Retribution

6

The door to Viviase’s office was open. His name was Etienne. No one called him Etienne, not, according to him, even his wife. He was Ed. That’s what it said on the small plaque on his desk: “Detective Ed Viviase.”

The last time I had been in the office, there were scaffolds against two walls that were going to be painted the same shade of detective brown as the other two. This time there was no scaffolding, just a large office with very little furniture, three metal desks, a couple of chairs, and a line of file cabinets. Each desk held a computer and stacks of papers and reports threatening to tumble or already tumbled.

Viviase was the only detective in the room. I guess he had seniority. He was closest to the window in the room.

“Lewis,” he said, shaking his head as he looked up at me from behind his desk over the glasses perched on the end of his ample nose.

It was getting to be our regular routine.

Viviase was a little under six feet tall, a little over fifty years old, and a little over two hundred twenty pounds. His hair was short, dark, and his face was that of a man filled with sympathy, the smooth pink face of a man whose genes were good and who probably didn’t drink. He was wearing a rumpled sports jacket and a red tie. He looked like a policeman, a cup of coffee in front of him, an already tired look on his face though it was a little before ten in the morning.

I knew he had a wife, kids, worries about his older daughter’s tuition and bills at the University of Florida, and an inability to resist carbohydrate intake. Ergo, the oversized chocolate-filled croissant on a napkin next to his coffee cup.

“Have a seat,” he said. “We’ll play a game.”

I sat across from him. He held up his cup, wanting to know if I’d like some coffee. I had drunk some of the coffee from the machine down the hall once before. The pain had been bearable.

“Okay,” said Viviase, “let’s play.” He took a long drink of coffee making a face that suggested he was ingesting prison-made whiskey. “I describe two men. You tell me if they resemble anyone you know.”

I nodded.

“One man is short, on the thin side, balding, looks like his pet turtle just got mashed on McIntosh Road. With him is a tall old man, denim, flannel, maybe even cowboy boots. Old man stands tall, looks like a cowboy.”

I shrugged.

“You want to use a life line? Call a friend who might have an idea?” he asked.

“It sounds like me and Ames,” I said.

“That your final answer?”

“Sounds like me and Ames.”

“Then,” he said, looking at his coffee and donut and settling on a bite of donut, “that would place the two of you at the home of a man who was murdered last night. Man’s name was Corsello, Bernard Corsello, sixty-nine, retired shoe salesman from Utica.”

“Someone said Ames and I killed this Corsello?”

“No,” Viviase said with a shake of his head and a cheek full of croissant. “Three kids driving by Corsello’s house said they saw two men go up to Corsello’s door. They were on bikes. The kids, not the men. When they drove past the house about five minutes later, they saw two white men fitting yours and Ames McKinney’s description getting into a white car, an old white car with a blue top. You renting a car, Lewis?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Happen to be white with a blue top?”

“Yes.”

He swiveled his chair, took off his glasses, and looked out the window. His back to me now he said, “Corsello was shot, bam, once, right through the stomach, tore a hole in his heart. Bullet dug its way through his back into the hallway wall. Shaeffer hasn’t had much time but he thinks it’s a nine-millimeter from a Glock. Nice gun, the Glock. Costs a lot but you get your money’s worth. Lightweight, easy to shoot, no kickback, almost indestructible. Know anyone with a gun like that?”

“No,” I said.

“If your friend Ames were to carry a weapon, what would you guess it would be?” Viviase swiveled back to face me and adjusted his glasses. His right hand reached for the donut and then clasped his left instead. He began tapping his thumbs together.

“Ames isn’t allowed to carry a gun,” I said.

“I know. I said ‘if,’” Viviase reminded me.

“Something old, heavy, noisy, reliable,” I said.

Viviase shook his head.

“What did you find in Corsello’s house?” he asked.

“I wasn’t at Corsello’s house,” I said. “It was another tall cowboy and short Italian.”

He unclenched his hands and downed more coffee.

“Maybe this will help,” he said. “We know you didn’t kill Corsello, at least not the time the kids saw you. He’d been dead for hours. But you were in there with the body for at least five minutes.”

“No,” I said.

“Lewie, don’t make me bring those kids in here for a lineup,” he said. “Waste my time, your time. And I don’t like one of the kids. Smart mouth. X-rated mouth. Seen too many movies with that black guy, what’s his name, Martin Lawrence.”

“We knocked,” I said. “The door was open.”

