Always Say Goodbye: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (19 page)

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Authors: Stuart M. Kaminsky

BOOK: Always Say Goodbye: A Lew Fonesca Mystery
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Holiger looked around the room. Smiling faces. Sad faces. A fat young man with a well-trimmed beard holding a donut in one hand, coffee in the other. Franco in a stare down with a thin woman holding a coffee cup who wanted his table. The two young women, one black, one clearly Latina, behind the counter in trim uniforms serving, scurrying.
“A post office box,” said Holiger. “The mail goes to a post office box in White Plains. In your name. Lew, I didn’t start writing the checks till almost a year after you were gone. You left no address. You could have been dead.”
“When I left there was less than a hundred dollars in the account,” Lew went on. “Then, all of a sudden, four hundred thousand dollars. Now there’s a hundred thousand.”
Holiger shook his head, reached up to tighten his tie, changed his mind.
“You want to be exact? Four hundred and twenty-two thousand, Catherine’s life insurance. I had it deposited in your account. There’s one hundred and nine thousand dollars and forty-seven cents in there now.”
“And no one at the bank or the insurance company asked any questions?”
“Why should they? I had it directly deposited into your joint account. Lew, I was in the hole. One kid in college, another about to go. Ruthie’s diabetes is, well, it’s bad.”
“You killed two men, Milt.”
“No, I …”
“Santoro was working for the bank,” said Lew. “He came to you to see if he could find a lead to me. So, you killed him, him and Aponte-Cruz.”
“I could say I’ll find a way to pay you back the the rest of the money,” Holiger said, leaning over the table, whispering.
“How are you going to get three hundred thousand dollars, Milt?”
“I don’t know. Overtime?”
Holiger smiled. Lew did not.
“You murdered two people, Milt.”
“You’re going to turn me in. That guy Lee, he murdered Catherine and you didn’t turn him in.”
“He killed Catherine. He didn’t murder her.”
Franco had lost the stare down contest with the waiting woman. He was up now and heading toward the table where Lew and Milt Holiger sat.
“Lew, Ruthie, the kids, what are you going to do?” asked Holiger, sitting back, eyes closed, rubbing his forehead with his fingers.
“What are you going to do?” asked Lew.
He hadn’t touched his coffee or the muffin. Franco was standing next to the table now.
“I don’t know,” said Holiger. “I’m not going to shoot myself or jump off the Sears Tower if that’s what you’re hinting at. There are too many people dead in the last few days. You know why, Lewis?”
“Yes, because I came back to town.”
“Okay, I’ll turn myself in, plead … I don’t know what.”
“Not going to eat that, Lewis?” Franco said.
Lew shook his head no. Franco picked up the muffin.
Lew stood up. Franco saw the bullet on top of the unfolded bank statement.
“I’ll call Dupree tomorrow,” said Holiger. “I want to tell Ruthie first.”
Franco looked puzzled.
“What?” he asked. “What’s goin’ on?”
Holiger looked up at Franco and then at Lew and said, “Watch the ten o’clock news tomorrow.”
Lew walked past tables toward the door, Franco at his side. Franco bumped into the table where two black men wearing identical blue long-sleeved turtle-necked sweaters swept up their coffee cups before they spilled. Franco excused himself. Lew looked back at Milt Holiger, who was staring down at the bullet.
“Mind telling me what that was all about?” Franco said.
“I’m going home,” said Lew.
And after the family dinner that night, he did.
TO LEW’S RIGHT
on the Southwest Airlines flight to Tampa, a woman in her thirties, large, heavy, was trying to untie a knot around a package wrapped in blue paper. She kept pushing her slipping glasses back on her nose and mumbling to herself as she struggled.
Lew was on the aisle, eyes closed, seeing dead people.
On the other side of the mumbling woman was a young man in an orange T-shirt. The young man’s arms were folded, his green baseball cap pulled down over his closed eyes.
“I don’t want to tear it. I don’t want to tear it. I’m not going to tear it,” the woman mumbled.
Lew opened his eyes. Through the window past the three people across the aisle, he could see a forever of darkness pricked with tiny white pulsing stars.
“Oh, God,” said the woman, leaning back and placing the
package on her lap while she reenergized to continue her battle with the string. “What’s inside? What’s inside? What’s inside?”
“A book,” said Lew.
He regretted his two words before he had even finished getting them out. The woman had turned her head and was tight-lipped.
“It’s supposed to be a surprise,” she said. “He said it was a surprise. Now you’ve goddamn spoiled it.”
“I do that sometimes,” Lew said.
“Trying to be funny? That it? Stand-up comedian wannabe ?”
“No,” said Lew.
“Okay, do something useful, George Carlin. Untie the knot.”
She handed him the package.
