Bright Futures: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (Lew Fonesca Novels)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  When I opened the door, Flo and Adele were there with Catherine in Adele’s arms. Ames was there, too, and by the sound of the toilet flushing I figured Victor would soon make an appearance. The people in front of me were all reasons why I wanted to leave. They were also reasons I wanted to stay.

  “Nice place you have here, Lewis,” said Flo, her silver earrings tinkling if you listened quietly.

  “We’ve got a ride to take, Lewis,” Ames said.

  Adele put Catherine down so I could see that she could now stand on her own with arms outstretched. I looked at Ames.

  “Darrell,” he said. “Doing poorly. You’d best put on something dry.”

  Catherine took a lone baby step toward me.

  “Ain’t that something?” asked Flo in her best Western drawl, which decades ago had replaced the twang of Brooklyn.

  Victor appeared and looked at Catherine, who looked up at him and smiled. Victor knew the baby was named for my dead wife, the woman he had run down while he was drunk. Victor tried to smile back.

  “Lewis,” Ames said, “we’d best go.”

  Darrell’s mother, dark and angry, came out of the intensive care unit at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. She said nothing to me or Ames. She didn’t have to.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  For an instant, her anger seemed about to turn to fury. I waited for the outburst. I would welcome it. But just before the anticipated attack, something changed. The tightness in the lean woman let go and her shoulders dropped. The anger turned to pure sorrow.

  “You didn’t do it,” she said. “I know that. Fault’s mine for letting Ms. Porovsky talk me into letting Darrell spend time with you. I should have known what kind of business you were into. I should have asked. And then Darrell started liking you, talking ’bout you, changing, gettin’ better in school and such. You find the man who shot my only boy. You find him and shoot him back before you give him up to the police. You hear?”

  “I hear,” I said, acknowledging that there was nothing wrong with my hearing but not that I was agreeing with her order for me to commit murder. I owned no gun and wanted none. As long as Ames was nearby, I wouldn’t need one.

  “How is he?” asked Ames.

  “Poorly,” she said. “Poorly. That BB or whatever it was infected him. Poorly.”

  Victor had driven Ames and me to the hospital. It was not the car he had driven when he had killed my wife, but he was the driver. Once again I searched for anger. Ann Hurwitz had urged me to find the anger, to purge it, to deal with it. Though she couldn’t tell me, I had the distinct impression that she would have considered it a step forward if I suddenly attacked Victor in a bitter rage. It wasn’t in me. The hate button in my psyche didn’t seem to exist. I had witnessed much in my life that would put others into squinting anger. I should probably have felt that way about whoever had shot Darrell. Nothing came except a sad determination to confront the person who had put Darrell in that hospital bed.

  It was still raining. Flo, Adele, and Catherine went home, and I promised to stop by the house and report.

  Darrell’s mother went back into the intensive care unit with us. Darrell lay on his side, knees up near his chest, hands under his face on the pillow, eyes closed. Curled up, he looked like a dark, peaceful baby. The usual machines were blinking and beeping in the darkened room.

  “She’s right,” Ames whispered. “We should shoot him when we catch up with him.”

  Darrell’s mother couldn’t hear the whisper, and I chose not to respond.

  The rain was down to a steady shower with a full bright sun shining round, red-orange, and happy when we got back to the place I was now expected to call home. Victor parked on the gravel path next to the stairs.

  All three of us got out slowly, ignoring the rain. A clump of small white and yellow flowers yielded to rain drops and then popped up again for another gentle assault. Before I hit the first step, I heard her.

  Parked on the street was a familiar car. When the window rolled down I saw Sally Porovsky looking at me. She didn’t call out or wave. She just looked at me.

  “You’ve got work to do,” Ames said.

  “I know.”

  Victor stood silently, a thin trail of rain wending its way down his nose. Ames nodded at me and said no more. My door was open. Ames knew it. He led Victor upward, their shoes clapping on each wooden step.

  I went to the street and moved around Sally’s car to the passenger door. It was open. I got in and sat.

  “You’re wet,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “There’s a beach towel in the trunk. You want to get it?”

  “No.”

  Her hands were tight on the steering wheel as if she were about to peel into a drag race. She looked forward. The shadow of rain rolling down the front window danced against her face. She looked pretty. She was pretty. Her skin was clear and pale, her hair dark and cut short. She was slightly plump and normally totally in control of herself, but not at this moment.

  “I was going to call you,” I said.

  “I remember,” she said. “I decided not to wait. How is Darrell?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “His mother won’t answer my calls.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  She went on. “I think she blames me for getting Darrell involved with you.”

  “She does.”

  “She told you that?”

  “Yes.”

  We went silent for about half a minute and then she said, “Let’s go someplace where we can talk.”

  I could have said, “What’s wrong with right here,” but I sensed that she wanted to talk about something other than Darrell.

  “FourGees?”

  FourGees is a coffee shop, a decent place for lunch and late-night live music, at Beneva and Webber. It was dark in the daytime, with amber shadows and places to talk quietly.

