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

  “You found me,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, shaking his head once with pride.

  “Why?” I reached for my beer.

  “I want you to find Vera Lynn.”

  “You want me to find your sister,” I said, putting the beer down. “I’m a process server. I find people to give them orders to appear at court or in a lawyer’s office for a deposition, or to produce documents. I’m not a private investigator.”

  “You find people,” Marvin said. “I heard. Old guy at Gwen’s told me.”

  “A few times,” I said. “A few times I found some people.”

  “There, there she is,” he said, tapping on a photograph on the page I had just turned to. He was tapping on the color photograph of a very pretty and very well sculptured blonde in a blue dress. The girl was smiling. Her teeth looked white and perfect. I guessed she was no more than eighteen. Another girl about the same age stood next to the blonde. She was pretty, thin, wearing a red dress and no smile.

  “Who’s the other one?”

  Marvin craned his neck awkwardly to get a better view at the photograph with a look of amazement as if he were seeing it for the first time.

  “Sarah,” he said. “She’s been dead a long time. I need to find Vera Lynn.”

  He was looking at me and rocking back and forth.

  “When was the last time you saw Vera Lynn?” I asked.

  He bit his lower lip considering the question.

  “Twenty, twenty-five years maybe. I got a letter.”

  He reached over and turned the album pages quickly past yellowed notes, withering photographs, cracking postcards, matchbooks, and some candy wrappers.

  “Here,” he said, triumphantly slapping the page he was looking for with the palm of his hand.

  I was looking down at an envelope.

  I had come to the Crisp Dollar Bill to have a sandwich, a beer, and to feel sorry for myself, not for Marvin Uliaks. I removed the letter from the envelope.

  Marvin fidgeted around and leaned forward getting nearly on top of me.

  “Letter’s from Vera Lynn,” he said, pointing to the neatly scripted name in the corner of the envelope I had laid aside. “She’s not in Ocala no more. She’s not in Dayton no more. I called, asked. Long time ago. I looked for her couple of times. Took the bus or a car out of Ocala after the wedding.”

  I was tempted to ask Marvin about Dayton and whatever wedding he was talking about. I didn’t. Instead, I said, “This letter’s almost twenty-five years old.”

  “I know. I know. I just want you to find her. Tell me where she is, is all.”

  “Why?”

  “Family business,” he whispered as he rocked. “Important family business. All I can say about it. Family business is all I can say.”

  “Why now after all this time?” I asked.

  “Somethin’s come up. Family business. I don’t want to talk about it. Please just find Vera Lynn. Let me talk to her, like just a minute. Converse.”

  “Fresh beer?” Billy called from the bar.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “On me, Mr. Fonesca,” Marvin said. “On me.”

  “You want privacy, Mr. F.,” Billy said from behind the bar. “I’ve got a job out back Marvin can do, cleaning out the cabinets.”

  Marvin shook his head “no.”

  “No, thanks,” I told Billy. “Marvin and I are old friends.”

  Actually, I had known Marvin for a couple of years, but we weren’t friends. He did odd jobs in the three-block stretch of stores on 301 from Main Street to the Tamiami intersection, basically my neighborhood. Marvin washed windows, ran errands, swept up in exchange for food from the restaurants, an old pair of shoes or pants from a shoe or clothing store, a dollar from other businesses, and a place to sleep behind the sagging Angela’s Tarot and Palm Reading shop down the street from where I worked and lived.

  I was now engaged in the longest conversation I had ever had with my friend Marvin.

  “I got a confession, Mr. Fonesca. I got drunk. Just a little. To get up the nerve to come find you. Then I was ashamed of being drunk so I sobered. So now my head is hurting fierce.”

  I gulped the last of my beer, patted Marvin on the shoulder, slid out of the booth, and got up.

  “She’s gone, Marvin,” I said. “Get some sleep.”

  “I’ve got money,” he said, digging into the pockets of his old denim jacket. Crumpled singles, fives, and tens appeared in his gnarled fists. He dropped them on top of the open album and kept digging into his pockets.

  “See, I can pay.”

