Vengeance lf-1

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  He looked up at the painting of his wife.

  “I’ll check it out,” I said. “If I’m still on the job.”

  “You’re on the job,” he said, his voice low as he turned away from me.

  “Melanie is a bit of a loner,” he went on. “But because of business connections we belong to a wide variety of organizations. Selby Gardens. Asolo Theater Angels, Opera Guild, charity groups, and we’re seen at balls and dances. Melanie said that in the past two years we have been on the Herald-Tribune’ s society page eleven times. In spite of this, Melanie had no really close friends, with the possible exception of Caroline Wilkerson, the widow of my late partner. Her address and number are in the folder along with Green’s.”

  “And what do you want me to do?”

  “Do? Find my wife, of course,” Sebastian said, turning from the painting to look at me again.

  “Has she committed a crime? Stolen money from you, money she doesn’t have the right to take?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. The money in the accounts was both of ours. The jewels are hers.”

  “So she’s free to go where she wants to go, even free to leave her husband, take money out of your joint accounts and wander away. It may be a boyfriend. It may be a lot of things.”

  “I just want you to find her,” he said. “I just want to talk to her. I just want to know what happened and if there’s anything I can do to get her back.”

  “She could be halfway to Singapore by now,” I said.

  “Your expense account is unlimited,” he answered.

  “I just want you to keep me informed if you leave town in search of Melanie and I would expect you, as a professional, will keep expenses to a minimum and give me a full accounting of all expenditures when you find her.”

  “If I find her,” I said. “I’ll do my best to find out why she left. If I find her, I’ll have to ask her if she’s willing to talk to you. I’ll tell you where she is if she gives me permission to tell you.”

  “I understand,” he said. “Come with me.”

  I followed him into an office, where he moved to a desk and picked up something that lay next to a computer. The office was bright, with large windows and another angle on the bay, going north. The walls were “decorated” with about a dozen large, framed photographs, black-and-whites: Dust Bowl, toothless men with caps and overalls, scrawny women with their arms draped over the shoulders of scrawny children standing in front of clapboard shacks.

  “If I find she’s left the area, it’ll have to wait till I finish a job I’ve got,” I said.

  “How long will this other work take you?”

  He had a checkbook in his hand, a red leather checkbook.

  “Few days, no more, probably. Can’t be sure, but not long.”

  “Would a bonus persuade you to put this other work aside?” he asked, tapping the checkbook against his side.

  “No.”

  “Anything could have happened to Melanie,” he said. “Doesn’t that mean something to you?”

  “I can recommend someone else you can contact about the job,” I said. “There are about eight licensed private investigators in Sarasota. Another handful in Bradenton. A few in Venice. Maybe three of them are reasonably good.”

  “Are you independently wealthy, Mr. Fonesca?”

  “No, but I don’t have to be wealthy to be independent.”

  “Do you have any idea of what it’s like to lose a wife?” he asked with a catch in his voice.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said without pursuing the loss of my wife. “I’ll give you a chance. Larry said you’re good. He also said your fee is negotiable. I’ll write out a check. If it’s acceptable, you have the job. If not, hand it back, give me the folder and the name of a reliable private detective and we’ll shake hands and go on about our business.”

  He put the checkbook on the desk, opened it, pulled a glistening gold pen from his pocket and wrote. He wrote fast, tore out the check and handed it to me.

  I looked at it. Five hundred dollars.

  “Consider that is for your fee and expenses. If anything is left, you can apply it to a daily payment of one hundred and twenty dollars a day. Of course I’ll want an itemized bill before final payment. If you run out of money, come back to me and we’ll work it out.”

  I nodded to show that I agreed and put the check in the folder.

  “How long do I keep on looking? I can probably find her but it might be hard and it might be easy and it might even be impossible if she’s really smart.”

  He touched my arm fleetingly and directed me back into the living room.

  “Let’s say we reevaluate after three days if it goes that long,” he said. “But I want her back if it’s at all possible. I want to find her soon. I’m too old to start again. I don’t want to be alone and I love Melanie. You understand?”

  I nodded, tucked the folder under my arm and let him lead me to the front door. Usually in a situation like this I would have to ask for some information, numbers of any credit cards they shared, the tag number and make of her car and various other things to make my job easier. But Carl Sebastian, or maybe his friend and attorney Lawrence Werring, had anticipated well and the information was in the folder.

  “My card is in the folder,” he said, opening the front door. “My office phone and cell phone numbers are on the front. My home number is written on the back. Keep me informed. Call anytime. As often as you like.”

  He waited with me at the elevator.

  “Anything else I can tell you?” he asked.

  “Your wife have any living relatives?”

  “No, it’s all in the folder. Her background. All she has is me. And I don’t think she’s gone far. We’ve traveled all around the world, but she considers the Gulf Coast her home. I could be wrong. Where will you start?”

  The elevator hummed to a stop and the doors opened silently.

