Midnight Pass: A Lew Fonesca Novel (Lew Fonesca Novels) (15 page)

“I can’t,” I said.

“You can do it,” she said soothingly. “You can do it.”

“I’ll try.”

“Don’t try, succeed. You know who was a great teller of jokes and stories? General Patton. Loved to tell jokes and funny stories. I think he was depressed, too. I’ve been told he sometimes had his jeep driver completely naked when he drove him around after a battle. He’d pretend not to notice and people were too embarrassed to look at the driver or say anything. Patton thought it was hilarious.”

“That reassures me,” I said. “But I don’t think the world’s ready to see me walking around naked.”

“Sarcasm,” she said. “A small step toward recovery. A step to one side of comedy. Let’s try something. You’ve told me all the wonderful things about your wife, her beauty, wit, kindness, idiosyncrasies. Tell me things you didn’t like about her.”

“There are none,” I said.

“She was a human being, not a goddess. It is not disloyal to remember her as a human being. Besides, it is easier to tell jokes to a human being than a goddess.”

I looked down at my cup of coffee, cocoa brown with two packets of artificial sweetener. I drank.

“Start small,” Ann prompted.

“She left cabinet doors open,” I said. “I always had to close them. I told her about it at first and then I just gave up and did it.”

“You liked doing it, closing the cabinet doors?”

“I didn’t mind. Sometimes it bothered me but usually…”

“You smiled and did it,” said Ann.

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m not sure I’d count that as a fault, but it’s a start.”

“She told me what to do when I drove, told me if I was going too fast or too slow, or not passing other drivers when I should or passing them when I shouldn’t.”

“That bothered you.”

“Yes.”

“Because you’re a good driver?”

“Yes.”

“Progress. More.”

“She was always telling me to stand up straight, sit up straight. We’d be out somewhere and she’d come up behind me and press her hand into my lower back to remind me to straighten up.”

“She press you hard? Did it hurt?”

“No, it wasn’t that she was wrong. I guess I didn’t like the criticism.”

“Keep going.”

“She was almost always late when we had somewhere to go. She’d tell me she would be ready in five minutes and it was always fifteen or even twenty and we’d have to drive like hell to get where we were going on time.”

“And she would be telling you how to drive during all this?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you want to cry?” Ann asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Because you feel disloyal to her memory?”

“Because I miss her faults,” I said.

“So cry?”

“I can’t.”

“I’m pushing too hard,” Ann said. “You want a Diet Coke? I’m still thirsty. I’ve got some in the refrigerator.”

“Sure,” I said.

While she left the office to get the Cokes, I tried to imagine Catherine reacting to the joke about the Wongs. I tried to see her face. She would groan and then she would smile supportively. Or maybe she wouldn’t.

Ann came back with the two Diet Cokes, sat down, and said, “So, in the time we have left, do I tell you what I’ve learned about recently discovered innovations in surgery that were employed by the South during the Civil War or why Serbians are so good at preparing Middle Eastern food, or do you tell me what you’ve been doing for the past three days?”

I opted for the last three days. I had already told her about Hoffmann and Stanley and Roberta Trasker, so I told her about Digger and the boy named Darrell Caton and his mother in Sally’s office. I told her about Dr. Obermeyer. I told her about Ames’s little gun. And I told her about the Severtsons.

“And this is all true?” she asked with great interest. “You’re not creating any of it?”

“I don’t know how to create it,” I said. “And why would I make it up?”

“To please your therapist,” she said. “People do it all the time. I suggest something and the patient, wanting to please me, agrees even if they don’t believe it. Don’t try to please me. It gets in the way.”

“I didn’t make any of this up,” I said.

“For a man who is trying to hide from the world, you seem to have been drawn very deeply into it.”

“Not by choice,” I said.

“You could have said no. No, I won’t look for the woman and her two children. No, I won’t try to find the county commissioner. So, why did you say yes?”

“I don’t know. You want me to think about it?”

“Yes, but not consciously. The dead woman,” Ann said. “The actress. You want to know who killed her.”

“Of course.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Closure,” I said.

She said nothing, just looked at me till I said, “The closure I can’t find with my wife’s death. You think the reason I take on these searches for people, why I’m a process server is to find people responsible for things they know or have done wrong? You think I do it because I don’t know who killed…”

“Catherine,” Ann supplied. “And do you know who killed Mrs. Trasker?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“But?”

“Nothing’s ever simple about death. Nothing’s ever simple about murder.”

“We are once again out of time.”

