Charles Willeford - Sideswipe

by Unknown

  At eight-thirty Ellita said to Aileen:

  "I think your father's gone back to sleep in his chair. Why don't you wake him and tell him it's eight-thirty? I know he has to work because he told me last night he had fifteen new supps to read through today."

  "It's eight-thirty, Daddy," Aileen said, her right hand ruffling the stiff black hairs on Hoke's back and shoulders. Aileen, every time she got an opportunity, liked to feel the hair on Hoke's back and shoulders with the tips of her fingers.

  Hoke didn't reply, and she kissed him wetly on the cheek. "Are you awake, Daddy? Hey! You in there, old sleepyhead, it's after eight-thirty!"

  Hoke didn't open his eyes, but she could tell from the way he was breathing that he wasn't asleep. Aileen shrugged her skinny shoulders and told Ellita, who was sorting laundry from the hamper into three piles, that she had given up on waking her father. "But he's really awake," she said. "I can tell. He's just pretending to be asleep."

  Aileen was wearing a white T-shirt with a "Mr. Appetizer" hot dog on the front; some of the egg yolk from her breakfast had spilled onto the brown frankfurter. Ellita pointed to it, and Aileen stripped off the T-shirt and handed it to her. Aileen did not wear a brassiere, nor did she need one. She was a tall skinny girl, with adolescent chest bumps, and her curly sandy hair was cut short, the way boys used to have theirs trimmed back in the 1950s. From the back, she could have been mistaken for a boy, even though she wore dangling silver earrings, because so many boys her age in Green Lakes wore earrings, too.

  Aileen returned to her bedroom to get a clean T-shirt, and Ellita went into the living room. "Hoke," she said, "if you aren't going downtown, d'you want me to call in sick for you?"

  Hoke didn't stir in his chair. Ellita shrugged and put the first load of laundry into the washer in the utility room off the kitchen. She then made the bed in her bedroom (the girls were supposed to make their own), hung up a few things in her walk-in closet, and gave Aileen $1.50 for lunch money. Aileen, together with her girl friend Candi Allen, who lived on the next block, were going to be driven to the Venetian Pool in Coral Gables by the girl's mother. They would be there until three P.M., and then Mrs. Allen would pick them up and bring them back to Green Lakes. Aileen left the house, carrying her bathing suit in a plastic Burdine's shopping bag, after kissing her father again and running the tips of her fingers through the hair on his back and shoulders.

  By eleven A.M., when Hoke had not stirred from his chair--he had urinated in his shorts, and there was a large damp spot on the brown corduroy cushion--Ellita was concerned enough to telephone Commander Bill Henderson at the Homicide Division. Bill Henderson, who had been promoted to commander a few months back, was now the Administrative Executive Officer for the division, and all of the paperwork in the division--going and coming-- crossed his desk before he did something about it or routed it to someone else. Bill did not enjoy this newly created position, nor did he like the responsibility that went with it, but he liked the idea of being a commander, and the extra money.

  Ellita told Bill that Hoke had been sitting in the chair since breakfast, that he had pissed his underpants, and that although he was awake, she could not get him to acknowledge her presence.

  "Put him on the phone," Bill said. "Let me talk to him."

  "You don't understand, Bill. He's just sitting there. His eyes are open now, and he's staring at the wall, but he isn't really looking at the wall."

  "What's the matter with him?"

  "I don't know, Bill. That's why I called you. I know he's supposed to go to work today, because he got fifteen new supps yesterday and he has to read through them this morning."

  "Tell him," Bill said, "that I just gave him five supps on top of that. I handed them to Speedy Gonzalez about fifteen minutes ago."

  "I don't think that will make an impression."

  "Tell him anyway."

  Ellita went into the living room and told Hoke that Bill Henderson just told her to tell him that he now had five more supps to look at, in addition to the fifteen Bill had sent him yesterday.

  Hoke did not respond.

  Ellita returned to the phone in the kitchen. "He didn't react, Bill. I think you'd better tell Major Brownley that something's wrong. I think I should call a doctor, but I didn't want to do that without talking to you or Major Brownley first."

