Denial lf-4

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Ames went to the end of the corridor and peeked down the long hallway. Then he turned and motioned for me to follow him. He moved quickly across the hallway and into an alcove. I followed, glancing to my left, relieved to see nothing and no one.

  I knew where we were now, right in front of Amos Trent’s office. Ames tried the door. It was locked. He pulled his jackknife from his pocket, found a thin blade that looked like a toothpick with a tiny forked tip. In no more than four seconds, the door opened. We went in. Ames’s flashlight came on as the door closed. I turned mine on too.

  We both knew what we were looking for. I went to the desk. Ames went to the file cabinet. We worked fast. I found a few interesting things, including a clearly marked medicine bottle from Eckerd’s drugstore containing two Viagra pills, five low-carb chocolate bars, a tube of Thomas Valerian’s toupee paste, and a thin catalog of items guaranteed to “embarrass or gross out” your friends and enemies.

  Ames was on the second drawer, thumbing through file folders.

  “Wrong place,” came a voice from the door.

  I froze. Ames turned his light toward the voice.

  A figure in a blue robe pushed the door closed. I turned my light on him. He was ancient, pudgy, pink-faced, with sparse white hair carefully brushed to the right of his age-spotted scalp. He stood with both hands on a walker.

  “Saw you here this afternoon,” he said to Ames. “Or maybe it was yesterday. It’s easy to lose track of days or time in here.”

  Neither Ames nor I said anything.

  The man flicked on the lights.

  “No one’ll see the light,” he said conversationally. “Even if they look at the door, there’s nothing out there but trees, grass, the creek and Rose Teffler’s gator. Well?”

  “You know what we’re looking for?” I asked.

  “Dorothy told me,” he said. “My name’s Ham Gentry, by the way.”

  “You knew we’d come here?” I asked.

  “Hell no,” he said. “I’m a night wanderer like Dorothy and a few others, Sid Catorian, Lilly Carnovski. You can hear Sid’s wheelchair whining fifty feet away. I just happened to see you when I came out of the toilet at the end of the hall.”

  “Where is it?” I asked.

  He pointed past me to the wall. There was a corkboard a few feet above where I sat. It was covered with neatly posted memos and announcements skewered with colorful tacks. I had looked at the board when I came in. There had been nothing about patient discharges.

  “Under the green brochure about Medicare and Medicaid,” he said.

  I got up, lifted the brochure and saw a report marked, Discharges, Admissions. The date at the top was yesterday.

  “I saw him put one of those up there a few months ago,” said Gentry. There were others beneath it dating back a week.

  “Why’s he hide it?” Ames asked.

  I put the report on the desk and began to copy the information I needed onto the back of an envelope I took out of the trash can under the desk.

  “I think he juggles the numbers,” said Gentry. “My guess is he uses it to skim moola, dinero, a few bucks here and there. Not sure how, but I’m working on it and when I find out, there will be perks aplenty for Hamilton Gentry and his friends.”

  “Got it,” I said, writing down the last of four names and the addresses.

  I put the report and the brochure back on the corkboard as close to where they had been as I could remember. Ames and I headed toward the door but Gentry raised his hand to stop us.

  “Just go out the window here,” he said. “I’ll lock it behind you.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Dorothy says someone was murdered here, then someone was murdered here,” he said. “Nurses here are damned nice, considering what they have to put up with, but Amos Trent is… what the hell, get going.”

  Ames opened the window, lifted his right leg over the sill, and then his left followed and he dropped into the darkness. I followed him. When my feet touched the ground, the window lock clicked. A few seconds later, the light went out.

  I followed Ames along the brick wall and made it past Rose Teffler’s window without encountering Jerry Lee.

  I dropped Ames at the Texas and headed to my office. There were no cars in the DQ lot. When I opened my office door, I half expected the phone to be ringing, but it wasn’t. I didn’t look at the information I had copied. I just placed it on my desk in the dark and headed for the back room, where I stripped down to my boxers and lay down on the cot, two pillows under my head. I wasn’t sleepy. I watched the lights between the slats of my blinds from occasional cars passing on Washington.

