Retribution: A Lew Fonesca Novel (Lew Fonesca Novels) (10 page)

“I get a little help from the police when I need it,” she said.

“And from your friends,” I said. “Mickey Merrymen’s grandfather is dead. Murdered, I think. Ames and I found his body about an hour before I came here.”

“Which accounts for your lack of appetite.”

“Which accounts for my lack of appetite,” I agreed. “Can you forget this conversation for a few days while I look for Adele?”

“No,” she said, glancing over at Michael and Susan who were now looking at us impatiently.

“They thought you were coming over for Trivial Pursuit,” Sally said.

“Not tonight. Can you forget?”

“No,” she said. “But I can lie and say we didn’t have this conversation. I lie a lot. It’s part of my job. Sometimes, too often, you have to lie to kids to give them a chance to survive. Call me. If you don’t, I’ll call you.”

She moved forward and kissed my cheek slowly, the side that hadn’t been slapped by Bubbles Dreemer, and then she headed for her car.

I drove back to the DQ parking lot, the smell of Thai food battling with the odor of a decade of indifferent cleaning and those little yellow cardboard things that you hang from your mirror to override whatever has been dropped or invaded the upholstery.

It was definitely a Joan Crawford night. I was always ready for
Mildred Pierce
, but tonight I’d go for
Woman on
the Beach
. I knew just where the tape was in the pile next to my television set.

The DQ was still open but I didn’t feel like doing any more talking. This had already been the kind of day I had been trying to avoid for the last five years. I told life to leave me alone. It refused to stop knocking at my door, calling me on the phone, and slapping me in the face.

I walked up the concrete steps and moved along the rusting metal railing on one side and the dark offices on the other. When I came to my door, I found an envelope stuck into it with a push pin. The only word on the envelope in penciled block letters was “
FONESCA.”

I dropped the envelope in my brown bag, opened the door, turned on the lights, and moved to my desk where I put down the bag and opened the envelope.

The single white sheet inside bore a simple, short message in the same block letters as my name on the envelope.

STOP LOOKING FOR HER. ONE INNOCENT PERSON IS DEAD AND GONE. LET IT BE AN END. LET THIS BE A WARNING.

It was unsigned. I put the brown paper bag on the ledge of my office window and went into my small office, which was really what passed for home, a single cot, which I made up every day with an old comforter and two pillows. A chest of drawers. A tiny refrigerator. A closet. A fourteen-inch black-and-white television with a VCR and a stack of tapes and a folding wooden television table. It had taken me minutes to move in three years ago. It would take me ten minutes to move out when the time came.

I found
Woman on the Beach
and did my best not to think, not to think about the murdered man, not to think about Adele, not to think about the pleading face of Marvin Uliaks. I succeeded when the tape came on. The dream world on the tube was mine. Swirling behind it in my mind, deep but hard and always ready to scream, was the image of my wife being hit by that car on Lake Shore Drive. I hadn’t been there but I had imagined, dreamed about what it had looked like, about what she might have had time to
think, to feel. Each dream was just a bit different. I wanted one solid one to hang on to, but my imagination refused to cooperate, to tell me the truth or a lie I could believe.

Joan Crawford smiled, but there was a troubled look behind that smile. I knew why. I had seen this picture many times. It never changed. Only my dream changed.

I took off my clothes while I watched and hung them in my almost empty closet. I lay in my underwear. Joan was in for pain, lots of pain, lots of anguish. That was her job in film. She bore it well. Better than those of us who have to live it.

I couldn’t sleep. I listened to the whishing of cars going down 301. There weren’t many of them at this hour and I normally tuned them out, but tonight I listened. I lay there for a while in the dark, then got up and turned on the light.

