She nodded at me but she didn’t make the correction.
“Yes,” she said into the phone.
She hung up, looked at me and said, “Through that door, office all the way straight back.”
I went through the door. A muscular man with a well-trimmed beard wearing green lab pants and shirt came out of a room on my right.
“Changing room is through that door,” he said.
“Not a patient,” I said.”I have an appointment with Dr. McClory.”
He pointed down the corridor and ducked back into the room he had popped out of. The door to Richard McClory’s office was open. It was big, with a tan leather sofa against the wall, two tan leather chairs in front of the desk, a swivel chair with matching tan leather behind the large well-polished dark wood desk. The desk was completely clear except for a large black-and-white framed photograph of four men at a small table playing cards. The men, who seemed to be in their sixties or older, sat on folding chairs. One had his hand to his chin as if he were considering his next move. The wall behind McClory’s desk was covered in framed degrees, awards and certificates. The one window right across from the door looked out on a parking lot.
“Fonesca?” came the voice behind me.
I turned. He was tall, looked as if he could pass for John Kerry’s brother or cousin. He was wearing a white lab coat and a look that suggested it had been a while since he had a full night of sleep.
He held his hand out toward one of the chairs. I sat and he moved behind his desk, leaned forward and folded his hands.
“Nancy hired you,” he said.
“Yes.”
He looked out the window. An SUV went over a speed bump with a rattle.
“Has anyone close to you died unexpectedly?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
He looked away from the window at me. It wasn’t the answer he expected. There was a flash of something, maybe anger in his eyes. How dare my tragedy be compared with his?
“Kyle was my only son,” he said.
I wasn’t going to play. I wasn’t going to say, “Catherine was my only wife.” These were different tragedies, different pains for two different people.
“I know,” I said.
“You do this for a living?” he asked. “Exploit people’s grief, promise them justice?”
“No,” I said.
“No?” he repeated with sarcasm.
“No.” I got up and said, “Sorry.”
I was on my way out, almost at the door, when he said, “Wait. Close the door. Sit down.”
I closed the door and went back to the chair.
“I’m sorry,” he said, pushing his hair back with the palm of his large right hand. “I deal with death, the death of near strangers, every day. We save some, save a lot, but some come too late. The families, the wives, parents, children, must feel what I’m feeling.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Now I’m one of them and I think about the crap I say to them and know that if someone tries to give me that about losing Kyle… I’m sorry. I’m tired. I haven’t slept in almost three days.”
“I know a good therapist,” I said.
“Don’t believe in it,” he said. “You know you’re the first person I’ve discussed Kyle’s death with? Everyone just looks at me sympathetically or tells me how sorry they are, but they don’t talk to me and I don’t want them to. God, I’m rambling.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
“I suppose. It doesn’t matter.”
He put his head in his hands for an instant, sighed deeply, looked up and said, “You want to know why I’m a good radiologist?”
I nodded.
“I’ve been through what about half of my patients have been through. I’ve had prostate cancer. Radiation. Seed implants. I tell them, I’m living proof that you can survive. It’s the survivors of those who don’t make it that I can’t deal with. You know the side effects of radiation and seed implants?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, the one on the table now is the inability to produce sperm,” he said. “I can’t have any more children, Mr. Fonesca. I’m forty-two years old and Kyle will be the only child I will ever have.”
He stared at me, either waiting for a response or seeing through me.
It should have been clear five minutes earlier, but I was sure now. Dr. Richard McClory was self-prescribing to deal with his pain and it looked as if he might be using more than the minimum recommended dose of whatever it was.
“Ask your questions, Mr. Fonesca,” he said, leaning back, eyes closed.
“You were supposed to pick up your son after the movie,” I said.
“Yes. Kyle and Andrew.”
“Both?”
“Yes.”
“And when they didn’t show up?”
“I called Kyle’s cell phone.”
“Cell phone?”
“Yes,” he said wearily. “There was no answer.”
“So you…?”
“Parked in the lot. Looked around. Went inside the lobby. Went back to the car.”
“You were worried?”
“I was, God help me, angry. I blamed Andrew Goines. I thought he had convinced Kyle to forget about me and go off and do something stupid. I was going to tell Kyle he couldn’t see Andrew again, not when he was staying with me.”
“And then?”
“I waited in the car, cell phone on the dashboard. Called Andrew Goines, asked about Kyle. Waited for an hour, gave up and drove home. When the phone rang, I thought it was Kyle with a lame apology asking me to pick him up or telling me he was staying at Andrew’s. It was the police.”
He opened his mouth and sucked in air. His eyes were red.
“Did Kyle ever run away, stay out all night, do things that-”
“Never, nothing. He wasn’t perfect. We weren’t buddies. But we weren’t enemies either. He was straight. No drugs. No drinking. One of the perks of being a physician is you know such things. It also helps when you go through your kid’s drawers and pockets.”
We sat silently for a few seconds. He looked at his hands. I looked at him.
