Denial

10

I headed for the Goines’s home off Gulf Gate. It was easy to find. A quiet street. Modest one-story two-bedrooms. I parked in the driveway next to a Kia mini-SUV and went to the door.

The woman who answered about fifteen seconds after I rang wore jeans and a yellow man’s shirt with the sleeves rolled up. She looked at me over the top of her round glasses.

“Mrs. Goines?” I asked.

She looked too young to be Andrew Goines’s mother, at least at first glance. Her skin was clear, her eyes blue, her hair short, straight, blonde.

When she spoke, I added a decade to my first impression.

“Yes,” she said.

“Lew Fonesca,” I said. “I talked to you earlier about your son and Kyle McClory.”

“Oh yes, sorry,” she said. “I thought you were someone here to try to sell me something or donate to saving the world or supporting a political hack. I’m working on a grant for the Sarasota County Film Commission. Almost finished. Come in.”

I followed her in. The entryway was small. The living room to my right was small. The dog that came bounding out of nowhere was big, big and hairy and brown. He tried to stop his rush at me but slid on his nails on the tile floor and bumped into me. I didn’t fall but it was close.

“Clutch,” she said. “Get out of here.”

Clutch was panting, tongue out, looking from me to her.

“Out,” she repeated.

The dog took a few steps into the tiled living room and then looked back at me.

“Out,” she repeated.

The dog slowly, almost mournfully disappeared through an open sliding door.

“I did call Nancy Root,” she said. “She told me you were working for her. Mr. Fonesca, Andy got a little, well, nervous when I told him you were coming by. He was better, but not much, when I told him I’d talked to Kyle’s mother about you.”

“How has he reacted to Kyle’s death?” I asked.

She shook her head and said, “Odd; he seems-maybe I’m just imagining it-frightened. He puts on a front, but the more he says everything is fine, the more I’m convinced everything isn’t fine. He won’t talk to me about it.”

“Andy’s father?”

“Dead,” she said. “He was a helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. It went down. Everyone on board died. The captain who came by said it wasn’t downed by enemy fire. As if that makes a difference.”

“Andy?”

“Andy’s in his room,” she said. “I told him you were coming. Don’t expect a lot of cooperation.”

“You said you didn’t know Kyle McClory well.”

“Not well,” she said. “Tell the truth, the few times he came over he worked a little too hard to be likeable. Tried to say what he thought I wanted him to say. Couldn’t get past that. Can’t say I really tried too hard to break through. Poor kid.”

“Andy?”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “Come on. Call him Andrew, at least to start out. My guess is if you call him Andy, he’ll tell you to call him Andrew. If you call him Andrew, he’ll tell you to call him Andy.”

I followed her through the living room into an alcove with three doors. The door in the middle was the bathroom. That door was open. The door to the right was obviously Mrs. Goines’s bedroom. The door to the left was closed and a yellow plastic streamer said, verboten.

She knocked.

“Yeah,” came the boy’s voice.

“The man I told you about is here,” she said.

“Changed my mind,” he said.

“Andy, he’s working for Kyle’s mom,” she said. “Give him five minutes.”

“I haven’t got anything to say that’ll help him.”

“You never know,” I said. “Five minutes is all I need.”

Long pause, the door opened. Andy Goines, barefoot, cutoff jeans and a Def Jam T-shirt, stood in front of me. He was short, stocky, round pink face, dark hair brushed straight back. He looked at me and clearly wasn’t impressed.

“Okay,” he said. “Come on in. Five minutes. I’m watching the clock.”

Andy’s mother excused herself, saying she had to get back to her grant proposal. Andy kicked the door closed behind me.

The room was clean, the bed made with a plain green blanket and four green pillows. A black director’s chair sat next to the bed. Nothing on the wood floor. CDs and DVDs neatly stacked on shelves next to a low dresser on top of which sat a television set and a CD deck on top of a DVD deck. There was a speaker on each side of the dresser. Next to the dresser was a small desk with a computer and chair. The desk wasn’t cluttered. A blue backpack sat on the chair.