I reached for one of Lonsberg’s books. Maybe a random passage would put me to sleep. When I married, when I had a wife, I always kept books at the bedside, books I could nip at randomly. The Holy Scriptures weren’t bad. Poetry, if it wasn’t too abstract, was fine. History, popular history, was particularly good. William Manchester was perfect, but I seldom went for fiction. I sat cross-legged in bed in my shorts, scratched my chest, and opened my battered book. I flipped to about the middle of the book and started to read:

Foreceman was angry. Foreceman was mad as hell. Foreceman was ready to tear off arms or heads, to take a bomb to the top of the Barnes Hospital, throw it off, and destroy all of St. Louis except the part and people he cared for. Luckily the Cardinals were out of town. Foreceman knew way down deep where even he couldn’t find it that he wasn’t going to tear off, blow up, or destroy anything but his own sanity. He had lost everything. Ellen, the factory, the house, the car, two fingers off of his right hand, and three toes, thanks to bad luck, diabetes, and some conspiracy between heaven and hell. He was on his own, a fat little man in a fat world.

He sat in his apartment looking out the window at
the thin layer of snow on the street below and the snow that was still falling from a sky he couldn’t tell had a beginning or end.

Okay then. Why was he laughing? What was so damn funny? He didn’t own a television set. Not anymore. Not since Ellen and Vickie. He didn’t read the papers. He didn’t listen to the radio or records. His day was worked out. Get up, shave, eat two fried eggs and white bread. Wonder bread or Silvercup. It had no taste but he wanted no taste except the flabber of egg and the heavy muck of Miracle Whip.

Check the mail. Throw it away unless his check came that day. Walk, walk, walk. He was the fat walking man, hands in his pockets, serious look on his face or sudden unexplained smile. People avoided him. Store clerks didn’t meet his eyes. Eggs, hot dogs, cans of sloppy joe, bread, cucumbers, butter pecan ice cream. Walk. They called him the fat walking man. He knew it, heard it. Maybe he didn’t hear it. Maybe he imagined it as he made his plans for destroying St. Louis, Nashville, New York, Asheville, places he and Ellen and Vickie and … what were the names of the others? What was his father’s name? His mother’s? Hers was Denise, but his? His father pitched horseshoes in the park with old men who had once been young old men.

At night, just before dark and hot dogs and a half of unpeeled cucumber, Foreceman had his talk with Ellen. She was a kinder Ellen, a more patient Ellen than the one who had lived, but sometimes they argued and she asked him the questions he didn’t want to hear. And he answered.

Ellen: What do you want to do?

Foreceman: Erase the past.

Ellen: You can’t.

Foreceman: I didn’t say I could. I said I wanted to. I want to strap on a gun belt, get a machine gun, fill my pockets with grenades, put on a helmet, and lead a charge.

Ellen: Against who?

Foreceman: The past. I want to destroy the past.

Ellen: Why?

Foreceman: Because it won’t come back. If it won’t come back, it doesn’t deserve to live.

Ellen: You are very crazy.

Foreceman: I know, but that’s all I have. Ellen: The children.

Foreceman: I never had them. Are they alive?

Ellen: Find out.

Foreceman: No. They’re part of the past.

Ellen: Or the future.

Foreceman: They hated me. They ran away.

Ellen: They did. And they were right.

Foreceman: They were right. I screamed. I ignored. I think I even beat them. Did I beat them?

Ellen: No.

Foreceman: You’re not real so you won’t tell me the truth.

Ellen: You beat them.

Foreceman: Did I… do things to them? I don’t remember.

Ellen: You didn’t do things to them. You never did anything to anyone, not to yourself, not to me.

Foreceman: Let’s play gin. Let’s play Monopoly. Let’s play chess. Let’s play Yahtzee. Let’s play pinner baseball. Let’s play pin the tail on the donkey. Let’s pretend you like sex with me. Let’s take a bath, a hot bath that burns and makes the air cold when we get out.

Ellen: We never did those things.

Foreceman: Then what? Then what the hell what?

Ellen: The children.

And then Foreceman turned her off, had some butter pecan ice cream in one of the two Fiesta ware glasses that were still left, and went to sleep thinking of the destruction of the world, thinking of the destruction of the world of William Clamborne Foreceman.

I put the book down, wondered for a few seconds about the man who could have written this, and fell asleep.

In my dream I did what I had done every weekday morning of my married life. It was part of our marriage agreement. I had been warned by her and her friends. She needed a cup of coffee before she could function even minimally. I wasn’t a coffee drinker, but I had always been an early riser.

In my dream as it had been in life, I got up quietly, staggered through the apartment into the kitchen, took a bag of gourmet coffee beans out of the freezer, opened the cabinet next to the refrigerator, and pulled out the small coffee bean grinder. I put a filter in the coffeemaker and filled the plastic tank with tap water.