  It was, I guessed, a little after three-thirty.

  Sleep came, but not quickly.

  8

  Someone was knocking at my door. I opened my eyes. The sun was casting bands of dusty light through the slats of my blinds. More knocking. Not hard. Not insistent, but not giving up either. I reached for my watch, almost got it before it fell off the chair next to my bed. Then I almost fell out of the bed reaching for the watch.

  It was a few minutes after eight.

  I got up and stood for a few seconds, swaying slightly, blinking, wanting the knocking to stop so I could fold myself back onto my cot.

  The knocking didn’t stop. In need of a shave, clad in my blue boxer underwear with the little white circles and an extra-large gray Grinnell College T-shirt that I picked up at the Women’s Exchange for fifty cents, I was as ready as I wanted to be for visitors.

  When I opened the door, the sun greeted me just over the acupuncture center across Washington Street. A cool breeze and the sight of a man wearing a Tampa Bay Bucs sweatshirt dappled with stains from coffee and liquids unknown also greeted me.

  “Digger,” I said.

  “Little Italian,” he said, with a smile showing white, inexpensive but serviceable false teeth.

  Digger, until a few months ago, had been homeless. Well, not homeless if you were willing to consider the rest room five doors down a home. Digger, bush of pepper gray hair and nose tilted slightly to the right, was a thinker. Once, when I was shaving in the rest room, he had said, “Why do women complain when men leave the toilet seat up? Why shouldn’t men complain when women leave the toilet seat down?”

  We stood looking at each other for a few seconds, Digger with his hands behind his back, rocking slightly, me with my hands at my sides, waiting.

  “Job’s gone,” he said, looking over his left shoulder.

  I knew what he was looking at, the second-floor dance studio across the street where he had been working as an instructor. Digger had dug deeply into his memory of different times to call up what he called “the Spirit of Terpsichore.” The studio had closed a few days ago. No notice. Just gone, cleaned out, empty.

  “You want to come in?” I asked.

  “I bear no gifts,” he said.

  “I expect none,” I said, stepping back.

  He came in and I closed the door.

  “Lewis,” he said, facing me. “I am optimistic.”

  “I’m happy to hear that,” I said.

  “Wrong word,” he said. “You are not happy. I have never seen you happy. I have seen you relieved.”

  “I’m relieved to hear that you are optimistic,” I said.

  Digger looked at the chair in front of my desk. I motioned for him to sit. He did. I went into the back room, changed into my yellow boxers with the little gray sharks, put on my jeans and a clean short-sleeved white button-down shirt, white socks and white sneakers. Then I went back into the office, Cubs hat in hand, where Digger was examining the sheet of names and addresses from the Seaside I had scribbled.

  He looked up as I sat behind the desk and said, “I’m optimistic. My room rent is paid for two weeks. I have prospects, ideas.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “I thought you should be the first one I told because you were the one who lifted me from the chill confines of the WC and the depths of i
gnominy to the dignity of steady work and eating regular.”

  Digger was smiling. With people who look like Digger, the conclusion to jump to was that he had spent the night cuddling with a bottle of inexpensive but well-advertised wine or some drug not of choice but of last resort. Neither was true. Digger neither drank nor used drugs. His troubles were deeper than that, rooted, as he put it, in faulty genes, ill-fated life choices, a series of concussions and a god or gods who enjoyed experimenting on him. I knew those gods.

  “Ideas,” he said, looking down at my list and then back up at me. “I’ve thought of starting a church, the First Presbyterian Church of the Tupperware. Sell religion and plastic containers that you put things in and pop the tops. On top of each lid will be an inscription: jesus saves; so should you.”

  I nodded. Digger leaned forward.