“Do what you can,” he finally said without looking up. “If you need more money for, I don’t know, people who might help…”
“Your ex-wife’s paying me,” I said.
“If you find out anything,” he said now, looking up, “you let me know.”
“I will.”
“Have you ever felt that you could kill someone?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“My job is to save lives,” he said. “For the dozens, maybe hundreds I’ve saved, I think I deserve to take one, the life of the person who murdered my son. Well?”
“I don’t think it’s in you, Doctor,” I said.
“You don’t know me,” he said with a touch of anger.
“I could be wrong,” I said.
There was nothing more to say except to ask for the number of the cell phone Kyle had been carrying. He pulled a flap-top silver cell phone from a pocket, pushed a couple of buttons and gave me the number. I wrote it in my notebook.
A knock at the door.
McClory said, “Come in.”
A woman in nurse’s whites, probably mid-forties, strong features and eyes that looked at McClory with sympathy.
“Mr. Saxborne is here,” she said.
“Thank you,” said McClory.
She closed the door slowly, eyes on the doctor.
“Raymond Wallace Saxborne is going to die soon,” he said, getting up. “Raymond Wallace Saxborne is almost eighty. Fonesca, between you and me and whatever God is not out there, I am going to have a hard time giving my bedside best to Mr. Saxborne. Kyle was fourteen.”
He walked around the desk, past me and out of the office without a word or a glance in my direction.
9
I should have been delivering summonses to two people. I should have been going to see Yolanda Root, Andrew Goines and the four people who h
ad been released from Seaside Assisted Living. I should have gone back to Nancy Root for more information. I should have done a lot of things, but I didn’t.
Back in my office, I sat behind my desk and looked over at the painting on my wall, the dark jungle foliage with the nighttime sky and just the touch of red, and the hint of a bird.
I picked up the phone and hit the buttons that connected me to the office of Ann Horowitz. Ann never let a call go by even if she was in the middle of a confession of matricide from a raving client. How do I know this? From the calls she had taken over the past three years when I sat in front of her, one of which came while I was trying to remember what might have been a telling dream about… I don’t know what it was about. When she ended the call, the dream was gone.
“Dr. Horowitz,” she answered.
“Are you alone?” I asked.
“Lewis?”
“Yes.”
“I’m alone for the next ten minutes,” she said.
“I can’t do it,” I said.
“Do what?”
“Face any more of them.”
“Them?”
“The grieving, frightened, angry, depressed,” I said. “I’ve got a list in front of me.”
“People you are supposed to help?”
“Why am I supposed to help? I can’t help myself.”
“You are helping yourself. You’re talking to me. Who told you that you had to help those people on your list?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It happens. They find me. I’m a magnet for despair.”
“What do you think you want to do?” she asked. “Notice I said think, because what you want to do may not be what you think you want to do.”
I took off my cap and rubbed the top of my head.
“I think I want to buy a cheap car, throw in all my things I want to keep, which probably wouldn’t even fill the trunk of a Honda, and drive away.”
“Never come back?” she asked.
“Never.”
“Where would you go?”
“Away. You’re going to say I can’t run away from what I am.”
“No,” she said. I could tell she was eating something. “You can run. You can hide. Sometimes it works very well. I’ve even recommended it, but the problem is that wherever you go, you will always be with you. You are your own God, your own judge, your own executioner.”
“Freud,” I said.
“No, the German actor Klaus Kinski,” she said.
“What are you eating?” I asked.
“Ham and cheese on thin white,” she said.
“You’re Jewish.”
“I appreciate your calling this to my attention,” she said.
“You don’t eat ham.”
“I eat ham. I like ham. If God wants to punish me for eating ham, I have little use for her.”
“Tradition,” I said.
“We were talking about your unwillingness to deal with the problems you’ve taken on,” she said. “I’ll deal with my God.”
“You pray to your God?” I asked.
“I talk to my God and call it prayer. If my God talks to me, I call it schizophrenia.”
“Klaus Kinski?”
“Thomas Szasz. Let’s deal with your God.”
“I have none,” I said.
“Nonsense,” she said, chewing. “God is in your head. You created God. Deny other people’s God. Deal with your own. You have no intention of running away. If you did, you wouldn’t have called me. You would just go. You want me to talk you out of it.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t have to,” she said. “I know. I’ve been doing this for fifty years. What is on that list of yours? You’ve got five minutes.”
I told her, even mentioned Jerry Lee the gator and ended with my visit to Richard McClory.
“I’m tired,” I said.
“Not sleepy?” she asked.
“Tired.”
“I’ll ask my required question now,” she said.
“No, I’m not thinking about suicide. If death wants me, I’m easy to find. I’m not running…”
“Got you,” she said. “You’re not running away from death. You are living a paradox. You want to run from your grief, but you don’t want to leave it behind. You want to just let the days go by, but you can’t do it.”
“You tricked me,” I said.
