Always Say Goodbye: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (12 page)

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Authors: Stuart M. Kaminsky

BOOK: Always Say Goodbye: A Lew Fonesca Mystery
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“I saw him,” she shouted. “I saw the shooter, saw him clear as healthy piss. White man over by the alley, over there. Saw him.”
Her voice drifted away.
“Posno?” asked Franco as they drove.
“Maybe.”
“Who else wants you dead?”
“Maybe the driver of the car that killed Catherine.”
“Posno, right? Same thing,” said Franco.
The phone buzzed as they hit Lake Shore Drive and headed south. Franco dug into the bag for a donut.
“There’s a bullet hole in your door,” said Lew.
“Damn. Toro can take care of that.”
“Went through,” said Lew, looking at the hole.
“Yeah,” said Franco. “What’re you gonna do? Shit happens.”
The phone hummed.
Lew ducked his head and reached down as Franco hit the speakerphone button and said, “Massaccio Towing.”
Milt Holiger’s voice came on.
“Lew?”
“I’m here, Milt.”
“Bank lead is a bust,” he said. “I went there. Santoro did do a lot of legal work for First Center. Estate settling, bequests, nothing involving Catherine, you. Dead end.”
“Thanks, Milt,” Lew said, still with his head down. He and Catherine once had a small savings account in First Center.
“I’m sorry. Anything else I can do?”
“I’ll let you know.”
Lew sat up as Milt Holiger signed off. In Lew’s hand were the mangled remains of a bullet. He showed it to Franco.
“Is it 9 mm?”
“I think so,” said Lew.
On the way south, they passed a late-model blue Pontiac with its hood up and a man with his hands in his pockets watching the traffic move past. Franco pulled in front of the Pontiac, turned on his revolving light and said, “Gotta check.”
He got out and called back to the man, “Need help?”
“Yes,” he said.
Five minutes later, the Pontiac was being towed, the man was squeezed in next to Lew, and Franco was making arrangements to bring the car to a garage in Naperville.
“Name’s Kerudjian, Theodore Kerudjian,” the man said. “I repair copy machines, business, home, whatever.”
He handed Franco and Lew cards.
“But what I really want to do is direct,” he said. No response.
“That’s a joke,” said Kerudjian.
“You know other ones?” asked Lew.
“Sure, you want to hear some?”
Kerudjian turned his head toward Lew. The man was probably in his late sixties, maybe he was seventy. He was short, baldness firmly established against a desperate island of gray hair.
With enthusiasm and arm movement, laughing at his own timing and punch lines, Kerudjian told a string of jokes, pausing after each to say, “Funny, huh?”
“It’s funny,” Franco agreed.
Kerudjian looked at each of them. He had been the only one laughing.
“You’re not laughing,” he said.
Lew looked at the man whose surface of good humor had suddenly vanished. Without it, Kerudjian wore a look of defeat.
“Lewie doesn’t laugh,” said Franco, “and I’m a little pissed right now. Somebody shot a hole in my truck. You see it?”
“I didn’t know it was a bullet … .”
“It was. It is,” said Franco. “Someone was trying to kill Lewie. He’s my sister’s brother.”
“Lewie?”
“Me.”
“When … ?”
“About half an hour ago,” Franco said.
“This is a joke, right?” asked Kerudjian. “I tell a joke, you top me, right?”
“No,” said Lew.
Kerudjian smelled of distant garlic, ink, hints of sweat.
No one spoke till they got to the garage. They dropped the car and the confused Kerudjian, who had given Franco a credit card to pay for the tow.
“Not bad,” said Franco as they got back into the truck. “And I get a referral fee from Raphael. It’s a long tow to Naperville.”
 
 
John Pappas never left his house. Never.
This was, Pappas knew, in crisp, sharp contrast with Andrej Posnitki who was forever moving, flittering, following, threatening, maiming, killing and reciting secondhand poetry.
Seated in the kitchen, Pappas, who had lived with Posno for years, could hear his former partner delivering a flat monotone recitation of a poem neither he nor Pappas understood.
