Midnight Pass lf-3

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  I entered Ann Horowitz’s office ten minutes late. Her inner door was open and I moved to it, holding out a coffee container and the white bag with the chocolate croissants.

  She was seated in her leather chair next to her desk. The office was small. Three chairs, three bookcases filled with works on psychology and history. History was Ann Horowitz’s passion.

  She took the coffee and fished into the bag for a croissant, placing it on a napkin she laid out on the desk. I sat in the brown leather recliner across from her and took off the lid of my coffee.

  “I thought you were going to bring almond,” she said.

  “They were out.”

  She looked at me as she held the croissant in her hand and said, “I’ll endure the hardship.”

  Ann is a psychologist. She took me on as a challenge and charged me twenty dollars a session if I could afford it, ten if I could only manage that, nothing less.

  Ann had come to Sarasota with her husband to retire a dozen years earlier, planning to write a book about forgotten Jewish figures in American history. She discovered that she would rather read and talk about them than write, and she also discovered that she missed working with people who challenged her.

  She kept looking at me as she bit into her croissant. The ritual had begun. I was uncomfortable with it. Ann said my discomfort indicated that I was making progress.

  “Discomfort will turn to return,” she had told me during my last visit. “We started with reluctance, got you almost to hostility, and now you have attained discomfort. Progress.”

  I sipped some coffee, took a deep breath, and softly said, “Catherine.”

  Ann nodded, put down her croissant, and pulled the lid off of her coffee container.

  “Which Catherine? Adele’s baby?”

  “My wife. Both maybe.”

  “Time for the question,” she said.

  I sighed and answered it before she could ask.

  “I am not suicidal. I do not want to kill myself.”

  “You said that the way the police give the Miranda rights on Law amp; Order.”

  “Doesn’t mean I don’t mean it.”

  “You want to be dead?”

  “Numb,” I said. “I want to be numb.”

  “You still want to hold on to your depression?”

  “Yes, I want to hold on to my depression.”

  “Would you be relieved or frightened if you knew you were about to die?

  “Die how?” I asked.

  “Hit by a car, shot by a bullet, know you have been fatally bitten by a coral snake.”

  “Relieved maybe. Maybe not. Hard to tell till it happens.”

  We had been here before and would be here again until the answers changed or she gave up. Ann is not the kind of person who gives up.

  “No anger yet?” she asked, finishing the last of her croissant. I had broken off half of mine. The second half lay on a napkin on the little table next to the recliner. A book lay on the table. There was always a book for patients to look at in case Ann had an emergency phone call or an urgent trip to the rest room. The current book was a little one with short paragraphs by William Bennett.

  “Lewis?”

  “No anger,” I said.

  “You are not ready to hate the man who killed your wife?”

  “Could have been a woman.”

  “Person,” said Ann, accepting the remaining half of my chocolate croissant I handed to her.

  “No anger. Nothing I can do with anger.”

  “But you can try to hide in your depression?”

  “I try. It’s hard work. You don’t make it easier.”

  “That’s why you come to me. Trying to feel nothing,” she said, taking a small bite of the croissant to make it last. “Like a religion. Nirvana. Except without a god.”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “Sleep?”

  “I’m down to about fourteen hours a day,” I said.

  “Progress. Like an Atkins diet for depression,” she said. “Lose a little more solitude and isolation each day. Adele, her baby, Flo, Ames, Sally.”

  “And Dave and you,” I finished.

  “All people you care about.”

  I turned my eyes away and shook my head.

  “Things happen. People happen. I’ve been thinking about saving some money and buying a car.”

  “So you can run away again?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you stay and come to me.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “There’s a lot to be said for it, but depression has its downside,” I said.

  “Why do you like Mildred Pierce so much?” she asked, now working on her coffee. “My husband and I watched it last night.”

  “You like it?”

  “Yes. I have seen it before. What do you like about it?”

  “I don’t know. What do I like about it?”

  “Maybe that bad things happen to Mildred, lots of bad things, but she keeps going. She never gives up.”

  “Her husband leaves her,” I said. “One daughter dies. The other daughter betrays Mildred with her new husband, the husband who…She keeps going.”

  “But you do not.”

  “I do not, but maybe I have to.”

  “Abrupt change of subject,” she said, wiping her hands with the paper napkin. “During the Civil War many people in the North still had slaves. There’s a new book about it.”

  I nodded.

  “On the other hand,” she went on, tossing the crumpled napkin into her half-full wastebasket, “there were many Southerners, prominent Southerners, who fought and even died in the war, who did not believe in slavery and never had any slaves or freed the ones they had before the first shot was fired.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “You going to tell me that I’m a slave to my depression, to my refusal to give up my wife’s death? That I have to take off the shackles and start to live free?”

  She smiled.

  “No,” she said. “I was simply making a reference to something that came to mind, but you’ve done a good job of finding something personal in it.”

  “Maybe I should be a shrink?”

  “God, no. You think you’re depressed now?”

  “You’re not depressed.”

  “I keep busy,” she said. “I have my moments, but I am not chronically depressed. A little occasional depression is normal.”

