Retribution: A Lew Fonesca Novel (Lew Fonesca Novels) (12 page)

“We knocked,” I said. “The door was open.”

“Progress,” Viviase said with a very false smile, reaching for his coffee. “Go on.”

“We went in, found him dead. Got out and I called nine-one-one.”

“Didn’t leave your name,” Viviase said. “Tape sounds like someone doing a bad imitation of Rex Harrison.”

“James Mason,” I said.

“You left the scene of a crime, a homicide.”

“I panicked. I called the police,” I said.

Viviase was shaking his head now. When he stopped, he adjusted his glasses and said, “Why were you there? What were you looking for in his house? What did you find?”

Viviase was well acquainted with Adele, former child prostitute, abused daughter, suspect in a murder. He knew Adele lived with Flo now. He knew a lot but he wasn’t going to get anything more from me.

“He called me,” I lied. Lying is no problem for me. I have a good memory. It takes a good memory to be a successful liar.

“Why?” Viviase asked, sitting back with his hands behind his head in an I-know-you’re-lying pose.

“Don’t know, just asked me to come over about six.”

“When did he call?”

“Morning,” I said to give myself as much room as possible to be sure he hadn’t died before my created phone call. “Early morning.”

“Why would he ask a depressed process server to come to his house?” Viviase asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Why did you agree to see him?”

“He said it was important.”

“What did you find in those five or ten minutes you and McKinney were alone in the house?”

“We weren’t in there four or five or ten minutes,” I said. “Maybe two minutes to be sure he was dead and another minute to be sure the killer or someone else wasn’t still in the house.”

“Michael Merrymen,” he said. “Recognize the name?”

“Ames and I went to see him yesterday,” I said. “What does he have to do …”

“He’s the dead man’s son-in-law,” explained Viviase. “See this file?”

He held up a green folder about two inches thick with papers creeping out. “Michael Merrymen is a lunatic. He has sued and been sued by some of the best and worst people in Sarasota. He has threatened bodily harm, frightened children, and is suspected of destroying the lawns, automobiles, vegetation, and small animals of neighbors. So, question three. Why did you go see Merrymen? He says you did. You and Ames and that Ames almost killed his dog with a baseball bat.”

“You said the man’s crazy,” I said.

“Crazy, not blind. The dog’s almost dead.”

“Why does Merrymen say we were there?” I asked innocently.

“To spy on him for his neighbors. He claims you represented yourselves as police officers.”

It was getting deep now. I almost considered asking for a cup of coffee, but I wasn’t that desperate yet.

“We were looking for Merrymen’s son,” I said.

Viviase slapped the desk with both hands. The coffee cup, croissant remnant, and piles of paper jumped.

“Progress. Fill in.”

“Merrymen made no sense. He didn’t know where his son was.”

“Why were you looking for his son?”

“I think he can help me track down someone I have papers to serve on.”

“Who?”

“Can’t divulge,” I said.

“How does contempt sound to you?”

“Like a word I’ve heard a lot.”

“So, you get a call from the dead guy in the morning…”

“He was alive when he called,” I corrected.

“I stand corrected. You get a call to come to his house at six. Doesn’t say why. Then you go to Michael Merry-men’s house to look for his son Mickey. No Mickey. So,
in a coincidence that rivals walking into your dear departed wife on a small street corner in Budapest, you go to the house of the grandfather of the very Mickey Merrymen you’re looking for.”

“A man in Hint, Michigan, got killed by frozen human waste that fell from an airplane last week,” I said. “He was a hard hat at a construction site. Took the hat off for an instant to wipe his brow and…”

“Very enlightening,” Viviase said. “Let’s say the kid you’re looking for, Mickey Merrymen, lived most of the time in his grandfather’s house. Let’s say maybe he has inherited some of his father’s tendency toward out-of-control lunacy. Let’s say he shot his grandfather, took his money, whatever there was of it, and ran. Let’s say the kid you’re looking for is our prime suspect.”

“I’m not after him,” I said. “I’m after someone he knows.”

“What do we call that? A non sequitur? An abrupt change in subject? Who are you looking for and do you know where Mickey Merrymen is?”

“I don’t know where Mickey Merrymen is,” I said. “Who I’m looking for has nothing to do with Corsello’s murder.”

With the palms of his hands, Viviase rubbed his hair and looked down in thought. Then he straightened up and brushed his hair back with his fingers.