“Progress,” Viviase said with a very false smile, reaching for his coffee. “Go on.”

“We went in, found him dead. Got out and I called nine-one-one.”

“Didn’t leave your name,” Viviase said. “Tape sounds like someone doing a bad imitation of Rex Harrison.”

“James Mason,” I said.

“You left the scene of a crime, a homicide.”

“I panicked. I called the police,” I said.

Viviase was shaking his head now. When he stopped, he adjusted his glasses and said, “Why were you there? What were you looking for in his house? What did you find?”

Viviase was well acquainted with Adele, former child prostitute, abused daughter, suspect in a murder. He knew Adele lived with Flo now. He knew a lot but he wasn’t going to get anything more from me.

“He called me,” I lied. Lying is no problem for me. I have a good memory. It takes a good memory to be a successful liar.

“Why?” Viviase asked, sitting back with his hands behind his head in an I-know-you’re-lying pose.

“Don’t know, just asked me to come over about six.”

“When did he call?”

“Morning,” I said to give myself as much room as possible to be sure he hadn’t died before my created phone call. “Early morning.”

“Why would he ask a depressed process server to come to his house?” Viviase asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Why did you agree to see him?”

“He said it was important.”

“What did you find in those five or ten minutes you and McKinney were alone in the house?”

“We weren’t in there four or five or ten minutes,” I said. “Maybe two minutes to be sure he was dead and another minute to be sure the killer or someone else wasn’t still in the house.”

“Michael Merrymen,” he said. “Recognize the name?”

“Ames and I went to see him yesterday,” I said. “What does he have to do…”

“He’s the dead man’s son-in-law,” explained Viviase. “See this file?”

He held up a green folder about two inches thick with papers creeping out. “Michael Merrymen is a lunatic. He has sued and been sued by some of the best and worst people in Sarasota. He has threatened bodily harm, frightened children, and is suspected of destroying the lawns, automobiles, vegetation, and small animals of neighbors. So, question three. Why did you go see Merrymen? He says you did. You and Ames and that Ames almost killed his dog with a baseball bat.”

“You said the man’s crazy,” I said.

“Crazy, not blind. The dog’s almost dead.”

“Why does Merrymen say we were there?” I asked innocently.

“To spy on him for his neighbors. He claims you represented yourselves as police officers.”

It was getting deep now. I almost considered asking for a cup of coffee, but I wasn’t that desperate yet.

“We were looking for Merrymen’s son,” I said.

Viviase slapped the desk with both hands. The coffee cup, croissant remnant, and piles of paper jumped.

“Progress. Fill in.”

“Merrymen made no sense. He didn’t know where his son was.”

“Why were you looking for his son?”

“I think he can help me track down someone I have papers to serve on.”

“Who?”

“Can’t divulge,” I said.

“How does contempt sound to you?”

“Like a word I’ve heard a lot.”

“So, you get a call from the dead guy in the morning…”

“He was alive when he called,” I corrected.

“I stand corrected. You get a call to come to his house at six. Doesn’t say why. Then you go to Michael Merry-men’s house to look for his son Mickey. No Mickey. So, in a coincidence that rivals walking into your dear departed wife on a small street corner in Budapest, you go to the house of the grandfather of the very Mickey Merrymen you’re looking for.”

“A man in Hint, Michigan, got killed by frozen human waste that fell from an airplane last week,” I said. “He was a hard hat at a construction site. Took the hat off for an instant to wipe his brow and…”

“Very enlightening,” Viviase said. “Let’s say the kid you’re looking for, Mickey Merrymen, lived most of the time in his grandfather’s house. Let’s say maybe he has inherited some of his father’s tendency toward out-of-control lunacy. Let’s say he shot his grandfather, took his money, whatever there was of it, and ran. Let’s say the kid you’re looking for is our prime suspect.”

“I’m not after him,” I said. “I’m after someone he knows.”

“What do we call that? A non sequitur? An abrupt change in subject? Who are you looking for and do you know where Mickey Merrymen is?”

“I don’t know where Mickey Merrymen is,” I said. “Who I’m looking for has nothing to do with Corsello’s murder.”

With the palms of his hands, Viviase rubbed his hair and looked down in thought. Then he straightened up and brushed his hair back with his fingers.

“When I find out who you’re looking for, who’s connected to Mickey Merrymen,” he said calmly, “we’ll have another talk. One with higher stakes.”

