Retribution lf-2

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “Best not,” Ames said.

  “Go, go report to the bitch that you almost killed my dog,” Merrymen shouted. “I can get another dog. Two of them.”

  “Just be sure you clean up their manure and yours,” said Ames.

  We went through the door. Ames pushed it closed behind us.

  “He might have a gun,” I said.

  “Might,” Ames agreed.

  We hurried to the Cutlass and got in. Merrymen’s door didn’t open. I made a circle in the cul-de-sac and headed away from the far side.

  “You know how to swing a bat,” I said.

  “Played some,” Ames said calmly.

  “In high school?”

  “Farm team. Pittsburgh Pirates. Didn’t have the temper or talent for it,” he said. “Long time ago.”

  I checked my watch. I still had an hour and a half before I met Sally and her kids for dinner.

  “You’ve got some time?” I asked.

  “Whatever the Lord if there is one is willing to give,” he said.

  I pulled over to the Walgreen drugstore at Tuttle and Fruitville. Walgreens drugstores seem to be about half a mile apart throughout Sarasota. The phone book was reasonably intact and I found a Bernard Corsello on North Orange. We drove, said nothing. I turned on the radio. A talk-show host I didn’t recognize was on WFLA talking about serial killers. The NPR station had the market report. I switched back to AM and found WGUL, the oldies station.

  A woman was singing, “Let me free.”

  “’Let Me Go, Lover,’” Ames said. “First song written for a television drama. Don’t know her name.”

  The woman on the radio was just singing, “If you’ll just let me go” when we pulled in front of a one-story house just north of Sixth. The neighborhood was a couple of notches below middle class. The houses were small, in reasonable shape with neat green yards.

  A half-moon and bright stars. A nice evening. On the cool side. Some kids on bicycles, two black, one white, the kids purposely came close to hitting us and zipped away jabbering to each other.

  There was no driveway. The concrete walkway was narrow and cracked. There were lights on in curtained rooms on both sides of the door. I found the bell, pushed it, listened to it ring inside, and waited. No answer. I rang again. No answer.

  I tried the door. It opened but not much, about three or four inches. It was hitting something.

  “Mr. Corsello,” I called through the crack.

  No answer. I pushed the door again. It gave. A little. Ames pitched in. Whatever was blocking the door gave way enough for me to stick my head in. I saw what was blocking the door.

  The body was facedown, head toward the door. There were two reasons to think he was dead. The floor in front of your front door is an unusual place to take a nap. I’ve known stranger ones, but the blotch of blood and the hole in his back took whatever hope I might have had.

  “Dead man,” I told Ames.

  He nodded as if he were accustomed to finding dead men on a daily basis. I stood trying to decide which way to take this. I looked around the street. Nothing. No one. A small red car with a bad muffler zoomed down the street.

  I thought about the missing Mickey and Adele and I motioned for Ames to help me push some more. When there was enough room, we slid through the door. I closed it behind us. There was a light on in the entryway. From where we stood we could see the entire place. Small living room with an old overstuffed chair placed about four feet away from a giant television screen where an old episode of Jeopardy! was going forward silently. It was an old show. Alex Trebek, with no gray hairs, played with the cards in his hand.

  Beyond the living-room area was a kitchen with a table and four chairs. To the left were three doors. Two were open. The closest one was a bedroom with a neatly made bed, a big dresser, and a giant Jesus on the cross over the dresser. The second open door was a bathroom. No light was on in there.

  “Don’t touch anything,” I said, kneeling at the body for a number of reasons.

  First, I wanted to confirm that he was really dead. He was. Completely. The body was cool. The dead man was wearing a robe. It was pulled high enough so I could see the only other thing he had on, a pair of underpants.

  I guessed the dead man had been in his late sixties, maybe older. I guessed he was Bernard Corsello. I wondered about a lot of things.

  “Quick look around,” I said. “Touch nothing.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “Something that says this has something to do with Adele. Something I don’t want to find.”

