Retribution lf-2

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “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 amp; 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.”

  “Everyone’s out to get him,” I said.

  “At this point,” said Tim, turning a crinkly page of the paper, “he’s probably right.”

  “Adele Hanford,” I tried on Jesse who pursed her lips.

  “We hung out a little for a while,” she said, “before I dropped out. She was wild but straightened out. Won some kind of writing prize even. It was in the paper or somewhere.”

  “She and Mickey going together?” I asked.

  Jesse laughed.

  “Anything can happen,” she said as a customer came through the door, a nervous-looking woman in a hospital blue uniform, a cigarette in her hand.

  “Anything can happen,” Tim repeated. “Anytime.”

  Jesse moved away and I finished my sandwich.

  Anything could happen. Anytime. A woman could be driving home from work one night, her husband at home checking on the pasta, and a car the shape and color of grinning death could cut her in half, crumple her into nothingness.

  “Anything,” I said, not bothering to finish the last bite of my sandwich. “Anytime.”

  “Watch out for yourself,” Tim said as I dropped three dollars on the counter. “Probably doesn’t make any difference but it can’t hurt.”

  “You’ve brightened my morning,” I said, getting off of the red-leatherette stool.

  “Glad to help,” said Tim.

  Ames was waiting for me in front of the Texas Bar and Grille. The temperature had already reached the eighties according to the not-very-bright bantering talk-show abuser out of Tampa who I was listening to on the radio. I can take almost any defect in a car but it has to have a radio. I need voices, sounds. I can deal with thoughts at a second level but I needed noise, voices filling the void of consciousness on the surface. B.J. and M.J. in the morning talking to women who had hit policemen with toilet plungers, Dr. Laura failing to listen to people nearly in tears trying desperately to tell their tales, even the threatening voices of southern-born-again or born-into-it Christian broadcasters telling me what the Scriptures really said. I liked the Sunday morning black Baptist preachers going hoarse with warnings and promises of an afterlife far better than the one Tim from Steubenville read about in the papers.

  Ames was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, jeans, and boots. He also wore a thin blue zipper jacket under which, I was sure, rested a weapon of not recent vintage.

  He climbed in.

  I took Osprey down to Tamiami Trail and turned left when I got the light. Traffic was reasonably heavy for what was now lunch hour for most people.

  “We’re going to Osprey,” I said.

  Ames nodded.

  I explained about Marvin Uliaks, the note left on my door, Conrad Lonsberg’s children in Venice. Ames nodded. I told him what I knew about Bernard Corsello whose body we had found. Ames nodded.

  “Adele,” he said.

  “Right,” I agreed. “We’re looking for Adele.”

  He nodded in agreement. As we passed Sarasota Memorial Hospital, I pushed the AM button on the radio and got WGUL, the oldies station which I knew was Ames’s favorite. We listened to Frankie Laine doing “Ghost Riders in the Sky” as we moved slowly past Southgate Plaza and then crossed Bee Ridge.

  “Read some of Lonsberg’s stuff last night,” he said.

  “Me too.”

  “Rereading, I guess,” he said.

  “And?”

  We went over the bridge at Phillipi Creek as Johnny Mercer sang “The Waiter and the Porter and the Upstairs Maid.”

  “Not my kind of book,” he said. “Pushes the knife too deep. Feels sorry for himself. Least he did.”

  I resisted the urge to turn to Ames in astonishment or to say something about this historic moment when Ames Mc-Kinney decided not only to carry on an extended conversation, but to criticize a book. Maybe he was the pod who had replaced Uncle Ira in the old Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

  I wondered what Ann Horowitz would say about Conrad Lonsberg feeling sorry for himself. I had come to Ann feeling sorry for losing my wife, my life. She had told me that I was feeling sorry for two things, for the loss of the wife who defined who I was and for myself. Ann had said that both feelings were reasonable and that there was no hurry to get rid of either of them. Was Conrad Lonsberg like that? Or had he been when he was a young man and had written those books that met the feelings of a generation of people who felt they had lost something but were never quite sure what it was? Lonsberg gave them something to feel lost about. Were his missing manuscripts all about learning to live with failure?

  In Osprey we turned on Bay Street off of Tamiami Trail at the Exxon station and then turned left at t
he next corner, Patterson. The house we were looking for was about two blocks down. We couldn’t actually see the house. It was deep behind trees and bushes huddled right up to the paved street that had no sidewalk. The mailbox was black, looked almost freshly polished, and had a red metal flag tucked down to show there was no mail to be picked up. The house number was in clear white letters on the box along with the name “Dorsey.”

  I pulled onto the narrow stone driveway between the trees and drove slowly, leaves and branches slapping against the windshield and top of the car suggesting that visitors weren’t frequent.

  We came to a clearing after about thirty yards after the assault of the flora. To the left was a blue Ford, vintage 1950 with collector’s license tags. I parked next to it and got out.

  We turned to face a man at work and a woman reading. They were in front of a building, or rather a collection of small one-story buildings connected to each other. The oldest-looking building on the right was solid white stone. Attached to it was a wooden section that contrasted with the stone section. A third section attached to the wooden one was made of something that resembled aluminum siding. Together they formed a single structure that looked as if it had been built by a blind man, but the man on his knees, with a brick in his hand as he worked on a fourth unmatched section of red bricks, was clearly not blind. He turned his head to look at us, brick in one hand, a bucket of mortar at his side. He wore paint-splattered painter’s overalls and a baseball cap that looked like vintage Pittsburgh Pirates. He straightened but didn’t get off his knees.

  I guessed he was Clark Dorsey. I also guessed that he was around fifty years old. I didn’t have to guess that he wasn’t happy to see us. His face was a dead giveaway.

  The woman was sitting in one of those green and white vinyl beach chairs. There was a round white table next to her and a big umbrella sticking out of a hole in the middle of the table to provide her some shade, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She wore a floppy straw hat and sunglasses and I guessed she had a supply of 46 SPF sunscreen nearby.

  The woman took off her glasses and examined us as we approached. She was about the same age as the man, lean, hair still dark but showing some gray, few lines, and a wary smile.

  “Clark Dorsey?” I asked as we kept moving forward.

  The man got up slowly, put the brick on a huge pile of bricks nearby.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “My name is Fonesca, Lew Fonesca. This is my friend Ames McKinney.”

  The woman I assumed was Mrs. Dorsey didn’t move.

  “And?”

  “I’m looking for your brother,” I said.

  He turned his head to one side. Something he had wanted to forget had come back to haunt him. I glanced at Mrs. Dorsey. She hadn’t responded.

  “Why?” he asked, turning his head back to us.

  “I’ve been hired to find his wife. Her brother wants to talk to her,” I said.

  “That poor son of a bitch,” Dorsey said, wiping his hands on his overalls. “I don’t know where Charlie and Vera Lynn are and I don’t think they’d want to see Marvin even if they knew he wanted to. Marvin’s not all there. The whole family… Marvin’s never really been all there. You talked to him. You can see that.”

  “Some people spend their money doing strange things like looking for lost sisters,” I said. “Others go out on little boards and risk their lives for thrills. And then there are others who build strange houses.”

  “Your point, Mr…”

  “Fonesca,” I said. “My point is that people who aren’t hurting other people should be able to do what they want to do as long as they don’t hurt anybody but themselves.”

  “I never see Marvin,” he said, stepping toward us. “I don’t go into town much. Peg has run into him a few times. Even looked him up.”

  “We had him out here twice since we’ve been here,” the woman under the umbrella said.

  “I’m not comfortable with him,” Dorsey said.

  “Clark’s not comfortable with anyone really,” Peg Dorsey said with a smile in her voice.

  “What can I tell you?” he said with a shrug. “She’s right. I used to be a fireman. For twenty years. I’ve seen enough trouble, enough people. I don’t stay in touch with my family. I, Peg and I, we keep to ourselves.”

  “And you build houses,” I said, looking at the oddity behind him.

  He turned his head as if he had never before really considered what he had done.

  “The white stone one-bedroom came with the land. I added on. I’m not much of a reader. I don’t care much for television, movies, or newspapers and we don’t have a hell of a lot of friends. So I build. I don’t care what it looks like. It’s comfortable inside. Each addition is a new challenge. Maybe when I’m done, if I ever get done, I’ll cover the whole place with stucco or something.”

  “No maybe about it,” said Peg Dorsey.

  “No maybe,” Clark Dorsey agreed. “For sure;”

  ’Two feet higher on the metal-sided one, shored with straight I-beams, and the one you’re working on at least a foot lower than what you’re planning,” said Ames.

  Dorsey looked at him.

  “They’d line up, give you enough headroom,” said Ames. “Brick in the whole place. Double your property value.”

  “Ames used to be in the business,” I explained.

  “Retired?” asked Peg Dorsey, shading her eyes.

  “Business go bad?” asked Clark.

  “Business was fine. Partner was as uneven as your roof over there with just as many unmatched parts,” said Ames.

  The Dorseys waited for me. There was no more coming.

  “Marvin just wants to talk to Vera Lynn,” I said. “It’s all he has.”

  “You a private detective?” Clark said.

  “Just a friend, and I’m not going to charge him more than a few hundred dollars tops, find her or not,” I said, “but Marvin’s not going to give up.”

  Dorsey looked at his wife and she looked back at him and nodded.

  “Charlie and Vera Lynn don’t want to hear from Marvin,” Dorsey said.

  “Why?”

  “Because of what happened,” Dorsey explained. “You know what happened in Arcadia?”

  “You mean the girl who fell out of the window,” I said. “Sarah Taylor.”

  Dorsey nodded his head and said, “I’ve got to go inside for a minute. Either of you want water?”

  “I’d like that,” Ames said.

  Dorsey disappeared past his wife and through a door into the white stone section of the puzzle house.

  “Clark doesn’t like to talk about it,” Peg Dorsey said, looking at the door her husband had closed behind him. “He’s leaving me to do the talking.”

  I watched her play with her sunglasses, put them back on, and look in our direction.

  “The girl who went out that window, Sarah,” she said. “She was a very pretty girl, but a jumpy thing, can’t-sit-still type. She got worse, started acting crazy, one day dancing in the street and singing, the next day sitting on the bench near city hall for hours not talking. Sarah was a pretty girl and she was wrong about most things but she was right about one. Charlie had been engaged to Vera Lynn, or as close to engaged as you can be from the time you’re both fourteen. They were comfortable together, Charlie and Vera Lynn. Charlie had no trouble with Vera Lynn’s brother Marvin who was, let’s put this kindly, not fully together from the time he was born.”

  She paused, bit her lower lip, and went on.

  “What made things worse was that Marvin was Sarah Taylor’s puppy dog. He has no guile, that Marvin. He adored Sarah, would follow her around, sit with her on that bench, even dance with her in the street. Arcadia wasn’t filled with good-looking, smart men with a future. I was lucky. Sarah wasn’t. Sarah started to spread the word that she and Charlie had a thing together and that he was dropping Vera Lynn. Some people even believed it. They just saw that pretty girl on the outside and not the one inside. It d
oesn’t matter. If the town is small enough, people want to have a good box of rumors to pass around, especially one involving the young police chief even if the rumor comes from someone like Sarah.

  “Well, to make it short, no one really knows what happened in that room that day, the day Sarah went out that window and died. Charlie was there. Vera Lynn was there. They said she fell when it first happened. Then later, next day, Vera Lynn said Sarah jumped. More rumors started. You can’t imagine. An old woman named Esther Yoderman who could barely see said she was looking up when Sarah came through the glass. Esther claimed Vera Lynn pushed her. Then she changed her mind the next day and said Charlie threw her out the window. Charlie and Vera Lynn just said it had been an accident.”

  “But…?” I prompted.

  Peg Dorsey shrugged.

  “The Dorseys have a temper,” she said with a shrug. “They hold it in like my Clark, stay away from people when they can, but everyone knew about Charlie’s temper. And since he and Vera Lynn wouldn’t say much…”

  “People drew conclusions,” I said.

  “Coroner’s hearing declared it accidental,” she said. “Charlie let his deputy do the investigation since Charlie was a witness for most and a suspect for others. Charlie’s deputy was Earl Morgantine, two notches higher on the evolution pool than poor Marvin. Marvin accused Charlie of killing Sarah. Vera Lynn tried to talk to the boy but Marvin ran away, hid in the pastures for days. People could hear him crying and wailing. There was no evidence. It was ruled an accident. Charlie and Vera Lynn packed up. Charlie quit his job. They drove off before Marvin could come out of the woods. That’s about it.”

  “What do you think happened?” I asked.

  “Something different each time I think about it,” she said, “but getting right down to it, I don’t think Charlie or Vera Lynn killed Sarah. And I’ll say it right out. I don’t care anymore. I just care about what it did to Clark. I’m sorry but that’s how I feel.”

  “Nothing to apologize for,” Ames said.

  “I suppose,” she sighed, shifting in her chair and looking back at the door again. “Clark and I hung on for more than ten years and you would have sworn it had been forgotten, but things like that never are in a small town. So, as soon as he could, Clark retired and here we are.”