“You going to talk to Ames?” I asked.

“What good would it do,” he said. “That old man would tell us his name and not say another word. That’s what he did the last time. I expect he would do the same again. You can go.”

He tossed the end of his croissant into his mouth and washed it down with coffee.

“I hope I’ve helped,” I said.

“Not in the least,” he answered pleasantly. “Lewis, you can leave now.”

I left.

When I got back to my office, I called Harvey the human computer.

“Got a little something for you, Lewis,” he said. I could hear him clacking away at his computer while we spoke. “On April 12, 1975, in the town of Arcadia, Florida, a young woman named Sarah Taylor fell to her death from the window of the city building. Witnesses in the office were Sheriff Charles Dorsey and a Miss Vera Lynn Uliaks. You getting this, Lewis?”

“Yes?”

“The mourning period was all of two weeks before he quit his job and moved away. Vera Lynn packed up and left the same day. Someone found out the ex-sheriff and Vera Lynn were married in Ohio. A small item on the subject appeared in the newspaper.”

“Story on Sarah Taylor’s fall?”

“Listed as accident. That’s all I can get. And I can’t track down a Charles or Vera Lynn Dorsey, not in Ohio, not anywhere. I’ll keep on it. But I can tell you where to find Clark Dorsey, Charlie’s brother.”

“Where?”

“Retired,” Harvey said. “Former fireman in Arcadia. Lives in Osprey, right off Old Venice Road. Open your white pages. He’s listed.”

“Thanks, Harve.”

“Let me know how it comes out,” he said. “Holy piss. I’ve just broken into the Pentagon files.”

“I thought you already did that,” I said.

“But they keep changing passwords and access codes. Gets harder all the time.”

“Have a good day, Harve,” I said.

“It already is,” he said.

I pulled out the sheet Lonsberg had given me with the phone numbers and addresses of his son and daughter. Osprey is on the way to Venice, no more than half an hour away, and Venice another ten minutes.

With the neatly folded threat that had been posted on my door tucked into my shirt pocket, I called Ames McKinney and asked him what his day was like.

“Cleaning and contemplation,” he said.

I told him the police might be talking to him about our discovery of Corsello’s body and told him what I had said. Then I asked him if he wanted to take a ride to Osprey and Venice.

“Armed?”

“Lightly,” I said.

“When?”

“Pick you up in ten minutes.”

“Can you make it an hour?” he said. “I’m working on the grill.”

I agreed and walked over to Gwen’s Diner. It was a little early for lunch but I was hungry. Gwen’s is a holdover from a few years before the day Elvis supposedly came in in the 1950s. I looked over at Elvis. He was still smiling. There were two booths open. I went to the counter. If you looked out the window from any seat in Gwen’s, you could watch the collisions where 301 met the curve at Tamiami Trail.

There was a nonsmoking section in Gwen’s, not a real one, just a couple of tables set aside. People in the neighborhood called the place Gwen’s II. The original Gwen, if she ever existed, was now long gone. The place was run by a woman named Sheila and her two teenage daughters, one of whom was about to graduate from Sarasota High School a block away, the other was seventeen and working on her second baby. Jesse, the younger one, short, blond, round with child, came up to me when I sat at the counter next to Tim from Steubenville. 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 engaged in conversation over anything from the price of gasoline to the latest school shooting.

There was very little left of Tim from Steubenville. Blue veins undulated over the thin bones in his hands as he turned pages of the Herald-Tribune and shook his head.

“Fonesca,” he said as Jesse poured me a coffee and waited.

“Fried egg sandwich,” I said. “White toast.”

“Tomato and onion?” she asked.

“Tomato, I’m working today.”

“Fonesca,” Tim from Steubenville repeated, tapping my arm.

It was a little after eleven. The place was empty except for me, Tim, and four guys who looked like air-conditioning repairmen in a booth drinking coffee and eating pie.

“Tim,” I said.

“You see about this guy in Nebraska,” he said, poking a finger at an article in the newspaper awkwardly folded. “Someone stuck a rattler in his mailbox.”

“Did it bite him?” I asked.

“No, scared the shit out of him though,” Tim said thoughtfully. “How’d you like to get up some morning, walk out to your mailbox expecting your pension check or AAA card, and find a rattlesnake.”

“I don’t have a mailbox,” I said. “Just a slot in the door.”

“Not the point, Fonesca.”

He shook his head at my density and sipped at his sixth or seventh cup of coffee.