On one wall were two posters, both framed, lined up next to each other. One poster was for one of the Lord of the Rings movies. On it, Sean Astin was leaning over Elijah Wood, his hand resting on Wood’s shoulder. In Wood’s open palm was the bright gold ring. The other poster was Eminem. I knew who it was because his name was printed in bold blood red across the top of the poster. Eminem was holding a microphone in one hand and pointing at me. Eminem looked angry.

On the other wall were three posters, all brightly colored sports cars. One car, a convertible, was red. The second car was a squat, dark Humvee with what looked like teeth, and the third car, a yellow Mini Cooper.

“Okay if I sit?” I asked.

“Suit yourself,” he said, his hands plunged into the pockets of his jeans.

I sat in the director’s chair. Andy Goines stood across the room in front of the television set.

“I’ve got nothing new to say about what happened to Kyle,” he said.

“Tell me again, please.”

“You a Cub fan?” he asked, looking at my cap.

“Yes,” I said.

He shook his head. I thought he was going to say something like “loser” or maybe he was thinking it.

“We went to the movie, got out,” he said flatly. “We were supposed to be picked up by Kyle’s dad. Kyle called him. We had time. We walked around the block. Kyle told me he’d meet me in front in a few minutes. Had something he had to do. He ran through the parking lot. I thought he had to find a toilet or something. I went out in front. Kyle didn’t show. I called my mom and asked her to pick me up. That’s it.”

“You didn’t see Kyle’s dad?”

“Nope, but I wasn’t looking for him.”

“You didn’t think something happened to Kyle?”

“Nope. He did stuff like that. Went off. Called me the next day to tell me something cool he’d done. It happened.”

I nodded and said, “What phone did you use to call your mother?”

“Kyle’s,” he said.

“But Kyle wasn’t with you. Did he give you his phone?”

Andrew Goines looked at his watch. He was definitely uneasy.

“Wait, now I remember. I called from the pay phone in the Main Street Book Store.”

“Main Street Book Store doesn’t have a public phone,” I said, not knowing if they did or didn’t.

“I don’t know. Maybe I called from the Hollywood 20,” he said. “What’s the difference?”

“What time did you call your mother?”

“What time? How the hell would I know? Maybe ten, fifteen minutes after we got out of the movie.”

Since one lie had worked and the kid looked beyond nervous, I went for two more.

“I checked the movie times,” I said. “You got out at nine-thirty. You mother says you called her at about ten-thirty. That’s an hour.”

“We were talking, following some girls we knew,” he said.

“Who were the girls?” I asked.

“You mean their names?”

“Yes,” I said, taking out my notebook.

“What’s this? Law amp; Order? They were just girls we see at school in the halls and stuff. They didn’t even look at us.”

“Kyle was your best friend, right?”

“Yeah, so?”

His hands were out of his pockets and his palms were beating gently against his thighs. I looked at the poster.

“Frodo and Sam,” I said. “Kyle was Frodo. You were Sam.”

“You saw the movies?”

“Read the books,” I said. “Long time ago. Sam saved his friend.”

“You’ve got a point? You saying I could have saved Kyle or something?”

He took a small step forward. The crack in his voice was small, but it was there.

“I don’t know. What happened to Kyle?”

“I told you. I told the police.”

I was shaking my head no.

“You don’t believe me? You calling me a liar?”

“You put it that way, I guess I am, but I think you’ve got a reason to lie,” I said. “I think you’re scared.”

“Of what?” he said, aiming for defiance but hitting fear.

“Of who,” I said. “He called me.”

Andy Goines tilted his head to one side.

“What? Who called you?”

“The man who killed Kyle,” I said.

“You are shitting me, man,” he said, his voice rising, pointing a finger at me the way Eminem was across the room on the wall. Only Andy’s look was definitely not anger but fear.

“No.”

“You’re lying. Why would he call you?”

“To tell me to stop looking for him,” I said. “I think he tried to run me down the way he did Kyle.”

Andy Goines was shaking now. He pulled the backpack from the chair by the desk, dropped it on the floor and sat down, hands rubbing his legs.

“Did he say anything about me?”