“I’m good at it. I’m not telling you anything I haven’t told you before. You listen, but you hear very little. You are a tough case, Lewis, but an interesting one. I’ve got to go. I hear my next victim coming through the outside door. Go to work, Lewis. Don’t go to sleep. Don’t go to Key West or Columbia, Missouri. Come see me next week, usual time and day.”
She hung up.
I felt better, not good but better. If I hurried, I could get to Yolanda’s grandfather’s hardware store in Bradenton. On the phone, she hadn’t sounded as if she was going to let anyone see her grief, if she had any. That was fine with me.
I drove up 41 past the Asolo, past the Sarasota/Bradenton airport, past malls, one-story chiropractic offices, dentists, Sam Ash’s music store, all the fast food franchises known to the world. I listened to Neal Boortz on WLSS. He was talking about airplanes. I’m not sure what he said.
Root’s Hardware was in a small strip mall on the north side of DeSoto. It wasn’t big. It wasn’t small either. Finding Yolanda was no problem. She stood behind the counter tallying up items for a chunky man with a freshly shaved head and a bushy mustache.
Yolanda wore a yellow tight-fitting tank top, a black skirt, a silver ring in her navel, makeup that would be right at a Halloween party and a sour look that said, What do you want?
When the man with the shaved head had gone through the door, little bell tinkling, I moved to the counter and said, “Lew Fonesca.”
She looked at me, folded her arms under her breasts and sized me up. I don’t think she was impressed. Her mouth was open. She had a silver tongue ring.
“I’m busy,” she said.
I saw no customers.
“I’ll be quick,” I said.
“The Cubs suck,” she said, nodding at my cap.
“Things change,” I said. “Know anyone who might want to hurt your brother?”
“You could have, like, asked me that on the phone.”
“I like to see people I talk to,” I said.
“So, you looking?”
She unfolded her arms and smiled. It wasn’t a friendly smile. It was a taunt. It was a tease. It was an I-know-what-men-think smile designed to put her in charge.
“You’re a pretty girl,” I said. “You don’t have to hide it.”
“Who’s hiding anything?” she said.
“Most people,” I said. “Kyle. Someone who might want to hurt him?”
“No,” she said. “You mean, like, kill? He was, like, fourteen, for God’s sake, you know?”
I didn’t answer.
“No,” she repeated.
“Anyone want to hurt you?” I asked.
“Me?” she asked, shaking her head and closing her eyes, pointing a crimson fingernail at herself. “You want to get on the list? Take a number. But no way anyone would try to get to me by killing Kyle.”
“You got along with him?”
“Sure. He was always trying to show me how he and his friend Andy had done stuff. Kid stuff. He was just, like, trying to impress me.”
“Stuff?” I said.
“Water balloons, scratching parked cars with a key or something, you know. Spitting on people from the parking garage by the Hollywood 20, stuff like that, you know. He was a kid.”
“So you liked him?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“Sure. That make a difference?”
“Yes.”
“Why? He’s dead. Like, end of his life, end of story. Go talk to his daddy.”
The word daddy dripped with venom a coral snake would envy.
“I did,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Fucking hypocrite,” she said. “He didn’t give a shit about Kyle. Just threw money at him and let him know he didn’t want to hear about any problems.”
“And your mother?”
Yolanda shrugged again.
“She’ll cry you enough tears to fill Robarts Arena. She’s an actress.”
The word actress came out with the same venom that had covered the word daddy.
“What are your plans?” I asked.
“My… what’s that got to do with anything? None of your fucking business. I haven’t decided yet. You got any ideas?”
The words were clearly provocative, words she had used on men and boys for the past four or more years.
“You’d be a good actress,” I said.
She laughed.
“I mean it,” I said.
She stopped laughing, looked at me.
“You’re not kidding, are you?”
“No.”
“I’ve thought about it,” she said. “My mother…”
The mask softened a little, but there was no time for it to drop. A man in his sixties, white hair, rugged farm look on his dark face, stepped around an aisle and moved to the counter. He was wearing dark slacks and a white shirt with a blue tie.
“Yolanda?” he asked, looking at her and then at me.
“He’s a customer, Grandpa,” she said.
“What’s he buying?” asked Elliott Maxwell Root.
“A key chain,” I said, plucking a chain from a cardboard display on the counter. It had a little laser light on the end that went on when you pressed the blue plastic sides.
“Two dollars and twenty-seven cents,” Yolanda said.
I took three dollars from my wallet and handed them to her under Grandpa’s watching eyes. She gave me change and a receipt. Grandpa’s eyes were watching to see if I was looking at Yolanda in places or ways that might be inappropriate. I considered suggesting that Yolanda might be issued a uniform that covered her, but even in an oversize blue smock, that sexual challenge would burn through.
“Take care,” I said to her.
I meant it. She understood.
“I will,” she said softly. “Thanks.”
Before I headed back to Sarasota, I made two notes in my notebook and checked one I had written earlier. First, where was Kyle’s cell phone? Second, according to his sister, Kyle and his friend Andy Goines were into minor vandalism. The note from earlier read: Robles said there was a passenger in the car that hit Kyle, maybe a kid.
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