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Authors: Stuart M. Kaminsky

Denial: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (Lew Fonesca Novels) (3 page)

BOOK: Denial: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (Lew Fonesca Novels)
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“
Music Man
,” he said. “It’s from
The Music Man.
‘Trouble in River City,’ right?”
Nancy Root nodded to show he was right.
“I played Marian the librarian in rep in Portland,” she said. “Long time ago.”
“Kyle,” I reminded her.
“Richard and my … our only child.”
I drank the coffee. It was straight, black, hot, no real flavor besides coffee. I burned my upper palate.
“Richard was waiting for me after the show,” she said, eyes moist, mouth open, taking in air. “They’d found Kyle’s body, his wallet, couldn’t reach me, called Richard. Kyle had four dollars and sixty-two cents in his pockets. He also had a Susan B. Anthony dollar he kept for good luck. His keys. His …”
She stopped, breathed deeply.
“His cell phone?” I asked.
“They couldn’t find it, the police,” said Tycinker.
“And there was a witness?” I asked.
“Mexican,” said Tycinker. “Ruiz or Rubles. It’s in the police report. Said the boy was … Nancy, is it … ?”
“Go ahead,” she said, pulling herself together.
“Witness was walking home from work,” Tycinker went on. “Assistant cook at some restaurant. Didn’t see much. Came from behind. Car was moving fast. Dark car. Kyle was in the middle of the street. Car caught him in the headlights. Kyle was frozen and …”
“Ruiz or Robles see the driver?”
“Says no,” said Tycinker. “No license number, even partial. You’ll have to look at the report to get any more.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
“No,” Nancy Root said. “Find him.”
“You have a standard fee for this sort of thing?” asked Tycinker.
“Just reimburse me for what it costs,” I said. “I’ll keep receipts.”
“I’d rather just give you a check for professional services,” she said. “What’s fair?”
Not much, I thought. Not in my life and it looks like not in yours either.
“Three hundred,” I said. “Pay me if I find the driver.”
“
When
,”she said with intensity. “When you find the driver.”
“Done,” said Tycinker, rising behind his desk before I could respond. He held out his right hand.
I put down my coffee, reached over the desk and shook it. Firm grip. Nancy Root put out her hand too. I took it. It was cold.
When she let go, she opened the small purse next to the chair she had been sitting on, came out with a wallet and handed me five twenty-dollar bills.
“Not necessary,” I said.
“Oh yes,” she said. “It is. Call it an advance on the three hundred dollars. You’ll have expenses.”
I understood. I had to be retained for her to feel I had made the commitment.
I folded the bills and put them in my pocket.
“My card,” she said, handing me a small white card.
The card simply gave her name, address and phone number. Nothing fancy. No border curls, touches of light. No
Actress
in the lower left-hand corner.
I pocketed the card and told her I’d get back to her when and if I found anything.
“Find something, Mr. Fonesca,” she said.
I left the half-finished coffee on a coaster Tycinker had provided. I had no more questions and I was sure none of us wanted to sit in silence or engage in conversation about the economy and tax cuts.
Cap in hand I went to the office door. Nancy Root lingered. As I stepped out I caught a glimpse of Tycinker in front of his desk holding both of her cold hands in his large firm ones. There was nothing covert in the hand holding, but I couldn’t tell if he was playing comforting attorney, good friend or something closer.
I’d need a car. I made a decision and biked back to Washington Street, took my bike up to my office, went back out past the DQ and a small line of storefronts on the west side of the street and walked to the driveway of the car rental agency I did business with when I needed four wheels.
EZ Economy Car Rental is a half block north of the DQ. Once, long ago, it was a gas station. That was before I came to Sarasota. It still looked like a gas station without the pumps. The lot was small but there was space behind the whitewashed office for a dozen cars in addition to the four parked beyond the two open sliding doors where once oil was changed, tires repaired, engines overhauled and grease-covered hands cut with the lids of opened cans.
Inside the small office, Alan, a big, bulky man in his late forties, drank two-handed from a pink cup that had the word MOCHA running in large letters facing me. He was leaning back against one of the two desks.
His partner, Fred, in his sixties, big belly, wasn’t in sight.
“Fonesca,” Alan said with a sigh. “I’m not sure I’m up to the challenge. I’d ask you to try smiling a little, but I don’t think I could take it.”
He pushed away from the desk and looked down at whatever was in his cup. Alan was known, as Fred put it once, to “tipple” from time to time. “Nothing serious,” Fred had said. “Takes the edge off.”
