Midnight Pass: A Lew Fonesca Novel (Lew Fonesca Novels) Read online

  Roberta and William Trasker were not close to their children.

  “Roberta looks like a lady, drinks a little but not too much, can outcuss me if she wants to, and likes being the woman of mystery. Won’t say much about her life before she moved here. Mystery woman. It’s an act. I don’t know who the actress is behind the character. Doubt if you’ll find out. She doesn’t take off the makeup.”

  “She get along with her husband?”

  “Roberta? She worships the ground he bought her. They get along in public. Times I’ve seen them in private, back when Gus was alive, they looked as if they felt comfortable together. That’s about it.”

  “What does she do with her time?”

  “Spends it,” said Flo. “And Bill’s money, but he’s got plenty to spend, more even than my Gus.”

  I put my cap back on, used the bathroom, washed my face and hands, and moved back to the living room, where Flo had risen.

  “When do I get that license back?”

  “I think it’ll come in the mail,” I said. “Maybe a day or two.”

  “Take care of yourself, Lew,” she said at the open door.

  “Take care of Adele and the baby,” I said, opening the Nissan’s door.

  “With my life,” she said. “Anything else I can do for you?”

  I paused. “You know any jokes?”

  3

  I HAD TO GET as much done today as I could and it was already a little after noon. I’d have to devote at least the next day to my other client.

  My other client was a very burly two hundred and twenty pounds with a pink round face. His name was Kenneth Severtson. He had been waiting in front of my office when I came back from lunch at the Crisp Dollar Bill on Friday. He was in his late thirties and knew how to dress.

  “You’re Fonesca?” he asked, clearly unimpressed by what he was looking at. He was in a neatly pressed, lightweight tan suit complete with a bold red designer tie. I was dressed in contemporary Fonesca, complete with my Cubs cap.

  “I am,” I said, opening the door and stepping in, with him behind me.

  I flicked on the air conditioner, pulled up the shade to let some light in, and sat behind my desk. He looked around my office clearly as unimpressed with it as he was with me.

  My office is a cube about the size of a small Dumpster. One small, scratched desk, a wooden chair—no wheels, no swivel—behind it, and two chairs—simple, wood, secondhand—in front of it.

  Thumbtacked on the wall behind my desk was a Touch of Evil poster, a reproduction of the original with Charlton Heston and Orson Welles glaring at each other. The poster was beginning to curl. On the wall across from my desk was a painting about the size of an eight-by-eleven mailing envelope. Flo had given the painting to me as a Christmas gift. The artist worked at the Selby Gardens on the Bay. There was an orchid in my painting. The Selby specializes in orchids, but that didn’t tell you what you needed to know about the painting.

  “Looks like you,” she had said when she handed it to me.

  And it did. It was a dark, almost ebony jungle with black jagged mountains and dark clouds in the background. The only touch of color was a small yellow orchid on a gnarled tree in the foreground. The dark jungle, night sky, and the gothic mountain was definitely me, and the small touch of living color was about the right size.

  I got to meet the artist, Stig Dalstrom, one afternoon at Patrick’s restaurant on Main Street. He specializes in paintings like the one Flo had given me but Flo said he also did commissions.

  Dalstrom was taller than me, a little broader, with glasses, a slightly receding hairline, dark blond hair, and an echo of his dark paintings in his eyes. He had a slight Swedish accent.

  Our conversation had been brief and I wondered what haunted his past. I wondered how much one of his paintings or prints would cost. I told him I’d like to look up from behind my desk and see more of that haunting darkness and those little touches of light.

  I was deep inside that tiny orchid when I heard a voice.

  “Mr. Fonesca, are you all right?” the man across from me said, and I brought myself back from the jungle.

  “You’re…?” I asked.

  “Severtson, Kenneth Severtson. She took the kids,” he said to me to open the conversation.

  “Nice to meet you,” I answered.

  “She had no right,” Severtson said, leaning toward me and staring into my eyes without a blink.

  I don’t play “who blinks first.” I didn’t speak. He waited. It was my turn. I wasn’t playing.

  “You’ve got to find her.”

  He won.

  “Who do I have to find?”

  “My wife, Janice, and the children.”

  “I’m a process server,” I said. “You want the police.”

  “There’s no crime, not yet.”

  I was about to give him my standard line about needing a private detective.

  “You find people,” Severtson said.

  “That’s what a process server does,” I agreed.

  “Find my wife and children.”

  “Mr. Severtson, I don’t do that kind of thing.”

  That was a lie. The truth was that whatever “that kind of thing” was I had probably done it when someone pushed the right tender buttons of my despair.

  “Sally Porovsky said you might be able to help.”

  “How do you know Sally?”

  He turned his head away and lowered his voice.

  “There was an incident about a year ago,” he said. “Janice and I had an argument. The neighbors called the police. The police called child protection. Sally Porovsky was the caseworker. She saw us a few times. So when Janice left three days ago, I called Sally. She told me to wait a few days and then come to see you if Janice and the kids didn’t show up.”

  I held up a hand to stop him, reached over, picked up the phone, and dialed Sally’s cell phone.

