Always Say Goodbye: A Lew Fonesca Mystery

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “No. Not anymore. Papers are in the glove compartment. Bon voyage,” Alan said, sitting slumped behind the desk, not looking at Lew.

  “I liked Fred,” Lew said.

  “Who didn’t? Wait. I take that back. A lot of people didn’t,” said Alan. “It’s this business.”

  Alan tightened his lips and looked around.

  Lew wanted to tell him that he didn’t want to own a car, fill it with gas, have it repaired, have to report it if it were stolen, which was highly unlikely unless the thief couldn’t see. Simply put, Lew Fonesca didn’t want the responsibility. He didn’t want any responsibility. He had spent four years trying to avoid owning or caring for anything. He had succeeded in avoiding everything but people.

  He wanted to say something hopeful, helpful to the man behind the desk, who avoided meeting Lew’s eyes, but he could think of nothing to say, nothing he was capable of saying that wouldn’t be a lie.

  Lew would either return the car when he was finished using it or he would give it away. He would probably return it. He didn’t want the responsibility of finding a new owner.

  Lew stopped at the DQ lot to get his already packed carry-on duffel bag and drop it on the passenger seat.

  Dave, the owner of the DQ, was out on his boat in the water. His arms and face were tanned, lined and leathered from years on the deck. Lew tried going with him once. Once was fine. He handed the girl behind the window a folded note and asked her to give it to Dave. The girl was new, couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Her face was freckle-covered, her eyes sleepy, her mouth partly open and her hair struggling to escape the rubber band that held it back.

  “There are almost six thousand DQs in the world,” said Lew.

  The girl, note in hand, looked at him and crinkled her nose.

  “Twenty-two countries,” Lew went on. “Company started in an ice cream shop in Kankakee, Illinois, in 1938. First franchise was in Joliet, Illinois, in 1940.”

  The girl’s mouth opened a little wider, showing not-quite-even teeth.

  “The original DQ motto was ‘We treat you right.’ Now it’s … ?”

  “I don’ know,” said the girl.

  “‘DQ something different,’” said Lew. “I prefer ‘We treat you right,’ and I try to have at least two chocolate cherry Blizzards every week. You do good work.”

  “Thank you,” the girl said. “Almost six thousand around the world you say? Maybe some day I could work at a DQ in England or Japan or some place like that.”

  “It could happen,” said Lew.

  The girl was smiling to herself as he left.

  He got to the Texas Bar & Grille where the morning crowd was dwindling after plates of barbecue breakfast burritos and Texas fries. No lights were on but the sun spread through the tinted windows. Ames McKinney—seventy-four, tall, lean, white hair, and wearing a flannel shirt—came around the tables and looked down at the seated Lew. Ames was his friend, his protector, but not this time.

  “Goin’?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He understood. Ames wanted to go with Lew, but he understood.

  “Thought anymore ’bout what you’re gonna do when you find him?”

  “No,” Lew said.

  “That’s one way to go about it,” he said.

  Lew shook his hand. His grip was hard, tight, sincere.

  “You take care,” he said. “I’ll look in on your goods.”

  “Thanks,” Lew said and then, “Goodbye.”

  Ames nodded his goodbye and turned back toward the bar and the small room down the narrow corridor next to the kitchen where his room was. Ames had once been rich. Now he was the cleanup man in a bar and he liked it just fine.

  Lew’s Uncle Tonio once said, “Always say goodbye.”

  Short absences, long absences. Forever. “Goodbye.” God be with you. Any absence might become forever. Lew didn’t remember whether he said goodbye to Catherine on the morning of the last day of her life.

  He had said his goodbyes to Sally Porovsky last night. Sally, an overworked social worker with two kids, had touched his cheek and said, “Look in your pocket when you get outside. Goodbye.”

  The Long Goodbye, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, “Goodbye Mama, I’m Off to Yokohama. Goodbye dear and amen, here’s hoping we meet now and then,” “Every time we say goodbye.” They all applied but lately the word goodbye had begun to sound odd to Lew, to look odd on paper. He wanted to make it mean something to him again.

