Vengeance

6

Putting on my jeans and a loose-fitting black T-shirt was painful now that the punch to my stomach from Dwight Handford had settled in. I’ve been punched before, usually when I delivered or attempted to deliver a summons to someone who decided that since I was the only one available, he or she would take out their wrath on me.

I had learned that showing a gun wouldn’t stop an infuriated recipient from attack. I had tried the gun bit- using an unloaded weapon-once when it looked as if the large Hispanic man standing in his doorway with the summons I had delivered in his hand was going to do something angry, violent and out of control. He had spat at the gun, taken it from me and tried to shoot me. When it didn’t fire, he threw it at me, hitting me in the face. He had then run into his apartment shouting in Spanish and looking, I was sure, for something lethal-at the very least a large knife. I picked up the gun and ran like hell to my car. Eight stitches later, I vowed never to try the gun bit again.

I pushed the chair out form under the doorknob and, carrying the tire iron at my side, went outside, where I was greeted by a small lizard on the metal railing. He cocked his head in my direction. Nothing new about lizards in Florida. There were usually three or four scuttling along the concrete and the railing. This one seemed to sense that things were a little different this morning. He looked at me, puffed out the sac under his neck, and watched as I made my way down to the rest room, each step a painful reminder of the reality of the previous night.

The rest room could only be opened by a key, or so I had been told. Once in a while, when the weather really got bad, meaning heavy rain, I found a homeless man curled up under the sink. There was no one in there this morning. I laid my tire iron across the sink, shaved, washed, brushed my teeth and looked at my face. I am not formidable. I thought about Sally Porovsky and tried out a smile. It wasn’t hideous, but it wasn’t winning. I’m not ugly. I’ve been called pleasant, plain, interesting. My wife always said I had hidden appeal, Mediterranean hidden appeal.

My grandparents on my father’s side had met in Viareggio, not far from Florence. My grandfather had been a waiter. My grandmother had been a chef’s assistant. They came to the United States in 1912 and made their way to Chicago, where they opened a small neighborhood restaurant on the Northwest Side. They were officially retired by the time I was born. My maternal grandparents came from Rome. My mother’s father was a reporter for a newspaper. My maternal grandmother worked at a bakery near the newspaper office. When they came to America, she stayed at home and had children and my grandfather split his time between working as a furniture upholsterer and writing for an Italian-language newspaper. He had a political column and a bad temper.

When my parents married, they left the Catholic Church and became Episcopalians. I don’t know why. They have never told me, and when I asked, as a child or an adult, they said the equivalent of “Some things are personal, even for parents.”

There are times I’ve thought of becoming a Catholic like my grandparents, but I’ve never had the religious calling. It just seemed like something I might want to do, which is not a good reason for becoming a Catholic. It is probably a good reason for going to a basketball game or ordering a banana split, but a bad idea for becoming a Catholic.

I tucked my soap, toothbrush and Bic razor in a desk drawer and, tire iron in hand, went down to the Metro. Getting in was painful. Getting out after finding a parking space on Main Street was even more painful. I didn’t take the tire iron with me to the Cafe Kaldi.

Caroline Wilkerson was already there. I had no trouble finding her even though the coffeehouse tables were full. She sat alone inside, not at one of the outside tables, an open notebook in front of her, a pair of half-glasses perched on the end of her nose. She was writing in a large notebook. A cup of coffee rested nearby. I recognized her from the society pages of the Herald — Tribune. I picked up a cheese and onion croissant and a large coffee and made my way back to her table. I didn’t want to bite my lower lip when I sat, but my sore plexus insisted.

When I sat across from her, she looked at me over her glasses, took them off, folded her hands on the table and gave me her attention.

The widow Caroline was a beauty, better in person than in the papers. She was probably in her late forties or early fifties, with short, straight silver hair, a wrinkle-free face with full red lips that reminded me of Joan Fontaine. If she had spent time with a plastic surgeon, the surgeon had done one hell of a good job.

She wore a pink silky blouse with a pearl necklace and pearl earrings and a lightweight white jacket and no friendly smile.

“Mr. Fonesca?”

“Yes,” I said.

She nodded and took a sip of her coffee.

“She didn’t. No way,” someone said.

A pretty girl with long blond hair and a silver ring through her left nostril had uttered the words of disbelief. The girl began to laugh. So did the girl with short dark hair with her and the boy with a little beard and a baseball cap worn backward.