  “Hello,” she said, her voice cell-phone crackly.

  “Kenneth Severtson’s here,” I said.

  “He’s in your office?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you help him?”

  “Can you?”

  “No,” she said. “But my deep-down instinct is that if you don’t help him, he’ll try to help himself, and I think he has the kind of personality that could snap.”

  “Professionally put,” I said.

  “If I put it into social-work babble, it would say the same thing but you wouldn’t understand it. I doubt if the people I write reports for understand them. I doubt if they even read the reports. Lewis, you are starting to depress me.”

  “I have that effect on people,” I said.

  I looked at Severtson, who strained to figure out what was going on. I didn’t say anything.

  “Lew, you still there?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well?”

  “You want me working instead of spending the afternoon in bed with Joan Crawford.”

  “Something like that,” she said.

  “Dinner Sunday? My place,” she said. “Seven?”

  “I’ll bring the pizza.”

  “Kids want Subway sandwiches. They like the ads on television.”

  “What kind of sandwiches?”

  “Your choice. Seven?”

  “Seven,” I said.

  “Call me later,” she said. “I’ve got to run down to Englewood.”

  I hung up the phone.

  “You like movies?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said cautiously.

  “Old movies?”

  “Sure, sometimes.”

  “Really old movies,” I pushed. “From the Thirties and Forties?”

  “Not particularly.”

  He was beginning to look at me as if he had come to the wrong place, which was fine with me. He didn’t move so I pushed ahead.

  “How old are your children?” I asked, looking at Severtson, taking off my hat, and putting it on the desk. “You have recent pictures of t
hem and your wife?”

  “Yes,” he said, reaching into his inside jacket pocket. “Sally said I should bring them.”

  He handed me a brown envelope with a clasp. I opened it and looked at the three pictures. There were individual color photos of a boy and a girl. Both were smiling. Neither looked at all like their father. The third photograph told me who they looked like. The kids stood on each side of their mother, who wore jeans and a white shirt tied about her belly to reveal a very nice navel. Her hair was blond, just like both kids, and all three had the same smile.

  “My daughter’s name is Sydney, after my father. She’s four. My son is Kenneth Jr. He’s six. He says he has a loose tooth.”

  “Nice family,” I said, returning the photographs to the envelope and placing it in front of me.

  “Used to be,” he said. “Then…. wherever Janice has the kids, Andrew Stark is probably with them.”

  “Friend of your wife?” I asked.

  “More than a friend,” Severtson said.

  He looked as if he were about to cry.

  “I see,” I said.

  “Stark is my partner,” he said. “We own S & S Marine on Stickney Point Road. Upscale boats.”

  “I’ve seen it,” I said.

  “I caught them on the phone. Janice didn’t deny it. She says it’s my fault, that I’ve changed, that she needs attention not grunts.”

  “Have you?”

  “What?”

  “Changed,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “We’ve been married eleven years. I gained about four pounds a year. It’s in my genes. So now Andy Stark is in my wife’s jeans.”

  “You talk to him about it?”

  “They were gone before I could,” he said. “Janice left me a note saying she wants a divorce and that she’ll get back to me as soon as she’s settled somewhere. That’s what she says she wants.”

  “What do you want?”

  “My kids back,” he said. “I’d probably even take Janice back if she’d come. She’s going through some midlife thing or some woman’s thing. I don’t know. But she has no right to run away with Andy and take the kids. I want you to find them and bring them back.”

  “I can find them, maybe,” I said. “It’s hard to hide in the age of computers. But I can’t force her to come back. If she doesn’t want to come back, I can tell you where she is. It might be a good idea for you to let a lawyer know what’s going on while I’m looking.”

  “I’ll do that,” he said.

  “Did you bring the note she left?”

  He went into an inside jacket pocket and came out with an envelope. He handed it to me. It had “Ken” written neatly on the front in blue ink.

  I opened the envelope and unfolded the piece of unlined paper inside. The note was handwritten, neat, blue ink. It read: “Ken, the children and I are going. Please don’t try to find us. I’ll write to you when we are settled. I think a divorce would be for the best.” It was signed “Janice.”

  “Show this to your lawyer and start thinking about whether you want custody of your kids,” I said, returning the note and envelope to him. “That note is the start of a good case. And if she’s in a hotel room with Stark and your son and daughter, and I see them spend the night together, I can testify if it comes to that.”

  I waited to see if this was sinking in.

  “Ask my lawyer,” he said.

  “That’s what I would do.”

  “I want my kids,” he insisted. “I may want my wife, but if I can’t have her, I want Kenny and Syd.”

  “I told you what I can do,” I said.

  He thought about that for about a minute.

  “Okay,” he said.

  We worked out the payment and he gave me a five-hundred-dollar cash advance, all in fifties. I told him I’d check in with him and if it started to take a lot of time he could reassess the situation, especially if I had to go out of town or out of the state. He agreed.

  “Find them,” he said, placing a business card in front of me. “Please find them.”

  And he was gone. His office number was on the front of the card along with his home number. I pocketed the card as my phone rang. I picked it up and said, “Fonesca.”