  Ames strode over the body and into the living room. I went for the open bedroom. On the table next to the bed was a flat and warm glass that seemed to have about two inches of some liquid in it. I smelled it. Cola. Next to the drink were two pens, a pad of paper, a telephone, a wallet, and some change. I picked up the wallet, opened it, and found sixty-two dollars. I rubbed off my prints with my shirt and put the wallet down. Nothing else in the room seemed interesting except for the hanging Jesus who looked down on me. I didn’t say anything to him. I hadn’t since I was a kid.

  I went into the bathroom. Nothing of interest. The third room, the one with the closed door, I opened with my shirt as a mitt. The lights were off. I hit the wall switch and wiped away my print.

  This was clearly Mickey Merrymen’s home away from home. The drawers were open, and nearly empty except for a few T-shirts and a single pair of underpants with a hole in them. A CD player sat on the small dresser. The bed was a mess. There was a small bookcase next to the bed. There were only a few books in it, all horror stories, Straub, Koontz, King, Saul, McKimmon. What made it clearly Mickey’s room were the three photographs tacked to the wall above the bed. They were small. One was on an angle. Adele was in all of them. From the holes in the wall around the three photographs I guessed there had been more, lots more.

  Adele was alone in two of the photographs, both outdoors. Adele from stomach to head. The other of her alone was also outdoors. In the first she was smiling. In the second, she pursed her lips with a pretend kiss for the camera. She looked like any other pretty sixteen-year-old. Her past didn’t show. In the third photograph, Adele was leaning against a tall young man who reminded me of both Michael “the bat” Merrymen and a young Anthony Perkins. His arm was around Adele. He was grinning. I liked his white button-down shirt. I liked his smile. I didn’t like having Adele’s photographs on the wall. I took them down, dropped the tacks in an empty wastebasket, and pocketed the pictures. There was nothing else I could find to link Adele to the house. I doubted the police would go over every print in the place, but there was nothing I could do about it.

  I found Ames in the kitchen looking at the refrigerator. There were magnets holding up three messages. Each magnet was a photograph, Einstein, Marlon Brando, and Hank Aaron. One message was a simple grocery list. The second message read: “Insurance due first Tuesday of the month.” The third message was, “Remember to call for pizza for Mickey and the girl.”

  I pulled the pizza message from under Hank Aaron and said, “Anything?”

  Ames shook his head “no” and we headed toward the corpse and the door.

  “Didn’t take his money, the television, CD player,” I said.

  We moved past the dead man and Ames stepped out of the door. I should have hurried after him but I looked one last time at the dead man and the thought came. That was the way I wanted to see the man who had run down my wife four years ago on Lake Shore Drive. He had left her bleeding, dying, barely alive. It took at least five minutes before someone went to help her. It was too late. The driver had gone on. What was that murderer doing now? Was he haunted by what he had done? Had he been a drunk who didn’t remember the life he had taken? I looked back at Jesus in the next room expecting no answer or solace.

  “Best be going,” Ames said.

  I looked back at Corsello one last time, wiped the door handle, went into the night, and wiped the outside handle.

  “
Now?” asked Ames.

  I looked around. The street was almost empty. Half a block down to our left an old black woman was laboring under the weight of two heavy shopping bags. We got into the car and drove.

  I dropped Ames and his scooter back at the Texas Bar and Grille.

  “We’re looking for Flo Zink’s white minivan,” I said as we maneuvered the scooter out of the trunk. “This kid,” I said, pulling out the photograph of Mickey and Adele, “is probably with her.”

  “I’ll ask around,” Ames said.

  Neither of us said what we were thinking. Adele had killed before. She had killed a man who deserved killing. Adele, in short, knew how to pull a trigger. If something had happened, something… I gave up.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said.

  Ames nodded, locked his scooter, and waved as I got into the Cutlass.

  It had been a busy day. And it wasn’t over.

  I called the police from a pay phone on Main Street. If I leaned back I could have seen the downtown police headquarters. I hit 911.

  “How can we help you?” a woman asked calmly.

  I told her, with my best James Mason imitation, that a man was dead. I quickly gave the address and hung up before she could ask for my name.

