Vengeance

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Authors: Stuart M. Kaminsky

BOOK: Vengeance
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To Francis and King Stutzman,
With Fond Memories of the Midway
In tasks so bold can little men engage,
And in soft bosoms dwells such mighty rage?
 
—Alexander Pope,
The Rape of the Lock
THERE WERE THREE
reasons I was staying a few miles over the speed limit on 301 heading toward Bradenton.
First, Sarasota is full of the very old, to whom the State of Florida will grant a driver’s license even if the person is blind or too short to see over the dashboard. Old people and tourists are treated with dignity in the Sunshine State. They have the dollars. Many of them drive not in the State of Florida, but in a state of complete oblivion, leaving accidents in their wake, driving on in the certainty that they are doing no evil. A second group of drivers in abundance is the smiling and soused teens and their parents. They are not outsiders. Their pickup trucks proudly bear decals of the Confederate flag and bumper sticks with comments like WE DON’T GIVE A SHIT HOW YOU DID IT UP NORTH and YOU CAN HAVE MY WIFE BEFORE I’LL GIVE UP MY GUN.
These two groups seem miraculously to miss each other in the highway bumper-car game and cause only
misery, mayhem and death to the majority of people who drive and live normally beneath the sun and in the wake of hurricanes.
I said there were three reasons.
The second is that my wife died in a car crash in Chicago a little over three years ago. Six months and five days more than three years. It wasn’t her fault. Someone had sideswiped her, probably an accident, sent her into a low concrete wall on Lake Shore Drive, and driven away fast. Never found. I’ve driven as little as I could since then, but sometimes I have no choice if I’m going to make a living. I drive carefully, always aware of the upcoming driveway hidden by shrubs, the white Nissan with no visible driver, the maroon Ford Futura that may or may not be weaving just a little two blocks back in my rearview mirror. Until a few months ago, I used to sweat whenever I drove, even with the automobile air conditioner dialed to high.
The third reason I was only a few miles over the speed limit letting cars, vans and trucks whip past me was that I was reasonably sure I was too late. I didn’t know if I wanted to get where I was going in time to stop a murder.
The radio was on. I seldom listened to music, I liked a voice, almost any voice, a southern Baptist preacher, G. Gordon Liddy, Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, an abusive local talk-show host on WFLA out of Tampa using words I thought were prohibited by the FCC. If I were lucky, I’d catch NPR and listen to
All Things Considered
or
Fresh Air
but really, any voice would do and I didn’t always listen to the words.
I wasn’t alone in the car. Ames McKinney sat erect, seat-belted next to me, riding shotgun. Literally. He had an old Remington M-10 twelve gauge pump-action shotgun lying across the lap of his yellow slicker. Ames seldom spoke. He had said almost all he had to say in his seventy-four years of life. Ames looked like an aged
Gary Cooper with long white hair and a face of sunned leather.
He knew how to use a gun, though he was not supposed to have one. Ames had come to Sarasota three years earlier in search of his business partner, who had run off with all the money from the sale of their business back in Arizona. Ames and his partner had gone out to the white sand behind the trees on South Lido Beach and had an old-fashioned shoot-out. Ames won. The judge called it justifiable homicide and gave Ames a suspended sentence for carrying an illegal firearm. There are actually laws about dueling in Florida, but the judge wasn’t about to invoke them. The partner fired first. Actually, the partner fired four times before Ames shot him. I was there. I testified on his behalf. Ames thinks I saved him from Old Sparky.
I made a turn off the highway at Ellenton, saw the huge shopping mall I’ve never been to flash by me and headed west toward Palmetto.
Past the Gamble Mansion, preserved as it had been when slaves lived in shacks and the second floor was reached by ladders that could be pulled up in case the Seminoles attacked. Past the tomato-packing plants, tiendas and pawnshops where the migrant Hispanic laborers worked and shopped.
By the time I had made a turn and headed north on Tamiami Trail, I was sure we were going to be too late.
It began to rain. It began to rain hard. Summer was the time for rain on the Gulf Coast. But weather truths, like human ones, had begun to change here long before I arrived.
My windshield wipers worked. I was driving a newly rented white Geo Metro, which wanted to leave the road with every blast of wind.
I had an address and only a general idea of where I was going, but with a turn again I knew I was in
Palmetto. Palm trees went wild in the wind. The streets began to flood. Traffic slowed to a crawl. People, all black, ran for cover or home. I drove trying to see street signs and passed the one I was looking for. I went to the next corner and turned left around a battered green Chevy that was stalled in a deep puddle. The driver was an old black woman with gray hair. I caught just a glimpse of her but I could see that she was sitting in a state of near-perfect calm. She had been through this before. She had been through much worse before. So had I. She would endure. I probably would too.