“No,” I said.

“I think he’s going to try to kill me. Oh shit. Shit. Shit.”

He was pounding his fists on his legs now. He bit his lower lip and looked at Eminem for help, didn’t get any and turned back to me.

“Help me find him,” I said.

“Shit,” he said once more. “He went crazy, man.”

“Kyle?”

“No, that guy.”

“Kyle’s sister said you and her brother were into doing things?”

“She’s a lying whore. What kind of things?”

“Scratching cars, dropping water balloons.”

He looked at me and began blinking fast.

“You know, don’t you?”

I shrugged.

“I mean, we shouldn’t have done it, but we were just shitting around. It wasn’t the first time. Other guys up there did it.”

“Did it?”

Andy got up and sat down again.

“Okay, after the movie we went to the top of the parking garage. You know, the one behind the 20. We leaned over and waited for people to go by and we spat down on them, tried to hit them. Then we’d duck back before they could look up and we listened to hear if they said something that’d show we had a hit.”

“You spit on people’s heads?”

“Four levels up,” he said. “It’s not easy.”

“I’m sure it takes a lot of skill.”

There was a lot more I could say, but I stopped. I didn’t want him to stop now that he was going.

“We hit a guy with a girl,” he said. “Then a while later we looked down and saw this older guy with white hair. He was with a girl. They were walking real slow, right on the walk under us. We dropped big ones on them.”

He stopped. Andy was breathing hard now.

“You’ve gotta understand,” he said. “It didn’t mean anything. Just messing around. You messed around when you were a kid, right?”

“No, not like that,” I said.

He ignored my answer and started to rock in the chair.

“Anyway, we heard a scream,” he said. “Like someone got hit by a rock or something. It was just spit. Kyle and I looked over the roof and the guy with white hair was looking up at us and the girl was holding the top of her head and screaming real weird-like.”

Andy went silent, remembering, and then went on. “Well, anyway, we moved back from the edge of the roof and started to go back to the ramp. I was the one who heard it first.”

“It?”

“Footsteps, someone running, like an echo,” he said. “That crazy son of a bitch was coming up after us.”

“You’re sure?”

“Sure? We were at the ramp when we looked back and there he was screaming at us like a nut. For spitting. We ran. He didn’t catch us. We hid out in the main-street bookstore on the second floor for about ten minutes and then came out to wait for Kyle’s dad. And there he was.”

“Kyle’s dad?”

“No, the crazy guy. In a car coming right up in front of the movies. There was someone in the back, but I couldn’t see. He saw us. We ran like hell back down the sidewalk toward the parking lot. When we hit the lot, we heard a car screeching into the parking lot. It was him, same car.”

“What kind of car?”

“Taurus. Blue. Late model. No more than a year old. He saw us, came flying over the speed bumps. We ran through the lot and went over the fence on Fruitville. Ran across the street, almost got hit by a pickup. Then we went down the first street. I don’t know what it was.”

“He was still following you?”

“He must have seen us go down the street. We were half a block down, running, when we heard the car turning behind us. We didn’t know where we were. I followed Kyle between two houses. A couple of guys, Mexicans, yelled at us, asking us where the hell we thought we were going.”

“The guy in the car?”

“Didn’t look back,” he said. “Went through a yard full of old tires and stuff and ran around down 301 and into the Walgreens on the corner. We went to the toilet in the back and locked ourselves in. I’m telling you, that guy was nuts.”

“You decided to separate,” I said.

“Yeah, but not until we got out of the toilet and saw the guy running out of the store. The girl at the checkout counter said she thought a guy who just left was looking for us. She said we could catch him if we hurried.”

“That’s when you decided to separate?”

He nodded.

“We looked through the window and saw him pulling out of the lot,” Andy said. “He wasn’t going to give up. So we split up. I went back toward the 20. Kyle went back around the drugstore. That’s it. Who’d ever think someone would kill a kid because he spit on his wife or daughter? Have to be nuts.”

“You’d recognize him again if you saw him?”

“I’m pretty sure, yeah. White hair, little beard. Pretty big guy.”