  When I got to the Bangkok, the place was packed. Sally saw me making my way through the crowd. She was seated at a booth with her two kids, Michael, fourteen, and Susan, eleven. Sally raised a hand and I moved to the booth.

  Sally and Susan sat on one side of the table. I sat next to Michael on the other.

  “Someone hit you,” Susan said, pointing to my cheek.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I brought her bad news.”

  “It happens,” Sally said.

  Sally is and will always be a year older than I am. She is solid, ample, and pretty with clear skin, short wavy hair, and a voice that always reminded me of Lauren Bacall.

  “Ready to order now?” asked a beautiful Thai waitress in a yellow and white silk dress.

  “You look terrible,” Michael said, turning toward me.

  Neither of Sally’s kids disliked me. I think I puzzled them. I never made jokes, didn’t work at making them like me. And I’m sure they wondered what their mother found in the soulful, balding man who reached for the tea and said, “You guys?”

  “Crispy duck,” said Sally.

  “The same with a Thai iced tea,” said Michael.

  “Another one. Thai iced tea too.”

  “I’ll have the tofu pad thai,” I said.

  The pretty waitress smiled and walked away.

  “So,” said Sally. “How was your day and how can you afford this?”

  “New clients,” I said. “Two of them.”

  “Your cheek?” she said.

  “Someone slapped me.”

  “You deck him?” Michael asked.

  “It was a woman,” I said.

  “Did you deck her?” asked Susan.

  “She was a lot bigger than I am,” I said.

  “Most people are,” said Susan. “That doesn’t mean you should let them hit you.”

  “It’s part of my job,” I said. “I slap people with a summons. They slap me with their hands.”

  “It’s more than that,” Sally said, looking into my eyes.

  Yes, I thought, I’ve just come from discovering a dead man, almost certainly murdered. I not only found him, I pounded his head three or four times when I tried to open his door.

  “There’s more,” I said. “Later.”

  During dinner, Susan did most of the talking, mainly about a friend named Jackie who may have decided she no longer wanted to be friends with Susan. Jackie’s transgressions were numerous. I know one was that Jackie had begun sitting at a different table at lunch. I don’t remember the others. I don’t remember eating. I sort of remember paying the check with some of the crumpled bills from Marvin Uliaks. I sort of remember Sally asking the waitress to pack up the pad thai and rice I hadn’t touched and put it in a little white carton for me to take home.

  I do remember being in the parking lot where Sally told the kids to go to her car and she walked me to my rental and handed me the brown bag of rice and pad thai.

  “What is it?” she asked as we stood in the parking lot.

  Some kids came running out yelling and laughing from the 7-Eleven at the end of the small mall. I looked at them and back at Sally.

  I had been seeing Sally for a few months. We were friends. Well, maybe we were more than friends, but nothing intimate, not yet. I couldn’t. I hadn’t been able to find a safe place for the memory of my dead wife. I didn’t know if I ever would even with Ann Horowitz’s help.

  And Sally had been a widow for more than four years, too busy for men, not interested in becoming involved, not really being pursued. We were friends. She was also a family therapist and at the Children’s Services of Sarasota. Adele had been and officially still was one of her cases.

  “Adele,” I said.

  I looked over at Michael and Susan quarreling over something in the backseat of her decade-old Honda.

  “What happened?” Sally asked calmly.

  “You know about her and Lonsberg?” I asked.

  “What she told me. What Flo told me,” she said.

  “Adele’s missing,” I said. “It looks as if she ran away with a kid named Mickey Merrymen. You know the name?”

  “No,” she said. “What does this have to do with Lonsberg?”

  “Adele and Mickey may have stolen a roomful of Lonsberg’s unpublished manuscripts.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But it gets worse. I’m not sure you want to know the rest.”

  “I’ve got to find Adele,” she said. “I need to know whatever there is to know.”

  “You don’t have much free time to search for missing girls,” I said. “Not with your caseload.”

  “I get a little help from the police when I need it,” she said.