I found the house whose address I had been carrying around for three days. It was dark. The morning was almost as dark, with black, driving rain. A pickup truck with a tow winch was parked in the driveway. The house was a one-story cinder-block bunker. There was no grass on the place where a lawn should be. There was just a thin lake of rainwater with bits of debris, dirt, beer bottles and rocks peeking out.
I turned off Dr. Laura in midsentence as she told a weeping young woman to stop crying and take charge of her life. She could have been talking to me.
Ames and I got out of the car and I was soaked deep as I hurried to the front door of the house. Ames, yellow slicker protecting him, walked cradling the shotgun, right hand at the trigger. Lightning crackled and struck somewhere on the other side of the nearby Manatee River.
I knocked. Thunder above. The noise of pelting rain. My feet were getting soaked through my shoes. I knocked louder. No answer. I didn’t expect one. I tried the doorknob. Since the rain was knocking at the door too, I didn’t think any fingerprints remained on the knob. I was breaking the law. I should have called the police hours ago, but the police were not happy with me at the moment.
The door wasn’t locked.
I started in but Ames put out a long, lean arm to hold me back so he could enter first. This was the home–well, the house–of a dangerous man, a man who had … Later, I’ll talk about it later. Now, I followed Ames inside. There were no lights on, but it was still day and in spite of the storm, there was enough light so that I could see faintly.
The rain pounded on the roof demanding to be let in, demanding to carry away this concrete hell.
A sofa and unmatched cushioned chair and a metal folding chair were covered with dirty clothes, full ashtrays and empty Dr Pepper cans and amber beer bottles.
Maybe he hadn’t been here when the knock had come, even though his truck was. Maybe he was away somewhere. A friend, if he had one, had picked him up and they were out looking for trouble or for me.
“Here,” said Ames in his raspy voice as he stepped over the debris and through an open door.
I followed him into a kitchen that smelled like a Port-o-Let at a county fair. Dishes, food in the sink, an overflowing bag of garbage and a body on the floor.
I turned on the light. A large roach scurried out of the garbage bag and headed for the darkness.
There was blood, damp, fresh. Ames looked down at the body, around the room and shook his head. The shake was hardly more than a tick but I knew Ames McKinney. He hated filth, human and otherwise.
“Let’s go,” I said, turning off the light.
There was a telephone in the living room but I couldn’t bring myself to stay here any longer and I didn’t want to report finding my third corpse in four days. I didn’t search the place. I didn’t go into the bedrooms. I knew what I would see. I just wanted to get out. Maybe I would call the police from my office when I was dry and I wasn’t shaking. Maybe I would call
and tell them a story. It wouldn’t be the truth, so I needed time to make it up.
The rain was heavier.
I had to move slowly going back to the car where the rising water was now up to mid-hubcap. I wondered if any neighbors had seen us go into the house. I wondered if any neighbors had seen someone go in an hour or two before us. I wondered if anyone in this neighborhood would tell even if they had seen the murder on their front lawn.
Ames and I got in the car and I drove slowly through heavy rain that would move the waste but not wash it away.
My name is Lew Fonesca.
The crumbs of Gretel that had led me to that house had begun to drop four days earlier when …
“HOT IN HERE.”
She looked around my tiny office, trying not to show uncertainty and disapproval.
“Air conditioner doesn’t work,” I said.
“Then why do you leave it on?”
“Fan makes the air move a little. Your daughter is missing?”
She nodded.
So far all I had from her was that her daughter, Adele, was missing and that the woman’s name was Beryl. She hadn’t given a last name yet. She was holding that back till she decided if she was going to trust me with it. Beryl was about forty, with dark hair cut short, on the thin side, and she was wearing a serious but slightly shabby loose-fitting blue dress with a belt and no style. She kept her purse on her knees and her knees tight and together. She had nice blue eyes and had probably once been very pretty. She also had a blue-yellow bruise on her cheek the size of a large peach.
I had somewhere I had to be in a little over an hour, but I couldn’t bring myself to hurry this woman. She needed to take her time. She needed someone to listen to her story.
“I have a picture,” she said, opening her purse.
I waited. The air conditioner buzzed and I pretended it wasn’t hot.
“Here.”
She handed me a little photograph that looked as if it were taken in one of those automatic camera booths you find in malls.
The girl was definitely pretty. She had blond, straight hair, was wearing a green sweater and showed a fine set of white teeth. She looked grade-school young.
“Adele,” Beryl said, looking toward the window as if her daughter might suddenly appear.
It was my turn to nod.
“How’d you get hurt?”
She touched the bruise on her check and said,
“Fell in the bathroom of the motel.”
“Tell your story, Miss …”
“Mrs.,” she corrected looking down at her purse. “Husband moved out when Adele was little. Driver.”
