Who Killed the Fonz?

by James Boice

  “But he had a rule about married women. They were off-limits. What about that?”

  “In this case it wasn’t up to him. Because he was feeling the same thing I was. He said he was making an exception because he was in love with me. And sometimes love breaks rules. He also said it was the first time he had ever told a woman he loved her.”

  The record ended. They left it alone, the only sound the embryonic rhythms of the finished record spinning beneath the needle.

  She said, “I was the first person since you whom he trusted enough to really let his guard down. I made him happy.” She looked around. “This was our place. My husband doesn’t know about it. I bought it for us, with my own money, like I did my Harley.”

  Richard said, “So what happened? How did all hell break loose?”

  She said, “The way it always does: by telling the truth. The whole truth.”

  “What do you mean, you mean you told your husband about Fonzie?”

  “No, he never knew about us. It was the other way around: I told Fonzie about my husband. He knew I was married. He knew the whole situation. But he didn’t know the real truth about my husband. No one did. I told him, and it was the worst mistake I ever made in my life.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The real truth about Martin Sealock,” she said, “is that he negotiated a deal with that company.”

  “Sackett-Wilhelm? But everyone knows about that.”

  “No, not that deal. That’s not the real deal. I overheard him on the phone. The deal he negotiated—the real one—is that Sackett-Wilhelm would announce they were staying in Milwaukee and would credit Martin for their decision. Meanwhile, their lobbyists would donate five million dollars to the campaign. In return, when Martin is elected—and he will be, for keeping Sackett-Wilhelm here—he will return to them three times their donation in tax credits. And this time next year the company will leave for China after all.”

  Richard was shaking his head, ill. “I don’t believe it. I just don’t.”

  “Whether you believe it or not doesn’t matter. Every one of those people who work at that factory will be crushed, their families will be crushed, and none of them have the slightest idea what’s coming. And it makes no difference to Martin. He doesn’t care. Because he will already have been elected governor.”

  “And you told Fonzie all this.”

  “He cared more about protecting the people than getting back at Martin—especially knowing Potsie and Ralph work there. So he came to the house one night and told him he knew about the deal. He did not tell him how he knew—only that he knew. He wanted to protect me.”

  “Martin doesn’t know about what was going on?”

  “Egomaniac that he is, the idea that his wife would ever fall in love with someone else, let alone with the mechanic? It’s just not within the realm of possibilities.”

  “What’d Fonzie do?”

  “He gave him an ultimatum. Tell the people the truth, or he would. He would take what he knew to the Milwaukee Journal. Well, Martin broke down. I was outside the door listening. He cried. He begged Fonzie for mercy. He told him he was right about everything, that he had been desperate because he had been so far behind in the polls and wasn’t raising money, he had made a horrible mistake. He agreed to come clean. First thing in the morning, he would call a news conference and tell the people everything. He walked Fonzie to the door. Fonzie told him he would help him however he could. Then he left. Martin called someone on the phone. I couldn’t hear who. But on his way home, Fonzie crashed.”

  Richard put his hands to his head. “Okay,” he said. “Hold on. Okay.”

  “As soon as I heard about it, I knew he’d done it, but I didn’t know how. I couldn’t investigate it myself without Martin finding out. I didn’t know what I was going to do, who I could trust—I was dead inside. The love of my life was dead. And then you showed up. Fonzie had told me so much about his old friend Richie Cunningham. And here you were. It was like you were an angel. It took everything I had, at the memorial service, to keep myself from telling you everything then and there. I tried to tell you at the house, but I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the nerve. And Martin doesn’t miss a thing. All I could do was try and direct you to the bike and hope you found a clue.”

  “I found one all right. How’d you know it was at TJ’s?”