  He said, “Goodbye,” and Sally closed the door.

  In the moonlit parking lot next to her apartment, he took out the sheet of paper she had placed in his pocket. It read, Find him, take care of yourself, come back. Sally.

  Lew had said his goodbyes to Flo Zink, the bangle-clad, frizzy-haired, feisty little seventy-one-year-old woman who favored Western clothes and music. Her choices of both were badly out-of-date.

  Flo was from New York. Her husband had died, leaving her lots of money and a drinking problem. She had worked out her drinking problem motivated by the prospect of being allowed to take in Adele, a sixteen-year-old girl Lew and Ames had rescued from a daddy-sanctioned life of prostitution. Adele had an infant baby named Catherine. The baby had been named for Lew’s dead wife. When he said goodbye at twilight, Flo was holding the baby. Jimmy Wakely and the Rough Riders were singing “When You and I Were Young Maggie Blues” through speakers placed throughout the house. Adele was out but would be back in an hour. Lew couldn’t wait.

  Flo held Catherine out for Lew. He was afraid to touch her. He didn’t have bird flu or the plague but he knew his depression could be infectious.

  Finally, Lew stopped back at his office and called Ann Horowitz, his eighty-two-year-old therapist whose main, but not only, virtue was that she charged him only ten dollars a visit. He was, she said, an interesting case.

  “Lewis,” she said. “You’re leaving in the morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Call me if you need me. You have a joke?”

  Getting a joke from a chronic depressive is not that hard. Getting the depressive to appreciate the joke, to smile, to laugh, is almost impossible.

  “Yesterday I called the makers of Procrit, Ambien, Lipitor and Cialis and asked them if my doctor was right for me. They all said no.”

  “Lewis, you make that up?”

  “Yes.”

  “I told you there was hope,” she said. “Now go find the man who killed your Catherine.”

  Thirty-four thousand feet above the Gulf of Mexico, Lew sat in an aisle seat at the very back of the Southwest Airlines plane out of Tampa. The back seats didn’t recline, but they were the closest ones to the restroom. There is no real silence on an airplane. The flying machine is constantly roaring, whistling, grinding and changing its mind about the thrust of the engines. Inside the plane, children whine, adults lie to just-met seatmates, a couple hugs, their eyes shut. Flight attendants up and down the aisle pass out cholesterol chips in little bags you can’t open.

  Ames had given Lew a book to read, A Confederacy of Dunces. It lay in his lap unopened.

  The young man next to Lew scratched his cheek as he looked at the screen of his laptop computer and tapped in something. He was wearing headphones and humming a song Lew didn’t recognize. The image on his screen was the Warner Brothers black-and-white shield. Then came the words, Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce. Lew closed his eyes, trying not to watch, trying not to say the words as the characters spoke.

  He didn’t concentrate. He drifted through a dark sky. Lew was floating, tumbling in nothingness. Then sudden panic. He tried to open his eyes. Couldn’t.

  “You okay?” the young man with the laptop said with concern.

  Lew’s eyes opened. He was panting. The man was about thirty, with dark curly hair. He was looking at Lew with concern. His left eye was green. His right eye was too, but a darker, lifeless green. The right eye, he could see now, was definitely glass.

  “Yes,” Lew said, sitting up. “Bad d
ream.”

  “Sure?”

  “I’m sure,” he said, but he wasn’t.

  When Catherine was alive, he had dreaded flying, had held her hand tightly when they took off and landed, had silently cursed the madness of the other passengers who didn’t realize that the odds of their dying were higher than they thought, that they were in a machine, a very heavy machine, that could lose an engine, a single bolt, a stretch of wire, and they would all be dead.

  When Catherine died, that had all changed. Flying presented no problems, no fears. The worst that could happen was that the plane would crash. He could live with that. He could die with that.

  He must have slept, because the captain was announcing the beginning of the plane’s descent into Chicago’s Midway Airport. The young man closed his laptop, looked at Lew with his bad and good eye, and smiled. Lew nodded.

  When the plane landed, Lew went to the exit, duffel-shaped carry-on in hand, between baggage claim 3 and 4. Outside Lew saw his sister’s husband, Franco, in his white Ford tow truck at the curb, looking across at Lew and holding up his hand.

