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

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  I did follow the little car down Midnight Pass and off the Key, but I kept going straight when they turned left on Tamiami Trail.

  My cell phone rang. I considered throwing it out the window, but I answered it.

  “Lewis, I have a death in the family,” said Ann Hurwitz.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “My cousin Leona was ninety-seven years old,” she said. “She’s been in a nursing home for a decade.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Lewis, you are one of the few people I know whose expression of sorrow over the death of a very old woman you don’t know I would believe. I must cancel our appointment tomorrow so I can attend the funeral in Memphis.”

  “All right.”

  “But I have an opening today,” Ann Hurwitz said.

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “I’m on the way.”

  “You did your homework?”

  My index cards were in the notebook in my back pocket.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Decaf with cream and Equal. Today I feel like a chocolate biscotti.”

  “With almonds?”

  “Always with almonds,” she said and clicked off.

  Fifteen minutes later I picked up a pair of coffees and three chocolate biscotti from Sarasota News and Books and crossed Main street. I was about to go through the door to Ann’s office on Gulfstream when he appeared, mumbling to himself.

  He was black, about forty, wearing a shirt and pants too large and baggy for his lean frame. His bare feet flopped in his untied shoes. He looked down as he walked, pausing every few feet to scratch his head and engage himself in conversation.

  I knew him. Everyone in this section of town near the Bay knew him, but few knew his story. I’d sat down with him once on the park bench he lived under. The bench was across the street from Ann’s office. It had a good view of the small boats moored on the bay and the ever-changing and almost always controversial works of art erected along the bay. He had been evicted from his bench in one of the recurrent efforts to clean up the city for tourists. I didn’t know where he lived now, but it wasn’t far. Even the homeless have someplace they think of as home.

  “Big tooth,” he said to himself as he came toward me.

  “Big tooth,” I repeated.

  The bag in my hand was hot and the biscotti must have been getting moist.

  He pointed across the street toward the bay. There was a giant white tooth which was slowing the passing traffic.

  He scratched his inner left thigh and said, “Dentist should buy it. Definitely.”

  One of the charms of the man was that he never asked for money or anything else. He minded his own business and relied on luck, the discards of the upscale restaurants in the neighborhood and the kindness and guilt of others.

  I reached into the bag and came up with a coffee and a biscotti. He took them with a nod of thanks.

  “You, too?” he asked, tilting his head toward the nearby bench—not his former residence, but the one right outside Ann’s office.

  “Can’t,” I said. “Appointment.”

  “Old lady who talks to ghosts and crazy people?”

  “Not ghosts,” I said.

  “I’m not a crazy person,” he said.

  “No,” I agreed.

  “You a crazy person?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You should maybe find out,” he said, moving toward the bench, his back to me now.

  “I’m working on it,” I said and stepped through the door.

  Ann’s very small reception area was empty except for three chairs, a neat pile of copies of psychology magazines, and a small Bose non–boom box playing generic classical music. The music was there to cover the voices of any clients who might be moved to occasional rage or panic, usually directed at a spouse, child, sibling, boss or themselves. The music wasn’t necessary for me. My parents never raised their voices. I have never raised mine in anger, remorse, or despair. All the passion in our family came from my sister, and she more than compensated for it with Italian neighborhood showmanship.

  Ann was, as always, seated in her armchair under the high narrow horizontal windows. I handed her the bag. She smelled it and carefully removed coffee and biscotti and placed them on the desk near her right hand.

  “No coffee for you?” she asked, handing me a biscotti.

  “No,” I said. “Caffeine turns me into a raging maniac.”

  I took off my Cubs cap and placed it on my lap.

  “Levity,” she said, removing the lid of her coffee and engaging in the biscotti-dipping ritual.

  “I guess.”

  “Small steps. Always small steps. Progress,” she said. “Biscotti are one of the tiny treasures of life. When one of my clients tells me he or she is contemplating suicide I remind them that, once dead, they will never again enjoy coffee and biscotti.”

  “Does it work?”

  “Only one has ever committed suicide, but I can’t claim that the biscotti approach has ever been the reason for this high level of success. Did your mother make biscotti?”

  “No, she ate it. My father made pignoli. My uncle made biscotti.”

  “Pignoli?”

  “A kind of cookie with pine nuts.”

  “My mother made mandel bread,” Ann said. “That’s like Jewish biscotti, made with cement, at least the way my mother made it.”

  I looked at the clock on the wall over her head. Five minutes had passed.

  “You want to know when we are going to start,” she said. “Well, we already started.”

  “I asked Ames to be my partner.”

  “Putting down roots,” she said, finishing her biscotti. She had eaten it in record time.

  I handed her mine.

  “You sure?” she asked. “I didn’t have time for lunch.”

  “I’m sure about you having my biscotti. I’m not sure about asking Ames to be my partner.”

  “Why?”

  “He’ll expect me to stay around.”

  “Yes.”

  “Besides, I make just enough to live on.”

  “Yes, but you asked him and he said yes.

