“Spiltz,” she said. “I’m writing a report now. I have no choice, Lewis. I could lose my job, maybe even be up on charges, obstructing justice.”
“You told your supervisor?”
“I told my supervisor.”
“Can I buy you dinner?”
“I don’t know when I’ll be done,” she said.
“I’m not in a hurry.”
“I told the kids I’d have dinner with them,” she said. “I’m picking up fried chicken. You want to come over?”
“You think Michael and Susan would go for that?”
“They think you’re interesting,” she said with the first touch of amusement.
“Give me a time,” I said. “I’ll show up with the chicken.”
“Eight,” she said. “That should be safe. You don’t happen to know someone who wants to become a foster parent? Someone who might want and be able to control Adele. We’re talking about a saint here. You know any saints?”
“Not exactly,” I said.
Harvey chortled. I have heard few real chortles in my life, but this was definitely one of them. He chortled at a list of telephone numbers on the screen in front of him.
“On the other hand,” I said, “I may know someone who might be willing to take on the challenge.”
“Give me a name,” Sally said. “I’ll turn it over to the department that handles placement.”
“I’d better talk to her first,” I said. “See you at eight.”
I hung up. I was procrastinating. I was avoiding. Now that I was starting to feel alive, I was also starting to look forward to things, like a bucket of fried chicken with Sally and her kids. I had realized while John Pirannes was telling me to put on a pair of swimming trunks that I was not as suicidal as I had been only a few days ago.
Ann Horowitz would definitely be pleased. I was feeling fear, pain, possibility and anxiety. There was much to be said for the alternative, depression.
I didn’t want to go talk to Dwight Handford now, at least not for the same reasons I had wanted to before. But I did have to talk to him.
“Couple of more calls,” I said, figuring out a way to avoid Dwight.
“Many as you like,” Harvey said as telephone numbers scrolled rapidly down the screen. “Bingo. Bingo. Bing. There it is.”
“What?” I asked, pushing buttons on the telephone pad.
“Not your job,” Harvey said. “I don’t think you’d be interested, but I can tell you when I crack something like this, when it hits the screen, it’s better than any drink or the best coke I ever had.”
“Great,” I said.
Harvey had traded one set of addictions for a healthier one.
“What can I do for you?” Flo asked.
Unlike Harvey, she had not found a substitute for the loss of her husband. She bathed in the smoothness of expensive whiskey. I could hear it in her voice.
“It’s me, Lew,” I said.
“You find the kid?”
“She’s okay,” I said.
“I screwed up, Lewis,” she said. “I let Beryl go, let her get killed. I’d like to find her bastard husband and blow a hole through his head, but that won’t bring her back.”
“I’m sorry, Flo,” I said. “I shouldn’t have brought you into this.”
“I live with more, maybe even with worse.”
“Can I come over tonight, late, maybe eleven?”
“Come ahead. Something on your mind?”
“Something’s on my mind,” I said. “I’m going to offend you now.”
“Offend.”
“Have something to eat, take a shower and-”
“Be sober,” she continued. “Okay, but that’s an agreement, not a promise. I’ve learned not to make promises.”
“See you at eleven if I’m not in jail,” I said.
“Expecting to be?”
“I’ll let you know if I am.”
I hung up. Harvey was singing softly now to the numbers on his screen. I didn’t know what he was singing.
I made one more call. It was almost six. Detective Etienne Vivaise was still on duty. He was busy. I asked the woman who answered the call to tell him Lewis Fonesca was on the phone and wanted to talk to him about Tony Spiltz.
“One moment,” she said.
Vivaise was on the phone within seconds.
“Fonesca,” he said. “You want to come in and confess to a pair of murders? You doing a murder a day? Forget it. My mind’s on something else. You know something about the Spiltz murder? It’s got something to do with… hold it. Beryl Tree?”
“I think they were both killed by the same person,” I said.
“Do I come to you or you come to me?”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I said. “I’m not far.”
“Ten minutes,” he said and hung up.
I touched Harvey’s shoulder, said I’d call him latter.
“An hour, two tops,” he said.
I headed for police headquarters on Ringling. The blue Buick followed. I wondered what he made of my route. My guess, based on my brief encounter with him, was that he was not high on imagination. That was probably his greatest asset.
The cop at the desk asked me if I knew the way. I told him I did. He waved me on. In the room outside of Vivaise’s office, a scaffolding and a paint-stained plank suspended between the rungs of two ladders stood against one wall. Desks, file cabinets, chairs were covered with paint-splattered white canvas drop cloths. One wall had been painted the exact color it had been before. Before the painters had quit for the day, they had gotten halfway finished with the second wall in front of the scaffold.
The only uncovered piece of furniture in the room was a bench against a wall. Two men, both black, were seated on the bench, handcuffed together. One man was in his late thirties, groomed, suited, with a neat tie and trim mustache: Eddie Murphy without an attitude. His eyes were closed. The young man he was handcuffed to was short, wearing jeans and blue polo shirt. He didn’t look like anyone I could think of. He saw me, turned his head.
