Denial lf-4 Page 5

  Sally hung up.

  “She won’t be there, will she?” I asked.

  “You could tell?”

  I shrugged.

  “She might,” said Sally, swiveling around to face me, “but she won’t the next time or the time after that. This one will go to court. And given the judges on the bench, odds are exactly three to one the kid will go back to her mother.”

  “Drugs?”

  “And men. And… who knows?”

  “I have an idea for an ad,” I said. “Television. You find real addicts, young ones, put the camera on them, black and white, and on the screen you put their ages, first names and the drugs they use. Off-camera voice just asks them questions, which they mess up, and the kids who see the ads know that they are watching people whose minds are-”

  “You’ve given this some thought, huh, Lew?”

  Then it hit me. I must have shown it.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It wasn’t my idea,” I said. “It was… my wife’s. I’d forgotten until…”

  “Have a seat,” Sally said, pulling the chrome-and-vinyl chair out of the corner.

  I sat and took off my cap.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “For what? I’m getting off at seven. Kids want to go to Shaner’s for pizza.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You have a car?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Pick us up at the apartment at seven-twenty,” she said, smoothing the folds in her green skirt. “Or pick up the pizzas and we’ll have them at the apartment. Now, what can I do for you?”

  “Kyle McClory,” I said. “Name mean anything?”

  “You mean, is he in the system?”

  “Yes.”

  She turned, moved the mouse next to her computer, punched in the name, found a file and opened it.

  “Not much,” she said. “In fact, not anything.”

  “Try Andrew Goines,” I said.

  She did.

  “Nothing there either,” she said. “Anything else?”

  “Try Kyle Root. His mother is Nancy Root.”

  “The actress?”

  “Yes.”

  Sally did some more clacking of the keyboard and turned to me.

  “No Kyle Root,” she said. “But there is a Yolanda Root. Let’s see. She… yes, her mother is Nancy Root. Yolanda has a long sheet. Drugs, men and boys, even attempted blackmail on a local businessman when she was thirteen. Went into his office, took off her clothes and demanded money. She picked the wrong guy. Gay. He called the police. Yolanda is, let’s see, eighteen now.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Last known address is her grandmother and grandfather, mother’s parents, in Bradenton. Grandfather owns a hardware store. You know I’m not supposed to be doing this.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Could lose my job,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “You’re helping someone, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the worst that could happen? I’d wind up in an office or managing a fast food franchise. Regular hours and no bad dreams about the day.”

  “And the kids would get all the free leftover junk food they could eat,” I added.

  “That supposed to be a joke, Fonesca?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Good. Don’t forget about Saturday,” she said.

  “Saturday?”

  “Darrell Caton,” she said with a sigh.

  Darrell was a fourteen-year-old Sally had conned me into seeing once a week. Big Brother plan. Darrell had no faith in the idea. Neither did I, but we had both agreed to start this week.

  “I remembered,” I said.

  “Sure you did. I’m busy, Lewis,” she said wearily. “See you tonight.”

  She touched my hand, turned her back and picked up her phone.

  John Gutcheon was on the phone when I got off the elevator. He waved at me with a stapler and I went into the afternoon.

  I parked in the DQ parking lot and went up to my office, where the phone began ringing as soon as I opened the door.

  “Lew Fonesca,” I said, picking it up.

  “No more,” came a man’s voice, low, a little raspy.

  “Let it end here,” he said.

  “What?”

  “What happened to the boy, Kyle McClory,” he said.

  “You know.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said so low that I could barely hear him. “You have to stop looking.”

  There was no threat in his voice, just exhaustion.

  “You did it?” I asked.

  “Someone who doesn’t need any more pain, doesn’t deserve any more pain will suffer if you don’t let it just end here,” he said.

  I took the phone and looked out the window as I said, “I can’t.”

  Whoever it was had either been lucky and called the second I reached my door or he had watched me and called from a cell phone when he saw me get to the office. There were four cars in addition to my rental in the DQ lot. Across Washington three cars were parked, the sun bright on their windows, so I couldn’t see if anyone was inside.

  “You don’t understand,” the man said. “I’ve got to stop you.”

  “Why?”

  “Seneca said, ‘The final hour when we cease to exist does not itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death process.’ We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way.”

  My eyes were still on the cars in the lot and on the street.

  He hung up. One of the cars, a late-model compact, pulled out of the space on Washington and into traffic.

  I went across the street to the Crisp Dollar Bill. The bar was dark and smelled of beer. The bar and the smell reminded me of Mac’s Tavern a block from our house in Chicago. My father used to send me there with a glass jar for Mac to fill with draft beer on Saturday nights. There was no music at Mac’s, just the silent black-and-white image on the ten-inch screen of the old DuMont television that sat on a shelf and the loud voices of the Irish and Italian neighborhood working men who came to complain, brag and declare the superiority of one nation over another, one baseball team over another. I was informed by my father that no Republicans were allowed in Mac’s.

  In contrast to those memories, the expensive acoustical system of the Crisp Dollar Bill was playing Bernadette Peters singing “It’s Raining in My Heart.” Billy the bartender/owner’s taste was eclectic. So were his politics.