“His name is Driver?”
“No,” she said with a sigh. “His name was Dwight. Tow truck driver.”
“He was a tow truck driver,” I prompted.
“Still is, I think. Few minutes back, I lied.”
“You lied?”
“To you. Said I fell in the motel.”
She started to raise her hand to the bruise on her face and changed her mind.
“He did it.”
“Your husband?”
She nodded and sighed, lips tightly together.
“You live in Sarasota?”
“No, but it looks like he does. Not sure.”
I glanced at my watch, pretending to be considering the situation. I now had less than half an hour to get where I had to be.
“Adele and I live in Brisbane, Kansas. Dwight left when Adele was seven. I can’t say I was all that unhappy to see him go. He sent a letter two months back,” she said. “To Adele. Don’t know what it said. She didn’t show it to me, but I did see the return address. Don’t remember the address, but it was from here.”
I nodded.
“I think she ran off to be with him. I raised Adele alone. Not much to do for a child in Brisbane after school. I worked days and a lot of nights at the restaurant, Jim and Ella’s Good Food. Truckers welcome. Most nights Adele would watch the TV, look out the window of the apartment at the oil rigs in the field. At least till she got older and got in with the crowd.”
“Bad crowd?” I asked.
“Only crowd in Brisbane, if you count four or five kids as a crowd.”
“Go on.”
“Not much more to tell. She’s smart. Good grades, always good grades, but she got into a little trouble once in a while. She’s got a temper like Dwight.”
“Her father,” I said.
“Got on the junior cheerleaders but didn’t go to practice and they cut her,” said Beryl with a sigh. “In a couple of school plays. One she had a lot of things to say. How do they remember all those things to say?”
I ignored the sweat on my scalp.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well,” Beryl went on. “Life is a puzzle.”
“Yes,” I said.
“She ran away a little over three months ago. No note. Just packed up and left a message taped to the TV saying she was going and she would call. I told
Josh Hamilton, the sheriff, that she had run and he took a picture just like the one you’re holding and said he’d follow up and maybe get her on milk cartons and paper bags if she didn’t show up in a few weeks. I told him about the letter from her father.”
“And you … ?”
“Worked, waited. She didn’t show up. Josh suggested I get one of those things you put on your phone that shows the number someone is calling you from in case she called. I did–couldn’t really afford it–but … but no call from Adele till two weeks ago. I wrote down the number. Adele sounded bad, scared. Wouldn’t tell me why. I told her to come home. She said she couldn’t, that she’d be all right.”
Beryl reached into her purse and came up with a sheet of paper. She handed it to me. It had an 941-area-code number.
“I called her back,” Beryl said, fingering the little silver latch on her purse. “Called back maybe fifteen times. No answer. Little over a week ago a man answered, said I was calling a pay phone outside a motel on Tamiami Trail in Sarasota, Florida. I got a ride from Ellis to Wichita, bus here. Adele is fourteen, just barely. She’s pretty, smart and in trouble. I’ve been wandering around for the last week looking for her, but I don’t know how to do it or what to ask.”
“Did you go to the police?”
“Yes,” she said. “First thing. They took a picture of Adele and the phone-booth number and said they’d look into it. Nice man, a sergeant, said it would get it posted and go in the computer. I got the feeling Adele was going in a big box with a thousand or more other lost children.”
“I think you’re right.”
I placed the phone number right next to the photograph of the smiling girl on my desk.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“Motel I’m staying at, the Best Western, is just down the street. Came here for a Dairy Queen fish sandwich just maybe fifteen, twenty minutes back. I showed the man who served me the sandwich Adele’s picture. Told him my story. He said maybe you could help.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, looked down and then straightened up. “Who are you?”
“My name is Lewis Fonesca. I used to work for the state attorney’s office in Cook County, Illinois. Investigations. One morning my wife took the car to work. She died in a car accident on Lake Shore Drive. It was winter. I wasn’t going any further up in my job and I’m not ambitious. I was cold and too many places and people reminded me of my wife. Am I telling you too much?”
“No.”
There was more but I didn’t see the need to share it with Beryl. I had come to Sarasota a little over three years earlier, just drove till my car gave out and I felt safe in the sunshine after spending my life in the gray of Chicago. I drove away from the dead-end investigator’s job with the State’s Attorney’s office. Now I made a sort of living finding people, asking questions, answering to nobody. I had a growing number of Sarasota lawyers using me to deliver a summons or find a local resident who hadn’t turned up for court or a divorce hearing. I had a county process server’s license, complete with a full-color card with my photograph on it. It was the same face I saw in the mirror: sad, balding. A short, thin man who definitely looked Italian.