  Lew knew why he had panicked on the plane. He was going back to Chicago. Now that he was here, the panic threatened to return.

  He climbed up into the passenger seat and put his bag on the floor. The interior of the truck smelled of grease and oil.

  “Lewie,” Franco said, reaching over to hug him. “Lewie.”

  “Franco,” Lew responded.

  Lew had known Franco Massaccio since childhood. A barrel of a man with an easy grin. Genius didn’t run in Franco’s family, but hard work and loyalty did. Franco was loyal and a good husband to Lew’s sister Angela. He liked talking religion. He was a reasonably good Catholic. Lew considered himself a reasonably bad Episcopalian.

  “You never get used to the smell, huh?” asked Franco. “‘I like the smell of the streets. It clears my lungs.’ You know who said that?”

  “No.”

  “Bobby De Niro in Once Upon a Time in America,” said Franco. “An Italian playing a Jew. Well, listen, what are you gonna do? Right?”

  “Right.”

  “You have it?” Lew asked as Franco looked over his left shoulder and eased into the traffic.

  “It’s at home,” Franco said.

  Lew nodded and looked out the window. Standing at the curb was the one-eyed young man with the laptop. He was looking back at Lew.

  “Friend or something?” asked Franco. “That guy back there?”

  “Something, maybe,” Lew said, looking back.

  The young man with one eye focused on the back of the tow truck. He was looking at the license plate number.

  “Want to know about what’s going on in the family, Lewie?”

  “Later,” Lew said, looking over his shoulder at the one-eyed man who got into a green Buick that pulled up to the curb.

  “Want the radio?”

  “No,” Lew said.

  “Want to go into outer space in a Russian shuttle?”

  He was looking ahead and grinning. Franco had a strange sense of humor, but at least he had one.

  “Would I be alone?” Lew asked, looking at the familiar brick bungalows on Cicero Avenue.

  “No, you’d have to go up with the national baton-twirling champion and an abusive long-retired astronaut.”

  “I think I’ll pass.”

  “Suit yourself,” Franco said with a shrug. “Like a miniature Snickers bar left over from Halloween?”

  “Yes.”

  “Glove compartment,” he said.

  Lew opened the glove compartment and small wrapped bars of Twix, Snickers, Milky Ways, and Twizzlers tumbled out. He leaned over to scoop them up and put them back.

  “I’ll take a Twix,” Franco said.

  Lew handed him one and took a Snickers for himself.

  “Two things I gotta tell you,” Franco said, opening the candy wrapper and popping the mini-Twix bar in his mouth while Lew carefully tore the Snickers bag and took a bite.

  “First,” he said. “Terri, Teresa, is a freshman at Northern Illinois. Doing great. You know that?”

  “No.”

  Teresa was Angela and Franco’s daughter.

  “Political science,” he said.

  The entrance to the Dan Ryan Expressway was right in front of the truck.

  “Second, a car is following us,” Franco said calmly.

  Lew didn’t turn around to look.

  “Driver’s young, big, buzz cut,” said Franco. “Passenger is the one who was looking at you at the curb.”

  Southwest had open seating. The one-eyed man had chosen to sit next to Lew.

  They were on the expressway now.

  “Want me to push them to the rail?” Franco said. “I’ll get out, yank ’em out of the car and find out what the hell they’re doing.”

  “No,” Lew said. “But if you can get behind them I’ll get their license plate number.”

  “This have something to do with Catherine?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Franco slowed and when the other car was no more than fifteen feet behind them, Franco pulled suddenly into the next lane cutting off an SUV. The driver of the Buick didn’t have Franco’s skill or experience. Franco cut across lanes, dropped back and then scooted right behind the Buick. Lew wrote the license plate number in his notebook.

  “Okay,” said Lew.

  Franco was grinning and shaking his head.

  “I can’t believe this, Lewie. You’ve been here what, five, ten minutes and people are following you. Beneath that beat-down exterior, you are one piece of cake.”

  “Thanks,” said Lew.