Everyone seated at the heavy, knife-scarred wooden table knew the truth about the siege that kept John Pappas in his house. His mother, Bernice; his sons, Stavros and Dimitri; and John himself knew that it really wasn’t fear of Posno that kept him inside the house.
John Pappas was agoraphobic. It had started suddenly, on a Sunday morning while he was reading the
Tribune
at this table. Nothing particular seemed to have triggered it. He simply knew that he was afraid to go outside. There were ghosts out there, people he had killed. It didn’t matter if they were real ghosts or memory-conjured and imaginary. They were beyond the protection of his home. Even thinking about leaving the house started an undulating wave of anxiety that moved toward him, an invisible flow under the level of control and consciousness. To keep the ghosts away, and to keep Posno outside, Pappas simply stopped considering opening the door and stepping out.
And he blamed Posno.
Sipping his coffee as he chewed a grainy sliver of warm
halavah
his mother had finished this morning, John Pappas wondered if Posno was now afraid of being inside. It would be an almost Mother Goose irony.
John Pappas didn’t go out.
Posno didn’t come in.
And so it was between them both
They had much room to sin.
“Irony,” Pappas said with a grin.
“What, Pop?” asked Stavros, cocking his head to one side so he could clearly see his father with his remaining eye.
“Nothing,” Pappas said. “Nothing.”
Pappas knew too much about Posno. If the police or the State Attorney’s Office or Fonesca found Catherine Fonesca’s file, Posno would be done; John Pappas would be uncovered. Pappas could not, would not allow that to happen. Pappas had only once killed emotionally. All of the other times, including the stabbing of LeRoy Vincent, had been acts of pride and payment, displays of professionalism. The people who hired John Pappas knew and respected him. Pappas was a legend in the darkened dining rooms of those, like him, who gave little value to the lives of those outside their family.
“We all die,” one of his clients, Mitch Dineboldt, had said. “You just make the inevitable happen sooner.”
“We’re sorry,” said Dimitri, playing with powdered sugar between thumb and finger.
“It’s all right,” said Pappas, reaching over to touch his younger son’s cheek and then looking at Stavros. “You?”
Bernice Pappas sat back upright next to her son. Bernice was clean, hair neatly combed, wearing a dark dress and yellow
sweater. She had been to church that morning, St. Adolphis Greek Orthodox Church. She had driven herself.
“I think you should kill him,” she said.
Her grandsons looked at her. Her son turned away.
Stavros thought his grandmother was telling him and Dimitri to kill their father. Dimitri thought she was telling him to kill his brother. Pappas knew who she really meant.
“Kill them both,” she said to her son.
Now the brothers thought their grandmother was telling their father to kill his two sons.
They feared their grandmother as much as they loved her baking. They knew what she had done with a kitchen knife. Dimitri and Stavros Pappas also both knew that she was insane.
“Your grandmother means Fonesca and Posno,” Pappas said with a sigh.
“In the pay of others, to protect others, my son didn’t hesitate to kill,” she said. “Now to protect your family, yourself, you are a Popsicle.”
Stavros and Dimitri had not lost their desire to escape, to get away, but it would have to wait. The brothers looked at each other. They both knew, understood, that the threat of Posno and the possibility that Fonesca might find the file were real.
“Posno will die,” Pappas said.
“And the nice Italian?” she asked.
“Fonesca,” Stavros said.
She nodded.
“We wait till we’re sure he has that file or that he won’t find it,” said Pappas.
“No,” she said, shaking her head and moving to the oven.
“We wait,” said Pappas.
Neither Dimitri nor Stavros had ever killed anyone, but their father, sitting benignly lost in thought as he drank thick, black coffee, had told them that he had never felt hesitation or guilt when he had “assassinated.”
“Tonight,” said Beverly, getting up slowly, hand on the table to steady herself. “I’m making my lamb, couscous and peas. Soup will be a surprise.”
Pappas wondered what Posno would be having for dinner and where he would be having it.
 
 
Andrej Posnitki had a bowl of Vietnamese soup with noodles, vegetables and pieces of fish. He sat at the counter of the little storefront restaurant-grocery on Argyle off of Broadway. His was the only non-Asian face among the twenty-seven customers. He had a Kiran beer, no glass, and ate. The other customers talked quietly and occasionally looked his way.
