The Autumn Dead by Edward Gorman Page A

word here. I had the impression that they lined them up in their wheelchairs and hosed them off to get rid of the stench, then brought in an industrial waxer to shine pallor and wheelchair alike. Then they shot them up with enough Thorazine to make Charles Manson mellow for the rest of his life. And then they brought in the guests and moved them along quickly, the way you got moved along quickly in an art gallery where an especially popular artist was being shown, and the visitors got to see how clean and shiny and docile their parents looked and so the most wonderful thing of all happened. They could jump back in their Volvos, throw in some Barry Manilow tapes, and drive back to suburbia without feeling even 1.4 percent guilty.
    "Gosh," she said. "I'm afraid it's impossible. You know, we really do try to be accommodating here at Windmere, but—" She was too plump and wore too much makeup, but still you could see the erotic twenty-year-old she'd probably been, the full lips especially knowing. But she mined any real human heat with the living brochure monotone of her voice. She shrugged and her breasts raised slightly against the fabric of her bra and the bra in turn against the fabric of her white uniform and it was one of those odd moments—sunlight on linoleum, the smell of floor wax, a robin on a window ledge—when the thought of sex should not have occurred at all but it did. Oh yes, it did. But her green eyes held no promise, and so my erection slunk away.
    " Has my cousin been here?"
    "Cousin?" she said.
    I smiled my glad-hander smile. "I imagine you'd know my cousin. Rides a motorcycle."
    Now she smiled, too. " Oh, Evelyn Dain."
    "That's right. Evelyn Dain."
    " No, she comes Mondays and Fridays. " The green eyes were haughty a moment. " The hours everyone else does."
    "I should talk to her, I guess. About Patti. See how things are going. " Here I had to be careful. Careful and casual. "You wouldn't know where she works, would you? I seem to recall she changed jobs a while back."
    The phone rang, helping me. If the nurse had any doubts about me, about who I might really be and what I might really be doing there, they were forgotten in the rush of answering the phone. "Damiano's Aerobics over on Third Avenue."
    "Thanks," I said. "And say hi to Patti for me."
    She smiled with those wonderful erotic lips—you imagined them the kind of lips sixteenth-century kings demanded in their whores—and then waved me off to take her phone call. After answering, she said, "I'll be glad to tell you about Windmere.” She was back to being a brochure.

Chapter 14
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    "H ow's your head?" I asked Donna.
    "Pretty good. As long as I don't move too fast. She really hit me. Where're you?"
    "Phone booth across the street from an aerobics place out on Third Avenue."
    "Y ou're joining an aerobics class?"
    " No, the woman who hit you. It's where she works."
    "God," she said. "That's neat."
    "What's that?"
    "That you've found her already. I mean, you really are a good detective."
    " All I did was run down a couple of things."
    "But that's what's so neat, Dwyer. You run down a couple of things and bingo, you've got it."
    " That's just the problem."
    "What?"
    " I don't know what I've got."
    "How come?"
    " Well, the motorcycle is registered to a Mrs. Slater who resides at the Windmere nursing home. I don't know what relation she has to this Evelyn Dain or why Evelyn Dain is following me or what any of this has to do with the suitcase that Karen Lane hired me to find."
    "Yeah, God, it really is confusing, isn't it?"
    "Yeah."
    "So why're you doing it? I mean, why not just tell Edelman?"
    "Because right now the police are saying that Karen Lane's death was an accident resulting from mixing alcohol and barbiturates. Which means they won't be pursuing things. Which means it's left to me, I guess."
    "I wouldn't mind if you, you know, sort of paid her back for me."
    "Who?"
    "Evelyn Dain."
    "Paid her back?"
    "You know."
    "You mean