“Old?”

“Yeah, like your age, maybe.”

“Anything else?”

“He had a bumper sticker,” Andy said, looking at the Lord of the Rings poster. “Saw it when he pulled out of the drugstore lot. Manatee Community College parking sticker.”

“How do you know that?”

“My mom has one, blue and white. She teaches a course there Thursday nights.”

I got up. So did Andrew Goines.

“You’re going to tell the police, aren’t you?”

“Soon,” I said.

“You have to tell my mom?”

He had quickly gone from being a cocky fifteen-year-old to a frightened ten-year-old.

“She wouldn’t understand,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t say anything to the police. Kyle was dead and I wasn’t sure it wasn’t just an accident. But now…”

“Now?”

“He called you. You said he called you, right?”

“He did,” I said.

“My mom thinks I’m some kind of perfect kid,” he said. “She’s all the time telling people how much I’m like my dad. I’m not like my dad. She’s going to find out, isn’t she?”

“About the spitting?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know. Maybe not for a while. Maybe not any time.”

Andy Goines looked at his watch.

“Almost fifteen minutes,” he said. “I told you I’d give you five. You done?”

“I’m done.”

“You’re going to find him, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Thanks.”

He awkwardly held out his hand. I shook it. His palm was wet. He walked with me to the front door. His mother was in another room talking on the phone and tapping something out on the computer at the same time. I didn’t wait to say good-bye.

“I should have stayed with Kyle,” the boy said. “I should have been there to help him. My dad would have.”

“He might have run you down too,” I said. “Then your mother would have to go on without your dad and you. It’s hard to go on alone.”

I was going to add, “Trust me,” but I didn’t trust people who said that. It almost always meant that I had just heard something I definitely should not trust.

He closed the door behind me.

I stopped to report to Marie Knot that I had handed out the two summonses and to pick up a check for my work. Then I drove to the DQ lot and parked. It was a little before six. I got a double burger and a large chocolate cherry Blizzard, went up to my office and turned on the light.

The phone was ringing.

“Fonesca,” I said.

“I was watching you. I could have killed you,” he said. “You didn’t see me.”

“Thanks for not killing me,” I said, sitting behind my desk, Blizzard and burger in front of me.

I took off my cap and waited. He was sitting out there no more than a few hundred feet away. He had seen me go through the door.

“Can’t you understand?” he pleaded.

“Explain it to me,” I said. “Come on up to my office. I’ll split a burger and a Blizzard with you.”

“It’s useless, isn’t it?” he asked.

“You mean trying to get me to stop looking for you? Yes, but it doesn’t hurt for us to talk. Call whenever you like.”

He started the car he was in. I heard it over the phone and out the window.

“How’s your knee?”

“Never hurt much,” I said, moving to the window to see if I could spot the car. I didn’t. “Well, maybe for a minute or two.”

“Your shoulder?”

“Seems all right. Don’t you have a philosopher to quote?”

“You’re joking,” he said. “You’re mocking me.”

“No,” I said. “I’m interested.”

“Do you believe in God?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Depends on when you ask me.”

“God,” he said, “is a concept by which we measure our pain.”

“Which philosopher said that?”

“John Lennon.”

He hung up before I could ask him if he had ever heard of a poet named Gregory Cgnozik who was another admirer of the dead Beatle. I walked out the door. At the railing, which rattled when I leaned on it, I looked up at the clouds, fluffy billows, reddish in the reflection of the sun. I watched them drift south. I don’t know what I wanted from the clouds, from the moment. Peace? A minute, five minutes of peace?

I could have started visiting the people who had been released from the Seaside the night Dorothy Cgnozic had supposedly witnessed a murder, but it wasn’t in me.

I went back inside and made two calls while I finished eating.

Call one was to Nancy Root. She wasn’t there. I told her machine I was making progress and would report to her soon. Call two was to the Texas Bar amp; Grille. Ed Fairing answered after three rings and said, “Texas,” over the rumble of voices. I could almost smell the beer. I asked for Ames, who came on a few seconds later.

“What have you got planned for the next two or so days?” I asked.

