Retribution: A Lew Fonesca Novel (Lew Fonesca Novels) (27 page)

“I don’t know,” she said. ‘I don’t want his money. I don’t want my baby to have any of his money.”

“Then you’re going to destroy the rest of the manuscripts even though we made a deal?”

“Deals are made to break,” she said. “My father taught me that among other things.”

“If your father taught it,” I said, “it must be wrong.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said. “I’m not sure I believe you.”

“Read tomorrow’s
Herald-Tribune”
I said. “And meet me somewhere with the manuscripts in two days.”

“Why not tomorrow?” she asked.

“I have to go to a town near Macon,” I said.

“I’ll call you on Monday,” she said. “Tell you where to meet me. Can I ask you a favor?”

“Ask.”

“Will you call Flo and Sally before they read it in the paper?”

“I’ll call them,” I said.

“Thanks,” Adele said and hung up the phone.

Before I called Flo and Sally I tracked down Rubin at the
Herald-Tribune
. He was there finishing a story for the next day.

“Rubin,” I said. “Recognize my voice?”

“Sure,” he said.

“I’m not giving you permission to tape,” I said, hearing an odd click on the line.

“Okay.”

“Go over to the police station right now,” I said. “Drop what you’re doing. I have a feeling the murderer of a man named Corsello and another named Merrymen just turned himself in.”

“That’s not my story,” he said.

“Find out the name of the killer,” I said. “It’s your story.”

I hung up, called Flo, told her Adele was fine, and then decided it was too late to call Sally. I’d call her early in the morning before she picked up the newspaper.

I opened my desk drawer and pulled out the two notes Digger had seen the monk pin to my door. I read the top one:

STOP LOOKING FOR HER. ONE INNOCENT PERSON IS DEAD AND GONE. LET IT BE AN END. LET THIS BE A WARNING.

It didn’t sound like Brad Lonsberg, and Digger, even given his relative lack of connection to the real world, had said the person who had left the note was small. The person had probably been wearing a raincoat and hood, enough to make Digger see a monk.

Some words in the message jumped out at me. “Innocent, gone, her.”

It wasn’t a warning to stop looking for Adele. It was a warning to stop looking for some other woman. There was only one other woman I was looking for, Marvin Uliaks’s sister Vera Lynn Dorsey.

I went to bed. No Joan. No Bette. I had lived and seen enough melodrama for one night. I slept without dreaming and woke early. Digger was back in the bathroom wearing
relatively clean pants and a gray sweatshirt that had “Rattlers” written on the front with a picture of a coiled rattlesnake under it. Digger was shaved and looked sober.

“Rained last night,” he explained. “Ran out of the money you gave me so I had to come here.”

I started to reach into my pocket.

“No,” he said, trying to stand tall with some dignity while I stood shirtless washing myself.

“Five dollars for more information on that monk who left the note on my door,” I said, soaping my face and neck. “Payment for services.”

“That’s different,” said Digger. “What can I tell you?”

“You said the person was short.”

“Very short.”

“Shorter than me?”

He nodded his head. “Shorter than you.”

“Could the person have been a woman?”

“Women ain’t monks,” said Digger.

“Maybe it was a woman in a raincoat,” I said as I finished washing.

Digger looked up and then over at me. “Could’a been. Sometimes I’ve got a little imagination.”

I rinsed, dried myself with the towel I had brought from my room, and handed Digger a five-dollar bill. He pocketed it quickly and deep.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You earned it,” I said and went back to my office where I dressed, threw some clean underwear, socks, a clean shirt, and my razor in the Burdine’s cloth bag I had in the closet and went back out into another sunny day.

I picked up Ames who had a small duffel bag in his hand. He was wearing dark pants and a long-sleeved blue shirt. No slicker. No jacket. No visible weapon. He climbed in next to me and reached back to place the duffel bag on the floor of the backseat. It dropped a few inches with a metallic clank. I knew where Ames had stored his artillery.

We paused at a 7-Eleven for donuts and coffee and then headed straight up 175 North. There were a few slowdowns, once along the Bradenton exits for road construction, and then near the Ocala exit.