“Are you in pain, Mr. Fonesca? You look…”

“Minor accident,” I said. “I wasn’t looking and I ran into something. Do you know that Melanie Sebastian is missing?”

“If I didn’t know,” she said, lifting her glasses so they rested on top of her head and closing her notebook, “I wouldn’t be here talking to you. Carl Sebastian called me. He was frantic. Almost in tears. I couldn’t help him. Melanie hasn’t contacted me. I would have thought, as Carl did, that if Melanie did something like this, she’d get in touch with me. I told Carl to call the police. Melanie might have been hurt. She could even be…”

I drank some coffee and took a bite of the croissant. It was pretty good. I really wanted an egg.

“Did they fight?” I asked. “Could that be the reason she ran away?”

“Why don’t you ask Carl?”

“Spouses sometimes don’t want to face certain truths.”

“Yes, I know,” she said.

The trio at the table next to ours laughed. Caroline Wilkerson looked at them somewhat wistfully for an instant and then back to me.

“Fight? The Sebastians?” I reminded her.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “But I can’t be certain. Carl said nothing about a fight and I don’t recall ever seeing them fight or hearing from Melanie that they fought. I’m very worried about her, Mr. Fonesca.”

“Any idea of where she might have gone?”

The pause was long. She bit her lower lip and made up her mind and sighed.

“Geoffrey Green,” she said softly, meeting my eyes. “He’s her analyst and… I think that’s all I can say.”

“Carl Sebastian thinks his wife and Dr. Green might have had an affair, that she may have left to be with him.”

She shrugged.

“I’ve heard rumors that Geoff Green is…”

“Homosexual,” I supplied.

“Bisexual,” she amended.

“You can’t think of anyplace else she might have gone to, anyone else she might be with?”

“No, but I’ll think about it.”

I had finished my croissant and coffee and got up slowly. I handed her one of my cards.

“If you hear from Mrs. Sebastian,” I said, “would you tell her that her husband just wants to talk to her. If she doesn’t want to talk to him, I’d like to talk to her. She can call me at that number. I won’t try to talk her into anything she doesn’t want to do.”

“I hope you find her,” Caroline Wilkerson said. “Melanie has had problems recently, depression. One of her relatives, her only close relative, a cousin I think, recently died. That’s hardly a reason for

… who knows? Frankly, I don’t know what to make of all this.”

At the moment, that made two of us.

“Are you permitted to let me know if you find out anything about where Melanie is and why she’s-”

I must have been shaking my head no, because she stopped.

“I’m sorry,” she said with a sad smile, showing perfect white teeth. “That’s what I would expect if you were working for me.”

When I got to the coffeehouse door, I looked back at Caroline Wilkerson. Her half-glasses were back on and her notebook was open.

Back in the DQ parking lot, I parked the Metro and went to the window for a burger, fries and a chocolate/ cherry Blizzard. It was still early. There was no line. Dawn, an almost nothing of a woman, was behind the window, freshly aproned, smiling.

“Dave not in yet?” I asked after she took my order.

“On the boat,” she said. “Workin’ on it at least. Said he had the need. And I can use the extra hours.”

Dawn was probably in her early thirties and had two small kids, but she looked like a pre-teen. She was sad in the eyes but fresh-faced and never wore makeup. Dave said she had been through a tough time. He let her and her boys live rent free in his one-bedroom rental house off of Orange and north of downtown. With the money she made at the DQ and an additional hundred a month she got from cleaning houses, she got by.

“Ever hear of a guy named Dwight, Dwight Handford or Dwight Prescott?” I asked her over the buzz of the machine as she worked on my Blizzard.

“Know a couple of Dwights,” she said. “But not those two.”

“It’s one guy who uses different names.”

“What’s he look like?”

I told her.

She came to the second window, Blizzard in one hand, burger and fries in a bag.

“Rings a cowbell,” she said. “I’ll think on it.”

I nodded, took my food to one of the red picnic tables covered by a gray and red Coca-Cola umbrella and tried to think while I ate and watched the cars and trucks speed down 301. My stomach hurt with the first shock of cold. Dwight had done a very good job with one punch. I was careful from that point on, but I was determined to finish the drink.