“Point is,” he said. “You can be going along, minding your own business, thinking about some old song by Perry Como or Peggy Lee or what you might have for lunch, and bango-bamo, you got a snake hanging on your goddamn nose. Anything can happen. That’s the truth of the news, what it really tells you. People don’t understand. We don’t have to know when there’s a train derailed in Pakistan or a drug dealer gets knocked off in Colombia. Who needs to know that?”

I could think of some people but I just nodded at Jesse as she placed a mug of coffee in front of me.

“Point is that the newspapers are telling us that anything can happen, anytime. Careful doesn’t take care of half of that. The newspaper is like the goddamn Bible. The Bible says God can do whatever He damn well pleases without giving a reason or making sense. We have to learn to take whatever comes and like it. Arguing with God is like arguing with the news. Same lesson.”

“I agree,” I said. ‘Tim, you’re a philosopher.”

“Used to be a printer,” he answered, looking back at the newspaper for more disasters and surprises. “Nothing’s changed. Not in thousands of years. Just put in engines, make bigger guns, take the taste out of our food, and why?”

“Why?” I asked as Jesse delivered my egg sandwich cut neatly down the middle with two pickle slices on the side.

Tim reached out and grabbed Jesse’s wrist so she would hear the answer. Jesse patiently paused. There were no customers waiting and Tim was the diner’s resident character.

“People think they can change things,” he said softly. “They can’t. They can make bigger, faster, even keep you alive a few years longer, but we all go through the cycle and never know if a rattler’s going to come out of the mailbox.”

Or what messages will be hung on our doors, I thought. Tim released Jesse’s wrist though he couldn’t have held it if she hadn’t been willing to cooperate in the first place.

“Jesse,” I asked, reaching for half a sandwich. “You know a Mickey Merrymen?”

Jesse was a pretty pale girl on the thin side. Her blond hair was short and her look was that of a kid who had a two-year-old at home and another on the way. Jesse’s primary claim to respectability was that she was married. Her husband, Paul, also known as The Chink, was a mechanic right across the street in the Ford Agency. The two-year-old, Paulie Jr., was in day care every other day when Jesse wasn’t working. Jesse was finishing high school through the mail. Jesse was and looked tired all the time.

“Freak time. Geek time,” she said. “Yeah, I know him.”

“What do you know about him?” I asked while Tim shook his head and pointed at yet another article to substantiate his world view that, as a matter of fact, was mine too.

“Mickey’s a weird bird, an X-man mutant,” she said. “Smart, a little nuts, not bad-looking when he cleans up, but a weird bird.”

“Get in trouble?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“Look at this. Look at this,” Tim said, finding some new truth in the Herald-Tribune in front of him. Tim spoke with the quiet resignation of one who knew everything he found would vindicate his philosophy. Tim was a true believer who moved from coffee during the day to the whiskey he must have kept secreted in his room at night and which was still not fully masked by Eckerd mouthwash in the morning.

“Mickey,” I reminded Jesse.

“I think he graduated last year, works at the Burger King up the Trail,” she said. “Says he’s going to college. Or used to say it. Massachusetts Institute of Technicals or something. Father’s nuts.”

“That’s all you know about Mickey Merrymen?” I said, finishing the first half of the sandwich.

“Merrymen?” asked Tim. “Michael Merrymen?”

Jesse and I looked at Tim who smiled and said, “Man’s in the paper almost as much as that doctor who’s always suing the hospital or someone,” said Tim. “Classic paranoid. Sues Albertson’s, Barnes amp; Noble, neighbors, gets himself listed in the crime reports, noise levels, guns. Name it. He’s your man. Even tried to run for City Council a few years ago. Couldn’t come up with even twenty signatures on his petition. My theory, if you ask me, is he saw the light one morning, maybe turned on his television and saw something or found a rattlesnake in his mailbox and realized the world wasn’t a safe place to live in.”

“Everyone’s out to get him,” I said.

“At this point,” said Tim, turning a crinkly page of the paper, “he’s probably right.”

“Adele Hanford,” I tried on Jesse who pursed her lips.

“We hung out a little for a while,” she said, “before I dropped out. She was wild but straightened out. Won some kind of writing prize even. It was in the paper or somewhere.”

“She and Mickey going together?” I asked.

Jesse laughed.

“Anything can happen,” she said as a customer came through the door, a nervous-looking woman in a hospital blue uniform, a cigarette in her hand.