  “He said yes.”

  “Sally’s leaving, moving North. Better job.”

  Ann said nothing, just worked on her biscotti, brushing away stray crumbs from her white dress with dancing green leaves.

  “Did you ask her to stay?” she said finally.

  “No.”

  “Do you want her to stay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there anything you could say or do that would make her stay?”

  “I think so. Maybe.”

  “But you won’t say it.”

  “I can’t. You want to hear the first lines I’ve collected?”

  “Not this session,” she said.

  The phone rang. She never turned off the phone during our sessions and I guess she didn’t turn it off during anyone else’s sessions either. She had too much curiosity to turn off her connection to anyone who wanted to confess or try to sell her something.

  “Yes, I’ll take it,” she told the caller after listening for a few seconds.

  She hung up.

  “I’m going to give you a conundrum, an ethical dilemma, a moral puzzle,” she said. “With that call, I just paid to become beneficiary of a life insurance policy for a ninety-one-year-old man. He gets paid with my cash offer immediately. I double or triple my investment when he dies, providing he dies before I do and, given my age, while the odds are in my favor, I stand some chance of losing. I have six such policies. What do you think?”

  “Do you meet these people?” I asked.

  “Absolutely not,” she said, sitting back and folding her hands.

  “Life insurance is gambling on beating or forestalling death,” I said.

  “Precisely, Lewis. Still?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right.”

  “No, it doesn’t, but why not? Does it cha
llenge God or the gods who might decide to strike you down instead of the person from whose death you would profit?”

  Her eyes were dancing. We were getting somewhere or going somewhere. She leaned forward.

  “I lied, Lewis,” she said. “I didn’t buy life insurance for a dying man. I told my stockbroker to go ahead and buy pork belly futures. I’m betting on people who might profit from the slaughter of pigs.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “Your opinion of me faltered for a moment,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “But it’s all right if I profit from the death of pigs.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “We bet against death every day,” she said. “But it is taboo to bet for death. We don’t want to make those gods angry even if they exist only in our minds.”

  “Someone may be trying to kill me,” I said.

  “This has happened before.”

  “Yes.”

  “You invite it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You gamble with your life.”

  “I suppose,” I said.

  “And the irony is that you keep winning.”

  “I don’t want to die anymore,” I said.

  “I know. But you haven’t decided what to do about staying alive.”

  “I don’t want anyone else I know to die.”

  “But they all will,” she said, looking over her shoulder at the clock on the wall.

  “Some of them have.”

  “Catherine,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “The world is not perpetually sad in spite of the fact that the ones we love will all die,” Ann said.

  “Yes it is,” I said.

  “Time to stop. Next time, I hear your first lines.”

  She clapped her hands and rose. Her fingers were thin and the backs of her hands freckled with age. The wedding ring she wore looked too large, as if it would fall off.

  I got up and put my Cubs cap back on my head. We faced each other for a moment. She seemed to be trying to convey some question with the tilt of her head and a few seconds of silence. I felt the answer but had no words for it. I nodded to show that I had at least a glint of understanding. I got twenty dollars out of my wallet and handed it to her.

  When I stepped out into the sun, the homeless man was still on the bench squinting out at the setting sun. He had finished his coffee and biscotti, and his arms were spread out, draped over the bench. He was at home. He scratched his belly. I sat beside him and looked at the boats bobbing in the water. He didn’t acknowledge my presence.

  “You have a favorite first line from a book?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What is it?”

  “‘Kelsey Yarborough hated grits with salt but he ate them anyway because his mother told him it was good for him.’”

  “What’s the book?” I said, writing the line on one of my cards. I had a neat little packet of them now.

  “Kelsey Plays the Blues.”

  “Who wrote it?”

  “Kelsey Yarborough.”

  I looked at him, but he was too busy looking toward the sun. I thought I knew the answer to the unstated question, but I said nothing.

  He helped me out by saying, “Me. I’m Kelsey Yarborough.” He pointed a thumb at his chest.

  “You wrote a book?”

  “Hell no,” he said. “I wrote the first line of a book. “The rest of the book’s in my head and it’s never gonna come out. I wrote the music for the first notes of a song. That ain’t never gonna come out either. You know why?”

  “No.”

  “Because,” he said, tilting his head up so he could catch the dwindling warmth of the setting sun. “Got no creative juice. Got no interest. Now I got a question for you, but I don’t want no answer. My time’s too precious to spend getting involved.”

  “The question?”

  “Who is in that car comin’ this way down the block. Been circling ever since you went into the doctor’s office.”

  I looked down the street. There was a dark Buick of unknown age moving slowly in our direction. When it got close enough, I could see that its windows were tinted and dark.

  The passenger side window facing us came down slightly and the car stopped about fifteen feet in front of us.

  “Get down,” I said, going to the pavement prone and scurrying under the bench.

  Kelsey didn’t move other than to look down at me. The two shots came in rapid succession. Both seemed to whiz precariously close to Kelsey.

