Denial

2

In the beginning I was an Episcopalian. At least that’s what my family claimed to be though my mother was the only one I knew who ever went to church services. All our other relatives were Catholics. Some were good Italian Catholics, meaning not that they were necessarily good people but that they made the right moves, attended Mass, went to confession and crossed themselves.

I start my story this way because of how Dorothy Cgnozic, who called me that morning five days ago as I was headed toward the door, began the conversation.

“Mr. Fonseca?”

“Fonesca,” I corrected her, as I had patiently corrected people over the slightly more than forty years of my life.

“Are you a Catholic?”

“No,” I said.

There was a long pause on the line, a raspy breathing sound and then, “It can’t be helped.”

“Guess not,” I said.

“You’ve been recommended. By Sterling Sparkman.”

I had no idea who Sterling Sparkman might be.

“You met him here. Gave him some papers saying he had to go to court.”

“Here?”

“Seaside Assisted Living,” she said. “He said you were polite, talked to him for a while about Chicago, baseball, treated him as if he were alive.”

“I remember,” I said.

Sterling Sparkman’s favorite Cubs of all time were Andy Pafko and Hank Sauer. My favorites had been Ernie Banks and Andre Dawson till the dawn of Sammy Sosa.

“He said I should call you,” she said. “So I’m calling you.”

“You want me to serve papers on someone?”

“No, I want you to find out who’s been murdered,” she said.

Her voice was definitely old, not strong but matter-of-fact, determined.

“Murdered?”

“That’s right. Last night I saw one of the residents being murdered.”

“Who?”

“Don’t know. Didn’t get a good look, but I’m sure. I was walking past the room, couldn’t sleep, pushing my walker. Mine has the yellow tennis balls attached on the feet so they slide better, you know?”

“Yes.”

“She was getting killed.”

“Did you tell someone?”

“Went to the nursing station. Night nurse wasn’t there.”

“Maybe she was murdering the woman,” I said.

“It’s a thought, but the night nurse is Emmie, a small Negro woman with a gold tooth right over here and grandchildren though she is only forty-four years old. Yesterday was her first day here.”

“Such people can commit murder,” I said.

“She’s too small.”

“The killer was big?”

“Big,” Dorothy Cgnozic said. “She, the new nurse, looked in the room where I told her the woman had been murdered, said there was no one in it. She didn’t believe me.”

“I’m sorry…”

“I told the desk nurses in the morning,” Dorothy went on. “They said no one had been murdered during the night. They are wrong.”

“Who’s missing?”

“I don’t know everyone here. It’s too big.”

“I’ll give you the name of a policeman you can talk to,” I said. “You have a pencil and paper?”

“I have several pens and a pad, but I don’t need them. The police will think I’m an old nut with a fuzzy brain. Come talk to me.”

“I really don’t-”

“I can pay,” she said.

“It’s not the money,” I said.

“Sterling said you find people,” she said.

“Yes. I’m a process server.”

“Well, find the woman who was murdered,” she said.

“And find whoever killed her?” I added.

“If you wish,” she said. “I’m not crusading. I’m simply trying to prove that I am not a demented old woman. And I want to do something besides watching game shows and re-reading books from the library here that I’ve already read three times. Besides, murder is wrong.”

“I’ll try to stop by before noon.”

“Come any time,” she said. “I’m always here.”

I hung up. The sky was clear with a few pillow-drifting clouds. The air was cool. I could bike to the Seaside Assisted Living Facility on Beneva south of Clark in about half an hour but I wouldn’t have to.

I had been called the day before and asked to be at the office of Tycinker, Oliver and Schwartz, a law firm just off Palm Avenue. I regularly served papers for the partners. I assumed they had a job for me, maybe a summons or two. Two would be fine. I had some cash in a video box mixed in with my stack. I didn’t need the money, but I couldn’t turn down the request.

When I got to the office, parked my bike and chained it to the drainpipe next to the gray wooden sign that carried the name of the law firm, I thought I smelled gardenias. Catherine liked the smell of gardenias. Sometimes, like this moment, I smelled gardenias and wasn’t even sure they were really there.

I had told Ann about smelling things that weren’t there when I thought about Catherine. Ann thought it was either a healing compensatory delusion or I was getting migraine auras. I don’t get headaches. My teeth are fluoride protected. I’ve never had surgery and the worst illness I’ve had was the flu. I was cursed with almost perfect health.

