Bright Futures: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (Lew Fonesca Novels) (27 page)

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” Corkle said, “but I do know where your cowboy friend is.”

“Where?”

“Searching the rooms upstairs for Rachel Horvecki.”

He pushed a button under the desk and a section of the bookcase popped open to reveal a bank of eight full color television screens. They were all numbered. On number three Ames was talking to a young woman sitting on a bed.

“Why did you take her?”

“Protect her,” he said. “My daughter and grandson believe in Ronnie’s . . . What’s his real name?”

“Dwight Ronald Torcelli. He’s still Ronnie.”

“I don’t want her threatened to the point where he feels he can’t proclaim his innocence.”

“You think he’d do the noble thing?”

“No,” said Corkle, swiveling his leather chair so that it faced the window and presented me with the back of his head. He had a little monk’s bald pate you couldn’t see unless he was seated like this and leaning back.

“Don’t ask me why my daughter and grandson believe in him.”

“Their belief may be eroding.”

“I wouldn’t try to talk them out of it,” he said. “On the other hand, I wouldn’t say a word against . . .”

“Dwight Torcelli,” I said. “You let us steal those documents about Ronnie Gerall while we played poker the other night,” I said. “You dropped a hint about them and left them on your desk. You had a pretty good idea we would come the night I bought into your poker game.”

“Why would I do that?”

“To give us reasons to believe that he was guilty without handing us evidence.”

“You think I’m that devious?”

“You’re that devious,” I said.

He swiveled back to face me and looked up at the television monitors.

“Persuasive,” he said.

I looked at the monitors. Ames and the young woman were coming out of the bedroom. He led the way to some narrow steep stairs just off the kitchen. The young woman followed him.

“Augustine?” I asked.

“You think he killed Horvecki and Berrigan?”

“The thought had entered my mind.”

“Anything else?”

“Are you paying me to clear Torcelli or to find something against him?”

“Given his relationship with your friend Sally Pierogi . . .”

“Porovsky.”

“Porovsky,” he amended. “Given that, I think you might have an interest in proving Torcelli is not a nice person. There, they’ve left the house.”

I looked up at a screen in the lower left-hand monitor to see Ames and the young woman hurrying across the back lawn.

“You’re good at all this,” I said.

“Couldn’t have sold forty-eight thousand copies of the Guitar Master 12-Lesson Plan and almost twenty thousand guitars to go with it if I weren’t good at sizing up the potential customers.”

“What are you trying to sell me?” I asked.

“I’m buying,” he said.

“What?”

“The truth,” he said. “Not the big truth. Just a small one about who killed Horvecki. If it clears the dago weasel, so be it. You don’t believe me?”

“No. Police will be coming to talk to you about what they found in Torcelli’s apartment.”

“The meat tenderizer?”

“The meat tenderizer.”

“They’re waiting for you in your car,” he said.

He got up and so did I.

“You get your choice of items in the closet,” he said.

“Some other time,” I said, going to the office door.

“D. Elliot Corkle has irritated you,” he said following me. “The dago remark? I was just pulling your chain.” He reached up and pulled once on an invisible chain.

“I know,” I said.

He grinned and pointed a finger at me to show I had hit the mark.

“Answer four questions and we’re friends again,” I said.

“Ask.”

We crossed the foyer to the front door.

“You know a policeman named Essau Williams and an Evangelist named Jack Pepper?”

“D. Elliot Corkle knows who they are,” he said. “Wait a moment.”

He hurried to the closet off the front hall, opened it and disappeared for no more than a few seconds before coming out with a white cardboard box and handing it to me. Second question?”

“Have you given money to either one of them?” I asked as we went out onto the redbrick path.

“Nothing to Williams but I did volunteer to put up a suitable headstone of his choice for his mother when they die. Five thousand dollars to Pepper to help support his ministry.”

“In exchange for?”

“Nothing, but I did indicate to both of them that I appreciated their efforts to bring Philip Horvecki to justice.”

“Blue Berrigan?” I asked.

“Unfortunate. No, tragic. No, shocking. A terrible coincidence. If you see my daughter . . .”

“Yes?”