  Like a kid doing magic tricks Marvin continued to produce bills from his pants pockets, shirt pocket, the cuffs of his socks.

  Lincoln and Washington looked up at me from the top of the heap of bills.

  “We got a discrepancy there?” Billy called.

  Marvin was hyperventilating now, his large eyes fixed on my face waiting for the answer to all his prayers.

  “Almost all my life’s savings,” he said, his face pressing against an imaginary window of expected failure. “Just about all I’ve got. I’m not asking for favors here. Oh, no. I’m hiring you just like any other Joe. You too busy now? Okay, but I’m a… a…”

  Marvin wasn’t sure of what he was and I wasn’t going to tell him.

  “Billy,” I called. “You have a paper bag?”

  Billy looked over at the pile of bills.

  “For that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Paper or plastic?”

  “Paper,” I said.

  Billy pulled a paper bag from under the bar, came around, and handed it to me. I shoved Marvin’s money into it and handed Marvin the bag. He pushed it back at me.

  “I’m saying ‘please,’” Marvin said. He looked as if he were going to cry.

  “Twenty dollars a day,” I said with a sigh. “If I don’t find Vera Lynn in five days, I give it up and you promise to give it up. Deal?”

  Marvin went stone still.

  “Give me forty in advance for two days,” I said. “Most it can cost you is a hundred. I’ll need the album and the letter.”

  He nodded and smiled.

  “That’s business,” he said, holding out his hand. We shook and he dipped into the paper bag to pull out four tens. He handed them to me. “All’s you got to do is find her, tell me where she is. I’ll do the rest. It’s important.”

  “I’m closing up for an early lunch, Mr. F.,” called Billy, closing the newspaper. “Meeting some people at Longhorn. Place’s like a morgue this morning anyway.”

  I assumed both Marvin and I were prime contributors to the funereal atmosphere.

  I closed the album, tucked it under my arm, went to the bar, and handed Billy one of the four tens Marvin had put in my hand. Billy nodded and Marvin followed me into the street.

  Traffic was moving slowly, but there was a lot of it. I wanted to cross the street, go to my room, and watch The Shadow, but I knew I’d be looking at Marvin Uliaks’s album.

  “Anything else you can tell me about her?” I asked.

  “All in the book,” he said, tapping the album. “All the answers I got. Like the Bible. Got the answers. You just have to figure out what they mean. I never could, not in the album, not in the Bible, not in any book pretty much even when I was a kid. But you know how to find me. Right now I’m going to Lupe’s Resale to do some work unless you want me to come with you.”

  “Go to Lupe’s,” I said. “I’ll find you if I need you.”

  He stood on the sidewalk while I waited for a break in traffic and jogged across the street, past the DQ, through the parking lot, and up the stairs to my office. When I turned around, Marvin was standing where I had left him looking up at me. I motioned for him to go to Lupe’s. I pointed in the right direction. He shook his head in understanding and walked to his right while I entered my office.

  Home. The day was cool. A little over seventy degrees. Typical winter in Sarasota. I didn’t need the air
-conditioning, which was good because I don’t have any. The ancient air conditioner that came with the office had given out. Ames McKinney had kept it alive for more than a year. We had buried the window unit in the Dumpster at the DQ with Dave’s permission.

  I opened the windows, pulled the chains on the Venetian blinds, flipped on the fluorescent light, and listened to it crackle as I sat down at my desk with Marvin’s album in front of me.

  There wasn’t much in the office to distract me. There was a single chair across the desk. A wastepaper basket with a Tampa Bucs logo under the desk and facing me on the wall was a poster, the only decoration in the room, an original Mildred Pierce. Joan Crawford looked across at me feeling my pain and Mildred’s. Tomorrow was Friday. I’d watch my tape of the movie tomorrow night in the next room where I had my cot, television, and VCR. Tonight I was watching The Shadow.

  The beer and Marvin’s appearance had taken a little of the sting from my cheek. Not enough, just a little.

  Except for a possible call from a lawyer with papers to serve and dinner that night with Sally Porovsky and her kids at the Bangkok, Marvin Uliaks’s album was the only obligation on my schedule for the week. It was more than I would have wanted, except for Sally and the Bangkok, but I had taken the forty from Marvin. I touched the cover of the album and glanced at my answering machine.