  “How about this? A line of candy. Simple chocolates maybe made in the shape of offensive things. I’d call it Good-Tasting Chocolate in Bad Taste. You know. Swastikas. Klansmen. That one would be white chocolate, which you know is not really chocolate at all.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you need a job and a loan,” I said.

  Digger stopped smiling.

  “I paid you back last time,” he said.

  “That you did.”

  “Well, I’ve started finding some dignity. Now I guess I’d better find another job to keep the search going.”

  I shifted my weight, took out my wallet, removed three twenties and handed them to Digger. I noticed that his hands were clean and his face freshly shaved. He took the money and touched his cheeks.

  “Spic and span and speaking Spanish,” he said. “Ready to take on the world again.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Any ideas?”

  “Can you cook?”

  “Continental, Mexican, Italian, Thai, Chinese, French,” he said, counting each one off on his fingers.

  “Short order,” I said. “Griddle cakes, eggs, bacon, sausages.”

  “With the best of them, whoever they might be,” he said.

  “Gwen’s looking for an early-morning short-order cook,” I said.

  Gwen’s was just down the street, a clean, bright survivor of the 1950s, not a kitsch and cool fifties diner, but the real thing. There was even an autographed poster of Elvis on the wall near the cash register. Elvis had dropped in for breakfast in 1957 when Gwen was a little girl and her parents had owned the place. Now, Gwen and her daughters ran the diner, kept the prices down and the food simple.

  “I’m the man for the job,” Digger said. “Though I have to confess, I can’t really handle all that ethnic cuisine.”

  “Confession accepted,” I said. “You know Gwen?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Let me know how it goes,” I said, getting up. He did the same.

  “Can I buy you breakfast?” he asked.

  “Get the job and you can make me breakfast tomorrow.”

  “How do I look?” he asked.

  “Got another shirt?”

  He looked down at himself.

  “Yes.”

  “Clean?”

  “Spotless,” he said.

  “Put it on and go see Gwen. Tell her I sent you.”

  “Here’s hoping,” he said, moving to the door.

  I had long ago given up hoping and I didn’t think Digger had much left in him, but he hung on. I hung on. I was never really sure why. That’s one of the reasons I saw Ann Horowitz.

  I got a clean towel from my closet, took my ziplock bag containing a disposable Bic razor, soap, toothbrush and toothpaste and made my way to the rest room along the railed concrete walkway outside my door.

  The rest room was always clean, thanks to Marvin Uliaks, slow of wit, doer of odd jobs on the stretch of Washington Street between Ringling and Bahia Vista. He swept floors, cleaned toilets, washed windows and smiled at whatever cash was handed to him. I regularly gave him a dollar a week. It was worth it.

  It was going to be a busy day. I did not want a busy day. I had my list from the Seaside. I had a dead boy whose mother was waiting for something that people called “closure.” Closure, the end of grief and the answer to why a tragedy burst through their door. I didn’t have hope and I suspected that closure, if I ever found it, would close nothing, just open new doors.

  When I got back to my office, I sat down and made a list of people to see:

  Richard McClory, the dead boy’s father

  Yolanda Root, the dead boy’s half sister

  Andrew Goines, the dead boy’s best friend

  The four people who had been released from the Seaside Assisted Living Facility the night Dorothy Cgnozic had seen someone murdered

  I wanted to go back to bed.

  The phone rang.

  “Fonesca?”

  It was a woman. I recognized her voice. I closed my eyes, knowing what was coming.

  “Yes.”

  “Two today,” she said.

  “My lucky day.”

  The woman was Marie Knot. She was a lawyer. She was around fifty, black, no-nonsense face, thin and all business. I wanted to say no, but I couldn’t afford to lose her as a client. I was, according to the card with my picture on it in my wallet, a process server.

  “I’ll pick them up in a little while,” I said.

  “Need them served before five,” she said. “Shouldn’t be hard. I have addresses.”

  She hung up. My going rate was seventy-five dollars for each person served, regardless of how long it took or how much abuse I had to deal with.

