Retribution lf-2

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “Someone hit me,” I said with a small smile to suggest that such things happen.

  “Why?”

  “I served her papers.”

  “Slap the messenger,” she said with an understanding tilt of her head. “You hit her back?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Give me her name and I’ll go kick her ass for you,” she said.

  “She’s big,” I said. “And kicking her ass won’t make me feel better. Flo, why am I here?”

  “To find Adele,” she said. “I told you.”

  “Are you sure she ran away?”

  “Drove, been gone three days. Took the van. Left a note. Here.”

  She reached into the pocket of her flannel shirt, pulled out a sheet of paper, and handed it to me. It was double folded. I opened it and read: “Flo, I don’t know if I’m coming back. I’ll pay you for the van when I have the money or I’ll return it. There’s something I’ve got to do. I’ll call. You know I love you.” It was signed “Adios, Adele.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe she couldn’t take me acting like a mother. I don’t think so. She seemed to like it. Maybe she ran away with Mickey what’s-his-name, works at the Burger King right over there on the Trail. She’s been seeing him. But I’m betting on Conrad Lonsberg.”

  “The writer?” I asked.

  “Not many other people around here named Conrad Lonsberg, are there?” she said, working on her drink. “Yes, the great Conrad Lonsberg.”

  She held up her glass to drink to the name. There wasn’t much left to drink.

  I knew Lonsberg had a place in Sarasota. He was seldom seen and never attended any literary parties or gave talks or went to the Sarasota Reading Festival. Once in a long while his photograph would appear in a big magazine, People, Vanity Fair, places like that. But there was never much text.

  I had read his classic Fool’s Love when I was about seventeen. I guess almost everyone had read it. It was now over forty years old and still selling along with his two collections of short stories, mostly reprints from the series he did for The New Yorker, and his second novel, Plugged Nickels, which had stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for one hundred twenty weeks. Plugged Nickels came out in 1978. That was the year his wife died. And that was it. I seemed to remember that Lonsberg had moved from someplace east, I think Connecticut, to Sarasota. He had two children, a son and daughter. He gave no interviews, allowed no photographs of his children. Seemed to have no friends and made it clear he wanted minimal contact with the world. Lonsberg was a Sarasota legend. People reported Lonsberg sightings along with Stephen King, Monica Selles, and Jerry Springer glimpses.

  I sympathized, empathized, sometimes envied Lonsberg’s decision. I didn’t remember Fool’s Love very well. It was a short novel about a teenage girl from a small town who leaves home and heads across the country to live with her aunt who has a supposedly wild lifestyle. The girl meets all kinds of people on the way and when she finally gets to her aunt finds that the aunt is basically no different from the mother she left behind.

  “Lonsberg?” I prompted Flo who was looking up at the stag head.

  “Remember when Adele got that story published?” she asked. “First prize, right in City Tempo. Her picture in the newspaper.”

  “I remember,” I said.

  The story had basically been autobiographical, loose ends tied together by fiction and the names of all the characters changed. I was in the story, sort of. There was a detective hired by the girl’s mother to find her. The detective’s name was Milo Loomis. He was big, tough, and had a sense of humor. No one would recognize me in Milo, but it wasn’t hard to spot her central character, Joan, as Adele. The story was honest. Joan wasn’t spared her responsibility for the things that had happened to her.

  “Lonsberg read the story,” said Flo. “A few days after the magazine came out, he called, gave me his name, asked if I was Adele’s mother. Tell you the truth, I didn’t know who the hell Conrad Lonsberg was, but Adele did. She’s been great, Lew. These months… her grades went up. She pretty much stayed home though she worked on the school paper. She started going with this Mickey kid. Seemed okay. Friendly. Things were going great. Then this Lonsberg calls. I sort of remembered the name, I think. He asked if he could talk to Adele. Adele was shaking when she took the phone. Anyway, Lonsberg told Adele that he had read her story and would like to meet her. She stood there holding the phone waiting for me to give her permission.”

