Bright Futures: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (Lew Fonesca Novels)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  I passed a mess of construction heading north on Tamiami Trail. Wooden yellow-and-black traffic horses and dingy red cones created a minor maze that slowed vehicles and made ancient drivers, pregnant mothers, and slightly drunken men mad with the challenge.

  It took me almost an hour to make the trip to Cortez Village. Ames had installed a third-hand junkyard radio in the car. It worked just fine, so I was accompanied by the soothing voice of a man with a Southern accent. The voice wasn’t strident; he was confident and sounded as if he were smiling as he spoke. I had been told when I called Jack Pepper’s phone number that he was at the studio doing his show. The woman told me the address of the station’s studio and number on the dial where WTLW could be found. I found it and listened as I drove.

  “You know, friends,” the man said, “the Jewish people are holy. They are the people chosen by God to redeem the land of Israel, the sacred land of our Lord Jesus Christ. We must support the Jewish people in their quest to survive against heathen hordes. Palestine does not belong to the Arab. Palestine comes from the Biblical word Philistine. The Philistines were neither Arab nor Semite. The Emperor Hadrian designated the land as Palestine. The Arabs can’t even say the word. They call it ‘Palethtine.’ ”

  He almost sounded as if he were crying.

  “We can’t let the Jewish people be pushed into the sea. We cannot let the land of Israel once again go into the hands of those who would make of it an unholy land. If there need be another Crusade, we must march in it armed with truth.”

  And a lot of heavy firepower, I thought. Pepper was just getting warmed up.

  “There will come a time,” he said, “when our Savior returns and those who have believed in him will be saved and shall sit in the house of the Lord and bask in the warmth of Christ.”

  And what about the Jews? I thought, but Jack Pepper let it hang in the air.

  Cortez Village, on the Gulf of Mexico, still has a few small fishing companies and some independent fishermen making a living pretty much as fishermen have been doing there for more than a century. The air was salty with the smell of fish.

  The radio station was a little hard to find. It was about thirty yards down a narrow dirt street, at the rear of a small frame church on a white pebble-and-stone parking lot. Four cars were parked in the lot. A four-foot sign indicated that I was indeed not only in the parking lot of the Every Faith Evangelical Church but, that, if I followed the arrow pointing toward the rear of the church, I’d find radio station WTLW, THE LORD’S WORD.

  There was a seven-foot-high mesh steel fence with three strands of barbed wire surrounding the lot. Inside the fence there was a patch of crushed white stone and shell about the size of my office. About twenty yards beyond the enclosure was a three-story steel radio tower.

  On the patch of grass on my side of the fence was the door with a freshly painted white cross about the size of an ATM machine. Next to the cross was a gate with a button and a speaker just above it. I pushed the button. The clear but speaker resonant voice of a woman said, “Who is it?”

  “Lew Fonesca. I’m here to see Jack Pepper.”

  “Reverend Pepper,” she reprimanded.

  “Reverend Pepper,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Philip Horvecki,” I said.

  Long pause. Long, long pause.

  “Why?”

  This time it was a man’s voice, the same voice I had just been listening to on the radio.

  “Detective Viviase of the Sarasota Police suggested I talk to you,” I lied.

  Another long pause.

  “I do not wish to testify,” he said.

  “Ronnie Gerall may not have done it,” I said.

  I could hear the man and woman talking, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. One of them must have put a hand over the microphone. I could tell that the woman sounded insistent and Pepper sounded resigned.

  “Come in,” said Pepper. “Close the gate behind you.”

  Something clicked and I pushed the gate open.

  The door at the end of the path was painted a bright red. It looked as if a new coat of paint had been applied minutes earlier. The station’s call letters were painted in black in the middle of the door with a foot-high brown cross under them.

  “Come in,” came the man’s voice.

  I opened the door.

  “Take off the hat please,” the man said. “This station is part of the House of the Lord.”

  I took off my Cubs cap, stuffed it in my back pocket, stepped in, and closed the door behind me.

  The room was about the size of a handball court. There were three desks with chairs lined up side by side on the left, and on the right stood a narrow table with spindly black metal legs. The table was covered in plastic that was meant to look like wood, but it looked like plastic. On the table there sat a computer and printer and boxes of eight-by-ten flyers I couldn’t read from where I stood. There were eight folding chairs leaning against the wall. Beyond all this, through a large rectangular window, I could see a studio barely big enough for two people. In fact, two people were in there. One had a guitar. One was a man. One was a woman. They were obviously singing. They were smiling. I couldn’t hear them.

  I looked over at an ample woman of no more than fifty whose dark hair was a study for one of those “before” pictures on early morning television.

  “Speak,” she said.

  I looked at the man behind the second desk. He was gaunt and had red hair and an almost baby-like face. He could have been any age.

  “You’re Reverend Pepper?”

  “I am,” he said. “And you are?”

  “An investigator hired to see if Ronnie Gerall killed Philip Horvecki. Want to go someplace more private?”