  I got the answering machine from a pawnshop on Main Street. It was so old it would probably be worth taking to the Antiques Road Show in another few years. But it worked. I didn’t want to talk to people, not to old friends and acquaintances in Chicago, not to my own relatives, certainly not to the Friends of the Firefighters or someone claiming they could save me money on my phone bills. So, I never answered my phone, even when I was in my office or my room. If I was there and I was willing to talk to the person who started to leave a message, I would pick up. My answering machine message to callers was eloquent in its simplicity: “Lew Fonesca. Leave a message.”

  I put a tentative finger on my cheek where Bubbles had slapped me. My cheek didn’t appreciate the touch. There were two messages on the machine.

  Message one: “This is Richard Tycinker’s assistant Janine. Mr. Tycinker has an order for appearance at a deposition for you to serve, maybe two if I get the paperwork and court date set this afternoon.”

  Message two: “Lew? Flo here. Give me a call. Adele’s … It’s about Adde.”

  Tycinker could wait. I didn’t like the way Flo sounded.

  I had known Flo Zink for about three years. She was loud, vulgar, sixty-eight years old, in love with country and western music, and very rich. Flo lived in a big house on the coast with a great view of Sarasota Bay. When her husband Gus had died two years earlier, Flo, who had developed a friendship with gin decades earlier, made it a love affair. Adele Hanford was an orphan who had been through more hell in her sixteen years of life than most families would experience in five generations.

  Adele had run away from her mother to join her father in Sarasota. Her father had not only sexually abused her but turned her over to a cheap pimp on the North Trail who had in turn sold her to a middle-time slug named John Pirannes. Adele was an orphan because her father had murdered her mother who had tried to protect Adele. Adele had shot Pirannes and her father was killed by… but that story’s over. With the help of family therapist and friend Sally Porovsky, I had managed to have Adele taken in by Flo as a foster child. Adele had gone straight. Adele was doing well at Sarasota High School, even won a few prizes for poetry and stories, one of which was published in Sarasota City Tempo magazine. Adele’s story was about an abused girl who runs away from her family and finds salvation and respect as a waitress. I liked the story. I didn’t like the message from Flo. Flo had given up her love affair with alcohol for the chance to take in Adele. I didn’t know with certainty how tempting the memory of the comfort of gin might be and Flo’s voice was a toss-up between tipsy and distraught. Adele wasn’t easy. Before I called Flo, I opened Marvin Uliaks’s album.

  Marvin’s album contained eighty photographs and a few postcards and newspaper clippings. Under each photograph Marvin had neatly printed in pencil the name of the person or persons or things in the photographs. No dates. I went through photographs of parents, aunts, uncles, people I supposed were friends, pictures of people clipped from magazines and newspapers including Mario Van Peebles, Al Unser, Bette Midler, Lionel Hampton, the Marlboro Man, Lainie Kazan, Bruce Cabot, and Douglas MacArthur. There were a few dozen of Marvin as he aged from golden childhood to gradual nearly blank homeliness. In each photograph, Marvin was smiling or grinning. He looked better smiling. There were also six photographs of Vera Lynn. In the most recent one she looked about eighteen, a pretty girl in a white Sunday dress with a big white bow in her short blond hair. Marvin’s little sister would be in her mid-forties now.

  I read the one letter in the album, the one Marvin had shown me. It didn’t help much. It was postmarked Dayton, Ohio. It was in pencil, short, written simply in block letters for a slow-witted brother or by a slow-minded sister.

  DEAR MARVIN,

  CHARLES AND I ARE MARRIED. WE ARE GOING TO MOVE. FORGIVE ME. I’LL WRITE AGAIN.

  YOUR SISTER,

  VERA LYNN

  Vera Lynn’s printing was clear. Finding her might be easy or impossible. If I ran into emptiness, I could simply give Marvin his album back. I wouldn’t insult him by trying to return the forty dollars.