I got up and handed her a twenty-dollar bill. She placed it on her desk and rose.

“Remember, tell the jokes to Catherine.”

I nodded. I wasn’t sure I could do it.

The sky was threatening but no rain was falling. The homeless, shirtless black man who slept in the park right across the street, with traffic whizzing by on Tamiami Trail, was sitting on the green metal bench on the corner, his arm spread out along the back of the bench. He was talking to himself. I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

“Hi,” I said.

He nodded back.

“Want a cup of coffee?” I said.

He nodded back again. I didn’t have to tell him to wait. I went back to Sarasota News & Books, got him a coffee and a bran muffin, and went back to the bench.

He took the coffee cup in one hand and the muffin in another.

“You want to hear some jokes?” I asked.

HEAVY BLACK CLOUDS
were moving in quickly from the east, pushing the heavy, slower-moving gray clouds out of the way.

Dr. James Obermeyer’s office was in a three-building complex on East Street right across from Michael’s on East restaurant. I’d been in one of the buildings a few months ago for an eye exam.

The picture on my television had started to look fuzzy, but Dave had come up to take a look at it and pronounced the television healthy and me in need of an eye doctor. I went to his.

The eye doctor examined me, told me I didn’t need glasses, and asked me how much television I watched.

“Too much,” I had told him. “Mostly movies on tape.”

“How much do you watch?”

“A lot, whenever I can.”

His advice was simple. Stop watching so many videos, read books, go to the movies, see a baseball game, or bowl. I thanked him, paid him, and ignored what he had told me.

Obermeyer’s office was in the building directly across from the ignored ophthalmologist. It was just before ten when I went through his outer office door and faced one of those glass partitions, behind which sat a young woman talking on the phone and nibbling at the ends of her hair.

I stood waiting till she hung up.

“Yes?” she asked with a tired smile.

“You eat your hair.”

“What?”

“You eat your hair,” I repeated.

“I…what’re you, a doctor?” she asked without interest.

“You can develop a fur ball just like a cat,” I said. “Only you can’t cough it up. It gets big enough and you need surgery.”

“You want an appointment with the doctor?” she asked with a look that made it clear she thought I needed a psychiatrist, not an internist.

“No,” I said. “Jim and I are friends. We were out drinking last night. I was having my eyes checked across the way and I thought I’d stop by and give him my half of the bar tab. I left before he did and just forgot.”

“Your name?”

“Lew Fonesca.”

“I’ll see if he can see you,” she said, pushing a button on the phone as she picked it up.

My question was answered. The good doctor was in.

“Yes, Doctor,” she said, after giving him my name. “He says he’d like to see you for a second. He owes you money. Okay.”

She put one hand over the mouthpiece and said. “The doctor says you can leave the money with me. He’s busy now.”

“Can’t do that,” I said, and took four quick steps to Obermeyer’s office door and opened it before the receptionist could stop me.

“Wait a minute,” she called from the outer office, as I let the door close behind me and moved past two examining rooms, one on my right and one on my left. I found Obermeyer in his comfortable, carpeted office complete with leather chairs, a leather love seat, prints made by pressing inked dead fish against canvas on two walls, and all of his degrees, titles, and awards framed on the wall behind him.

He looked up from behind his desk. He was wearing a clean, white smock and a hangover.

“I have a very low tolerance for alcohol,” he said, sitting up and blinking his eyes as he tried to focus on me.

Then it came to him.

“I remember,” he said, pointing a finger at me. “Kevin Hoffmann’s. You wanted me to—”

“Help get William Trasker out of that house.”

“Mr. Trasker is a very sick man. He should not be moved.”

“What would happen to him if he were moved?”

“I wouldn’t want to be responsible,” he said.

“So he’s too sick to be moved?”

“That’s my opinion, yes,” he said, putting a palm against his forehead to determine if he might need an aspirin.

The phone buzzed. He picked it up, listened for a few seconds, and said, “No, Carla. It’s all right. Do not call the police.”

He hung up and looked up at me.

“What happens to you if the police find a way to get a couple of specialists to look at Trasker and it turns out that he’s sick but there wouldn’t be any problem moving him?”

“Professional difference of opinion,” he said, looking around for something. “I’d have to stand by my diagnosis.”

I pulled my notebook out of my pocket and read, “James Ryder Obermeyer, B.S. in physiology, North Dakota State University, M.D. from the University of Utah. Certified in internal medicine, practiced in five different towns in North Dakota before you came to Sarasota six years ago. Malpractice suits, seven. Complaints to American Medical Association, sixteen.”

