved that story. The fear and desperation of Jane, the theft, the unknowing callousness of Malcolm, the uncharacteristic gentle wisdom of Nellie. It had everything. He brought it up to Jane every chance he could. His only regret was that Malcolm had moved to Indiana before they would have all met in first grade. Tim had a feeling that Malcolm would have been his second-best friend.

"If you help me measure the whole basement, I just might give you the tape measure," Tim said.

"I've outgrown Malcolming, you know," Jane said, looking down at the carved Bakelite ring on her finger. She
had
taken it from Richard Rose's store when there was no clerk on duty, but she had sent full payment in the mail the next day. No, her grown-up conscience was far too scrupulous to allow Malcolming.

She jotted down the uneven window measurements. "I think I kissed Eddie right over there. That was where the couch was."

There was no furniture left in the Gerber basement. It had been stripped of everything, including the old linoleum, and Tim was now throwing down flooring samples and sighing. "If the old stuff hadn't been damaged, I would have kept it. It had the look I wanted, that's for sure."

"You can find vintage flooring, Timmy, I…"

Jane and Tim both looked up at the sound of a door closing and footsteps above them.

"Tim, is that you down there?"

"Be right up, Lilly," Tim said.

Tim had told Jane that Lilly Duff was coming over. She had been three years behind them in high school and was now serving on the fund-raising committee with Tim. She had even agreed to decorate a bathroom in the McNamara Flea Market Show House, now being referred to around town as "the McFlea." Jane remembered her not as a classmate, but as a fellow traveler. Her father had owned a bar just down the street from the EZ Way Inn. Like Jane, she had grown up waiting for her parents in backrooms, hoping the bartender wouldn't be too late. Unlike Jane, however, she hadn't broken the pattern. Duff's Bar was now Lilly's Place, and Jane was most curious about why she had decided to take on the family business.

As soon as Jane saw Lilly, sitting at the built-in breakfast bar, circa 1959, in the Gerber kitchen, she realized that now might not be the right time to ask her about her chosen profession. Lilly's hair was uncombed, her eyes circled with dark, puffy clouds.

"I have seasonal allergies," she said, sniffing softly and extending her hand to Jane. "I know you. We were in Sodality together at Mac."

Tim passed her a box of powdered sugar doughnuts and poured a cup of coffee. The coffeemaker, Tim's spare from the flower shop, was the only thing in the kitchen made after 1962. The Gerber house was frozen in time, just the way Jane wanted it to be. Now all she had to do was convince Tim that things should not be changed or redone, just enhanced.

"I can't do any redecorating, Tim," Lilly said. "I'm going to be really busy at the bar. I've got to let a lot of help go and do some longer hours for a while."

Lilly explained that buying the building from Gus Duncan had pushed her to her financial limits and that now there would be even more expenses, bringing the building up to code, taxes, and so forth. As plausible as it all was, Jane sensed that some part of her excuse for backing out of the fund-raiser had more to do with her puffy, sleep-deprived eyes than having to work longer hours at the bar.

"Sally Turney really wanted the first-floor bathroom anyway, so you should give it to her," Lilly said.

"Who'll take the kitchen then? It took me all night and a bottle and a half of decent Merlot to get her to agree to that," Tim said.

Jane had taken a rag from the box of cleaning supplies Tim had brought and was polishing one of the knobs on the old Chambers's stove. She turned it slightly and laughed out loud when the hissing of gas proved the stove still worked.

"This is priceless, Tim. I can't believe they left it in the house for you. They could have sold these appliances to a dealer for a small fortune."

"I do know how to write up an offer, honey. I bought the place as is."

"More like 'as was,'" said Lilly, rubbing her eyes as she sipped her coffee.

"Claritin?" Jane asked, turning back to Tim and Lilly, both seated at the wooden breakfast bar. She walked over to her backpack where she always carried a stash of whatever Nick was taking or needing for his allergies.

Lilly stared blankly.

"For your hay fever," Jane said.

"Oh no, thanks," Lilly said. "I'm allergic to penicillin."

"It's not…," Jane started to say, but realized Lilly was not listening to her. She had turned to Tim and whispered, purposely loud enough for Jane to hear. "I think I know someone who could take the kitchen so Sally could have the bathroom."

"Absolutely," said Tim, grinning at Jane.

"Full plate, baby," Jane said, shaking her head.

Tim laughed. "I don't want to be unkind, Janie, but may I remind you that you no longer have that advertising job that made you so nasty and busy all the time. You're carefree, with an independent son and a flexible husband."

"There's the EZ Way Inn to finish. Fall is major rummage and sale season, and I
do
work as a picker for Miriam. Nick still needs me around whether you think so or not… even if it's just to drive him to his soccer games. And since Charley and I are separated, he's not as flexible as you might think."

"Separated?" Tim snorted. "He still sleeps at your house."

"Of course he does; his stuff is there. We are
psychologically
separated, which is much more important than our physical arrangements," Jane said, starting to wonder if Lilly really needed to know about what she was beginning to think of as her living
derangements
.

"Besides, I'm going to be busy until Gus Duncan's murder is cleared up."

Lilly dropped her coffee cup. Jane and Tim both turned to her, Tim jumping up for a rag to sop up the liquid. No one said anything; then everyone said something.

"I'm sorry, I…"

"Let's get that before it…"

"You didn't know…"

They stopped, Tim holding up his hand. "Three-way stop. I yield to my right," he said, pointing to Jane with his coffee-soaked rag.

"Gus Duncan was murdered sometime yesterday. Maybe the day before… I don't know for sure yet. My dad and I found him at his house."

"I heard that he'd died, but…" Lilly stopped and wiped furiously at her eyes. "He wasn't murdered. He had a heart attack or something. He had high blood pressure. He was always complaining… he was sick."

"There are a few things that need to be explained before that's…"

"No, my brother knows somebody on the police force, and he told Bobby that it was a heart attack," Lilly said, standing up.

"Oh, Jane's got a theory about the whole finger thing, that Gus couldn't have almost cut his own finger off the way…"

"I might have Allegra in my backpack, do you want Allegra?" Jane asked.

"
What
are you talking about?" Lilly asked, her voice pitched high. "You think you can come back into town and just take over things like the know-it-all you were in high school? The police know what they're doing here. They don't need you to complicate matters."

Jane and Tim both looked at Lilly, who seemed now to want to take back her outburst but was uncertain how to begin.

"I didn't mean that," she said finally.

"It's okay," Jane said.