Retribution lf-2 Read online

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Change is good, small stimulation from small changes. I just segued from my own taste to a metaphoric reference to your state of mind.”

  “I noticed,” I said.

  “You were meant to. You wouldn’t be one of my favorite clients if you couldn’t follow what I say.”

  “I thought I was your favorite,” I said.

  “You are part of an elite group.”

  “Am I making progress?” I asked.

  “Do you want to make progress?” she asked in return.

  Good question.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You still seeing Sally?”

  “Yes, tonight. Why?”

  “You can turn in your blanket of depression for something else,” she said. “Like coming back to life with a real person.”

  “I’m not giving up my wife,” I said.

  “You said her name,” Ann said with a smile, pointing her finger at me. “Progress. I’m not asking you to give her up. I’m asking you to place her gently inside you where she belongs and go on with your life.”

  I shook my head and said, “We keep saying the same things.”

  “But in different ways and… tell me, Lewis, are you starting to feel different?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And it makes you anxious?”

  “Angry.”

  “At who? Who are you angry with?”

  “You.”

  “Say something about her,” Ann said, leaning back.

  “What?”

  “Your wife. Did she do anything that annoyed you?”

  I closed my eyes, and shook my head “no.”

  “She was perfect,” Ann said. “Nobody’s perfect. Remember the last line of Some Like It Hot? When Joe B. Brown finds out Jack Lemmon isn’t a woman? ‘Nobody’s perfect,’ he says.”

  “She left doors and drawers open,” I said. “Medicine cabinet, kitchen cabinets, dresser drawers. All the time.”

  “And what did you do?” Ann prompted.

  “I closed them.”

  “Never got irritated?”

  “For a while. Then…”

  “You liked her having little faults?”

  “I guess,” I said. “I think I can remember everything in those cabinets and drawers.”

  “Do you want to remember them?”

  “No… yes. This isn’t fun.”

  “It’s not supposed to be fun. You don’t know how to have fun yet.”

  Ann stood up and jogged in place a few seconds.

  “Knee tightens,” she said, sitting again. “You showed me her photograph. She was pretty.”

  I nodded, seriously considering never coming back here again.

  “Lewis, you are not pretty.”

  “I know. We… she picked me. We had…”

  “Fun?”

  “A lot in common,” I said. “Movies, books. We found the same things funny. Monty Python, Thin Man movies, Rocky and Bullwinkle.”

  “Moose and squirrel,” Ann said in a terrible imitation of either Natasha or Boris. “What?”

  Something must have broken through. I bit my lower lip.

  “Sometimes she called me Rocky,” I said. “If I was being particularly dense, she called me Bullwinkle. I… I called her… No more.”

  Ann clapped her hands and rocked forward once.

  “Perfect. Are you still going to the beach?”

  “When I can.”

  “And the gulls, do you still hear them speak?”

  “Gulls don’t speak,” I said. “Sometimes their squawk… I’ve told you this… Sometimes their talk sounds like they’re saying, ‘It’s me.’”

  “You like the gulls?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the pelicans?”

  “And the pelicans who dive like clumsy-winged oafs into the Gulf literally going blind from the constant collision with the water in search of food.”

  “You are getting very literary, very poetic,” said Ann.

  “As my friend Flo would say, ‘Bullshit.’”

  “You are the gull crying, ‘It’s me.’ You are the pelican going blind while it dives for food.”

  “I’m literary. You’re cryptic.”

  We went on like that for a while. I glanced at the clock on the wall over her desk. Five more minutes.

  “You ever read Conrad Lonsberg?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Compelling, disturbing, elevating. Isn’t that what the reviews said? All true but there was a true despair behind those poems and stories. I met him once, briefly, here in Sarasota. I recognized him from the old photograph on the jacket of Fool’s Love. He was more than forty years older than the man in the photograph leaning against a tree with his hands in his pockets. But the eyes were the same. I remember. Our eyes met. It was at Demitrio’s on the Trail. Melvin and I were there. Lonsberg was with a young woman. Our eyes met for an instant and he knew I recognized him. I think I smiled to let him know his secret was safe and I would not bother him. I wonder if he has had any therapy. Judging from his books, I would say it would be a good idea as long as he didn’t go to one of the quacks with shingles. Why the interest in Conrad Lonsberg?”