  “Fonzie mentioned once that he got his parts there, that TJ always had good stuff because the cops let him have unclaimed road wrecks. TJ was the closest thing he had to a friend. I thought someone had to have either cut his brakes or monkeyed with his accelerator, or I didn’t know what exactly, but I knew that if I could get you there to take a closer look at the bike, then that would make TJ take a look too, and maybe the two of you would see something the cops hadn’t—because either they didn’t care or had a reason not to look. It was a long shot, but that’s all I had.” She continued, “It wasn’t until tonight that I realized it was that cop on the bridge.”

  “You know him?”

  “No, I’ve never seen him before. But I’m not surprised Martin has a cop on his payroll. There’s probably more than one. Maybe the whole force.”

  Richard said, “And there’s no evidence of the deal to take to the newspaper? No proof?” She shook her head no. He stood up. He paced.

  “Martin needs to pay, Richard,” she said. “How do we make him pay?”

  The fire was dying down. Richard sat on the sofa. The drip, drip in his head had stopped. The two open pipe ends had been connected. The only question that remained was whether Kirk was in on it. Richard would not have pegged him for a dirty cop—if anything, the problem with Kirk was he had always been too clean, obsessively straight. And when Sealock said he wanted to get rid of him, he sounded like he meant it. He sounded like he had meant everything. Richard felt foolish falling for the act. But he was not the only one. The man was a talented actor. Richard had been around enough to know one of the greats. And he had wanted so badly to believe him. After Gleb and Space Battles, he had needed someone who was not his wife or his mother to believe in him. And with Fonzie gone, he needed a friend. Sealock had found the easiest mark in the world.

  But Richard could act too. He could lie. He had been lying to himself about Suttree for years now. He had been lying to himself about himself. He wasn’t who he told himself he was. The Corvette. The suits. The famous friends. The name—Richard? He wasn’t Richard. He was Richie. He always had been and always would be. He realized that now. He had been running in shame from who he was. Sealock was willing to trample whoever got in his way—but for Richard, it was only himself who got in his own way and so only himself who was trampled. But these last few days, being back where he had come from, being around the old friends, he was no longer ashamed, in fact he was proud. From now on he would be honest about who he was and where he had come from.

  But first there was one more lie to tell.

  “I have an idea,” he said. “But it’s better if you don’t know about it, or it’ll put you in danger. Fonzie wanted to keep you out of this.”

  She took the car, left the bike. Richard waited until she drove off and he could not hear the car’s engine anymore. Then he picked up the phone and called the only people he could trust.

  • • •

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING OUT here?” Potsie said as Richard climbed into the back seat of Ralph’s Pontiac. “Reenacting Deliverance?”

  Richard sat leaning forward between the two front seats and filled them in. He told them about Kirk, and about what Margo Sealock had told him. About Sealock they were heartbroken, shocked, angry—and not entirely credulous.

  “You don’t believe her, do you?” Ralph said.

  “I don’t know,” Richard said. “I don’t know who to believe anymore. I don’t know exactly what is going on. All I know is Fonzie was killed, and either Sealock or Lieutenant Kirk is responsible, maybe both. Whoever it was, I’m going to bring them down, and I can’t do it alone. I
need your help. What do you guys say? Up for one more harebrained youthful misadventure, for old times’ sake?”

  “Absolutely,” Ralph said.

  Potsie asked, “What do you need?”

  “For one thing, a safe place to crash tonight. Sealock knows I’m staying at the old house. The cops probably have it staked out as we speak.”

  “You can stay in our guest room,” Potsie said.

  “Perfect,” Richard said. “And, Ralph, we’re also going to need that new recording equipment you mentioned the other night at Arnold’s.”

  Ralph had started to put the car into gear but now slid it back into park. “Richard,” he said, turning around to face him, growing serious. “I appreciate your wanting to get the band back together, but I don’t think now’s quite the right time to work on our ‘Splish Splash.’ ”

  “Hey, Ralph,” Richard said.

  “Yeah, Richie?”

  “Just drive, you bonehead.”

