“Does Sydney know what Stark was trying to do to her?”
“No, I don’t think they even looked at the bed when we left the room,” she said. “They weren’t even really awake.”
I checked my watch. Florida police had been under fire for months over not responding to 911 calls quickly enough. Time was running out.
“You came out of the bathroom,” I said to Janice Severtson. “You could tell he was drunk, mumbling. Words you couldn’t understand. Saw him stab himself. You called 911 and remembered that you had seen me, an old friend of your husband’s, in the hotel. You called me, brought the children to my room, and came back here to wait for the ambulance and police. You understand?”
“I…,” she said, looking at Stark.
“He’s been talking about killing himself for running away with you, his partner and best friend’s wife. He’s been talking about regretting things he did in the past. He’s been drinking and he got depressed when he drank. You’ve got that?”
“I…”
“Mrs. Severtson,” I said, “if you want to keep your kids out of this, you better remember. You tell the truth about what happened and why, and you lose your kids. Television news will get it and make it all very ugly. Your picture, the children’s picture all over the place, maybe network. Good-bye kids. Good-bye husband. Probably jail time. So, can you remember what to say?”
“He killed himself,” she said. “But why can’t I just say he attacked me and I defended myself?”
“That’s what you told me, and it took me about two minutes to figure out you were lying,” I said.
Stark’s hand and fingerprints were on the knife handle. Even if a smart cop thought something was more than a little suspicious, he probably wouldn’t pursue it. Stark had a record. Stark, Janice, and her children weren’t rednecks in a cheap motel room. Class still has its privileges.
“I’m going,” I said. “They’ll be here any second. You’ll be all right.”
It wasn’t a question but she answered more strongly than I expected.
“I’ll be all right.”
I moved toward the door.
“Wait,” she said.
I turned toward her. She went into the bedroom and came back almost immediately. She handed me the teddy bear, the stuffed elephant, and the pink blanket. I went out and moved fast without running toward the stairwell. Below, out of sight, I could hear the sound of voices in the lobby. I ran up the one flight and came out close to the wall where I couldn’t be seen by anyone eight flights below. I made my way to my room, opened the door, and found Sydney asleep on the sofa next to her brother, who was nodding off as he watched the end of the Dick Van Dyke episode. In her sleep, Sydney took the elephant and the pink blanket and clutched them to her chest.
Kenny looked at me. I handed him the teddy bear.
“What happened?” he asked, eyes blinking heavily. “Where’s my mom?”
“Mr. Stark had an accident,” I said.
“I don’t like him anymore,” the boy said. “Sydney doesn’t like him anymore either. He smiles, buys us stuff, but he’s a fake. We told Mom. She wouldn’t listen.”
“She’s listening now,” I said. “What did you see tonight before your mom brought you to my room?”
Kenneth didn’t hesitate.
“Andy was sleeping on the bed,” the boy said. “All covered up.”
“You want to get some sleep, Kenneth?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Get into the bed in the other room,” I said.
“Sydney might get up and be scared.”
“I’ll put her next to you.”
That seemed acceptable to him. I picked up the girl, who clung to her blanket and elephant. She smelled clean. She smelled like a little girl. I followed Kenny into the bedroom, where he watched me put his sister down on the bed. Then he climbed into the bed, put his head on the pillow, and fell asleep almost instantly with one hand touching his sister’s arm.
It was just a question of how long it would take some cop to knock at the door to my room. My story would be simple, always best to keep it simple. Friend of Janice’s husband, taking a few days off to enjoy the Orlando glitz, ran into them in the elevator. Then she brought me the kids. I didn’t know Stark. I didn’t know what he was doing there. Janice would have to swallow the humiliation and tell them the truth on that one. The cops would probably just go through the motions. No need to do anything else.
I was halfway through a Diet Dr Pepper and an ancient rerun of a Bob Newhart Show when the knock came.
The two uniformed cops looked as if they had been awakened from a deep sleep. They were both young. The older of the two, who was about thirty, asked the questions. The other one took the notes.
They stayed long enough to get statements from Janice Severtson and me. They didn’t wake the kids. Janice told them she had seen Stark stab himself but the kids hadn’t even seen the body. She told them she had brought them up to me when Stark stabbed himself. She said she had quickly run back down and found him on the bed. She got the blood on herself, she told them, when she tried to help him.
She was a good liar. So am I. She agreed to stay in Orlando the next day to come in, answer a detective’s questions, and sign a statement. They said the kids should stay in Orlando in case a detective wanted to talk to them. Then the cops said I could do whatever I wanted.
I asked Janice if she was going to be all right, took her to my room after the police let her gather some clothes, gave her my door card, packed in about a minute, put on my cap, and moved to the door.
“You might want to shower,” I said, “and get some sleep on the sofa.”
She nodded.
“Thank you,” she said. “I don’t think they believed me.”
“They believed me,” I said. “Shower, sleep.”
“Yes,” she answered, drained, automatic.
“You be all right?”
“Yes.”