“Anything can happen,” Tim repeated. “Anytime.”

Jesse moved away and I finished my sandwich.

Anything could happen. Anytime. A woman could be driving home from work one night, her husband at home checking on the pasta, and a car the shape and color of grinning death could cut her in half, crumple her into nothingness.

“Anything,” I said, not bothering to finish the last bite of my sandwich. “Anytime.”

“Watch out for yourself,” Tim said as I dropped three dollars on the counter. “Probably doesn’t make any difference but it can’t hurt.”

“You’ve brightened my morning,” I said, getting off of the red-leatherette stool.

“Glad to help,” said Tim.

Ames was waiting for me in front of the Texas Bar and Grille. The temperature had already reached the eighties according to the not-very-bright bantering talk-show abuser out of Tampa who I was listening to on the radio. I can take almost any defect in a car but it has to have a radio. I need voices, sounds. I can deal with thoughts at a second level but I needed noise, voices filling the void of consciousness on the surface. B.J. and M.J. in the morning talking to women who had hit policemen with toilet plungers, Dr. Laura failing to listen to people nearly in tears trying desperately to tell their tales, even the threatening voices of southern-born-again or born-into-it Christian broadcasters telling me what the Scriptures really said. I liked the Sunday morning black Baptist preachers going hoarse with warnings and promises of an afterlife far better than the one Tim from Steubenville read about in the papers.

Ames was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, jeans, and boots. He also wore a thin blue zipper jacket under which, I was sure, rested a weapon of not recent vintage.

He climbed in.

I took Osprey down to Tamiami Trail and turned left when I got the light. Traffic was reasonably heavy for what was now lunch hour for most people.

“We’re going to Osprey,” I said.

Ames nodded.

I explained about Marvin Uliaks, the note left on my door, Conrad Lonsberg’s children in Venice. Ames nodded. I told him what I knew about Bernard Corsello whose body we had found. Ames nodded.

“Adele,” he said.

“Right,” I agreed. “We’re looking for Adele.”

He nodded in agreement. As we passed Sarasota Memorial Hospital, I pushed the AM button on the radio and got WGUL, the oldies station which I knew was Ames’s favorite. We listened to Frankie Laine doing “Ghost Riders in the Sky” as we moved slowly past Southgate Plaza and then crossed Bee Ridge.

“Read some of Lonsberg’s stuff last night,” he said.

“Me too.”

“Rereading, I guess,” he said.

“And?”

We went over the bridge at Phillipi Creek as Johnny Mercer sang “The Waiter and the Porter and the Upstairs Maid.”

“Not my kind of book,” he said. “Pushes the knife too deep. Feels sorry for himself. Least he did.”

I resisted the urge to turn to Ames in astonishment or to say something about this historic moment when Ames Mc-Kinney decided not only to carry on an extended conversation, but to criticize a book. Maybe he was the pod who had replaced Uncle Ira in the old Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

I wondered what Ann Horowitz would say about Conrad Lonsberg feeling sorry for himself. I had come to Ann feeling sorry for losing my wife, my life. She had told me that I was feeling sorry for two things, for the loss of the wife who defined who I was and for myself. Ann had said that both feelings were reasonable and that there was no hurry to get rid of either of them. Was Conrad Lonsberg like that? Or had he been when he was a young man and had written those books that met the feelings of a generation of people who felt they had lost something but were never quite sure what it was? Lonsberg gave them something to feel lost about. Were his missing manuscripts all about learning to live with failure?

In Osprey we turned on Bay Street off of Tamiami Trail at the Exxon station and then turned left at the next corner, Patterson. The house we were looking for was about two blocks down. We couldn’t actually see the house. It was deep behind trees and bushes huddled right up to the paved street that had no sidewalk. The mailbox was black, looked almost freshly polished, and had a red metal flag tucked down to show there was no mail to be picked up. The house number was in clear white letters on the box along with the name “Dorsey.”

I pulled onto the narrow stone driveway between the trees and drove slowly, leaves and branches slapping against the windshield and top of the car suggesting that visitors weren’t frequent.

We came to a clearing after about thirty yards after the assault of the flora. To the left was a blue Ford, vintage 1950 with collector’s license tags. I parked next to it and got out.

