Always Say Goodbye: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (7 page)

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Authors: Stuart M. Kaminsky

BOOK: Always Say Goodbye: A Lew Fonesca Mystery
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“You’re loitering,” said the beefy cop.
Santoro looked down at the hood of the Lexus and shook his head with a smile.
Franco backed the tow truck into the street. Franco and Lew looked down at the men named Santoro and Aponte-Cruz. Santoro met Lew’s eyes and smiled. Lew couldn’t read the smile.
DINNER,
rigatoni with shrimp, had reminded him of his grandmother’s cooking, Sundays at her house. She hadn’t learned any of her recipes in Sicily. She had learned them from cookbooks, mostly written by second- or third-generation American recipe gatherers, most of them Jewish. Her food was good. Lew’s mother had not carried on the tradition, but Angela had picked it up like a loose football and run with it. Franco had been a lean Massaccio when they were married.
Franco’s friend Manny Lowen, the beefy cop, still in uniform, had come by. He had a bowl of rigatoni with grated Parmesan and told them that the two men in the Lexus were Claude Santoro and Bernard Aponte-Cruz and that Santoro owned the car.
“Santoro’s a lawyer,” said Manny, working on a coffee and
one of the last of the Greek deserts Angie had put out on a plate. “No criminal record. Lots of money. Lots of friends. Office up high on LaSalle Street. You want to find him, he won’t be hard to find. He’s in the phone book. The other guy, Aponte-Cruz, another story. He’s a leg breaker for rent. Did four years downstate for breaking up a restaurant owner on Elston Avenue in front of witnesses. Owner came out on the other side with a limp, a twitch and a tendency to look over his shoulder a lot.”
When Manny had left, Angie said, “You need my car tomorrow ?”
“I can drive him,” said Franco, failing to resist the last Greek cookie.
“Lewis?” Angie asked.
Lew didn’t like driving anywhere. He didn’t like driving in Chicago in particular. These weren’t streets. They were bumper-to-bumper miles of memories. He accepted Franco’s offer.
The phone had rung while they were still at the table and Franco had answered.
“Franco … got it … fifteen, twenty minutes tops.”
He hung up, said, “Work,” and kissed Angie on the cheek as she patted his hand. “Lewis, see you in the morning.”
And he was gone.
“Can I ask?” Angie had said, folding her hands on the table when Franco had left.
“Yes.”
“You going to see the rest of the family?”
“Not this time.”
“Uncle Tonio?” she asked.
“Maybe.”
He started to reach for the last baklava on the plate and
changed his mind. What he really wanted was a DQ chocolate cherry Blizzard. He knew his comfort food and that was it, something he had not tasted before Catherine was killed.
“You’re thinking about giving up, aren’t you?” Angie said. “Thinking it wasn’t such a great idea, your coming here?”
“Something like that,” Lew said.
“Don’t,” she said.
She got up, came around the table, hugged her brother from behind and kissed the top of his head. There was nothing more to say. Not now. He helped Angie clear the table and put the dishes in the dishwasher. Then he went to Teresa’s room where he called Ann Horowitz.
“It’s me,” he told her when she answered the phone.
“We start with a joke,” she said. “You have one?”
“How many advisors to the president does it take to change a lightbulb?”
“I don’t know, Lewis,” said Ann Horowitz. “How many?”
“I don’t know. The president has appointed a committee to investigate and they’ll let us know the answer as soon as possible.”
It was almost ten at night in Chicago, which meant it was almost eleven in Sarasota. Ann and her husband went to bed around midnight and Lew had been told he could call until then. Now he said, “I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
“You are trying to find out how your wife was killed,” she said, “and who was responsible.”
“You’re eating,” Lew said.
“Frozen Twix and green tea,” she answered.
“How is it?”
“So-so,” she said, “but I like to try new things.”
“I don’t,” Lew said.
“Where did you get the joke? Did you make it up?”
