Denial

9

I should have been delivering summonses to two people. I should have been going to see Yolanda Root, Andrew Goines and the four people who had been released from Seaside Assisted Living. I should have gone back to Nancy Root for more information. I should have done a lot of things, but I didn’t.

Back in my office, I sat behind my desk and looked over at the painting on my wall, the dark jungle foliage with the nighttime sky and just the touch of red, and the hint of a bird.

I picked up the phone and hit the buttons that connected me to the office of Ann Horowitz. Ann never let a call go by even if she was in the middle of a confession of matricide from a raving client. How do I know this? From the calls she had taken over the past three years when I sat in front of her, one of which came while I was trying to remember what might have been a telling dream about… I don’t know what it was about. When she ended the call, the dream was gone.

“Dr. Horowitz,” she answered.

“Are you alone?” I asked.

“Lewis?”

“Yes.”

“I’m alone for the next ten minutes,” she said.

“I can’t do it,” I said.

“Do what?”

“Face any more of them.”

“Them?”

“The grieving, frightened, angry, depressed,” I said. “I’ve got a list in front of me.”

“People you are supposed to help?”

“Why am I supposed to help? I can’t help myself.”

“You are helping yourself. You’re talking to me. Who told you that you had to help those people on your list?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It happens. They find me. I’m a magnet for despair.”

“What do you think you want to do?” she asked. “Notice I said think, because what you want to do may not be what you think you want to do.”

I took off my cap and rubbed the top of my head.

“I think I want to buy a cheap car, throw in all my things I want to keep, which probably wouldn’t even fill the trunk of a Honda, and drive away.”

“Never come back?” she asked.

“Never.”

“Where would you go?”

“Away. You’re going to say I can’t run away from what I am.”

“No,” she said. I could tell she was eating something. “You can run. You can hide. Sometimes it works very well. I’ve even recommended it, but the problem is that wherever you go, you will always be with you. You are your own God, your own judge, your own executioner.”

“Freud,” I said.

“No, the German actor Klaus Kinski,” she said.

“What are you eating?” I asked.

“Ham and cheese on thin white,” she said.

“You’re Jewish.”

“I appreciate your calling this to my attention,” she said.

“You don’t eat ham.”

“I eat ham. I like ham. If God wants to punish me for eating ham, I have little use for her.”

“Tradition,” I said.

“We were talking about your unwillingness to deal with the problems you’ve taken on,” she said. “I’ll deal with my God.”

“You pray to your God?” I asked.

“I talk to my God and call it prayer. If my God talks to me, I call it schizophrenia.”

“Klaus Kinski?”

“Thomas Szasz. Let’s deal with your God.”

“I have none,” I said.

“Nonsense,” she said, chewing. “God is in your head. You created God. Deny other people’s God. Deal with your own. You have no intention of running away. If you did, you wouldn’t have called me. You would just go. You want me to talk you out of it.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You don’t have to,” she said. “I know. I’ve been doing this for fifty years. What is on that list of yours? You’ve got five minutes.”

I told her, even mentioned Jerry Lee the gator and ended with my visit to Richard McClory.

“I’m tired,” I said.

“Not sleepy?” she asked.

“Tired.”

“I’ll ask my required question now,” she said.

“No, I’m not thinking about suicide. If death wants me, I’m easy to find. I’m not running…”

“Got you,” she said. “You’re not running away from death. You are living a paradox. You want to run from your grief, but you don’t want to leave it behind. You want to just let the days go by, but you can’t do it.”

“You tricked me,” I said.

“I’m good at it. I’m not telling you anything I haven’t told you before. You listen, but you hear very little. You are a tough case, Lewis, but an interesting one. I’ve got to go. I hear my next victim coming through the outside door. Go to work, Lewis. Don’t go to sleep. Don’t go to Key West or Columbia, Missouri. Come see me next week, usual time and day.”

She hung up.

I felt better, not good but better. If I hurried, I could get to Yolanda’s grandfather’s hardware store in Bradenton. On the phone, she hadn’t sounded as if she was going to let anyone see her grief, if she had any. That was fine with me.

I drove up 41 past the Asolo, past the Sarasota/Bradenton airport, past malls, one-story chiropractic offices, dentists, Sam Ash’s music store, all the fast food franchises known to the world. I listened to Neal Boortz on WLSS. He was talking about airplanes. I’m not sure what he said.

Root’s Hardware was in a small strip mall on the north side of DeSoto. It wasn’t big. It wasn’t small either. Finding Yolanda was no problem. She stood behind the counter tallying up items for a chunky man with a freshly shaved head and a bushy mustache.

Yolanda wore a yellow tight-fitting tank top, a black skirt, a silver ring in her navel, makeup that would be right at a Halloween party and a sour look that said, What do you want?

When the man with the shaved head had gone through the door, little bell tinkling, I moved to the counter and said, “Lew Fonesca.”

She looked at me, folded her arms under her breasts and sized me up. I don’t think she was impressed. Her mouth was open. She had a silver tongue ring.

“I’m busy,” she said.

