Retribution: A Lew Fonesca Novel (Lew Fonesca Novels) Read online

  PRAISE FOR STUART KAMINSKY

  “As accomplished as he is prolific.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Perhaps it is time to declare award-winning Stuart Ka-minsky as the reigning monarch of excellent detective series.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  RETRIBUTION

  “A polished follow-up to Vengeance… Kaminsky is such a pro that the pages fly by, and even though Lew is often such a sad sack, it’s hard not to root for him.”

  —The Chicago Tribune/The Orlando Sentinel

  “Lew is still a triumph: a Lew Archer type with nerve endings so sensitive that when he’s asked, ‘anybody dead?’ he replies, ‘Most of the people who ever lived. ‘”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Kaminsky’s gifts for visceral scene-setting, for dialogue that has perfect pitch, and for telling details are much in evidence here.”

  —Booklist

  “Kaminsky has another winner.”

  —The Arizona Republic

  “An excellent hard-boiled private-eye novel.”

  —The Sunday Republican

  “Kaminsky expertly delivers a sense of foreboding in Sarasota where ‘one can spend a day, a week or a lifetime avoiding the mean streets, the dark corners … Sarasota is a beautiful bright orange blanket over a layer of darkness. Most people who come here don’t look under the blanket’.”

  —The Sun-Sentinel

  “Written with the distinct voice of its main character and an attention to details that would seem relevant to him, Retribution has a very Raymond Chandler-like feel and is a superb installment in the Lew Fonseca series which will hopefully enjoy the same longevity Kaminsky’s other creations have.”

  —Rapport

  “Well written and briskly paced.”

  —The Capital Times

  BY STUART M. KAMINSKY

  Lew Fonesca Mysteries

  Vengeance*

  Retribution*

  Abe Lieberman Mysteries

  Lieberman’s Folly

  Lieberman’s Choice

  Lieberman’s Day

  Lieberman’s Thief

  Lieberman’s Law*

  The Big Silence*

  Not Quite Kosher* †

  Toby Peters Mysteries

  Bullet for a Star

  Murder on the Yellow Brick Road

  You Bet Your Life

  The Howard Hughes Affair

  Never Cross a Vampire

  High Midnight

  Catch a Falling Clown

  He Done Her Wrong

  The Fala Factor

  Down for the Count

  The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance

  Smart Moves

  Think Fast, Mr. Peters

  Buried Caesars

  Poor Butterfly

  The Melting Clock

  The Devil Met a Lady

  Tomorrow Is Another Day

  Dancing in the Dark

  A Fatal Glass of Beer

  Porfiry Rostnikov Novels

  Death of a Dissident

  Black Knight in Red Square

  Red Chameleon

  A Cold, Red Sunrise

  A Fine Red Rain

  Rostnikov’s Vacation

  The Man Who Walked Like a Bear

  Death of a Russian Priest

  Hard Currency

  Blood and Rubles

  Tarnished Icons

  The Dog Who Bit a Policeman

  Nonseries Novels

  When the Dark Man Calls

  Exercise in Terror

  Biographies

  Don Siegel: Director

  Clint Eastwood

  John Huston, Maker of Magic

  Coop: The Life and Legend of Gary Cooper

  Other Nonaction

  American Film Genres

  American Television Genres (with Jeffrey Mahan)

  Basic Filmmaking (with Dana Hodgdon)

  Writing for Television (with Mark Walker)

  *denotes a Forge book

  †forthcoming

  RETRIBUTION

  A Lew Fonesca Novel

  Stuart Kaminsky

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  RETRIBUTION: A LEW FONESCA NOVEL

  Copyright © 2001 by Double Tiger Productions, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN: 0-812-54036-0

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001040483

  First edition: December 2001

  First mass market edition: December 2002

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Enid,

  who fills my days with life

  and touches my nights with her smile

  With thanks to Stephen King

  for suggesting that I tackle

  this story idea

  Terror in the house does roar, But Pity stands before the door.

  —William Blake,

  “Morning”

  Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  PROLOGUE

  IN ABOUT FIFTY THOUSAND years, give or take a few centuries, the state of Florida will be gone. The Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean will cover the peninsula that rests just above sea level. Geologists tell us it has happened before and they know about when it will happen again.

  This information does not keep the tourists, retirees, winter residents from the North who Floridians call snowbirds, and the less than savory drifters and always hopeful dreamers from adding each year to the population. They are attracted by the weather, beaches, opportunities for theft and mayhem, or the hope of a last frontier or a final resting place.

  The west coast of Florida faces the Gulf of Mexico. On the white sand shore a little over fifty miles south of Tampa lies Sarasota.

  Money magazine ranks the city as one of the fifteen most livable communities in the United States. Southern Living magazine recently named Sarasota County “the nation’s per capita arts capital.” The wealthy residents sponsor and support five live equity theaters, world-class museums, an opera company and opera house, a ballet company, a performing arts center, a circus tradition, and lots of film festivals.

