Read Always Say Goodbye: A Lew Fonesca Mystery Online

Authors: Stuart M. Kaminsky

Always Say Goodbye: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (20 page)

BOOK: Always Say Goodbye: A Lew Fonesca Mystery
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“You know who they are?” Lew asked.
“Yes, you met them at the hog-dog. They’re my sons, Chet and Matt. Different mother than Lilla. Mr. Fonesca, Mr. McKinney, I have many regrets, those two boys being high on the list, but that girl is the lone glow in my life of darkness. I live simple, but there’s not much meaning to it without that one pinpoint of light whose name is Lilla.” He paused and then said, “I laid it on a little too heavy-handed, didn’t I?”
“A little,” Lew said.
“Are they in Kane?” Lew asked.
“I don’t know, but I’m confident you can find them. You found me four years ago. I’ve asked some people who know people who owe people and I know you’re good at situations like this. They know about you.”
“They?” Lew asked.
Borg kept staring toward the horizon. Lew resisted looking at whatever it was Borg seemed to see out there.
“In my often wicked business, I meet and use and am used by people who have connections below the line of legality,” said Borg.
Lew looked at Ames, whose nod of yes was almost imperceptible.
“I need some information,” Lew said to Borg.
“Whatever you want,” said Borg. “Want to talk money first?”
“How much is she worth to you?” Lew asked.
“My fortunes have diminished a bit since you last saw me, but I’m far from impoverished. So, I’ll pay, at the far end of reasonable, whatever you ask if you bring her to me or her mother safely and get those two whelps the hell out of Florida forever.”
Lew looked at Ames, who met his eyes. Across the table Earl Borg stared between them.
“Gas, car rental, expenses, reimbursement for any information I have to buy.”
“That’s it?” asked Borg.
“There’s a children and family services fund in the county,” Lew said. “Give them a donation.”
“Four thousand?”
“Four thousand,” Lew agreed.
“Best deal I’ve ever made if you don’t count the time I got four acres of downtown Sarasota from a half-wit named Tarton Sparks,” said Borg. “Ask your questions. Take your time.”
 
 
Three hours up I-75 through heavy snowbird and normal traffic they passed a jackknifed truck that lay dead on its side. The truck’s hood was open like a
King Kong
dinosaur. After the gapers’ block, traffic moved faster, but not much. Early in the afternoon, Lew pulled into the same gas station and general store he had gone to the last time he had come to Kane. The boiled
peanuts sign was still there, now peeled away so that it read:
B ST OILED PEA TS IN THE SOUT
.
Another change from the last time Lew had come to Kane was that Ames McKinney was with him and armed with an impressive long-bareled revolver in the pocket of his yellow slicker. The revolver was there courtesy of Big Ed and the Texas Bar & Grille. Big Ed told people that the gun, which usually rested in a glass-covered display case on the wall behind the bar, had belonged to John Wesley Hardin. Ames doubted the legend, but admired the weapon. Ames’s job, among his others at the Texas, was to keep the display guns clean and in working order.
Lew filled the tank with gas.
The overweight woman behind the counter was the same one who had been there the last time. It even seemed to Lew as if she were wearing the same dress. She looked at Ames and then at Lew and back at Ames. Her hands were facedown on the glass countertop.
Lew handed her a twenty-dollar bill.
“Sixteen-twelve out of twenty,” she said as if making the transaction were a burden.
She opened the cash register with a soft grunt, deposited the twenty, counted out change, closed the register and faced Lew and Ames with a gun in her right hand.
“Why the gun?” asked Lew.
“Everyone in this town has a gun,” she said. “When a couple of new folks come to town and one is carrying a gun under his slicker, you consider if you might be on the wrong end of a holdup.”
“Makes sense,” said Ames. “But it’s not so.”
“I’ve been in here before,” said Lew.
“Don’t remember you,” she said, gun steady.
“Guess not. You know a girl named Lilla Fair, a woman named Denise Fair?” asked Lew.
The gun was steady in her hand. Her expression didn’t change.
“I know everybody in and around Kane,” she said. “All four hundred and eighty-two of them.”
“How many are named Lilla Fair?” Lew asked.
The woman’s eyes moved back and forth from Lew to Ames.
“Why?”
“She’s missing,” Lew said.
“No,” said the woman, shaking her head. “She’s with the Manteen boys. Left two days ago, stopped for gas. Ask me, I’d say Denise is some kind of fool to let Lilla go anywhere with Chester and Matthew. Lilla’s not a baby girl anymore, if you know what I mean.”
“I know,” said Lew. “Would you mind putting the gun down?”
“You related to Denise?”
“No,” said Lew. “Lilla’s father wants to be sure she’s safe.”
“Well, he will not soon have his wish,” she said. “Long as that girl is with those nutcrackers, he will not have reason to be sure she’s safe.”
She put the gun back under the counter and handed Lew his change.
 