“Nothing,” he said. “She’ll come back here. She always does when her funds get down to the level of the gross national product of Poland. Another question.”

“Does Jeff Augustine play golf?”

“Why? Do you want him to join you on the links at the Ben Hogan Gulf Club? I don’t know if he plays golf. I do know that if he does it will be a bit difficult for him now with but one eye.”

He closed the door and I carried my prize to the car, where Rachel was sitting in the front passenger seat. I got in beside Ames and Darrell.

“Where are you taking me?” Rachel Gerall said.

“Wherever you want to go,” I said.

“To see Ronnie,” she said, her voice in twang from the center of the State of Florida.

She was frail and pale, red of hair and green of eyes. She should have been Irish. She had a pinched face and thin lips. She could have been cast as a tubercular resident of an Irish mining town a century ago. Either that or a hardcore drug user.

“Who are you people?” she said, half turning to look at me.

“People trying to help the police find whoever killed your father,” I said.

“I don’t trust you,” she said, giving me the evil eye.

“Trust him,” Darrell said. “He ain’t lying.”

“Ronnie’s in jail,” I said.

“Big boy jail,” said Ames.

“And his name ain’t Ronnie,” Darrell added.

“That’s no never mind to me,” she said. “I want to see him.”

“Do you know what happened to the one-eyed man who took you from the motel?” I asked.

“No.”

“Would you like a drink?”

“Of what?”

“Whatever you want to drink,” I said.

“I’d like an iced tea with lemon,” she said.

“We’ll stop,” said Ames.

Victor drove to the Hob Nob on the corner of Seventeenth and Washington. The Hob Nob isn’t trying to look like a fifties diner. It is a fifties diner. It hasn’t changed in half a century. It’s open air with a low roof, picnic tables, a counter with high stools and bustling waitresses who call you “honey.” Smoking is permitted. You could be sitting next to two local landscape truckers, a couple who’ve just escaped from a drug bust, or a retired stockbroker from Chicago and his wife. There’s not much privacy at the Hob Nob, but the food is good and the service is fast.

Darrell lived within walking distance of the Hob Nob, passed it almost every day, ate at it almost never. He ordered a burger and a Coke.

“I know what you want,” Rachel said after I ordered her an iced tea with lemon.

Ames, Victor, Darrell, and I all wanted different things, none of which we could imagine Rachel providing.

“You want me to tell you that Ronnie killed my father.”

“Did he?” Ames asked.

“No, he did not,” she said, raising her head in indignation. “It was that other man.”

“What other man?” asked Ames.

“The one who went out the window. I heard the noise, my father shouting. I was in my room. I opened the door and saw this man climbing out the window and Ronnie, all bloody, kneeling next to my father.”

“What can you tell us about the man who went through the window?” I asked. “White, black, tall, short, young, old?”

“He was white and he had an orange aura,” she said with confidence.

“Orange aura?” asked Darrell.

She turned to Darrell and said, “Orange is anger. Yours is green, nervous.”

Connecting thoughts did not seem to be a strong element of Rachel’s being.

“You watchin’ too much TV,” said Darrell. “A wife can’t be forced to testify against her husband, but if she wants to nail his ass, it’s party time. If you want to help him, you’d be best off sticking with the guy through the window and forgetting auras. Tell her, Fonesca.”

“He’s right,” I said.

Her iced tea had arrived. She slowly removed the straw from its wrapper, dropped the wrapper in the black plastic ashtray on the table, and inserted the straw into her drink.

Rachel was a little slow in everything she did—thinking, talking, moving. My first thought was drugs, but my second thought was that heredity had not been kind. Or maybe it had. There was an almost somnambulatory calmness to the young woman. Daddy had bullied his way through life. His daughter was sleepwalking through it.

She sipped her drink loudly with sunken cheeks.

“Could your husband have killed your father, maybe with the other man’s help?” I asked.

“You’re trying to trick me, like the one-eyed man,” she said coming up for air.

“The one-eyed man tried to trick you into saying Ronnie killed your father?”

“He did,” she said emphatically. “But I told him no such thing. He was on television.”

“The one-eyed man?”

“Yes. I watch television,” she said. “Good, clean entertainment if you are discerning.
Rockford Files
on the old TV channel.”