  • • •

  WHEN THEY WERE BACK IN town, he had Ralph pull the Pontiac over at a phone booth. He stepped inside the Plexiglas-and-aluminum closet, dropped in a quarter, and dialed Sealock. Potsie and Ralph leaned against the booth’s open door to listen.

  “Richard,” Sealock said pleasantly. “How did it go on the bridge? What’d you find?”

  “Quite a lot.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “Well, for one thing: a goon. Your goon.”

  “Yes—Sauer. He told me.” His voice was warm and friendly as always.

  “Good,” Richard said, “then he also told you that Fonzie’s still alive. That was him on the bike. You thought you could kill him? You thought you could kill Fonzie? You’re not man enough. You’re not even halfway there. He survived your lousy hit job, he was alive when he hit the water and swam away. Didn’t anyone teach your muscleman to shoot a few holes in them to make sure the job was done right?”

  Potsie and Ralph were guffawing at Richard’s performance. He waved his hand at them and put a finger to his lips to shush them.

  “If that’s your best Philip Marlowe,” Sealock said, “it’s more Elliott Gould than Humphrey Bogart. Who’s that with you?”

  “Who do you think? It’s Fonzie. Now listen up. We want to make a deal. Give me the money I need to make my movie.”

  Sealock scoffed. “That’s a lot of money.”

  “A lot of money. Five million dollars. The exact amount you got from Sackett-Wilhelm.”

  “That money’s spent, Richard.”

  “What’s left of it?”

  “A million. At most.”

  “That’ll have to do then.”

  “And what is that buying me?”

  “My silence.”

  “And the greaseball?” said Sealock. “How much does Fonzie want?”

  “He doesn’t want your money. All he wants is to get far away from this lousy place and start a new life somewhere else. You beat him, okay? You won.”

  “It’s going to take time to get that money together,” Sealock told him. “It’s not liquid. It’s tied up in various accounts and holdings.”

  “Out in Hollywood, we have a saying,” Richard said. The words just came out, he said them before he had thought it through, there wasn’t really any saying he had in mind, and now his brain scrambled for something. All he came up with was: “You’ve got until tomorrow night.”

  “It’s not a very exciting saying,” Sealock said.

  “Tomorrow night. Seven o’clock. Meet me at the Cheesehead Lodge on South Kinnickinnic. You know it?”

  “I know it.”

  “And if you’re getting your hopes up about getting another shot at Fonzie or any other kind of monkey business, know this: I’ll be alone. Fonzie won’t be there. If I don’t meet him with the money at ten o’clock tomorrow night, he’s going straight to the papers. Like he should have done in the first place.”

  He hung up. He let out a deep breath and fell atop the phone, his forehead on his arm. Then he lifted his head and turned to Potsie and Ralph and held out his hands. They were shaking.

  • • •

  POTSIE SCOOPED OUT TWO DISHES of Hamburger helper from the pan his wife had left on the stove. She and the girls were already in bed when he and Richard arrived. “Voilà,” he said, presenting a plate to Richard, who was sitting at the kitchen table. “The San Francisco treat.”

  “I think you’re thinking of Rice-A-Roni, Potsie.”

  Potsie shrugged. He opened a Shotz for himself and poured milk into a glass for Richard. They ate. Richard was starved—the day and all its tortured anxiety had scooped him out. He ate with the ferocity of an animal. Eating had always made him think. Sometimes he could almost feel his brain releasing the thoughts as he ate, like they were something physical, like a flock of small colorful birds. This time every single one of his thoughts involved one of three people: Caroline. Richie Jr. Lori Beth.

  Potsie must have been thinking along the same lines because he said, with his mouth full, “What would you say is the worst part of being a parent?”

  “Easy,” Richard said, his mouth full too. He swallowed. “The constant terror.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. Can you imagine how it gets around here in the mornings with two teenage girls? We have only three bathrooms. It’s not enough. Three bathrooms. I’ve got to think about putting in a fourth.”

