“Some jokes are taken from life,” she said. “The second joke?”
“You go on a picnic and you’re having a good time. Then you open your basket of food and the flies start coming. You close the basket. Flies go away. You open it. They come back. Conclusion: Flies time when you’re having fun.”
“That’s a good one,” she said. “You make that one up?”
“Yes.”
He could hear her crunching the biscotti.
“You said three jokes,” Ann went on.
“I’ll save it. I only owed you one.”
“So, what happened?” she asked.
“I found him,” Lew said. “The man who killed her.”
“Catherine.”
“Catherine,” he echoed.
“And what did you say to him, he to you?”
“He’s Chinese.”
“And that is relevant?”
“No.”
“What else?”
“He has a wife, a daughter, a painting of a dark city street. He wasn’t trying to kill Catherine. He was drunk.”
“And what did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Not possible to do nothing, not for you,” she said, finishing the biscotti and licking her fingers. “You’ve tried it.”
“I know. I walked away from him.”
“Why?”
“He was sorry.”
“And?”
“He was suffering, has been since he killed her. He’s lost his job, his family, his future,” Lew said.
“Remind you of anyone?”
“Yes.”
“When are you coming back?”
She was now drinking coffee she had poured into a cup from her yellow Thermos.
“Tomorrow, I think.”
“Good. People are looking for you.”
“Tell them I’m coming back tomorrow.”
“Lewis, how do you feel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s consider that progress,” she said. “I’ll let you know how much this call cost when I see you.”
“Wait. Rebecca Strum,” he said.
“I’ve read her books, met her twice at conferences,” said Ann.
The outer door to her office opened. The next client had arrived.
“I met her,” said Lew. “There’s something-”
“A good human being, a troubled human being who is brilliant enough to turn her denial into successful philosophy of coping with the vagaries of life,” said Ann. “I didn’t just make that up. I’m quoting myself from a paper I wrote on her in 1983. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Read one of her books,” said Ann, taking another sip of coffee. “They are filled with vivid memories of horror and inhumanity and the determination to endure.”
“Just what I need.”
“Yes, it is,” said Ann, finishing her coffee. “Goodbye.”
She hung up. So did Lew.
Franco’s friend Manny Lowen was the first officer on the scene. The beefy cop was on the overnight shift, which gave him the opportunity to keep an eye on Franco and Angie’s house. He had been on Maxwell Street about to drive back to the station when the call came through.
Normally, he would have let it go to Abel Rodriguez, but not this time. Manny Lowen knew the address. Besides, he was one hundred percent sure that when he got home, his wife would be on him again about taking in her mother. Heather never raised her voice, never got angry. She just stayed with the case, backed away for a while, a short while, and then came back again till she wore him down, nerve by nerve, guilt by guilt.
Franco was standing on the sidewalk in front of four neighbors and two college kids, one black, the other a kind of Indian or something. They were all looking into the window of the car that, Manny noted, was in almost the same parking spot from where he had rousted Santoro and Aponte-Cruz, who were now dead.
“Manny, hey,” said Franco. “Curse of Cabrini Street. You park here. Look what happens.”
Two old ladies behind them argued while they stared at the dead man half sprawled out of the car, arms out, eyes closed, mouth open.
The old ladies were speaking Italian.
“Anyone here see what happened?” said Manny, turning to face the group.
All the head shakes were negative. Manny knew the routine. If there were a chance the man slumped out of the car was alive, Manny would be working on him, but the deep purple hole in his neck surrounded by slowly drying blood and the open mouth decided it for him. He looked dead. He smelled dead. He was dead. He would wait for the detectives to make it official. Manny would not risk touching something or doing something that might contaminate the scene. Last time he had done that had been eight years ago when he picked up what looked like a silver dollar at a rape scene. The silver dollar was an aluminum foil condom packet. The condom wasn’t in it and the person who owned the packet had left fingerprints that were then under those of Patrolman Emanuel Joshua Lowen.
“You okay, Franco?” Manny asked.
“No,” Franco answered. “These crazy sons of bitches are turning my street into a graveyard. I’m a simple guy, Manny, a simple guy with a simple new mission in life: to kick the crap out of whoever is killing people in front of my house.”
A blue car, revolving light on the roof flashing, pulled up and parked in the middle of the street.
“I’m gonna have to tell them, Franco, about the other night,” Manny said as two detectives drove up. Longworth was short, heavy, white and breathing hard, and Trahairn, who was almost as heavy, was three inches taller than his partner, and in possession of a deep purple birthmark on his neck. They got out of the car slowly. They weren’t in a hurry.
“I know,” said Franco.
The two detectives stepped next to the dead man’s car and looked down at him.
What Franco knew was that Manny would have to tell the detectives, if they didn’t already know, that two men who had parked in this same spot were also dead. He would tell them about talking to Angie and Franco. That would lead to Lew and lots of questions about all these dead people and what Lew had to do with them. Longworth and Trahairn told Manny to do what he already knew he was supposed to do, keep the citizens from touching the car.
The detectives put on white plastic gloves, took out flashlights, reached over the dead man and looked into the car. They popped the trunk with the switch on the floor. Without touching anything, they came to the same conclusion, except for the blood, the car was clean, not even a gum wrapper or a bitten-off fingernail. And, except for one of those plastic spare tires, the trunk was even cleaner. For more, they would have to wait till someone from the crime scene division showed up.
“People walk by and don’t see a dead man on the street?” Longworth asked the crowd.
“He wasn’t on the street,” said Franco. “Not till I opened the door.”
“You have the key?” asked Traihairn.
“Don’t need one,” said Franco, looking across the street where Angie, dressed for work, was standing in the doorway with a cup of coffee in her hand.
“Who’re you?” asked Trahairn.
“Tow-truck driver.”
Lew’s second call from the phone booth at Shoney’s was a little trickier. He couldn’t reverse the charges. He had a pile of quarters piled next to the phone, five dollars in quarters.
“Texas,” said Big Ed when he answered the phone at the Texas Bar amp; Grille in Sarasota.
“Fonesca.”
“You back?”
“No.”
“Things interesting?”
“Yes.”
“You are a payload oil gusher of information, amigo. I’ll get Ames.”
Lew watched a stringy woman in her sixties paying her bill at the cashier’s counter. At her side was a rotund boy about four years old. His hair was thin and the color of corn. His cheeks were pink. His beltless pants were slipping and his principal task was keeping them up. The boy looked at Lew.
“McKinney,” came Ames’s deep raspy voice. “You okay?”
“I’m okay.”
“You find him?”
“Yes.”
“Turn him in? Shoot him? You in jail?”
“No to all three questions.”
Ames knew where the line was between what he should and should not ask his friend.