  I made a few phone calls.

  Andrew Goines was in school. When I told his mother that I was working for Nancy Root, she said I could talk to her son when he got home at four.

  “I don’t really know Kyle’s mother,” she said. “Talked to her on the phone a few times. His father too. Kyle… Andrew could have been with him when it happened.”

  The familiar sound of a computer printer clacked on her end.

  “I work at home,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to get back online with a client.”

  “I’ll come by at four,” I said.

  “Mr…?”

  “Fonesca,” I said.

  “Hope you don’t mind, but I am going to call Nancy Root to verify that you’re working for her.”

  “You want her number?”

  “No, I’ve got it,” she said. “Got to run.”

  She hung up.

  I found the phone number of Elliott Maxwell Root in Bradenton. Sally had said Yolanda had been living with her grandparents. I called. The voice that answered was young, female.

  “Yolanda Root?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Careful, slow, wary.

  “My name is Lew Fonesca. Your mother hired me to try to find out who killed your brother.”

  “What difference does it make?” she said. “He’s dead. We’re all dead or will be sooner or later.”

  “Can I talk to you about Kyle?”

  “Go ahead,” she said. “I’m waiting for a ride. When he comes, I say good-bye, private eye.”

  “I’m not a private detective,” I said. “I just find people.”

  “Interesting,” she said, making it clear that she didn’t find it interesting at all.

  “Can we talk in person?”

  “Sure.”

  “When?”

  “I’m between jobs, sort of,” she said. “I clerk a few hours at my grandfather’s hardware store on DeSoto near Fifty-seventh. I’ll be there between one and three.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  I started to hang up but she said, “Wait.”

  “I’m here.”

  “What the fuck. Yeah, I’d like to know who killed Kyle. They could have stopped, called the police, given him first aid, something, instead of running away.”

  “Any idea who might want to hurt Kyle?”

  �
��Hurt? It was some drunk or some blind old lady or something,” she said. “Hit-and-run. Police said.”

  “We’ll talk at your grandfather’s,” I said.

  “Hey, if you-”

  I hung up.

  Richard McClory said I could meet him in half an hour at his office on Orange.

  I folded my list, tucked it in my back pocket, put on my Cubs cap, locked the door, went through the drive-thru at McDonald’s half a block away where 301 joins Tamiami Trail. I ate my Big Mac and drank my Diet Coke while I drove to Marie Knot’s office in the complex at the corner of Bee Ridge and Sawyer.

  I didn’t see Marie, just told the temp at the desk that I was Lew Fonesca. The girl was young, maybe eighteen or nineteen, round face, peach skin, long dark hair. She handed me an eight-by-ten envelope with my name on it and I was out the door checking my watch.

  When I pulled into the parking lot of the McClory Oncology Center, I opened the envelope, scanned the two summonses to figure out where they had to be delivered and what they were for. Both were less than fifteen minutes away and neither suggested that the person I’d be delivering it to was particularly dangerous, but one never knows.

  I put them back in the envelope, left the envelope on the seat and entered the oncology center in what my watch and the clock on the wall over the television set in the waiting room told me was within a minute of the half hour McClory had given me.

  There were four people in the waiting room. Three were men over sixty. One was a woman who couldn’t have been more than forty. They all were staring at the television. A woman on CNN was telling them that people were dying in a place thousands of miles away, in a town whose name they couldn’t pronounce.

  “Sign in,” said the woman behind the counter on the right with a smile. She wasn’t much younger than the quartet watching CNN.

  “I’m not a patient,” I said. “I have an appointment with Dr. McClory.”

  She looked at me, never losing her smile. I didn’t look like serious business.

  “My name is Fonesca,” I said. “Just tell him I’m here.”

  She picked up the phone and held it to her ear as she pressed a button, paused and said, “A Mr. Fonseca to see Dr. McClory.”

  “Fonesca,” I said.