“Edge of what?” I had asked.
“Edge of the weary life we all bear,” Fred had said. “Weighs heavier on him than most with the possible exception of Lewis Fonesca, whose very presence proclaims the end of days.”
“Where’s Fred?” I asked Alan.
“Where’s Fred?” Alan repeated. “I’ll tell you where Fred is. He’s in his third day at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. Third day. Third heart attack. Man’s had three wives, three kids. Now he’s had three heart attacks. What he needs is three wishes.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Alan shrugged.
“Makes the days long. Coffee?”
“No thanks.”
“Transportation then?” said Alan, taking a slow sip from his cup.
“Yes.”
“Take the Saturn,” he said, tilting his head toward the window. “Gray one, ninety-eight, right out in front.”
“How much?” I asked.
“Whatever you want to pay Lewis, bringer of light and joy, bearer of good spirits,” he said, toasting me with his coffee.
It was a little after ten in the morning. Alan wasn’t smashed, but he was sloshing down the road to oblivion.
“Same as last time?” I asked.
“Whatever. You caught me depressive,” he said with a shrug. “I try to stay manic. Right now, I don’t think these walls can hold the power of depression you and I can generate.”
“Keys?” I said.
“On the board,” he said, nodding his head at the Peg-Board on the wall to his right. “Help yourself.”
I found the right keys.
“You all right?” I asked.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “I’m hoping the manic stage will kick in, but I don’t think it will, not for a while. When I’m manic, I can rent an oil-leaking ninety Honda that shits rust and farts oil to Mr. Goodwrench. Can’t stop, but this …”
“I know,” I said.
“Fred keeps me above the line,” he said. “Costello was no good without Abbott. Hardy wasn’t much without Laurel. Jerry Lewis … you get it. I need a straight man.”
I reached for my wallet. Alan, cup to his lips, saw me and held up his right hand.
“No,” he said. “I don’t feel like doing the paperwork, writing a receipt. Just take the car. Belonged to a secretary in the biology department at the University of South Florida. Standard shift.”
“Fine,” I said.
The door opened. A couple, Mexican, maybe in their late thirties, both plump, both serious, with a boy about twelve at their side, came in. They didn’t quite look frightened, but they didn’t look confident either.
“That little car outside for sale?” the man said. “Sign says eight hundred dollars?”
Alan sighed.
“The Focus? Six hundred,” he said. “Gala sale day.”
I went outside and got into the Saturn. It was clean, smelled a little musty, and the window at my left rattled as I pulled onto 301.
I TOOK A CHANCE
. It wasn’t a big one. I drove past downtown a few blocks away and turned onto Sixth Street past city hall and parked across from the Texas Bar & Grille.
The lunchtime regulars at the Texas, lawyers, cops, construction workers, shop owners on Main Street, lost tourists and snow birds, were about an hour from coming through the door.
A lone guy with three chins and a business shirt with a morning beer and
The Wall Street Journal
sat at a table by the window. Ed Fairing, white shirt, black vest, flowing dark mustache, hair parted down the middle, sat at a table to the right, a book in his hand. Ed was from Jersey, living out his dream of being an old-fashioned barkeep and saying, “What’ll it be?” a few hundred times a day.
The Texas was known for its one-pound burgers and beer on tap. Ed was known for his esoteric knowledge of bars of the Old West. The walls of the Texas were covered with old weapons kept in working condition
by Ames McKinney, and photographs and drawings of some bars, including the Jersey Lilly with Judge Roy Bean, lean and glinty-eyed, one hand on the bar behind him, the other clutching a thick book that Ed said contained the laws of Texas. Another showed the Suicide Table in Virginia City, Nevada. Ed had been to Virginia City, a pilgrimage, had seen the Suicide Table, where three men were reported to have killed themselves after losing small fortunes.
“Lewis,” Ed said, looking up over the top of his rimless glasses.
“Ed,” I said.
“If you’ve come to collect for the United Jewish Appeal, I gave at the blood bank,” he said.
I’m not Jewish. Neither is Ed. Ed thinks he has a sense of humor. I wouldn’t know. He had given me a joke to tell Ann Horowitz. It had something to do with aardvarks walking into a bar. I had forgotten the punch line.
“Ames is out back,” Ed said. “Garbage pickup this afternoon.”
I walked past the bar at the rear, down the narrow hallway, past the small kitchen that smelled of grease and sugar, past the rest rooms and through the rear door.