“No,” he said. “A Greek hit man told it to me. His mother baked us Greek pastries.”
“Good?”
“Yes,” he said.
“The trick is not just in the ingredients,” said Ann. “It’s in sharp, even cuts of the phyllo.”
“She killed her husband and his cousin with a very sharp baking knife,” he said.
“Tonight?” she asked calmly.
“No, about six years ago. Tell me again, what am I doing here?”
“I assume you’re not asking a what-is-the-meaning of-life kind of question.”
“No.”
“Good,” she said. “You are there to bring to an end a part of your grief and to come back and tell me whatever it is you have not yet told me.”
“I …”
“Not all of it,” she went on. “I will not deprive you of your grief and depression. Without them you fear you would be looking into dark emptiness, that there would be no more Lewis Fonesca for Lewis Fonesca believes he is defined by his grief and depression. I know, not because of my brilliance as a therapist but because you have told me repeatedly. I don’t need to have you do it again, so I’ve done it for you. You are a tough town, Lewis.”
“I know.”
“It’s not a compliment. Okay,” she said with a sigh, taking a crunchy bite of Twix. “I’ll give you some reasons for finding out what happened to Catherine. You pick one or more or all of them. Ready? No, of course you’re not ready, but you need the halftime pep talk. So, first, you owe it to her. It’s selfish to cling
to the darkness and videotapes on your cot, memorizing the lines from
Mildred Pierce
. Your Catherine deserves to lie in peace with the final line written by you. Call it a loving eulogy. Or try this, someone is responsible for your wife’s death. You don’t want them to forget what they have done. Also, you don’t know what or who you might find. Your sense of the world, your two-room world, may be forever changed by what you find. And that could be good.”
“Or bad.”
“Or bad,” she agreed. “Or something that can’t be defined by good and bad.”
“All right,” he said.
“Good. Remember, no matter what you find, you can always come back here to your misery.”
“That’s comforting,” Lew said.
“And in your case, I know you mean that. Are you going to go to the cemetery?”
“No. There’s nothing there but a stone cross.”
“It’s not what is there, Lewis, but what you bring there with you.
The Daily Show
is coming on. Good night.”
She hung up. Lew was sitting in the pillowed wicker chair in Teresa’s room, the phone in his lap.
When Ann hung up, he sat there thought about Catherine’s missing file, the one Pappas and Andrej Posnitki and, for all Lew knew, maybe Claude Santoro wanted as well. All of the things in Catherine’s and his apartment had been been boxed, taped and taken to his uncle Tonio’s warehouse on Fullerton by Angie, Franco, Tonio and some of Tonio’s men after Lew had left Chicago. Lew hadn’t wanted to look at any of it then. He didn’t want to now.
Milt Holiger had told Lew that he and two Assistant State Attorneys had gone through all of the files in Catherine’s two
cabinets and the contents of the drawers of her office desk. Nothing was surprising in them, nothing about an upcoming case that might lead to someone running her down. Lew believed him. Milt was good, but Lew was another set of eyes, another history.
“The active files,” Milt had said, “were turned over to other lawyers in the department. The closed-case files have been crated and stored.”
Lew decided that in the morning he would move again, go through the motions, do the one thing he did well, find people, let them talk. He got up. He hadn’t unpacked anything from his duffel bag. He didn’t intend to. He unzipped the blue cloth bag, took out clean socks, underwear, a folded white button-down shirt, a folded blue shirt, a rolled-up black T-shirt with the faded words THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE, and a Ziploc plastic bag containing his toothbrush, toothpaste and disposable razor. He laid them out on one side of the bed next to his zippered denim jacket.
Teresa had a small bathroom inside her room, no bath, just a shower. Angie had put out a pair of towels on the sink. Ten minutes later Lew turned out the light and lay in bed, looking up at the ceiling at the swaying shadows of the branches of the tree outside of Teresa’s window.
Just before he fell asleep a name came to him: Rebecca Strum.