  “And you did?”

  “Adele’s picture had been in the paper, remember? She had been interviewed by Channel 40. Adele is one beautiful sixteen-year-old. But then again I seemed to remember Lonsberg was an old guy, older than yours truly Florence Ornstein Zink.”

  She drank to that too.

  “So,” she went on, “seemed okay to me and I figured from the look she had that she would probably see him even if I said ‘no,’ but thanks for asking, I thought.

  “They set up a time the next day after school,” Flo went on. “He gave his address on Casey Key, north end. I drove her down, a thick folder full of her stories and poems in her lap. You know that big stone wall on the north end of the Casey?”

  “Which one?”

  “The one out toward the water. White stone walls maybe nine feet high?”

  “I think I know the place. That’s where Lonsberg lives?”

  “That’s where,” she said, looking at her now-empty glass. “Adele rang a bell. Few minutes later the gate was opened and she went in.”

  “And you?”

  “Wasn’t invited,” she said, getting up with a sigh. “Sat in the van reading something. I can’t remember what. Sat for about an hour. I was thinking of ringing the bell when she came out, all excited. Lonsberg wanted to work with her, wanted her to come every Saturday morning. So, that’s what we did. She told me he was a nice old man. I know about nice old men. Old men are still men. So, every Saturday we drove to Casey Key and I sat in the car reading. Son of a bitch never invited me in, never so much as came over to the car and introduced himself. I kept asking Adele if he tried to get in her pants or touch her. She said he didn’t Went on like this for five or six months, then six weeks ago Saturday she came out, got in the car, and said, ‘Let’s get away from here.’ We got away. She was mad as a cougar with an arrow in his ass and she was shaking. Adele’s been through a lot we both know about, and she can handle herself. She wasn’t handling herself after that visit. She wouldn’t talk about it. And she never went back to Lonsberg’s place. A couple of days later she started going out with this kid Mickey, the one from Burger King, almost every night. I saw some of the old Adele coming back. Smart-ass talk, schoolwork just barely getting done. She stopped writing and I think she was making it with this Mickey.”

  “So something happened at Lonsberg’s that day and she’s run away with Mickey,” I summarized as Flo went to the wooden liquor cabinet to pour herself another drink.

  “Lonsberg called last week,” she said, bottle in hand closing the cabinet door. “Adele talked to him for maybe thirty seconds, mostly she listened and then at the end said ‘yes’ and slammed down the phone.”

  Flo brought her bottle to the sofa and poured herself another drink, putting the bottle on the table in front of the Remington horse.

  “She tell you what the call was about?”

  “Nope,” said Flo, taking a drink. “Not a word. Then, like a fast fart from a buffalo, she leaves a note and takes off.”

  “I’ll find her,” I said.

  “Good,” Flo said, toasting.

  “Does Sally know?”

  Flo shook her head “no.”

  Sally Porovsky was a social worker with Children’s Services of Sarasota. Adele was one of her cases. I was also seeing Sally and her two kids from time to time. In a way, Adele had brought us together.

  “I’ll let her know,” I said.

  “She’ll call in the cops,” said Flo. “They’ll find her, put her someplace. They won
’t let her come back here. I’m one tough old bitch, Fonesca, but I need that girl back here and I think she needs me.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I said.

  “I’ll write you a check,” she said, putting down her glass and starting to rise.

  “No,” I said.

  She looked at me, closed her eyes, and shook her head in understanding.

  “But I do want two things.”

  “Name ‘em,” she said.

  “I want to look at Adele’s room and I want you to stop drinking.”

  “My drinking is none of your fuckin’ business,” she said, now standing over me.

  “Back on the wagon or I tell Sally this isn’t the place for her.”

  “You little pope-loving wop son of a bitch,” she said.

  “I’m immune to flattery, and besides, I’m Episcopalian,” I said. “Flo, the wagon’s making its rounds. Climb in.”

  “God’s truth,” said Flo, sagging, “I don’t know if I can.”