  “I can’t stay long,” she said as she drove. “I have to go back to the office.”

  The office was children’s services, about ten minutes from FourGees.

  I nodded. She drove. I like company when I drive alone. I’ll listen to conservative talk shows, ball games, religious evangelists, but not music. I want no music. I want company. When I’m with other people in a car, I like to listen to them talk, which they seem to do whether or not I’m doing the driving.

  Look at your watch or the time on your cell phone and count off a minute, then two, then three. Minutes become interminable when you count them. Silences become an anticipation of bad news.

  We said not a word as Sally drove to FourGees and found a space directly in front of the shop.

  The rain had stopped.

  Silently, we got out of the car and went inside. Only two of the tables in the front room were occupied, one by a man and a small boy, and the other by three older women. The boy was playing with the straw in his drink. The women were eating slices of cake and drinking coffee. They seemed happy with one another’s company.

  Sally and I marched solemnly past the counter near the rear, where a tattooed girl in her twenties said, “I’ll be right with you.”

  The second room was empty. Sally hesitated as if this wasn’t what she had had in mind, and then she decided to sit on a wooden chair as far from the window as she could get. I sat too. I sat, and I waited.

  “I have to tell you something, Lewis.”

  She leaned over and put a hand on mine.

  “Your husband isn’t dead,” I guessed.

  “He’s still dead,” she said.

  “You have cancer.”

  “No. I think you should stop guessing.”

  The girl with the tattoos appeared and asked if we had made up our minds. I ordered a plain black coffee and a slice of the same kind of cake the women in the other room were having.

  “Nothing for me,” Sally said. “No, wait. Tea. Hot. Mint if you have it.”

  “We have it,” the girl said. “Two forks for the cake? It’
s big.”

  “Sure,” Sally said.

  When she was gone, Sally looked down and said, “Lewis, I’m moving.”

  “I’ll help.”

  “No, I’m moving to Montpelier.”

  “France?”

  “Vermont.”

  This time, the silence almost insisted that no one break it.

  “For good?” I asked.

  “For good.”

  “People move here from Montpelier. They don’t move from Florida to Vermont. Why?”

  “My family, cousins, brother, people I’ve known all my life, people I went to school with. Besides, I have a good job offer at a hospital as social services director. Double my present salary.”

  “And?”

  “And,” she said, “I’ve been doing what I do for more than twenty years. I’m burned out, Lewis. I can’t stand getting up in the morning and facing children who keep getting sent back to drug-addicted parents, kids who are hurt, abused, ignored, and dumped on the system, on me, with no resources other than whatever we can get by with off the books and paperwork. I don’t want to think about the pile of cases on my desk that keeps growing. I want to be with my kids more, come home without feeling the footsteps of those kids behind me, silently calling for attention.”

  “I understand.”

  All the things she said were true, but I felt that something was missing, another reason that haunted her, a reason she didn’t want to share.

  “Do you? Do you understand without just feeling sorry for yourself because you’re going to have to deal with another loss?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Music started. It came down from a speaker mounted high on the wall. Lilly Allen was singing one of those songs that sways gently but carries lyrics as sharp as the edge of a sheet of newspaper.

  “Lewis, how many times in the more than two years we’ve known each other have we made love or even had sex?”

  “None,” I said.

  “I’ve respected your memory of Catherine with you, but we both have to move on. How many times have we kissed, really kissed?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “I make it twenty, but you’re almost certainly right. You never forget anything.”

  “My curse,” I said.

  “It’s the way you want it,” she said.

  “When are you leaving?”

  “As soon as the school year ends, so the kids won’t be too disrupted.”

  “Seven weeks,” I said.

  “Seven weeks,” she repeated.

  The girl with the tattoos came back and placed the drinks in front of us and the cake between.

  “Two forks. Enjoy.”

  I would not cry, but not because of pride. It just wasn’t in me, but I would feel it. I would feel it, alone, sitting on the toilet, lying on my bed, listening to someone speak or Rush Limbaugh rant. I would feel it.

  “I’m sorry,” Sally said.

  I handed her a fork and answered without saying that I was sorry, too.

  “It’s banana-chocolate,” I said.

  7

  *

  SEVEN WEEKS,” Ann Hurwitz said, dunking one of the two biscotti I had brought her into the cappuccino I had also brought to her office. A bribe.

  “Seven weeks,” I said.

  “How do you feel about it?”

  “Helpless. Relieved. I’m thinking of buying a cheap car and leaving.”

  “Again.”

  “Again,” I said. “This time maybe I’ll go west till I hit the Pacific Coast somewhere.”

  “And you’ll look out toward Japan but see nothing but water.”

  “Maybe it will be clean.”

  “Pollution is everywhere.”

  “Sally’s leaving me. Someone is trying to kill me or at least frighten me. I have a new client I don’t like and another client who lied to me and may be a child molester.”

  “Lied about what?”