We turned to face a man at work and a woman reading. They were in front of a building, or rather a collection of small one-story buildings connected to each other. The oldest-looking building on the right was solid white stone. Attached to it was a wooden section that contrasted with the stone section. A third section attached to the wooden one was made of something that resembled aluminum siding. Together they formed a single structure that looked as if it had been built by a blind man, but the man on his knees, with a brick in his hand as he worked on a fourth unmatched section of red bricks, was clearly not blind. He turned his head to look at us, brick in one hand, a bucket of mortar at his side. He wore paint-splattered painter’s overalls and a baseball cap that looked like vintage Pittsburgh Pirates. He straightened but didn’t get off his knees.

I guessed he was Clark Dorsey. I also guessed that he was around fifty years old. I didn’t have to guess that he wasn’t happy to see us. His face was a dead giveaway.

The woman was sitting in one of those green and white vinyl beach chairs. There was a round white table next to her and a big umbrella sticking out of a hole in the middle of the table to provide her some shade, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She wore a floppy straw hat and sunglasses and I guessed she had a supply of 46 SPF sunscreen nearby.

The woman took off her glasses and examined us as we approached. She was about the same age as the man, lean, hair still dark but showing some gray, few lines, and a wary smile.

“Clark Dorsey?” I asked as we kept moving forward.

The man got up slowly, put the brick on a huge pile of bricks nearby.

“Yes,” he said.

“My name is Fonesca, Lew Fonesca. This is my friend Ames McKinney.”

The woman I assumed was Mrs. Dorsey didn’t move.

“And?”

“I’m looking for your brother,” I said.

He turned his head to one side. Something he had wanted to forget had come back to haunt him. I glanced at Mrs. Dorsey. She hadn’t responded.

“Why?” he asked, turning his head back to us.

“I’ve been hired to find his wife. Her brother wants to talk to her,” I said.

“That poor son of a bitch,” Dorsey said, wiping his hands on his overalls. “I don’t know where Charlie and Vera Lynn are and I don’t think they’d want to see Marvin even if they knew he wanted to. Marvin’s not all there. The whole family… Marvin’s never really been all there. You talked to him. You can see that.”

“Some people spend their money doing strange things like looking for lost sisters,” I said. “Others go out on little boards and risk their lives for thrills. And then there are others who build strange houses.”

“Your point, Mr…”

“Fonesca,” I said. “My point is that people who aren’t hurting other people should be able to do what they want to do as long as they don’t hurt anybody but themselves.”

“I never see Marvin,” he said, stepping toward us. “I don’t go into town much. Peg has run into him a few times. Even looked him up.”

“We had him out here twice since we’ve been here,” the woman under the umbrella said.

“I’m not comfortable with him,” Dorsey said.

“Clark’s not comfortable with anyone really,” Peg Dorsey said with a smile in her voice.

“What can I tell you?” he said with a shrug. “She’s right. I used to be a fireman. For twenty years. I’ve seen enough trouble, enough people. I don’t stay in touch with my family. I, Peg and I, we keep to ourselves.”

“And you build houses,” I said, looking at the oddity behind him.

He turned his head as if he had never before really considered what he had done.

“The white stone one-bedroom came with the land. I added on. I’m not much of a reader. I don’t care much for television, movies, or newspapers and we don’t have a hell of a lot of friends. So I build. I don’t care what it looks like. It’s comfortable inside. Each addition is a new challenge. Maybe when I’m done, if I ever get done, I’ll cover the whole place with stucco or something.”

“No maybe about it,” said Peg Dorsey.

“No maybe,” Clark Dorsey agreed. “For sure;”

’Two feet higher on the metal-sided one, shored with straight I-beams, and the one you’re working on at least a foot lower than what you’re planning,” said Ames.

Dorsey looked at him.

“They’d line up, give you enough headroom,” said Ames. “Brick in the whole place. Double your property value.”

“Ames used to be in the business,” I explained.

“Retired?” asked Peg Dorsey, shading her eyes.

“Business go bad?” asked Clark.

“Business was fine. Partner was as uneven as your roof over there with just as many unmatched parts,” said Ames.

The Dorseys waited for me. There was no more coming.

“Marvin just wants to talk to Vera Lynn,” I said. “It’s all he has.”

“You a private detective?” Clark said.

“Just a friend, and I’m not going to charge him more than a few hundred dollars tops, find her or not,” I said, “but Marvin’s not going to give up.”

Dorsey looked at his wife and she looked back at him and nodded.

“Charlie and Vera Lynn don’t want to hear from Marvin,” Dorsey said.

“Why?”

