Denial lf-4

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  I stopped at a Walgreens and picked up a disposable cell phone. Then I headed to a camera shop in Northgate Plaza off 301. I had a little trouble finding it A truck loaded with wooden planks was parked in front. A couple of sweating men wearing work gloves were removing the planks and piling them up. I moved past them into the shop.

  It was small; cameras in locked glass cases lined the walls to my right and behind the counter to my left. A young man, maybe twenty-five, grinned at me. He was about six feet tall and couldn’t have weighed more than 120 pounds. His grin was cadaverous.

  “Wayne Bennett?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  I took out the summons and handed it to him. He looked at the envelope and then at me.

  “This what I think it is?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think it is?”

  He placed the envelope on the counter and wiped his palms on his shirt.

  “They want me to tell what I saw Jesse doing,” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know who Jesse is.”

  “Jesse will kill me,” he said. “No, I mean he might really kill me. You try to help a friend…”

  “Your friend Jesse might want to kill you?”

  “He hates prison,” said Bennett.

  “Most people do,” I said.

  “Not more than Jesse,” he said.

  I had nothing to say.

  “What am I going to do?” he asked.

  “Be where it tells you to be when they tell you to be there,” I said.

  I left without looking back. If I paused, he would tell me his story. I couldn’t handle any more stories. They filled the air wherever I went, invisible, ghostly. Ann was right. There was no hiding from ghosts, mine or other people’s.

  My next stop was on Longboat Key, one of the high-rise, high-priced condos on the bay. I pulled up to the guard gate and an old man in a khaki uniform and a matching cap came out of the small shack with a clipboard.

  “You’re here to see…?”

  “You Benjamin Strayley?”

  “Yes,” he said, puzzled.

  I handed him the envelope.

  “She did it,” he said with a sigh. “She really did it, didn’t she?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “The bitch,” he said, shaking his head. “Sorry, I don’t usually use language like that but… the bitch did it. You know how long we’ve been married?”

  He looked as if he really expected an answer or a guess.

  “Forty-one years,” he said.

  Catherine and I had been married nine years when she died. There was no point in telling this to Benjamin Strayley, who slid the envelope under the clip on his board.

  “Forty-one years,” he repeated. “I didn’t even want to move down here. Her idea. All my friends, family are in Danville.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  There was a car behind me.

  “I’ll open the gate,” Strayley said. “Turn around and you can go right out.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He went back in the shack.

  I bypassed my office, parked in front of Gwen’s diner, ordered two grilled cheese sandwiches and a chocolate shake and found out that Gwen had taken Digger on as a fill-in short-order chef.

  A few people knew that Gwen’s real name was Sheila. Her mother had been Gwen. When her mother died, people saw the sign on the roof of the one-story building and assumed the woman who owned it and bustled behind the counter and in the kitchen and from table to table was Gwen. She accepted without correcting.

  Tim from Steubenville was sitting at the counter. I joined him. 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 into conversations about eliminating the income tax, abolishing drug laws, ending almost everything the “damn government” was involved in besides having an army, paving the highways and providing a police force.

  There was very little left of Tim from Steubenville beyond his convictions. Blue veins undulated over the thin bones in his hands as he drank his coffee from a white mug.

  “I tried Digger out,” Gwen said. “He can cook the easy stuff, good enough for breakfasts. He’ll make enough to live on if he’s careful, and the food’s free if he doesn’t overdo it.”

  I thanked her.

  “No favor,” she said. “I can use the extra help in the morning now that my firstborn is out producing grandbabies.”

  Gwen was buxom and full of energy with curly brown hair that she was constantly brushing back with her arm. She poured me a cup of coffee. I put in two Equals and a lot of milk from the small metal pitcher.

  “Banana cream?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said.

  She winked and went off to get me a slice of pie.

  “She shouldn’t pay him more than the free market will bear,” said Tim. “Minimum wages are an infringement of free enterprise. If the market says she has to pay him twenty dollars an hour, so be it. If the market says she only has to pay him four dollars an hour, so be it. Free market.”

  He held up his mug as if he were toasting what he had just said. I held my mug up too.

  When I finished the pie, I felt better, but better is a comparative term; better than what? Better than when? Gwen was talking to two men at a booth who looked like truckers. Something she said made them laugh. I put four dollars on the counter and got up.

  “I say,” said Tim, looking at his almost empty coffee mug, “almost every damn government agency should be shut down. Now, tomorrow. That’s what I say.”

  I knew. He had said it before. The next thing he would do if I didn’t escape would be to go through the list of government departments that should be dismantled. He usually started with OSHA, but sometimes the FDA came first.

  “You know it’s damn unconstitutional to deprive Americans of their right to get their damn prescription drugs wherever they want,” he said.

  “You were a constitutional lawyer?” I asked, immediately regretting it.

  He turned his head to me and said, “I worked the line in an automobile assembly factory for almost fifty years. I don’t need a damn law degree. Just read the Constitution.”

  “I will,” I said. “Gotta go.”

