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Authors: Stuart M. Kaminsky

Denial: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (Lew Fonesca Novels) (14 page)

BOOK: Denial: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (Lew Fonesca Novels)
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I EXPLAINED
to Ames as we drove up 301 to DeSoto and then went west past the greyhound track on our left and then the airport on our right. There was a long wait at the light at Tamiami Trail. The Ringling Museum of Art sat about three hundred yards in front of us behind the iron fence. The light changed. I went across the Trail and made a right turn into the Florida State University Asolo Center.
The parking lot was almost full, with visitors to the museum and to the matinee performance. I drove past the large box, which housed the theater, the Sarasota Ballet and the Florida State University graduate program for acting students.
I found a parking spot near the backstage entrance, pulled in and got out with Ames coming around and joining me as I moved up the concrete steps toward the door. It had taken less than fifteen minutes.
I had tried to think about what I would do when I stood in front of the man who had wept on the phone, but nothing would come. Whatever happened would
happen. I had no plan. I glanced at Ames and saw that he had a plan; it consisted of showing me a very small pistol in the palm of his right hand.
“Double derringer,” he said. “A forty-one-caliber rimfire.”
“I don’t think we’ll need that,” I said.
“Can’t hurt,” he said.
“Yes, it can.”
He shrugged. We had no time to discuss it. We went through the door, Ames hiding the weapon in the palm of his large hand.
The security counter was on our left. A man in a blue uniform, lean and spectacled, stood behind the counter. There was no one else in view. The double doors leading backstage were closed.
“A man,” I said. “Big, white beard, wanted to see Nancy Root.”
The man behind the desk looked at us.
“Who’re you?” the guard said.
“Friends of Miss Root,” I said. “Where’s the man?”
“Left,” he said. “Nervous. Asked how much longer the show was. Not much room to pace in here. He went outside, walked around a little and then went off to the right, walking fast. You want to see Miss Root, you’ll have to wait too.”
“Is there any other way in?” I asked.
“Couple,” he said. “Can’t open them from outside and if they open from inside, it lights up on the board back here.”
“Except for the entrance to the theater?” I said.
“That’s right.”
“If he comes back, don’t let him in to see Miss Root,” I said.
“Not up to me,” he said. “Up to her.” He looked us over. A short dark man wearing a baseball cap. A tall
old man in flannel shirt and an old cracking leather jacket. “You’re not cops.”
I didn’t confirm his keen observation. I went back outside with Ames next to me. We hurried around the building and up the steps to the theater. The doors were open. The play had to be nearly over.
An old woman in a white blouse and blue skirt stood talking to a young man behind the refreshment counter in front of us. They looked us over as we moved quickly toward them. The woman held a finger to her lips to let us know that we should be quiet. She whispered, “Show’s almost over. Can I help you?”
“Big man, white hair, white beard,” I said. “Did he come in a little while ago?”
“Yes,” she said. “Very odd. He said he had to get in. I told him he had missed more than half the show, but he went to the box office and bought a ticket.”
“He’s in the theater?” I asked.
“Oh yes.”
“Where?”
“Balcony,” she said. “Plenty of seats on the main floor, but I didn’t want him to disrupt the actors, so I thought—”
“We really have to find him,” I said.
“Performance will be over in about fifteen minutes or so,” she said.
“We really have to find him now,” I said.
“Why?” the young man behind the counter said.
I tried to think of a good lie that would get us in. I failed, so I said, “You know what happened to Nancy Root’s son?”
“Yes,” said the woman.
The young man nodded.
“I think the man with the beard was driving the car,” I said. “I’m working for Miss Root.”
“I’m calling security,” said the young man.
The woman looked confused.
“Good idea,” I said, starting toward the stairs on my left, half expecting the old woman to try to stop us. She didn’t.
We came to the mezzanine landing and went up another flight of carpeted steps and moved through a closed door into near darkness. We could hear voices, the projected sound of actors’ voices that said,
We’re actors. We’re not talking normally. We’re projecting. We expect you to pretend that you don’t notice.
I groped my way through a hanging velvety drape with Ames at my side. A voice from the stage below us, Nancy Root’s voice, said, “And you think that would stop me? Fifteen years together and you think a few words can stop me now?”