I saw no customers.

“I’ll be quick,” I said.

“The Cubs suck,” she said, nodding at my cap.

“Things change,” I said. “Know anyone who might want to hurt your brother?”

“You could have, like, asked me that on the phone.”

“I like to see people I talk to,” I said.

“So, you looking?”

She unfolded her arms and smiled. It wasn’t a friendly smile. It was a taunt. It was a tease. It was an I-know-what-men-think smile designed to put her in charge.

“You’re a pretty girl,” I said. “You don’t have to hide it.”

“Who’s hiding anything?” she said.

“Most people,” I said. “Kyle. Someone who might want to hurt him?”

“No,” she said. “You mean, like, kill? He was, like, fourteen, for God’s sake, you know?”

I didn’t answer.

“No,” she repeated.

“Anyone want to hurt you?” I asked.

“Me?” she asked, shaking her head and closing her eyes, pointing a crimson fingernail at herself. “You want to get on the list? Take a number. But no way anyone would try to get to me by killing Kyle.”

“You got along with him?”

“Sure. He was always trying to show me how he and his friend Andy had done stuff. Kid stuff. He was just, like, trying to impress me.”

“Stuff?” I said.

“Water balloons, scratching parked cars with a key or something, you know. Spitting on people from the parking garage by the Hollywood 20, stuff like that, you know. He was a kid.”

“So you liked him?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“Sure. That make a difference?”

“Yes.”

“Why? He’s dead. Like, end of his life, end of story. Go talk to his daddy.”

The word daddy dripped with venom a coral snake would envy.

“I did,” I said.

“All broken up?”

“Yes.”

“Fucking hypocrite,” she said. “He didn’t give a shit about Kyle. Just threw money at him and let him know he didn’t want to hear about any problems.”

“And your mother?”

Yolanda shrugged again.

“She’ll cry you enough tears to fill Robarts Arena. She’s an actress.”

The word actress came out with the same venom that had covered the word daddy.

“What are your plans?” I asked.

“My… what’s that got to do with anything? None of your fucking business. I haven’t decided yet. You got any ideas?”

The words were clearly provocative, words she had used on men and boys for the past four or more years.

“You’d be a good actress,” I said.

She laughed.

“I mean it,” I said.

She stopped laughing, looked at me.

“You’re not kidding, are you?”

“No.”

“I’ve thought about it,” she said. “My mother…”

The mask softened a little, but there was no time for it to drop. A man in his sixties, white hair, rugged farm look on his dark face, stepped around an aisle and moved to the counter. He was wearing dark slacks and a white shirt with a blue tie.

“Yolanda?” he asked, looking at her and then at me.

“He’s a customer, Grandpa,” she said.

“What’s he buying?” asked Elliott Maxwell Root.

“A key chain,” I said, plucking a chain from a cardboard display on the counter. It had a little laser light on the end that went on when you pressed the blue plastic sides.

“Two dollars and twenty-seven cents,” Yolanda said.

I took three dollars from my wallet and handed them to her under Grandpa’s watching eyes. She gave me change and a receipt. Grandpa’s eyes were watching to see if I was looking at Yolanda in places or ways that might be inappropriate. I considered suggesting that Yolanda might be issued a uniform that covered her, but even in an oversize blue smock, that sexual challenge would burn through.

“Take care,” I said to her.

I meant it. She understood.

“I will,” she said softly. “Thanks.”

Before I headed back to Sarasota, I made two notes in my notebook and checked one I had written earlier. First, where was Kyle’s cell phone? Second, according to his sister, Kyle and his friend Andy Goines were into minor vandalism. The note from earlier read: Robles said there was a passenger in the car that hit Kyle, maybe a kid.

I stopped at a Walgreens and picked up a disposable cell phone. Then I headed to a camera shop in Northgate Plaza off 301. I had a little trouble finding it A truck loaded with wooden planks was parked in front. A couple of sweating men wearing work gloves were removing the planks and piling them up. I moved past them into the shop.

It was small; cameras in locked glass cases lined the walls to my right and behind the counter to my left. A young man, maybe twenty-five, grinned at me. He was about six feet tall and couldn’t have weighed more than 120 pounds. His grin was cadaverous.

“Wayne Bennett?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

I took out the summons and handed it to him. He looked at the envelope and then at me.

“This what I think it is?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think it is?”

He placed the envelope on the counter and wiped his palms on his shirt.

“They want me to tell what I saw Jesse doing,” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know who Jesse is.”

“Jesse will kill me,” he said. “No, I mean he might really kill me. You try to help a friend…”

“Your friend Jesse might want to kill you?”

“He hates prison,” said Bennett.

“Most people do,” I said.

“Not more than Jesse,” he said.

I had nothing to say.

“What am I going to do?” he asked.

“Be where it tells you to be when they tell you to be there,” I said.

I left without looking back. If I paused, he would tell me his story. I couldn’t handle any more stories. They filled the air wherever I went, invisible, ghostly. Ann was right. There was no hiding from ghosts, mine or other people’s.