“Because of what happened,” Dorsey explained. “You know what happened in Arcadia?”

“You mean the girl who fell out of the window,” I said. “Sarah Taylor.”

Dorsey nodded his head and said, “I’ve got to go inside for a minute. Either of you want water?”

“I’d like that,” Ames said.

Dorsey disappeared past his wife and through a door into the white stone section of the puzzle house.

“Clark doesn’t like to talk about it,” Peg Dorsey said, looking at the door her husband had closed behind him. “He’s leaving me to do the talking.”

I watched her play with her sunglasses, put them back on, and look in our direction.

“The girl who went out that window, Sarah,” she said. “She was a very pretty girl, but a jumpy thing, can’t-sit-still type. She got worse, started acting crazy, one day dancing in the street and singing, the next day sitting on the bench near city hall for hours not talking. Sarah was a pretty girl and she was wrong about most things but she was right about one. Charlie had been engaged to Vera Lynn, or as close to engaged as you can be from the time you’re both fourteen. They were comfortable together, Charlie and Vera Lynn. Charlie had no trouble with Vera Lynn’s brother Marvin who was, let’s put this kindly, not fully together from the time he was born.”

She paused, bit her lower lip, and went on.

“What made things worse was that Marvin was Sarah Taylor’s puppy dog. He has no guile, that Marvin. He adored Sarah, would follow her around, sit with her on that bench, even dance with her in the street. Arcadia wasn’t filled with good-looking, smart men with a future. I was lucky. Sarah wasn’t. Sarah started to spread the word that she and Charlie had a thing together and that he was dropping Vera Lynn. Some people even believed it. They just saw that pretty girl on the outside and not the one inside. It doesn’t matter. If the town is small enough, people want to have a good box of rumors to pass around, especially one involving the young police chief even if the rumor comes from someone like Sarah.

“Well, to make it short, no one really knows what happened in that room that day, the day Sarah went out that window and died. Charlie was there. Vera Lynn was there. They said she fell when it first happened. Then later, next day, Vera Lynn said Sarah jumped. More rumors started. You can’t imagine. An old woman named Esther Yoderman who could barely see said she was looking up when Sarah came through the glass. Esther claimed Vera Lynn pushed her. Then she changed her mind the next day and said Charlie threw her out the window. Charlie and Vera Lynn just said it had been an accident.”

“But…?” I prompted.

Peg Dorsey shrugged.

“The Dorseys have a temper,” she said with a shrug. “They hold it in like my Clark, stay away from people when they can, but everyone knew about Charlie’s temper. And since he and Vera Lynn wouldn’t say much…”

“People drew conclusions,” I said.

“Coroner’s hearing declared it accidental,” she said. “Charlie let his deputy do the investigation since Charlie was a witness for most and a suspect for others. Charlie’s deputy was Earl Morgantine, two notches higher on the evolution pool than poor Marvin. Marvin accused Charlie of killing Sarah. Vera Lynn tried to talk to the boy but Marvin ran away, hid in the pastures for days. People could hear him crying and wailing. There was no evidence. It was ruled an accident. Charlie and Vera Lynn packed up. Charlie quit his job. They drove off before Marvin could come out of the woods. That’s about it.”

“What do you think happened?” I asked.

“Something different each time I think about it,” she said, “but getting right down to it, I don’t think Charlie or Vera Lynn killed Sarah. And I’ll say it right out. I don’t care anymore. I just care about what it did to Clark. I’m sorry but that’s how I feel.”

“Nothing to apologize for,” Ames said.

“I suppose,” she sighed, shifting in her chair and looking back at the door again. “Clark and I hung on for more than ten years and you would have sworn it had been forgotten, but things like that never are in a small town. So, as soon as he could, Clark retired and here we are.”

“Why didn’t you move farther away?” I asked.

“Charlie and Clark’s mother is still in Arcadia. She wouldn’t move, wouldn’t come with us. We visit her every two weeks, take her out to dinner or eat at her place. People are polite and don’t ask questions.”

“You don’t have the answers,” I said.

“Don’t like the questions they don’t ask but want to,” she said as Clark came out of the door, a tall, clear glass of water with ice in one hand.

He walked over to Ames who took it and shook his head in thanks.

We all watched Ames’s Adam’s apple bob as he drank the water and the ice tinkled and then he handed the glass back to Dorsey with a thanks.

“There are some questions a man can’t live without an answer to,” said Ames. “They find the real one or they make one up that works.”