The light from the stage was bright enough to make out the seats in the balcony, though the people in them were shadowy.
“Not here,” Ames whispered before I could see faces.
Most of the seats weren’t filled. People were scattered.
From the stage, a man’s voice said, “Stop you? With words? You’re right. I know you too well to think that common sense would make any difference. No, Maddy, I’m going to kill you.”
I motioned Ames down narrow steps and looked over the balcony into the orchestra seats. Ames did the same. The man wasn’t there. On the stage, Nancy Root, in a blonde wig, stood in a living room, arms folded, facing a tall, burly-looking man with wavy brown hair and a knowing smile. She was wearing a blue dress showing cleavage. He was wearing a tuxedo. He was holding a gun.
I was trying to think of where we could stand to see the seats in the mezzanine and the rear of the ground floor when Ames nudged me and pointed across the theater at a box seat at the mezzanine level.
A single figure sat in it, a burly man with a white beard. His hands gripped the bronze rail in front of him as he looked down at Nancy Root.
I was moving back up the steps to return to the steps to the mezzanine level when the man looked over at us. Our movement had caught his eye.
Our eyes met. He recognized me. I didn’t recognize him but I knew who he was. He got up and stepped back quickly into the shadows of the box. Ames and I hurried up the last few steps, went through the drapes and headed for the door and the steps beyond, which would take us to the mezzanine level.
The box where the man had been was empty, the door open.
On stage, Nancy Root was saying, “I have a cliché for you, Norman. You won’t get away with it.”
“Why not?” the man asked with a touch of amusement.
“Because,” she said, “I’m recording everything we say. Don’t bother to look around. It’s voice activated and the microphone is extremely well hidden.”
“You’re lying,” he said.
“Am I? Well, there is one way to find out,” Nancy Root said. “I don’t recommend it for either of our sakes.”
Ames and I were back in a dark corridor just beyond the box seat. The man hadn’t passed us. There was an emergency exit to the left. This time Ames led the way. We were on a bare concrete landing. Bare concrete steps with a metal railing led down. Footsteps clanged below us.
“Wait,” I called.
The footsteps stopped.
“Let’s talk,” I said.
Ames, derringer in hand, started slowly, quietly down the stairs back against the wall. I leaned over the railing. There was no one in sight.
Somewhere below us the man, his voice echoing, said, “Not here. Not now. I have to take care of things. Take care of her before—”
“Nancy Root?”
“No,” he said. “Oh God, I should have let her kill you.”
“Her?” I called.
“The woman who tried to run you down,” he said.
I could hear him move, heard the echo of running feet below. First the man. Then Ames hurrying down. I started after him, my sore knee slowing me down, and reached the ground level in time to see Ames go through a door and turn to the right. The door started to close. I pushed the door back open and followed him.
The security guard came through a door in front of me and said, “What’s going on?”
I didn’t answer. I followed Ames.
“I said, What’s going on?” the guard repeated.
A turn in the corridor. Dressing rooms. Something that looked like a small lounge. An almost empty room with a polished wooden floor and floor-to-ceiling mirrors on one wall.
I was closing in on Ames, who pushed through a door into a small, empty theater with seats graded upward about fifteen rows. There was a dim light coming from the small stage to our right and exit lights behind us and across from us.
We headed for the exit and pushed through a door and found ourselves back in the lobby with the old
woman and the young man behind the refreshment counter.
“That way,” shouted the man, pointing to the entrance to the theater.
We ran through the doors into the late afternoon.
Fear, anger, desperation, adrenaline had kicked up the speed of the big man in front of us. He had a lead of about thirty yards.
Ames slowed down a little and said, “Damn arthritis.”
I moved past him, losing my Cubs cap. I was in good shape, at least for running, but my knee did more than just slow me down. I didn’t know what I’d do even if I had been able to catch up with the man, who was a good four or five inches taller than I was and at least fifty pounds heavier.
The man got to his car, opened the door, sat heavily and slammed the door. I was in the middle of the aisle. He was parked between two cars facing into the space. He backed out, swinging the rear of his car in my direction with a wailing squeal.
