Always Say Goodbye

10

The Boneyard Tavern was a little under a mile from the east end of campus. When Lew was an undergraduate, it had been two miles from campus. Eventually, the university would embrace the the Boneyard Tavern, which wasn’t yet an institution and wasn’t a student or faculty hangout. It was, and had been since it opened in 1934, a neighborhood tavern. University people did come, eat the burgers, have a beer, in a place that didn’t blare the walls with music, a place where people could talk to and hear other people. It was a place where the wood-paneled walls were always polished, the light a soothing, isolating amber, and the photographs on the wall were of past and present owners on pier decks solemnly pointing at large puzzle-eyed fish they had caught hanging next to them. It had been Lew’s getaway of choice in Urbana when he was an undergraduate.

It was the place where a couple who looked like they had grandchildren and maybe great-grandchildren sat, showing photographs to the tubby bartender who smiled and nodded at each picture. It was the place where three men and a woman sat at one of the six round wooden tables playing cards. All four wore black lined zipper jackets with the words U.S. AIR FORCE printed on the back in red script. It was the place where Victor Lee sat at another table, watching Lew come through the door and head toward him.

In front of Lee was a nearly full glass of dark liquid. Lew sat across from him and handed Lee the painting he had carried in under his arm.

“I was coming back for it,” said Lee, looking at the dark cityscape and then gently propping it on the table against the paneled wall. “That was you in my apartment, you and my landlord?”

A long pause, a double beat. One of the card players laughed at something, and the bartender looking at the photographs said, “This is Jason? Got big like his dad.”

Lew took Lee’s folded B.S. degree and handed it to him.

“Forgot that,” Lee said, taking the sheet and placing it alongside the painting.

“You’re the husband?” asked Lee, looking down at painting and document.

“Yes.”

Lee nodded and went on, “I’ve been waiting for you for four years.”

“You could have found me,” said Lew.

The bartender called, “What are you drinking?”

“What he has,” said Lew, nodding at Lee’s drink.

“It’s root beer,” said Lee.

“Got you,” called the bartender.

“I couldn’t…” Lee began and trailed off, looking at the city canyon. “I killed her, your wife.”

Lee took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt.

“I know.”

“I’m… sorry isn’t enough, is it?”

“It’s a start.”

“It’s not enough for me,” said Lee, rubbing his eyes and shaking his head. “I thought that when I told you… but it doesn’t work that way, does it? I killed her.”

“Why?” asked Lew.

The bartender placed the glass of root beer in front of Lew, took away the small empty wooden bowl on the table and replaced it with an identical bowl filled with pretzels and beer nuts.

“Hey, Larry, take a look at this one,” called the woman at the bar, holding up a photograph. “It’s a hoot.”

The bartender moved from the table. Victor Lee ate a pretzel, gulped and took a drink.

“Thirsty,” Lee said.

Lew nodded. It had come to this, sitting across from a shaken man who needed a haircut, a man who had lost his family, his confidence, his life. There was evil out there, in the canyons and forests of cities and towns and jungles, and sometimes Lew sat across from evil, but more often then not, as it was now, he sat across from someone lost who had committed someone’s sense of their own sin.

“What happened?”

“What happened?” Lee repeated.

Victor Lee told his story.

Lee was certain he would be offered the job. The interview over lunch and drinks had gone more than well. Doctor Mitchell Waltrop, Executive Vice-president for Research of Permigo Pharmaceuticals, the third-largest drug manufacturer in the United States, had all but promised him the position of head of Experimental Research. It was more than a step up.

Lee, his wife and baby daughter, would have to move near Permigo corporate headquarters here in Skokie or nearby. No problem.

The only problem was that Victor Lee did not drink, never, but Waltrop had not given him an option, had poured him a full glass of wine over lunch to match his own. Waltrop talked, asked questions, poured a second glass, talked more, listened, another glass of wine.

Lunch had ended with a handshake, the promise of a call as soon as Waltrop had conferred with the CEO and the president of Permigo.

Then the ride back.

There was a better way home, a faster way, but Victor didn’t know it. He had seldom left the far-south suburbs, ever expanding with malls, traffic, developments like the one in which he lived. He took the safe way, the way he knew after he had stopped to call his wife, tell her the news.

The ride back.

South on Skokie Boulevard. He remembered that. South. He drove, turned left on Dempster. Had he turned right, in less than ten minutes he would have hit the expressway. What was this street? Did he remember it? Chicago Avenue. Right on Chicago. He was lost. He had laughed. Victor Lee could follow and remember the theoretical variations of a strain of repellent-resistant fleas for seven generations and project it for more than seven thousand more. City streets, however, puzzled him even when he was quite sober, which was always, with the one exception of this day.