  "Don't call a doctor, Ellita. I'll drive out and talk to Hoke myself. If there's nothing radically wrong with him, and I don't think there is, I can cover for him and Major Brownley'll never know anything about it."

  "Have you had lunch yet, Bill?"

  "No, not yet."

  "Then don't stop for anything on your way over, and I'll fix you something here. Please. Come right away."

  Ellita went back into the living room to tell Hoke that Bill was coming to the house, but Hoke was no longer sitting in his chair. He wasn't in the bathroom, either. She opened the door to his bedroom and found him supine on his narrow army cot. He had pulled the sheet over his head.

  "I told Bill you weren't feeling well, Hoke, and he's coming right over. If you go back to sleep with the sheet over your face, you won't get enough air and you'll wake up with a headache."

  The room air conditioner was running, but Ellita turned it to High-Cool before closing the door. Low-Cool was comfortable enough for nighttime, but with the sun on this side of the house, it would be too warm in the afternoon.

  Bill arrived, and after pulling the sheet away from Hoke's face, talked to him for about ten minutes. Hoke stared at the ceiling and didn't respond to any of Bill's questions. Bill was a large man with big feet and a huge paunch, and he had a brutal, metal-studded smile. When he came out of Hoke's room, he carried his brown-and-white seersucker jacket over his left arm, and he had taken off his necktie.

  Ellita had fixed two tuna salad sandwiches and heated a can of Campbell's tomato soup. When Bill came into the kitchen, she put his lunch on a tray and asked him if he wanted to eat in the dining room or out in the Florida room.

  "In here." Bill pulled out an Eames chair at the white pedestal dining table and sat down. "It's too hot out there without any air conditioning. The announcer on the radio coming over said it would be ninety-two today, but it seems hotter than that already."

  Bill bit into a tuna salad sandwich, sweet with chopped Vidalia onions, and Ellita put two heaping tablespoons of Le Creme into his steaming tomato soup.

  "What's that?" Bill said, frowning.

  "Le Creme. It turns ordinary tomato soup into a gourmet treat. I read about it in -Vanidades-."

  "When you called me, Ellita, I thought maybe Hoke was just kidding around, and I was half ready to kick him in the ass for scaring you. But there is something definitely wrong with him."

  "That's what I was trying to tell you."

  "I know. But I still don't think we should tell Major Brownley. Was Hoke sick to his stomach, or anything like that?"

  "No. He was all right when I fixed his coffee this morning, and he'd already read the paper."

  Bill stirred the soup in his bowl; the creamy globs of Le Creme dissolved in a pinkish marble pattern. "I don't want to scare you any more than you are already, Ellita--but-- how's the baby coming, by the way? All right?"

  "I'm fine, Bill, don't worry about me. I've put on ten pounds more than the doctor wanted me to, but he doesn't know everything. He told me I'd have morning sickness, too, but I haven't been sick once. What about Hoke?"

  "What it looks like to me, and I've seen it more than once in Vietnam, is 'combat fatigue.' That's what we used to call it. A man's mind gets overwhelmed with everything in combat, you see, and then his mind blanks it all out. But it isn't serious. They used to send these guys back to the hospital, wrap them in a wet sheet for three days, put 'em to sleep, and they'd wake up okay again. Then they'd be back on the line as if nothing had happened."

  "It's all psychological, you mean?"

  "Something like that--and temporary. That wasn't a big problem in the Army. In the dep
artment, though, it could be. If Major Brownley calls in the department shrink to look at Hoke, I'm pretty sure that's what he'd call this. I mean, not 'combat fatigue,' but 'burnout' or 'mid-life crisis,' and then it would go on Hoke's record. That's not the kind of thing a cop needs on his permanent medical record."

  "Hoke's only forty-three, Bill. That isn't middle-aged."

  "It can happen at thirty-three, Ellita. You don't have to be middle-aged to go through a mid-life crisis. Instead of telling Brownley, it might be best if we keep this to ourselves. I'll fill in the papers, and we can put Hoke on a thirty-day leave without pay. I can forge his name easily enough. I did it plenty of times when we were partners. Then I'll call his father up in Riviera Beach and get him to take Hoke in for a few weeks. If Hoke's up there on Singer Island, instead of here with you, Brownley won't be able to come and check on him."

