Always Say Goodbye lf-5

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “How many advisors to the president does it take to change a lightbulb?”

  “I don’t know, Lewis,” said Ann Horowitz. “How many?”

  “I don’t know. The president has appointed a committee to investigate and they’ll let us know the answer as soon as possible.”

  It was almost ten at night in Chicago, which meant it was almost eleven in Sarasota. Ann and her husband went to bed around midnight and Lew had been told he could call until then. Now he said, “I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

  “You are trying to find out how your wife was killed,” she said, “and who was responsible.”

  “You’re eating,” Lew said.

  “Frozen Twix and green tea,” she answered.

  “How is it?”

  “So-so,” she said, “but I like to try new things.”

  “I don’t,” Lew said.

  “Where did you get the joke? Did you make it up?”

  “No,” he said. “A Greek hit man told it to me. His mother baked us Greek pastries.”

  “Good?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “The trick is not just in the ingredients,” said Ann. “It’s in sharp, even cuts of the phyllo.”

  “She killed her husband and his cousin with a very sharp baking knife,” he said.

  “Tonight?” she asked calmly.

  “No, about six years ago. Tell me again, what am I doing here?”

  “I assume you’re not asking a what-is-the-meaning of-life kind of question.”

  “No.”

  “Good,” she said. “You are there to bring to an end a part of your grief and to come back and tell me whatever it is you have not yet told me.”

  “I…”

  “Not all of it,” she went on. “I will not deprive you of your grief and depression. Without them you fear you would be looking into dark emptiness, that there would be no more Lewis Fonesca for Lewis Fonesca believes he is defined by his grief and depression. I know, not because of my brilliance as a therapist but because you have told me repeatedly. I don’t need to have you do it again, so I’ve done it for you. You are a tough town, Lewis.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s not a compliment. Okay,” she said with a sigh, taking a crunchy bite of Twix. “I’ll give you some reasons for finding out what happened to Catherine. You pick one or more or all of them. Ready? No, of course you’re not ready, but you need the halftime pep talk. So, first, you owe it to her. It’s selfish to cling to the darkness and videotapes on your cot, memorizing the lines from Mildred Pierce. Your Catherine deserves to lie in peace with the final line written by you. Call it a loving eulogy. Or try this, someone is responsible for your wife’s death. You don’t want them to forget what they have done. Also, you don’t know what or who you might find. Your sense of the world, your two-room world, may be forever changed by what you find. And that could be good.”

  “Or bad.”

  “Or bad,” she agreed. “Or something that can’t be defined by good and bad.”

  “All right,” he said.

  “Good. Remember, no matter what you find, you can always come back here to your misery.”

  “That’s comforting,” Lew said.

  “And in your case, I know you mean that. Are you going to go to the cemetery?”

  “No. There’s nothing there but a stone cross.”

  “It’s not what is there, Lewis, but what you bring there with you. The Daily Show is coming on. Good night.”

  She hung up. Lew was sitting in the pillowed wicker chair in Teresa’s room, the phone in his lap.

  When Ann hung up, he sat there thought about Catherine’s missing file, the one Pappas and Andrej Posnitki and, for all Lew knew, maybe Claude Santoro wanted as well. All of the things in Catherine’s and his apartment had been been boxed, taped and taken to his uncle Tonio’s warehouse on Fullerton by Angie, Franco, Tonio and some of Tonio’s men after Lew had left Chicago. Lew hadn’t wanted to look at any of it then. He didn’t want to now.

  Milt Holiger had told Lew that he and two Assistant State Attorneys had gone through all of the files in Catherine’s two cabinets and the contents of the drawers of her office desk. Nothing was surprising in them, nothing about an upcoming case that might lead to someone running her down. Lew believed him. Milt was good, but Lew was another set of eyes, another history.

  “The active files,” Milt had said, “were turned over to other lawyers in the department. The closed-case files have been crated and stored.”