“That’s not uncommon for a physician in today’s litigious world,” he said.

“How about six DUI arrests and three accidents while under the influence?” I asked. “In one of those accidents in Ogden, Utah, a teenage girl was injured, lost her left leg. Your malpractice-insurance rate went up to something near the annual budget of the states of North Dakota and Utah combined.”

“Are you threatening me?” he asked with indignation.

“Happens to me all the time,” I said. “No, my point was that your professional opinion might not hold up particularly well against a cancer surgeon.”

“I stand by what I’ve said,” Obermeyer insisted with very little confidence and a distinct beading of perspiration on his upper lip.

“Mrs. Trasker was murdered. Kevin Hoffmann’s holding Mr. Trasker against his will. You could wind up as accessory to a murder.”

“I think you can leave now, Mr. Fonseca,” he said.

“Fonesca. I’ll call you later,” I said. “Have Trasker ready to leave Hoffmann’s house or I throw you to the American Medical Association, the AARP, the Florida Medical Ethics Board, the County Medical—”

“Stop,” he said. “You can’t intimidate me and you don’t frighten me.”

“Channel Forty, SNN television, the
Longboat Key Observer
, the
Planet
,” I continued. “The…You get the idea.”

His face had turned red. He looked distinctly intimidated and frightened.

“You wouldn’t do that,” he said. “I’d sue you.”

“I don’t think so but if you did, it would be a waste of your time and money. I don’t have anything. I could have ten thousand dollars if I take Kevin Hoffmann’s money to be quiet about Trasker and get out of town. I wonder how much he’s paying you.”

“Do not come back here,” he said with a quiver in his voice, “or the police will be called.”

I considered pushing him a little further, but I remembered what he had told me about his bad heart.

I left the office, closing the door quietly before he could say anything more. I half hoped he would follow me into the hall and do some bargaining.

Carla the receptionist gave me a glance and then looked down at whatever she had been doing.

I stopped at the Texas Bar and Grill too early for lunch and not hungry. Ames was in his room in back. Ed Fairing was behind the bar, talking to a pair of black men in their fifties who could have been twins.

There were people at a few of the tables, early lunch birds, all-day drinkers with nowhere else they wanted to be, a woman in a sweat suit drinking coffee and reading a book.

“Ames?” I called to Ed, who nodded toward the narrow hallway next to the bar.

“Fonesca,” Ed said, stopping me as I started to walk past the bar. “Listen, I’m thinking of making this place a little more upscale. Lot of pressure on me from some of the downtown business people. Jerry Robins, you know him? Know what he said to me? ‘Ed,’ he said, ‘you’ve got a really funky place.’ I said, ‘Yes, thanks,’ and he said, ‘I hate funky.’ You understand where I’m going with this?”

“No,” I said.

“I don’t want to change the Texas,” he said. “I’m thinking about it but I don’t want to do it. I like it just the way it is.”

“Funky,” I said.

“I guess,” he agreed, “but that’s not the way I see it. I see it as authentic. You know people, right?”

“People?”

“You know what I mean,” he said confidentially. “People who might be persuaded to get people like Jerry Robins to leave me alone. People like Trasker and Hoffmann. People on the City Council or Board of Commissioners. People who might owe you a favor, might see the Texas as kind of a landmark.”

“That kind of person can’t be bought for what you could afford to pay, Ed.”

Ed touched the corners of his handlebar mustache to be sure they were still there and properly upturned.

“I’m not talking about bribing anybody,” he said. “I’m talking about your maybe calling in some markers.”

Markers. He sounded like Dean Martin in
Rio Bravo.

“I’ll talk to someone,” I said.

“Thanks,” said Ed with a small, gentle punch of my arm. “A beer?”

“Maybe later,” I said.

I went down the hallway past the ladies and men’s rooms and the utility closet and knocked at a door on the right.

“Who is it?” Ames asked.

“Lew. Want me to wait for you at the bar?”

He paused a long pause and said, “Come in.”

I had never been in Ames’s room before. He liked his privacy, not as much as I loved my isolation, but enough to be respected, and his privacy was intruded on far less than my isolation. Ames had the bearing of man whose space and dignity should not be violated. I had the bearing of a man whose isolation seemed to call for intrusion.