A flight attendant, the sleeves of her white blouse rolled up, came quickly down the aisle, smiling as she passed. Lew thought she looked tired. Wary? Terrorists? Crazy people? Drunks? Turbulence? Rockets from the ground? Every flight brought down the odds for her. But then, Lew thought, every day brings down the odds for all of us.
“Can you untie it or not?” the woman said.
Then she suddenly brightened, a smile on her face.
“Hey, can you untie it or knot? Get it? Not like with a
k
in front not
n-o-t.
”
“Yes,” said Lew, working on the string.
The young man in the orange T-shirt and green cap shifted and turned his back on the woman and Lew.
Lew untied the string and handed the package back.
“My fingers,” she said. “Too short, too stubby, for which I blame my mother who has them too.”
“It could be something worse,” said Lew.
“Could be?” said the woman, carefully pulling back the paper. “It is worse.”
She folded the paper carefully, placed it in the pouch on the back of the seat in front of her and looked down at a paperback copy of
Heart of Darkness
. She put her right hand on the book and sobbed.
“That sun-diddly son of a bitch.” She looked at Lew. “He remembered. We had to read this back when we were in second year of high school. I hated the damn thing. But he liked it. You know what?”
“No.”
“I’m gonna keep this book, and the paper in my handbag,” she said. “Carry around something from someone you love and you hope-to-hell loves you even if he’s not there for you and never will be. You know what I mean?”
Lew’s hand was in his pocket, touching Catherine’s wedding band on his key chain.
“Yes,” he said.
The woman leaned forward and looked out the window past the sleeping or pretending-to-sleep young man.
“Almost there,” she said. “That’s Tampa.”
“Almost there,” Lew agreed. He closed his eyes and thought about a conversation only hours old.
Angie had wanted to have the family over. Lew could leave the next day. Franco had agreed. Angie had looked at her brother’s face and understood.
“Okay,” she had said, taking his right hand in both of hers.
“What’s okay?” asked Franco. “Uncle Tonio’s gonna be here, Maria and the kids, Jamie …”
“Next time,” Angie had said.
“Next time,” Lew had agreed.
It was close to midnight when Lew pulled the rental car into a space at the rear of the DQ on 301. He would ask Dave if he could leave it there for a while. If Lew didn’t think of someone to give it to in the next few days, he would call a charity that takes vehicles and have it hauled away. There were advantages to having the Saturn, but he could think of only one, ready transportation. There were lots of negatives, including responsibility for keeping it running, feeding it gas, getting a vehicle tag. There would be the resistible temptation to drive when he should walk or use his bike. There would also be the resistible temptation to keep the vehicle clean.
Tonight was sleep. Tonight was doors locked and darkness.
When he opened the door and flicked on the light, he was aware, probably for the first time, of how bare the space was. Three folding chairs, small desk with ping dents and one empty lone wire box on it for letters, and on the wall, the painting. Tonight was sleep.
He went to the painting, stood in front of it. Not long, a few seconds, enough to refresh his memory. Darkness shrouded mountains and the lone spot of color. Stopping to look at the painting had become not a compulsion but a ritual. For the first time, he realized that. Don’t think about it. Tonight was sleep.
He turned off the light, made his way to the small room off of the office, clicked on the floor lamp and looked at the cell in which he lived. Cot. Television. VHS player. His few clothes on hangers in the closet and in the low unpainted three-drawer dresser against the wall. Everything was neat. Order. Keep one small space clean. Order. He put down his bag, put his dirty clothes in the small wicker basket in the closet, placed the book Angie and Franco had given him on the wooden chair next to his bed alongside the black traveling clock with the
relentless red numbers. He took off his clothes, folded them neatly on the waist-high closet shelf Ames had built and pulled on his oversize Shell T-shirt. Then he turned out the light and got into bed, but not under the thin khaki blanket. Tonight was sleep.
But he did not sleep. They weren’t ghosts. They weren’t vivid memories. They were part of him. Everything that happens, every moment spent became, he felt certain, part of him. Dreams, movies, imagination, distorted and real memories. All took up bits of the real time of his life, were as much a part of him as a chocolate cherry Blizzard. He let the dreams and thoughts come, beginning and ending with Catherine.
And then he slept.
 
 
There was light and the faint rustle of someone in the next room. Lew blinked at the window. He had forgotten to close the blinds. The morning sun, rising above the shops on the other side of 301, cut through the spaces between the plastic slats.
Lew sat, bare feet on the floor. Then as he rose, he reached for his faded leather pouch with his soap, razor, toothbrush and toothpaste. He took a fresh blue towel from his closet, draped it over his shoulder and went through the door into his office.
Ames McKinney leaned back against the wall across from the door a few feet from the Stig Dalstrom painting. Ames wore his usual naturally faded jeans, a long-sleeved blue flannel shirt under a blue denim jacket. His gray-white hair was cut trim and his face cleanly shaved. He was reading a paperback book, but looked up when Lew entered the room.
“You look sartorial,” said Lew.