My next stop was on Longboat Key, one of the high-rise, high-priced condos on the bay. I pulled up to the guard gate and an old man in a khaki uniform and a matching cap came out of the small shack with a clipboard.

“You’re here to see…?”

“You Benjamin Strayley?”

“Yes,” he said, puzzled.

I handed him the envelope.

“She did it,” he said with a sigh. “She really did it, didn’t she?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“The bitch,” he said, shaking his head. “Sorry, I don’t usually use language like that but… the bitch did it. You know how long we’ve been married?”

He looked as if he really expected an answer or a guess.

“Forty-one years,” he said.

Catherine and I had been married nine years when she died. There was no point in telling this to Benjamin Strayley, who slid the envelope under the clip on his board.

“Forty-one years,” he repeated. “I didn’t even want to move down here. Her idea. All my friends, family are in Danville.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

There was a car behind me.

“I’ll open the gate,” Strayley said. “Turn around and you can go right out.”

“Thanks,” I said.

He went back in the shack.

I bypassed my office, parked in front of Gwen’s diner, ordered two grilled cheese sandwiches and a chocolate shake and found out that Gwen had taken Digger on as a fill-in short-order chef.

A few people knew that Gwen’s real name was Sheila. Her mother had been Gwen. When her mother died, people saw the sign on the roof of the one-story building and assumed the woman who owned it and bustled behind the counter and in the kitchen and from table to table was Gwen. She accepted without correcting.

Tim from Steubenville was sitting at the counter. I joined him. Tim was a regular, close to ninety. He lived in an assisted living home a short walk away at the end of Brother Geenen Way. He spent as much time as he could at Gwen’s reading the newspaper, shaking his head and trying to get people into conversations about eliminating the income tax, abolishing drug laws, ending almost everything the “damn government” was involved in besides having an army, paving the highways and providing a police force.

There was very little left of Tim from Steubenville beyond his convictions. Blue veins undulated over the thin bones in his hands as he drank his coffee from a white mug.

“I tried Digger out,” Gwen said. “He can cook the easy stuff, good enough for breakfasts. He’ll make enough to live on if he’s careful, and the food’s free if he doesn’t overdo it.”

I thanked her.

“No favor,” she said. “I can use the extra help in the morning now that my firstborn is out producing grandbabies.”

Gwen was buxom and full of energy with curly brown hair that she was constantly brushing back with her arm. She poured me a cup of coffee. I put in two Equals and a lot of milk from the small metal pitcher.

“Banana cream?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said.

She winked and went off to get me a slice of pie.

“She shouldn’t pay him more than the free market will bear,” said Tim. “Minimum wages are an infringement of free enterprise. If the market says she has to pay him twenty dollars an hour, so be it. If the market says she only has to pay him four dollars an hour, so be it. Free market.”

He held up his mug as if he were toasting what he had just said. I held my mug up too.

When I finished the pie, I felt better, but better is a comparative term; better than what? Better than when? Gwen was talking to two men at a booth who looked like truckers. Something she said made them laugh. I put four dollars on the counter and got up.

“I say,” said Tim, looking at his almost empty coffee mug, “almost every damn government agency should be shut down. Now, tomorrow. That’s what I say.”

I knew. He had said it before. The next thing he would do if I didn’t escape would be to go through the list of government departments that should be dismantled. He usually started with OSHA, but sometimes the FDA came first.

“You know it’s damn unconstitutional to deprive Americans of their right to get their damn prescription drugs wherever they want,” he said.

“You were a constitutional lawyer?” I asked, immediately regretting it.

He turned his head to me and said, “I worked the line in an automobile assembly factory for almost fifty years. I don’t need a damn law degree. Just read the Constitution.”

“I will,” I said. “Gotta go.”

It was almost three. I hurried to the Gillespie Park neighborhood, got out of the car and walked the same route Kyle McClory had walked before he died. I turned on the cell phone I had bought and punched in the number Richard McClory had given me. There was no answer. I didn’t expect one. I was listening for the ringing on Kyle’s phone, looking in the bushes and grass. Nothing.

I tried for the fifth time. I was about where Kyle had been standing when he was hit. This time someone answered. Or, to be more accurate, someone was breathing hard on the other end.

“Hello,” I said.

More breathing.

“Hello,” I repeated.

“Fonesca,” he said with a sigh. It was the voice of the man who had told me to stop looking for who killed Kyle.

“Can we talk?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I should have thrown this thing away as soon as I picked it up. I’m going to do that now.”

“What happened? The night you killed Kyle?”

“No,” he said. “Just listen to me. Listen. You’ve got to stop. Please. I don’t want to kill you. I’ve… I… just stop. No one will be helped by you finding me.”

“I’ll find you,” I said.

“You’re going to make me kill you, aren’t you?”

“You sound like you’d rather not,” I said.

“I can’t think of another choice,” he said.

“Well, since it’s my life we’re talking about, maybe I could come up with some alternatives.”

“I don’t think there are any,” he said.

“How about-” I began, but he turned off the phone.