  “You can,” I said. “You want Adele back?”

  “Oh, shit,” she said, putting down the half-full glass in her hand. “How about beer? Two a day, no more.”

  “Deal,” I said, getting up and holding out my hand. She took it and held on.

  “I’m sorry what I said,” she said softly. “I was wrong to call you…”

  “I can live with it,” I said, still holding her hand.

  “Find her for me, Lew,” she said.

  Now there were definitely tears.

  “I’ll find her, Flo. Let’s take a look at her room.”

  Flo led me down a corridor, past closed doors to an open one. It was clearly a girl’s room. Brightly colored. Flowered comforter. Stereo in the corner. A few stuffed animals. A desk and bookcase and posters on the walls, four of them, three of recent rock idols with blaring colors and one small one in black and white of a woman from another time and place.

  “Who’s that?”

  “The woman? Willa Cather. Adele says she was a great writer, wanted to be like her.”

  “Anything missing?” I asked, moving to the clean, clear desk.

  “A stuffed penguin is all I’m sure of,” Flo said, looking around. “And clothes. She took clothes.”

  One of Lonsberg’s books was on the shelf along with a collection of classics we all claim to have read in school but never did or don’t really remember. The Lonsberg book, a paperback, was a bit battered from frequent readings. I opened it to the title page. In a scrawl I had trouble reading was a note in ink: “Adele, you have the talent. Don’t lose it. Don’t compromise.” It was signed. I couldn’t read the name but I could make out the “C” and the “L” at the beginning of each name. It was an autographed first paperback edition.

  “Mind if I take this?”

  “Take what you need,” Flo said. “I don’t read that stuff. Louis L’Amour and a few others, Frank Roderus, that’s what I read. Lew, I kept hoping she’d just come back but…”

  There was no diary, no journal, no short stories or notes by Adele in her desk, drawers, bookshelf, or closet. Flo walked me back through the house giving me directions to Lonsberg’s house.

  “You have Lonsberg’s phone number?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Come to think of it I don’t think Adele did either. She never called him. He always called her.”

  I touched her shoulder at the door. She gave me a weak smile of courage and out I went. Before I reached the Cutlass, the voice of Tex Ritter blasted through the Zinc house singing of lost dogies.

  When I got in the car, I reached for Fool’s Love and flipped it open. Every page was covered with thick black Magic Marker lines. Adele had put in a lot of work making this book unreadable.

  I drove away with twenty minutes to make it ‘til my appointment with Ann Horowitz. I found a two-hour parking spot across from Sarasota News amp; Books. A new crowded upscale Italian restaurant had just opened across the street from the bookstore at the corner of Main and Palm. Parking didn’t come easy and two-hour parking meant two-hour parking or a ticket.

  I found a pay phone and called Harvey the computer.

  “Haven’t had time yet,” he said.

  “I’m not calling about Vera Lynn Uliaks,” I said. “I need an unlisted phone number.”

  “When?”

  “Now,” I said, holding my hand over my ear to blur the sound of a couple in their fifties doing battle as they headed in the general direction of the library.

  “Okay,” said Harvey.

  “Don’t put me on hold,” I said. “I can’t take the music.”

  “Name?”

  “Conrad Lonsberg,” I said.

  “He doesn’t have a phone,” said Harvey. “That’s an easy one. Tycinker wanted to reach him a few months back about some case. No phone. I can give you an address.”

  “I’ve got one. Harve, what do you think about AA?”

  Pause and then. “They can help,” he said. “It’s like a religion if it works. I tried it, needed too much support, went cold on my own. So far so good. Why are you asking?”

  “I’ve got a friend,” I said.

  “Good luck. Talk to you tomorrow.”

  He hung up and I checked my watch. I had five minutes, just enough time to stop at Sarasota News amp; Books, pick up two coffees and a biscotti. I paid Ann Horowitz twenty dollars a visit when I could afford it, ten when I couldn’t, and always brought her coffee and a chocolate biscotti.