Inside his office, behind his desk, sat Vivaise in a position from which he could see the two men on the bench through his open door. Vivaise motioned me in, pointed to the chair across from his desk and rubbed his forehead.
“Headache,” he said. “I live with them. Allergies, migraine, whatever’s possible, I have it.”
“You look it,” I said, sitting. “I met someone else today who suffers from migraines, John Pirannes.”
Vivaise stopped rubbing.
“Let’s talk Spiltz first,” he said. “You want a coffee?”
“No, thanks,” I said.
“Sometimes caffeine is good for a headache. Cola, coffee, pills. Hey,” he shouted over my shoulder, “where are you going?”
From behind me a voice said,
“We got to piss.”
“Both of you,” Vivaise said wearily.
“Both.”
“It can wait. Sit down. Your lawyer’s on the way. When he shows up, I’ll let him walk you to the toilet.”
Vivaise turned his attention back to me.
“So, who killed Spiltz? And how do you know?”
“Dwight Handford,” I said. “Killed his wife. Killed Spiltz.”
“You have some evidence, a witness, a story?”
The door to the outer office behind us opened and Vivaise shouted, “You’re right on time, Charlie. Your clients are having bladder-retention problems. You want to walk them down the hall? I called the county attorney’s office. They’re sending someone.”
“Who?” the voice behind me asked.
“I think it’s Angie Fairchild,” Vivaise said.
“Good,” said Charlie. “I’ll walk my clients down the hall and confer.”
The door behind me opened again and then closed. Beyond it I could hear the handcuffed men talking. And then there was silence.
“Story,” said Vivaise.
“You saw my file on Beryl and her daughter.
”
“Got it right here,” he said.
“A street pimp on the North Trail named Tilly told me Dwight Handford sold Adele to Pirannes. Tilly was in no position to argue. I went to Pirannes to check out his tale. I found Adele there. No Pirannes. She said some men came during the night. She was in the bedroom. She heard a shot. She came out. Spiltz was dead. The men were gone. Adele was in shock, shaking. I got her something to eat, turned her over to her therapist and caseworker. She’s in Juvenile now.”
“Go on,” Vivaise said.
“It was stupid. I panicked. I should have called you when I found the body, but all I could think of was taking care of the girl,” I said. “I realized my mistake an hour or so ago. I called you. I’m here.”
“Who was the other guy with you at Pirannes’s place?”
“Other guy?”
“Old guy with long hair wearing a yellow coat,” said Vivaise. “I’ve got the report right here, pulled it when you called. Hard copy. Guard at the gate said a sad little balding guy, which I assume was you, and a tall old guy with long hair wearing a coat in eighty-degree weather tried to get in to see Pirannes this morning. When a couple of residents reported seeing these suspicious characters, the guard called the police. We went to Pirannes’s apartment, found Spiltz’s body. Between you and me with no tape rolling, the departure of Tony Spiltz from the earth was not a great loss to humanity. Thirty-eight arrests here and in New Jersey and New York. Spent time in Attica twice, once for racketeering, once for conspiracy to commit murder. If someone asks, I’ll contribute ten bucks for his funeral. Who was the old guy?”
“The guard made a mistake,” I said.
“The guard made a mistake?” Vivaise asked. “That’s what you’re going to say when you make a statement on the record, the guard made a mistake?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll ask my lawyer. If there was an old man in a slicker with me, which there wasn’t, he might have an arrest record. He isn’t part of this, if he existed, which at this point he doesn’t.”
“I’m having trouble following you,” Vivaise said. “It’s been a long day. I need coffee. Our coffee isn’t all that bad if the pot was emptied recently and someone made a fresh batch. Sure you don’t want any?”
“I’ll take some,” I said.
Vivaise rose heavily and left me sitting and thinking while he went out. I came up with nothing new while he was gone, but he wasn’t gone very long.
“Luck,” he said, handing me a large white foam cup. The cup was hot. The liquid black. “Fresh pot. I sent Charlie and his clients downstairs to wait. I wanted to give you my full attention.”
He went behind his desk, sat and sipped his coffee. I put my cup down and looked at him.
“You were talking about mistakes you made,” he said. “You were talking about John Pirannes.”
“I went to see John Pirannes,” I said.
“Where?”
“He has a boat, the Fair Maiden, docked at the Sunnyside Condos on Longboat.”
Vivaise was taking notes now.
“Why did you go to see him?”
“You said you had a daughter about Adele’s age. Maybe you’ll understand. I was angry.”
“You had a plan?”
“No,” I admitted. “I wanted to warn him, tell him to stay away from Adele. Maybe he’d tell me that Dwight Handford killed Tony Spiltz.”
“Brilliant,” said Vivaise, having some more coffee. “Of course, he agreed to stay away from Adele and confessed to either killing Spiltz himself or being present when Dwight Handford did it.”
“No,” I said, hiding in my cup of coffee.
Vivaise was right. The coffee wasn’t bad.
“You found out fast that Pirannes is smarter than you are,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And that he has a very short fuse.”
“Yes.”