I was expected, nodded to by the secretaries, told to go into Richard Tycinker’s office. Tycinker, solid, fifties, gray suit and colorful tie, sat behind his desk and shook his head as he looked at me. I was wearing my jeans, a washed-out white short-sleeved pullover with a collar and a little embossed koala bear on the pocket. Sitting in the chair across from Tycinker looking back over her shoulder at me was a woman who did not look impressed. I took off my Cubs cap.

“Miss Root, this is Mr. Fonesca,” Tycinker said.

She nodded and smiled, a sad smile. I had the feeling that I was supposed to recognize her. She was lean, almost skinny, pretty face, not much makeup. Her eyes met and held mine.

“You know about Miss Root’s son?” Tycinker asked solemnly. “Kyle?”

I remembered. Page three or four of the Herald-Tribune about a week ago. The article had said the boy was Nancy Root’s son, but his name hadn’t been Root.

“Kyle McClory,” Tycinker said. “His father and Nancy are divorced.”

Nancy Root was an actress. She appeared regularly at the Asolo Theater and Florida Studio Theater, in St. Pete, around the state and from time to time in regional productions around the country. Her name popped into bold type frequently in Marjorie North’s column. Once in a while she did a cabaret act, show tunes, ballads at the Ritz-Carlton. She had even had some small speaking roles in television shows like Law amp; Order, Profiler, Without a Trace and Just Shoot Me.

I had never seen her act or heard her sing. I had never gone to a play or a movie in Sarasota, seldom watched television and never been inside the Ritz-Carlton. The reviews always said she was good. It was a local given.

A hit-and-run driver on Eighth Street had killed Kyle McClory, fourteen, a student at Sarasota High School, half a block from Gillespie Park. Gillespie Park is a heavily Hispanic neighborhood just north of Fruitville, the street that marks the northern border of downtown Sarasota. The driver had driven away. One witness. I didn’t remember who. I didn’t have to ask if the driver had been found. I knew from the look on Nancy Root’s face that he or she hadn’t.

I could now place the look on the woman’s face. It was the look of pain and no answers that I had seen in any mirror I looked into. I knew what was coming. I was the right person for it. I was the wrong person for it. I didn’t want it, but I knew before the question was asked that I would do it.

“You want me to look for the person who killed your son?” I said.

“I want you to find the person who killed Kyle and drove away.”

“The police,” I said.

She shook her head and said firmly, “It’s a case. On a list. In a file. They’re ‘looking.’ That’s what they tell me,” she said. “Looking. I think they are. I just don’t know how hard. I don’t know what else they have to do. I don’t know if they really care. I’ve spoken to the detective in charge of the investigation, a Detective Ransom. He expressed his sympathy, promised he would give Kyle’s death the highest priority. He gave a very unconvincing performance. I want someone finding, looking full-time and finding. I want to know.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Nancy, Miss Root has been told that you’ve done an amazing job finding people for us,” Tycinker said, brushing a hint of nothing from his lapel.

“I have a job I’m working on,” I said, thinking about Dorothy Cgnozic and her night vision of murder.

“But you will do this?” she said.

“Coffee, Lewis?” Tycinker asked.

He wanted to catch my eye. He wanted his smile to remind me that I was on a small monthly retainer from his office and that I had access to the computer-hacking skills of Harvey, whose room was just down the hall. Tycinker and Company were my bread-and-butter clients. I looked at him and shook my head yes, acknowledging the offer of both the coffee and the job.

“I’ll get it,” he said, moving toward the door.

He could have picked up the phone and had someone bring the coffee but either he or Nancy Root wanted Tycinker out of the room and so Tycinker was gone.

I sat in the chair next to Nancy Root. She looked at my face. I was uncomfortable and looked away, placing my cap on my lap.

“What can you tell me?” I asked.

“That my son is dead,” she said. “That someone ran him down in the street, that there’s a witness who thinks it was intentional, that the driver wanted to kill Kyle. I don’t think the police believe him.”

I asked more questions. She answered. Tycinker came back with coffee, which reminded me that I hadn’t had anything to eat. He went back behind his desk, sat and listened, hands folded, lips pursed, head moving, turning toward whoever was talking.

Traffic whooshed gently by on Palm and I was aware of the passage of colors, yellow, red, black, blue, from people who had someplace to go.

We started with Nancy Root handing me an eight-by-ten color photograph of her son. It looked like it had been taken in his bedroom. There was a poster behind him on the wall of a dreadlocked black man in a soccer uniform about to kick a ball directly at the camera. His teeth were bared. The ball, the camera or whoever was looking at the photograph was his enemy.

