Bright Futures lf-6

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

“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.”

  16

  He’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.

  “She says Berrigan killed her father,” I said.

  “Convenient,” Viviase said, looking into his empty cup for some answers.

  He dropped the cup into the garbage can behind his desk.

  “Williams and Pepper,” I said.

  “You make them sound like a law firm, a men’s clothing store, or a mail-order Christmas catalog.”

  Someone screamed down the hall, not close, but loud enough. I couldn’t tell if it was a cackle, a laugh, or an expression of pain.

  “Williams and Pepper both have solid alibis for the times of death of both the Horvecki and Berrigan murders.”

  “They weren’t each other’s alibis, were they?”

  “I’m in a good mood, Fonesca. Truly. I don’t look it, but I’m in a good mood. My daughter, I’ve discovered, has not been fooling around with our heartthrob prisoner.”

  “That’s good.”

  “No,” he said. “She’s been fooling around with a high school senior. She assures me and her mother that ‘fooling around’ is all that she’s been doing, whereas if she were fooling around with Ronnie the words would take on a whole new meaning. So, I’m in a good mood. I’m waiting for a DNA report on Horvecki and the blood on the meat pounder.”

  “You checking Berrigan’s DNA too?”

  “We are.”

  “I think the blood on the tenderizer is Berrigan’s, not Horvecki’s.”

  “Why would our boy want to kill Berrigan?”

  “Maybe he wouldn’t, but somebody else might and then hide the murder weapon where it was sure to be found in Torcelli’s apartment.

  “Life is complicated,” I said.

  “Life is uncooperative.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I talk to him?”

  “He doesn’t want to see you. He’s only talking to his wife and his lawyer-the lawyer courtesy of your very own D. Elliot Corkle and his daughter, the same daughter who put up the charming Ronnie’s bail.”

  The first words Ames uttered since we entered Viviase’s office were, “We’d best go.”

  “Fine,” said Viviase, turning to me. “Let me know if you and your sidekick find more of Ronnie’s or Torcelli’s wives or girlfriends kicking around.”

  His eyes didn’t meet mine but I sensed something and that something was the name of Sally Porovsky.

  Rachel didn’t want a ride. She asked the receptionist at the jail to call her a cab so she could be taken to the nearest hotel, which happened to be the Ritz-Carlton on Tamiami Trail just outside of downtown. The Ritz-Carlton was about a three minute ride from the jail. She told Ames, who was waiting for her, that her husband had reminded her she was rich and could now stay anywhere she liked and didn’t even need to pick up the clothes she had left at her father’s house.

  “How did she seem to you?” I asked.

  “Something on her mind wherever her mind was,” Ames said as he, Victor, Darrell, and I walked over to the pizza shop next to the Hollywood 20 Movie Theaters on Main Street.

  “So,” said Darrell, “who killed those two guys and who shot at me and you, Fonesca?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “But you think?” said Darrell.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Victor said nothing. Victor was extending his silence. He was waiting for something, something for me to say or do, or something he had to decide to do, or something that came down from heaven or up from hell.

  “Movie?” asked Darrell as we all shared a large sausage pizza.

  “Next week,” I said.

  “When’s the last time you went to a movie, Fonesca?” Darrell asked.

  It had been June 6, 2003. Catherine and I went to see Seabiscuit at the Hillside Theater. We both liked it. We usually liked the same movies. Since then the only movies I had seen were on videotape or television, almost all made before 1955, almost all in black and white.

  “I don’t remember,” I said.

  “We’re right next door to the fucking place,” Darrell said. “They’ve got Saw 8 or 9 or something. And you Ames McKinney, what was the last time you went to a movie in a real, honest-to-god theater?”

  “Can’t say I remember,” Ames said. “Maybe forty, fifty years ago.”

  “I need some help here,” said Darrell. “Victor, you, when? Or don’t they have movies in China?”

  “I’ve never been to China,” said Victor. “I went to this movie the night before last.”

  “That settles the issue,” said Darrell. “The Chinese guy who’s not from China and me are going to see Saw.”

  “No,” said Victor. “I won’t see movies in which women or children are killed.”

  “Fonesca, I’m pleading with you,” said Darrell.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll go.”

  “I guess I will, too,” said Ames.

  “Depends,” Victor said.