  “Colleen Davenport,” Warren Murphy’s secretary said.

  She worked for one of the partners at Tycinker, Oliver, and Schwartz, where I was on a retainer. In exchange for that retainer, I got paid a fixed sum each time I served papers and I got the reasonable use of the services of Harvey the Hacker, who had an office in the back of the law firm.

  “Two jobs,” she said. “One has to be done today. The other by Friday.”

  “I’ll be right over,” I said. “Can I talk to Harvey?”

  Colleen said Harvey was out of town, which could mean that Harvey was out of town or Harvey had fallen off the wagon. I hung up and went to my backup, Dixie Cruise, no relation to the actor.

  Dixie was slim, trim, with very black hair in a short style. She was no more than twenty-five, pretty face, and big round glasses. Dixie worked behind the counter at a coffee bar in Gulf Gate Plaza. About six months back, I had sought her out to answer a summons about a reported assault she had witnessed in the coffee bar and found that Dixie, who had as down-home an accent as any Billy Bob, was a computer whiz.

  I called her at the coffee bar and she agreed to meet me when she got off of work at her apartment in a slightly run-down twelve-flat apartment building near the main post office. She had a small living room with a sofa bed, a large kitchen, and a bedroom devoted to her two computers, two large speakers, and all kinds of gray metal pieces with lights.

  When I got to Dixie’s apartment and she got in front of her computers, it took her ten minutes and cost me fifty bucks, which I would bill to Kenneth Severtson. Andrew Stark belonged to AAA. Three days earlier he had purchased two adult and two children’s tickets to Disney World, Sea World, and Universal Theme Park. Dixie got a list of hotels in Orlando. Andrew Stark had Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express cards. He had used the Visa to check into an Orlando hotel yesterday.

  “Embassy Suites on International Drive,” Dixie said, pointing at the screen as if her right hand were a handgun. “Checkout Thursday. Want to know what he ordered from room service?”

  “Should I?”

  Dixie shook her head and said, “A lot of burgers, fries, and Cokes, both diet and the new vanilla one,”

  In the old days, prehacker, I would have gone to AAA, told a sad story, and hoped for the best. Then I would have tried airlines, travel agencies, and friends of Janice Severtson and Andrew Stark. Sarasota isn’t huge but it might have taken me days, which means that without Dixie, Stark and Janice would have checked out before I found them.

  I went to the law offices of Tycinker, Oliver, and Schwartz on Palm Avenue. Colleen Davenport gave me two sets of papers to serve: one was urgent, the other had a few days.

  “How’s Harvey?” I asked her.

  She was young and inexperienced and trying to look a little older and filled with understanding of the world. She did a fair job.

  “Truth?” she said softly as I stood next to her in her cubicle outside of Murphy’s office. “He’s had a relapse.”

  “Bad?”

  “He’s been at this place in Mississippi for two weeks,” she said. “Firm is paying the bill. Harvey’s too valuable to lose.”

  I went back to the Nissan with the papers. I put one aside for a Mickey Donophin and read the one for Georgia Heinz. There was an address on a street behind Gulf Gate Mall. I drove there. It was a small house, white, one bedroom, maybe two. No car in the driveway.

  Paper in my pocket, I went up to the door and knocked. No answer. I found an almost hidden bell button. I pushed it. No sound.

  “She’s not home,” a woman’s voice came from my left.

  The woman came from behind a tangelo tree, holding a green hose. Water was spraying weakly from the nozzle. A little rainbow ran through the spray.


  “At work,” the woman said.

  She was about seventy, maybe more, dry, wearing a flowery gardening dress and a big green floppy hat that shaded her face.

  “You happen to know where she works?” I asked.

  “I happen to know. Yes I do. Who is asking? I’m not sending her no bill collectors. Poor thing got enough trouble.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Lost her job at the bank, leg infection, even her old dog died. Then she had to see what happened.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Swear you’re not a bill collector.”

  “I swear,” I said. “I just want to give her something.”

  It didn’t really matter what I told the woman. I could have said I was a hit man out to get Georgia Heinz. This was a lady determined to tell a story.

  “Happened right out there,” she said, pointing her hose at the street just behind my car. “Night, around ten maybe. Victor and I were watching a Nero Wolfe when we heard the scream. I said, ‘Victor, somebody screamed.’ And he acknowledged the fact. Victor has a hearing aid, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said.

  “Of course you didn’t,” she said with faint exasperation. “You don’t know Victor. I was just using a phrase. Victor’s a retired detail man. Thirty years with Pfizer.”

  “Impressive,” I said.

  “Minneapolis,” she said. “Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, the Dakotas, all his.”

  “A scream. You were watching Nero Wolfe,” I reminded her.

  “Yes, right. Well, Victor and I came running out and there she was standing on the sidewalk and there was the boy on the street, and there was the pickup truck and there was this young man leaning out of the pickup truck window and he looked at her and he looked at us and he got back in that truck and drove away. I guess it’s not a hit-and-run exactly because he did stop after he hit the boy.”