“Confession time here, Lewis,” he said in a stage whisper. “Pirannes is smarter than I am. He is slick. He had great lawyers. We’ve got nothing on him. We’ll look for him, find him or maybe he’ll come to us. He’ll have a great story to cover where he was when Spiltz was killed and an even better one to cover why Spiltz was in his apartment. We know what Pirannes does, who he does it with. But nothing to crucify him with. And so far you’ve given me nothing.”
“He tried to kill me or, at least, he planned to kill me,” I said.
Vivaise shook his head in a way that said, What did you expect, you moron?
“He told me to put on a bathing suit, made it clear that he was going to dump me in the bay. I can’t swim.”
“You annoyed him. We have it on good authority that he doesn’t like to be annoyed, that others have annoyed him and have gone swimming in the gulf or the bay and never made it to shore. He told you straight out that he was going to kill you?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Vivaise said. “All we’d have is your word. What else do you have?”
“Pirannes told me he had an alibi for Spiltz’s murder, that he hadn’t been back to his apartment last night, that he could prove it.”
“He could prove he hadn’t been there whether he had been there or not,” Vivaise said. “What else?”
“He was on his boat with a big man named Manny.”
Vivaise wrote and said, “Manny Guzman. And?”
“He was waiting for a woman. She was coming for lunch.”
“Very helpful, Lewis. How did you get away from Pirannes?”
“Luck,” I said.
Vivaise thought for a while. We both drank coffee. I was feeling a little better.
“How’s your headache?”
“Better,” he said. “Okay. We’ve been looking for Pirannes all day. You find a body in someone’s apartment. You look for him. Pirannes is probably still on the boat. Maybe he even went back to the apartment. It’s sealed, but he has a key and he can claim he doesn’t know what this is all about. Maybe the girl’s lying. Maybe she saw her father or Pirannes or Manny kill Spiltz, for who knows what reason, and she’s afraid to talk?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“Hell, I’ll talk to her. In the morning. I’m going home, kiss my wife, probably have an argument with my kids.”
“And me?”
“Leaving the scene of a crime. Withholding evidence,” he said, standing up and finishing his coffee. Then he looked at me for a long time and added, “You were trying to protect the kid. Go home. Stay out of trouble. No charges on this one. If I find out you’re lying, you’ll get those charges and some I’ll invent.”
“I’m not lying,” I said.
I hadn’t finished my coffee.
“I don’t think you are, but I’ve seen liars who believed their lies and convinced me. Go home.”
I didn’t go home.
“Kentucky Fried,” Susan Porovsky said when she opened the door and saw the two bags on my arms.
“Is that good?” I asked.
“It is if there’s corn and mashed potatoes with gravy. Is it extra crispy?”
“Half and half,” I said as she pulled one of the bags toward her to peek into it.
“Can I come in?”
She took the bag she had been peeking in and led me into the apartment.
“Your mom home?”
“Coleslaw?” she asked, leading me through the living room to the dining room table.
“Coleslaw,” I said.
“I hate coleslaw.”
We started to unpack the bags. Susan seemed to be searching for something.
“What’s this?” she asked, holding up a bag.
“Roasted chicken, for your mother. She doesn’t eat fried chicken.”
“I know,” she said. “But she takes the crispy off and eats it when we get it fried.”
We had it reasonably laid out and ready now, right down to the paper plates, paper napkins and paper cups. A bottle of Coke and another of Diet 7UP stood next to e
ach other.
“Your mother’s not home?”
“No,” she said. “She called. Said if you got here first to wait ten minutes and then eat without her.”
“Your brother?”
“Michael lives in the bathroom.”
“He’s in the bathroom.”
“Confirmed,” she said, nodding her head. “When he isn’t in the bathroom, he watches TV, reads, goes out with friends to R-rated movies he shouldn’t see and he plays basketball. I play basketball. I play the recorder too. Want to hear?”
I sat at the table and said,
“After dinner maybe.”
“You don’t think I can really play, do you?”
“I think you can really play. I just don’t know how well. I play a harmonica. It sounds all right to me. Other people think I stink.”
“You have a harmonica with you?”
“No, I haven’t played since… for a while.”
She sat across from me.
“That’s because you’re not happy.”
“You are very wise for a child who has not even lived one lifetime,” I said.
“What?”
“That’s from Dracula.”
“I don’t remember that part. I can’t think of anything else to entertain you. Mom said I should entertain you.”
“You’re doing a great job.”
Michael emerged from the bathroom and said, “Kentucky Fried, great.”
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” he answered, reaching into a bucket for a chicken leg.
“Wait for mom,” Susan said.
“I’m starving,” he said. “I’ll just eat one and then I’ll wait.”
“Do Borgs eat?” I asked.
He sat and thought about it, drumming the chicken leg against a finger.
“What are Borgs?” Susan asked.
“Borgs are like zombies in Star Trek,” Michael explained.
“I don’t like Star Trek,” she said to me. “My father was big. Mom thinks Michael looks like him and is going to be big. He’s already pretty big.”
“I think Borgs don’t eat because they’re mostly machines,” he concluded. “It’s a good question.”
“I don’t like mashed potatoes when they get cold,” Susan said.
“We can microwave them,” Michael said, looking at me. “Mind if I ask you a question? I’m not trying to offend you or anything.”
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