Always Say Goodbye lf-5

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  The crowd was almost gone. The well-dressed man was helping the dazed gladiator to his feet, being careful not to cover himself in blood.

  “Thank you,” said the red-capped man.

  “What were you before?” Lew asked.

  “Before what? Oh, first a soldier and then I was a very bad preacher of bootlegged and distorted meanderings randomly recalled from the Holy Bible.”

  The man in the suit was steadying the bleeding man with one hand and speaking to him softly. The bleeding man nodded in understanding as he stained Jackson Street.

  “Whomsoever will take my hand,” the man in the cap suddenly bellowed. “So shall he walk with me through the valley of monsters and devils and emerge on the path to a bright eternity. And that is no shit.”

  People were not attracted by his call to salvation.

  “I still got it,” the man said, smiling. “Haven’t done that in years. Feels good. Come on. Get down. Feels good. Feels good.”

  “It doesn’t feel good,” said Lew.

  “Give it half a shot.”

  “It’s not in me.”

  The man in the knit cap plunged his hands into his coat pockets, backed away and looked at Lew saying, “I see that now.”

  He turned his back and swooped through the crowd.

  “Do I have any blood on me, Lew?” came a question from Lew’s left.

  Lew turned to face the well-dressed man. There was no visible blood on Milt Holiger.

  The bloody man, the crowd and the preacher had drifted away. A new line of hurrying pedestrians and grinding cars took over.

  “His newspaper,” said Holiger, looking at Lew. “I once had a guy, little guy, mean face, lips pushed out like this.”

  Holiger jutted his chin out and opened his eyes wide.

  “Little guy says I’m wearing his pants. Won’t give up. Stays in my face. He was too pathetic to hit. I told him where the Goodwill store was on Madison and gave him a buck. He, can you believe it, struts away mumbling about my stealing his pants. Guy had maybe a twenty-four waist, tops. The pants were thirty-eights.”

  There weren’t many people inside the Dunkin’ Donuts and there was no line. Milt Holiger ordered a black coffee and a sourdough donut. Lew ordered a coffee with cream and double sugar and a corn muffin. Franco came in. He nodded at Holiger, looked over the counter at the trays of donuts, muffins and pastries.

  “Hard to decide,” Franco said. “Okay, a chocolate chip muffin, a chocolate-frosted donut, not the fluffy one, the cake kind, and a coffee straight.”

  Lew paid for all three orders and headed for a small table for two in the back near the restrooms.

  “It’s okay. I’ll sit over there,” said Franco, nodding at an empty table across the room.

  “Gracie got accepted at Vanderbilt,” Holiger said, pulling his chair up to the table.

  “And your son?”

  “Alan’s still straight A at Northwestern,” Holiger said, tearing his donut in half and dipping one of the halves into his coffee with his right hand. The left he used to keep his tie from dipping into the coffee. “So you want to tell me more about the person or persons who killed Catherine?”

  Lew looked at his muffin and coffee but didn’t reach for them.

  “His name is Victor Lee.”

  “And you haven’t turned him in? You want me to do it?”

  “No.”

  “He’s alive, right? Wait. Maybe I don’t want to know,” Holiger said, working on his coffee and muffin.

  “He’s alive. I talked to him.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He’s suffering.”

  “He said he was suffering?”

  “I could see he was suffering,” said Lew, touching his coffee cup but still not lifting it.

  “Where is he now?” asked Holiger, starting on the second half of his donut.

  “Lost,” said Lew, looking over at Franco who had finished both his muffin and donut. “Pappas is dead.”

  Holiger paused, soggy wedge of donut halfway from the table to his mouth. Then he leaned forward, but it was too late to stop the end of the donut from dropping into the coffee.

  “Killed himself right after lunch,” Lew continued.

  “Today? How do you know?”

  Holiger checked himself to be sure no drops of coffee had splashed on him.

  “I was there,” said Lew. “Catherine, Pappas, Posno, Santoro, Aponte-Cruz, all dead.”

  “Posno, dead?” said Holiger.