  We spent two hours in darkness watching beautiful women with too much make up saying they were witches and trying to kill bearded guys who looked like Vikings by sending monkey-faced creatures riding on short but fast rhinos with short fire-spitting spears in their hands. Darrell drank a seemingly gallon-sized Coke and a giant popcorn.

  When we got out, it was dark.

  “Help that near-crazy lady,” Darrell said as we let him off outside the apartment building on Martin Luther King in which he lived with his mother.

  I didn’t answer. Neither did Ames. We drove off with Victor.

  “Someone beat Horvecki to death,” Ames said. “Someone killed Blue Berrigan almost in front of our eyes. Why? Who?”

  “And someone shot Darrell in the back and put a pellet through the window of Jeffrey Augustine’s car,” I said. “Who? Why?”

  Victor parked in the narrow driveway next to the house. We all got out.

  “You’ve got some ideas,” said Ames.

  “An idea,” I said.

  “Partners, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Ideas?”

  I told him. He rolled his scooter out from under the stairs and drove back to his room at the back of the Texas Bar and Grill.

  Victor took a shower and then settled into his sleeping bag in the corner of the office. I got into my black Venice beach shorts and my X Files black T-shirt and spent about an hour in bed, just looking up at the ceiling. I considered calling Sally. I didn’t. Sleep snuck up on me, as it usually does just when I’m convinced insomnia will have me waiting for the sun to rise.

  No wandering preachers or wayward policemen woke me. No new great ideas came to me in dreams. I remembered no dreams. I woke up three minutes after six in the morning. My X Files shirt was soaked with sweat, though the room felt cold. I got up, dressed in clean jeans and a plain blue T-shirt, and picked up the Memphis Reds gym bag I had purchased for two dollars at The Women’s Exchange.

  In the outer office, Victor was tossing on his sleeping bag. Half of him was on the bag. The other half was on the floor. I made it out the door without waking him and went down the stairs to retrieve my bicycle from the shed under the stairs.

  The morning was cool, maybe in the seventies. The sky was clear and traffic on 301 was lighter than usual. The YMCA was on Main Street in the Mall next to the Hollywood 20 Movie Theaters.

  I saw a few people I knew as I did my curls with fifteen-pound weights. It felt better after I got them done and began my second set. Then I did crunc
hes, bends, and heartbreakers until my shoulders began to ache.

  After I finished my workout, I showered, put on my clothes, and stepped out onto Main Street where someone took a shot at me.

  I stood on the sidewalk for a few seconds, not quite registering what had happened. A trio of teens passed me laughing, noticing nothing. An elderly woman with a walker slowly crossed the street, looking forward and moving slowly. Nothing seemed unusual until the second shot fell short, pinging off the hood of a shiny new red Honda Accord a few feet away from where I was standing. I could see the small dent in the car showing silver metal under the red paint. With the second shot I held up my gym bag and bent at the knees. Something thudded into the bag I held in front of my face. I ducked for cover alongside the Honda, hoping the shots were coming from the other side of the street and not from either side of me.

  I sat on the sidewalk, my back to the car, my Cubs cap about to fall in my lap. A couple in their fifties came down the sidewalk. They tried not to look at me.

  “Down,” I said. “Get down.”

  I motioned with my hand. They ignored me, probably considering me an early-morning drunk. They walked on. No more shots.

  After a few minutes I hadn’t been killed, so I stood up carefully and looked around. There were places to hide, doorways to consider, rooftops, corners to duck around. I looked at the front of my gym bag. A pellet was lodged in the fabric. I pulled it out, pocketed it, and went to get my bicycle from where it was chained around a lamppost. There was a Dillard’s bag dangling from the handlebars. I looked inside and found a folded handwritten note.

  Should you survive, think no ill of me.

  Folly is as folly always does.

  Folly is and never was completely free.

  Stop or hear again the bullet’s buzz and it will be as if Fonesca never was.

  “High school kid,” said Ames, looking down at the poem that lay flat on my desk. “Maybe a girl.”

  “Real men don’t write poetry?” I asked.

  “They might write it, but they don’t show it to anybody.”

  “Why write a poem?” I said. “Why not just a note saying, ‘Stop trying to help Ronnie Gerall or I’ll shoot at you again and next time I won’t miss.’ ”

  “Guns are easy to get,” Ames said. “Why shoot at you with a pellet gun, especially after having been less than gentle, beating two men to death?”