I moved between two parked cars. I could see the dented fender, the broken light. He was almost even with me. He looked over the passenger seat and met my eyes. I’m not sure what he saw. I’m not sure what I was feeling. I definitely wasn’t thinking.
He shifted into drive and started forward.
A shot, the sound of a firecracker, came from the small gun in Ames McKinney’s hand. Ames was standing in the driveway now. The bullet hit the rear window of the car as it started forward. It made a hole but didn’t shatter. Ames fired again. The bullet pinged off the trunk as the driver made a sharp left turn.
“Two pellets,” Ames said. “That’s it.”
He held up the empty little gun.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“No,” I said, imagining a wild car chase, imagined the clearly desperate man losing control, a crash. “We’ll find him. Now we know where to look.”
We went back through the stage door, where the fuming security guard stood with his hands on his hips and greeted us with, “What the hell is going on here?”
“Miss Root will explain,” I said.
“She’d better,” he said. “I’ve got to write this up, you know.”
“I understand.”
“I don’t need this kind of crap, you know.”
“I know,” I said.
“I get crap about this, I’m quitting. I can always bag groceries at Publix or Albertsons.”
He went back behind the counter, pulled out a pad and began to fill out the form, shaking his head the whole time while we waited for Nancy Root.
She came out about five minutes later, still in costume and makeup.
“Where is he?” she said, looking at Ames and me.
“Got away,” I answered.
“I saw him in the box stage right, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” I said.
“He’s insane, isn’t he?” she asked.
“Something like that,” I agreed.
I wondered if the person who had run down my wife had felt anything like the kind of guilt as the bearded man. I hoped he did.
Nancy Root and I looked at each other. Her mask of makeup didn’t cover the pain in her eyes. I knew that pain. I saw it in mirrors when I had to look or mistakenly looked. She was an actress. She would have to look in mirrors as long as she worked at her profession. She was young. She had a lot of years to look at those mourning eyes.
“WE SHOULD GO.”
Ames spoke softly, seated next to me, looking straight ahead as I drove down Tamiami Trail.
“In the morning,” I said.
“Suit yourself.”
Ames wanted to go to Manatee Community College and track down the bearded philosopher. I wanted to eat something very bad for me, full of carbohydrates, maybe a couple of Big Macs or a chocolate cherry Blizzard. Maybe both. Or maybe I’d try something different. Then I wanted to put on a clean pair of underwear and go to sleep. It was just before five at night.
We said nothing as we made the turn at Fruitville just past the quay. I turned on the radio. Someone on WLSS was interviewing a woman named Sunny who ran a shelter for stray cats. She had several hundred of them, knew all their names, played them symphonies to keep them calm, assured all listeners that she wasn’t a crazy cat lady.
“Roland and I keep the yard clean,” the woman named Sunny said, as if she were the happiest person in Sarasota, possibly the world. “And there are temperature-controlled little nooks for all of them.”
Sunny didn’t want money. She had plenty. Her husband, Roland, was a retired CEO of a corporation called InterTelex.
I imagined a hundred cats grinning, pawing, leaping, fighting, cuddling, rolling and jumping. Orange, black, white, striped, furry, hairless.
For a minute or two I managed to push reality from my mind, put it in a green fragile bubble and let it quiver away to wait. Catherine had wanted a cat, but neither of us was home during the day and she didn’t think it would be fair to a cat to leave it alone.
A week or so before she had died, I made up my mind to surprise her on her birthday with two cats. I’d get them from the humane society on Halstead, or maybe it was Broadway. I wouldn’t name the cats and I wouldn’t use whatever name the humane society had tagged them with. I would let Catherine name them.
I lost Sunny’s bouncing voice and the cats faded away. The bubble came floating back and for an instant I imagined a baby.
“Easy up,” said Ames, reaching out and turning the steering wheel as I drifted into the left lane just before we came to 301.
I stopped imagining and straightened out as Ames changed the station. The golden oldies station came on. Cyndi Lauper was belting out “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” She sounded too much like Sunny the Cat Lady. I turned off the radio and turned right.
We made it to the DQ parking lot, where Ames’s motor scooter was chained against a metal post.
“I could go it on my own,” he said.
“No, I’ll go with you in the morning.”
“Lock your door tonight,” he said as he got out and then leaned back through the door, his hand open, the derringer lying in it. “Two shots. Pellets are already loaded.”
“I don’t need it,” I said, looking at the tiny weapon.
“Someone trying to kill you?”
“Looks that way,” I said.
“Want me camping out in front of your door all night?”
“No.”
He reached farther into the car, the gun inches from my hand. I took it and nodded.
Ames closed the door and headed for his scooter while I parked in an open space closer to my office home.
Dave was at the DQ window. Dark tan, wrinkled skin, bleached-out hair from hours on his boat in the Gulf, he said, “Lewis, you look like a bulimic manatee.”
Even at my best I doubted if I could come up with the image of a bulimic manatee.
Dave owned the DQ franchise and four others on the Gulf coast. He filled in from time to time to remind himself of what it meant to work the counter and to prove to himself that he was still working at making a living.
“Chili and a Blizzard,” I said.
“Chocolate cherry?”
“Surprise me,” I said. “No, don’t surprise me. Chocolate cherry. Large.”
“I’m thinking of calling the sizes tall, grande and venti,” he said. “Like Starbucks. Think they’ll sue?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Hope so,” he said. “Great publicity. They ask me to stop. I tell the newspapers, argue that they don’t have
trademarks on words like
tall, grande
and
venti.
Then I get the publicity free, business picks up. I reluctantly give into the pressure and come up with different names, maybe have a contest to name the sizes. What do you think?”
“Donald Trump and Warren Buffett will both come to you with big offers.”
I paid him.
“Dreams don’t cost anything, Lew,” he said, turning to prepare my chili and Blizzard.
Oh yes, they do, I thought. Dreams could be very expensive.
A pair of teen girls were behind me. I moved out of the way and stood in front of the pickup window. The girls were talking about someone named Shelly. Like Yolanda Root, the two girls used the word
like
at least once every other fragment of a sentence. They were wearing almost identical jeans and T-shirts with words on them that I didn’t recognize.
It took me about fifteen seconds to figure out that the “Shelly” they were talking about was the dead poet.
“Like, he’s got these great metaphors,” said one girl.
“He is so cool,” said the other.
“‘The moonbeams kiss the sea’” said the first girl. “‘What are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me?’”
“Can you imagine, like, Bill Sherman saying something like that?” said the second girl.
“As if,” said the first girl. “Bill Sherman is a carved-out empty hunk.”
“Bingo,” said the first girl.
They both laughed. I shuddered once. The second girl glanced in my direction. They were both looking at me now, aware that I had been listening to them. I turned to the window as Dave came up with my order. He looked up at the sky and said, “Tomorrow
should be clear. Want to go out with me on the boat for a few hours?”
“Busy,” I said. “Rain check.”
The last time I had gotten on a boat in the bay, the owner, complete with white captain’s hat, had tried to kill me.
I moved past the girls with my bag and didn’t look at them.
Were they fourteen like Kyle McClory? Did they know him? Were they closer to sixteen, like Adele? Did they know her? Did they think about vulnerability or mortality? I was afraid the answer was yes.
In my office, the phone was not ringing.
Maybe I should get that answering machine.
I sat at the desk, ate and drank, and tasted nothing. “Bingo,” I said out loud.
The word meant something. It was the key to the question that had been coming back to me, the question whose answer I needed if I were to … what? Prove Dorothy right? Find the truth about the bearded philosopher?
Nothing more came. Then I noticed both the chili and the Blizzard were gone. I didn’t remember enjoying or finishing them. Comfort food had failed to comfort.
It was almost six. I was in my white boxer shorts with the little red valentines. I wore my extra-large University of Chicago T-shirt. The phone had not rung. I was too tired to turn on the television and the VHS player and push in a tape. Covers over my head, I closed my eyes.
A knock.
Not here, I thought.
Another knock.
I’ve not returned.
Two short hard knocks.
I pushed back the covers, pulled on my pants and went to the door. It was Arnoldo Robles.
“I tried to call,” he said.
I stepped back so he could enter and closed the door.
“I remembered something,” he said.
“Have a seat,” I said.
“No time. Got to get back to El Tacito. I could be making it up or imagining it or maybe even dreaming it,” he said. “But that other person in the car, the one that killed that boy, I think she was smiling at me through the back window just when the car hit the boy, big kind of goofy smile like she was happy to see me.”