“When I find out who you’re looking for, who’s connected to Mickey Merrymen,” he said calmly, “we’ll have another talk. One with higher stakes.”

“You going to talk to Ames?” I asked.

“What good would it do,” he said. “That old man would tell us his name and not say another word. That’s what he did the last time. I expect he would do the same again. You can go.”

He tossed the end of his croissant into his mouth and washed it down with coffee.

“I hope I’ve helped,” I said.

“Not in the least,” he answered pleasantly. “Lewis, you can leave now.”

I left.

When I got back to my office, I called Harvey the human computer.

“Got a little something for you, Lewis,” he said. I could hear him clacking away at his computer while we spoke. “On April 12, 1975, in the town of Arcadia, Florida, a young woman named Sarah Taylor fell to her death from the window of the city building. Witnesses in the office were Sheriff Charles Dorsey and a Miss Vera Lynn Uliaks. You getting this, Lewis?”

“Yes?”

“The mourning period was all of two weeks before he quit his job and moved away. Vera Lynn packed up and left the same day. Someone found out the ex-sheriff and Vera Lynn were married in Ohio. A small item on the subject appeared in the newspaper.”

“Story on Sarah Taylor’s fall?”

“Listed as accident. That’s all I can get. And I can’t track down a Charles or Vera Lynn Dorsey, not in Ohio, not anywhere. I’ll keep on it. But I can tell you where to find Clark Dorsey, Charlie’s brother.”

“Where?”

“Retired,” Harvey said. “Former fireman in Arcadia. Lives in Osprey, right off Old Venice Road. Open your white pages. He’s listed.”

“Thanks, Harve.”

“Let me know how it comes out,” he said. “Holy piss. I’ve just broken into the Pentagon files.”

“I thought you already did that,” I said.

“But they keep changing passwords and access codes. Gets harder all the time.”

“Have a good day, Harve,” I said.

“It already is,” he said.

I pulled out the sheet Lonsberg had given me with the phone numbers and addresses of his son and daughter. Osprey is on the way to Venice, no more than half an hour away, and Venice another ten minutes.

With the neatly folded threat that had been posted on my door tucked into my shirt pocket, I called Ames McKinney and asked him what his day was like.

“Cleaning and contemplation,” he said.

I told him the police might be talking to him about our discovery of Corsello’s body and told him what I had said. Then I asked him if he wanted to take a ride to Osprey and Venice.

“Armed?”

“Lightly,” I said.

“When?”

“Pick you up in ten minutes.”

“Can you make it an hour?” he said. “I’m working on the grill.”

I agreed and walked over to Gwen’s Diner. It was a little early for lunch but I was hungry. Gwen’s is a holdover from a few years before the day Elvis supposedly came in in the 1950s. I looked over at Elvis. He was still smiling. There were two booths open. I went to the counter. If you looked out the window from any seat in Gwen’s, you could watch the collisions where 301 met the curve at Tamiami Trail.

There was a nonsmoking section in Gwen’s, not a real one, just a couple of tables set aside. People in the neighborhood called the place Gwen’s II. The original Gwen, if she ever existed, was now long gone. The place was run by a woman named Sheila and her two teenage daughters, one of whom was about to graduate from Sarasota High School a block away, the other was seventeen and working on her second baby. Jesse, the younger one, short, blond, round with child, came up to me when I sat at the counter next to Tim from Steubenville. Tim was a regular, close to ninety. He lived in an assisted living home a short walk away at the end of Brother Geenen Way. He spent as much time as he could at Gwen’s reading the newspaper, shaking his head, and trying to get people engaged in conversation over anything from the price of gasoline to the latest school shooting.

There was very little left of Tim from Steubenville. Blue veins undulated over the thin bones in his hands as he turned pages of the
Herald-Tribune
and shook his head.

“Fonesca,” he said as Jesse poured me a coffee and waited.

“Fried egg sandwich,” I said. “White toast.”

“Tomato and onion?” she asked.

“Tomato, I’m working today.”

“Fonesca,” Tim from Steubenville repeated, tapping my arm.

It was a little after eleven. The place was empty except for me, Tim, and four guys who looked like air-conditioning repairmen in a booth drinking coffee and eating pie.

“Tim,” I said.

“You see about this guy in Nebraska,” he said, poking a finger at an article in the newspaper awkwardly folded. “Someone stuck a rattler in his mailbox.”