Across the street, a man and a boy in his teens who should have been in school walked into the acupuncture center under the dance studio. On a really quiet day when the traffic was light on this urban stretch of 301, I could even hear the music while I ate at Dave’s. My favorites, which they played over and over, were Eydie Gorme singing “La Ultima Noche,” an orchestral verson of “The Vienna Waltz,” and Tony Bennett singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” People were dancing in the window now. One of the instructors, a thin man with a small, well-trimmed beard, was demonstrating something Latin. He had one hand up in the air and the other on his stomach. His eyes were closed and an old couple were holding hands and watching. I couldn’t hear the music.

There was a tire shop on one side of the acupuncture building and then to the left as I faced it stood a trailer-supply store and then the bar called the Crisp Dollar Bill. On the other side of the bar was the dance studio I could see from my office window. I had never been in the bar. Dave told me that it had been called the Dugout before the White Sox moved their training camp.

“Mr. F.,” Dawn called.

I looked over at her framed in the window.

“Mr. F., I may be nuts or so, but I saw that guy you asked me about, least I think it was him. Could have been. He parked in the lot ‘bout an hour back. Pickup truck with one of those things, you know, for hauling cars. Got out and looked around. I remember him ’cause he didn’t buy anything, just stood around. Morning breakfast was busy. Then he was here, got a coffee, took it off and…”

There was no pickup truck in the parking lot. I took a final bite of my burger, got up as quickly as I could and dumped my early lunch in the garbage can.

“I think I’m wrong, Mr. F.,” she said.

I looked toward the back of the lot and up at my office door.

“I think you’re right. Thanks, Dawn,” I said.

I went past the Geo and headed for the steps, past the spot where Dwight had come out of the bushes. He could have reparked the pickup and waited in his familiar spot. There was no Dwight now. Dawn could have been wrong, but I had a pain in my stomach and a wish for a tire iron that said she wasn’t.

The slightly open door to my office made me sure.

Dwight had probably just looked around, seen no one watching and, when Dawn wasn’t paying attention, come up the stairs and thrown his shoulder against the door. It was no match for him. I stepped in. The lights were on. Dwight had trashed the place, not that there was much to trash. I pushed the door shut. It stayed in place. Drawers were on the floor. The desktop had been swept away. Papers, an empty glass, business cards and things I didn’t remember having were all over the floor. I moved to the other room. Nothing had been touched.

Dwight hadn’t been there just to give me a warning. If he had, he would have caved in the front of my TV with the tire iron that now lay on the floor in the doorway. Conclusion: Dwight had been looking for something, something he found. As far as I knew, the only thing I had that Dwight wanted was the file I kept on Adele. It was on the floor with other debris. I had made a note in it that I had taken Beryl to Flo Zink’s

I turned my desk chair around, picked the phone off the floor and hit the redial button.

“I’m here,” came a familiar voice.

“Flo, it’s Lew.”

“Bad news for you, Lewis,” she said. “Bad news. She’s gone.”

“She’s gone,” I repeated.

“Got a phone call about an hour ago. Guy said you’d given him the number. Asked for Beryl. Said he was a lawyer friend of yours, that he was going to get an injunction against her husband, going to get him to tell where Adele was. I asked him if he wanted to talk to Beryl. Said no, asked me the address. That’s when it hit me.”

“He wasn’t a friend,” I said.

Dwight had probably called from my office sitting in my chair.

“That’s what hit me. You would’ve called, told me he was gonna get in touch. You would have told him where I live.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Beryl had left, gone off to a motel or somewhere. I said she got in a cab and went off, didn’t tell me where. The son of a fuckin’ bitch hung up. I told Beryl, told her to get her things together, that we were taking her someone safe. While she got ready, I got the car out of the garage, drove around front, went in to get her and-”

“She was gone,” I said, seeing if it was worth super-gluing a broken little plaster duck I kept on my desk for luck.

“Gone, walked away. I looked for her. Drove all over. Nothing. Lew, I think it’s time for the cops. That shit’s after her and she’s running scared.”

“Maybe you’re right, Flo.”

“I’m sorry, Lew. I fucked up.”

“No you didn’t,” I said, putting the two halves of the duck on my desk. “You figured it out. Flo, I think you might want to get out of there.”

“Lewis, I want that bastard to show up here,” she said. “I want it so bad I’d pay big dollars for the joy. I’m holding a very large weapon in my hand and if I see him coming to my door, I’m shooting a hole right through the door and him.”