  There were six people I could see in the booths and at the bar. Might have been others in the shadows. There was nothing really shady about the Crisp Dollar Bill. As far as I knew, no one had ever been shot there; though, back when the Chicago White Sox had spring training in the long-gone box behind the Crisp Dollar Bill, there had been lots of after-the-game fights over games in March that really didn’t matter when June came.

  Billy came over with a Beck’s.

  “Food?”

  “No.”

  “Two Sousa marches coming up next,” he said, moving back toward the bar.

  I was in a corner booth in the back on the right facing the door. I nursed my beer knowing that as soon as Bernadette Peters’s last plaintive notes ended, the music would blare. It did. “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

  “Oh shit,” someone at the bar said.

  “Departure is always an option,” said Billy amiably.

  I was halfway through the Beck’s, considering what to do next, when the door opened and Ames came in. He knew which booth I was in. He sat across from me.

  “I think our Miss Dorothy is onto something,” he said.

  5

  “Four people aren’t at Seaside Assisted Living who were there two nights ago,” Ames said.

  “Someone in the office told you that?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “Went to see Dorothy. We took a walk around, talked to people. Came up with a list. Word is no one died the night our Dorothy says she
saw the murder.”

  A new song came on. A tenor was warbling something called “I’m Going Shopping with You.” Ames turned his head toward the speaker over the bar.

  “That’s Dick Powell.”

  “Right. Give the man a free beer,” said Billy from behind the bar.

  “What happened to the people who left?” I asked, bringing Ames back to the present.

  “Word is one was transferred to a nursing home,” he said. “Another two left on their own. Other went to live with her daughter-in-law.”

  Billy came over with a beer for Ames and said, “On the house. Got another Powell coming up, ‘Speaking of the Weather.’ Know it?”

  Ames nodded. He knew it.

  “You checked with the nurses?” I prompted as Billy walked back to the bar.

  “That’s your job,” he said.

  He was right. Ames nursed his beer through Dick Powell before we left.

  It took about ten minutes to get to the Seaside and five minutes to be sent into the office of the director, Amos Trent, a serious, heavyset man with a well-trimmed mustache and a suit almost as tan as his face. He said that neither he, nor the nurses, nor any member of the Seaside staff could give information about residents except to relatives. His eyes moved for an instant toward the four-drawer steel filing cabinet in the corner of his office.

  “You understand,” he said. “Privacy. There are people who prey on older people, offer them everything from jobs stuffing envelopes to life insurance for a dollar a month. We have to be concerned about insurance, liability. One of our heaviest insurance premiums covers privacy of records. I’m sorry.”

  He got up, put out his hand to Ames and me to let me know the meeting was over. His handshake was firm. So was his decision.

  “Okay, then we’d like to see Dorothy Cgnozic,” I said.

  “You were here earlier, weren’t you?”

  “We were,” I said. “Dorothy’s an old friend.”

  “You mean,” said Trent, “Dorothy is old and you are friends, not that you’ve been friends a long time.”

  Trent looked at Ames.

  “We’re friends,” he said.

  “Well,” said Trent. “That’s up to Dorothy, but I believe she is sleeping, afternoon nap. We don’t like to wake our residents up when they’re napping. You understand?”

  “Perfectly,” I said.

  Trent looked at his watch and said, “I’ve got to get to a meeting. Look, I know about Dorothy’s… mistake, delusion, dream. She’s been telling everyone, the residents, nurses, even the dining room staff about the supposed murder. No one was murdered. Dorothy has, let’s see how I can put this, Dorothy has an active imagination. Her husband was a poet.”

  I didn’t see how Dorothy’s husband being a poet had anything to do with her having an imagination, but I just nodded.

  He was looking at Ames again when he said, “If the time comes when you’re inquisitive about assisted living…”

  I didn’t give him any help.

  “Father? Uncle?” he tried.

  “Mr. McKinney is my friend,” I said.

  Ames wasn’t smiling. Ames smiled almost as little as I did and I never smiled.

  “Sorry,” said Trent. “I just thought…”

  “You boning me?” Ames said evenly.

  “Boning you?” repeated Trent with a smile.

  “Playing with me,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t play with my friend,” I said, recognizing the look in Ames’s gray eyes.

  In a few seconds if Trent didn’t leave or we didn’t back out, I was reasonably sure Ames would find a way to make the mustached manager of the Seaside suffer.

  “Let’s go,” I said, putting a hand on Ames’s sleeve.

  “Dorothy doesn’t get many visitors,” Trent said, folding his hands in front of him. “Please come back to visit.”

  In the parking lot we got into the car. I backed out of the space and turned down the road past the pond, where two ducks floated.

  “He was boning me,” Ames said.

  “He was,” I agreed.

  Silence again as we drove south on Beneva and turned at Webber, heading for Tamiami Trail.

  “We’re goin’ back,” he said, looking straight ahead.

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  I looked at the clock on the dashboard.

  “About two in the morning,” I said. “Suit you?”