Ames, tall, wearing a red flannel shirt in spite of the seventy-degree weather, was hoisting a fat green plastic garbage bag into a yawning Dumpster.
“Busy?” I asked.
He wiped his hands on his jeans and turned toward me.
“Last one,” he said, nodding at the Dumpster.
That’s all we said. Nothing more was needed. Ames was seventy-four now, lean, still over six-four, long white hair, a Gary Cooper face of suntanned leather.
Four years ago he had come to Sarasota to find his
partner, Jim Holland, who had run away with every nickel he could steal from their company in Arizona, moved to Sarasota, changed his name and became a pillar of society, a hollow pillar made of plaster.
I had helped Ames find Holland. Ames wanted his money and some retribution. Holland wanted to keep everything and get rid of his old partner. I had arranged for them to come unarmed at nine at night to the beach in the park at the south end of Lido Key.
When Ames and I arrived, we crossed the road and walked around the parking lot chain. I didn’t know how often the police patrolled the park after closing, but it was hard to keep people out since the beach ran into the park on the Gulf side.
We listened to the surf, the gulls and the crunch of parking lot stones under our feet as I led the way past picnic tables and through a thin line of trees onto the narrow beach. Across the inlet, the lights from the houses looked friendly but far away.
We were early. Holland wasn’t there.
I moved to the shore with Ames and looked into the clear moonlit water. A ray about the size of a large kite glided just below the surface of the water no more than a dozen feet out
“Ames,” I said. “It’s beautiful here.”
“That’s a fact.”
“Being alive is not bad.”
“Depends. You’re talking to the wrong man.”
At that point, the right man came walking through the trees about thirty yards up the beach. A small white heron skittered away from him. Jim Holland walked erect, sure-footed in our direction, a little man with a mission, hands behind his back. Ames took four or five steps in his direction.
I stepped between them when they were about a dozen paces apart.
“Hold it,” I said. “I talk. You listen. You both agreed.”
They said nothing.
“Compromise,” I said.
“There’s no compromise about this,” said Ames.
“Told you that. He gives me my money back and I let him live.”
“Money is mine, my father’s,” said Holland. “I told you that. He gets out of town and I let him live.”
“Cash money,” said Ames, standing tall, a rush of warm wind bristling his hair.
The white heron had wandered back and stood a few paces behind Jim Holland in the moonlight.
“That’s it,” I said. “That’s it. We’re leaving now. I’m preparing a report and turning it over to the police in the morning. I’m also giving a copy to my lawyer.”
That part had been a lie. I had no lawyer.
“Can’t work like that,” said Holland.
“Can’t,” agreed Ames.
“I’m not a violent man,” said Holland. “I told you, but I see no options here. I’ve got a business, a wife, children and family honor.”
My stomach warned me even before Holland pulled a shotgun from behind his back.
There was nowhere to run and no one to call. I had a vision of a small shark in the water going for my dead eyes.
“This is crazy,” I said.
“No argument from me,” agreed Holland as he raised the shotgun and moved toward us.
Holland’s shotgun was about halfway up when Ames pulled what looked like a Buntline special from under his shirt behind his back and fired twice at the same time as Holland’s shotgun. I was still standing. So was Ames, but Holland went down on his back
and flung his shotgun toward the bay. Birds and squirrels went chattering mad in the brush and trees.
Ames returned the long-barreled gun to his belt and turned to me.
“It’s done,” he said.
“You lied to me,” I said. “You said no gun.”
“So did Jim. If I didn’t lie, we’d be dead men.”
He was right and I suddenly needed a toilet. A car, maybe two, raced across the gravel in the parking lot beyond the trees and picnic tables. A pair of headlights cut through, bouncing toward us.
“Gun was my father’s. It ends fitting.”
Footsteps came crashing through the brush branches and a pair of flashlights found us.
“Put your hands up,” came a less-than-steady voice behind the light.
I put my hands up and so did Ames. The two policemen moved toward us past the dead man.
“On your knees,” said one of them. “Arms behind your back.”
I moved as fast as I could. Ames hadn’t budged.
“Can’t do that,” he said.
“Old-timer,” came the voice, drawing nearer, “I’m in no mood.”
“Don’t go on my knees,” said Ames. “For man nor God. I’ll take the consequences.”
And he did. When they took us in to the station back on Ringing Boulevard, Ames took full responsibility, told the police that I had come to patch up an old quarrel and that Holland had set us up. He told them I’d tried to stop the killing and that I had no idea that he had a gun or might use it.