  One can spend a day, a week, or a lifetime avoiding the mean streets, the dark corners, and the violence that occurs daily, at least until they become a victim or witness it on television.

  Sarasota is a beautiful bright orange blanket over a layer of darkness. Most people who come here don’t look under the blanket.

  And then the newspaper or television news on Channel 40 lifts it to safely reveal a woman murdered in front of her infant triplets, a cabdriver staggering into the lazy Sarasota-Bradenton Airport bleeding from two b
ullet wounds in the chest, the rape and murder of a woman in her bed in a safe and expensive condominium community.

  For every high-rise there is a trailer park.

  For every theater there are six crack houses.

  For every festival there are a dozen bank robberies.

  For every millionaire there are a hundred desperate souls who would kill for twenty dollars.

  For every new upscale mall there’s a Circle K waiting to be robbed. The night clerk working is often a single mother with a child or two, her eyes questioning each customer who enters after dark.

  And for me, two men had died in the past two days and a woman had died twenty-two years before them.

  Nothing really held their deaths particularly together but me. The first death hadn’t even made it to television. Each of the other two turned out to be big stories for almost a week until a teenage girl and her boyfriend murdered the girl’s mother. That was news because the dead woman and the girl were white and the boyfriend black.

  Our murders are frequent, black, white, and red, colorful, the stuff our natural, morbid curiosity draws us to, and then we move away to work, eat, watch television, or go out to the movies.

  I want nothing but to be left alone. I don’t want corpses, problems, weeping women, doomed children. I don’t want them but they make their way to me. I had come to Florida, to Sarasota, to escape from memories of the dead.

  I had fled from such visions, from the helpless who asked for help, from the dead who needed no help, and from those who were haunted by ghosts who were as real to them as my ghosts are to me.

  The world intrudes on my seclusion because I need to eat, to have some place to live, and to keep my clothes reasonably clean. I work as little as I can and live in isolation as much as I can.

  The Cincinnati Reds have spring training here and we have a minor league team, the SaraSox. I’ve never gone to a game, the opera, the ballet, or one of the five live theaters.

  I take my pleasures in small guilty doses.

  Until the very end, I took no pleasure in what I had just been through.

  It had begun with pain and ended with promise. I’ll tell you about it.

  1

  THE LEFT SIDE OF my face hurt.

  A woman named Roberta Dreemer, affectionately known to her few friends and many enemies as Bubbles, had filled the doorway of her rusting trailer in the mobile home park just across from the Pines Nursing Home seconds after I knocked. Bubbles Dreemer was a very big woman.

  She had been easy to find. She had a phone and it was listed in the Sarasota phone directory. It seemed like a quick, easy job for Richard Tycinker, attorney-at-law in the firm of Tycinker, Oliver and Schwartz with offices on Palm Avenue who needed Big Bubbles’s testimony in an assault case.

  I handed Bubbles the folded sheet. She looked at it for a beat and hit me. Then she slammed her door.

  It was a Thursday. Still morning. I was sitting by myself in a booth at the back of the Crisp Dollar Bill, almost directly across from my office/home on Washington Street, better known as 301. I was doing my best to forget Bubbles Dreemer. I’m not good at forgetting. That is one reason I see Ann Horowitz, the shrink treating me for depression.

  I had bicycled to the trailer park and back to save the cost of a car rental. From where I lived and worked I could bike or walk to almost anything I needed or wanted in Sarasota. Before I went into the Crisp Dollar Bill I had stopped at the Main Street Book Store, the largest remaindered bookstore in Florida, gone up to the third floor, and bought a two-videotape 1940 serial of The Shadow starring Victor Jory. It took six dollars of my fifty. I was using some of what was left on a beer and a Philly steak sandwich that, thanks to Bubbles, was a little painful to eat.

  My name is Lew Fonesca. When people look at me, they see a five-foot-seven, thin, balding man, a little over forty years old with a distinctly Italian, distinctly sad face. That’s what I see when I look in the mirror, which I do my best to avoid.

  I came to Florida five years ago from Chicago after my wife died in a hit-and-run accident on Lake Shore Drive. I was headed for Key West. My wife, whose name I’ve spoken only twice since she died, was a lawyer. I was an investigator in the office of the state’s attorney of Cook County. My specialty was finding people. I’m not a cop. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not a private investigator. I’m not even an accountant.

  My car had died in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen that I could see from the booth in which I was sitting at the Crisp Dollar Bill if I leaned to my right and looked through the amber window. Thirty feet from where my car died, there had been a “FOR LET” sign on the run-down two-floor office building at the back of the DQ parking lot. I had rented a small two-room office on the second floor, converted the small reception room into an underfurnished office and the equally small office behind it into the place I slept, read, watched television and videotapes, and thought about the past.