Kyle looked like many teens, a little scrawny, mop of reddish hair, face like his mother’s, teeth a little large. Good-looking kid. I turned my cap over and laid the photograph gently inside, face-up, so I could look down at it.

Kyle had been a good student at Sarasota High. Not a great student, but a good one, his mother said. Played soccer, hoped to be a starter the next season, had there been another season for him. Liked science.

I could also tell he liked video games, the new kind with people scoring points for how many prostitutes and men in turbans they kill. She didn’t tell me that. I could see the boxes on the table behind the kid in the photograph in my lap.

She told me Kyle had a few friends. He had been out the night he was killed with his best friend, Andrew Goines. According to Nancy Root, they had gone to a movie at the Hollywood 20 on Main Street. Andrew was fifteen, couldn’t drive. His mother had picked him up.

When Kyle’s father, Richard McClory, had gone to the theater to pick up his son, Kyle wasn’t there. Kyle had a cell phone. His father called him. No answer.

McClory called his ex-wife and left a message. She was doing a George Bernard Shaw play, Man and Superman, at the Asolo that night. She and McClory had been divorced for six years. Kyle was staying that week with his father, a radiologist. The father had a small house on Siesta Key a block from Siesta Key Village, a one-block walk to the beach.

The night McClory had gone to pick up his son at the movie, he waited, wandered, drove, got the Goines’s number from Information, talked to Andrew, who said he had no idea where Kyle was.

“He ever run away?” I asked.

“Kyle?” she said.

“Yes.”

She shook her head no, once.

“Nothing like that. Never,” she said. “No problems. No drugs. No smoking. No drinking. No girls. Straight arrow. Straighter than his mother, God knows.”

I guess I made a sound that prompted her to add, “I didn’t wear tinted glasses around Kyle,” she said. “He knew he could tell me anything he did. He knew I had done it all. And even if he had decided not to tell me, I’d have known.”

“You would?”

“The telltale signs of corruption,” she said with that sad smile. “Nicotine stains on his fingers. Knickerbockers rolled down.”

I looked at Tycinker.

“ Music Man,” he said. “It’s from The Music Man. ‘Trouble in River City,’ right?”

Nancy Root nodded to show he was right.

“I played Marian the librarian in rep in Portland,” she said. “Long time ago.”

“Kyle,” I reminded her.

“Richard and my… our only child.”

I drank the coffee. It was straight, black, hot, no real flavor besides coffee. I burned my upper palate.

“Richard was waiting for me after the show,” she said, eyes moist, mouth open, taking in air. “They’d found Kyle’s body, his wallet, couldn’t reach me, called Richard. Kyle had four dollars and sixty-two cents in his pockets. He also had a Susan B. Anthony dollar he kept for good luck. His keys. His…”

She stopped, breathed deeply.

“His cell phone?” I asked.

“They couldn’t find it, the police,” said Tycinker.

“And there was a witness?” I asked.

“Mexican,” said Tycinker. “Ruiz or Rubles. It’s in the police report. Said the boy was… Nancy, is it…?”

“Go ahead,” she said, pulling herself together.

“Witness was walking home from work,” Tycinker went on. “Assistant cook at some restaurant. Didn’t see much. Came from behind. Car was moving fast. Dark car. Kyle was in the middle of the street. Car caught him in the headlights. Kyle was frozen and…”

“Ruiz or Robles see the driver?”

“Says no,” said Tycinker. “No license number, even partial. You’ll have to look at the report to get any more.”

“Anything else?” I asked.

“No,” Nancy Root said. “Find him.”

“You have a standard fee for this sort of thing?” asked Tycinker.

“Just reimburse me for what it costs,” I said. “I’ll keep receipts.”

“I’d rather just give you a check for professional services,” she said. “What’s fair?”

Not much, I thought. Not in my life and it looks like not in yours either.

“Three hundred,” I said. “Pay me if I find the driver.”

“ When,”she said with intensity. “When you find the driver.”

“Done,” said Tycinker, rising behind his desk before I could respond. He held out his right hand.

I put down my coffee, reached over the desk and shook it. Firm grip. Nancy Root put out her hand too. I took it. It was cold.

When she let go, she opened the small purse next to the chair she had been sitting on, came out with a wallet and handed me five twenty-dollar bills.

“Not necessary,” I said.

“Oh yes,” she said. “It is. Call it an advance on the three hundred dollars. You’ll have expenses.”

I understood. I had to be retained for her to feel I had made the commitment.

I folded the bills and put them in my pocket.