  It was almost three. I hurried to the Gillespie Park neighborhood, got out of the car and walked the same route Kyle McClory had walked before he died. I turned on the cell phone I had bought and punched in the number Richard McClory had given me. There was no answer. I didn’t expect one. I was listening for the ringing on Kyle’s phone, looking in the bushes and grass. Nothing.

  I tried for the fifth time. I was about where Kyle had been standing when he was hit. This time someone answered. Or, to be more accurate, someone was breathing hard on the other end.

  “Hello,” I said.

  More breathing.

  “Hello,” I repeated.

  “Fonesca,” he said with a sigh. It was the voice of the man who had told me to stop looking for who killed Kyle.

  “Can we talk?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I should have thrown this thing away as soon as I picked it up. I’m going to do that now.”

  “What happened? The night you killed Kyle?”

  “No,” he said. “Just listen to me. Listen. You’ve got to stop. Please. I don’t want to kill you. I’ve… I… just stop. No one will be helped by you finding me.”

  “I’ll find you,” I said.

  “You’re going to make me kill you, aren’t you?”

  “You sound like you’d rather not,” I said.

  “I can’t think of another choice,” he said.

  “Well, since it’s my life we’re talking about, maybe I could come up with some alternatives.”

  “I don’t think there are any,” he said.

  “How about-”
I began, but he turned off the phone.

  10

  I headed for the Goines’s home off Gulf Gate. It was easy to find. A quiet street. Modest one-story two-bedrooms. I parked in the driveway next to a Kia mini-SUV and went to the door.

  The woman who answered about fifteen seconds after I rang wore jeans and a yellow man’s shirt with the sleeves rolled up. She looked at me over the top of her round glasses.

  “Mrs. Goines?” I asked.

  She looked too young to be Andrew Goines’s mother, at least at first glance. Her skin was clear, her eyes blue, her hair short, straight, blonde.

  When she spoke, I added a decade to my first impression.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Lew Fonesca,” I said. “I talked to you earlier about your son and Kyle McClory.”

  “Oh yes, sorry,” she said. “I thought you were someone here to try to sell me something or donate to saving the world or supporting a political hack. I’m working on a grant for the Sarasota County Film Commission. Almost finished. Come in.”

  I followed her in. The entryway was small. The living room to my right was small. The dog that came bounding out of nowhere was big, big and hairy and brown. He tried to stop his rush at me but slid on his nails on the tile floor and bumped into me. I didn’t fall but it was close.

  “Clutch,” she said. “Get out of here.”

  Clutch was panting, tongue out, looking from me to her.

  “Out,” she repeated.

  The dog took a few steps into the tiled living room and then looked back at me.

  “Out,” she repeated.

  The dog slowly, almost mournfully disappeared through an open sliding door.

  “I did call Nancy Root,” she said. “She told me you were working for her. Mr. Fonesca, Andy got a little, well, nervous when I told him you were coming by. He was better, but not much, when I told him I’d talked to Kyle’s mother about you.”

  “How has he reacted to Kyle’s death?” I asked.

  She shook her head and said, “Odd; he seems-maybe I’m just imagining it-frightened. He puts on a front, but the more he says everything is fine, the more I’m convinced everything isn’t fine. He won’t talk to me about it.”

  “Andy’s father?”

  “Dead,” she said. “He was a helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. It went down. Everyone on board died. The captain who came by said it wasn’t downed by enemy fire. As if that makes a difference.”

  “Andy?”

  “Andy’s in his room,” she said. “I told him you were coming. Don’t expect a lot of cooperation.”

  “You said you didn’t know Kyle McClory well.”

  “Not well,” she said. “Tell the truth, the few times he came over he worked a little too hard to be likeable. Tried to say what he thought I wanted him to say. Couldn’t get past that. Can’t say I really tried too hard to break through. Poor kid.”

  “Andy?”

  “Oh, sure,” she said. “Come on. Call him Andrew, at least to start out. My guess is if you call him Andy, he’ll tell you to call him Andrew. If you call him Andrew, he’ll tell you to call him Andy.”

  I followed her through the living room into an alcove with three doors. The door in the middle was the bathroom. That door was open. The door to the right was obviously Mrs. Goines’s bedroom. The door to the left was closed and a yellow plastic streamer said, verboten.

  She knocked.

  “Yeah,” came the boy’s voice.

  “The man I told you about is here,” she said.

  “Changed my mind,” he said.

  “Andy, he’s working for Kyle’s mom,” she said. “Give him five minutes.”

  “I haven’t got anything to say that’ll help him.”

  “You never know,” I said. “Five minutes is all I need.”

  Long pause, the door opened. Andy Goines, barefoot, cutoff jeans and a Def Jam T-shirt, stood in front of me. He was short, stocky, round pink face, dark hair brushed straight back. He looked at me and clearly wasn’t impressed.

  “Okay,” he said. “Come on in. Five minutes. I’m watching the clock.”

  Andy’s mother excused herself, saying she had to get back to her grant proposal. Andy kicked the door closed behind me.