Occasionally, I would turn up some street trade, a referral like Beryl from Dave at the Dairy Queen. I lived in and worked out of a second-floor office in a two-story office building behind the DQ parking lot. Entrance to each of the offices was through a door to the outside. My door, like the others, needed a coat of
paint. The metal railing on the balcony was starting to rust seriously.
I had a deal with the building manager. The landlord lived in Seattle. By giving the manager a few extra dollars a month beyond the reasonable rent for a seedy two rooms he referred to as a “suite,” he ignored the fact that I was living in the “suite.” The outer room where I now sat with Beryl was designed as a reception room. I had turned it into an office. The room behind it was a small windowed office, which I had turned into a living space. I had fixed it up to my satisfaction. The clothes I had brought with me from Chicago would hold out for another year or two. I had a narrow bed, an old dresser, a small closet, a television set–with a VCR picked up at a nearby pawnshop–and a low bookcase, which stood next to the dresser and was overflowing with paperbacks and videotapes. To get to the bathroom, which had no bath, I had to walk outside past five offices, accepting whatever the weather had to offer. I showered at the downtown YMCA every morning after I worked out there. Normally, I bicycle to the Y. My bike was standing in the corner behind my new client.
There was nothing but my name printed on the white-on-black plastic plate that slid into the slot on my outer door. The plate didn’t indicate what service I provided.
“Man at the Dairy Queen,” she said, nodding at the door, beyond which was the concrete landing overlooking the Dairy Queen on Route 301, which was also Washington Street, though in my two years in town I never heard anyone call it anything but 301. They also called Bahia Vista “Baya Vista,” and Honore Avenue. was usually referred to as Honor Avenue.
“He said you had feelings.”
She looked at me for about the third time and saw a sad-looking forty-two-year-old man with rapidly thinning
hair and reasonable dark looks wearing a short-sleeved button-down blue shirt and gray jeans.
“You’re a detective, like on television,” she said. “Rockford.”
“More like Harry Orwell,” I said. “I’m not a detective. The only license I have in this state is a card with my picture on it that says I’m a process server. But any citizen can make inquiries. That’s what I do. I make inquiries.”
“You ask questions.”
“I ask questions.”
“What do you charge?”
“Fifty dollars a day, plus expenses.”
“Expenses?”
“Phone calls. Gas. Rental car. Things like that. I report to you every night if you want me to. You can stop my services anytime before the next day. My guess is I’ll find Adele in two or three days or tell you she’s not in Sarasota.”
“Okay,” she said, opening her purse once again and pulling out a wallet, from which she extracted five tens. “I will need a receipt.”
I took the money, found a pad of yellow legal-sized paper and wrote out a receipt. She took it and said, “I told you I’m staying at the Best Western. I’m in Room Two-o-four.”
“Well,” I said, handing her my card. There was nothing on it but my name, address and phone number. “You can call me here day or night.”
Beryl took my card, looked at it, put it in her purse, and snapped her purse closed.
“I am not a warm woman,” she said. “I do not show my affections. I did not do so with Adele, but I do love her and I think she knows that. Please find her.”
“I’ll do my best to find her.” I said. “A few more questions. What’s your last name?”
“Tree. My name is Beryl Tree. My daughter is Adele
Tree. Took my maiden name back when Dwight walked out, took it back and gave it to my daughter. His name is Handford, Dwight Handford.”
“And he knows you’re in town and where you’re staying.”
“Didn’t tell him where I was stayin’. Just ran into him on the street, coming out of the Waffle House across from the motel. He looked scared, then mad. I asked him where Adele was. He hit me, told me to get back to Kansas or the next time he saw me he’d …”
She stood looking at the humming air conditioner. She had something more to say. I waited.
“He, Dwight, was married before me. Said he divorced her. Had a daughter before he married me. Josh, he’s the sheriff …”
“I know.”
“Josh came checking on him once. Didn’t know what it was about till Adele ran off. Then Josh told me. Dwight spent prison time for … for doing his first daughter when she was twelve.”
I knew what “doing” meant.
“Adele’s a pretty girl,” she said. “Too pretty maybe.”
“I’ll find her,” I said.
And she was gone.
I pulled some Kleenex from my drawer, wiped my head, face and neck, and threw the used tissues into my Tampa Bay Bucs wastebasket. My shirt was sweat-blotched and clinging wet to my back. It was a hot December day in Sarasota, probably about eighty-four degrees and humid–hot for winter, but not unheard of. It was the middle of the snowbird season. Tourists and winter residents rented or owned overpriced houses and apartments on the mainland in Bradenton, Sarasota and all the way up the coast to Pensacola and down the coast to Naples. The winter crowd with real money were in the resorts and condos on the beaches of Longboat and Siesta Keys. All in all, there were about
200,000 people in Manatee and Sarasota Counties combined during The Season.

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