No one screamed. No one jumped up. The only voice was Franco’s saying, “Holy shit.” For an instant, the only movement was Franco’s, who crossed himself.
Then Lew got up, leaned over the blood-covered face. The two sons knocked over their chairs and went to kneel and weep in their father’s blood. Franco stood behind them. At the far end of the table, Bernice Pappas said, “I didn’t make any desert.”
“She knew,” said Dimitri. “She knew he was going to do this. Why the hell did he do this?”
He looked at his dead father, then at his brother and finally at Lew.
“What did you say to him? What did he say to you?” asked Stavros.
“The sky is falling,” said Lew.
Stavros stood up and said, “Dimitri, get Grandma to her room, give her one of her sleeping pills. No, give her two.” Dimitri rose, looked back at his father’s torn face and hurried to his grandmother.
“You two,” Stavros said. “You don’t have to be part of this. Go.”
Franco placed a hand on Pappas’s neck to be sure he was dead and then stood.
“He shot himself in the same eye as me,” said Stavros quietly while his brother coaxed his grandmother from her chair at the other end of the table. “Why don’t I feel anything?”
Lew knew, but he didn’t say. Stavros would have to make his own deal with his father’s ghost.
Stuart M. Kaminsky
Always Say Goodbye: A Lew Fonesca Mystery
13
At five minutes to three, Franco dropped Lew in front of Dunkin’ Donuts and went to park the truck. The sky grumbled an introduction to a promise or threat of rain. At a newsstand four doors away, two men stood arguing. Lew stopped. He recognized one of the men. The one he didn’t recognize had a round belly, blue sweatshirt, rolled-up sleeves and arms moving to the beat of his anger. The angry man pointed a threatening thick finger at the sidewalk as he said, “Right here. Right now. You got a brother could help you. Fine. Get him here fast so I can lay him on his ass and get back to work.”
The man he was talking to was about the same height as the angry man but from another world. His belly was still under control. He wore a dark suit with a tightly knit, loosely wrapped purple tie. The tie had little spots of sunlike orange. His hands were folded against his chest and he neither turned his head nor lashed out at the raving man who was in his face.
People flowed around them. No one had yet struck a blow, no one had addressed the passing crowd.
“What’s it about?” a slouching man in a well-worn khaki Army surplus topcoat asked Lew.
The man was black, in need of a shave or a good beard trim. He pulled and shifted from leg to leg as if he were cold and tugged at his dirty red watch cap. At the side of the watch cap was an orange T.
“So waddya gonna do about it?” the hairy man said.
“You from Tennessee?” Lew asked the man next to him.
“Been there, been there,” the man in cap said sagely, “but born right here in Detroit.”
“We’re in Chicago,” said Lew.
The man in the cap looked around at the buildings, the street signs, the people and said, “Chicago? I need to wake up and call Leanne. Leanne, that’s my daughter. She lives here in…”it
“Chicago.”
“Yes. You see I’ve been a little under the weather since the war.”
“Which war?” Lew asked as the hairy man began to poke the well-dressed man in the chest with a finger.
“Pick two, your choice,” said the man with the cap, hunching up his shoulders, hands in his pockets, moving from foot to foot. “World War Two, Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Kosovo, Afghanistan, good old Iraq, some secret places I couldn’t even pronounce when I was there and a couple I never knew the name of. Pick two and I’ll jab them in your eyes like Moe in the Three Stooges.”
The hairy man was inches from the well-dressed man now. The hairy man was now shouting, insisting, “Cash, now, all of it.”
“I didn’t take your newspaper,” the well-dressed man said calmly.
People were pausing now. Something was about to happen. It had to. The hairy man became aware of the gatherers and tried to up the language ante.
“You have taken that which is rightfully mine,” he said, face turning red. He slapped his open fist against his chest, making a thumping sound like that of King Kong.
“This paper is mine,” the well-dressed man said calmly, wearily. “Brought it from home this morning.”
“I saw you take it, you lying son of a bitch.”
The hairy man’s spittle sprayed the other man, but the other man showed no emotion.
“You’re wrong,” said the well-dressed man.
The hairy man swung a brick-sized right fist at the other man’s head. The well-dressed man stepped to his right and the hairy man’s momentum took him into the unwelcoming arms of a couple from Duluth celebrating their fifty-ninth anniversary.
“Just like on the television,” said the man in the red cap. “Someone ought to help that fella.”
Lew wasn’t sure which “fella” he was supposed to help.
The hairy man, fists clenched, making growling sounds, was striding toward the man in the suit. The man in the suit didn’t move.
“Which one?” asked Lew.
“Which one? Donald Trump with a good haircut, that’s who? I’d bet you a buck against him if I had a buck.”
“You’d be picking a loser,” said Lew.
“You know somethin’ I don’ know, right?”
“Right,” said Lew.
“Well, I know other stuff you don’t know.”
“I’m sure,” said Lew as the hairy man moved in.
“Just this A.M., over by the drain over there at Navy Pier, a guy named H. Lee zwooped a knife right into the arm of another guy name of Crazy Proof, on account he carries an old shit-up piece of paper says he’s crazy. How’s your day, man?”
The hairy man was moving slowly now, determined to end the show, satisfy the onlookers.
“I had a nice lunch and watched a guy shoot himself in the head,” said Lew.
The man in the cap nodded knowingly and said, “I seen stuff like that too. Guy named Willie, Silly Willie they called him, jumped off a roof. Splatter, you wouldn’t believe ’less you saw it. Your guy? Lot’s of blood?”
“Lots of blood.”
The hairy guy feinted with his body, shouted, “Newspaper!” and threw his weight into a decent right cross. The well-dressed man grabbed the lunger’s sleeve as he punched and helped his momentum carry the man through a space made by the crowd.
The hairy man landed on his face, tried to get to his knees, groaned and looked around. He had temporarily lost track of time and space. The fight was over without a punch landing. The crowd clearly felt cheated. The man in the red knit cap said, “Well, least we didn’t pay for a ticket.”
“Small blessings,” said Lew.
“Amen, brother. You think you might…”
Lew fished a handful of change from his pocket and handed it to the man.
The crowd was almost gone. The well-dressed man was helping the dazed gladiator to his feet, being careful not to cover himself in blood.
“Thank you,” said the red-capped man.
“What were you before?” Lew asked.
“Before what? Oh, first a soldier and then I was a very bad preacher of bootlegged and distorted meanderings randomly recalled from the Holy Bible.”
The man in the suit was steadying the bleeding man with one hand and speaking to him softly. The bleeding man nodded in understanding as he stained Jackson Street.
“Whomsoever will take my hand,” the man in the cap suddenly bellowed. “So shall he walk with me through the valley of monsters and devils and emerge on the path to a bright eternity. And that is no shit.”
People were not attracted by his call to salvation.
“I still got it,” the man said, smiling. “Haven’t done that in years. Feels good. Come on. Get down. Feels good. Feels good.”
“It doesn’t feel good,” said Lew.
“Give it half a shot.”
“It’s not in me.”
The man in the knit cap plunged his hands into his coat pockets, backed away and looked at Lew saying, “I see that now.”