Vengeance

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “I don’t smirk.”

  “Geoffrey Green gets women who feel comfortable with him and then seduces them. Maybe they think they’re rescuing him from his choice or nature.”

  “And maybe he’s gay,” I said.

  “Or maybe he is whatever the client wants him to be,” said Sebastian. “I think he knows where Melanie is. I want her found. I’m sure I can straighten this out if she’ll just talk to me face to face.”

  “I’ll keep looking,” I said.

  He sat back and said, “Good.”

  I finished my drink, got up and said I had to leave. He looked at his watch and said he had to leave too. He dropped a twenty on the table and we made our way through cigar smoke and hoarse laughter and down the stairs and through the doors to the outside. Sebastian nodded to one of the young valets, who blinked and went looking for the right car.

  “Find her for me, Fonesca,” he said, putting a hand gently on my shoulder.

  I nodded and started down the pier toward the parking lot. There were more gulls now but the pelicans were gone.

  Sally Porovsky’s apartment was in one of those two-story complexes in blocks of six or seven buildings. There was plenty of parking, the grass was green and the bushes and trees, including some stunted palms, were taken care of. This was not where the retired wealthy spent their golden years.

  The apartment was easy to find. The buildings were clearly marked with large gold address numbers, which were easy to read by the complex’s night lights. When I got to the door, I could hear voices inside, including one male voice I recognized: Harrison Ford. I pushed the button and waited. From inside, a boy shouted.

  “Door. It must be Kevin Costner for you, Mom.”

  “Michael,” said Sally, “how about a gesture of goodwill?”

  A few seconds later, the door opened and I was facing a lanky teen in a blue T-shirt, million-times-washed jeans and bare feet. His hair was long and he had an earring in his left ear. He was still into acne, but it was minimal. He said nothing.

  “I’m Lew Fonesca,” I said, holding out my hand.

  He shook and stood looking at me, holding the door.

  “Can I come in?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said, moving to a sofa against a wall and plopping into it. His feet went up on a low coffee table and his eyes turned to the television set, where Harrison Ford was scrambling along a rooftop.

  I was standing in a small, neat living room with a bright comfortable sofa, an armchair, a dark wooden coffee table, a line of Georgia O’Keeffe flowers on the walls. The floor was gray carpet. I guessed the floors in all the apartments were management-gray carpet. The room and the dining room beyond it were clean and uncluttered.

  I pushed the door closed behind me and said,

  “Frantic.”

  “Yeah,” Michael said.

  “What’s your favorite Harrison Ford movie?”

  He looked up at me and said, “You care?”

  “I think so. I’m killing awkward time till your mother comes to save me, but it’ll be easier for both of us if we find something reasonably interesting to talk about. My favorite is Witness.”

  Mike nodded and looked back at the television set. Harrison Ford almost fell.

  “I like the first Indiana Jones too,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Mike.

  “I’ve got tapes of both of them,” I said.

  “We don’t have much room for tapes,” said Mike. “But we do have the VCR.”

  “You can borrow my. tapes,” I said.

  “That depends on if you go on another date with my mother.”

  “No, not really, but maybe. I live over by the DQ on Three-o-one.”

  “I go there all the time,” he said, looking at me. “You eat there?”

  “Every day,” I said.

  “No shit. Oh shit, I told Mom I wouldn’t say ‘shit’ or …”

  “I don’t give a shit,” I said.

  He looked at my blank face and smiled.

  Sally came hurrying out of a door across the room. She was putting in an earring.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Just got home. Home visit … I told you. You met Mike.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You said casual. I’m casual,” she said.

  She was wearing a loose-fitting dress with a belt, flats and the silver earrings. She’d done something to fluff her hair and she’d put on more makeup than she wore the day before. She looked alive. She looked great.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  Mike was transfixed by the television. He wiggled his toes.

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  I was lying. I had the feeling she was too.

  “One more thing,” she said. She turned and called, “Susan.”

  A second door opened and a girl about nine came out. She was wearing cutoff jeans, a green blouse and sneakers. She was dark, pretty, with long dark wavy hair. She was definitely her mother’s daughter.

  “Susan, this is Mr. Fonesca,” Sally said.

  “Fonesca,” she said. “Are there Italian Jews?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but I’m not one of them.”

  “I told you,” Mike said without looking up.

  “Nice to meet you, Susan, Mike,” I said.

  “Have you got the X-Files movie?” asked Mike.

  “No,” I said as Sally guided me toward the door.

  Mike shrugged.

  “Can I stay up till ten?” Susan asked sweetly.

  “Nine. In bed, lights out. School tomorrow. You’ve heard this story every night for years.”

  “But tonight is different,” she said, glancing at me.

  “Nine. Mike?”

  “Nine,” he said. “What time will you be home?”

  “Not late,” said Sally.

  “You look like that actor who plays the bad guy,” said Susan to me. “You know the one.”

  “Stanley Tucci,” said Mike without looking back at me. “He does funny stuff too.”

  “Is that his name?” Susan asked. “Two cheese?”

  “Nine o’clock,” said Sally, ushering me out the door and pushing it closed behind us.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Well?”