 
Denise Fair stood on the wooden stoop of her two-bedroom, one-story box of a house. The house was about a two-minute drive from the gas station. From the look on her face, both Lew and Ames concluded that the overweight woman had called to announce that they were coming.
She wore tan slacks and an extra-large orange University
of Florida sweatshirt. Her arms were folded against her chest. She looked like a college student, hair tied back in a ponytail, skin clear, pretty.
“My name is Lewis Fonesca. This is my friend Ames McKinney. Earl Borg has asked us to find your daughter.”
She looked at the two of them and was clearly not impressed.
“Tell Earl,” she said evenly, “that I am still begging him to pay what they want. They wouldn’t hurt Lilla. They’ve known her all her life. They may be stupid, but they’re not going to molest or hurt their own half sister, especially if Earl gives them the goddamn few hundred dollars. Problem is that Lilla is diabetic. Her medication is gone. She took it when they … I think she has enough for …”—she shook her head and went on—“I don’t know. I know Matt and Chet. Lilla likes them, but they’re not … no, they wouldn’t hurt her.”
Both Ames and Lew knew she was trying to convince herself and was failing.
“Any idea where they might take her?” Lew asked.
“Earl’s still in Sarasota?”
“Yes,” said Lew.
“They don’t have much in the way of imagination,” she said. “They’d go where they could be close to the money they hoped to get from Earl.”
“Sarasota,” said Ames.
“Sarasota,” Denise Fair confirmed.
“Chet and Matt’s mother,” said Lew. “Is she in town?”
“Alma Manteen died last week,” she said. “May account for why they’re doing what they’re doing.”
“You have a photograph of Lilla we could borrow?” Lew asked. “A recent one.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll get it for you. You don’t have to return
it. Give it to Earl. Yes, I know, he can’t see it, but he can hold it. Give it to him and tell him to pay them. He’s stubborn, but the Lord knows Earl loves Lilla. If he won’t pay, then I pray the Lord guide you to her.”
“We’ll find her,” said Ames.
“Lilla’s all I’ve got,” she said. “I lost my son in Iraq.”
“Fred,” said Lew.
She looked at him.
“I was there when Lilla named the hog,” Lew said.
Denise Fair, arms still folded, went back into her house to find a photograph of her daughter.
IF THE PHOTOGRAPH OF
the girl was close to her reality, than Lilla Fair was not destined for beauty. She was thin, long dark hair over a smiling face, showing large teeth, round surprised eyes, and a night sky full of freckles. She looked more like Borg than she looked like her mother, but she really didn’t look that much like him either.
The bonus in the photograph was that a group of people in the background were standing with beer bottles in hand. Except for one, they weren’t paying attention to Lilla. The one looking at her was either Chet or Matt. The other twin was next to him in profile. He was hoisting a blur of a beer bottle toward his mouth.
The first thing Lew and Ames did when they got back to Sarasota was to make ten wallet-size machine copies of the photograph at Office Max on Bee Ridge. The second thing they
did was walk to the end of the mall and have dinner at the nofrills home cooking restaurant that featured mini-burgers.
“Dinner’s on Borg,” Lew said when they were seated across from each other at a small booth.
Lew had three mini-burgers with cheese. Ames had a steak, salad and mushroom soup.
When they finished, Lew gave Ames five of the copies of the photo and made a list of places and the people they should give the photographs to. Ames looked at the list and then at Lew.
“Let’s do it,” he said.
The list consisted of people whose names Ames recognized.
“Let’s do it,” Lew agreed. “I’ll take you back to the Texas. Then we split up. Take the ones I marked.”
“Sure you want it that way?”
“I’m sure,” said Lew.
“Suit yourself,” said Ames.
 