“Working on my models, reading, breathing easy,” he answered.

“Think you can make a trip in the morning and maybe one in the afternoon to Manatee Community College?”

“I can,” he said.

“Paying job,” I said. “Go through the parking lot looking for a late-model Ford Taurus, blue with an MCC parking sticker. Check the front of the car for dents, blood or some repair or paint touch-up in the last few days. If there’s more than one Taurus that matches, write down the license tag number. Tell Ed it’s important.”

“Ed’s no problem,” Ames said. “I’ll start in the morning.”

That was it. Enough for one day. Too much for one day. I wanted to lie down and watch a VHS of Joan Crawford in Possessed, followed by Seven Keys to Baldpate, the version with Richard Dix. I wanted to sleep for about eight or nine days.

But it wasn’t to be. The knock at my door came at the point in Possessed where Joan Crawford was about to shoot Van Heflin.

I went to the door half expecting that the guy who killed Kyle McClory would be there ready either to talk or shoot me or both.

I didn’t recognize him for a second or two, but he was familiar.

I didn’t recognize Detective Etienne Viviase because he was wearing sneakers, brown slacks with a big buckle shaped like an Indian-head nickel and a University of Florida baseball cap and sweatshirt. The gator on the shirt grinned at me. The detective did not.

“Detective,” I said.

“Process server,” he said. “I’ll make this quick. My wife and kids are parked out there and my Peanut Buster bar is probably melting.”

“Want to come in?”

He looked over my shoulder at my office and said, “No thanks. Know a man named Maxwell Root?”

“Hardware store in Bradenton,” I said. “Father of Nancy Root. Grandfather of Kyle McClory.”

“And,” said Viviase, “grandfather of Yolanda Root. He says you harassed his granddaughter.”

“Just asked her some questions,” I said.

“How about Dr. Richard McClory and Andrew Goines? You ask them questions too?”

“Yes, but-”

“Anonymous caller,” he said. “Call transferred to me because Mike Ransom has the day off and Lichtner on the desk knew I’d dealt with you a few times in the past. The caller, a very nervous man, said you were harassing the friends and family of Kyle McClory.”

“You check with McClory and Goines’s mother?”

“They have no complaints.”

“Yolanda Root?”

“She says you were, quote, an asshole, but that you weren’t harassing her. Don’t feel too upset about the ‘asshole’ comment. She had equally unoriginal insults for McClory.”

“So what brings you to my door with a Buster bar melting below? Just Nancy Root’s father’s harassment claim?”

“Who made that call with all that bullshit about your harassing people?”

“The guy who ran down Kyle McClory,” I said. “He tried to run me down too.”

“Really? When was this?”

“Yesterday. Mall on Fruitville and Lime. Good Mexican restaurant there.”

“The one where Robles works. Have any plans for telling Ransom?”

“Not until I know the name of the caller,” I said.

“And you know this guy who called killed the McClory boy?”

Someone called, “Dad,” from the parking lot beyond the railing. Viviase looked over his shoulder and shouted, “Be right there.”

“He told me,” I said. “He practically told me.”

“When?”

“He calls me a couple of times a day,” I said. “Wants me to stop looking for him. Said he’ll have to kill me too if I don’t stop.”

“You’re a suitable case for treatment,” Viviase said.

“I’m in treatment,” I said.

“You getting close to finding the guy?”

“Yes.”

He thought for a few seconds.

“When you do, if you do, let me know,” he said. “Remember the case is Mike Ransom’s and he’d get more than a little pissed off if a process server came up with his hit-and-run killer.”

“It was murder,” I said.

“Great,” said Viviase with a sigh. “Better and better.”

“Ed,” came the voice of a woman from the DQ lot.

“Your ice cream is now cold chocolate peanut soup.”

“Dump it and I’ll come down and get another one,” he called.

I was half afraid he was going to ask me to meet his family. He didn’t. He just turned and walked toward the steps. I closed the door and went back to my bed. The pause button froze Joan Crawford, gun in hand, wild look on her face. I pressed her into action. She fired six bullets and the scene faded to black.