“He was on the
Rockford Files
?” Ames asked.

“What’s the
Rockford Files
?” asked Darrell.

The marriage of Torcelli and Rachel had been made in heaven or in hell. He exhaled a slick veneer of deception and she floated on a vapor of ethereal innocence.

“Did he kill your father?” Ames asked.

“The one-eyed man?” she asked, bubbling the last of her iced tea through the straw.

“Your husband,” I said.

She thought, looked down at her drink, and said, “May I have another one?”

I ordered her another iced tea. Rachel wasn’t brilliant, but she wasn’t a fool. If she was playing with us, we were losing.

“Ronnie,” I repeated. “Did he kill your father?”

She sucked on her lower lip for a few seconds as she considered her answer and said, “I wouldn’t have blamed him if he did. My father was not a good man. He never hurt me, but he wasn’t a good man. No, he was definitely a bad man. Ronnie saved me from him. When I finish my second iced tea, I’d like to see him.”

“You’re very rich now,” I tried.

“Lawyer said. Policeman said. Man with one eye said,” she said. “Ronnie married me for the money.”

“He did?” I asked.

“He did,” she said as she worked on her drink. “He never denied it. He said when my father died we would be rich and he would be a good husband. Ronnie’s a looker and though I am somewhat plain and wistful, he treats me nicely and I tell him he is smart and beautiful which he delights in hearing provided I don’t overdo it, and he pleases me in bed or on the floor. He likes sex.”

“More than I need to know,” said Darrell with a mouthful of hamburger.

“Did Ronnie kill your father?” I tried once more.

“No. I saw the other man do it.”

“You actually saw him do it?” asked Ames.

“Yes. He was all bloody. He was there earlier. Had words with my father, who called him a ‘shit-bastard-cocksucker.’ ”

“And you didn’t recognize the killer?” I asked.

“I had a little dog and his name was . . . ?” she said with a smile.

“Blue,” said Ames.

“Yes,” she said.

“Old song,” said Ames.

“New suspect,” I said.

“Please take me to Ronnie now, after I pee,” Rachel said.

Victor got the washroom key and walked with her to the rear of the Hob Nob, where he waited outside the door.

“Lady’s on a cloud,” said Darrell finishing off his burger. “What time’s the next cloud? I might want to hitch a ride.”

“Believe her?” Ames asked.

“You?” I answered.

“She didn’t see Berrigan kill her father, just heard it,” said Ames.

“Or maybe didn’t hear it. Or maybe just wants to get her husband off the hook and the murder of her father blamed on a dead man.”

“She’s just acting?” asked Ames.

“If she is, she’s really good.”

“Ain’t nobody that good,” said Darrell.

“Yes,” I said. “There is.”

H
E’S TOO SMART FOR THAT
, the little bastard,” Detective Ettiene Viviase said.

He was seated behind his desk at police headquarters on Main Street. Ames and I were across from him, in wooden chairs that needed a complete overhaul and serious superglue to forestall their inevitable collapse.

Victor and Darrell were at Cold Stone ice cream store, across the street and half a block away.

Viviase was talking about Dwight Torcelli.

His door was open. Voices carried and echoed from the hallway beyond, where the arrested and abused sat after they got past the first line of questioning and into the presence of a detective.

“The weapon we found in Torcelli’s apartment is a now-bloody wooden meat pounder.”

“Tenderizer,” I said.

Viviase was working on a plastic cup of coffee of unknown vintage.

“The girl makes little in the way of sense.”

“Some things she said make sense,” I said.

“What?”

“Berrigan.”

“Says her father knew Berrigan, used him as a greeter at a weekend sale at his Toyota dealership in Bradenton.”

“He owned a Toyota dealership?” I said.

“Now she owns it and if luck or you turn up something to keep Torcelli from going to jail, the Horvecki estate will be his too. And weirdest goddamn thing is that they both really seem to like each other. She said she’d remarry him.”

I said nothing. I didn’t want to open the door to Alana Legerman and possibly to Sally and possibly to who knows how many others.

“Treats her like a nine-year-old,” said Viviase, finishing his coffee and looking into the cup to see if he had missed something.