Posno had tucked a napkin under his collar. He ate seriously. He was more interested in quantity than quality, but he had limits and favorites. Pasta of any kind satisfied him, if there were enough of it. He ate the noodles slowly, carefully, noiselessly, wielding his chopsticks expertly to pluck out noodles, bits of fish and even tiny peas.
Music was playing, generic Asian music, the same rippling strings, the same beat, that he heard in every Thai, Japanese or Chinese restaurant.
He would kill Fonesca. The little wop would find that incriminating file of Catherine Fonesca’s and then he would kill him and then deal with Pappas. He and Pappas, the phony Greek, had never been friends, but they had been tenuous partners. And
now Pappas wanted to protect himself, to let Posno take the blame for all that they had done. Pappas wanted to destroy him.
It would not happen. It would not happen unless Pappas was willing to go down with him. It would not happen if Fonesca were dead and that file found and destroyed. And that is just what Andrej Posnitki fully intended to do.
INSIDE TORO’S GARAGE,
Lew sat behind the wheel of a white 1993 Cutlas. The car had belonged to Ernest Palpabua, a Samoan former left tackle for the Green Bay Packers and later a wrestler. Ernest had plowed the Cutlas into a horse. It turned out to be a stroke of luck for the Samoan, but not for the dead horse or the Cutlas.
The horse belonged to a park policeman. The Cutlas belonged to Ernest Palpabua and Ernest belonged to the media. His encounter with the horse landed him on the front page of the
Sun-Times,
photograph and story. That night the Marigold Stadium, where he was wrestling, was jammed. Ernest, now suddenly known as the Samoan Horse Killer, was popular. He had enough money for a new car. Toro bought the old one and Lew Fonesca now sat in it.
Lew hadn’t driven in Chicago for a little more than four years. He didn’t want to do it now.
The car was idling in the shadows in front of the wide entrance to the garage, hiding from the October sun. On the other side of Taylor Street beyond the entrance, he could see the walls of a soot-stained three-story yellow brick apartment building. In front of the entrance to the apartment was a small circle of dirt in the cracked concrete sidewalk. Inside the circle was a lone stunted tree, its few yellow leaves fluttering in the wind.
The leaves were beckoning him to come out of the shadows. Lew didn’t trust the leaves.
When he and Franco had gotten back to the house, Angie had been there. Franco, the book tucked under his arm, had eagerly told her what had happened, ending with the confrontation with the four young men and the bullet that hit the truck.
Angie didn’t look happy. She didn’t even look tolerant.
“Let me get this straight. You were in a black neighborhood,” she said. “Four guys confronted you. Someone shot a gun. There’s a hole in the truck.”
“Well, that’s the short tale,” Franco said.
“It’s the one I prefer,” said Angie. “Who was the shooter trying to kill or was he just having his usual afternoon of street target practice?”
“Ange, you don’t know what it was like.”
“I had to be there,” she said.
“Yeah, you … no. I’m glad you weren’t there. Listen.”
Franco, book still under his arm, retold the story, adding a dance of hand and body movements.
Lew had sat at the dining-room table, hands folded in front of him. Though he had said nothing, his sister’s eyes returned to him as Franco savored his tale. Angie spoke to her brother without saying a word and Lew answered silently.
“You should have seen, Ange,” said Franco with a shake of his head. “You should have seen. We’re gonna grab something to eat and go after the guy in the car that—”
He was going to say, “killed Catherine,” but he caught himself. Franco held the book out to Angie. She looked at it.
“I just finished this one,” she said.
“I know,” said Franco. “Open it.”
She did and read the inscription: “‘To Angela, Imagine that we are holding each other’s hand and walking together through the forest of the night. Rebecca Strum.’”
She looked at her brother.
“Is this real?”
“Yes,” said Lew.
“What’s she like?”
“Probably what you’d expect her to be from her books,” said Lew.
“You haven’t read any of her books, Lewis,” Angie said.
“I’m going to.”
“Think I could meet her?” asked Angie.