  "I don't think Mr. Moseley'll like that, Bill. And I know his wife won't. I met her once, when the two of them were going on a cruise, and she's one of those society types. The sundress she had on when she came to the ship must've cost at least four hundred dollars."

  "There's not even any back to a sundress."

  "Make it three-fifty then. But she looked down her nose at me. She doesn't approve of lady cops, I think."

  "Hoke's old man's got all of the money in the world. I'll talk to Mr. Moseley, and he can get his own doctor to look at Hoke. A visit to the department shrink is supposed to be confidential, but it always gets out sooner or later. This thing with Hoke'll blow over soon, I know it will, and if we can get him out of town for a few days no one'll ever know the fucking difference."

  "What'll I tell the girls?"

  "Tell them Hoke's gone on a vacation. I'll call Mr. Moseley on your phone after I finish eating--the soup's good with this stuff, by the way--and you can drive Hoke up there this afternoon. You can still drive, can't you?"

  "Sure. I go to the store every day."

  "Okay, then. Take Hoke's Pontiac. Your car's too small for him, and you can drive him up there right after I call and explain everything to Mr. Moseley. You'll still be back in plenty of time to fix dinner for the girls. If not, you can always send out for a pizza."

  Ellita nibbled her lower lip. "You really think Hoke'll be all right?"

  "He'll be fine." Bill looked at his wristwatch. "It's onefifteen. If anyone ever asks you, Hoke's been on an official thirty-day leave of absence since eight A.M. this morning."

  Hoke hadn't planned it that way, but that's how he got back to Singer Island.

  CHAPTER 2

  Stanley and Maya Sinkiewicz lived in Riviera Beach, Florida, in a subdivision called Ocean Pines Terraces. The subdivision was six miles west of the Atlantic Ocean and the Lake Worth waterway. There were no pines; they had all been bulldozed away during construction. There were no terraces, either. Not only was the land flat, it was barely three feet above sea level, and flood insurance was mandatory on every mortgaged home. Sometimes, during the rainy season, the canals overflowed and the area was inundated for days at a time.

  Stanley was seventy-one years old but looked older. Maya was sixty-six, and she looked even older than Stanley. He had retired from the Ford Motor Company six years earlier, after working most of his life as a striper on the assembly line. During his last three years before retiring, he had worked in the paint supply room. Because of his specialized work on the line for so many years, Stanley's right shoulder was three inches lower than his left (he was right-handed), and when he walked, his right step was about three inches longer than his left, which gave his walk a gliding effect. As a striper, Stanley had painted the single line, with a drooping striping brush, around the automobiles moving through the plant as they got to him. These encircling lines were painted by hand instead of by mechanical means because a ruled line is a "dead" line, and a perfect, ruled line lacked the insouciant raciness a handdrawn line gives to a finished automobile. Stanley's freehand lines were so straight they looked to the unpracticed eye as if they had been drawn with the help of a straightedge, but the difference was there. During Henry Ford's lifetime, of course, there were no stripes on the black finished Fords. No one remembered when the practice began, but Stanley got his job as a striper on his first day of work and had kept it until his final three years. He had been transferred to the paint shop when it was decided by someone that a tape could be put around the cars; then, when the tape was ripped off, there was the stripe, like magic. Of course, it was now a dead stripe, but it saved a few seconds on the line.

  Stanley and Maya had lived in Hamtramck, and they had paid off their mortgage on a small two-bedroom house in this largely Polish community. On a Florida vacation once they had spent two weeks in a motel in Singer Island. During this time they had enjoyed the sun so much they had decided to retire to Riviera Beach when the time came. The Ocean Pines Terraces development had been in the planning stages, and because pre-phase construction prices were so low, Stanley had made a down payment on a twobedroom house and hadn't had to close on it for almost two more years. After Stanley retired, he and Maya trucked their old furniture from Hamtramck down to the new house and moved in. The house Stanley had closed on for fifty thousand dollars, six years earlier, was now worth eighty-three thousand. With his U. A. W. pension and Social Security, Stanley had an income of more than twelve thousand a year, plus three ten-thousand-dollar certificates of deposit in savings. Their son, Stanley, Jr., now lived with his wife and two teenage children in the old house in Hamtramck, and Junior paid his father two hundred a month in rent. Maya, who had worked part-time, off and on, at a dry-cleaning shop a block away from their house in Hamtramck, also drew Social Security each month, and both of them were on Medicare.