Older brick buildings, storefronts, resale shops, television-repair shops, faces on the street black instead of white. Hispanic faces now. IHOP, bars, a bank. Asian faces, restaurants. Vietnamese, Koreans, no Chinese. Didn’t matter.

The ride back.

The radio was on. A man with a rapid voice kept saying, “You know what I mean.” Change. Change. Change. Lake Michigan on his left. “That’s the ticket,” said the man on the radio. Hospital, park, apartment buildings. He opened the windows. Cold air. “Hold your horses there,” said the radio man.

The sports car had almost been a gift, sold for so little by a Mentic board member. The car had been that of the man’s teenage son, who had been given a new one by the boy’s widowed grandmother, whose name… what was it? What did it matter? Bargain. Still big enough to hold Victor’s family till it grew, which was now going to be financially possible. He was frugal. She was frugal. They saved. It had been the way of both of their families forever. Save something, something for the inevitable destruction, the certain disasters. The good risk.

The ride back.

Victor Lee didn’t see Catherine Fonesca crossing Lake Shore Drive, lake still on his left, skyline of downtown on the right, couple walking. He didn’t see her. There was a traffic light. He didn’t know if it was red, yellow, green or polka dot. Then he hit her. Then he saw her, tumbling, rolling away toward the couple he had passed. There was no thought. Stop? And do what? He had been drinking, drinking wine, three glasses. More? With Dr. Mitchell Waltrop. The wine had been red.

Over. Everything. Choice now. No time. He was already thirty or more car lengths ahead of the image in his rearview window. He went faster, passing cars, weaving, knowing that he should slow down, not attract attention.

“You know what I mean, don’t you, Gwen?” asked the man on the radio. The radio man cackled.

The ride back.

He hit the other car near the turnoff to Hyde Park at 51st Street. The University of Chicago ten blocks in. He had been there for conferences twice. He had given a paper, “A Theory of Collision of Sub-Organic Particles in High Density.” There had been no questions.

The car he hit bounced away, almost collided with a pickup truck, came to a halt. The car he had hit was now a miniature in the mirror world. He sped. He hit the steering wheel with the heels of his hands till they hurt. He wept.

The ride back ended, the driver a different Victor Lee from the one who had left five hours and twenty-seven minutes earlier. He had arrived home.

He told his wife he wasn’t feeling well.

When the job offer came the next day, he turned it down. He told his wife that he had thought about it on his way home, found too many problems.

He held onto his job at Mentic, lived in the penumbra of a dream, bought the painting of the dark canyon of the city with the single apartment of dim light.

Three years and four months later, Victor Lee, who had made his own and the life of his wife and child a misery, left his home and moved into an apartment, taking with him only the framed painting, his University of Illinois degree and a canvas and a slightly dented aluminum Samsonite bag.

He had lost his ability to read for more than half an hour. He lost track of television shows. At first he could lose himself in his work, the numbers, the formulas, the possibilities. Then that too had changed and all that remained was the memory of the day, from morning to night, that he had killed Catherine Fonesca.

Every night when he lay in bed or on the sofa or on the floor with a pillow in his arms, he had repeated in his mind a forty-minute movie of imagination.

And so, Lew realized, there had been no murder.

If Catherine had a secret file, it had nothing to do with her death. Pappas, Posno. The murder of Santoro and Aponte-Cruz. Nothing to do with Catherine’s death. But it did have something to do with Catherine. There were loose ends. He wanted to get back to Sarasota, his cell, but he owed it to Catherine, and whatever peace of mind he could hold, not to leave loose ends.

“I’ll go back with you,” Lee said, sitting up with a sigh.

“Why?”

“I killed her.”

“Will turning yourself in bring her back?” asked Lew.

Lee’s shoulders dropped forward and his eyes turned to the last bubble of his almost-finished drink.

“No,” said Lee.

“Do you want to go to prison?” asked Lew.

“Yes… no. I…”

“You’re going to pay,” said Lew.

“Yes.”

“I mean for the drinks.”

“Yes.”

Lew stood. Lee looked up and said,

“I had considered killing you. To protect my family. Hide my shame.”

Lew said nothing.

“I couldn’t, can’t do it,” said Lee.

Lew turned and headed toward the door.

The grandparents at the bar had shown their last photograph. The card players were showing their final hands of the night. “And here comes the River,” called out one of the players slapping down a card.

Lew had seen a pay phone on the wall at the end of the bar. He decided to find a different one somewhere in a darkened motel room where he could hear traffic, turn on the television, find an old movie, anything in black and white, and try to pretend that he was back in Sarasota.