A thousand miles south in Florida, the hurricane season had begun.
 
 
Lew was up early, the sun warm across his eyes. He covered his face with his arms, but thoughts, names, memories cometed through his mind with fleeting images he almost recognized.
This time he wasn’t dealing with someone else’s missing husband, wife, mother or child. He wasn’t losing himself in someone else’s loss. This Chicago pain was all his.
Dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved, reasonably ironed blue shirt with a collar that could have used a couple of stays, Lew tucked his Cubs cap on his head, put on his white socks and sneakers, checked for the first signs of daily stubble on his cheeks and neck and looked at himself in Teresa’s mirror.
Catherine said that he looked particularly good in blue shirts. She seemed to mean it. He didn’t think he had looked particularly good when she had said it and he certainly didn’t think so this morning.
Lew put on his denim jacket.
Franco was sitting in his overstuffed chair in the living room. The chair had been sat into exhaustion by three generations of Massaccio and Fonesca men. Franco was drinking coffee from a white mug with a black-and-white photograph on it of the DiMaggio brothers—Joe, Vince and Dominick—in uniform, arms around one another’s necks, grinning the toothy DiMaggio grin.
“Hey, Lewis,” he said, getting up. “Angie had a client coming into the office early. Coffee’s on. Want some eggs, something? How about I put some butter in a pan and fry you up some spaghetti and meatballs?”
Lew checked the wooden clock on the wall, Roman numerals. It was a little after seven. Lots of time. The imagined smell of a recooked dinner jolted him with the memory of his standing over a black iron skillet and preparing almost the same breakfast Franco had just offered.
“That breakfast I smell?” Catherine had asked, wandering in, still in a blue-and-white–striped nightshirt.
She stood behind him at the stove, kissing his cheek and looking down at the sizzling skillet.
“Smells good,” she said.
This was a few weeks before his wife had been killed.
Something about the way she spoke, the lack of a morning hug, the surface-only kiss, came back to him. Was he imagining it? Should he have said something?
In his mind’s eye Lew looked over his shoulder at Catherine who, cup of black coffee in front of her, sat at the tiny kitchen table. She drank slowly, looking out the window at the morning traffic. The morning was overcast. Normally, the downtown Chicago skyline was a panorama in front of them. Not that morning. She ran her fingers through her disheveled hair. Normally, she turned on the television on the counter to watch the morning news. She did not turn on the television set. That morning had been forgotten until now.
“No, thanks,” Lew said to Franco. “Just coffee.”
“Want the last of Norman Bates’s mom’s pastries? We saved it for you.”
“Sure.”
An hour and a half later Franco and Lew were at the law offices of Glicken, Santoro and Turnbull. The offices were on LaSalle Street in the heart of the Loop, fifteenth floor. Franco had parked the tow truck in a four-story garage two blocks away where the hourly rate was eight dollars an hour for off-the-street and six dollars an hour for daily customers. Franco would be charged neither. He knew the night manager and the day manager who steered breakdown calls his way and got a finder’s fee.
Lew tucked his blue Cubs cap into his pocket.
The large, gray-carpeted reception area had six black leather armchairs and a reception desk with a telephone, computer, pad
of lined yellow paper and three pens ready for the day. On the wall were large side-by-side color photographs of the partners smiling confidently. Glicken was dark, curly-haired and definitely Jewish. Turnbull was Black. Claude Santoro was either Hispanic or Italian.
Lew never found out.
Santoro’s name was on the door on their right in the small waiting area. His door was slightly open. The lights were on. No voices.
Lew knocked and then knocked again. Franco reached past him and pushed the door all the way open. Santoro was seated behind the desk in front of them. His eyes were open. He seemed lost in thought. There was a black hole over his right eye, another in his neck and a third just above his mouth. All were ringed by blood.
“He’s fucking dead,” said Franco.
Lew said nothing. Blood had oozed out of the bullet holes and dried up.
Franco reached for the phone on the desk in front of the dead man.

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