Always Say Goodbye

11

The next morning about an hour before Herman came to work, Uncle Tonio got to fire his carbine for the first time since Korea. He had always thought, and often said, the compact, light rifle was the best weapon ever invented. As a sergeant in the Signal Corps responsible for storing electronic equipment, primarily phones, Tonio had carried a carbine. It didn’t shoot as far or quite as straight as an M1, but it wasn’t a weight on his back, a constant reminder of where he was and what he was doing.

Tonio had started checking the doors and the windows, as he always did, when he heard the sound in the darkness. He could tell where it was coming from. He knew the echoes and scurries of mice, cats and rats, the creaking of boxes and furniture, the groaning of the floor and walls when weather changed.

Tonio went back to his office, opened his closet, reached behind his clothes, pulled the carbine out of its leather carrier, loaded it and walked back out into the warehouse.

The sound was definitely coming from one of three mesh-enclosed storage rooms. One of the three was the one in which Lewis and Catherine’s furniture, papers, all the remnants of their lives, were stored and protected.

They were back, he decided, as he walked in the shadows outside the reach of the dim overhead nightlights.

Tonio had shot two soldiers in Korea, one Chinese, the other North Korean. They, in turn, had shot him in the thigh. Still hurt. Once, years ago, he wondered if the two men he had shot had lived, were still alive, what it would be like to get together, try to talk about memories that didn’t exist in words. Show them, give them his Purple Heart. Maybe they would give him their equivalent of the Purple Heart, if they had one.

No doubt now. He heard it. Tonio was angry. He kicked off his shoes gently, turned the corner to his left and, carbine at the ready, looked down the aisle. The overhead lamp in the storage room had not been turned on. The wavering beam of a flashlight clicked off. Silence.

Tonio moved forward, carbine raised.

“Come out,” he called. “Come out you son of a bitch or I shoot.”

But Tonio knew he wouldn’t shoot at the room, wouldn’t risk destroying his nephew’s memories of his wife.

There was a shuffling in the darkness. No sound of the door being opened. Was it already open? Had the burglar left it open? Was he, she, they, now in stockinged feet like Tonio, padding toward a door or worse, was he-

The sound was behind him now. Tonio turned, weapon up as he heard the cocking of a gun. Then the sound was gone. Tonio had a choice: fear or anger. He chose a combination of the two, or, rather, they chose him.

It took four or five seconds and then Tonio was after the intruder. Tonio limped. The intruder ran.

Tonio turned down the aisle toward his office. The door to the dock was open. Morning sunlight silhouetted a man’s figure. The man was holding something in his right hand.

Tonio, panting heavily, put the rifle to his cheek and tried to aim, fired. Suddenly, a second figure dashed out of the warehouse darkness, pushed past the man in the doorway and turned left.

“Herman?” Tonio called, moving toward the open door.

“Who was that?” asked Herman.

Tonio moved past him and went out on the dock. There was no one in sight. Herman joined him and looked around. The question came simply, logically. The man in the dark had crept behind him. The man was armed. Tonio had a rifle.

“Why didn’t he shoot me?”

“Don’t know.”

“What did he look like?”

“Man, lot younger than you and me, lot older than a college kid,” said Herman. “White. Can’t say more. You’d best sit down.”

Tonio put his arm on Herman’s shoulder and the two went into the office and sat. Tonio propped his rifle against the wall, within reach.

“Want to give me the rifle and I’ll go after him?” asked Herman, who had been a sniper in both Korea and Vietnam.

“No,” said Tonio.

“Suit yourself,” said Herman, unzipping his jacket. “This is for you.”

He handed Tonio a blue plastic bowl.

“Cake. Celia made it last night. Plastic spoon’s inside the bowl there. We ran out of forks.”

Tonio had caught his breath.

“Thanks,” he said.

“My birthday,” said Herman. “Yesterday.”

“Happy birthday,” said Tonio.

“We get some people for guard duty tonight?” asked Herman.

“Special people,” said Tonio.

The rain had stopped, but the sky was Chicago gray, and thunder rumbled and rippled off of Lake Michigan, drowning out the sound of traffic.

It was morning. Early. Ken Sing, whose real name was Kudlup Singh Parajer, and Debest Williams, whose real name was Debest Williams, were walking their usual route from the one-bedroom apartment they shared to the University of Illinois campus where they were graduate students and assistants in the chemistry department.

The subject was Jochim Bachem, the professor for whom they worked, the professor Ken nearly worshiped and Debest thought was a sham.