  “Her friend Mrs. Wilkerson or maybe the psychiatrist, Green.”

  “Good,” he said, putting out a hand to keep the door open while I got on. “I don’t know what Caroline can tell you that I haven’t. Yet, maybe there was something said, some… I don’t know.”

  I stepped into the elevator, turned to face him and did my best to smile confidently at Carl Sebastian as the doors closed. He looked a little older than he had when I first saw him on the balcony.

  2

  “Tell me something important and ask me a question.”

  Ann Horowitz, Ph. D., sat forward in her upright chair to reach for her white foam cup of coffee and the chocolate biscotti I had brought her from Sarasota News and Books a block away.

  Ann was almost eighty. A small woman with a tolerant smile, she was given to bright dresses. Her hair was gray, straight and short enough to show off her colorful bright yellow and red stone earrings.

  Her office was small, neat, a desk on one side, another desk across from it and three chairs, blue and comfortable. There were two windows to let in light but they were high on the wall. From where I sat I could see blue skies and white clouds and in the past I had seen an occassional gull.

  Ann had retired to Sarasota with her husband, Melvin, a sculptor, ten years ago. She had left her writing and her practice as an analyst and devoted herself to her son and his two young children, who lived in town. She also devoted herself to a passion for history. She had grown bored after five years and opened a small office practice.

  Every time I came to see her she handed me a magazine or a book and told me about a fascinating chapter or article on how the Seminoles had won the war against the United States or how a small town of immigrant Mayans in Texas was thriving economically because they had retained the knowledge and the lessons of their history.

  “I have enough money to pay you what I owe you for today and last session,” I said.

  “Good. Pay after we talk. You’ve told me something. Now the question.”

  “You know a psychiatrist named Geo
ffrey Green?”

  She nodded her head as she chewed a reasonable piece of biscotti.

  “I’ve met him a few times. Have a few of his former patients.”

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  “That is a second question and is part of your hour,” she said, “in spite of the coffee-and-biscotti bribe.”

  I held out my hands to show that I accepted her condition.

  “He’s good. He’s expensive. He is young. But then, to me almost everyone is young.”

  “Even in Sarasota?”

  “Less so here, but the world is vast. My favorite opening of a book is Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s something like ‘The universe is very, very big.’ I am amused by understatement.”

  “He mess around with his female patients?”

  She paused mid-drink and put down her cup. She folded her hands in her lap and gave me her full attention.

  “You have reason to believe he does?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Well, I will answer you enigmatically. You may be half right.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When you do, let me know. I can say no more. Subject is dropped. Now, to you.”

  “You don’t want to talk about some lost tribe in the wilds of Indonesia?”

  “I do not. What are you doing for fun?”

  “Watching movies, videotapes.”

  “And?”

  “Working, eating, trying not to think, dreaming.”

  “You have a good dream for me, Lewis?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Every time you come to see me you have a dream the night before. Tell me.”

  She reached for the coffee.

  “Worms in my ear,” I said.

  “In your ear?”

  “You sure you want to hear this while you’re eating?”

  “I could make you violently ill with stories I have heard and continue to eat,” she said, working on the remaining crumbs of biscotti.

  “White worm, right ear. My wife is in the dream. I feel something funny, a tickle in my ear. She says there’s a worm crawling into my ear. I panic, tell her to get it out. She tries. I feel her fingernails gently going for the worm. She says she is having trouble getting a grip on it. It’s crawling deeper. I tell her to get a tweezer, fast. She runs into the bathroom, comes back with a tweezer, probes for the worm. I feel the metal, cold, touching the inside of my ear, jabbing. She is having trouble. Finally, she lets out a sound. I know she has it. She does, but she has to struggle. It comes apart. She digs it out of my ear in pieces while I keep asking ‘Is it out? Is it out?’ When she says it is, I run into the bathroom, turn on the shower, brush away real and imagined worms.”

  “You are nude? You don’t have to take off your clothes?”

  “Nude.”

  “Your wife. She is also nude?”

  “Yes, no, I’m not sure. Now she’s wearing something flimsy, white.”

  “And you were in bed with her when you discovered this worm?”

  “I… yes.”

  “You see where this is going?”

  She finished her coffee, shook the cup to be sure she hadn’t missed a drop or two and placed the cup on her desk next to the photographs of her grandchildren.

  “Yeah, at least part of the way.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Sex,” I said.

  “When is the last time you had sex? I mean with a woman or a man other than yourself?”

  The phone rang. She was like an answering machine. She couldn’t bring herself to turn it off or let it ring. I had asked her once to put on her answering machine when we talked. She had gone into a brief explanation about how she could do it, but in doing so she would wonder who was calling and not give sufficient attention to our session. In addition, she worried about her husband. Melvin had a bad heart. So I sat quietly, welcoming the opportunity to think not about my next answer but the possible ones after that.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t talk now. I’ll call you tomorrow morning… You have my diagnosis. I am not changing it… I am being reasonable. Good-bye.”