  I decided to call Richard Tycinker’s office first. I got his secretary Janine who told me the papers were ready for me to pick up for delivery.

  “Bubbles Dreemer slapped me in the face when I slapped her with the papers,” I said.

  “Part of the job, Lewis,” she said.

  Janine was black, in her late thirties, raising two kids alone and managing to look like a model. Sympathy was not part of her job description.

  “I was telling you so you could make a note in her file for the next person who served her papers,” I explained.

  “If it happens,” she said, “it will probably be you.”

  “I’ll deliver it in a hockey mask,” I said.

  “Summons delivered by Michael Myers,” said Janine.

  “Might stun her long enough for me to get away.”

  “Might,” she agreed. “It would work on me.”

  “Is Harvey in?” I asked.

  Harvey was the official file coordinator for the firm of Tycinker, Oliver and Schwartz. His real job was unofficial computer hacker. Schwartz had offered me a retainer. I had turned down the retainer and agreed to a flat fee for each legal paper I delivered to the unwilling and often unsuspecting. Instead of the retainer, I got the use of Harvey’s talents when I needed them. Harvey had once been a successful businessman in love with alcohol, computers, and a series of three wives, all of whom eventually left him alone with his computers and the bottle. Lately he had cut out the alcohol and was spending more time on the computer, Diet Pepsi, and women. There was enough unravaged in the forty-nine-year-old Harvey to attract some very attractive women.

  Harvey had a very well equipped room down a corridor near the washrooms where the lawyers and secretaries could drop by and check on whether Harvey was drinking Diet Pepsi or something stronger.

  Some of what Harvey did bordered on the illegal. The firm knew it, counted on it and the signed document by Harvey that he would never engage in any illegal activity on the Internet.

  Janine connected me with Harvey, who answered, “Yes?”

  “It’s Lew,” I said. “Got your pen?”

  “Always.”

  “Vera Lynn Uliaks. Born, I think, in Ocala. Lived there till about 1970, somewhere in there. Moved to Dayton, Ohio, maybe. Probably got married there. Don’t know to who, someone named Charlie. Brother here in town, Marvin Uliaks.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” I said.

  “Are we in a hurry? I’ve got a few company projects.”

  “No big hurry,” I said.

/>   “Should have it for you by tomorrow,” said Harvey. “You want to call me?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Having a bad day, Lew?” he asked.

  “They’re all bad days,” I said.

  “I’ve been there,” Harvey answered. “Back to work.”

  He hung up. So did I.

  Flo Zink was next on my short list. The phone rang once. Actually, it was only half a ring when she picked it up.

  “Lew?” she asked.

  There was a lot in that question. Panic with a dash of fear and maybe, just maybe, a shot of Jack Daniel’s.

  “How are you, Flo?”

  “How am I? How am I? How the fuck do I sound?”

  “Charming,” I said.

  “How fast can you get here?” she asked.

  “On my bike? Half an hour.”

  “Rent a car. I’ll pay.”

  “Flo, what…?”

  “Adele’s gone. I’m not going to spill my soul on this goddamn telephone. Get here.”

  She hung up. I checked my watch. I had an appointment with Ann Horowitz in two hours. I don’t have a shower. I don’t have a sink or a toilet. I usually shower after my morning workout at the YMCA downtown, which is a ten-minute walk from my place. But there is a building rest-room outside my office and four doors down. It is not on the top ten list of facilities in Sarasota County, but it had a mirror and I had an electric razor, the same one my father had used for ten years before he died and my mother gave it to me in a box of his things. It worked well enough to get me through the day.

  The thin guy in the mirror looked at me and shook his head as we shaved. I normally didn’t take a good or even passing look at the man in the mirror. His cheek was Bubbles Dreemer pink. I didn’t like meeting his sad spaniel look. I washed, brushed my teeth, combed back my remaining hair, and felt no more ready to meet the world than I had when I got up that morning.

  The EZ Economy Car Rental Agency was six doors down on my side of 301. It had once been a Texaco gas station. The two guys who owned and ran the place were Alan and the older Fred. They looked like rotund cousins. They thought they had a sense of humor.