“Oh, come on, Kude,” Debest said. “How many times I have to tell you to watch him. Nods his head, chews on that damn stained yellow stem pipe, acts like he’s thinking. Then what does he say when someone, anyone, you, me, asks him a question?”

“Sometimes he says, ‘What do you think?’”

They were walking past a few half asleep children shuffling in the opposite direction toward the Catholic grade school.

“He always says that,” said Debest. “Maybe he had answers once, but not now.”

Debest slammed his palm down on the car they were passing. Something inside the car moved. The horn went off. Ken and Debest stopped and looked back.

The head propped over the steering was deep red with blood. Debest and Ken tried to open the car doors. The horn kept wailing. Doors opened in the homes across the street. People stepped out.

Ken looked around and called, “Call 911.”

A bulky man in jeans and a black sweatshirt moved across the street to the car. He touched Debest’s shoulder to move him out of the way, took a knife from his pocket, pushed the window in far enough to insert the knife against it and down the glass, pushed down on the door handle. The door popped open. The dead man slumped off the steering wheel and the noise stopped.

A small group of kids and residents, all wide-awake now, stood on the sidewalk.

“We’re going to have to stay,” said Ken.

“Yeah, but that asshole Bachem won’t believe our reason.”

Franco closed the knife, put it back in his pocket and waited for the police to arrive.

“I have three jokes.”

It was the first thing Ann Horowitz heard when she picked up the phone in the morning after two rings. She had her first client in fifteen minutes. Lew knew it. He was sitting in the phone booth of a Shoney’s, twenty miles outside of Chicago. He had eaten the breakfast buffet, drunk two cups of fully leaded coffee, and watched the parking lot for signs of Victor Lee’s car. There had been none.

Ann had accepted the collect call.

“Three,” she said, taking a bite of biscotti as she sat in her office chair. “I am to be thrice-blessed.”

“I saw a man on the street when I driving. He was holding up a sign that read WILL WORK FOR MONEY.”

“Did you really see this?”

“No, it’s a joke.”

“Some jokes are taken from life,” she said. “The second joke?”

“You go on a picnic and you’re having a good time. Then you open your basket of food and the flies start coming. You close the basket. Flies go away. You open it. They come back. Conclusion: Flies time when you’re having fun.”

“That’s a good one,” she said. “You make that one up?”

“Yes.”

He could hear her crunching the biscotti.

“You said three jokes,” Ann went on.

“I’ll save it. I only owed you one.”

“So, what happened?” she asked.

“I found him,” Lew said. “The man who killed her.”

“Catherine.”

“Catherine,” he echoed.

“And what did you say to him, he to you?”

“He’s Chinese.”

“And that is relevant?”

“No.”

“What else?”

“He has a wife, a daughter, a painting of a dark city street. He wasn’t trying to kill Catherine. He was drunk.”

“And what did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Not possible to do nothing, not for you,” she said, finishing the biscotti and licking her fingers. “You’ve tried it.”

“I know. I walked away from him.”

“Why?”

“He was sorry.”

“And?”

“He was suffering, has been since he killed her. He’s lost his job, his family, his future,” Lew said.

“Remind you of anyone?”

“Yes.”

“When are you coming back?”

She was now drinking coffee she had poured into a cup from her yellow Thermos.

“Tomorrow, I think.”

“Good. People are looking for you.”

“Tell them I’m coming back tomorrow.”

“Lewis, how do you feel?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s consider that progress,” she said. “I’ll let you know how much this call cost when I see you.”

“Wait. Rebecca Strum,” he said.

“I’ve read her books, met her twice at conferences,” said Ann.

The outer door to her office opened. The next client had arrived.

“I met her,” said Lew. “There’s something-”

“A good human being, a troubled human being who is brilliant enough to turn her denial into successful philosophy of coping with the vagaries of life,” said Ann. “I didn’t just make that up. I’m quoting myself from a paper I wrote on her in 1983. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“Read one of her books,” said Ann, taking another sip of coffee. “They are filled with vivid memories of horror and inhumanity and the determination to endure.”

“Just what I need.”

“Yes, it is,” said Ann, finishing her coffee. “Goodbye.”

She hung up. So did Lew.

Franco’s friend Manny Lowen was the first officer on the scene. The beefy cop was on the overnight shift, which gave him the opportunity to keep an eye on Franco and Angie’s house. He had been on Maxwell Street about to drive back to the station when the call came through.

Normally, he would have let it go to Abel Rodriguez, but not this time. Manny Lowen knew the address. Besides, he was one hundred percent sure that when he got home, his wife would be on him again about taking in her mother. Heather never raised her voice, never got angry. She just stayed with the case, backed away for a while, a short while, and then came back again till she wore him down, nerve by nerve, guilt by guilt.