“Did it bite him?” I asked.

“No, scared the shit out of him though,” Tim said thoughtfully. “How’d you like to get up some morning, walk out to your mailbox expecting your pension check or AAA card, and find a rattlesnake.”

“I don’t have a mailbox,” I said. “Just a slot in the door.”

“Not the point, Fonesca.”

He shook his head at my density and sipped at his sixth or seventh cup of coffee.

“Point is,” he said. “You can be going along, minding your own business, thinking about some old song by Perry Como or Peggy Lee or what you might have for lunch, and bango-bamo, you got a snake hanging on your goddamn nose. Anything can happen. That’s the truth of the news, what it really tells you. People don’t understand. We don’t have to know when there’s a train derailed in Pakistan or a drug dealer gets knocked off in Colombia. Who needs to know that?”

I could think of some people but I just nodded at Jesse as she placed a mug of coffee in front of me.

“Point is that the newspapers are telling us that anything can happen, anytime. Careful doesn’t take care of half of that. The newspaper is like the goddamn Bible. The Bible says God can do whatever He damn well pleases without giving a reason or making sense. We have to learn to take whatever comes and like it. Arguing with God is like arguing with the news. Same lesson.”

“I agree,” I said. ‘Tim, you’re a philosopher.”

“Used to be a printer,” he answered, looking back at the newspaper for more disasters and surprises. “Nothing’s changed. Not in thousands of years. Just put in engines, make bigger guns, take the taste out of our food, and why?”

“Why?” I asked as Jesse delivered my egg sandwich cut neatly down the middle with two pickle slices on the side.

Tim reached out and grabbed Jesse’s wrist so she would hear the answer. Jesse patiently paused. There were no customers waiting and Tim was the diner’s resident character.

“People think they can change things,” he said softly. “They can’t. They can make bigger, faster, even keep you alive a few years longer, but we all go through the cycle and never know if a rattler’s going to come out of the mailbox.”

Or what messages will be hung on our doors, I thought. Tim released Jesse’s wrist though he couldn’t have held it if she hadn’t been willing to cooperate in the first place.

“Jesse,” I asked, reaching for half a sandwich. “You know a Mickey Merrymen?”

Jesse was a pretty pale girl on the thin side. Her blond hair was short and her look was that of a kid who had a two-year-old at home and another on the way. Jesse’s primary claim to respectability was that she was married. Her husband, Paul, also known as The Chink, was a mechanic right across the street in the Ford Agency. The two-year-old, Paulie Jr., was in day care every other day when Jesse wasn’t working. Jesse was finishing high school through the mail. Jesse was and looked tired all the time.

“Freak time. Geek time,” she said. “Yeah, I know him.”

“What do you know about him?” I asked while Tim shook his head and pointed at yet another article to substantiate his world view that, as a matter of fact, was mine too.

“Mickey’s a weird bird, an X-man mutant,” she said. “Smart, a little nuts, not bad-looking when he cleans up, but a weird bird.”

“Get in trouble?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“Look at this. Look at this,” Tim said, finding some new truth in the
Herald-Tribune
in front of him. Tim spoke with
the quiet resignation of one who knew everything he found would vindicate his philosophy. Tim was a true believer who moved from coffee during the day to the whiskey he must have kept secreted in his room at night and which was still not fully masked by Eckerd mouthwash in the morning.

“Mickey,” I reminded Jesse.

“I think he graduated last year, works at the Burger King up the Trail,” she said. “Says he’s going to college. Or used to say it. Massachusetts Institute of Technicals or something. Father’s nuts.”

“That’s all you know about Mickey Merrymen?” I said, finishing the first half of the sandwich.

“Merrymen?” asked Tim. “Michael Merrymen?”

Jesse and I looked at Tim who smiled and said, “Man’s in the paper almost as much as that doctor who’s always suing the hospital or someone,” said Tim. “Classic paranoid. Sues Albertson’s, Barnes & Noble, neighbors, gets himself listed in the crime reports, noise levels, guns. Name it. He’s your man. Even tried to run for City Council a few years ago. Couldn’t come up with even twenty signatures on his petition. My theory, if you ask me, is he saw the light one morning, maybe turned on his television and saw something or found a rattlesnake in his mailbox and realized the world wasn’t a safe place to live in.”