I groaned my way up the steps, used the rusting handrail and made it to my office. I went inside and locked the door behind me. Light came through the window from the DQ and cars on 301. I leaned my back against the door and tested the spot just below the ribs where Handford had punched me. I was reasonably
sure nothing was broken or ruptured. It wasn’t that kind of pain.
There was a chance Handford would come back that night. I didn’t think so, but you never know. I didn’t have a gun but I did have a tire iron in my closet. I had rescued it from my Toyota when it died. The tire iron would remain dose to me, and my reasonably sturdy office chair would go under the doorknob. I couldn’t count on my guardian angel in a sports coat to return.
I closed the drapes, turned on the lamp on my desk and looked at the air conditioner in the window. It was humming and doing its best to kick out air. Ames had done something to it, but the air coming in was still almost as warm as the night.
I got the tire iron from the closet, brought it back to my desk, reached for the telephone and the folder Carl Sebastian had given me. It was almost nine. It felt like a washed-out midnight. I made my call. An answering machine kicked in with a male voice repeating the number and politely asking me to leave a message.
“My name is Lew Fonesca. I’m working for Carl Sebastian. I’d like to speak to Caroline Wilkerson. When she—”
“This is Caroline Wilkerson,” she said, picking up the phone.
Her voice was light, cultured.
“I’d like to talk to you about Melanie Sebastian,” I said.
“Are you all right, Mr … . ?”
“Fonesca,” I said. “Aside from suffering from depression and having recently been punched in the stomach by a very big man, I’m fine.”
“Have you been drinking?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Forgive me. I’m a little under the weather and the moon is full.”
“You have been drinking,” she said with irritation.
“No. I’m sober and I’m looking for Melanie Sebastian. Mr. Sebastian suggested that I talk to you.”
The pause at her end was long. I tried not to gasp from the pain as I waited.
“Cafe Kaldi, tomorrow morning at nine,” she said.
“Sounds fine,” I said, fairly sure that I would be in no condition to work out at the Y.
“And Mr. Fonesca, please leave your sense of humor, if that’s what it is, at home.”
“I’ll do that, Mrs. Wilkerson,” I said.
We hung up.
I thought of Sally Porovsky at her desk brushing back her hair, adjusting her glasses. I didn’t want to think about Sally Porovsky. I had her card. I had her phone number. I thought about calling her and making an excuse and forgetting about seeing her tomorrow for dinner. I pulled the card from my wallet, looked at it, put it down on the desk and knew I was going to go through with it. I made a few notes in my file on Adele. There was a lot to write. I kept it simple.
I watched an old tape of
The Prince and the Pauper.
The tire iron lay next to my bed. A bottle of Advil kept it company. I wondered what happened to the Mauch twins who starred in the movie. I wondered, but not enough to find out.
I wondered about my guardian angel. Who had sent him to protect me? Why? I heard my grandfather’s mandolin. He was playing “Darktown Strutter’s Ball,” one of his favorites.
When the twins stopped smiling at the end of the movie, I leaned back and fell asleep. One of my recurrent dreams came deep but with a new twist. My wife’s car was driving in the right-hand lane. Night. She was heading home. The water of Lake Michigan off to her left. I was there. Standing in the median strip, watching her come toward me. A pickup truck suddenly appeared,
red, fast, hit her hard crushing her car a few feet in front of me. The pickup sped past. The driver was Dwight Handford. He was smiling at me like the Mauch Twins.
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