  “Suits me just fine,” he said.

  I drove Ames to the Texas Bar amp; Grille, and said I’d pick him up at one-thirty in the morning. That suited him fine too.

  Then I headed for El Tacito, the Mexican restaurant where Arnoldo Robles, the man who had witnessed Kyle McClory’s death, worked. El Tacito is in a shopping mall at Fruitville and Lime. I found a parking space four doors down from the restaurant in front of a dollar discount store.

  I had a friend, James Hahn, back in Chicago. He was an ex-cop who got a PhD in psychic studies at Northeastern Illinois University. He claimed that he could conjure up parking spaces, that by simply concentrating, envisioning and believing, he could make a space available when he arrived where we were going. I tried him on it a couple of times. It seemed to work for him. It never worked for me.

  I don’t believe in magic. I don’t believe in the miracles of the Bible. I’d like to. I’d like to believe that my wife is somewhere, that she is some kind of entity, that she is not simply gone, but I can’t. I’ve tried.

  There was an early dinner crowd, about twenty, at El Tacito, or maybe it was a late lunch crowd. The air smelled of things fried, sauces hot, and tacos crisp. There were large color photographs on the wall, all of them of hills, mountains, probably in Mexico. Music was playing, guitars and a plaintive tenor almost in tears. I think it was “La Paloma.” The people at the red-and-white-tableclothed wooden tables paid no attention to the music. They talked, mostly in Spanish, ate, laughed and raised their voices.

  A harried waitress, thin with long dark hair tied back, hurried from table to table taking orders, delivering orders, giving orders when she went back to the kitchen.

  “Sit anywhere,” she said with a smile.

  She had a pile of dirty dishes cradled in her left arm. A wisp of dark hair escaped the band that touched the nape of her neck. She brushed the stray strand away with her hand. She looked tired, satisfied, pretty.

  “Looking for Arnoldo Robles,” I said.

  A trio of men at a back table called to her by name, Corazon. She held up a single finger to let them know she’d be with them in a second or a minute, depending on how much time I took.

  “Arnoldo’s busy,” she said, smile gone, starting to turn away.

  “Just take a minute,” I said, holding up one finger as she had done.

  “You know Arnoldo?” she asked.

  I shook my head no. She looked at me from stained loafers to Cubs cap.

  “You’re not with Immigration?”

  I shook my head again.

  “Arnoldo has his green card,” she said.

  “Good.”

  “Corazon,” called one of the trio in the back.

  “Then what do you…?”

  “The dead boy,” I said. “I’m working with the boy’s family.”

  It was her turn to nod.

  “He’s in the kitchen.”

  She looked at the back of the restaurant, turned and headed for the three men. I followed and moved past her through a swinging door decorated with bright paintings of flowers, musical instruments and a single word, GUADALAJARA.

  To my left was the open doorway to a small kitchen, barely big enough to let the two men in white aprons working in it move. The griddle was sizzling; a red light glowed above the oven in the corner. The air was steamy in spite of an old wall-mounted air conditioner that rattled noisily.

  Both men were slightly built, about my height. Both were dark. Both had neatly shaved heads. One man was probably in his sixties, the other in his forties. Both men were mov
ing quickly, hands flying, conducting a kitchen symphony, maybe about to do a juggling act. They were perspiring. The older one quickly reached for a half-full bottle of water and took a few quick gulps. The younger one looked over at me. He had a knife with a broad flat blade in his hand.

  “Arnoldo Robles?”

  His grip on the knife got tighter.

  “Can we talk?”

  The older man looked over his shoulder at me.

  “What about?”

  “What you told the police,” I said.

  “Who are you?”

  “Not the one who was driving the car,” I said, looking at the blade. “I’m working for the boy’s mother. I could use your help.”

  “Busy,” he said.

  “He’s busy,” the older man added.

  Corazon came through the swinging door, looked at the two cooks and me and then went on through another door where I heard dishes clacking.

  “I can wait,” I said.

  “I don’t want any trouble,” Arnoldo Robles said.

  “I worry about people who want trouble,” I said. “I’m not bringing trouble.”

  The two men’s eyes met, and Arnoldo sighed and looked at the ceiling. They said something to each other in Spanish. The older man wasn’t pleased or cooperative. He finally shrugged and went back to work.

  “Have a seat out there,” Robles said to me. “I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

  I went back into the restaurant and found a small table near the window. A few people had left. The waitress named Corazon came up to me, hands on hips, but there was no challenge in the move, just a weary resignation.

  “Arnoldo can’t sleep,” she said. “He says he keeps seeing that boy in the street and the car… He thinks he should have done something.”

  “You’re his…?”

  “Wife,” she said. “We’ve got a little boy, eight. My mother watches him when he gets home from school. She thinks some crazy man is out there trying to crash into little boys. She won’t let him out to play. Is she right? Is there a crazy man out there?”

  “There may be a crazy man out there, but I don’t think he’s out looking for little boys to run over.”

  “How do you know this?” she asked.

  “I think he was just after one fourteen-year-old boy.”

  “You know this for sure?”