  My goal in life was simple. To be left alone. To make enough to keep me in breakfast, burgers, videotapes, an occasional movie, and payments to my shrink.

  Almost all my meals were eaten within a few hundred yards of where I lived, worked, and watched old movies on tape. There was Gwen’s Diner at the junction of 41 and 301 where a big photograph of young Elvis in white smiled out in black and white with a proud sign under it that said, “Elvis Presley ate here in 1959.” There was the DQ owned by a sun-weathered man named Dave who spent most of his time alone in his small boat in the Gulf of Mexico. And there was the Crisp Dollar Bill where the bartender and owner Billy Hopsman played an endless series of tapes and CDs he loved that seemed to have nothing in common. There was Mel Torme, Verdi operas, the Pointer Sisters, Linda Ronstadt, Ruben Blades, B. B. King, Blue Grass, Dinah Washington, Sinatra, and odd German stuff that sounded like Kurt Weill gone into a depression not far from my own. You never knew who you might hear from the Bose speakers when you entered the Crisp Dollar Bill. Right now it was Joe Williams singing “Don’t Be Mad at Me.” Billy had been a hippie, a cabdriver, and for a brief time a minor league catcher with a very minor league Detroit Tigers farm team. Best of all, Billy was not a talker. He wasn’t much of a listener either except for his large collection of tapes.

  The door of the Crisp Dollar Bill opened and in walked Marvin Uliaks. Actually, you couldn’t call Marvin’s mode of transportation “walking.” It was much closer to a shuffle. In this case, a nervous shuffle.

  Marvin had brought an unwelcome blast of sun behind him reminding me that there were hours to go before I could call it a day.

  “Close the door,” Billy said automatically without looking up from the copy of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune laid out on the bar in front of him.

  Marvin shifted the weight of the oversized book under his arm, pulled himself together, and closed the door. Then he squinted, blinked, and tried to adjust his eyes to the amber darkness.

  Marvin’s nose was pushed to one side as if his face were permanently pressed against a store window. His large popping eyes made him look amazed at even the most inconsequential contact with other human beings. Marvin was short, had an unkempt mess of brown hair beginning to show gray at the temples, and was so thin that you wondered how well he could stand up against an evening breeze off the Gulf. I imagined Marvin in a hurricane, arms out, hair blowing as he went spinning in the air, a startled look on his face as he passed the same cow Dorothy had seen on her way to Oz.

  Marvin had the kind of face that made people say, “He’ll never win a beauty contest.” As I was soon to discover, people were once again wrong. The great “they,” the ones we mean when we say “they say,” were often wrong but completely protected by being someone other than you and me.

  Marvin’s eyes adjusted quickly and he headed straight for my booth. He dropped the huge book in front of me and sat facing me across the table. The pockets of his well-weathered denim jacket were as bulged out as his eyes. He folded his hands in front of him on the table and looked at me.

 
“Look at it,” Marvin said.

  He was harmless and quiet, two levels below minimally bright. I pushed my Shadow videos aside and opened what was clearly an album of photographs and newspaper clippings. The first item was a newspaper clipping that said Marvin Uliaks, age three, had won the annual cutest child contest at the county fair in Ocala in 1957. The article, wiltingly Scotch-taped in the album like every other item, had a photograph of a smiling blond kid with curly hair wearing a sailor suit. The kid was pointing at the camera and beaming. Flanking the little boy were a thin, sober-looking man with a baby in his arms and a pretty brunette who was holding Marvin’s free hand. The woman wore a little hat and held her free hand up to shield out the sun. The man and woman were identified as the proud parents of Marvin.

  “That’s me all right,” Marvin said, tapping a finger on the newspaper clipping. “My mother, my father, and my baby sister.

  “My sister, Vera Lynn. She was named for a singer.”

  “‘Till We Meet Again.’” I said.

  “Don’t know where, don’t know when,” Marvin sang. Vera Lynn, the British singer during World War II, was a favorite of my father’s who made it through the war with all his organs and body parts except his right eye.

  “Look at the next one,” Marvin said with excitement.

  In the photograph, Marvin’s father was holding the little blond boy upside down by the ankles. The father had a little smile. The boy was grinning.

  “Turn the album upside down,” Marvin said, turning the album. “See, now I look right side up and my father looks upside down.”

  “You’re right,” I said, turning the album around again.

  “Marvin, what…?”

  “Keep looking, Mr. Fonseca. Keep looking,” he urged, turning the page.

  “Fonesca,” I corrected.

  “Yeah, oh, sorry. My name’s Uliaks.”

  “I know,” I said, looking at several pages of photographs that meant nothing to me.

  “I went to your office,” Marvin said. “You weren’t there. I went to Gwen’s. You weren’t there either. I went…”