  “Whatever you have to say to me can be said in front of Lilly.”

  “Philip Horvecki,” I said. “He was not a good man.”

  Lilly closed her eyes and nodded her head.

  “He wasn’t punished for what he did to you,” I said.

  “It was my word against his. The police said that wasn’t enough,” Pepper replied.

  “He wasn’t punished,” I said.

  “Yes he was, but not by the law. His punishment was delayed, but the Lord was not in a hurry.”

  Lilly was slowly nodding her head to the rhythm of Pepper’s voice and the eyes of Jack Pepper vibrated back and forth.

  “Where were you Saturday night?”

  “What time?”

  “Evening, at about ten.”

  “In my home, my aunt’s home where I live. She looks after me. Lilly was there too.”

  “I was,” Lilly said.

  “Lilly came to dinner and to talk about a tour I have been planning. I’m sorry. I have to get back in the studio. Gilbert and Jenny are almost finished with their song.”

  “And today, about eleven in the morning?” I asked.

  “Another crime?”

  I said nothing.

  “I was here, doing the morning call-in show,” he said.

  Before I could question Lilly, the theory I had been putting together about recorded shows and lying alibis seemed to come apart. Maybe I had just seen Laura too many times.

  Jack Pepper rose with the help of two aluminum forearm crutches. He leaned forward as he slowly came out from behind the desk.

  He looked up at me with what may have been a touch of pain and said, “MS. Multiple Sclerosis. The Lord has chosen to touch me with this affliction. Would you like the name and number of my doctor to see if I’m telling the truth?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Fonesca? Italian. You are a Catholic?” he asked.

  Lilly was shaking her head yes. She was either answering for me or at the brilliance of Jack Pepper’s observation.

  “No,” I said.

  “Lapsed?”

  “No. I’m a lapsed Episcopalian.”

  “We are all one in Christ,” he said.

  “Except for the Jews and a long lis
t of others.”

  “They are welcome to join the faith and be embraced as brothers and sisters and be saved,” he said.

  “Amen,” said Lilly softly.

  “You believe that in spite of what God has let happen to you?”

  “Because of what God has let happen to me.”

  “Philip Horvecki sodomized you,” I said gently.

  “No,” he said with a smile. “He tried and failed. The Lord did not choose to let it happen.”

  I shut up and watched him make his painful way toward the door to the studio in which I could see that the two singers had wrapped up. Then he stopped and looked back at me.

  “The Lord has allowed something bad to happen to you, too,” he said. “You are filled with grief and sorrow.”

  That could have been said of just about everyone I knew or had ever known. But, it hit me. He opened the door to the studio a few seconds after the red light over the door had gone off.

  “You have a favorite first line of a book?” I asked.

  “Genesis one,” he said.

  “Something else.”

  He paused and said, “ ‘Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.’ ”

  “What’s that from?” I asked taking out my index cards and pen.

  “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” he said.

  He entered, and the studio door closed behind him.

  Never underestimate the ability of a human being to surprise.

  “There are many roads to enlightenment and belief,” Lilly said.

  If there were that many roads, why wasn’t I on one of them? I looked at her. She was beaming, her eyes fixed on the studio door.

  “All are welcome to this church,” she said.

  “Then why the barbed-wire fence?” I asked.

  “There are people on this earth who have been put here to challenge, vex, and destroy to keep us from spreading the faith.”

  “Vandals,” I said.

  “Minions of the devil,” she said.

  I thought I might save a little time, so I simply asked, “You didn’t happen to kill Philip Horvecki and Blue Berrigan?”

  “I don’t know any Blue Berrigan and I don’t believe in killing.”

  “You happen to have a favorite first line from a book?”

  “ ‘It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed,’ ” she said. “Fahrenheit 451.”

  With that, I went to the door.

  “Feel free to come back,” Lilly said.

  I had no intention of doing so. When I got back into the car and turned on the radio, I was greeted by the voice of the Reverend Jack Pepper:

  “… a special prayer for the soul of Lewis Fonseca, one of our Lord’s lost children.”

  “Fonesca,” I said softly. “Not Fonseca.”

  I turned off the radio and drove amid the sound of silence.

  10

  *

  ESSAU WILLIAMS WAS IN THE VENICE telephone directory. I sat in the Saturn and punched in the number I had written on one of my index cards.

  The phone rang three times before a man answered with a sleepy, “Williams.”

  “Fonesca,” I said. “I’m from Sarasota. I’d like to talk to you about Philip Horvecki.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m not sorry.”

  “I’m not surprised. Can I talk to you?”

  “Who are you?” he asked sounding a little more awake. “A reporter?”

  “No, a friend of the family.”

  “Whose family?”

  “Ronnie Gerall.”

  “You want me to contribute to his defense fund? Put me down for an anonymous fifty dollars. No, make that a hundred dollars. Any killer of Horvecki is a friend of mine. And since you’re calling me, I think you know why I’m being generous.”