 
“I’m glum.”
Matt Manteen made the pronouncement from the bed in Room Six of the Blue Gulf Motel on Tamiami Road. His cap was perched on his head, his hands folded over a pillow on his stomach. He had always slept or taken a nap with a pillow on his stomach. He didn’t know why, and no one had ever asked, so he didn’t have to think about it. Matt had heard someone say, in a movie or something, “I don’t think about what I don’t think about.” It was his protective motto when asked to give an opinion on almost anything.
Matt had lots of opinions, all of them donated willingly by his dead mother and his brother. He would have welcomed a
few more from his father, but he had given up on that. His father, when he had seen him, mostly at the hog-dog, had given orders, not opinions. Now he and Chet were giving their father orders.
Couldn’t help it though. Matt was glum.
The shower was running behind the door about ten feet from the foot of the bed. A television on a table against the wall was on but mute. On the screen, an old man with big white teeth and toupee that didn’t match the color of what little hair he had left was holding up a white plastic thing like it was first-place prize in the county fair. He was looking right at Matt, talking, saying nothing.
“I’ll call him back in an hour,” said Chet, sitting in a chair, his feet propped up on the bed he would share with Matt again that night if they were still in Sarasota. Lilla, if she were still alive, would sleep on the couch again, which was fine with her. Matt kept looking at the old man on the television screen. To Chet, the old man seemed happy as shit.
Behind the closed door, Lilla wasn’t singing.
“What are we gonna do about Lilla’s medicine?” asked Matt.
“She’s got enough of the stuff for a couple of days.”
The pause was long.
“What if he won’t pay?” asked Matt.
Chet was the longer-term thinker of the Manteen brothers, which was not a fact that merited pride. Life for him was a checkers game he could handle only one move at a time. Matt couldn’t even play the game. It had nothing to do with intelligence. It was about concentration. When they were in grade school, every other day, as they had been ordered by their mother, they had taken the pills Dr. Winenholt had given her. Hadn’t helped. They were put in a “special” class. That didn’t
help. They were as smart as some of the other kids who didn’t go special. The Manteen brothers just couldn’t think ahead. Same thing in high school. “Jumpy,” that’s what their mother had told the teachers and principals. “My boys are jumpy.”
“Remember, if he won’t pay, we kill her,” said Chet. “It’s what we said we’d do and we’ve got nothing much in the world but our word.”
Matt shook his head, clutched the pillow more tightly to his stomach and said, “Killing Lilla won’t get us the money to make it to Montana. What it’ll get us is we’re murderers with no money instead of being not murderers with no money.”
“What are you talking about?” Chet asked, sitting up.
“I don’t know,” said Matt.
The shower thundered on. Chet glanced at the bathroom. A thin fog of steam lazily wisped under door.
“We are murderers,” said Chet.
“No,” said Matt, sitting up and pointing a finger at his brother, pillow still on his lap. “We killed two people. We did not murder them. We did not.”
“You shot the guy from Williston,” Chet said with weary exasperation. “The guy who won the money at the hog-dog, remember?”
“That,” said Matt emphatically, “was not murder. That was a necessity. We were broke. When good old Papa Borg closed the show, we were broke. I’m telling you something you already know here.”
“And Miss Theodora in the toilet at the All-Naked Girls Live?” asked Chet. “You shot her.”
“I’m not saying I didn’t. I did it right there in front of you and I’m saying I killed her, but it was not murder. It was a survival necessity. The difference seems to be a little too subtle for you,” Matt said. “Checkmate. That’s what they say in chess
when you know you’ve got the game won and I’ve got this argument won. We are not murderers.”
“You don’t know how to play chess,” said Chet. “You can’t even play checkers.”
“I can,” Matt insisted. “I just don’t play it very good.”
They had agreed on one thing this time. They hadn’t really kidnapped Lilla. They had known her all her life, liked her. Damn, they shared the same father. The problem, Chet thought, was that there hadn’t been a plan here. Matt counted on Chet and Chet counted on their mother and their mother was dead. They had left Kane for good, a few things in the car trunk. They had stopped at Lilla’s house, asked if she wanted to go for a ride and a frozen Snickers or boiled peanuts. Lilla had said “sure” and climbed in the backseat. Lilla’s mom hadn’t objected.
When they had stopped at the gas station at the edge of town to put in ten dollars of gas, Lilla, singing, had gone into the bathroom. That was when Chet told him that they were going to hold Lilla for ransom. It was only right. Two years ago, Papa Earl Borg had just padlocked the hog-dog show and walked away, didn’t give them a three-dollar thank you.
Where Earl Borg had always made money on the dogs and looked like he was having fun, Chet and Matt had lost what little they had, including the three dogs and two hogs. They didn’t even have enough to pay what they owed Ralph Derby for patching up the animals.
Chet figured Earl Borg owed them severance pay or an inheritance or something.
“So,” Matt said with resignation. “He doesn’t pay and we kill her.”
“That’s the way of it, brother,” answered Chet. “That’s what I said. We’ve got nothing left but each other and our good word. We said we would kill her and that we full intend to do.”
The old man on the TV was suddenly replaced by a blond woman who had her own smile and her own plastic thing to sell. The shower stopped.
“That’s the way of it, brother,” Chet repeated, reaching for the almost empty bag of Doritos on the bed.
 
