“Lew, Ruthie, the kids, what are you going to do?” asked Holiger, sitting back, eyes closed, rubbing his forehead with his fingers.
“What are you going to do?” asked Lew.
He hadn’t touched his coffee or the muffin. Franco was standing next to the table now.
“I don’t know,” said Holiger. “I’m not going to shoot myself or jump off the Sears Tower if that’s what you’re hinting at. There are too many people dead in the last few days. You know why, Lewis?”
“Yes, because I came back to town.”
“Okay, I’ll turn myself in, plead… I don’t know what.”
“Not going to eat that, Lewis?” Franco said.
Lew shook his head no. Franco picked up the muffin.
Lew stood up. Franco saw the bullet on top of the unfolded bank statement.
“I’ll call Dupree tomorrow,” said Holiger. “I want to tell Ruthie first.”
Franco looked puzzled.
“What?” he asked. “What’s goin’ on?”
Holiger looked up at Franco and then at Lew and said, “Watch the ten o’clock news tomorrow.”
Lew walked past tables toward the door, Franco at his side. Franco bumped into the table where two black men wearing identical blue long-sleeved turtle-necked sweaters swept up their coffee cups before they spilled. Franco excused himself. Lew looked back at Milt Holiger, who was staring down at the bullet.
“Mind telling me what that was all about?” Franco said.
“I’m going home,” said Lew.
And after the family dinner that night, he did.
Stuart M. Kaminsky
Always Say Goodbye: A Lew Fonesca Mystery
14
To Lew’s right on the Southwest Airlines flight to Tampa, a woman in her thirties, large, heavy, was trying to untie a knot around a package wrapped in blue paper. She kept pushing her slipping glasses back on her nose and mumbling to herself as she struggled.
Lew was on the aisle, eyes closed, seeing dead people.
On the other side of the mumbling woman was a young man in an orange T-shirt. The young man’s arms were folded, his green baseball cap pulled down over his closed eyes.
“I don’t want to tear it. I don’t want to tear it. I’m not going to tear it,” the woman mumbled.
Lew opened his eyes. Through the window past the three people across the aisle, he could see a forever of darkness pricked with tiny white pulsing stars.
“Oh, God,” said the woman, leaning back and placing the package on her lap while she reenergized to continue her battle with the string. “What’s inside? What’s inside? What’s inside?”
“A book,” said Lew.
He regretted his two words before he had even finished getting them out. The woman had turned her head and was tight-lipped.
“It’s supposed to be a surprise,” she said. “He said it was a surprise. Now you’ve goddamn spoiled it.”
“I do that sometimes,” Lew said.
“Trying to be funny? That it? Stand-up comedian wannabe?”
“No,” said Lew.
“Okay, do something useful, George Carlin. Untie the knot.”
She handed him the package.
A flight attendant, the sleeves of her white blouse rolled up, came quickly down the aisle, smiling as she passed. Lew thought she looked tired. Wary? Terrorists? Crazy people? Drunks? Turbulence? Rockets from the ground? Every flight brought down the odds for her. But then, Lew thought, every day brings down the odds for all of us.
“Can you untie it or not?” the woman said.
Then she suddenly brightened, a smile on her face.
“Hey, can you untie it or knot? Get it? Not like with a k in front not n-o-t. ”
“Yes,” said Lew, working on the string.
The young man in the orange T-shirt and green cap shifted and turned his back on the woman and Lew.
Lew untied the string and handed the package back.
“My fingers,” she said. “Too short, too stubby, for which I blame my mother who has them too.”
“It could be something worse,” said Lew.
“Could be?” said the woman, carefully pulling back the paper. “It is worse.”
She folded the paper carefully, placed it in the pouch on the back of the seat in front of her and looked down at a paperback copy of Heart of Darkness. She put her right hand on the book and sobbed.
“That sun-diddly son of a bitch.” She looked at Lew. “He remembered. We had to read this back when we were in second year of high school. I hated the damn thing. But he liked it. You know what?”
“No.”
“I’m gonna keep this book, and the paper in my handbag,” she said. “Carry around something from someone you love and you hope-to-hell loves you even if he’s not there for you and never will be. You know what I mean?”
Lew’s hand was in his pocket, touching Catherine’s wedding band on his key chain.
“Yes,” he said.
The woman leaned forward and looked out the window past the sleeping or pretending-to-sleep young man.
“Almost there,” she said. “That’s Tampa.”
“Almost there,” Lew agreed. He closed his eyes and thought about a conversation only hours old.
Angie had wanted to have the family over. Lew could leave the next day. Franco had agreed. Angie had looked at her brother’s face and understood.
“Okay,” she had said, taking his right hand in both of hers.
“What’s okay?” asked Franco. “Uncle Tonio’s gonna be here, Maria and the kids, Jamie…”
“Next time,” Angie had said.
“Next time,” Lew had agreed.
It was close to midnight when Lew pulled the rental car into a space at the rear of the DQ on 301. He would ask Dave if he could leave it there for a while. If Lew didn’t think of someone to give it to in the next few days, he would call a charity that takes vehicles and have it hauled away. There were advantages to having the Saturn, but he could think of only one, ready transportation. There were lots of negatives, including responsibility for keeping it running, feeding it gas, getting a vehicle tag. There would be the resistible temptation to drive when he should walk or use his bike. There would also be the resistible temptation to keep the vehicle clean.
Tonight was sleep. Tonight was doors locked and darkness.
When he opened the door and flicked on the light, he was aware, probably for the first time, of how bare the space was. Three folding chairs, small desk with ping dents and one empty lone wire box on it for letters, and on the wall, the painting. Tonight was sleep.
He went to the painting, stood in front of it. Not long, a few seconds, enough to refresh his memory. Darkness shrouded mountains and the lone spot of color. Stopping to look at the painting had become not a compulsion but a ritual. For the first time, he realized that. Don’t think about it. Tonight was sleep.
He turned off the light, made his way to the small room off of the office, clicked on the floor lamp and looked at the cell in which he lived. Cot. Television. VHS player. His few clothes on hangers in the closet and in the low unpainted three-drawer dresser against the wall. Everything was neat. Order. Keep one small space clean. Order. He put down his bag, put his dirty clothes in the small wicker basket in the closet, placed the book Angie and Franco had given him on the wooden chair next to his bed alongside the black traveling clock with the relentless red numbers. He took off his clothes, folded them neatly on the waist-high closet shelf Ames had built and pulled on his oversize Shell T-shirt. Then he turned out the light and got into bed, but not under the thin khaki blanket. Tonight was sleep.
But he did not sleep. They weren’t ghosts. They weren’t vivid memories. They were part of him. Everything that happens, every moment spent became, he felt certain, part of him. Dreams, movies, imagination, distorted and real memories. All took up bits of the real time of his life, were as much a part of him as a chocolate cherry Blizzard. He let the dreams and thoughts come, beginning and ending with Catherine.