“Not a good idea,” I said.

“Lewis, I’ve got money and one hell of a great lawyer. Lord, let him come.”

“He’s driving a pickup truck-Ford-with a tow winch,” I said.

“One more question,” she said.

“I’d say ‘shoot’ but under the circumstances…”

“You’ve got a sense of humor hiding behind that sad face, Lewis. Question is, does he have my address? Are you sure? I’m not listed in the phone book.”

I looked at my mess of address and business cards on the floor and said, “I think so.”

All Dwight Handford had to do after he read my file on Adele and found out I had taken her to Flo’s was to get the address out of the address book on my desk.

“How long does it take you to get here from your place?”

“Fifteen minutes, maybe a little more,” I said.

“He called a lot more than an hour ago. What’s keeping the bastard?”

“Good question, Flo. Maybe you should get out of there for a while.”

I knew what her answer would be.

“Beryl was scared, real scared. That man’s hurt her. He’s sure as hell hurt that kid. He is one dangerous asshole.”

That I knew, but I said,

“Lock up tonight. I’ll keep calling.”

“You going to look for Beryl?”

“I’m going to look.”

There was a sound of footsteps coming slowly along the the concrete walk outside my office. I hung up and went for my tire iron. When I had it in hand, I faced the door. Someone pushed it open. I hoped the someone didn’t have a gun. He didn’t.

“Ames,” I said.

He looked at me as unmoved as he always was and said, “I came to work on the air conditioner some more.”

He looked at the air conditioner and so did I for the first time since I had come into the office. The front of it was caved in.

“You go berserk?” Ames asked, calmly nodding at the tire iron and then looking around the room.

“No,” I said. “Someone came in. Beryl Tree’s husband. He was looking for something.”

“Find it?”

“Yes.”

Ames nodded as if it was all clear to him. Maybe it was.

“Never fix the air conditioner now,” he said. “Don’t think there was much chance of it yesterday when it was still sort of alive.”

“We’ll give it a decent burial,” I said, sitting at my desk and biting my lower lip.

“Somethin’ hurtin’?”

“Beryl’s husband. Last night. Told me to stop trying to find his daughter and to get Beryl out of town. He performed euthanasia on the air conditioner and made this mess.”

Ames nodded and said,

“I’ll have to work out what I owe you some other way than the air conditioner.”

I wanted to tell Ames again to forget it, but he couldn’t forget what he thought he owed me. He had to pay it off to keep his self-respect.

“I’ll think of-”

The phone rang. I had a pretty good idea who it might be. Once again I was wrong. I picked it up.

“Hello.”

Ames started to pick things up off the floor. I didn’t stop him.

“Fonesca,” said Harvey the computer genius. “He tell you? I wanted to be sure you got the message.”

“Who? What message?”

“Your partner,” said Harvey.

Ames held up a black oblong something. I couldn’t figure out what it was for a second. Then I remembered. It was the name plaque that had been on my wife’s office door. Ames turned it over, looked at the name, rubbed it gently against the sleeve of his well-worn flannel shirt, placed it faceup on the desk and began to clean up the room.

“My partner?”

“When I called you earlier, he answered, took the message,” Harvey said.

“Give it to me again, Harvey. That wasn’t my partner. I don’t have a partner.”

“Then who… forget it. I don’t want to know.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That I had some information on Melanie Sebastian. Her car was found at the airport. Could have been there for weeks in the long-range parking, but Carl Sebastian reported it missing. Routine check found it. I found the report on the airport computer.”

“So she flew away,” I said.

“Don’t think so,” said Harvey. “I went into the records looking for a Melanie Sebastian, or a Melanie Lennell or a Melanie anything who might have flown out anytime between this morning going back to Tuesday. Nothing. Didn’t expect to find anything. Then I tried females with the initials M. L. or M. S. Nothing. You have to show ID when you get on a plane, you know.”

“I know, but how closely do they look.”

“Some do. Some don’t. You want the rest?”

Harvey was enjoying himself. I wasn’t. But I needed him. I watched Ames and listened to Harvey.

“Then I checked all the women who had paid for their tickets in cash since no credit card of hers showed an airline ticket purchase. Nothing. You know what I did next?”