  A very fat young man with a well-trimmed beard had replaced the two who had left the next table. The fat man was wearing a Chicago Bears jacket and cap. He glanced at Lew and went to work on some large iced drink covered with whipped cream.

  “And another hundred people just got off of the train,” Lew said. He thought he had said it to himself but Milt Holiger said, “Train?”

  “Nothing,” said Lew, breaking off a corner of the muffin.

  “Lew, you all right?”

  Their eyes met. Holiger’s concern was sincere.

  “Making a dollar a minute,” said Lew.

  “You’re losing me here, Lewis.”

  “Catherine’s missing files don’t have anything to do with Pappas, Posno or Victor Lee,” said Lew.

  “They don’t?”

  “No,” said Lew.

  Franco had finished eating. He stood and looked at Lew, who motioned him back down. Franco sat.

  “Okay, but what about Santoro and Aponte-Cruz?” said Holiger. “Did Pappas own up to killing them before he died? Did-what’s his name-Lee kill them?”

  “Pappas didn’t kill them. Neither did Lee.”

  “You know who did?”

  Lew took the folded bank statement and the bullet he had taken from the door of Franco’s truck out of his pocket and placed them on the table in front of Holiger.

  “You did, Milt,” Lew said.

  A woman, trying to keep her bulky flower-patterned bone-handled purse from falling from under her arm, held her white paper bag in front of her, scanning for an open table. There was none. She sighed and headed for the door.

  “I think Catherine’s missing file is the one with bank statements in it,” said Lew.

  “Lew,” Holiger said with a sigh.

  “You’re holding the one I picked up from the bank this morning,” Lew said. “You told me you went to the bank, talked to someone. You didn’t. They log in every visitor. They’ve also got video surveillance. You’re not going to be on that tape are you, Milt?”

  Milt Holiger looked down at the statement and the bullet that rested on top of it. He touched neither.

  “No.”

  “I saw the computer file,” said Lew. “The file shows individual checks, front and back.”

  “You know I can…”

  “That bullet’s going to match your gun, isn’t it?”

  Holiger looked away and played with a crumb on his plate.

  “It’s also going to match the bullets in Santoro and Aponte-Cruz,” Lew went on.

  “I could have changed guns,” Holiger said.

  “Why? No one suspected you.”

  “You’re right,” said Holiger, readjusting himself in the chair.

  “You’ve been taking our mail, our bank statements, forging checks,” said Lew. “You’ve got real identification. You really are a State’s Attorney investigator. You had the mail rerouted. I can find out where.”

  Holiger looked around the room. Smiling faces. Sad faces. A fat young man with a well-trimmed beard holding a donut in one hand, coffee in the other. Franco in a stare down with a thin woman holding a coffee cup who wanted his table. The two young women, one black, one clearly Latina, behind the counter in trim uniforms serving, scurrying.

  “A post office box,” said Holiger. “The mail goes to a post office box in White Plains. In your name. Lew, I didn’t start writing the checks till almost a year after you were gone. You left no address. You could have been dead.”

  “When I le
ft there was less than a hundred dollars in the account,” Lew went on. “Then, all of a sudden, four hundred thousand dollars. Now there’s a hundred thousand.”

  Holiger shook his head, reached up to tighten his tie, changed his mind.

  “You want to be exact? Four hundred and twenty-two thousand, Catherine’s life insurance. I had it deposited in your account. There’s one hundred and nine thousand dollars and forty-seven cents in there now.”

  “And no one at the bank or the insurance company asked any questions?”

  “Why should they? I had it directly deposited into your joint account. Lew, I was in the hole. One kid in college, another about to go. Ruthie’s diabetes is, well, it’s bad.”

  “You killed two men, Milt.”

  “No, I…”

  “Santoro was working for the bank,” said Lew. “He came to you to see if he could find a lead to me. So, you killed him, him and Aponte-Cruz.”

  “I could say I’ll find a way to pay you back the the rest of the money,” Holiger said, leaning over the table, whispering.

  “How are you going to get three hundred thousand dollars, Milt?”

  “I don’t know. Overtime?”

  Holiger smiled. Lew did not.