“I’m a trendsetter,” Ames said, putting the book in his jacket pocket. “How did it go?”
“Found the man who killed Catherine. Watched a man shoot himself. Talked to a man who had killed a lawyer and a bodyguard and stolen Catherine’s and my savings.”
Ames didn’t ask for further explanation.
“Busy few days,” said Ames, pushing away from the wall. “Got a busy one for you today.”
“What are you reading?”
Ames touched the pocket of his jacket into which he had slipped the book and said, “
Ivanhoe,
Scott. Wanna put your pants on, chief?”
“I’ll be right back.”
Lew opened the door, stepped into the cool morning facing the fully risen sun. Twenty steps to his right was the washroom. It was the only washroom for the six offices in the two-story building.
No one was inside when he entered. Sometimes a vagabond from Genesis, a tattered soul cast out of Eden by a vengeful God, would make the cracked tile floor his home for the night. The two toilet stalls had doors that wouldn’t stay closed and a sink with a perpetual slow drip that had left a dark stain leading to the drain. The room had two pinging overhead fluorescent lights. At the moment, they both worked.
Lew looked in the mirror and saw his mother’s face. It was impossible to avoid the resemblance, the pouting lower lip, the dark, sad face, brown eyes. He took off his shirt, hung it over the top of a toilet stall, washed, shaved, brushed, combed back his hair. It was the best he could do. It was all he wanted to do. While he liked to keep himself, his living space, his clothes clean and neat, he wasn’t obsessive. The world was chaotic. He wanted his part of it to be reasonably free of that chaos.
When he got back in the office, Ames said, “Borg.”
Lew moved into the other room and raised his voice. “You saw him?”
“Talked to him on the phone. Don’t know what his problem is but he won’t go to the police with it.”
When Lew dressed in jeans, a white dress shirt and his Cubs baseball cap, he said, “I’ve got a hundred and nine thousand dollars.”
Ames looked at him.
“Catherine’s insurance,” Lew said. “About a quarter of it. The other three-quarters was stolen.”
“Way you live that could stretch you for four or five years,” said Ames.
“It could,” Lew agreed. “I’ll think about it.”
They drove to Long Boat Key and straight up Gulf of Mexico Drive to the entrance of Conquistador Del Palmas. The uniformed guard at the gate was old, with perfect false teeth and a smile. Lew’s name had been left at the gate and he and Ames were waved in.
Earl Borg’s condo was in an eight-story building. Borg was on the sixth floor. He buzzed them in and they crossed the highly polished azure tile lobby to the elevator, which took them silently to the sixth floor. The door to 604 was closed. Lew knocked.
“Come in. It’s open.”
The apartment wasn’t large. A dining-room table and four chairs sat to the left in front of an open kitchen. Another door was open to Lew’s left. Beyond the door was a fully made double bed, ebony end tables and a matching dresser. To the right of the living room in which they were standing was an office-den. The leather smell of the den furniture dominated the apartment. On the small balcony across from Lew and Ames sat a man facing the Gulf of Mexico.
Something didn’t look right, feel right about the place or the man. Lew looked at Ames and knew that he sensed it too.
“Drink?” Borg asked. “I’ve got sangria out here. Ice. Glasses.”
Ames and Lew went out on the small balcony. There were two white canvas-backed director’s chairs.
“No, thanks,” said Lew.
“I’ll take one.”
“Mr. McKinney,” said Borg, without looking up. “I recognize your voice. Distinctive.”
“Montana mostly.”
And then Lew realized what was wrong with the apartment and the man. There was no television set, no computer, no paintings on the walls. There was no reason to put them there. Earl Borg was blind.
Lew and Ames sat, their backs to the Gulf.
“You figured it out,” said Borg, reaching slowly for the pitcher. “I’ve learned to read pauses, silences, inflections, hesitations over the past two years. I do have a television in the den and a computer that likes to talk.”
He found the pitcher and a glass and carefully and accurately poured till the glass was more than half full.
“Mr. McKinney?” he said, holding up the glass.
“Thanks,” said Ames, taking it.
“You wanted to see me?” asked Lew.
“Very much, but since I’m blind, that won’t be possible. I’ll settle for straight talking. I’m diabetic, knew it would take my sight someday. Took my father’s too and I’m pretty sure my grandfather’s. Happen to remember the little girl back at the hog-dog?”
“I remember.”
“That little girl is my daughter. She’s thirteen now. She
has also been kidnapped. I want you to find her and take her back to her mother.”
“The police,” Lew said.
“Officially, I’m not the child’s father and I’m certainly not nor ever was Denise’s husband. Denise wants me to pay the money. She won’t tell the police. She’s afraid of what might happen to Lilla. They’ve had her three days. Denise is now convinced they might kill her.”
“Are you convinced?” Lew asked.
“Oh, yes,” Borg said, taking a long sip of his drink. “I know them, know what they’re capable of.”

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