  Franco picked up the cell phone from the charger on his dashboard and punched in two numbers.

  “Rick,” Franco said into the phone. “How’s with you? Me too. Say, listen, can you run a plate for me and the driver’s license ? Great.”

  Franco looked at Lew who read the plate numbers. Franco repeated them to Rick.

  “Got that?” Franco said. “Great. What you say we go for beef sandwiches at Fiocca’s for lunch next week? Name the day … okay. Wednesday at one. Make it fast on those numbers.”

  He pushed a button on the phone and put it back on the dashboard.

  “Now do we stop ’em?” asked Franco.

  “Yes,” said Lew.

  Franco grinned.

  “Great to have you back, Lewie.”

  Franco moved into the lane next to the Buick. Lew could see both the driver and the one-eyed man. They didn’t look back at Lew.

  Franco checked the traffic behind him and moved the tow truck to within inches of the other car. The driver tried to move forward, but there was another slow-moving car in front of him. Franco gently eased the truck against the Buick at forty miles an hour. The other car started to lose control, regained it, and came to a stop against the rail. Franco parked ahead of the car, looked at Lew and said, “What do you want to know besides why they’re following us?”

  “They’re following me, Franco.”

  “Same difference. You, me. I’m fuckin’ offended.”

  Franco was staring at the rearview mirror. The car parked behind him didn’t move. No doors opened.

  “They might have guns, Franco,” Lew said.

  Franco opened his tow-truck jacket revealing a holstered weapon.

  “Legal,” he said. “Glock Twenty-eight … 380 caliber. Six inches long, a little over an inch wide. Weighs less than twenty ounces. I’ve got a permit. I’m a tow-truck driver in Chicago.”

  “You ever shoot anybody?” Lew asked.

  “No, you?”

  “Once,” Lew said, looking at the car which Franco had pinned to the steel divider.

  Franco looked at him, waiting. Lew offered no more.

  Franco turned on the radio, which was tuned to the police band. He kicked up the volume and got out of the truck, checking traffic.

  “Leave your door open,” he said, starting toward the other car.

  Lew
got out. He had almost forgotten the noise of expressway traffic, the clanging, coughing, squealing, braking, screeching agony of bouncing trucks and addicted horn pushers. And then there were the highway fumes. The memory became a reality again.

  As Franco approached the Buick, the driver was looking over his shoulder, trying to find room to back up and then get back into traffic. He didn’t have time and there were no breaks in the traffic.

  Lew’s eyes were on the one-eyed young man, who didn’t look the least bit concerned that the barrel of a man was lumbering toward him.

  Franco reached for the handle of the driver’s door. It was locked.

  “Open it,” he commanded over the noise.

  The driver showed no sign of opening the door. Franco reached into the lower pocket of his jeans and came up with a small silver metal hammer. He showed it to the driver who knew what it was, a compact powerful hammer made to go through automobile windows in an emergency.

  The driver looked at his passenger, who nodded to indicate that the driver should open the window. The window rolled down.

  “We’re not—” the driver said.

  Franco reached through the window, grabbed the man’s jacket and pulled him out. The man was big, not as big as Franco, but a certain two hundred pounds.

  “The police are going to be here,” the driver panted as Franco pushed him back against the car.

  “Take them ten, maybe fifteen minutes,” said Franco. “You could both be hurting a lot by then. I’ll know when they’re coming.”

  He glanced at the tow truck. The voice on the police band was clear in spite of the traffic that zipped by.

  Cars began to slow. There would be a gapers’ block in a few seconds. The possibility of seeing death or destruction or someone being beaten because of road rage was too much for most people to resist. They had to slow down, catch a glimpse and drive on, comforted by the fact that it was someone else who was at the side of the road.

  The one-eyed man sat calmly, looking forward. Then he made a decision, opened his door, got out and faced Lew.

  “Talk to me,” Franco said to the driver.

  The driver said, “No.”

  The one-eyed man turned and fixed his only eye on the driver. There was a distinct family resemblance. Brothers, cousins?

  Franco looked at Lew who nodded, and he let the driver slump against the door. Lew walked toward the one-eyed man.