Dorsey nodded.

“Marvin just wants to talk to his sister,” I said. “Know she’s alive. He has something to tell her. I don’t know what. It may be that he thinks the Martians are attacking or that he loves her or that… I don’t know. He wants closure.”

I knew what it was like to want closure. I knew what had made me take on the search for Vera Lynn Uliaks Dorsey. If I couldn’t have my own closure, I could work at a job that had simple closure. Hand them the papers and walk away. Find the missing person and step back. Let the story play out. In a world of chaos where brilliant, beautiful women said good-bye one morning with a smile and then were mangled by the unknown, there had to be moments of closure or there would be a world of madness. That was why I saw Ann Horowitz. That was why I would find Vera Lynn. Closure for Marvin and maybe for the Dorseys.

“I just want to find her, talk to her,” I said.

“My husband and I, we’ll talk about it,” Peg Dorsey said, looking up at her husband.

Clark Dorsey turned to her and saw a small smile of reassurance. Then he turned to us and said, “We’ll talk about it. You have a card?”

I didn’t have a business card. I didn’t want one. I wasn’t searching for more than the business I already had. But I did have a small black notebook in my back pocket with lined pages. I wrote my name and number on a sheet and handed it to Dorsey who pocketed it.

“I’ll find her,” I said softly. “If you can help me, it’ll be faster, easier, cheaper. I’m not out to hurt anyone. And I’m sorry if I’ve brought some ghosts with us this morning.”

Dorsey nodded.

Ames and I got back in the car. Dorsey plunged both hands into his overall pockets. He was a big man, a few years too young for the retirement and isolation he had brought and bought, but who was I to judge. I was trying to do the same thing with my life.

“Well?” I asked as I drove slowly down the stone driveway of whipping branches.

“They’ll call you,” said Ames.

“Think so?”

“Could feel it in the glass when he handed it to me,” said Ames. “Held it steady, but there was a tightness there. He needs something closed too. House he’s working on remind you of somethin’?”

“A kid working with unmatched building sets,” I said.

“Three little pigs,” said Ames. “Stone, wood. One he’s working on is brick. He’s getting ready for the wolf to come.”

“McKinney instinct?” I asked.

“Book I read once by a man in Chicago named Bettle-heim,” said Ames. “Good book. But he had his own wolf at the door blowing hard. Lived a lot of lies. Bettleheim. Couldn’t take it anymore. Killed himself.”

“You think Clark Dorsey is losing out to a wolf in his dreams?”

“Could be,” Ames said.

“People handle their wolves different ways,” I said. “You take your gun, hunt them down, and shoot them. Some people can’t find their wolves.”

“And some people build houses or sit in rooms waiting for the wolf to find them,” Ames said.

I had the uneasy feeling Ames was talking about me. I already had a shrink. What I needed was a friend who could ride shotgun.

We didn’t say another word till we found Laura Lonsberg Guffey’s house in Venice.

Trying to think of nothing is hard to do. Try it for ten seconds. Try to keep memory from coming unbidden. I can distract myself with old movies and work and sometimes with a painful empathy for other people and their problems, but I’m too much a part of the world to find Nirvana. Memory creeps up, as it did now, and leaps at me like a dream wolf.

We drove and the wolf hovered over my shoulder, breathing hot, panting, smelling of both animal and the half-remembered scent of my wife at night.

The wolf was just one shape that haunted me, reminding me that somewhere far behind lived the person who had killed her and driven away. The wolf reminded me.

Today a wolf, later or tomorrow a bear, cat, tiger, dog, something under the bed or in a closet, just outside a door or lurking under the dark surface of a cup of coffee.

She liked her coffee black, her tea unsweetened, herbal, but not mint. Her favorite food was grilled seafood. She wore solids, purples, greens, and grays. Old jewelry. She had a necklace that looked like the one Scarlett O’Hara wore at the ball before the war. But she also liked colorful costume jewelry that contrasted with the solid colors. I always gave her clothes or jewelry for birthdays, anniversaries, and sometimes for no reason but that I saw something that seemed right for her. She always put it on immediately, throwing back her hair, asking me to fasten, hook as I inhaled.

When she was lost in thought, she tapped gently at a tooth with the thumbnail of her left hand. Her nails were deep red because she knew it was my favorite color.

“We’re here,” Ames said.

We pulled up in front of a house. The wolf jumped out and disappeared.