  “You murdered two people, Milt.”

  “You’re going to turn me in. That guy Lee, he murdered Catherine and you didn’t turn him in.”

  “He killed Catherine. He didn’t murder her.”

  Franco had lost the stare down contest with the waiting woman. He was up now and heading toward the table where Lew and Milt Holiger sat.

  “Lew, Ruthie, the kids, what are you going to do?” asked Holiger, sitting back, eyes closed, rubbing his forehead with his fingers.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Lew.

  He hadn’t touched his coffee or the muffin. Franco was standing next to the table now.

  “I don’t know,” said Holiger. “I’m not going to shoot myself or jump off the Sears Tower if that’s what you’re hinting at. There are too many people dead in the last few days. You know why, Lewis?”

  “Yes, because I came back to town.”

  “Okay, I’ll turn myself in, plead… I don’t know what.”

  “Not going to eat that, Lewis?” Franco said.

  Lew shook his head no. Franco picked up the muffin.

  Lew stood up. Franco saw the bullet on top of the unfolded bank statement.

  “I’ll call Dupree tomorrow,” said Holiger. “I want to tell Ruthie first.”

  Franco looked puzzled.

  “What?” he asked. “What’s goin’ on?”

  Holiger looked up at Franco and then at Lew and said, “Watch the ten o’clock news tomorrow.”

  Lew walked past tables toward the door, Franco at his side. Franco bumped into the table where two black men wearing identical blue long-sleeved turtle-necked sweaters swept up their coffee cups before they spilled. Franco excused himself. Lew looked back at Milt Holiger, who was staring down at the bullet.

  “Mind telling me what that was all about?” Franco said.

  “I’m going home,” said Lew.

  And after the family dinner that night, he did.

  Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Always Say Goodbye: A Lew Fonesca Mystery

  14

  To Lew’s right on the Southwest Airlines flight to Tampa, a woman in her thirties, large, heavy, was trying to untie a knot around a package wrapped in blue paper. She kept pushing her slipping glasses back on her nose and mumbling to herself as she struggled.

  Lew was on the aisle, eyes closed, seeing dead people.

  On the other side of the mumbling woman was a young man in an orange T-shirt. The young man’s arms were folded, his green baseball cap pulled down over his closed eyes.

  “I don’t want to tear it. I don’t want to tear it. I’m not going to tear it,” the woman mumbled.

  Lew opened his eyes. Through the window past the three people across the aisle, he could see a forever of darkness pricked with tiny white pulsing stars.

  “Oh, God,” said the woman, leaning back and placing the package on her lap while she reenergized to continue her battle with the string. “What’s inside? What’s inside? What’s inside?”

  “A book,” said Lew.

  He regretted his two words before he had even finished getting them out. The woman had turned her head and was tight-lipped.

  “It’s supposed to be a surprise,” she said. “He said it was a surprise. Now you’ve goddamn spoiled it.”

  “I do that sometimes,” Lew said.

  “Trying to be funny? That it? Stand-up comedian wannabe?”

  “No,” said Lew.

  “Okay, do something useful, George Carlin. Untie the knot.”

  She handed him the package.

  A flight attendant, the sleeves of her white blouse rolled up, came quickly down the aisle, smiling as she passed. Lew thought she looked tired. Wary? Terrorists? Crazy people? Drunks? Turbulence? Rockets from the ground? Every flight brought down the odds for her. But then, Lew thought, every day brings down the odds for all of us.

  “Can you untie it or not?” the woman said.

  Then she suddenly brightened, a smile on her face.

  “Hey, can you untie it or knot? Get it? Not like with a k in front not n-o-t. ”

  “Yes,” said Lew, working on the string.

  The young man in the orange T-shirt and green cap shifted and turned his back on the woman and Lew.

  Lew untied the string and handed the package back.

  “My fingers,” she said. “Too short, too stubby, for which I blame my mother who has them too.”

  “It could be something worse,” said Lew.

  “Could be?” said the woman, carefully pulling back the paper. “It is worse.”