He knew it wouldn’t be easy.

And he was right.

It was dark, starless, the threat of rain had turned into the reality of a cold drizzle. Lew began silently singing “Adeste Fidelus” to the beat of the windshield wipers.

Off of I-56, he found a one-story pink concrete block of rooms. Under the parking lights, the rain reflected the neon of the North Star Motel’s office. It wasn’t up to the ambiance or quality of the Bates Motel. It looked more like the stone-and-sand jails in Westerns, the kind the good guys or bad guys blow holes in to escape. It would do.

When he entered the office, he could see the television on the other side of the desk and a man sitting in a wooden swivel chair. The man’s back was to Lew and his front no more than six feet from a rerun of Jeopardy!. The man didn’t turn.

“Hi,” said Lew.

The man didn’t answer. He was absorbed in trying to come up with the question to “It saves nine.”

“Jesus,” the man said. Then he urged, “Morons, Jesus saves lives. No, a cat has nine of them. That’s it. What does a cat have? Nine lives. Right?”

The thin man stood now, still staring at the screen. He was wearing a wrinkled long-sleeved white shirt that wasn’t fully tucked in. On his head was a dish towel.

“Head cold,” the man explained, pointing to the towel.

The man’s nose was puffy and pink, his eyes wet. He sneezed, possibly to convince what he thought was one who doubted his distress.

Lew said, “A stitch in time.”

The thin man turned to face him. Time was running out. The clock was ticking. The clerk held up a finger showing that Lew should wait for one second, minute, turn of a century.

“Gina?” asked Alex Trebek in a rerun from a time when Alex’s hair and mustache were black and his dark eyes amused.

“A stitch in time, Alex?” the chunky mother of four or five said.

Lights flashed. Bells rang. The audience applauded. The desk clerk turned off the television and said, “Wrong fucking answer. What can I do you for?”

The man’s lean face was weathered. He could be almost any age. He wore a thin green tie loosely under his collar and the word etched on on the shirt pocket was SALUKIS.

“A room,” said Lew.

“A room?” the man said.

“This is a motel. You have a room?”

“You headin’ to or from a place?”

“Does it matter?” asked Lew.

“Sometimes.”

He took the towel off of his head, examined it, smelled it and returned it to his head.

“Heading north.”

“You got cash or a credit card?”

“Cash.”

The man smiled.

“You’re in luck. We’ve got eleven empty rooms. Price for a man of distinction like yourself is twenty-one dollars and I’ll put you right next to the Coke machine.”

“Is it loud?” asked Lew.

The man wiped his nose with the towel and said, “Silent as the few seconds before a church hymn.”

The man reached under the counter and came up with a key. He held the key till Lew handed him a twenty and a single.

Lew filled out the guest information card.

“Don’t have all the amenities,” said the man. “But the place is quaint. We still use real keys ’stead of those plastic things with black strips and blue arrows and such. Room Six should do it. Clean towels, washed ’em myself, soap still wrapped, sheets clean.”

“Can you hear the road from six?”

“Well. Can’t tell you a lie, mister. Truth is I can. I know all the rooms down to the names of the roaches and the scratches in the wall behind the night tables. I’ve got a cultivated memory.”

He looked around the small office and added, “But not all that good so’s I could make a career out of it. Tried though. Three years of college at Southern Illinois.”

He looked up at the bottom of the dangling towel drooping down from his head. “History major, but my job, which I owe to my uncle Willy Hart, is my comfort and my tomb and my real passion now is old license plates. Got ’em from all states and lots of different years. Trade some time with a guy owns a barbecue place outside of Towson Falls, North Carolina.”

Lew tried to smile.

“You think that’s stupid, don’t you?”

“No,” said Lew. “Politicians tend to be stupid. License plate collectors tend to be honest.”

“You know a lot of politicians?”

“A few.”

“License plate collectors?”

“One, you.”

“Don’t talk much do you, mister?”

“No,” said Lew. “Room six is fine.”

“Great,” said the man. “Hey, take some M amp;M’s out of the bowl. It’s okay. They’re wrapped six in every bag.”

Lew reached into the bowl on the desk and took four packets of M amp;M’s.

“Phone in the room?”

“I can turn it on,” said the man. “Local calls free. Outside the county, you’re on your own. Credit cards or collect calls.”

Lew nodded.

“Oh, yeah, hell, almost forgot, the TV in Six is fritzy. You know picture sort of sizzles. Channel seven is clearest. Sometimes it’s bright and clear. Other times it sizzles. If you can’t live with that

…”

“I can live with that,” said Lew at the door.