We stopped at a Shoney’s for lunch. There wasn’t much to say or see on the drive. Trees, a few rivers, exit signs that promised Indian Reservation gambling, clubs that promised nude women twenty-four hours a day, flea markets.

At lunch, Ames finally spoke.

“Adele,” he said. He didn’t make it a question.

“I talked to her last night,” I said. “I’ll see her when we get back.”

“Is she keeping the baby?”

“I don’t know,” I said, working on a burger. “She sounded like she was planning to.”

Ames shook his head and pushed away the empty plate that had recently held a chicken fried steak and a lot of green beans.

“You think she should abort?” I asked.

“I don’t like Conrad Lonsberg’s son,” Ames said. “Child will be half his. Carry his blood. The girl’s barely just sixteen.”

It wasn’t the position I expected from Ames.

“So, you think she should abort?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said, getting up. “I don’t believe in killing babies. Maybe she can give it up. Maybe she and Flo can raise it. Maybe it’s none of our business.”

I nodded. That was pretty much the way I felt.

I turned on the radio to listen to talk shows, voices as we passed the turnoff for Gainesville and later crossed 110. Left for a long time on 110 took you to Tallahassee. Right for a long time took you to Jacksonville. I hadn’t been to either one. I had seen almost none of Florida outside of the Sarasota area. This was by far the longest trip I had taken since I had come down from Chicago and parked forever in the DQ parking lot.

Vanaloosa was a little hard to find. It was on the map, not far from Macon, which was a large circle. Vanaloosa, about ten miles outside of town, was a dark dot. We got off of 175 and headed for Vanaloosa.

When we got there it was dark. After asking a few questions at a Hess station just inside the town, we made our way to Raymond’s Ribs. The night was dark and the neighborhood
filled with run-down homes. The faces we saw in cars and in front of the houses were black.

Raymond’s was small, little more than a shack. Four cars were parked in front of it. As we got out of the Taurus, we could smell the rib sauce. It hit me with memories. My wife and I loved ribs. There were lots of rib places in Chicago and we … No, not now. A fat black man with a big white paper bag came out the door of Raymond’s Ribs as we walked in.

There wasn’t much there: a wooden counter, a small area for customers to stand and order, no tables or chairs, and an open grill behind the counter sizzling with ribs being tended to seriously by a small black woman. Serving the customers was an old black man who took orders. There was a phone on the counter.

A young couple and a slight man with a small beard who kept looking at his watch were ahead of us. When it came to our turn, there was no one behind us.

“Can I get you?” the old man said.

“Ribs and slaw for me.”

“Same,” said Ames.

“Full ribs, half ribs?”

“Full,” I said.

Ames nodded. The old man turned to the woman at the grill and gave her our order. She wiped her hands on her work dress and started the order while I started talking.

“You Raymond?”

“That’s right,” he said.

“Get many white customers?”

“Fair number,” he said with clear pride. “We got the best ribs in the county.”

“In the state,” the woman at the grill said. “Best outside of New Orleans.”

“Best outside of New Orleans,” Raymond agreed with a smile.

“Last week a white man made a long distance call from your phone,” I said.

Raymond stopped smiling.

“I don’t remember that,” he said.

“The white man who made that call must have paid for it,” I said.

Raymond shrugged and looked back at the woman at the grill. She had her head down.

I took the folded Arcadia newspaper clipping from my pocket, unfolded it, and laid it on the counter.

“He’s about twenty years older now,” I said. “Recognize him?”

Raymond glanced at the clipping and shook his head “no.”

“You police?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “We’re trying to find him and his wife. His wife’s brother wants to get in touch with her. Family reunion.”

Raymond looked down at the clipping again and thought.

“That’s Mr. Cleveland,” he said. “Regular customer. Doesn’t talk much. Regular customer. Never knew till now he had a wife.”

“What’s his first name?”

“Don’t know,” said Raymond. “Comes in once, sometimes twice a week, orders enough for four people, says hi and good-bye, and that’s what I know. Here’s your order.”

The woman placed a white bag on the counter and went back to her work.

“Knives, forks, napkins are in the sack,” Raymond said. “Fourteen dollars even.”

I paid the bill while Ames picked up the bag.