  “And from your friends,” I said. “Mickey Merrymen’s grandfather is dead. Murdered, I think. Ames and I found his body about an hour before I came here.”

  “Which accounts for your lack of appetite.”

  “Which accounts for my lack of appetite,” I agreed. “Can you forget this conversation for a few days while I look for Adele?”

  “No,” she said, glancing over at Michael and Susan who were now looking at us impatiently.

  “They thought you were coming over for Trivial Pursuit,” Sally said.

  “Not tonight. Can you forget?”

  “No,” she said. “But I can lie and say we didn’t have this conversation. I lie a lot. It’s part of my job. Sometimes, too often, you have to lie to kids to give them a chance to survive. Call me. If you don’t, I’ll call you.”

  She moved forward and kissed my cheek slowly, the side that hadn’t been slapped by Bubbles Dreemer, and then she headed for her car.

  I drove back to the DQ parking lot, the smell of Thai food battling with the odor of a decade of indifferent cleaning and those little yellow cardboard things that you hang from your mirror to override whatever has been dropped or invaded the upholstery.

  It was definitely a Joan Crawford night. I was always ready for Mildred Pierce, but tonight I’d go for Woman on the Beach. I knew just where the tape was in the pile next to my television set.

  The DQ was still open but I didn’t feel like doing any more talking. This had already been the kind of day I had been trying to avoid for the last five years. I told life to leave me alone. It refused to stop knocking at my door, calling me on the phone, and slapping me in the face.

  I walked up the concrete steps and moved along the rusting metal railing on one side and the dark offices on the other. When I came to my door, I found an envelope stuck into it with a push pin. The only word on the envelope in penciled block letters was “ FONESCA.”

  I dropped the envelope in my brown bag, opened the door, turned on t
he lights, and moved to my desk where I put down the bag and opened the envelope.

  The single white sheet inside bore a simple, short message in the same block letters as my name on the envelope.

  STOP LOOKING FOR HER. ONE INNOCENT PERSON IS DEAD AND GONE. LET IT BE AN END. LET THIS BE A WARNING.

  It was unsigned. I put the brown paper bag on the ledge of my office window and went into my small office, which was really what passed for home, a single cot, which I made up every day with an old comforter and two pillows. A chest of drawers. A tiny refrigerator. A closet. A fourteen-inch black-and-white television with a VCR and a stack of tapes and a folding wooden television table. It had taken me minutes to move in three years ago. It would take me ten minutes to move out when the time came.

  I found Woman on the Beach and did my best not to think, not to think about the murdered man, not to think about Adele, not to think about the pleading face of Marvin Uliaks. I succeeded when the tape came on. The dream world on the tube was mine. Swirling behind it in my mind, deep but hard and always ready to scream, was the image of my wife being hit by that car on Lake Shore Drive. I hadn’t been there but I had imagined, dreamed about what it had looked like, about what she might have had time to think, to feel. Each dream was just a bit different. I wanted one solid one to hang on to, but my imagination refused to cooperate, to tell me the truth or a lie I could believe.

  Joan Crawford smiled, but there was a troubled look behind that smile. I knew why. I had seen this picture many times. It never changed. Only my dream changed.

  I took off my clothes while I watched and hung them in my almost empty closet. I lay in my underwear. Joan was in for pain, lots of pain, lots of anguish. That was her job in film. She bore it well. Better than those of us who have to live it.

  I couldn’t sleep. I listened to the whishing of cars going down 301. There weren’t many of them at this hour and I normally tuned them out, but tonight I listened. I lay there for a while in the dark, then got up and turned on the light.

  I reached for one of Lonsberg’s books. Maybe a random passage would put me to sleep. When I married, when I had a wife, I always kept books at the bedside, books I could nip at randomly. The Holy Scriptures weren’t bad. Poetry, if it wasn’t too abstract, was fine. History, popular history, was particularly good. William Manchester was perfect, but I seldom went for fiction. I sat cross-legged in bed in my shorts, scratched my chest, and opened my battered book. I flipped to about the middle of the book and started to read: