Retribution lf-2

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  The woman placed a white bag on the counter and went back to her work.

  “Knives, forks, napkins are in the sack,” Raymond said. “Fourteen dollars even.”

  I paid the bill while Ames picked up the bag.

  “We’re not here to hurt Mr. Cleveland or his wife,” I said. “Her brother just lost contact with her.”

  Two teenage boys and a girl- came in. One of the boys was saying, “Singin’? You call that shit singin’? I call that shit ‘shit.’”

  “You might try Collier Street,” Raymond said softly. “You might ask around. I wouldn’t do it at night though. Wait till morning.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Ames and I left. The teenagers didn’t look at us. We went back to a Motel 8 we had passed coming into Vanaloosa. The room had two beds, a television, and a small table.

  We watched the tail end of a Will Rogers film on AMC while we ate.

  “Good ribs,” Ames said.

  “Very good,” I agreed.

  Besides “good night,” that was all of the conversation we had before we turned off the lights a little before midnight.

  When I woke up in the morning, Ames was sitting in a chair reading.

  “I need a shave and shower,” I said.

  Ames nodded. I looked at the cover of the book he was reading.

  It was Conrad Lonsberg’s Fool’s Love.

  When I came out of the bathroom clean, shaven, and dressed, Ames, now wearing a loose-fitting gray jacket, stood up, handed me the book, and pointed to a paragraph on page 148.

  “Went back to it,” Ames said.

  I sat on the bed and read the paragraph.

  There was no Amy now. There was no Sherry. She sat in the diner with an enormous double order of corn flakes topped with strawberries, drowning in half and half. She thought about who she should be now. She thought about the baby inside her who was just beginning to kick. She needed a name for him or her. She needed a name for herself. Not something exotic. She knew now that exotic just wasn’t in her and stylish wasn’t in her and New York wasn’t in her. And going back to her mother was defeat. She wasn’t a quitter. She would never quit. She had six hundred dollars in her purse and two lives inside her. She paused with a big spoonful of corn flakes in her hand and decided. Her name was from that moment Diane Lowell. If the child was a girl, her name would be Laura. If it was a boy, his name would be Bradley.

  I handed the book back to Ames who picked up his duffel bag and followed me out the door. It was just after eight in the morning. We had toast, coffee, and fruit at the motel’s morning continental breakfast that was served in the lobby. And then we were on our way.

  Collier Street wasn’t hard to find. It was one of those run-down side streets on which some developer had thrown up one-story white-frame houses back in the mid-1940s for the wave of servicemen coming back from the war and getting married and raising families in whatever jobs were available in Vanaloosa or for commuting to Macon.

  Fifty years later, the houses were long past the wrecker. They were occupied by black families where the breadwinners were women who cleaned house for the Macon middle class and businesses. How did I know? Because it looked exactly like neighborhoods I had seen from California to Florida.

  The houses were sagging and dead or dying. A few of them had been shorn up and coaxed like punch-drunk boxers into standing up for one more round.

  Three little girls were jumping rope when we parked. They were the only people in sight. We could hear them chanting something to the beat of the rope against the cracked sidewalk. The girl doing the jumping was about eleven. She jumped tirelessly and smiled at us as we watched and waited and the girls kept chanting something about babies.

  Finally the girl jumped out of the twirling rope and looked at us.

  “We’re looking for this man,” I said, showing the girl Dorsey’s photograph. “Know him?”

  The other two girls moved in to take a look. None of them recognized him.

  “He lives on this street,” I said.

  “Only white people on this street live over there,” the jumping girl said, pointing to a house across the street. “Old white people.”

  “You know their name?” I asked.

  “Them’s the Clevelands,” answered another girl. “They never go out. But them’s the Clevelands.”

  “He goes out sometimes,” one of the other girls said.

  “Sometimes at night,” the jumping girl agreed. “Not much.”

  I thanked them and Ames nodded.

  Behind us, one of the little girls whispered, “They gonna see the witch.”

  We crossed the street. The girls went back to their chanting and jumping.

  The morning already promised a hot day.

  The Cleveland house looked as if it couldn’t take another punch. The porch sagged and the paint flecked. The screen door had been patched so many times that it looked like modern art, and the dirt lawn, with only a barren little tree, had long given up.

  I knocked at the peeling frame of the screen door. Nothing. I knocked again and heard a shuffle inside. It stopped. I knocked again and the shuffle moved toward the door and then the door opened, but just a crack.

  “What?” came a man’s voice.

  “Mr. Cleveland?” I asked.

  “So?” he asked in return.

  “My name is Fonesca. This is my partner Mr. McKinney. We’d like to talk to you for a minute or two.”

  He hesitated and started to close the door.

  “It’s about your wife,” I said.

  The door stopped closing.

  “My wife isn’t well,” he said.

  “I’ve got a message for her,” I said.

  “No,” the man said, closing the door.

  “Mr. Dorsey,” I said, hoping to penetrate with the bullet of his real name, “I think you’re going to have to deal with us, either now or tomorrow or the next day. We can keep coming back and draw attention to you or you can let us in and get it over with.”

  If he hadn’t opened the door, we would have left and I would have gone back to Sarasota and told Marvin where she was. But Dorsey didn’t call my bluff. The door opened and we went through the screen door into a darkened hall. I could see the thin outline of a man in front of me. He backed away and we followed. When we stepped into a small living room, there was enough light coming through the drawn shades to see that the man was dressed in a badly faded blue shirt and equally faded blue pants. His mouth was partly open and his teeth were bad but they were all there. In his right hand he held a Smith amp; Wesson. 38 with a six-inch barrel, a favorite with cops. Charles Dorsey used to be a cop.

  The most striking thing about Charles Dorsey was that I knew he couldn’t be more than fifty, but he looked at least twenty years older, older than Ames. His hair was white, his shoulders bent, and his eyes a vacant, faded blue.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Fonesca, just the way I told you.”

  There were chairs to sit in, even a sofa, but they were old with a washed-out, ghostly pattern and I was sure that dust would rise from them if we sat. Dorsey didn’t ask us to sit.

  “He sent you, didn’t he?” Dorsey said, pistol moving between me and Ames.

  “He?”

  “Her brother,” he said.

  “I just want to talk to your wife for a minute,” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  Something stirred in the doorway and I turned, to the sound of sagging wooden floors. My eyes met the deepest, darkest, and most melancholy eyes I had ever seen. The eyes were set in a soft balloon of a face resting on a huge, neckless, round body. Vera Lynn Uliaks Dorsey walked with a cane to support her mass. Her breathing was pained and labored.

  “They’re from Marvin,” Dorsey said.

  Her eyes opened wide in fear.

  “He wants to talk to you,” I explained.

  “Charlie,” Vera Lynn croaked.

  “We’ve spent our lives hiding from hi
m, Vera,” Dorsey said with almost a sob in his voice. “I’m beginning to think our lives aren’t worth that damned much anymore.”

  With that he gave me his full attention.

  “How much is he paying you to kill us?” he asked.

  “Kill you? He doesn’t want to kill you. He wants to see his sister.”

  “His sister is dead,” Vera Lynn said, sagging into a nearby chair that groaned under her weight.

  “Dead?”

  “Her name was Sarah. Sarah Taylor,” Vera Lynn said. “My parents adopted Marvin. The Taylors adopted Sarah when their mother went mad and killed herself. Arcadia’s not that big. We all knew each other.”

  “Whole family, Marvin and Sarah’s mother and father, way back, were a little mad,” said Dorsey. “Sarah thought I was in love with her. She said I promised to marry her. She came to my office. Vera Lynn was there with me. We told Sarah that Vera Lynn and I were getting married, that she had to stop bothering me. And then…”

  “She acted crazy, threatened,” said Vera Lynn, her eyes looking beyond me into the past. “I lost my temper… I said things… and she…”

  “…jumped out the window?” I finished. “That’s…”

  “Crazy,” Dorsey said. “Sarah had talked to Marvin, told him lies about me, and when Sarah died he blamed us for it.”

  “And he was right,” Vera Lynn said.

  “He wasn’t,” wailed Dorsey. “We didn’t know she was that crazy.”

  “We should have been more gentle with her,” said Vera Lynn to no one.

  “We’ve been over it and over it,” cried Dorsey. “You want to die now? You want these men to shoot you?”

  “I’m past caring,” she said. “We ran from him when he came for us in Arcadia, and we ran from every other man he sent for us every place we moved. He found us.”

  “We’re not here to kill anybody,” I said, but the Dorseys weren’t listening to me. They were off in a conversation they must have had a thousand times on a thousand mornings, afternoons, and nights.

  “No more,” Vera Lynn said. “No more.”

  Dorsey’s hand dropped slowly as he spoke and the gun pointed toward the floor. I wanted to tell them to forget the whole thing, that I would just go back to Sarasota and tell Marvin it was over. And that’s what I would have done if Dorsey had given me the chance to explain. What he did instead was lift his. 38 and take aim at me. I read the look in his eyes. It said something like: “Charles Dorsey is no longer in command of this vessel. Charles Dorsey has nothing to do with what’s going to happen next. He’s somewhere else. When it’s over, he’ll come back and won’t even know what he had done.”

  “Best put that down,” Ames said, showing a gun about twice the size of Dorsey’s.

  Dorsey looked at the gun in Ames’s hand and started to lower his weapon. It fired. Intentionally, unintentionally. I don’t know. And then the gun clattered to the floor. Then he started shuffling over to Vera Lynn, who was slumped forward, a rivulet of blood snaking down her once-white dress. Dorsey tried to stop the massive body of his wife from sliding onto the floor. He didn’t have a chance.

  “She’s dying,” he wailed. “I shot her.”

  “She’s dead, Mr. Dorsey,” I corrected, walking over to him as the body of Vera Lynn Uliaks Dorsey rolled onto the floor.

  “I killed her?” Dorsey asked, looking at Ames.

  “You did,” Ames said, putting his weapon back under his jacket.

  “She’d be alive if you hadn’t come.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” Ames said, picking up the. 38 Dorsey had dropped by the barrel.

  “The phone,” I said.

  “We have no phone.”

  Dorsey sat cross-legged on the floor cradling his dead wife’s head in his lap. The dust in the house and the taste of death got to me. I went for the door and into the sun. The bright day had gotten brighter. The warm sun had grown hot and the children across the street had stopped jumping rope and were looking at me, probably wondering about the gunshot but maybe not too surprised to hear it in this neighborhood.

  Ames came out behind me holding Dorsey’s weapon by the barrel.

  “You got a phone?” I asked.

  “Sure, yes,” said the girls.

  “Go call the police. Nine-one-one. Tell them there’s been a shooting at…” I turned my head to look at the number on the house. “Three six two Collier. Can you do that?”

  “Sure,” said the tallest girl.

  She turned and ran into the nearest house. One of the remaining girls called, “Anybody dead?”

  “Most of the people who ever lived,” I said.

  Before the Vanaloosa police arrived, Ames hid his gun in some bushes behind the Dorsey house. Then we came back and we waited. The police were in no hurry to get to this neighborhood. When two policemen in their thirties, one black, one white, trying to show that cop look that said, “I’ve seen it all,” arrived, Ames turned Dorsey’s gun over to them and they were careful not to touch the grip.

  “Didn’t want to leave it where he could get at it,” I explained.

  He nodded, looking down at the dead woman and the pleading face of the old man on the floor.

  “She’s a big one,” the cop whispered, turning back to us. “What happened?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “Mr. Cleveland was a friend of my father back in…”

  “This your father?” he asked, looking at Ames and noting the clear differences between us.

  “No, Mr. Minor is just a friend. My father asked me to stop in and say hello. We’re headed up to Chicago. We could hear noises when we got to the porch and then a shot. We went in and found them like that.”

  I nodded at the tableau on the floor.

  Dorsey was too far out of it to contradict me or pay any attention. He had been waiting and planning to go mad for almost half his lifetime. His moment had come.

  “That the way it was, Mr. Cleveland?” the policeman asked.

  Dorsey shook his head “yes,” tears in his eyes.

  “You shoot her, sir?” he asked.

  “I shot her,” Dorsey agreed.

  The young policeman closed his notebook.

  “We’ll leave the rest for a detective,” he said.

  “We can stay around town for a day or so if you need us,” I lied. If we didn’t have to give up our names or anything that might lead them to us, I had no intention of being anywhere but Sarasota by that night.

  “Wouldn’t think so,” the young cop said. “You didn’t actually see him shoot?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “Then…” the cop said with a shrug. “This kind of thing happens around here, only they’re not usually white and sometimes it’s the husband who gets it and most times it’s not as clean as this.”

  I said nothing. Both cops talked for a while.

  “All right if we leave?” I asked.

  “You know next of kin, any family?” he asked.

  ” ‘Fraid not,” I said with regret. “Just a name and an address where I was supposed to stop and say hi.”

  The cop turned his back on us and looked down at the weeping Dorsey. Ames and I walked to the door at a normal pace and tried to keep from running when we got outside.

  One of the little girls, the one who had telephoned, asked, “She dead?”

  “She’s dead,” I said, getting in.

  “Ding dong, the witch is dead,” one of the girls behind her said. It gave them all an idea. They picked up their rope. This time one of the smaller girls jumped while all three chanted the song from The Wizard of Oz turning it almost into rap.

  We were back in Sarasota by nightfall. We stopped twice. Once to get gas, another time to pick up a sack of tacos and drinks from a Taco Bell. We didn’t say a word on the way back. I dropped Ames at the Texas with his duffel lighter by one gun.

  “Sorry about the gun,” I said.

  “I’ll go back for it maybe someday,” he said. “Maybe not. I guess m
aybe not.”

  I parked in the DQ lot and crossed the street to the Crisp Dollar Bill. The place was fairly crowded, at least for the Crisp Dollar Bill. About a dozen people, drinking, talking, laughing, looking up every once in a while at a tennis match. B. B. King was singing “Ain’t That Just like a Woman” above the soundless television as I sat in a booth, not my usual one. That was taken. I was in the one in front of it.

  Billy gave me a questioning look and I returned an answering one. He brought me a Beck’s.

  “Crazy Marvin’s been looking for you,” he said.

  I nodded “yes” and drank some beer. When I looked up a few minutes later, Marvin Uliaks entered, spotted me, and moved forward eagerly to sit across from me.

  “Figured I’d find you here when you weren’t in your office. Saw that black car you been riding parked at the Dairy Queen.”

  “You figured right,” I said.

  “Any luck, Mr. Fonesca?” he asked, squirming.

  “Not for Vera Lynn,” I said. “She’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “You’re too late, Marvin,” I said. “You can’t kill her. She’s dead.”

  “Kill her?” he asked, those eyes wide with confusion. “I didn’t want to kill her, Mr. Fonesca. I wanted to tell her I forgave her, about Sarah. I was bad to Vera Lynn a long time ago. I was dumb. I said some bad things to her and Charlie Dorsey. I just wanted to find her and tell her I was sorry. All these years. I didn’t know how to find her. I just wanted to forgive her.”

  “For what she did to Sarah?” I asked over a burst of laughter at the bar and B. B. King now doing “Early in the Morning.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Now I lost two sisters, Mr. Fonesca. Sarah and Vera Lynn. I lost ‘em.”

  I looked at Marvin and I could see from his battered face that he was telling the truth. Charles and Vera Lynn Dorsey had spent two decades running away from nothing but their own guilt.

  “I guess I got no sisters now,” Marvin said.

  “You’ve got change coming, Marvin,” I said, pulling out my wallet.

  He put his hand on top of mine to stop me.

  “No favoring,” he reminded me.

  I put my wallet back in my pocket.