“We’re not here to hurt Mr. Cleveland or his wife,” I said. “Her brother just lost contact with her.”

Two teenage boys and a girl- came in. One of the boys was saying, “Singin’? You call that shit singin’? I call that shit ‘shit.’”

“You might try Collier Street,” Raymond said softly. “You might ask around. I wouldn’t do it at night though. Wait till morning.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Ames and I left. The teenagers didn’t look at us. We went back to a Motel 8 we had passed coming into Vanaloosa. The room had two beds, a television, and a small table.

We watched the tail end of a Will Rogers film on AMC while we ate.

“Good ribs,” Ames said.

“Very good,” I agreed.

Besides “good night,” that was all of the conversation we had before we turned off the lights a little before midnight.

When I woke up in the morning, Ames was sitting in a chair reading.

“I need a shave and shower,” I said.

Ames nodded. I looked at the cover of the book he was reading.

It was Conrad Lonsberg’s
Fool’s Love
.

When I came out of the bathroom clean, shaven, and dressed, Ames, now wearing a loose-fitting gray jacket, stood up, handed me the book, and pointed to a paragraph on page 148.

“Went back to it,” Ames said.

I sat on the bed and read the paragraph.

There was no Amy now. There was no Sherry. She sat in the diner with an enormous double order of corn flakes topped with strawberries, drowning in half and half. She thought about who she should be now. She thought about the baby inside her who was just beginning to kick. She needed a name for him or her. She needed a name for herself. Not something exotic. She knew now that exotic just wasn’t in her and stylish wasn’t in her and New York wasn’t in her. And going back to her mother was defeat. She wasn’t a quitter. She would never quit. She had six hundred dollars in her purse and two lives inside her. She paused with a big spoonful of corn flakes in her hand and decided. Her name was from that moment Diane Lowell. If the child was a girl, her name would be Laura. If it was a boy, his name would be Bradley.

I handed the book back to Ames who picked up his duffel bag and followed me out the door. It was just after eight in the morning. We had toast, coffee, and fruit at the motel’s
morning continental breakfast that was served in the lobby. And then we were on our way.

Collier Street wasn’t hard to find. It was one of those run-down side streets on which some developer had thrown up one-story white-frame houses back in the mid-1940s for the wave of servicemen coming back from the war and getting married and raising families in whatever jobs were available in Vanaloosa or for commuting to Macon.

Fifty years later, the houses were long past the wrecker. They were occupied by black families where the breadwinners were women who cleaned house for the Macon middle class and businesses. How did I know? Because it looked exactly like neighborhoods I had seen from California to Florida.

The houses were sagging and dead or dying. A few of them had been shorn up and coaxed like punch-drunk boxers into standing up for one more round.

Three little girls were jumping rope when we parked. They were the only people in sight. We could hear them chanting something to the beat of the rope against the cracked sidewalk. The girl doing the jumping was about eleven. She jumped tirelessly and smiled at us as we watched and waited and the girls kept chanting something about babies.

Finally the girl jumped out of the twirling rope and looked at us.

“We’re looking for this man,” I said, showing the girl Dorsey’s photograph. “Know him?”

The other two girls moved in to take a look. None of them recognized him.

“He lives on this street,” I said.

“Only white people on this street live over there,” the jumping girl said, pointing to a house across the street. “Old white people.”

“You know their name?” I asked.

“Them’s the Clevelands,” answered another girl. “They never go out. But them’s the Clevelands.”

“He goes out sometimes,” one of the other girls said.

“Sometimes at night,” the jumping girl agreed. “Not much.”

I thanked them and Ames nodded.

Behind us, one of the little girls whispered, “They gonna see the witch.”

We crossed the street. The girls went back to their chanting and jumping.

The morning already promised a hot day.

The Cleveland house looked as if it couldn’t take another punch. The porch sagged and the paint flecked. The screen door had been patched so many times that it looked like modern art, and the dirt lawn, with only a barren little tree, had long given up.

I knocked at the peeling frame of the screen door. Nothing. I knocked again and heard a shuffle inside. It stopped. I knocked again and the shuffle moved toward the door and then the door opened, but just a crack.