“You just remembered this?”
He sighed and shook his head.
“No, everything happened just like that and I thought maybe I was seeing things,” he said. “Maybe I thought the police would think I was making it up.”
“You could recognize her again if you saw her?”
“It’s crazy,” he said, running the fingers of his right hand through his thick hair. “I had this feeling that I’d seen her before, or her twin brother or sister or something.”
“Where did you see this twin?”
“Don’t know,” he said. “But I’ll think about it. You find the driver yet?”
I considered saying that the driver had found me, but if I told him the story of the bearded philosopher, Arnoldo Robles might begin to wonder if the man might have the key witness against him on his hit list. It was, in fact, a possibility.
“No,” I said. “But I think I’m close. I’ll let you know.”
“Could have been my kid on that street,” he said. “I keep thinking about that, you know?”
“Yes,” I said.
We stood for a few seconds. There wasn’t anything else to say.
“Well,” he said. “I better go.”
I opened the door and as he walked through the door said, “Thanks for coming.”
“Sure,” he said and turned left toward the stairs.
I dreamt of cars. Cars and cats. The cars were in a demolition derby on Main Street. Cats dashed and leaped out of their way. Clowns, little people, Charlton Heston, Sammy Sosa. Women, children and someone who might have been me dashed from door to door trying to get away from the metal on metal, metal on flesh. The doors were all locked. I didn’t see them but I knew they were there, Adele with the baby in her arms, Flo in her Western boots, Ames on his scooter.
There was a parting of cars for an instant and two cars were coming at each other, the same two cars that had collided down the street with me in the middle. In the middle of reality. In the middle in my dream.
I stood frozen. It wasn’t fear. It was more like resignation. The cars missed me by inches, plowed into each other, spraying my back with tiny shards of glass from a broken window.
On the sidewalk were the two girls at the Dairy Queen and Dorothy Cgnozic with her arms around them. Together they yelled, “Bingo,” and I woke up.
I dressed in my clean second pair of jeans and a short-sleeved denim shirt and picked up a clean towel, soap and razor and headed barefoot for the door. When I opened it, Darrell Caton was standing there, or rather he was leaning against the metal railing five feet from my door. I didn’t trust the railing. I didn’t trust Darrell either. His arms were folded. The
last time I had seen him, his mother, whom he resembled, was standing in the same pose in Sally’s cubicle.
Darrell was thirteen, thin, black and angry. He had been given a choice. Shape up or go into the system, juvenile detention, maybe a series of foster homes. His mother was twenty-eight years old and reluctantly ready to give up on him.
He was wearing an unwrinkled pair of dark pants and a clean, dark blue T-shirt.
Darrell, who for all I knew was still a lookout for a crack dealer in Newtown, said nothing.
Sally had conned me into being Darrell’s Big Brother. It was difficult to tell if the idea appealed less to Darrell or to me. Our lack of enthusiasm for the experiment was the one bond we had.
“Darrell,” I said.
“Well, you got that right,” he said.
“What … ?”
“Saturday,” Darrell said. “It’s Saturday. Nine in the morning.”
“Saturday,” I repeated, shaking my head knowingly.
“You forgot,” said Darrell flatly.
“That it was Saturday or that you were supposed to be here?” I asked.
Darrell said nothing, just waited.
“I forgot both,” I said, realizing that there was no point in going out to Manatee Community College. There probably wouldn’t be anyone there on the weekend.
“Want me to go back home?” he asked.
“How did you get here?”
“Walked,” he said.
He lived just off Martin Luther King Drive in Newtown, about two miles away.
“No, give me a minute. I’ve got to clean up.”
He looked puzzled.
“Bathroom, down there,” I said.
“You sleep in your office last night?”
“I live in my office,” I said. “Just go in and wait. I’ll be right back.”
He unfolded his arms, pushed away from the railing and stepped past me without a hint of energy or enthusiasm. I closed the door behind him and moved down to the bathroom shared by the tenants of the building and, until recently, by Digger, who had frequently spent nights there stretched out, head on a folded jacket or sweater.
BOOK: Denial: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (Lew Fonesca Novels)
11.27Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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