Franco was standing on the sidewalk in front of four neighbors and two college kids, one black, the other a kind of Indian or something. They were all looking into the window of the car that, Manny noted, was in almost the same parking spot from where he had rousted Santoro and Aponte-Cruz, who were now dead.

“Manny, hey,” said Franco. “Curse of Cabrini Street. You park here. Look what happens.”

Two old ladies behind them argued while they stared at the dead man half sprawled out of the car, arms out, eyes closed, mouth open.

The old ladies were speaking Italian.

“Anyone here see what happened?” said Manny, turning to face the group.

All the head shakes were negative. Manny knew the routine. If there were a chance the man slumped out of the car was alive, Manny would be working on him, but the deep purple hole in his neck surrounded by slowly drying blood and the open mouth decided it for him. He looked dead. He smelled dead. He was dead. He would wait for the detectives to make it official. Manny would not risk touching something or doing something that might contaminate the scene. Last time he had done that had been eight years ago when he picked up what looked like a silver dollar at a rape scene. The silver dollar was an aluminum foil condom packet. The condom wasn’t in it and the person who owned the packet had left fingerprints that were then under those of Patrolman Emanuel Joshua Lowen.

“You okay, Franco?” Manny asked.

“No,” Franco answered. “These crazy sons of bitches are turning my street into a graveyard. I’m a simple guy, Manny, a simple guy with a simple new mission in life: to kick the crap out of whoever is killing people in front of my house.”

A blue car, revolving light on the roof flashing, pulled up and parked in the middle of the street.

“I’m gonna have to tell them, Franco, about the other night,” Manny said as two detectives drove up. Longworth was short, heavy, white and breathing hard, and Trahairn, who was almost as heavy, was three inches taller than his partner, and in possession of a deep purple birthmark on his neck. They got out of the car slowly. They weren’t in a hurry.

“I know,” said Franco.

The two detectives stepped next to the dead man’s car and looked down at him.

What Franco knew was that Manny would have to tell the detectives, if they didn’t already know, that two men who had parked in this same spot were also dead. He would tell them about talking to Angie and Franco. That would lead to Lew and lots of questions about all these dead people and what Lew had to do with them. Longworth and Trahairn told Manny to do what he already knew he was supposed to do, keep the citizens from touching the car.

The detectives put on white plastic gloves, took out flashlights, reached over the dead man and looked into the car. They popped the trunk with the switch on the floor. Without touching anything, they came to the same conclusion, except for the blood, the car was clean, not even a gum wrapper or a bitten-off fingernail. And, except for one of those plastic spare tires, the trunk was even cleaner. For more, they would have to wait till someone from the crime scene division showed up.

“People walk by and don’t see a dead man on the street?” Longworth asked the crowd.

“He wasn’t on the street,” said Franco. “Not till I opened the door.”

“You have the key?” asked Traihairn.

“Don’t need one,” said Franco, looking across the street where Angie, dressed for work, was standing in the doorway with a cup of coffee in her hand.

“Who’re you?” asked Trahairn.

“Tow-truck driver.”

Lew’s second call from the phone booth at Shoney’s was a little trickier. He couldn’t reverse the charges. He had a pile of quarters piled next to the phone, five dollars in quarters.

“Texas,” said Big Ed when he answered the phone at the Texas Bar amp; Grille in Sarasota.

“Fonesca.”

“You back?”

“No.”

“Things interesting?”

“Yes.”

“You are a payload oil gusher of information, amigo. I’ll get Ames.”

Lew watched a stringy woman in her sixties paying her bill at the cashier’s counter. At her side was a rotund boy about four years old. His hair was thin and the color of corn. His cheeks were pink. His beltless pants were slipping and his principal task was keeping them up. The boy looked at Lew.

“McKinney,” came Ames’s deep raspy voice. “You okay?”

“I’m okay.”

“You find him?”

“Yes.”

“Turn him in? Shoot him? You in jail?”

“No to all three questions.”

Ames knew where the line was between what he should and should not ask his friend.

“Earl Borg, remember him?” said Ames.

Lew remembered the man, the name, the sight of the dying boar and the snarling pit bill, the happy little girl, the smell of blood, sweat, tobacco. Lew remembered Earl Borg.

“Yes.”

“Wants to see you. Says now isn’t soon enough and yesterday might even have been too.”

“Tell him tomorrow,” Lew said.

“Told him that yesterday.”