  She folded the paper carefully, placed it in the pouch on the back of the seat in front of her and looked down at a paperback copy of Heart of Darkness. She put her right hand on the book and sobbed.

  “That sun-diddly son of a bitch.” She looked at Lew. “He remembered. We had to read this back when we were in second year of high school. I hated the damn thing. But he liked it. You know what?”

  “No.”

  “I’m gonna keep this book, and the paper in my handbag,” she said. “Carry around something from someone you love and you hope-to-hell loves you even if he’s not there for you and never will be. You know what I mean?”

  Lew’s hand was in his pocket, touching Catherine’s wedding band on his key chain.

  “Yes,” he said.

  The woman leaned forward and looked out the window past the sleeping or pretending-to-sleep young man.

  “Almost there,” she said. “That’s Tampa.”

  “Almost there,” Lew agreed. He closed his eyes and thought about a conversation only hours old.

  Angie had wanted to have the family over. Lew could leave the next day. Franco had agreed. Angie had looked at her brother’s face and understood.

  “Okay,” she had said, taking his right hand in both of hers.

  “What’s okay?” asked Franco. “Uncle Tonio’s gonna be here, Maria and the kids, Jamie…”

  “Next time,” Angie had said.

  “Next time,” Lew had agreed.

  It was close to midnight when Lew pulled the rental car into a space at the rear of the DQ on 301. He would ask Dave if he could leave it there for a while. If Lew didn’t think of someone to give it to in the next few days, he would call a charity that takes vehicles and have it hauled away. There were advantages to having the Saturn, but he could think of only one, ready transportation. There were lots of negatives, including responsibility for keeping it running, feeding it gas, getting a vehicle tag. There would be the resistible temptation to drive when he should walk or use his bike. There would also be the resistible temptation to keep the vehicle clean.

  Tonight was sleep. Tonight was doors locked and darkness.

  When he opened the door and flicked on the l
ight, he was aware, probably for the first time, of how bare the space was. Three folding chairs, small desk with ping dents and one empty lone wire box on it for letters, and on the wall, the painting. Tonight was sleep.

  He went to the painting, stood in front of it. Not long, a few seconds, enough to refresh his memory. Darkness shrouded mountains and the lone spot of color. Stopping to look at the painting had become not a compulsion but a ritual. For the first time, he realized that. Don’t think about it. Tonight was sleep.

  He turned off the light, made his way to the small room off of the office, clicked on the floor lamp and looked at the cell in which he lived. Cot. Television. VHS player. His few clothes on hangers in the closet and in the low unpainted three-drawer dresser against the wall. Everything was neat. Order. Keep one small space clean. Order. He put down his bag, put his dirty clothes in the small wicker basket in the closet, placed the book Angie and Franco had given him on the wooden chair next to his bed alongside the black traveling clock with the relentless red numbers. He took off his clothes, folded them neatly on the waist-high closet shelf Ames had built and pulled on his oversize Shell T-shirt. Then he turned out the light and got into bed, but not under the thin khaki blanket. Tonight was sleep.

  But he did not sleep. They weren’t ghosts. They weren’t vivid memories. They were part of him. Everything that happens, every moment spent became, he felt certain, part of him. Dreams, movies, imagination, distorted and real memories. All took up bits of the real time of his life, were as much a part of him as a chocolate cherry Blizzard. He let the dreams and thoughts come, beginning and ending with Catherine.

  And then he slept.

  There was light and the faint rustle of someone in the next room. Lew blinked at the window. He had forgotten to close the blinds. The morning sun, rising above the shops on the other side of 301, cut through the spaces between the plastic slats.

  Lew sat, bare feet on the floor. Then as he rose, he reached for his faded leather pouch with his soap, razor, toothbrush and toothpaste. He took a fresh blue towel from his closet, draped it over his shoulder and went through the door into his office.

  Ames McKinney leaned back against the wall across from the door a few feet from the Stig Dalstrom painting. Ames wore his usual naturally faded jeans, a long-sleeved blue flannel shirt under a blue denim jacket. His gray-white hair was cut trim and his face cleanly shaved. He was reading a paperback book, but looked up when Lew entered the room.