  “Remember Adele?”

  “Vividly,” said Ann. “There is a connection between this evocation of Conrad Lonsberg and Adele? It is not a simple stream of consciousness, a seeming non sequitur?”

  “No.”

  “You want to tell me what you are talking about or, rather, what you want to ask me?”

  “Too long to tell the whole story,” I said, looking at the clock on the wall. “Our time is just about up and I hear your next client coming through the outer door.”

  “Give me the question,” Ann said. “In your eyes, you have a question.”

  “Why would Adele, who Lonsberg has been working with, deface her copy of one of his books and not just tear it up or throw it away?”

  “You want a two-minute answer, which is the time we have left?”

  “What I want and what I get are almost never the same,” I said.

  “She is angry with him, very angry, feels betrayed, but can’t bring herself to throw away the book. Something is unfinished. Something went very wrong. In that which we call reality. In the reality of Adele’s mind. Lewis, I would need more information. Ideally, I would need Lonsberg and Adele together in this room. I think that unlikely. Meanwhile, I’ll end with a question. Why did you leap the chasm of thought from being angry with me and identifying with seagulls to Adele and Lonsberg?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Next time,” she said, rising. “Think about it. Come with an answer.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “It’s an assignment,” she said. “Like college. You fail to answer, you get an F and I make you do it again.”

  I fished out two tens, Marvin Uliaks’s tens, and handed them to her.

  “You should read Fool’s Love,” she said as I moved toward the door.

  “I did.”

  “When?”

  “A long time ago,” I said.

  “You read it as a boy. Read it as a man. You think it’s hot in here?”

  “Maybe, a little.”

  “Monday?”

  “Monday, same time?”

  “Yes,” she said, moving to the thermostat.

  In the small reception office, a woman-slim, long blond hair, well dressed, eyes down and covered with thick sunglasses-looked down. I walked past her and out into the sunshine.

  3

  I stopped at Brants Book Shop on Brown Street, a short street with Bee Ridge on the north end and the shopping mall with Barnes amp; Noble on the south. Brant’s is a one-story used-book institution that looks as if a good wind would blow off the roof or an NFL lineman would step through the creaking wooden floor. But there wasn’t much you couldn’t find there.

  I picked up a copy of Fool’s Love for a dollar and a quarter and walked over to Rico’s, great prices, good
food, terrific calamari, nearly perfect lasagna, just like my mother didn’t make. I had a Gorgonzola sandwich on a roll with a diet Coke and watched a court show on the big-screen television. A stern-looking wizened woman in a black robe was calling a stupidly grinning teenager a liar. He seemed like a liar to me too. She ruled against him. I don’t know what he did, kicked a dog, stole a CD player. The girl he had to pay a hundred thirty-four dollars to looked about Adele’s age-thin, dark, pretty, a ring through her eyebrow. I figured she had done some lying too before I started watching. Almost everybody lies. Everybody lies. Everybody dies.

  “I read that,” said the young woman who waited on me, pointing at Fool’s Love. She was dark, looked a little like my cousin’s daughter Angela, and smiled.

  I didn’t know her name but I had seen her in Rico’s before. At this hour of the afternoon, business was slow. I was the only customer.

  “You like it?” she asked, nodding at the book.

  “Read it a long time ago,” I said. “I’m thinking of reading it again. You like it?”

  “Great book,” she said. “I don’t read books, and that one, they made us read that one in school, Mr. Gliddings at Riverview. You know Pee Wee Herman went to River-view?”

  “I heard,” I said.

  “Only book they made me read that I liked, you know?”

  “Must be good. You know he lives here?”

  “Who?”