  “Can we meet?” I asked. “I’d like to gather information about Horvecki that might help justify what Gerall did.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Venice,” I said.

  “Come over.”

  He gave me directions and we hung up without good-byes.

  Essau Williams’s house was not near the beach. It was in Trugate West, a development about three miles south of the hospital. What it was west of, I have no idea. His was a small ranch-style house, one of hundreds built in the 1950s to house the middle-class migrants who didn’t have enough money to buy near the beach. They did have a little more money than the retirees who moved just outside of what was then the city limits into the mobile homes lying on tiny patches of grass that most of them tried to make homey with flowers and bright paint.

  The green grass, really the weeds that passed for grass in Florida, was mowed short. The two trees, one a small palm, the other a tangelo, grew on opposite sides of the narrow concrete path that led to the front door.

  I knocked. Essau Williams opened. He wasn’t big, he was huge. He wore a pair of blue shorts and a gray T-shirt with the name ESSAU in red block letters across his chest and the number 8 under it. He had a yellow towel draped around his neck, and sweat was thick on his forehead, cheeks, and arms. He was all muscle and probably could have made a career with his body if he had a face to match. Essau Williams, light brown with a brooding brow, looked a little like my cousin Carmine, who was not the beauty of our family. Williams had the additional drawback of a raised horizontal white scar across his forehead.

  “Go around back,” he said and closed the door.

  I walked through the grass to the back of the house where Williams was placing two tall glasses of what looked like lemonade on a wooden picnic table.

  “Have a seat,” he said.

  I sat. It was hard to tell how big the yard was. It was dense with fruit trees, succulent bushes, flowers, and vines. The picnic table was on a round redbrick island that left no room for anything but the table.

  “Nice,” I said, looking around.

  On a mat a few yards from the table was a plastic-covered bench. A series of bars and weights were lined up evenly next to the bench.

  “Thanks. If you go that way, down the path … See it?”

  “Yes.”

  The lemonade was cold with thin slices of lemon and clinking cubes.

  “There’s a fountain over there with a small waterfall. You should be able to hear it.”

  “I hear it,” I said.

  “Okay, maybe I can save us some time.” He took a deep drink of lemonade and looked in the general direction of the running water. “Philip Horvecki raped my mother and aunt when they were kids and got away with it. Eight years ago Philip Horvecki came to my mother and my aunt’s home, threatened them, and left them crying. He warned them not to tell anyone or he would come back and kill them.”

  I nodded. There was nothing else to do. He went on.

  “My mother was sixty-four, my aunt sixty-six. I was on the force in Westin, Massachusetts. They didn’t tell me what had happened till I came down for Thanksgiving. That was three months after the attack. I went to the sheriff’s office and demanded that Horvecki be arrested. My mom and aunt filed criminal complaints. Only the word of my mom and aunt against Horvecki, who had the best lawyers money could buy. They tore at the reports, said they were filed by two sexually frustrated, old black women who changed their minds about selling the house for what he called ‘a fair price.’ He also said they were angry because he wouldn’t accept their advances. His lawyers brought up medical histories, family history. We didn’t have a chance.”

  “So …”

  “Didn’t even go to trial,” he said, shaking his head. “He walked. Then I moved here, took a job with the Venice police and began watching everything Horvecki did or said. My mother and aunt moved back north. They’ve both been in therapy. They’re recluses. They seldom go out, and they’ve got guns and know how to use them. They think Horvecki’s going to make good on his promise to kill them.”

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p; “Didn’t you feel like doing more than watching him?”

  He was nodding now, considering. Then he leaned forward toward me.

  “I wanted to kill him. I told him I would. I told him I’d pick my own time. I wanted to turn him into a pile of frightened jelly.”

  “Did it work?”

  “No,” he said. “After a while, he didn’t believe me. The fact, which I’ll deny, is that I had a date set, the anniversary of what he did to my mom and aunt, to beat the bastard to death. Three weeks from today. I’m glad someone beat me to it.”

  “Horvecki was rich,” I said.

  “Very. Worth about sixty or seventy million. Real estate. He made at least two million of that from my aunt and mother’s house and property.”

  “You know who gets his money?”

  “His daughter I guess. Who cares? My mother and my aunt are lost. You know what it’s like to lose someone you love? You know what it’s like to become obsessed with punishing him?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He looked at me long and hard over the rim of his lemonade and then said, “Maybe you do. When you see him dead in a funeral home, the feeling of vindication doesn’t come. You just feel flat, empty.”

  “I know,” I said. “Did you kill Horvecki?”

  “What?”

  “Did you kill Philip Horvecki?”

  “No. I told you. I thought you were trying to find information that would justify what Gerall did, not come up with another suspect. Who do you work for?”

  “Ronnie Gerall. I told you. He says he didn’t do it.”

  “Surprise. A killer denies his crime. If you find out someone else did it, I’ll give that hundred dollars to his defense. Now I think you better leave.”