His room had mine beat in size, cleanliness, and color. There was a bed against one wall under the only window in the room. The view through the window was the alley behind the Texas Bar and Grill. There was a chest of drawers, slightly scratched, against the opposite wall. A heavy, dark wood rocking chair sat in one corner next to a floor lamp. In the middle of the room was a wooden table with heavy dark legs. There were no prints or paintings on the wall, just a small battered wooden crucifix next to a magazine-sized, framed black-and-white photograph of a young woman in an evening dress. The photograph looked as if it had been taken at least half a century ago. Ames McKinney sat at the table in one of the three chairs that faced the door.

In front of him were the parts of what looked like a rifle.

“New?” I asked.

“Hmm,” Ames answered as he finished polishing a black metal bolt about six inches long. “Marlin, New Model 1895 Cowboy,” he said, looking up at me, blue eyes, leathery face. “Ed just bought it. I’m checking it out.”

He began to put the rifle back together.

“Good feel,” he said as he worked. “Old Western-styled 45/70 with a twenty-six-inch tapered octagonal barrel with deep-cut Ballard-type rifling, nine-shot tubular magazine, adjustable Marble semibuckhorn rear and Marble carbine front sight.”

I sat across from Ames and watched quietly while he finished, put a cap on the oil can in front of him, wiped his hands on an oily piece of dark soft leather, and lay the gun gently down in front of him.

“Here about the dead lady?” he asked.

“Maybe. Probably. I want to take a look at Midnight Pass. Like to see it?”

“Want me to carry?”

“Don’t think it’ll be necessary but it can’t hurt to bring something small.”

He stood up and showed me that he was wearing his belt with the built-in pistol.

“That should do it,” I said.

Ames nodded, picked up the rifle, and left the room, closing the door behind him. When he came back a few minutes later, he was wearing his yellow slicker.

“Looks like it might rain some more,” he said.

I looked at the window. It was definitely getting darker.

“Then let’s go,” I said.

The rain started when we were no more than five minutes out of downtown. It stayed light and steady but the wind began to pick up when we made the turn on Stickney Point Road, turned left on Midnight Pass and headed down the two-lane road.

It still wasn’t heavy when I made a right turn into Sarasandbay Cove, a private, spaced-out quintet of huge houses facing the water. I had been here before, serving papers on a plastic surgeon named Amos Peet, who was being sued for malpractice. Women who didn’t like the way things had turned out were constantly suing plastic surgeons. Usually the insurance companies settled, knowing that if it got to a jury, the plaintiff would walk away with a very large check. So, insurance for a plastic surgeon’s practice was higher than the annual salary of a Sarasota fireman. So the plastic surgeons charged more and more. It costs about two thousand dollars to get eight hours of cardiac-bypass surgery and six months of follow-up, and four thousand dollars to get an hour of plastic surgery. I had served papers to Dr. Peet on behalf of one of Tycinker, Oliver, and Schwartz’s dissatisfied clients.

Amos Peet had been a gentleman about it. He had been through it all before. He did not blame the messenger. He offered the messenger a cup of coffee.

I remembered him telling me that he was about two hundred yards from Midnight Pass. I wasn’t interested at the time. This time I was. I parked next to a short, thickly leafed clutch of trees.

Ames and I got out of the car. It still wasn’t raining hard, but it was getting darker and the threat of something more was out there. I didn’t mind being soaked. I liked going back to my office, getting out of my clothes, toweling down, and getting in bed in a fresh pair of boxer shorts and a T-shirt.

A little distant thunder, a slight increase in the rain, and a noon as dark as night. We went behind Amos Peet’s house and headed in the direction of Midnight Pass. Ames led the way through the miniature rain forest. My sneakers were muddy long before we got to the clearing and the open stretch of rocks and shrubs.

“You think this is it?” I said.

“Don’t seem like much,” Ames said. “Can’t even build on it.”

“It’s worth millions,” I said. “Maybe a lot of millions.”

A trio of small crawfish scuttled behind a rock on the gravel to my left, and the wind picked up. The rain was steady and getting stronger and the sky was almost night black. Lightning crackled out across the Gulf. Neither wind nor rain made it any cooler. It was humid and hot. A steamy mist was forming close to the ground.

I couldn’t see Kevin Hoffmann’s house from where we stood, but I imagined it surrounded by fog. Inside that house lay William Trasker, and I didn’t seem to be getting very far in earning the money the Reverend Wilkens had given me.

There was nothing much else to see. It didn’t look like it would take millions of dollars to study the narrow strip of land to determine if it could be dredged. I didn’t know why it would take millions more to keep the Pass open once it was dredged.