  “That was test one.”

  “I think I like them,” I said. “You think I look like Stanley Tucci?”

  “A little,” Sally said, walking next to me as I guided her toward my Geo. “Where are we going?”

  “I know a good pizza place,” I said. “Then I’ve got some questions for you and I thought we might go looking for Adele Tree.”

  “Sounds like fun,” said Sally.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was trying to make a joke.”

  “No, you weren’t,” she said. “And I’d like to find Adele. You like anchovies on your pizza?”

  “I love anchovies on anything,” I said.

  “You just passed test number two.”

  There were a few things wrong with Honey Crust Pizza. The place was small, crowded, with booths on both sides and tables with red-and-white tablecloths down the middle. The place was smoker friendly, but the smells from the open kitchen behind the counter at the rear overrode the tobacco. The waitresses were friendly, efficient and fast, and the pizza matched anything I had eaten back in Chicago. My mother was an Italian cook only because she was Italian. Her preference was for American staples: meat loaf, fried chicken, broiled fish and matzo-ball soup. There was no explanation for the matzo-ball soup, but my father, sister and I didn’t need one. We liked it.

  All this I told Sally, who was a professional listener. She paid attention, appeared interested and knew when to ask questions. She was as good as I was, in a different way. Sally was animated, friendly, willing to talk herself. I am the quiet, sympathetic type. My basic affect was “I’m sorry for your trouble. I’m listening. I wish there was more I could do.” Compared to my father, I was a blabbermouth. My father’s usual evening conversation was “You all righ
t. Kid’s all right.” My mother usually said “Yes.” Sometimes, at dinner, she told about family slights, tragedies, inadvertent moments of comedy. My father ate, nodded and said nothing. He patted me on the head at least twice each night till I left the house and went out on my own. He always kissed my sister twice on the top of her head; once when he came home, the second time when she went to bed.

  When we went to bed, he always said, “Good dreams. If you have a bad one, wake yourself up and try again.” My mother claimed that was an old Italian saying. He always said it in English. Both my mother and father spoke Italian, though they had been born in the United States.

  All this, too, I told Sally as we shared our large onion-and-double-anchovy pizza.

  Sally had come to Sarasota a dozen years ago with her husband, whose name was Martin, Martin Herschel Porovsky. He liked to be called Jack because he admired John Kennedy. Sally had been born Sally Feld-man. They had come to Sarasota because Jack, an engineer, was transferred by his company to the research lab in Sarasota to work on government military projects. Jack had died in an accident at work. Sally had never been given a straight answer about what had happened. She had been given a $125,000 death benefit and collected another $150,000 in life insurance. The money was in a mutual fund for the education of her children. Sally never touched it. She worked, lived carefully and spent as much time as she could with her mother in Dayton, Ohio. She hadn’t dated in the five years since Jack died.

  All this she said over coffee and a split order of can-noli.

  “Why did you say yes?” I asked.

  “To you, about tonight?”

  I nodded. Like my father. Sally sighed and examined her coffee for an answer.

  “You seemed safe. I meet a lot of people, good, bad, sad, troubled. I usually read them well. Maybe intuition. Maybe intuition is just experience. You looked sad, safe, troubled. No threat.”

  “Some people,” I said, “think I look a little like Richard Gere. Those people are now safely locked away.”

  She smiled.

  “Some people say I’ve got a sardonic sense of humor,” I said. “I’m trotting it out in the hope of impressing you. I haven’t been out with a woman, I mean like this, since my wife died.”

  “We’re quite a pair,” she said. “You said we were going to look for Adele. Unless my intuition has failed me this time, I don’t think we’re here having pizza and telling our life stories because you want to get information out of me.”

  “No,” I said. “What I’m going to ask you I could have asked you in your office or over the phone. Your answers would have been the same.”

  “Ask,” she said, brushing her hair back in a way that reminded me of my wife.

  I went silent.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Time travel. I’m back. What’s Adele’s story? And Dwight?”

  “Not much. She was delinquent at school. She was also selling herself at night on the North Trail. Court called in her father. She was living with him. Court ordered us to take on the case. Dwight Handford, who calls himself Prescott, is living proof of the many mistakes made by God or Darwin. Adele is a smart kid, a decent kid. She said she would go to school, stay off the Trail. She said she wanted to stay with her father. He said he wanted her.”

  “But … ?”

  “No hard evidence,” she said. “Just hints and the fact that our Dwight spent time in prison for child molesting. I think Adele’s afraid of him. I think Adele also wants to be with him and doesn’t at the same time. I think, maybe, he knew she was hustling. She … it’s not easy. I think Dwight has been molesting Adele sexually. I think he did it when she was a kid and started up again when she came looking for him in Sarasota. She wants to please her daddy.”

  “And the court said she could stay with her father,” I said.

  “That’s it. No one knew there was a mother. Courts send kids home if there’s any way to do it. Doesn’t matter what the parent or parents have done in the past, doesn’t matter that a significant number of kids returned to abusive parents are abused again, some of them wind up dead.”

  “Now there’s Beryl,” I said.