  “Conrad Lonsberg, the guy who wrote the book,” I said.

  She stood up straight and her smile broadened.

  “He’d have to be a couple hundred years old,” she said.

  “No, it’s true. He’s alive. He’s here.”

  “I believe you,” she said. “That’s interesting. Want another diet Coke?”

  I declined, paid my bill, left her a twenty-percent tip, and got back in the white Cutlass. The drive down Tamiami Trail to Blackburn Point Road took me less than fifteen minutes. I turned right on Blackburn Point, crossed the small bridge over Little Sarasota Bay, turned right again, and kept going on Casey Key Road past houses great and small, many hidden by trees and bushes.

  Flo’s directions had been perfect. The walled-in fortress of Conrad Lonsberg was down a paved culde-sac. There was a gate. I parked just past it and walked back. There was no name on the door, not even an address, but there was a bell semihidden in the stone wall on my left. I pushed it, heard nothing, and waited. Nothing. I pushed it again. Nothing. Then I saw the camera. It was on the right at the top of the wall, its lens pointing straight down at me, camouflaged by a plant with big leaves.

  I wasn’t sure if I could be heard but I said, “My name is Lew Fonesca. I’m a friend of Adele Hanford’s. Could I talk to you for a few minutes?”

  I don’t know why but I held up my copy of Fool’s Love for the camera.

  Nothing happened. I stepped back and noted that the camera lens didn’t follow me. I got in the car, turned around, and parked where I could watch the gate. The Gulf was behind me. I turned off the engine, opened the windows, and listened to the surf. A few gulls drifted by, most of them made their squawking sound. A few said, “It’s me.”

  I opened Fool’s Love and began to read:

  By the time Sherry Stephens hit State Highway 71 at Weaver’s Texaco station, she had become Laura Or-dette. She shifted her full duffel bag, the green one her brother George had given her when he got back from Korea, into her left hand.

  Laura Ordette didn’t look back. Laura Ordette was not the kind of woman to look back. Sherry Stephens would probably be crying now walking along the roadside of Martin’s Lagoon Street, probably be looking back, thinking about what she was leaving. Sherry Stephens would be thinking about the small room she shared with her sister. Sherry Stephens would be thinking about her sister and her mother. Her mother was at work now answering calls at Rowlinson’s Real Estate. Sherry’s mother had a good telephone voice, deep and friendly. Those who actually met Grace Stephens were often surprised to see a small, serious woman in no-nonsense suits. Sherry’s father? Was he worth thinking about? Not by Laura Ordette. He was a red-faced, red-necked slab of beef who drove trucks across six states. Sherry would be worrying about missing school. Not Laura Ordette. Sherry was fifteen. Laura was eighteen and had three hundred dollars in her pocket. Sherry had saved it working after school at Pine’s Drug Store. Well, she had worked for most of it. About half she had taken from the cigar box in the bottom drawer of her father’s dresser.

  A car passed going in her direction. It stopped. “Want a ride?” the man asked. He was as old as her father. He smiled like he meant it but she knew he didn’t. He might be harmless. He might be hoping. Sherry would have said “no” and kept walking without looking at him. Laura looked, appraisingly, sighed, and said, “What kind of car is that?”

  “Buick.”

  “I don’t ride in Buicks,” Laura said. “My parents died in one.”

  The old guy drove on mumbling something.

  Laura Ordette knew many things besides the fact that the duffel bag was heavy. She knew that all adults were liars. She knew that most kids were liars. She knew Reverend Scools, the pastor at her church, was a liar and stupid. The only people who didn’t lie, who didn’t have to, were the smart ones with money and power. They didn’t have to lie though maybe they did it for fun. She knew that she would grow old and die. She knew that when she died she was not going to go to heaven or hell. You just died. That was it. The rest was shit. She knew that men and boys who were old enough looked at her thinking what it would be like to have her tits pressed against their naked chests, their tongues in her mouth, their wang tall and hard inside her. Yucch. Laura Ordette was above that. If people were all animals, and that’s what she believed, the ones who were worth breathing were the ones who stayed above being breeding animals distracting themselves while they waited to get old and die.