The clerk looked down at the card Lew had filled out and then looked up.

“You’re a vagabond from Genesis? What the hell is that? Wait. Now I get it. You’re with that rock group Genesis, and you’re the bass guitar player, Vagabond.”

The clerk looked at Lew and dug into his memory.

“You don’t look like a rock musician-type person.”

“I need a joke.”

“A joke? A rock music joke?”

“Any joke,” said Lew.

The clerk had been behind the counter every night and all night for the past eleven years. The sad, mad, scary, touching, religious, famous-if you count Bob Denver’s accountant-biking, ugly and beautiful had stopped, usually for no more than one night. They had been too tired, high or low, or lost to go farther. Most were cordial. A few were friendly, but the rest… Never before had he seen a vagabond from Genesis. Maybe they all were vagabonds from somewhere.

“Anything else?” the clerk asked, wishing to hell that the sad-faced bald guy at the door would say no and walk back into the night with the key to Room Six in his hand, but he didn’t.

“Just the joke.”

“Clean, dirty? Know a few about license plates. Heard a lot of good ones sitting in here. Forgot most of them.”

“Clean,” said Lew.

“Clean,” the clerk said, tilting his head to one side and running a hand down his tie. “I’ll think about that one.”

John Pappas knew exactly where Posno would be, exactly. Posno would be in a car across from the house of Lew Fonesca’s sister’s. He would wait patiently, for days if he had to, till Fonesca returned. No one would notice. John Pappas knew that no one would see him.

Posno’s plan would be to simply shoot the little Italian, drive away and disappear, maybe for years, maybe forever. That would depend on whether Catherine Fonesca’s files were ever found.

That would be his plan.

Posno, Pappas was certain, would be composing poetry as he sat. Many nights and days Pappas had sat with Posno in a car, heard the torpedo-shaped killer compose or recite not only Greek poets, modern Greek poets, but his own poems. Posno was most prolific and creative just before he killed. He existed to hurt and kill and when the job was done he disappeared.

One of Posno’s poems, unbidden, returned to Pappas. It was not surprising that he remembered it. He had heard Posno reciting it, revising it dozens of times. Besides, it was short:

If we link our arms, none but a demon can with all his charms break the chain of man.

John Pappas took a frigadelia, fried and rolled slices of lamb stomach filled with seasoned strips of calves’ liver, from the blue bowl on the window ledge. There were three left. His mother’s favorites were pastries. She was an artist in the kitchen with a butcher’s block table and a warm oven. But there were some specialties her son loved and frigadelia was one of them.

Her son had many things to worry about, but food would never be one of them.

John Pappas ate the first frigadelia so quickly that when he plucked up the second one, it was still quite warm to the touch.

After eating the packets of M amp;M’s, Lew turned up the heat in the room, stripped to his shorts, placed his shirt on a wire hanger and his pants on a wooden one, turned on the hot water in the shower and hung his clothes over the curtain rod where the water wouldn’t hit them. Then he laid back in the bed, lights out, listening to the running water beyond the bathroom door, hearing the whirr of cars and bumping trucks on the highway a little over a hundred yards away. He was too tired to watch television. It was too late to make any more phone calls but one.

He had called Angie and Franco, told them he was all right, that he was no longer looking for the man who had killed Catherine, and that he would be back late the next morning.

“Lewis, remember Ames McKinney wants you to call him,” said Angie. “Says it’s important. You have his number?”

“Yes. I’ll call tomorrow,” he had said, carrying the phone, walking a small, slow circle.

“Lewis,” said Angie. “You sound like shit.”

“What does shit sound like?”

He could hear the rain thudding harder against the roof of a car pulling into the parking lot of the motel outside his window. Lew pushed back a slat in the faded yellow plastic window blinds and looked out.

“Lewis, where are you?”

“Not sure, but I’m on my way. Tomorrow, Angela. When there’s sun. I have to make some stops first.”

“Lewis, maybe it’s enough. You know? Let it go. If you can’t let it go, live with it. Every day spent thinking about the last day is a wasted day.”

“Rebecca Strum,” he said.

“Paraphrase,” said his sister.

By the single light atop the twelve-foot post to his left, he could see the lean, slump-shouldered figure, eyes slightly open, hair pounded forward and dripping.

Victor Lee was speaking to someone who wasn’t there. Lee looked up at Lew’s window and their eyes met. Lee’s lips moved. Whatever he was saying, he had to know that Lew couldn’t hear it. Lewis let the slat drop.

“Lewis?” said Angie. “You hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Wherever you are, you should be somewhere else.”

“I know.”