Franco put his arm around her and said, “Sure. We just knock at the door. Right, Lewie?”
“I’m going alone,” Lew said in answer.
“What do you mean?” Franco said. “Go where?”
“He means,” Angie said gently, “he’s going alone to find the man who killed Catherine. Call Toro. Tell him to get a car ready.”
“That right, Lewie?”
Lew nodded. It was right.
“Hey,” Franco said, “What if … ?”
“Lew can deal with ‘what if,’” Angie said.
Now, behind the wheel of the Cutlas, window slightly open, Lew could smell the grease of the garage, hear the shush of the wind bending the beckoning tree.
He remembered Rebecca Strum’s inscription for Angie. There’s a forest of the day too, he thought, and only one hand he wanted to hold. He turned on the radio and pushed the buttons seeking a voice, any voice. What he did not want was music.
He stepped on the pedal and drove into the day.
 
 
“The ulcer,” said Dr. Royale after he finished his examination of John Pappas.
Donald Royale was John Pappas’s physician for one reason : he made house calls and asked no questions about why John didn’t come to his office the way the rest of the dysfunctional family did. Dr. Royale did not believe in agoraphobia. Oh, yes, there were half-crazy people like Pappas who didn’t or wouldn’t leave their houses, apartments, mental hospitals or sewers, but the reasons were all different. Lumping them together and giving them a name was of no help in treatment. Each case had to be dealt with individually. It needed a psychiatrist. Dr. Royale wasn’t a psychiatrist. He didn’t even want to talk to his patients about their fears of flying, shellfish, small spaces, death, water, tomatoes, Africans and going outside their homes. Such cases he immediately referred to Jacob Crasker, who was a psychiatrist. For Jake Crasker’s prescriptions, the borderline crazies would pay mightily. For Jake Crasker’s willing ear and tough-love advice, they would pay even more.
There were times when Dr. Royale believed the cost of Jake Crasker’s treatment was the price these people deserved to pay for not taking care of the problem that they created. Royale had his own problem, a painful, twisted and inoperable vertebrae. He had lived with it for more than fifty years. He took
pain pills, new ones when they came out, and prided himself on not letting the pain ever show. He stood straight, smiled benevolently and catered to the well-to-do. Dr. Royale was corpulent and double-chinned, hair brushed back and flat, the collar of his shirt always a bit sweat-stained under the same blue suit he always wore. Donald Royale was a mess, but John Pappas also knew he was smart and a damned good doctor.
The examination was done in Pappas’s den-office and now they sat across from each other, Pappas in his usual seat on the sofa by the low table, Royale in the same place Lew Fonesca had sat the day before.
“So,” said Pappas, “I just keep taking that white stuff and that’s it?”
Pappas knew what the white stuff was and Dr. Royale knew he knew. Pappas smiled. He lived for games like this.
“That’s it,” said Royale. “And something new.”
“What?” asked Pappas, reaching for an apple in the silver bowl on the table.
“You should get out of this room, this house,” Royale said. “It’s closing in on you and your ulcer. You didn’t call Dr. Crasker for an appointment.”
Pappas held the green shiny apple in his hand and looked at the doctor.
“I’ll think about it. What else? You were going to say something else.”
“Forget it,” said Royale, getting up and reaching for his black leather bag.
The bag, which looked exactly like the black leather bag in Norman Rockwell paintings, had cost almost five hundred dollars. Dr. Royale didn’t want to risk his retainer, but his obligation to his patient overcame his love of fine new cars, a home in the Bahamas, another in Maywood and an apartment on 57th
Street in New York that was a block away from Carnegie Hall. All of them had hot tubs that soothed Royale’s spine.
“I think you should see Dr. Crasker.”
“Shrink? You want me to get shrink-wrapped?”
He bit into the apple, grinning.
“He would be willing to make a house call. Talk to him once. Then decide,” said Royale.
“I told you last time I don’t need a therapist,” said Pappas, taking another bite of apple before he had finished chewing the first bite. His words came out with a gentle spittle that rained on the fruit. “Nothing wrong on that end. Trust me.”
“I have a choice?” asked Royale.