  Laura Ordette was going to New York. She knew the bus schedule. She had called to be sure there would be a seat. Laura Ordette was going to New York, the daughter of a wealthy Concord family who disdained their money and pleas and walked out to make it on her own. She would become a writer, a Broadway ticket seller, a greeter at some big art gallery on Fifth Avenue. She would go for that job in her one good dress, all made-up, tell them how she was going to New York University at night, and get the job. She was going to get her own room. She was going to meet rich, smart people, see a real play, speak in a voice nothing like that of Sherry whose name she was already forgetting as she had forgotten what her father had done to her, what her mother had said. No, not her father. That Sherry’s father, that weak, whining Sherry’s father and mother. Laura Ordette’s parents were upstanding, supportive, there for her if she wanted to go back.

  When she hit State 70 she put the duffel bag down. It had D. Stephens stenciled on it in black. Laura would get rid of it when she got to her home in New York. About two blocks down she could see the sign for the bus station. She lifted the duffel bag again and waited till the traffic let her cross.

  She was happy. She was on her way. Then why was she crying?

  Two hours had passed and I was almost finished with the book. I stopped after the scene in which Laura dumps the fully clothed drunken high school English teacher into his bath of cold water.

  No one had come in or out of the Lonsberg fort. I headed for the nearest pay phone. That took me all the way back to a gas station on the Trail. I called the Texas Bar and Grille on Second Street. Big Ed Fairing answered the phone.

  “Ed, is Ames there?”

  “He’s here. I’ll call him.”

  I heard Ed bellow for Ames above the late-afternoon beer and burger crowd.

  “He’s coming,” said Ed. “You know they’re creeping up on me, Fonesca?”

  “Who?”

  “Developers,” he said. “This used to be a perfectly respectable run-down street with some character. Now, art galleries, Swedish tearooms, antique shops. They’re creeping up. The upscaling of downtown is taking
away its character. We’ll be looking like St. Armand’s Circle in two years. People have no sense of history. You know what they’re putting in next door? I mean, right next door where the cigar store was?”

  “A tanning salon?” I guessed.

  “No, Vietnamese fingernail place,” he said. “That’ll bring in a lot of business. Here’s Ames.”

  “McKinney,” Ames said in his deep and slightly raspy western Sam Elliott drawl.

  Ames is tall, white-haired, grizzled, lean, brown, and almost seventy-five years old. Ames was not supposed to bear arms. It was a right he had lost after using an ancient Remington Model 1895 revolver to kill his expartner in a duel on the beach in the park at the far south end of Lido Key. Ames had hired me to find his expartner who had run away with all the money in the bank and everything he could sell from the company he and Ames owned, a company worth forty million dollars. Ames was ruined. The bank took the company. Ames with a few thousand dollars in his pocket had tracked the partner for more than a year on buses from Arizona to St. Louis and then to Sarasota. I had found the partner. I tried to stop the two old men from dueling. I failed but I was there when it happened and testified that the expartner had fired first. Ames got off with a few minor felony counts and two months in jail. He now believed that he owed me. He never got any money back but he felt that I had helped him regain his self-respect.

  Ames had a job at the Texas Bar and Grille, a room in back, and a motor scooter. He also had access to Ed Fairing’s considerable collection of old rifles and handguns that Ames kept in perfect working order.

  Ames considered me his responsibility. He was probably also the closest thing I had to a friend.

  “Ames, Adele is missing,” I said.

  “Run off?”

  Ames was with me all through the ordeal with Adele and her parents. Ames had gotten along particularly well with Adele’s mother Beryl. When Beryl died, Ames rode shotgun at my side, literally, when we got Adele back from her life on the North Trail. When Ames looked at Adele with disapproval, Adele’s inventive foul language disappeared. There was something about the old man that made people want to earn his respect.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You know the Burger King on 301, near the Ringling School?”