 
The door of Flo Zink’s house on the bay was opened by Adele. She smiled at Ames. In her arms was her baby, Catherine, who squiggled and made bubbles with her mouth. Catherine had been given the name of Lew’s wife for two reasons. Lew Fonesca had twice saved Adele’s life, and Adele really liked the name Catherine. Now she loved it.
Adele stepped back to let Ames in. The open living-room area had a playpen near the window and the familiar, clean, unstylish Wild West wood and leather furniture. The stereo, which was wired to speakers all through the house, was on low. Slim Whitman was singing “Since You’re Gone.”
“Flo here?” Ames asked.
“Shopping,” said Adele, putting the baby gently on her stomach on the white rug.
Catherine began making the arm and leg movements that would soon lead to crawling.
To Ames, Adele didn’t look much different from the way she had cleaned up after she came to live with Flo almost two years ago. Adele was blond, had a full woman’s body, and was, Ames knew from experience, one damn smart young lady. She had gone from a life of physical abuse and teenage prostitution to being a mother, albeit unwed. She was also now a high school student applying to colleges, particularly to New College and the Ringling School of Art, where she could go and still be in this house with Catherine and Flo.
Ames handed her the photographs and said, “You see any of these people, call me or Lewis.”
Adele looked at the photograph and then at Ames, a question in her eyes.
“The twins in the picture kidnapped the girl.”
“She reminds me of someone,” Adele said, still holding the photograph. “Me. Can I get you a coffee, Pepsi?”
There was no alcohol in Flo Zink’s house. Temptation had been cast out for almost two years.
“No, thank you. Got to deliver more pictures.”
“Did he find out who killed his wife?”
“He did.”
“And?” she asked, looking at Catherine who looked as if she were about to lurch forward.
“Best he tell you when he’s ready.”
In the next hour and a half, Ames gave copies of the photograph to several of the neighborhood’s bartenders and also to the clerks at 7-11, Circle K, Burger King, McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken, and asked them to call him if they saw the twins or the girl. He told each of the people he talked to simply, “They may mean the girl harm. Her mother and father are worried for her.” Everyone he talked to had listened. On the back of each picture, Ames had printed his name, Texas Bar & Grille, and the phone number of the Texas.
Ames didn’t get back to the Texas on his motor scooter till after one in the morning. The Texas was closed and dark except for the nightlights. He let himself in the back door, put the gun back in the case behind the bar, and went to his room where he showered, shaved, put on his khaki pajamas. Then Ames got his reading glasses from the case on the table and read
The Marble Faun
. He finished the book a little before three in the morning and turned out the lights.
He would have four-and-a-half hours until he had to get up and start his chores. He needed no more. As he grew older, he found that he needed and was satisfied with less sleep.
 
 
Lew had given the photograph to the red-haired girl at the DQ window and shown it to the bartender at the Crisp Dollar Bill across the street from his office.
Then he went back to his office. It was too late to call Sally Porovsky, tell her what had happened in Chicago, ask if she could go out for a pizza after work tomorrow. He decided he wasn’t ready to tell her what had happened and was happening. He knew that once he started to talk about Chicago, about Victor Lee, about Earl Borg and the missing girl named Lilla, he would discover things he wasn’t ready to deal with. It was all tied together, knotted together inside him, but he didn’t know how.
There was someone else he would have to talk to before he could face Sally.
He looked at Dalstrom’s painting alone on the wall, the dark jungle with the spot of light and then he looked down at the photograph of the twins and Lilla.
The phone rang. It was two in the morning.
“Fonesca,” Earl Borg said calmly. “My idiot sons called. Ironic. For the first time in their lives, they think for themselves and their first decision is to kidnap their sister and demand money from their father. They want the money, in cash, forty thousand, or they’ll kill her. I told them I’d do it. But I won’t. You know why? Because, though my voice does not show it, I am fucking mad. In addition to which, those morons might just kill Lilla even if I pay them. Or they might take her with them wherever they plan to go even if I pay them and rape her or … who knows what.”
“Where are you supposed to pay and when?”
“They’ll call at nine in the morning, let me talk to Lilla,” said Borg. “And then I have half an hour.”
“They know you’re …”
“Blind, yes. I told them I’d send someone. Can’t be you. They’re not bright, but they don’t have Alzheimer’s. They might recognize you from the hog-dog business and you might not be able to get close enough to them. Your lanky friend will do quite nicely.”
“Pay them,” Lew said.
BOOK: Always Say Goodbye: A Lew Fonesca Mystery
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