  The room was clean, the bed made with a plain green blanket and four green pillows. A black director’s chair sat next to the bed. Nothing on the wood floor. CDs and DVDs neatly stacked on shelves next to a low dresser on top of which sat a television set and a CD deck on top of a DVD deck. There was a speaker on each side of the dresser. Next to the dresser was a small desk with a computer and chair. The desk wasn’t cluttered. A blue backpack sat on the chair.

  On one wall were two posters, both framed, lined up next to each other. One poster was for one of the Lord of the Rings movies. On it, Sean Astin was leaning over Elijah Wood, his hand resting on Wood’s shoulder. In Wood’s open palm was the bright gold ring. The other poster was Eminem. I knew who it was because his name was printed in bold blood red across the top of the poster. Eminem was holding a microphone in one hand and pointing at me. Eminem looked angry.

  On the other wall were three posters, all brightly colored sports cars. One car, a convertible, was red. The second car was a squat, dark Humvee with what looked like teeth, and the third car, a yellow Mini Cooper.

  “Okay if I sit?” I asked.

  “Suit yourself,” he said, his hands plunged into the pockets of his jeans.

  I sat in the director’s chair. Andy Goines stood across the room in front of the television set.

  “I’ve got nothing new to say about what happened to Kyle,” he said.

  “Tell me again, please.”

  “You a Cub fan?” he asked, looking at my cap.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He shook his head. I thought he was going to say something like “loser” or maybe he was thinking it.

  “We went to the movie, got out,” he said flatly. “We were supposed to be picked up by Kyle’s dad. Kyle called him. We had time. We walked around the block. Kyle told me he’d meet me in front in a few minutes. Had something he had to do. He ran through the parking lot. I thought he had to find a toilet or something. I went out in front. Kyle didn’t show. I called my mom and asked her to pick me up. That’s it.”

  “You didn’t see Kyle’s dad?”

  “Nope, but I wasn’t looking for him.”

  “You didn’t think something happened to Kyle?”

  “Nope. He did stuff like that. Went off. Called me the next day to tell me something cool he’d done. It happened.”

  I nodded and said, “What phone did you use to call your mother?”

  “Kyle’s,” he said.

  “But Kyle wasn’t with you. Did he give you his phone?”

  Andrew Goines looked at his watch. He was definitely uneasy.

  “Wait, now I remember. I called from the pay phone in the Main Street Book Store.”

  “Main Street Book Store doesn’t have a public phone,” I said, not knowing if they did or didn’t.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I called from the Hollywood 20,” he said. “What’s the difference?”

  “What time did you call your mother?”

  “What time? How the hell would I know? Maybe ten, fifteen minutes after we got out of the movie.”

  Since one lie had worked and the kid looked beyond nervous, I went for two more.

  “I checked the movie times,” I said. “You got out at nine-thirty. You mother says you called her at about ten-thirty. That’s an hour.”

  “We were talking, following some girls we knew,” he said.

  “Who were the girls?” I asked.

  “You mean their names?”

  “Yes,” I said, taking out my notebook.

  “What’s this? Law amp; Order? They were just girls we see at school in the halls and stuff. They didn’t even look at us.”

  “Kyle was your best friend, right?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  His h
ands were out of his pockets and his palms were beating gently against his thighs. I looked at the poster.

  “Frodo and Sam,” I said. “Kyle was Frodo. You were Sam.”

  “You saw the movies?”

  “Read the books,” I said. “Long time ago. Sam saved his friend.”

  “You’ve got a point? You saying I could have saved Kyle or something?”

  He took a small step forward. The crack in his voice was small, but it was there.

  “I don’t know. What happened to Kyle?”

  “I told you. I told the police.”

  I was shaking my head no.

  “You don’t believe me? You calling me a liar?”

  “You put it that way, I guess I am, but I think you’ve got a reason to lie,” I said. “I think you’re scared.”

  “Of what?” he said, aiming for defiance but hitting fear.

  “Of who,” I said. “He called me.”

  Andy Goines tilted his head to one side.

  “What? Who called you?”

  “The man who killed Kyle,” I said.

  “You are shitting me, man,” he said, his voice rising, pointing a finger at me the way Eminem was across the room on the wall. Only Andy’s look was definitely not anger but fear.

  “No.”

  “You’re lying. Why would he call you?”

  “To tell me to stop looking for him,” I said. “I think he tried to run me down the way he did Kyle.”

  Andy Goines was shaking now. He pulled the backpack from the chair by the desk, dropped it on the floor and sat down, hands rubbing his legs.

  “Did he say anything about me?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I think he’s going to try to kill me. Oh shit. Shit. Shit.”

  He was pounding his fists on his legs now. He bit his lower lip and looked at Eminem for help, didn’t get any and turned back to me.

  “Help me find him,” I said.

  “Shit,” he said once more. “He went crazy, man.”

  “Kyle?”

  “No, that guy.”

  “Kyle’s sister said you and her brother were into doing things?”

  “She’s a lying whore. What kind of things?”