“You take care of the body. I’ll take care of this.” Pappas tapped his head, still chewing. He got up, stepped around the table, remnant of apple in his left hand, jaws working. He put his hand on Royale’s shoulder and guided him to the door.
“Suit yourself,” said Royale.
Pappas dropped his apple core in what looked like a ceramic bowl big enough to hold a bowling ball. The bowl was decorated with white figures of almost-nude men chasing one another around the bowl. Dr. Royale had been told it was ancient Greek. Pappas was using it as a garbage receptacle.
“Want me to walk you to the door?”
“No,” said Royale.
“You know, Doctor, you should get more exercise, work out a little. Forgive me, but you’re a little overweight. You’re busy, okay, but there’s always a little time.”
“I’ll consider it,” Royale said with a smile.
Taking advice from a neurotic patient who wouldn’t listen to advice himself was not a likely scenario for Donald Royale.
“Oh, wait, almost forgot,” said Pappas, snapping his fingers.
He moved to his desk and picked up a white paper bag. He
handed it to Royale who knew from the smell that he was holding a bagful of
loukoumathes
, Greek donuts. Royale had considered trying again to convince Pappas to be seen by a therapist, but the prospect of losing the retainer and the goody bags of homemade Greek pastries was more than Dr. Royale could bear.
Pappas’s mother, amazingly healthy, was beyond help. He was sure of that. Bernice Pappas, multiple murderer, made him uneasy. Whenever he treated her, she had looked at him with unblinking eyes as if he were an uncooked pork loin ready for roasting. At least it felt that way. Pappas? Well, there was definitely something wrong inside the head to which his patient had occasionally pointed. Pappas was alternately grandiose, paranoid, given to long ramblings about everything from Mayan Indians to the difficulties of establishing colonies in outer space. Royale couldn’t give it a name. Crasker could and, if given the opportunity, would give it a name. Donald Royale really didn’t want to know his patient’s secrets, certainly didn’t want to know the body count for which these people were responsible.
The sons might be salvageable. Probably not, but Royale was the family physician and he took his responsibility seriously.
Dimitri seemed almost normal, in need of his father and grandmother’s approval, unwilling to step out of the circle of his family. Stavros, whose eye socket had healed well, was loyal to his father and dedicated to getting the man who had turned him into a cyclops, the man who was his father’s enemy, the man whose name Royale had heard whispered. Posno.
When the front door had closed behind Royale, Pappas went down the stairs and to the kitchen where his mother sat drinking coffee and reading her favorite magazine,
Cottage Living
. She looked up over her glasses.
“The ulcer,” Pappas said, touching his stomach.
“Stress,” she said. “You’ve got too much stress in your life. Get rid of the stress. Get rid of Posno and then just kill the little Italian.”
He nodded. She was right. She was a great cook but more than a little crazy. It ran in the family. His grandfather, Bernice’s father, he had been crazy too, killed some people with a shotgun in a fishing village in Greece, had to get out of the country.
“They were looking at me with eyes of the devil,” the old man had explained once, a year before he died.
Yes, his mother was nuts, but she was also right.
“The boys are out looking for Posno,” he said.
“Good,” she said. “It’s time for Posno to die.”
She kept repeating that. She was right, but she kept saying it and he wanted her to stop.
“It’s time,” he agreed.
A remnant of forgotten nightmare burst open. The doorbell had been ringing, ringing. Pappas had hurried to open it. When he flung it open, there stood Posno, grinning.
“Is this a bad time?” Posno had asked.
The doorbell had not been ringing. Posno was not there. But even Posno in his fleeting daydream had been right. It was a bad time.
 
 
Posno knew that Stavros and Dimitri were trying to find him. He had played with them, dangled hints, whiffs, suggestions through the words of a doorman, a waitress, a drugstore clerk.
Now he looked down at the street as the car parked and the brothers got out. They would go to his apartment. He had already moved out, but he had left hints, clues—a parking stub,
a receipt for dry cleaning, a pad of paper with names and phone numbers. All of it was invention, none of it led to him. He enjoyed the moment. He liked the boys, was even sorry that he had shot Stavros. The shot had been a warning to the father. He had not meant to hit the son.

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