  She was just around the corner on Gulf Stream, a small office with a small waiting room. Ann had no secretary and a select few patients. At the age of eighty-one and with her annuity from Stanford University plus investments she had mentioned from time to time plus the money her husband Melvin still brought in as a successful sculptor, Ann could have retired two decades earlier. But therapy was what she did and enjoyed in addition to conversation, history, odd facts, coffee, biscotti, and opera. Ann and Melvin had chosen Sarasota because their only son lived here with his wife and two grown daughters.

  Ann’s inner door was open. I could hear her talking. From the pauses, I figured she was on the phone so I moved to the doorway where she motioned for me to take my usual seat across from her.

  Ann is a small woman with a tolerant smile. She likes bright dresses. Her hair is gray, straight, and short enough to show off her colorful earrings.

  “No,” she told the person on the phone, “I’ll see you at four… no, you will not kill yourself… I understand… four. Did you read the book?… I gave you a book, Lost Horizon… No, I did not want you to rent the movie. I wanted you to read the book… You’ve got a few hours. Start reading.”

  She hung up the phone and accepted the coffee and biscotti from me, placing both on the desk to her right, and looked at me.

  I knew what she was looking at.

  “I got slapped by a woman I was serving papers,” I explained as she examined the side of my face.

  “And what did you do?”

  “Do?”

  “In response to being slapped. What did you do?”

  “I got on my bike and left.”

  Ann shook her head.

  “What should I have done?” I asked.

  “Getting on your bicycle is one thing. Getting angry is another. Saying something to the woman.”

  “I wasn’t angry,” I said.

  “You should have been. You should let yourself feel, but don’t worry. I’m not commanding you to feel. It doesn’t work that way. Here, take this with you,” she said, handing me a copy of Smithsonian magazine. “Article in there about gargoyles. Fascinating.”

  I took the magazine. There was a grinning stone gargoyle on the cover, just the right gift for a depressed client. Ann took the lid off the cup of black coffee and dipped the biscotti.

  “Can you do it today?” she asked, looking at me as she lifted the saturated biscotti to her mouth.

  “Not today,” I said.

  She wanted me to speak the name of my wife. I had done
it only twice since she had died, once to Sally and two weeks ago when I managed to say it to Ann. Saying her name aloud had brought back images, memories, pain, the empty feeling in my stomach, the sound of my heart madly pulsing blood through my veins, my neck, my head.

  “Feel better?” Ann asked when I had said my wife’s name.

  “No,” I answered. “Worse. Much worse.”

  “Of course,” she said. “This is therapy, not magic.”

  I had gone through this opening session ritual four times since then with Ann asking me to speak the name aloud. I had managed it only that one session.

  “Can you do it?” Ann asked, biscotti in hand.

  I took a deep breath, felt the beat of my heart, closed my eyes, and softly uttered, “Catherine.”

  “And you feel how?” Ann asked, redipping her biscotti.

  “Sorry I said it,” I said, reaching for my own coffee, which unlike my therapist’s was strongly fortified with half and half and two packets of Equal.

  “Of course you are. You are still in love with your depression and self-pity. You’ve held it around you like a child’s comfort blanket since your wife died. If you give it up, what are you left with?”

  “We’ve been through this,” I said.

  “And each week we become different people,” she said. “Sometimes different people with different answers. This time you said her name.”

  “Without my depression,” I said. “The few times anxiety takes over. I shake. I can’t do anything. I walk till I’m exhausted. Even Mildred Pierce doesn’t help. I think… you know all this.”

  “You would rather be depressed than anxious,” she said, continuing to work on my burnt offering.

  “Is that a question or an observation?”

  “Your choice.”

  “Yes, I would rather be depressed,” I said.

  “You owe it to Catherine to live depressed and guilty. You want to hide, not feel and slowly die, a hermit, a saint who does not deserve life.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m just recapitulating,” she said. “Do they have flavors other than chocolate?”

  “Yes.”

  “Next time if you remember, bring almond or something,” she said.