  Then the car sped away with a screech. I turned my head to catch the license plate number. I think it was one of the save-the-manatee plates, or tags, as they call them in Florida. It began with the letters C and X. The rest was obscured by dirt.

  I slid out from under the bench, picked up my hat, dusted it, and then wiped away the worst of the garbage that covered the front of my shirt and jeans.

  “That was for you,” he said. “Only reason anyone wanting to be shooting me is because I’m a black man and a homeless eyesore. More likely the message was for you.”

  “It was,” I said, putting on my cap.

  I left him sitting on the bench and moved down the street to my Saturn. There was a folded sheet of notebook paper, the kind with ragged edges and punched holes. I retrieved the note. It read:

  What Part of Stop Don’t You Understand?

  Would you understand a death march band?

  Listen to the distant Orleans clarinet.

  Turn away. There’s still time yet.

  It was written in a cursive script you don’t often see anymore.

  I had learned something in my session with Ann. I tried to figure it out as I drove, but I was distracted by the background voice on a talk radio station. The host, who had a New York accent, wanted callers to tell him what they thought about bombing Iran and sending troops if Iran continued to defy the United States and continued their race to build a nuclear weapon.

  The car from which someone had shot at me was not the one Greg Legerman had driven to pick up Winn Graeme. The shots that had been fired at me a few minutes earlier had not come from a pellet gun, but from something with real bullets. Either Greg had another car and a more impressive gun, or this was a new shooter.

  About seven or eight minutes later I was parked outside the Texas Bar and Grill on Second Street. I was calm with a this-isn’t-real calm. My hands didn’t tremble. I didn’t weep.

  When I stepped through the door of the Texas, Big Ed was behind the bar. He nodded at me and adjusted his handlebar mustache. Guns of the old West hung on the walls, and the smell of beer and grilled half-pound burgers and onions perfumed the air. Around eight round wooden tables people, almost all men, were having a heavy snack before heading home for healthy dinners.

  “Ames here?” I asked Big Ed.

  “Back in his room,” Big Ed said, nodding over his left shoulder.

  Ed was a New Englander who loved old Westerns and would have worshiped Lilly Langtree were she to return in ghostly form.

  “You know Wild Bill Hickok wasn’t holding aces and eights when he died? Bartender made it up. No one knows what he had. Grown men still feel a little panic when they look down at the dead man’s hand in a game of poker.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “You want a beer, a Big Ed Burger?”

  “Beer and a Big Ed with cheese.”

  Behind the bar there was a horizontal mirror with an elaborately carved wooden frame, painted gold.

  “The same for Ames,” I said.

  I looked at myself in the mirror and saw a short, balding Italian with a sad face wearing a Cubs baseball cap.

  “He told me,” Big Ed said, adjusting the curl in his waxed handlebar mustache with both hands. “About partnering up with you.”

  “You all right with that?” I asked.

  “Ames has partnered up with you since he met you. I’d like him to put in some hours here, too, in exchange for his
room, providing you don’t have too much work for him to do.”

  “I don’t expect to overwhelm him with work.”

  “Good,” said Big Ed after calling back to the tiny kitchen for two half-pound burgers.

  He poured two mugs of beer from the tap and clunked them down in front of him.

  “Work on your beer. I’ll go back and tell Ames that you’re here.”

  When Ames came out, tall, hair shampooed and white, he was dressed in his usual freshly washed jeans and a loose-fitting long-sleeved white flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

  We moved to a table next to two guys speaking in Spanish and sounding like they were having an argument half the time and telling each other jokes the other half.

  “You play poker?” I asked Ames.

  “I do.”

  “How good are you at it?”

  “Middling good,” he said. “But then most I’ve played think they’re middling good.”

  “I’m less than middling bad,” I said. “Remember Corkle saying he had something on Ronnie Gerall?”

  “I do.”

  “We’re going to try to find it.”

  We listened to the guys speaking Spanish and drank our beers until Big Ed motioned and Ames moved around the tables to pick up our burgers.

  “You good enough in a seven-card stud game to help someone else win?” I asked.

  “Depends on who’s watching and playing.”

  We ate as we talked. More people, including the two Spanish speakers at the next table, left and a few others came in. Big Ed handled them all, nodding just right at each new customer as if he had known them all his life.

  “Players are multimillionaires …”

  “Corkle,” said Ames.

  “Yes, and four others. They have a game every other week at Corkle’s house. Stakes are fifty and a hundred. You need four thousand to sit down.”

  “I’ve got two thousand,” he said.

  “I’ve got another two,” I said. “We’ll borrow a few thousand more from Flo in case we run out.”

  “Not like you to be beholding.”

  “Little by little, day by day, I’m trying to change,” I said.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Not too good,” I said, taking a bite of burger.

  The grilled burger was handmade by Big Ed from extra-lean meat and cooked to greasy perfection by the kitchen cook. I was hungry. The slightly burnt beef reminded me of a taste from the past that I couldn’t quite place.