  Lew decided that in the morning he would move again, go through the motions, do the one thing he did well, find people, let them talk. He got up. He hadn’t unpacked anything from his duffel bag. He didn’t intend to. He unzipped the blue cloth bag, took out clean socks, underwear, a folded white button-down shirt, a folded blue shirt, a rolled-up black T-shirt with the faded words THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE, and a Ziploc plastic bag containing his toothbrush, toothpaste and disposable razor. He laid them out on one side of the bed next to his zippered denim jacket.

  Teresa had a small bathroom inside her room, no bath, just a shower. Angie had put out a pair of towels on the sink. Ten minutes later Lew turned out the light and lay in bed, looking up at the ceiling at the swaying shadows of the branches of the tree outside of Teresa’s window.

  Just before he fell asleep a name came to him: Rebecca Strum.

  A thousand miles south in Florida, the hurricane season had begun.

  Lew was up early, the sun warm across his eyes. He covered his face with his arms, but thoughts, names, memories cometed through his mind with fleeting images he almost recognized. This time he wasn’t dealing with someone else’s missing husband, wife, mother or child. He wasn’t losing himself in someone else’s loss. This Chicago pain was all his.

  Dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved, reasonably ironed blue shirt with a collar that could have used a couple of stays, Lew tucked his Cubs cap on his head, put on his white socks and sneakers, checked for the first signs of daily stubble on his cheeks and neck and looked at himself in Teresa’s mirror.

  Catherine said that he looked particularly good in blue shirts. She seemed to mean it. He didn’t think he had looked particularly good when she had said it and he certainly didn’t think so this morning.

  Lew put on his denim jacket.

  Franco was sitting in his overstuffed chair in the living room. The chair had been sat into exhaustion by three generations of Massaccio and Fonesca men. Franco was drinking coffee from a white mug with a black-and-white photograph on it of the DiMaggio brothers-Joe, Vince and Dominick-in uniform, arms around one another’s necks, grinning the toothy DiMaggio grin.

  “Hey, Lewis,” he said, getting up. “Angie had a client coming into the office early. Coffee’s on. Want some eggs, something? How about I put some butter in a pan and fry you up some spaghetti and meatballs?”

  Lew checked the wooden clock on the wall, Roman numerals. It was a little after seven. Lots of time. The imagined smell of a recooked dinner jolted him with the memory of his standing over a black iron skillet and preparing almost the same breakfast Franco had just offered.

  “That breakfast I smell?” Catherine had asked, wandering in, still in a blue-and-white-striped nightshirt.

  She stood behind him at the stove, kissing his cheek and looking down at the sizzling skillet.

  “Smells good,” she said.

  This was a few weeks before his wife had been killed.

  Something about the way she spoke, the lack of a morning hug, the surface-only kiss, came back to him. Was he imagining it? Should he have said something?

  In his mind’s eye Lew looked over his shoulder at Catherine who, cup of black coffee in front of her, sat at the tiny kitchen table. She drank slowly, looking out the window at the morning traffic. The morning was overcast. Normally, the downtown Chicago skyline was a panorama in front of them. Not that morning. She ran her fingers through her disheveled hair. Normally, she turned on the television o
n the counter to watch the morning news. She did not turn on the television set. That morning had been forgotten until now.

  “No, thanks,” Lew said to Franco. “Just coffee.”

  “Want the last of Norman Bates’s mom’s pastries? We saved it for you.”

  “Sure.”

  An hour and a half later Franco and Lew were at the law offices of Glicken, Santoro and Turnbull. The offices were on LaSalle Street in the heart of the Loop, fifteenth floor. Franco had parked the tow truck in a four-story garage two blocks away where the hourly rate was eight dollars an hour for off-the-street and six dollars an hour for daily customers. Franco would be charged neither. He knew the night manager and the day manager who steered breakdown calls his way and got a finder’s fee.

  Lew tucked his blue Cubs cap into his pocket.