  “Now there’s Beryl, but no matter what a court says, Adele is smart, street wise and able to run back to her father.”

  “It’s worth a try,” I said.

  “It’s worth a try,” she agreed.

  “So,” she said. “I’ll give you Dwight’s address—the real one, not the one he gave the school–and we’ll move the evening on to the North Trail, because if you find Adele you want me to be there.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “You know how to show a girl a good time on the first date,” she said.

  “Richard Gere,” I said.

  “Stanley Tucci,” she said.

  “So I’ve been told.”

  The dividing line between Bradenton and Sarasota is just north of the airport, New College and the Asolo Center for the Performing Arts on North Tamiami Trail. Sarasota is a Culture town, capital “C” in Culture. There’s an art museum, five Equity theaters, including one that only does musicals, a massive concert hall, a ballet company, and an opera company.

  There wasn’t much that could be considered big-C culture near the first phone booth outside the Warm Breeze Motel across from the Harcourt Inn. We checked the booth. The number was wrong. Sally went into the Warm Breeze to ask some questions.

  While I waited outside, a prostitute took me for a Mister Right.

  “Want some company?” she asked.

  She was a washed-out brunette with sad eyes, rough skin and almost no breasts.

  “No thanks, but I’d like to know if you recognize this girl.”

  I took out my wallet and handed Adele’s photograph to the hooker, who didn’t look much older than the girl she was looking at.

  “Nice-looking kid,” she said flatly and handed back the picture. “You a cop? I thought I knew all the cops in town. New?”

  “I’m not a cop,” I said. “I’m just trying to find a missing girl for her mother and ask her some questions.”

  “Thought you were a cop. Lots of cops last week or so.”

  “Why?”

  “Why am I telling you this? You want conversation? Ten bucks.”

  I put Adele’s photograph back in my wallet and removed a ten-dollar bill. She took it.

  “A john got killed at the Yellow Sun, across the street there. Cops marched all the girls in, asked questions, found nothing.”

  Traffic whizzed by. A car slowed down. A dirty-blond kid with a big round face stuck his head out of the window and in a redneck voice called,

  “That the best you can do, man? You are really sorry.”

  And the car sped up.

  The girl clenched her teeth, took a breath, and tried to jump back in the game.

  “That worth another five?” she said.

  I shook my head no.

  “Hard times,” the girl said, stuffing the ten in a pocket in her dress. “Her name’s Suzanne, at least on the Trail. Worked from the Linger Longer.”

  She nodded over her shoulder. Across Tamiami Trail and two motels down was a tired neon sign with a flashing arrow pointing the way to the Linger Longer Motel.

  “And?” I asked.

  “Then she was gone,” the girl said with a shrug.

  “Who was working her?”

  The girl shrugged again and looked across the busy street at nothing.

  “That wasn’t worth ten dollars,” I said.

  “All you’re gettin’,” she said. “Hard times, remember.”

  Sally came out of the Warm Breeze Motel. The girl saw her coming, turned around and tried to look as if she wasn’t in a hurry.

  “Anything in there?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “You get anything from Jean Ann?”

  “You know her?” I said, watching the girl move away between motel neon lights and in between shadows.

  “Yes. Not one of mine. Be
longs to Medino Guttierez. I’ll tell him she’s out here again.”

  “Adele is calling herself Suzanne. She works out of the Linger Longer Motel. Hasn’t been seen for a few days.”

  We drove across the street to the Linger Longer. There was a phone booth in front of it. The number was the one from which Adele had called her mother.

  “Game plan,” I said, looking over at Sally. “I go in alone. You stay here. If she spots you through a window, she may run. When I have her located, I’ll come for you.”

  “And what do you do when you find her?” she asked.

  “I talk,” I said. “And you?”

  “Not much more,” she said. “I can have her brought in for being on the street. She’s underage. I can keep it off her record. I’ve got friends in low places. She’s better off in juvenile detention than out here and maybe—”

  “Then that’s the plan,” I said, opening the door.

  “Be careful, Lew,” she said, touching my arm.

  I nodded, gave what passed for a reassuring smile and got out.

  The glass door on the Linger Longer Motel office said American Express, MasterCard, Visa, Discover were welcome and that German, Spanish, French and Canadian were spoken inside. It also said the clerk kept no cash. I pushed the door open. There was no lounge, no chair and not much room to linger. A coffeepot sat half full with white foam cups next to it. Behind the low counter, a kid sat reading a book. He put the book down and said, “Can I help you?”

  “Why not Italian?” I asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “Sign on the door says German, French, Spanish. Why not Italian?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they don’t get Italian tourists.”

  “You speak German, French, Spanish?”

  “A little.”

  He took off his big glasses and stood up with a polite smile.

  I took out my wallet and the photograph of Adele and handed it to him. He put his glasses back on.

  “Suzanne,” he said. “Stayed here …oh, a couple of months back. Why? What’d she do?”

  “Her mother’s looking for her.”

  He cocked his head to one side and looked at the photograph again before handing it back to me.

  “You’re not a cop. If you’re Children’s Services or a private investigator, I’d like to see some ID.”