I left, stopping at the desk, where the night manager heard my story, looked serious and sympathetic, and said he would be happy to give me a room for the rest of the night.
I checked my watch. It was almost five-thirty in the morning. The sun would be up in less than an hour.
“I don’t feel like seeing Mickey Mouse anymore,” I said.
“I had enough the first week I was here with my niece,” he said. “How much bouncy and jolly can an adult take?”
“A lot less than a kid,” I said.
I drove for a while on I-4, got off at a Lakeland exit, had an Egg McMuffin and coffee, and headed for Sarasota.
6
Traffic was weekday-morning heavy on both I-4 and I-75. I was back in the DQ parking lot and climbing the concrete stairs to my office and home a little after nine-thirty.
I called Kenneth Severtson’s number. No answer. I was relieved. I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t want questions.
“Your wife and kids will probably be back tomorrow,” I told his machine. “They’re fine. Be nice. Stark’s dead. Killed himself. A long story. Your wife will tell you.”
There was one message on my answering machine. It was one of the secretaries in the law offices of Tycinker, Oliver, and Schwartz.
“Mr. Fonesca”-her voice came through flat and dry-“Mr. Tycinker asked me to remind you that he needs those papers served on Mickey Donophin before Saturday. If we do not hear from you, he will assume you are unable to do this and will contact the Freewell Agency.”
I called Tycinker, Oliver, and Schwartz. There was no one there, but there was an answering machine.
“This is Lewis Fonesca,” I told it. “Tell Mr. Tycinker I’ll have the papers in Mickey Donophin’s hands within twenty-four hours.”
I hung up, got my soap, a towel, toothbrush and toothpaste, and my electric razor and moved toward the rest room I shared with the other tenants and Digger, an otherwise homeless old man, who was standing in front of the mirror over the sink when I went through the door.
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“Ah,” he said, looking at me in the mirror. “The little Italian.”
The rest room was almost always clean, which came as a stunning surprise to most visitors. A smiling, retarded man named Marvin Uliaks, for whom I had recently done a job, kept clean the rest room and most of the stores and storefront businesses on the three-block stretch of the seven short blocks of 301 between Main and the Tamiami intersection. He accepted whatever the business owners wanted to give him and smiled even when he was given only a quarter.
“How do I look?” Digger said, turning to me.
He looked like a disheveled mess of a human being who had put on a wrinkled gold tie that had nothing to do with his wrinkled blue-and-red striped shirt and sagging dark trousers.
“Dapper,” I said as he gave me room to get to the sink.
“Got a job interview,” he said over my shoulder, checking his tie in the mirror.
There was no hint of alcohol on his breath. There never was. Digger didn’t drink. He couldn’t afford to. He had told me when we first encountered each other by the urinal a few months ago that he neither drank nor took drugs.
“It’s my mind,” he had said. “Doesn’t function right. I lose days, weeks, get headaches, fall a lot.”
“Where’s the job interview?”
He moved out of the way so I could brush my teeth.
“Jorge and Yolanda’s,” he said, checking his own teeth over my shoulder and rubbing them with his finger.
I held up my tube of Colgate, and he held out a finger for me to drop some toothpaste on it.
“Obliged,” he said as I stepped out of the way after rinsing my mouth so he could work on his teeth.
Jorge and Yolanda’s was a second-floor ballroom-dance studio right across the street. I could see it from my office window.
Satisfied with his teeth, Digger rinsed with a handful of tap water and stepped back. I turned on my razor.
“Want to know what I’ll be doing?” he asked.
To the hum of my razor, I looked at him in the mirror and said, “Yes.”
“Dancing,” he said.
“Dancing?”
I stopped shaving.
“They have dances for their clients and prospective clients every Friday night,” he said. “They need extra men because they have more women than men. What’re you looking at me like that for? I’m a terrific dancer. Anything, you name it, waltz, tango, fox-trot, rumba, swing. You name it. I get fifteen bucks and all the appetizers I can eat every Friday night providing I don’t make a hog of myself.”
Digger used to be a pharmacist. He sometimes slept in a closet of one of the twenty-four-hour Walgreen’s. There was a seemingly infinite number of Walgreen’s and Eckerd drugstores in Sarasota, an even greater number of banks, and a supply of cardiologists, oncologists, and orthopedic surgeons that probably rivaled Manhattan’s.
I knew little about Digger’s past, didn’t want to know more.
“Sounds great,” I said, returning to my shaving. “Good luck.”
He looked at himself in the mirror again.
“Haven’t got a chance, have I?”
“Not a chance in the world,” I said, finishing my shave and checking my face for places I might have missed.
“What the hell. I said I was coming in, answered an ad in the paper. Said I was coming in. What the hell? It’s just across the street. What have I got to lose? You know?”
He started to loosen his tie.
“Got this tie at the Goodwill for a quarter,” he said. “Real silk, just this little stain where you can’t even really notice, but what the hell.”
“What time’s your appointment?” I asked, washing my face.
“Just said I should drop by some time after ten, but what the hell.”