  Despite their attainment of the American Dream, Maya was not happy in Florida. She missed her son, her grandchildren, and her neighbors back in Michigan. She even missed the cold and snow of the slushy Detroit winters. Maya didn't like having Stanley at home all of the time, either, and they had finally reached a compromise. He had to leave the house each morning by eight A.M., and he wasn't allowed to return home until at least noon. His absence gave Maya time to clean the house in the morning, do the laundry, watch TV by herself, or do whatever else she wanted to, while Stanley had the morning use of their Ford Escort.

  After eating lunch at home, which Maya made for him, Stanley usually took a nap. Maya then drove the Escort to the International Shopping Mall on U.S. 1, or to the supermarket, or both, and didn't return home until after three. Sometimes, when there was a Disney film or a G-rated film at one of the six multitheaters in the International Mall, she took in the Early Bird matinee for a dollar-fifty and didn't come home until five P.M.

  When they first moved to Florida, Maya had telephoned Junior two or three times a week, collect, to see how he and his wife and the grandchildren were getting along, but after a few weeks, when no one ever answered the phone, she had called only once a week, direct dial, on Sunday nights. She then discovered that Junior would be there to talk--for three minutes, or sometimes for five. Her daughter-in-law was never at home on Sunday nights, but sometimes Maya would be able to talk to her grandchildren, Geoffrey and Tern, a sixteen-year-old boy and a fourteenyear-old girl.

  Stanley was a clean old man, and very neat in his appearance. He usually wore gray or khaki poplin trousers, gray suede Hush Puppies with white socks, and a white shortsleeved shirt with a black leather pre-tied necktie that had a white plastic hook to hold it in place behind the buttoned collar. The necktie, worn with the white shirt, made Stanley look like a retired foreman (not a striper) from the Ford Motor Company, and he always said that he was a retired foreman if someone asked him his occupation. He hadn't been able to make any new friends in Florida, although, at first, he had tried. For a few weeks, Stanley had been friendly with Mr. Agnew, his next-door neighbor, a butcher who worked for Publix, but when Mr. Agnew bought a Datsun, after Stanley had told him that the Escort was a much better car, and an American car to boot, he no l
onger spoke to Mr. Agnew, even if Maya was still friendly with Agnew's wife.

  When Stanley left the house in the mornings, he wore a long-billed khaki fishing cap with a green visor. He always carried a cane, even though he didn't need one. He wore the cap because he was bald and didn't want to get the top of his head sunburned, but he carried the cane to fend off dogs. The gnarled wooden cane had a rubber tip and a brass dog's head handle. The handle could be unscrewed, and Stanley had a dozen cyanide tablets concealed in a glass tube inside the hollowed-out shaft of the wooden cane. Stanley had appropriated these cyanide tablets from the paint shop at Ford because he found them useful for poisoning vicious dogs in Hamtramck, and later in Florida. Stanley was afraid of dogs. As a boy, he had been badly mauled by a red Chow Chow in Detroit, and he didn't intend to be bitten again. During the last three years, he had used three pills to poison neighborhood dogs in Ocean Pines Terraces, and he was ready to poison another one when the opportunity arrived. Stanley had a foolproof method. He would make a hamburger ball approximately an inch and a half in diameter, with the cyanide pill in the center. Then he rolled the ball in salt and put the ball in a Baggie. When he took a walk and passed the house where the targeted dog lived, he would toss the ball underhand onto the lawn, or drop it beside a hedge or a tree as he continued down the sidewalk. When the dog was let loose in its yard, it would invariably find the hamburger by smell, lick the salt once or twice, and then gulp down the fatal meatball. Thanks to Stanley's skill, the neighborhood was shy one boxer, one Doberman, and one Pekinese.