  She hung up and said to herself and me, “HMOs.” Then to me, “So, last sex?”

  “The night before my wife died.”

  “With your wife?”

  “Certainly, with my wife. We’ve been through this.”

  “Why aren’t you angry with me? You should be at least a little angry,” she said. “I was angrier at the HMO clerk than you are at me for suggesting you might have had sex with someone other than your wife the night before she died.”

  The chair I was sitting in was a recliner. I reclined and clasped my fingers together on my stomach.

  “I don’t get angry anymore,” I said.

  “Nothing makes you angry?”

  “I don’t know. I think I’m looking for something to make me angry and I don’t want to find it. Does that make sense?”

  “Perfect sense. Next question: Why do you always say ‘my wife’ instead of using her name? You have never spoken her name to me. You want to answer or you want to spend a week thinking about it?”

  “It hurts.”

  “To say her name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pain sometimes just sits there waiting. If you confront it, perhaps it will get smaller. Do you want that pain to grow smaller?”

  “I don’t know. No, I don’t want it to get smaller. I want it right there where I can find it.”

  “And feel sorry for yourself?”

  “Yes, there’s a great comfort in feeling sorry for myself.”

  “When you’re ready, you’ll be able to say her name. It will hurt, but it will feel right.”

  “I don’t want it to feel right.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Her mother was overweight. Nice face, but overweight. I…”

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Your wife was a lawyer.”

  “Yes. I don’t want to talk about my wife today.”

  She leaned forward, pursed her lips, raised her eyebrows and said, “Then we’ll put that aside for now. You are working? You plan to pay me so I assume you are working. What are you working on? Besides your dreams.”

  “A runaway wife. A runaway girl.”

  “This is one person or two? A runaway girl who is also a wife?”

  I leaned farther back in the recliner and looked up at the ceiling.

  “Two people.”

  “And you are engaged, interested in finding them. It’s more than a job, a way to make money?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Your wife ran away,” she said.

  I remained calm and said,

  “She died.”

  “And you never had children.”

  “You know that.”

  “Are you angry yet?”

  “Not even close.”

  I didn’t look, but I was aware of her rising.

  “Enough for today. Go look for your missing females. We’ll talk about them next week. A missing wife. A missing daughter. And that dream. One thing I think it might be telling you is to stop punishing yourself. You know the Italian ice shop on Seventeenth Street?”

  It was my turn to sit up. The recliner slid back and I felt slightly dizzy as I opened my eyes.

  “I know it.”

  “Stop there. I recommend the banana chocolate. Melvin likes watermelon. Be good to yourself, Lewis.”

  Ann Horowitz is a good six inches shorter than I am, and I’m touching the lower edge of average. I took out my wallet and handed her two twenty-dollar bills. I had first met her when I served papers on her to appear in court to testify in a case involving one of her patients. She had taken the papers at her door, dropped them on the table inside her apartment and invited me in. No one had ever invited me into their home after I served them papers.

  She was fascinated by process serving, wanted to know all about it, told me tha
t serving papers for appearances before tribunals went back to biblical times. I was a member of a historically important profession. That wasn’t the way I saw it. For me it was anywhere from twenty-five to fifty dollars for a few hours of work.

  Ann Horowitz had said she saw pain in my eyes and asked if I wanted to talk about it. I said I didn’t and she asked, “How long can a person enjoy their pain?”

  “Till they die, if they’re lucky.”

  She gave me her card and said that she wanted to talk to me even if I didn’t want to talk to her. She planned to do more research on my honorable profession and fill me with history if not pride. She also said that she would charge me only ten dollars for each session. After our first session, I gave her twenty dollars and that became the fixed rate for our meetings. There had been a few times when I was behind on my payments, but I always caught up. I learned from a lawyer whose daughter was seeing Ann Horowitz that he was paying her an even one hundred per session, most of which was covered by his expensive health-care plan.

  She handed me a copy of an article from Smithsonian magazine about John Marshall, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court.

  “Jefferson hated him,” she said. “America was formed as much or more by Marshall than Washington or Jefferson. Great man. Read it. Tell me what you think. No hurry.”

  There was a couple sitting in the outer office when I left holding my article. They looked embarrassed and familiar. The woman looked down, pretending to read a recent office copy of People. The man smiled and adjusted his glasses.

  Ann told them to go into her office. Before she followed them, she whispered to me, “Someday you will be able to say her name and we can really begin.”

  “I thought we began months ago,” I said.

  “No, I’ve just been softening you up.”

  She followed the couple through the office door and closed it behind her.

  The wife’s voice came through to the reception room. I couldn’t make out the words, didn’t want to, but there was immediate pain, immediate anger.

  I went in search of someone who might know how to find Adele Tree. I had someone in mind. My bicycle was locked to a No Parking sign. I had made up my mind. I had to rent a car. Carl Sebastian had to pay for it.