  “No, I mean being afraid for them all the time.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “That’s the worst part. That constant, low-grade buzz in the back of your head that something terrible will happen to them. The word anxiety doesn’t begin to cover it. No one really talks about that part of it. They talk about the responsibility, maybe the stress. Never the terror.”

  “Yeah, no kidding,” said Potsie. “And it never goes away.”

  “Never.”

  “When Kelly was first born, I held her so gently, I was worried about breaking her. Then I always overdressed her because I was terrified of letting her be cold. I thought it would go away and I’d relax. But I did the same thing with Sarah. And now I still do it, even though it’s just other things. Like the way I talk to them. Always afraid of breaking them. But then again, you know, that’s the best part too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Having that feeling is awful. But it’s also kind of beautiful. To care about another person so deeply, so intensely—you can only feel like that when it’s your kid, when you’re responsible for their life. When everything—your sanity, your heart, everything—is at risk just by loving them.”

  “You think we’re as good as our parents? I mean, you think we’ve done as well? As dads? As guys?”

  “Geez, Cunningham.” Potsie shook his head, sipped his beer. “We’re doing okay.”

  “We could do better. I could, anyway.”

  “We’re doing okay,” Potsie repeated. “Our parents were a tough act to follow. Look, what was their big cause when they were young? Hitler. They had Hitler. There’s nothing confusing about Hitler—he’s evil, you go over, you fight him. Simple, right? Meanwhile, what did we have?”

  “Vietnam.”

  “I mean, are you kidding me? Vietnam? The most confusing foreign policy thing in the history of our country? And we’re supposed to understand it at such a young age? We’re supposed to know if it’s something we should kill or die for?”

  “Yeah,” Richard said, done with his food, folding his arms on the table before him and staring down at his plate, thinking.

  “And then what?” continued Potsie. “The postwar years. Booming economy, all that. You got a job, your company loved you, you stayed there for the rest of your life, you had enough for a good life for your family. Again: simple. It was easy to hold on to their values and to see right from wrong, to know which way was forward, which way was backward. And what did we get? Recession. Assassinations. Nixon. We got a whole other kind of world. Yeah, our parents were great. But I would have liked to see them with our war
s, and our world. See what kind of time they would have had sorting it all out. I think they would agree with me when I say that we’ve done a pretty good job. We’ve turned out very well. I think they’d be very happy. And proud.”

  “Hey, Potsie, look, you don’t have to come tomorrow. You and Ralph, you shouldn’t be there. I can set up the microphone and the tape recorder myself. You don’t need to be involved. You should be home with your families.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t want anything to happen to you guys.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen. It’ll be fine.” From the tone of his voice, Richard could tell Potsie himself was not so sure. “We’re going to be there tomorrow night, and that’s all there is to it.”

  They finished their drinks, then Richard tried to do the dishes, but Potsie would not let him. He scrubbed a plate with a sponge. “So ol’ Fonzie fell in love,” he said thoughtfully, almost singing it. “I have to say, there are worse ways to go out.”

  Richard had to admit he had a point. The Fonz’s ending was not such a tragic one.

  Potsie shut off the water and dried his hands. “I gotta hit the hay. You should too. Big day tomorrow. We have to take down the governor.”

  “He’s not the governor yet.”

  “Not if we can help it, no.”

  Potsie lurched up the stairs and down the hall, Richard following. Potsie gestured with his head at the guest room. Richard stopped there. “ ’Night, Potsie.” He watched as Potsie stopped before Kelly’s closed bedroom door and listened, seemed satisfied by what he heard, then stopped at Sarah’s door and did the same. Silence in both rooms. Richard knew what Potsie felt: there is no peace like knowing your children sleep tight.

  • • •

  RICHARD WENT INTO THE GUEST room and sat on the bed. HE stared into the darkness. He listened to himself breathe, felt his heart beating in his chest. Then he stood up again and went back downstairs. He picked up the phone and called to cancel his flight. Then he rang Lori Beth.