It was a beautiful dream. The sun was coming through the slightly frosted windows. I could see Lake Michigan between two high-rises as I opened the coffee and began to pour beans into the grinder. Routine. Comfortable. And then it happened as it does in dreams.

The bottom of the bag fell out. Brown beans rained onto the cool tile floor spraying the kitchen, bouncing off cabinets, the refrigerator. The bag should have been empty but the beans kept falling, crashing like a driving rain. The floor was turning pebbly brown and barefooted I danced feeling each small bean under me.

I was panicked. She had heard the thundering beans. She came in. Her hair a morning disarray, her eyes half closed. She saw the mess and tiptoed in slow motion carefully making her way to me, finding clearings in the layers of brown hail.

The phone was ringing.

The smell of coffee rustled through her hair as she touched my cheek.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

The phone was ringing.

She smiled and shook her head as if I had failed to understand some simple truth.

The phone was ringing.

I didn’t want the dream to end, but she stepped back and I was awake.

THE PHONE WAS
ringing in the other room. I rubbed my scratchy face, scratched my itchy stomach, and made it to the phone after five rings. Two more and it would have turned on my answering machine. I decided to start breaking my rule till I found Adele. I picked it up.

“Fonesca,” I said.

“Harvey,” he said and then gave his Paul Harvey imitation. “Stand by for news.”

The phone was cordless. I got the white carton of pad thai and the small carton of white rice, opened them, and fished a white plastic fork from my desk drawer while Harvey talked.

“Vera Lynn Uliaks ceased to exist in 1975,” he said. “She worked in a real estate office from 1972 to 1975, filed income tax every year. I’ve got her social security number, but no trace of her ever having used it or of filing taxes after 1975. No credit cards. No felonies in any state by anyone with that name. The lady vanished. You want to know how much money she made in 1975?”

“No,” I said, eating cold tofu.

“That’s it,” he said.

“Name of the real estate company she worked for?”

“Cornell and Bostik,” he said. “They’re still there. You want the address and phone number?”

I took them down on the lined pad on the desk.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“Not right now.”

“Get me something more to work on. I’ve got long fingers and the Internet is waiting to invade everyone’s privacy.”

I hung up, pushed the remainder of my Thai food away, and dialed the number in Arcadia. A very young woman named Faith informed me that the company no longer belonged to Mr. Cornell and Mr. Bostik. Both were dead. A woman named Lorraine Kinch had bought the business at least ten years ago. According to the young woman, there were no records kept from Cornell and Bostik. Since the young woman couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty, she was not even born when Vera Lynn Uliaks seemed to have disappeared, and according to Faith, Ms. Kinch was busy with a client.

“It’s urgent,” I lied.

“Well,” Faith said after appropriate hesitation. “I’ll give you her cell phone number.”

She did. I thanked her, hung up, and called the cell phone. Lorraine Kinch picked up on the second ring and said, “Yes.”

“Ms. Kinch, my name is Lew Fonesca. I’m searching for a woman named Vera Lynn Uliaks who worked for Cornell and Bostik.”

“I don’t know any Vera Lynn Uliaks,” she said. “There was a young woman who worked in the office when I took it over. She quit. I don’t think she wanted to work for a woman.”

“And that was it? You never saw her again?”

“No, this is a small town, Mr.…”

“Fonesca,” I said.

“I think I heard that she got married and… oh, I remember. She… I really can’t talk now. I’m showing a house to a client.”

“Can I call you back?”

“There’s nothing to call back about,” she said.

“But you remembered …”

That was as far as we got. She hung up. I called Arcadia information and got the number for the newspaper.

“Arcadia
News,”
a young woman said.

“Who is your oldest reporter?” I asked.

“Our oldest…”

“The one who’s been there the longest.”

“Mr. Thigpen, no, wait, Ethyl’s been here longer, I think.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know,” the girl said. ‘Twenty, thirty years, maybe more. She does social coverage.”

“May I talk to her?”

“I’ll connect you to her desk. She’s there right now.”

There was a click, a few seconds of Barry Manilow, and then a no-nonsense older woman’s voice.