The fat little boy was holding his pants up with both hands and staring at Lew, who stared back. Then the woman took the boy’s hand. The untended right side of his pants drooped. As they walked away, the boy smiled over his shoulder at Lew, who did his best to smile back. He held the smile, turned and examined it in the mirror on the wall. He saw the face of regret.

“I’ll tell him again,” said Ames.

“I’ll call him as soon as I get to Sarasota.”

There should be more to say, to tell, but Lew couldn’t do it. Ames would listen and somewhere inside him he would judge. His code was simple, right out of John Wayne. There was right. There was wrong. You didn’t need a god or a devil to tell you that. Ames would judge in silence and support his friend. The listener who did not judge, Ames knew, was Ann Horowitz.

“Good enough,” said Ames.

They hung up.

By the time Lew parked the car back at Toro’s and walked to Cabrini Street, the dead man in the car across from Angie and Franco’s house had been taken away, and the car towed. The small crowd was gone. Franco and Angie stood in front of their house, coffee mugs in hand.

“Cold?” he asked.

“Fine,” she said. “Think it’s too early to call Terri?”

“Nah. Let’s do it.”

They had just hung up when Lew came through the door.

“Lew,” Angie said. “You look…”

“I need a shower. Franco, are you busy today?”

“I’m as busy as I want to be,” said Franco. “If I wanna hustle, there’s always plenty of work. You need a ride or something?”

“A ride and something,” said Lew, heading for his niece’s room.

Lewis,” Angie said. “A man was killed in a car across the street last night.”

“Looks like the drawing you’ve got of that Posno,” said Franco. “They’ve even got ID.”

“And the police know about those other two,” said Angie. “That they were looking for you before they got killed.”

“Santoro and Aponte-Cruz,” said Franco. “Manny had to tell the detectives.”

“I know,” said Lew. “I think I’ll take a shower now.”

In his office-home in Sarasota, Lew had no bath, no shower, just a sink and a toilet stall that he shared with other tenants in his building and whatever homeless person may have made his or her way there. He did his showering at the YMCA, where he worked out. Teresa’s shower, however, had something his building and the Y didn’t have: privacy.

He shaved, soaped, rubbed and shampooed, hoping to not lose more hair, and rinsed. He dried himself with the towel Angie had laid out for him, then brushed his teeth, and brushed back his hair. Showers had their own sense of humor. When water pelted, the mirror told Lew that his hairline had decided to beat another hasty retreat. The battle line was moving back.

He put on fresh clothes, packed, called the airline to change his ticket, put on his Cubs hat and met Angie and Franco in the dining room. There was half a lemon cake on the table. Angie cut a slice for her brother and put it on a plate.

“I’m going back tomorrow,” Lew said, accepting the fork his sister handed him.

“And the guy who killed Catherine?” she asked. “You don’t have to be here to testify or something?”

“No.”

He dug into the cake. The taste and smell brought memories without images.

“Guy’s got to be punished, Lewie,” said Franco. “Taken down, put away.”

“He’s punishing himself.”

“Something happened here this morning,” Angie said, nodding in the general direction of the street. “Before you got here, remember?”

“ID., photo,” said Franco. “It was Posniti.”

“Posni tki,” Lew corrected.

“Right,” said Franco.

Lew nodded, ate and asked if he could use the phone. Before he could, Angie said, “Someone broke into the locker in Uncle Tonio’s warehouse. He didn’t see who but he almost shot him.”

“Uncle Tonio’s okay?”

“He’s fine.”

“It ends today?” Angie said. “I mean what you came back to do?”

“It ends today.”

“Sure?”

“No.”

Lew picked up the phone, punched in the numbers and waited two rings.

“Hi,” he said. “I found him.”

“Good, and-,” said Milt Holiger.

“That’s all,” said Lew.

“That’s all? Who is it? Did you kill him? Is there…?”

“No more,” said Lew. “If I told you and something happened that led to an investigation-”

“Then all I could say was you told me you found the person who killed her, but you didn’t tell me anything about him.”

“Or her,” Lew added.

“Got it.”

“One more thing,” said Lew. “Andrej Posnitki was found dead in a car parked across the street from my sister and brother-in-law’s house. Can you find out when it happened and what killed him?”

“Not a problem,” said Milt. “I’ll tell whoever’s handling the case that it might be linked to the killings of Santoro and Aponte-Cruz.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ll call you when I have something. You’re going back to Florida?”

“Yes. Tomorrow.”

“Cup of coffee and a couple of sinful donuts before you go?” asked Holiger.

“Let’s see how the day goes,” said Lew.

“Call you later.”

Lew said, “Goodbye.”