It was not with charity and goodwill, but on the advice of a county attorney that they eventually let me go home after starting a file on me.
They kept Ames and I testified at the inquest. Ames was turned over for shooting Jim Holland.
I’d been the only witness. Ames was given a suspended sentence for having an unregistered firearm. He stayed in town, got a job as odd-job man at the Texas and assigned himself the task of being my guardian angel.
“We going somewhere?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Need a weapon?” he asked, following me back into the Texas.
“No,” I said.
“We’ll be back by one,” I said to Ed as we passed him.
“No hurry,” Ed said without looking up from his book. “Marie and Charlie’ll be here in a little while. I can hold down Fort Apache.”
Ames had a motor scooter in his room. He also had various small arms and a Remington M-10 twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun and a yellow slicker that covered it when necessary plus the use of any of the guns of the Old West display on the walls of the Texas. Ames kept them unloaded but all in firing condition.
We got into the Saturn.
“How’s Ed’s liver?” I asked as I started to drive.
“Swears by acupuncture and Chinese herbs,” said Ames. “Seems to work.”
“Willpower,” I said. “Man owns a bar and can’t drink.”
“Man does what a man has to do,” Ames said.
I would have glanced at him to see if he was joking, but I knew Ames well enough to know that he meant just what he said. I never asked Ames for a joke to tell Ann. I was sure he didn’t have any.
He didn’t ask where we were going, didn’t ask why I pulled off of Beneva and drove down the narrow
paved road to the Seaside Assisted Living Facility. The Seaside was a good four miles from the Gulf of Mexico, but it did have a pond with ducks floating on the green water.
I parked in a space between two cars in an area marked RESIDENTS ONLY.
“We’re here to see a woman named Dorothy Cgnozic,” I said.
The nod from Ames was almost not there, but I knew what to look for. He didn’t ask me why we were going to see the woman or why I wanted him with me. If I wanted to tell him, that would be fine. If not, he wouldn’t burn with curiosity.
I told him.
“She thinks she saw a woman get murdered here last night,” I said.
He looked at me, gray eyes unblinking.
I had asked him to come because he was seventy-four, because people found him easy to talk to, to trust, especially the very young and the very old. He understood.
I took off my Cubs cap. We went inside and found the nursing station down a carpeted corridor. I had been here before to serve papers. It was clean, well lit. There was a slight bustle of chatter behind the counter between a large woman in white with a chart in her hands and a smaller, heavier woman with red hair that looked natural. The red-haired woman was on the phone. The large woman was reading to her from the chart.
“December eighth,” the red-haired woman said. “Chart says that’s when the Flomax should stop.”
The person on the other end was talking. The redhead looked at the woman with the chart and rolled her eyes upward and then said, “It’s your signature … . Will do.”
She hung up and looked at Ames and me.
An old woman, white-haired, wearing a light blue suit moved next to us at the desk. She leaned on a cane and looked straight ahead at the big nurse.
“We’re here to see Dorothy Cgnozic,” I said.
“You were here a few months ago,” said the large woman with the chart.
“I served some papers,” I said.
“And you’re going to serve papers on Dorothy?” she asked protectively.
“No. Just want to see her. She called me. My name is Lewis Fonesca. This is Ames McKinney.”
“Pleased,” said Ames.
If he had a ten-gallon hat, I’m sure he would have taken it off and said, “Ma’am.”
Ames is hard to resist. I’m not.
“May I ask what she wants to see you about?” asked the large woman.
I looked at the pin above her left breast. It said she was Gladys Sprague.
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, I’m asking.”
“My pills,” said the woman with the cane.
“Not for an hour, Lois,” said the large nurse patiently. “One of us will come to your room.”
“It’s lunchtime,” the woman with the cane said.
“When lunch is over, come back here or someone will come to your room,” said the redhead.
“You won’t forget?” said the woman with the cane.
“It’s all on the charts,” said Gladys the nurse with a smile. “We won’t forget.”
“My tissues,” said the woman with the cane.
“We understand,” said the large nurse.
The old woman started up the long corridor.
“Mr … .” Gladys said.
“Fonesca. And this is Mr. McKinney.”
“Right. I’m guessing,” said Gladys with a sigh. “Dorothy told you she saw someone murdered here last night.”
“Yes,” I said.
“No one was murdered here last night,” said the redhead. “And no one died. We get about a death a month, sometimes more, but not yesterday and no murder.”
BOOK: Denial: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (Lew Fonesca Novels)
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