Read Always Say Goodbye: A Lew Fonesca Mystery Online

Authors: Stuart M. Kaminsky

Always Say Goodbye: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (5 page)

BOOK: Always Say Goodbye: A Lew Fonesca Mystery
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Rebecca Strum’s name was familiar, not just to Lew but, he knew, to probably millions of people around the world. He had seen two of Rebecca Strum’s books on the bookshelf near the kitchen in Franco and Angie’s house. She was a visiting faculty member at the University of Chicago. She had won a Nobel prize for her writing and lecturing on the Holocaust. She was a death camp survivor. The driver of a red sports car had killed Lew’s wife and may have come close to killing the person frequently recognized as the most important woman in the world.
Before picking up the last report, Lew closed his eyes and clasped his hands together. The tremor was still there. He opened his eyes and saw his hands. Had he been praying? He picked up the report. If there is a god or gods, He, She, It, or They had nothing to do with what Lew had decided to do.
The last report was the coroner’s. Lew had seen hundreds of these reports. He had always tried to be as clinically dispassionate as the people who had dictated the reports appeared to be. This one would be different.
Catherine had almost certainly died almost instantly. Her hip and left foot had been broken and her skull had been cracked in six places as her body tumbled. Internal bleeding
was massive. Her brain had ruptured and filled with blood. That’s what it came down to. That was it.
Angie, Franco, Uncle Tonio would try to get him to go to the cemetery, but Lew wouldn’t go. Catherine was not there, only broken bones and decaying body.
If there was a soul, it wasn’t hanging around her grave. He hoped it wasn’t. If there was a soul, as he had been taught and rejected by the time he was ten, it would come to him. He would welcome it, but he didn’t expect it.
Lew slowly put the report on the pile, returned the documents to the envelope, put the envelope in his carry-on and went through the door. The smell from the kitchen was a kickback memory to better times, his grandmother’s garlic pasta with shrimp. He followed the smell and the sound of a young woman’s voice into the kitchen.
Angie and Franco were at the table watching CNN where someone who looked like Catherine was saying that thirty-one people had been killed by terrorists in New Delhi. Angie and Franco looked up at Lew, whose eyes were fixed on the woman reading the news. She was a young, pretty, long-haired blonde with perfect skin and a very red mouth. She really didn’t look like Catherine. She only blurred his memory of his wife.
“You okay?” asked Angie, getting up.
He nodded yes and said, “Garlic pasta and shrimp?”
“When do you want to eat?” she said.
“When Franco and I get back I think I need to do something first.”
“When you get back?”
“When I get back,” Lew said.
Franco pushed back his chair and got up.
She wanted to ask Lew where they were going, but held
back. Franco would tell her everything when they returned.
When they left the house, Franco asked, “Okay if we take the truck or you want me to get one of the cars from Toro’s?”
“Truck’s fine.”
“Good,” he said.
The sun was still up. No clouds. Cool October Chicago weather. The next day the temperature could rise or fall twenty degrees. It might even snow.
When they got in the truck, Franco asked, “Where to?”
“Pappas.”
Franco grinned, drove past Cabrini Hospital, made a left on Racine.
“Angie’s office,” he said, leaning over Lew to point out the sign, ANGELA MASSACCIO, REALTOR, in black letters on the window above Gonzalez’s Hardware Store.
“She’s doing great,” Franco said. “Want the radio?”
“No.”
When Lew had to drive, he liked to drive alone or with Ames McKinney who was silent unless Lew asked him a question. Lew liked to listen to a voice, any voice turned low. No music. Talk. Evangelists, Pacifica Radio, NPR, Limbaugh, Springer, any talk show. Company he could ignore or turn off.
“Think I need a haircut? Angie thinks I need one.”
Lew looked. Franco could use a haircut. Lew told him. Lew cut his own hair, what remained of it, with a comb, scissors and disposable razor. His father had taught him how, saying only “Like so. Like so. Like so,” as he cut, clipped and combed. For the past four years he had given himself haircuts looking into the pitted mirror of the men’s room of the building he lived in behind the Dairy Queen on 301 in Sarasota.
Ten minutes later they were heading west on the Eisenhower Expressway.
Franco knew Pappas’s address, remembered it from the fax Rich had sent him, but he wanted to be asked.
“You remember the address? I do.” Franco beamed.
“My job. Hey, I know the streets. You know how to find people. We’re gonna be a great team.”
Lew didn’t remember becoming part of a team.
“Yes,” Lew said.
Lew thought about Rebecca Strum, wondered if when she was a young girl in a concentration camp they had given her a tattooed purple number.
“What do we do when we get there?” Franco asked.
“We talk. We listen.”
“That’s the plan?” asked Franco.
“There is no plan.”
“Sounds good to me,” said Franco, adding, “Yellow light on?”
“Why not,” Lew said.
“Indeed,” Franco said, flicking a switch on the dashboard.
The spinning light on top of the roof of the truck flicked yellow on the truck’s hood. Franco began to weave through early rush-hour traffic. Lew tightened his fists and looked at the dashboard clock. Three in the afternoon. The time when Catherine was killed. Lew fought to hold onto that memory of Catherine’s face, smiling as if she had a secret. He fought to hold onto it, knowing that another image of her was forming, an image of her crushed and bleeding face.
He tried. He lost.
 