“My card,” she said, handing me a small white card.

The card simply gave her name, address and phone number. Nothing fancy. No border curls, touches of light. No Actress in the lower left-hand corner.

I pocketed the card and told her I’d get back to her when and if I found anything.

“Find something, Mr. Fonesca,” she said.

I left the half-finished coffee on a coaster Tycinker had provided. I had no more questions and I was sure none of us wanted to sit in silence or engage in conversation about the economy and tax cuts.

Cap in hand I went to the office door. Nancy Root lingered. As I stepped out I caught a glimpse of Tycinker in front of his desk holding both of her cold hands in his large firm ones. There was nothing covert in the hand holding, but I couldn’t tell if he was playing comforting attorney, good friend or something closer.

I’d need a car. I made a decision and biked back to Washington Street, took my bike up to my office, went back out past the DQ and a small line of storefronts on the west side of the street and walked to the driveway of the car rental agency I did business with when I needed four wheels.

EZ Economy Car Rental is a half block north of the DQ. Once, long ago, it was a gas station. That was before I came to Sarasota. It still looked like a gas station without the pumps. The lot was small but there was space behind the whitewashed office for a dozen cars in addition to the four parked beyond the two open sliding doors where once oil was changed, tires repaired, engines overhauled and grease-covered hands cut with the lids of opened cans.

Inside the small office, Alan, a big, bulky man in his late forties, drank two-handed from a pink cup that had the word MOCHA running in large letters facing me. He was leaning back against one of the two desks.

His partner, Fred, in his sixties, big belly, wasn’t in sight.

“Fonesca,” Alan said with a sigh. “I’m not sure I’m up to the challenge. I’d ask you to try smiling a little, but I don’t think I could take it.”

He pushed away from the desk and looked down at whatever was in his cup. Alan was known, as Fred put it once, to “tipple” from time to time. “Nothing serious,” Fred had said. “Takes the edge off.”

“Edge of what?” I had asked.

“Edge of the weary life we all bear,” Fred had said. “Weighs heavier on him than most with the possible exception of Lewis Fonesca, whose very presence proclaims the end of days.”

“Where’s Fred?” I asked Alan.

“Where’s Fred?” Alan repeated. “I’ll tell you where Fred is. He’s in his third day at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. Third day. Third heart attack. Man’s had three wives, three kids. Now he’s had three heart attacks. What he needs is three wishes.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Alan shrugged.

“Makes the days long. Coffee?”

“No thanks.”

“Transportation then?” said Alan, taking a slow sip from his cup.

“Yes.”

“Take the Saturn,” he said, tilting his head toward the window. “Gray one, ninety-eight, right out in front.”

“How much?” I asked.

“Whatever you want to pay Lewis, bringer of light and joy, bearer of good spirits,” he said, toasting me with his coffee.

It was a little after ten in the morning. Alan wasn’t smashed, but he was sloshing down the road to oblivion.

“Same as last time?” I asked.

“Whatever. You caught me depressive,” he said with a shrug. “I try to stay manic. Right now, I don’t think these walls can hold the power of depression you and I can generate.”

“Keys?” I said.

“On the board,” he said, nodding his head at the Peg-Board on the wall to his right. “Help yourself.”

I found the right keys.

“You all right?” I asked.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “I’m hoping the manic stage will kick in, but I don’t think it will, not for a while. When I’m manic, I can rent an oil-leaking ninety Honda that shits rust and farts oil to Mr. Goodwrench. Can’t stop, but this…”

“I know,” I said.

“Fred keeps me above the line,” he said. “Costello was no good without Abbott. Hardy wasn’t much without Laurel. Jerry Lewis… you get it. I need a straight man.”

I reached for my wallet. Alan, cup to his lips, saw me and held up his right hand.

“No,” he said. “I don’t feel like doing the paperwork, writing a receipt. Just take the car. Belonged to a secretary in the biology department at the University of South Florida. Standard shift.”

“Fine,” I said.

The door opened. A couple, Mexican, maybe in their late thirties, both plump, both serious, with a boy about twelve at their side, came in. They didn’t quite look frightened, but they didn’t look confident either.

“That little car outside for sale?” the man said. “Sign says eight hundred dollars?”

Alan sighed.

“The Focus? Six hundred,” he said. “Gala sale day.”

I went outside and got into the Saturn. It was clean, smelled a little musty, and the window at my left rattled as I pulled onto 301.

Stuart M. Kaminsky

Denial: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (Lew Fonesca Novels)