  “I don’t know, but I know he lied. Lies are heavy, dark, deep behind too much sincerity. And there are people depending on me, Ames, Flo, Adele. And Victor.”

  “Your house guest from Chicago.”

  “Yes. And I don’t like my new rooms. Too big. I like things, and places, small.”

  “Cubicles,” she said, leaning forward to ensnare the moist end of a biscotti with her teeth. “What else are small places?”

  “Boxes, caskets, car trunks, jail cells, monks’ cells, closets.”

  “You can hide in all of them,” she said. “You can even die in them. All both protect and threaten.”

  “I guess. You’re supposed to tell me that people can’t run from their problems, that nothing is solved by running away.”

  “No,” said Ann. “You got these biscotti at News and Books?”

  “Yes. I always do.”

  “They taste different. Very good. Sometimes things are solved by running away.”

  “I should run away?”

  “If you feel that you must,” Ann said, wiping her chocolate-tipped fingers with a napkin and then discarding it in her almost empty wastebasket. “I would miss you. You would miss Ames, Flo, Adele, and the baby.”

  “Her name is Catherine,” I said.

  “I know. I wanted you to say it.”

  “Because she was named for my wife, and it ties me to Sarasota.”

  “It ties you to people,” she said. “You’re not going to run away.”

  “I suppose not.”

  I leaned forward, my head between my legs.

  “Are you all right? Are you going to be sick?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m trying to find a box to hide in.”

  “Have you been having nightmares again?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me.”

  My head still down, I said, “I’m in New York City, at a hotel. I look out the window, across the street, at another hotel. On the seventh floor of that hotel, there’s an open window. A child, about two, is about to climb out the window. It’s New York during the day. The distance and the city noise let me know it would do no good to yell.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “Nothing. I stand there, looking, hoping, praying. I can’t move away. I can’t close my eyes. I’m crying, muttering.”

  “Muttering what?”

  “Oh, no. God, no. Jesus, no.”

  “Does the child fall?”

  “The child looks over at me and smiles over the chasm, the canyon of buildings and streets. I try to wave her back, but she just smiles and waves back at me. I push my hands forward. I’m afraid to scream or make a frightened and frightening face for fear she will fall.”

  “She?”

  “Did I say she?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “The child is Catherine or the baby we never had. She is about to die and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “What does the child look like?”

  “Dark curly hair. Wide eyes, brown eyes. Even at this distance I know they are brown.”

  “And,” said Ann, “Catherine’s hair was curly?”

  “No.”

  “Not even as a child?”

  “No,” I said.

  “And her eyes were wide and brown?”

  “No, her eyes were blue.”

  “Who is the baby?”

  “Me,” I said. “She looks just like my baby pictures.”

  “Breakthrough,” Ann said, sitting up in her well-padded swivel chair.

  “But why is it a girl?” I asked.

  “We save that for another time, to give you something to think about between now and then. Time for one more quick dream.”

  Knowing I would stare into the eyes of that baby who was me, looking for answers, I said, “Thalidomide man.”

  “Thalidomide man?”

  “You know. About fifty years ago in Chicago a lot of women who were given thalidomide and had deformed babies, withered arms or legs or both. In my dream I
see a man with a deformed right hand advancing toward me in slow motion. He’s smiling and holding out his hand to shake my hand. I don’t want to shake his three-fingered stump of a hand, but I extend mine to him. I always wake up then, and almost always it’s 4:13 in the morning.”

  “How did you know about thalidomide?” Ann asked.

  “I’m not sure. I think my mother and father talked about it, or I ran across it in a newspaper or magazine.”

  Ann looked puzzled, as if there were something she was trying to recall.

  “Lewis, think.”

  I thought. Nothing came.

  “The man with the withered right arm?” she prompted.

  Nothing.

  “The boy whose parents abandoned him.”

  I remembered. “I forgot.”

  “You never forget anything,” said Ann.

  “That’s what Sally said.”

  “The boy?”

  “His name was David Bryce O’Brien. I met him when I was investigating a homicide for the Cook County State Attorney’s Office. You know this.”

  “Tell me again,” she said. “I’m ancient and often forget what I move from one room to the next for.”

  “His father was a suspect.”

  “And?”

  “His father was the murderer. He killed his dry cleaner. Then he killed his wife and son.”

  “David Bryce O’Brien.”

  “Then he killed himself.”

  “And what did he do to the body of his son?”

  “No,” I said.

  Ann went silent. So did I. A waiting game. I could get up and leave, but I didn’t. Then I said, “He cut off his son’s withered arm and left a note saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ It’s the most common suicide note in the world.”

  “Biblical,” she said.

  “Biblical?”

  “If my right hand offends … ,” she said.

  “It wasn’t his right hand.”

  “How old was David Bryce O’Brien?”

  “Almost two years old.”

  “About the same age as the child in the window in New York?”

  “Yes.”

  “That feels true?”

  “Yes. You want me to think about it?”

  “Yes, but not consciously. Let it go. When the time comes to talk about it, you will. You forgot to bring me something, Lewis.”