“You’ve got time to shave, use a comb, get a pair of pants that fit, a white shirt, and a pair of socks and shoes at the Women’s Exchange.”
The Women’s Exchange consignment and resale shop was a few blocks down Oak Street.
“That’d cost,” he said, looking at me with eyes showing a lot of red and little white.
“How much?”
I dried my face.
“Ten, fifteen bucks,” he said.
I fished out a twenty and held it out. Digger took it.
“I gotta pay this back?” he asked.
“Get yourself something at the DQ if there’s anything left,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” Digger said, some of his confidence returning. “This isn’t a precedent.”
“I know,” I said. “Good luck.”
“Thanks. I tell you something? Now that the twenty is in my pocket?”
I nodded.
“You never smile.”
I nodded again.
“Some things are funny,” he said.
“Some things.”
“I mean, I’m not talking about a big smile like one of those yellow stickers. Just something besides doom and gloom.”
I imagined Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms, pushing up the corners of her mouth into a pathetic smile when her brute father ordered her to smile.
“I’m working on it,” I said, towel folded around my soap and shaving gear. “Know any jokes?”
“Couple maybe, if I can remember them,” he said. “Never could remember jokes. Wait, I’ve got one.”
He told it. I took out my notebook and wrote it down. The list for Ann Horowitz was growing. I already had the start of a second-rate stand-up act.
Digger looked as if he had something more to say but couldn’t come up with it.
“Wish me luck,” he said, going out the rest-room door ahead of me.
“Luck,” I said, and headed back to my office.
There were three new messages on my answering machine. I didn’t play them back. I knew I had a dying politician to find and not much time to do it and some papers to serve for the law firm of Tycinker, Oliver, and Schwartz, but there were other things more important at the moment, like spending the day on my cot sleeping when I could, watching a video of Panic in the Streets or A Stolen Life. I was trying to cut back on my dosage of Mildred Pierce.
I took off my pants and shirt, draped them on the wooden chair, and lay down after removing my shoes.
I didn’t have to sleep. Dreams came while I was awake. The dying Stark would be added to my sleeping nightmares. My waking dreams always came back to moments with my wife, little moments. A laugh shared across the table at the Bok Choy Restaurant, our buttery fingers meeting in a box of popcorn while we watched a movie I couldn’t remember. Her holding my face in her cool hands and looking into my eyes after we had an argument until I grinned and conceded her victory. Picking out the car in which she was killed.
There was an endless supply of pain. I savored every image, my depression fed on it. It wasn’t simply self-pity. There was some of that, but it was that deep sense of void, loss that I wanted to hold onto and lose at the same time.
I fell asleep before I could insert a videotape. I dreamed of nothing and was awakened by the ringing of the telephone. It was still light outside. I checked my watch. It was almost seven at night. The sun was going down. I went into the office and picked up the phone a ring before the machine kicked in to take the message.
“Fonesca,” I said.
“What happened?”
It was Kenneth Severtson asking a reasonable question.
“I left a message on your machine.”
I looked at the battered metal box I had picked up in a pawnshop on Main Street.
“So?” he asked anxiously.
I told him the story and ended with “They should be home soon. Your wife had to answer a few questions for the police.”
Long, long pause.
“He killed himself in front of Kenny and Sydney? She was in bed with him in front of Kenny and Sydney.”
“They were in another room. They’re young,” I said. “I don’t think the sex part sunk in.”
I didn’t believe t
hat and I wasn’t sure he would either, but it was a lie he could pretend to hang onto if he really wanted it.
“I’m thinking about a divorce and asking for custody of the children,” he said.
“Talk to Sally.”
“I don’t know. I want things the way they were,” he said, thinking out loud.
“I know, but it won’t happen. You take her back, you take the pain. There are things harder to take. Talk to Sally.”
“If there’s ever anything I can do,” he said.
I thought of asking him if he knew any jokes, but decided to say, “Thanks, you owe me some money. You can send it to me or drop it off.”
“How much?”
“Three hundred,” I said. “I’ve got to go.”
I played the messages, erased Severtson’s and two from Dixie to call her. I dialed Dixie at home.
“It’s me, Lew,” I said before she could cough or say hello in her fake hoarse voice.
“Roberta Goulding had a brother and a sister,” she said. “Brother, seven years younger, Charles. Sister, six years younger, now Mrs. Antony Diedrich living with her husband in Fort Worth. He’s got a Toyota and a Buick dealership. Don’t know where the brother is.”
“Thanks, Dixie,” I said.
“That’s not why I called mainly,” she said. “Kevin Hoffmann, member of the board of just about everything in Sarasota, major contributor to the Ringling Museum, Asolo Theater, Sarasota Ballet, Sarasota Opera, Pine View School and Booker School Scholarship funds, Committee to Open Midnight Pass. Goes on and on.”
“He’s bought lots of friends.”
“One might conclude,” said Dixie. “Makes lots of money, like lots.”
“Like?”
“Taxes on income over the past six years show over a million and half a year, some years over two million,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You haven’t heard the best,” she said. “He’s going to have a birthday Sunday.”
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