Free The Autumn Dead by Edward Gorman Page A

of the cops in the three white squad cars said anything. They just moved through the chill night, the stars clear and white in the dark blue sky, the scent of fir and pine and new grass contrasting with the smell of medicine and mortality coming from the ambulance.
    "You're Dwyer, right?"
    "Right."
    "Used to be on the force?"
    "Right."
    " Thought so." He offered me a Camel filter. I shook my head. "I'm Bill Lynott, Benny McGuane's cousin."
    "Oh. Right."
    Benny McGuane was a sergeant in the Fourth Precinct and we'd been buddies back in our first years of directing traffic and chastising husbands who kept wanting to break the bones of their cowering little wives. In those days, that was all the law would let you do, chastise them. Maybe that's why Benny drank so much and maybe that's why he'd had such fragile success with AA, on and off the program every few months or so.
    "How's he doing?" I said.
    " Much better."
    "Good."
    "Think it's really going to work for him this time."
    "He's a good man."
    "He is that." He had some of his Camel filter, standing there next to me, his face like a psychedelic phantasm of the sixties, alternately red and blue in the whipping lights of emergency vehicles. He exhaled. "Shitty thing to happen at a reunion."
    "Yes."
    "You know her?"
    " For a long time."
    "You have any reason to think there was any foul play involved?"
    "I don't think so."
    He looked at me carefully. He had one those fleshy Irish faces you associate with monsignors whose secret passion is chocolate cake. "You don't sound sure."
    There was the matter of the suitcase she'd wanted me to find. The matter of Dr. Glendon Evans being beaten up. The matter of her argument with Larry Price in the alley. The matter of somebody on a black Honda motorcycle following me around. "I guess I can't be sure."
    " Any particular reason?"
    "She was a woman who had a lot of friends and a lot of enemies."
    "I just got a quick look at her. Damn good-looking woman."
    "She was that, all right."
    "You think I should call for a plainclothes unit?"
    I thought about that one, too, and then I said, " I guess all we can do now is wait for the autopsy."
    "That's twenty-four hours minimum."
    "I know."
    "If anything did happen here, aside from natural causes, I mean, that's a damn long wait. You familiar with poisoning victims?"
    This kid was good. He must be taking all the night school courses available. That's one way you can divide cops these days. The men and women who put in their nighttime at the community colleges know a lot more than my generation of beat-pounders ever did.
    "Somewhat."
    "She look like she might have been poisoned?"
    "You familiar with aneurysms?"
    I shrugged. " Not really."
    " Did she just slip into unconsciousness?"
    "I guess. I'm not really sure. I mean, at first I thought she was just getting drunk."
    " It might have been a stroke."
    "Or a heart attack."
    He sighed. "My old man always said not to count on anything and he was right." He snapped his fingers. "You can go just like that."
    I was listening to him, sharing in his sense of how fragile our hold on living was, when out near the alley, next to a long silver Mercedes Benz sedan, I saw Larry Price grab a short, fleshy man and shake a fist at him. A tall, white-haired man with a Saint-Tropez tan and an arrogance that was probably radioactive stood nearby, watching. His name was Ted Forester. He was the man Glendon Evans had told me Karen was having an affair with. The man getting pushed around was a forlorn little guy named David Haskins. In high school the trio had been inseparable, though Haskins had always been little more than an adjunct, an early version of a gopher. Then, abruptly, Forester opened up the rear door of the Mercedes and Price pushed Haskins inside. A lot of people were watching all this, including Benny McGuane's cousin.
    "What do you suppose that's all about?"
    "I don't know," I said.
    "Think I'll go find out."
    By this time, Forester was in the car and behind