 
The house was surrounded by a ten-foot-high wall of stone painted a conservative burnt ash. The metal gate was simple, wrought-iron painted black, each spike sharply pointed and
level with the wall. There was a white button in the wall to their left. Lew pushed it and a man’s voice from nowhere said, “Yes?”
“We’re looking for John Pappas,” Lew said.
“State your business and leave,” the man said.
Franco leaned over and whispered in Lew’s ear, “That’s from
The Twelve Chairs
.”
“Two men driving your car were following me this morning,” Lew said.
“So?”
“I’d like to know why.”
“Idle curiosity,” came the voice, “or are you going someplace with this?”
“My name’s Lew Fonesca. I want to know who killed my wife.”
“I don’t know who killed your wife,” came the voice. Something in the voice, even filtered through the speaker, made Lew say, “But you know who did.”
“Come in,” the voice said wearily. “I’m clicking. Just push the gate and be sure it clicks locked behind you.”
Franco and Lew pushed the gate open, stepped inside and Franco pushed the gate closed behind them.
“I’m supposed to be impressed,” said Franco as they walked down a wide brick-lined path toward the big two-story wood-frame house set back on a broad green lawn with a spotting of orange and yellow leaves from a nearby tree. A breeze rustled. More leaves floated down.
“I’ve seen bigger houses with cars in garages that looked great and had to be towed because there was crapola under the hood and the owners were always afraid of what it would cost to fix ’em.”
“You don’t like rich people,” Lew said.
“Not until and unless I become one,” said Franco. “Then I’ll join ’em.”
Franco reached down and touched the gun tucked in under his jacket.
While Lew was knocking the second time, the door opened.
Standing in front of them was the driver who Franco had pulled from the car on the Dan Ryan. He didn’t look surprised to see them. He motioned for Franco and Lew to come inside. The house smelled of something baking, something sweet and familiar.
They followed the driver up a flight of highly polished light wood stairs. On the landing, he went to a closed door and knocked.
“Come in,” came a deep voice with the touch of an accent. “Come in.”
Sitting in an armchair, hands on his lap was the one-eyed young man. At the window, his back turned, was a man with white hair, wearing dark slacks and a yellow sweater over a white shirt with a button-down collar.
The room was a combination den and office—antique wood desk and chair, two matching armchairs, a sofa that challenged the rest of the room but seemed right. There were three painted portraits on the wall to the right, all of one woman.
“John Pappas,” Lew said.
The man at the window slowly turned. He was lean, dapper, had a weathered face and too-perfect false teeth as white as his equally full head of white hair. According to his driver’s license, Pappas was fifty-seven years old.
“Have a seat,” he said with a smile, pointing a hand at the sofa.
Behind them the driver, arms folded, leaned back against
the wall near the door. The one-eyed man in the armchair looked at him and then back at Pappas.
Lew and Franco sat. So did Pappas after hitching up his pants, a low glass coffee table between them.
“We begin by being polite,” he said. “Though you have met, I don’t believe you know the names of my sons. This is Dimitri.”
He turned his head toward the driver.
“He prefers to be called Dimi. Why? I don’t know. That’s what they called the young priest in
The Exorcist,
right?”
“Right,” said Franco.
“And that,” Pappas said, looking over his shoulder at the one-eyed young man, “is Stavros. He has no diminutive.”
Pappas raised his right eyebrow, looking for a sign of recognition at his vocabulary. He got none from Lew and Franco.
“You’re Greeks,” said Franco.
“Your powers of observation are quite remarkable,” Pappas said. “So, you have questions, ask.”
“Who killed my wife?”
“Perhaps the person who would like to kill me and would not hesitate to … please make an effort to sit still.”
The last, delivered with a smile, had been aimed at the fidgeting Franco. Franco folded his arms, looked at Pappas and decided to make the effort.
“Thank you. Conversation is a medium,” said Pappas, sitting back. “Like film, video, a blank canvas or an empty screen, when used with respect, it deserves our full attention. Am I right?”
It was Stavros’s turn to say, “You’re right.”
“See,” said Pappas. “Stavros went to college. He’s the artist who keeps our home and business running and repaired. Dimi is our heart, our emotion. I am the creator. In many
ways, I have been most magnificently blessed. In others …”
He shrugged and continued.
“So, the artist can engage the medium and create art. Let us strive for conversational art.”
“Let us,” Franco said.
Pappas raised his right hand and his sons left the room.
“They are going to get us coffee and something special. They will also check the video monitors to see if anyone is watching the house. One does not know when an enemy might approach and mark it well, for in truth there is an enemy out there and the enemy has a name. I am under siege in my own home. This is my Troy. And I must be sure I don’t let a gift horse enter. You understand?”
“Yes, you’re paranoid,” said Lew.
“And you are not,” he said with a sigh. “You should be.”
“I’m depressed,” Lew said. “That’s all I can handle.”
Pappas nodded and folded his hands against his chest.
“The one who has made me a prisoner in my own home and may have killed your wife is called Posno. His full name is Andrej Posnitki. I think he is Hungarian, but that doesn’t matter. When she was so foully murdered, your dear wife was gathering evidence against Posno, evidence that he committed murder, evidence of his life of crime which, I am sorry to admit, I participated in, though only at the edges.”
Pappas raised his right hand and let it float toward an unmarked periphery.
“The important documents supporting her evidence could not be found in her office desk or your apartment. Posno’s plan when your wife died was to find you and torture you, something he is very, very good at, and get you to tell him where those documents were, if you even knew. But you were not to be found. You fled, vanished, flew.”
Pappas let his right hand, fingers fluttering, move up. Then he brought his hand back to his lap.
“Posno is not a genius, but he is clever and determined. He has almost certainly found you the same way I found you. Stavros found your name on the Internet. Something about your being involved in the shooting of some professor. That was a week ago. I sent Stavros to Sarasota to keep an eye on you.”
BOOK: Always Say Goodbye: A Lew Fonesca Mystery
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