  The large, gray-carpeted reception area had six black leather armchairs and a reception desk with a telephone, computer, pad of lined yellow paper and three pens ready for the day. On the wall were large side-by-side color photographs of the partners smiling confidently. Glicken was dark, curly-haired and definitely Jewish. Turnbull was Black. Claude Santoro was either Hispanic or Italian.

  Lew never found out.

  Santoro’s name was on the door on their right in the small waiting area. His door was slightly open. The lights were on. No voices.

  Lew knocked and then knocked again. Franco reached past him and pushed the door all the way open. Santoro was seated behind the desk in front of them. His eyes were open. He seemed lost in thought. There was a black hole over his right eye, another in his neck and a third just above his mouth. All were ringed by blood.

  “He’s fucking dead,” said Franco.

  Lew said nothing. Blood had oozed out of the bullet holes and dried up.

  Franco reached for the phone on the desk in front of the dead man.

  “No,” Lew said.

  Franco jerked his hand back.

  “Hey, Lewie, come on. We’ve got to call the cops.”

  “Don’t touch anything.”

  “Okay.”

  Lew sat across the desk from Santoro.

  “We call the police right?” Franco said.

  Santoro’s eyes were open, fixed on Lew’s face. They were staring each other down. Santoro would win. He was dead.

  “Lewie, you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “We call the police, right?” he said.

  Lew didn’t move.

  “Or we get the hell out of here fast. Lewis, come on. Lewie, what’s going on here?”

  What was going on was that there was no way of getting around the truth. If Santoro’s death was not connected to Catherine’s, Lew faced a very large coincidence.

  He got up and moved around the desk behind Santoro.

  “You can wait outside,” he said, looking at the top of the desk.

  “You think I want out because of the dead guy?” Franco asked, shaking his head. “I’ve seen dead guys, kids on the roads like roadkill. I’m a tow-truck driver, remember?”

  “I remember,” Lew said.

  “You want help?” he asked, looking at the closed door to Santoro’s office.

  “No,” Lew said.

  There was a fresh, lined, yellow legal pad with a pen next to it. The top page was blank. There was an empty in box, an aluminum football with a clock imbedded in it, facing Santoro. Next to it was a fresh box of Kleenex with a red wood cover. At the right was a flat, black cell phone holder-charger. There was no phone. Franco mumbled something to himself. Lew took a small stack of tissues.

  “You know what your sister’ll do to me if we get arrested?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t either,” said Franco, clearly frustrated. “But I won’t like it. I know that.”

  Franco’s near panic had been transformed into quiet resignation. He would not be surprised if the killer burst through the door, guns in both hands, firing away. He wouldn’t have been happy either, but he wouldn’t be surprised.

  There were four desk drawers. Lew opened and went through them, flipping papers with the tissues. Then he went through Santoro’s pockets the same way. A little more than four hundred dollars in his wallet. Lew put the wallet back.

  He wanted to touch Santoro’s shoulder. Then he paused and looked down at the dead man.

  “Lewis, you okay?”

  “Yes, let’s go.”

  “I can live with that,” Franco said, moving ahead of Lew to the door. “You find anything?”

  Lew reached past him, opened the door with the tissues and wiped down the knob. Then he realized that while he was erasing their fingerprints, he might well be removing those of the person who had killed Santoro.

  They walked past the reception area, into the hallway outside and then to their right, back toward the elevator.

  “Find anything on him?”

  It wasn’t what Lew had found, but what he hadn’t found. Santoro’s phone was gone. He had no appointment or notebook in his pockets. Whoever had killed him had taken any phone and notebook he might have had.

  “No,” Lew said.

  “Stairs?”

  “No.”

  There were surveillance cameras in the building’s lobby, at the entrance and even one in the wooden mesh grid of the elevator’s ceiling. They were on tape. That would be fine. If Lew were right, the tape and medical examiner would prove Lew and Franco had entered the building at least eight hours or more after Santoro was dead. That wouldn’t stop the police from having questions.