  She shook her head and went on, “You are beginning to depress me,” she said. “Most of us have suffered terrible losses.”

  “The Cubs have them every year,” I said.

  “Your baseball cap,” she said, pointing at the cap still on my head. “It’s a hopeful sign.”

  “My cap?”

  “You wear it to mask your baldness,” she said. “You have some vanity, some will to feel that others view you with approval.”

  “My head burns if I don’t wear it,” I said.

  “A hat can have more than one function.”

  “You know what the ultraviolet index is?”

  “You mean as a concept or the actual number today?”

  “Today?”

  “You are interested in the present?”

  “I’m interested in my head not turning red and sore,” I said.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” she said, holding up a finger. “I think I heard a touch of irritation in your voice, a very small one, smaller than the birth squeal of a pink baby laboratory mouse, but something. I see hope in that.”

  “The squeal of a pink baby mouse?”

  “Vivid memory of a moment in a biology class in graduate school,” she said. “You know what happened to the mouse? Of course you don’t. One of my classmates took it home and fed it to his pet red corn snake.”

  “You know how to cheer a client up,” I said.

  “I do my best.”

  We went on for a while. We talked about Wilkens and Trasker, about my other client, about my relationship to Sally Porovsky and Adele’
s baby.

  “Time,” she said.

  I pulled one of the twenties Wilkens had given to me out of my pocket. She accepted it and looked at it.

  “Lucky bill,” she said. “There are four ones in the serial number. A liar’s poker bill.”

  “Now you believe in omens?”

  “Oh yes,” she said, reaching for the phone. “The universe is connected down to the smallest segment of an atomic subparticle. Past, present, and future are part of a continuum.”

  “I love it when you talk dirty,” I said, moving toward the door.

  I heard Ann chuckle and say, as I opened the door, “Lewis Fonesca made a parting joke. I’m making a note of it. Bring me three jokes on Friday. That’s an assignment. At least three jokes.”

  I closed the door. There was no one in the tiny waiting room.

  The homeless black guy wasn’t sitting on the bench. I had decided to break precedent and give him a dollar. It might open the door to him expecting more from me in the future, but since I didn’t have a lot of faith in the future, a buck in the present wouldn’t hurt.

  But he wasn’t there.

  I found a phone and a phone book at Two Senoritas Mexican Restaurant a few doors down from Sarasota News amp; Books. William Trasker was listed.

  I called. After five rings, a woman picked up and said, “Hello.”

  “Mrs. Trasker, my name is Lew Fonesca. Is your husband home?”

  “No.” She had a nice voice, a little cold but deep and confident.

  “Could I stop by and talk to you?”

  “You can but you may not,” she said.

  I was going to ask if she had been a grade-school teacher, but I said, “It’s about your husband.”

  “Who are you?”

  “A man looking for your husband,” I said. “All I need is a few minutes of your time. I could talk to you on the phone but I’d rather-”

  “I don’t care what you’d ‘rather’ or who you are.”

  She hung up.

  I didn’t know Trasker’s wife, but I did know when someone was frightened. She was frightened.

  I got back to my car, pulled out carefully, and headed for Flo Zink’s.

  I took Tamiami Trail down to Siesta Drive, made a right, crossed Osprey, and then took a left onto Flo’s driveway just before the bridge to Siesta Key.

  The white minivan was in the driveway. Flo couldn’t legally drive it. This was the third time her license had been taken away. Adele could drive. She wasn’t sixteen yet, so she needed an adult supervisor with her. In Florida, even though she had no license, Flo qualified as copilot.

  The door opened before I could knock or ring the bell.

  “Baby’s sleeping,” Flo said.

  Flo was wearing one of her country-and-western uniforms: her favorite denim skirt, blue-and-red checkerboard shirt. Her hair was white, cut short, and looking frizzy. Flo always reminded me of Thelma Ritter.

  Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison, Garth Brooks, or Faith Hill were usually playing backup for conversation at the Zink house, but not today, not now. The baby was sleeping.

  Flo was carrying a drink in her hand. It was in a wineglass. The liquid was amber. She caught me looking.

  “Diet Coke,” she said, handing me the glass. “Smell it.”

  I did.

  “I thought you’d take my word,” she said with disappointment.

  “Can’t afford to,” I said as we moved out of the late morning heat and into the air-conditioned house.

  “Can’t afford to?”

  “I’ll get to that in a little while,” I said.

  “There’s no alcohol in the house,” she said, leading me toward the kitchen. “Not the drinking kind anyway, just some baby kind. Want a Diet Coke? Iced tea?”

  “Diet Coke,” I said.

  She got me one from the refrigerator. I popped the tab and took a sip as I followed her through the living room and down the hallway to a half-open door. She motioned me in ahead of her and put her finger to her lips to let me know I had to be quiet.

  The curtains were drawn but there was enough light coming through for me to see the face of the baby Adele had named for my wife.

  Catherine was on her back, face turned toward me, eyes closed. She had a small crown of yellow hair, a round pink face. She looked vulnerable. I thought of the snake that had eaten Ann Horowitz’s pink mouse and I shuddered. The baby sensed something, fidgeted, and turned her head away.