I was reasonably sure, but I didn’t want to spoil Harvey’s surprise.

“Taxis from the airport to anywhere with a woman passenger. Town this size with most people getting picked up or having their own cars waiting, business at the airport isn’t all that hot for taxis even on the best of nights or days.”

I felt like blurting out “car rentals” but I said,

“And you found nothing?”

“Nothing. Then rentals cars. I got her, pilgrim. Last Wednesday night. Lady got a red Neon from Budget. Showed an ID, left a cash deposit. You have a pen and something to write on?”

I had a green-and-white push-button pen in my pocket. The word RHINOCORT was in green against the white. I had no recollection of picking it up. Everybody advertises on pens, gives them away. I haven’t bought a pen in five years. I found an envelope in the top drawer and said,

“Ready.”

“Georgia plates. License number 66884J. Now, you’ve got three questions, right?”

“Right,” I said as Ames, with a handful of junk, stood surveying the room to see what items larger than a paper clip he might have missed.

“Gonna get a broom,” he said.

I covered the mouthpiece of the phone and said, “DQ will lend you one.”

Ames nodded and left as Harvey said,

“Question one: How many days did she rent it for? Answer: Ten days. Question two: Where did she plan to return it? Answer: Back at the airport right here in town. Question three: Whose ID did she show? Answer: Caroline Wilkerson. Driver’s license. You ever see a photo of Caroline Wilkerson in the Herald- Tribune?”

“I’ve seen the woman up close, this morning.”

“I matched computer images from IDs of the two women,” said Harvey. “You’d have to be blind to think it was the same woman.”

“So,” I said, looking at my watch.

“So, someone with the touch, knowledge and a halfway powerful computer and a color printer could strip in a photograph of Melanie Sebastian over Caroline Wilkerson’s and then relaminate.”

“You know people who could do it?” I asked.

“I know some and I’m sure there are a lot more out there. I don’t think we’ll track her that way.”

“Thanks, Harvey.”

“I’ll keep looking,” he said.

“You’ve done enough.”

“This is fun. I need fun.”

“Then have fun. Call me if you turn anything up.”

We hung up and I looked at my wife’s nameplate. I remembered it on her door. I remembered her walking out to greet me with a smile, her hair pulled back, her… Question: How did Melanie get Caroline Wilkerson’s driver’s license?

I did know a lot now. Melanie Sebastian was driving a new red Neon. She was probably still within driving range of Sarasota unless she planned to: (a) drive back from somewhere two or three days away; or (b) return the car to some other Budget office. I was sure Harvey would keep track of that. And (c) was my favorite: She was still in the immediate area. Why?

I reached for the phone and the Melanie Sebastian file, which Dwight had gone through and dumped. It didn’t look as if he had taken anything. Why should he? He wasn’t looking for Melanie. I was. He was looking for Beryl Tree. I dialed the number for Caroline Wilkerson. It rang six times and the answering machine came on. It was her voice. The message was simple: “Please leave a message.” I did. I asked her to call me. Just in case she had tossed my card, I left my number.

Ames returned, broom and dustpan in hand, and went to work. I watched him. Once he had been worth about three million dollars, by his reckoning. Now he was cleaning the floors and tables in a bar and sweeping my floor and he said he was content. I believed him.

“Ames, I’ve got to find Beryl Tree.”

“She’s not at Flo’s?”

“Ran away. Her husband tracked her down.”

I pointed to the mess to indicate how he’d located her.

“We’ve got to find her,” he said as he swept. “I like the lady.”

“Then we better start looking for her and her daughter.”

“Adele,” he said.

“Adele,” I repeated.

“Nice name,” said Ames. “You feel up to it? You look kind of sickly.”

“Dwight came to see me last night.”

I got up, rubbed my sore stomach.

“Bad man,” said Ames, sweeping the floor.

“Very bad. I’ve got to get myself in shape fast,” I said. “I’ve got a date tonight.”

Ames stopped sweeping and looked at me. Just looked.

“A lady?”

“A lady,” I said, tucking the envelope with the tag number of the red Neon Melanie Sebastian had rented into my shirt pocket.

“You sure you’re up to it?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “But I’m going to try.”

I looked at him and he looked at me and then at my wife’s name plaque.

“It’s worth trying,” he said. “You know what trying does?”

“What?”

“Keeps a man alive,” he said.