  The elevator pinged and the doors slid open almost silently. In front of them stood a large black man in his forties. He was wearing a blue suit and matching tie and carrying a briefcase. He looked exactly like his photograph on the wall of the reception room of Santoro’s law firm.

  The man was Turnbull of Glicken, Santoro and Turnbull, or, to be more current, Glicken and Turnbull.

  He took Lew and Franco in and moved toward the offices Lew and Franco had left seconds earlier. Franco and Lew stepped in and Lew hit the Lobby button.

  They were only a few blocks from the County Office Building. Lew headed toward it with Franco at his side, looking back over his left shoulder.

  “I’m not gonna ask,” said Franco.

  People hurried to their offices or jobs serving the people going to their offices. Lew could tell by how they were dressed, by the color of their skin, which were the served and which the servers. Lew was definitely a server.

  They stopped on the broad stone courtyard in front of the building where Lew had worked, where Catherine had worked. Too many demons were being faced too quickly and he had been in the city for less than twenty-four hours.

  Franco looked at the three pay phones in front of the building and then at Lew who nodded.

  “Just say, ‘Attorney Claude Santoro murdered in his office’ and hang up.”

  Franco moved toward the phones to call 911.

  4

  I had a dream last night,” Franco said as they watched the doors, waiting for Milt Holiger to come out.

  Lew had used Franco’s cell phone to call Milt and ask him to come down. Holiger had said he would be down in a minute. About five minutes had passed.

  Lew’s body had changed. Four years in Florida had made a cool Chicago October morning feel like the inside of an ice-cream truck. The dead man they had found a few blocks away contributed more than a little frost.

  “You want to hear it?”

  “Sure,” Lew said without looking at Franco.

  “Craziest damn… anyways, you and me and Ange were watching the Bears playing the Eagles. Bears have the ball. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Lew said, eyes fixed on the glass doors.

  “Bears quarterback gets the snap, steps back, throws. Ball sails right into the hands of the referee. Ref cradles it like a pro and starts chugging it toward the goal like Thomas Jones. The other refs block for him. Touchdown. Refs celebrate. Crowd goes nuts. Now what the hell does that mean?�
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  “It’s not just the good guys and the bad guys you have to watch out for, you’ve got to keep your eyes on the peacekeepers because they might steal the ball.”

  Franco looked at Lew who didn’t look back.

  “You think?” he asked.

  “No,” said Lew.

  “I’m talking a little nuts like this because of the dead guy, right?” asked Franco.

  “Probably.”

  “You feel…?”

  “Yes,” said Lew, eyes still focused on the door.

  “You don’t show it,” Franco said.

  “No.”

  “It doesn’t mean you don’t feel it, right?” said Franco. “Yeah, I know. I sound like Angie.”

  Milt Holiger came through the door. He plunged his hands into his pants pockets. Lew remembered that Milt’s hands and feet were always cold.

  “Heredity,” Milt had once explained. “Father, brothers, uncle. We all wear socks in bed.”

  Milt was stocky at forty and working to maintain and nurture his still controllable belly. Lots of brown hair with perfect sideburns, Milt looked like the generic weary television series police captain or lieutenant whose shoulders were stooped from hunkering down to ward off the blows of word and fist.

  Milt dodged a pair of arm-gesturing lawyer types and walked to his right.

  “That him?” asked Franco.

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s he goin’? Doesn’t he see us?”

  “He sees us. He’s dropping bread crumbs,” Lew said, following Holiger through the morning crowd.

  Three blocks later they joined Holiger at a table in the rear of a dark narrow inauthentic deli that served neither good Jewish or Italian food. Holiger looked at Franco.

  “My sister’s husband,” Lew said. “Franco.”

  They shook hands. The morning crowd had dwindled down to six customers besides the three of them. The place smelled as if it had been fried in something sweet and fatty.

  “Better off not having people in the office see us together,” Milt said. “I give you information, someone connects the wires and I’ve got trouble.”

  “You mean you can’t help anymore?” Lew asked.

  “Who said that?”