  Flo took my arm and led me out of the room. When we were back in the living room, Flo pointed at a small white plastic box on the tree-stump coffee table.

  “Intercom,” she said, patting the box as if it were a pet dog. “She makes a peep, I hear her.”

  I worked on my Diet Coke.

  “So,” she said. “Take off your hat and sit a while.”

  Flo had the twang of New York in her voice and the grammar of Oklahoma picked up from more than half a century of listening to western music.

  I took off my cap, brushed what remained of my hair back with one hand, and said, “You’re getting your driver’s license back,” I said.

  “No shit,” she said, sitting upright.

  “None,” I said. “If you get another DUI, you, me, and an influential local politician will wind up on the front page of the paper.”

  “It’d have to be a slow news day,” she said.

  “No. He’s big enough to make the front page.”

  “I’m clean and sober, Lewis,” she said. “On my dead husband Gus’s grave, I swear. Don’t need it anymore. I’ve got Adele. I’ve got the baby.”

  “Adele is…?”

  “Straight arrow,” Flo said, gliding a flattened hand through the air. “Straight A’s. No boys. No men.”

  Adele had been a child prostitute, sold by her father to a pimp. She had straightened herself out and then let herself get involved with a married man, the son of a famous man. The married son of a famous man was Catherine’s father, who was serving life for a pair of murders.

  “Getting my license back,” Flo said with a grin, looking at her Diet Coke in a wineglass. “I was about to say ‘fucking license,’ but I’m working on my language. The baby. Adele’s heard everything I can say and more, but Catherine is something else.”

  “Gus was on the County Commission,” I said.

  “Till he joined the ghost riders,” she said, holding up her glass in a toast to her late husband.

  “You know William Trasker?”

  “Yep. Two terms on the council. Now he’s on the County Commission. I know Willie Trasker.”

  “His wife?”

  “Yep again. Known Roberta Trasker for more than twenty years.”

  “Friends?”

  “Have been. Sort of. Mostly when Gus was alive and he had business with Willie, but Roberta? Not for a while. Why?”

  “I’d like you to call her and ask her to let me talk to her.”

  “Why don’t you just call her yourself?”

  “She won’t see me.”

  “You tried?”

  “I tried.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Good-bye.”

  I explained why I wanted to talk to Roberta Trasker. Flo nodded her head as I spoke, finished her Diet Coke, and put the glass down.

  “I’ll call her now,” she said, getting up and moving to the phone on the wall of the kitchen. A thin, rectangular white board about the size of a small computer screen hung next to the phone with a black marker Velcroed to the top. There was a list on the board but I couldn’t make it out from where I sat.

  “Roberta? It’s Flo, Flo Zink. How the hell are you?”

  Flo looked at me as she listened. Flo made a face.

  “Is Billy okay?…Sure. How about coming over here sometime, the two of you, and see the baby…? No, not ‘sometime soon,’ sometime real…Okay, but you’ll call. Make that a promise…Good. One more thing. I’ve got a friend wants to talk to you, a good friend, name’s Lew Fonesca. I owe him big time, Bobby
, big time…How busy can you be? Give him a few minutes…Right. I’ll send him right over. Remember, you’re calling me next week to set up a time to come over. I don’t hear from you and I call back with hell to pay. This is some special baby.”

  Flo hung up and turned toward me.

  “Something’s wrong,” she said. “Could hear it in her voice.”

  “I heard it when I talked to her.”

  I told her what the situation was and she told me Roberta Trasker’s address.

  “She’s waiting for you,” Flo said. “But don’t expect much, Lewis. Roberta Trasker can be a frozen cod and I get the feeling she doesn’t like kids very much, not even her own.”

  Flo told me what she knew about Roberta Trasker. William Trasker did his best to make excuses for the absence of his wife at social and public functions over the years. She was ill or she was touring Europe or visiting her brother in Alaska, Montana, California, or Vermont. The Traskers had two grown sons and a daughter and four grandchildren. Flo had never seen them. One son and his family lived in Seattle. The other in Australia. They didn’t even have an address for the daughter, or so they said when they were backed into a social corner. The rumor was that the daughter was deformed, retarded, behind bars, or living as the fourth wife of a Mormon in Utah.

  Roberta and William Trasker were not close to their children.

  “Roberta looks like a lady, drinks a little but not too much, can outcuss me if she wants to, and likes being the woman of mystery. Won’t say much about her life before she moved here. Mystery woman. It’s an act. I don’t know who the actress is behind the character. Doubt if you’ll find out. She doesn’t take off the makeup.”

  “She get along with her husband?”

  “Roberta? She worships the ground he bought her. They get along in public. Times I’ve seen them in private, back when Gus was alive, they looked as if they felt comfortable together. That’s about it.”

  “What does she do with her time?”

  “Spends it,” said Flo. “And Bill’s money, but he’s got plenty to spend, more even than my Gus.”

  I put my cap back on, used the bathroom, washed my face and hands, and moved back to the living room, where Flo had risen.

  “When do I get that license back?”