“Fine,” I said. “Maybe he knows what you’re talking about. You ever read anything by Lonsberg?”
“Me? What has that got to do with this?” asked Rubin.
“It’s a trick question,” I said. “Think about it. Meanwhile, unless you have some papers you want served or someone hires me to serve papers on you, our friendship is over.”
“Maybe not,” said Rubin. “I read Fool’s Love in high school. Required reading.”
“And? Did you like it?”
“No.”
“Did you tell the teacher you didn’t like it?”
“She loved it. I’m not an idiot.”
“Neither am I,” I said and hung up.
My guess was that he wasn’t going to get any confirmation about Lonsberg, Adele, and the missing manuscripts. It was also clear that he made no connection between the dead Bernard Corsello and Adele. If he did, a good reporter would have no trouble tying me to Adele’s recent and unpleasantly dark life.
“Let’s go,” I said, standing.
“Need firepower?” Ames asked.
The last time we had gone to the house in Palmetto Ames had been carrying a very mean shotgun.
“Maybe something small,” I said.
“Got to stop at the Texas,” he said.
“Right. Let’s go, Mickey.”
“Where?” Mickey asked.
“To Palmetto,” I said. “To Adele’s house.”
“She’s not there,” he said emphatically. “She’s not there. She’d never go there.”
Now that he had confirmed to Ames and me where to find Adele, I grabbed my paperback copy of Plugged Nickels and we hurried him out of the office. I closed and locked the door and hustled Mickey to the Taurus. Ames sat with him in the backseat till we got to the Texas Bar and Grille. Mickey, his jaw now swollen to the size of a baseball, suggested the need for the nearest emergency room. He looked at the handle of the back door when Ames got out.
“I can’t go,” he said.
“Because you promised Adele you wouldn’t tell where she was and you’re afraid she’ll be angry.”
“Part of it,” he said. “I just want out right now. This is kidnapping.”
“You can get out,” I said. “Got friends? A place to stay? You need a doctor. We’ll take you to one unless you want to walk. You probably have something broken in your face. Hurt?”
“A lot,” he said, slumping back.
Ames was back quickly. He climbed in next to Mickey and held up a revolver that could well have been picked up as a souvenir after the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
I drove straight up Tamiami past the airport and through the carnival of malls and fast-food shops on both sides. When we passed Cortez in Bradenton, we went straight up Ninth while most of the traffic veered to the right to stay on 41.
The malls became small shops and Mexican tamale stands. There were places with rooms for the night, week, or month, cheap. The migrant Hispanic workers who picked tomatoes a few miles away filled the street in picking and packing season. This wasn’t the season.
We went past the Planetarium and over the bridge across the Manatee River. On the other side was Palmetto. The last time Ames and I had come here, it had been raining. Today the sky was clear.
I had no trouble finding the street and the house where Dwight Hanford had died. It looked a little different. Someone had cleared the yard of beer cans, decaying boxes, and assorted nausea. Where there had been only crumbled stone and shells, there was now grass trying to stay alive. Grass was in a battle with the shells and rock. It looked like the shells and rock were winning.
There was no vehicle parked on the narrow driveway next to the house. Adele was smart. If she was inside, she had probably parked on some side street within running distance but not within sight.
The three of us went to the door. I nudged Mickey ahead of me.
He knocked and called, “Adele.”
No answer.
“Adele, I’m hurt.”
Still no answer. I tried the door. It was open. We stepped in, side by side in the dining room that had no furniture. Nothing. A roach scuttled across the room.
In the middle of the floor was a small pile of paper.
I picked it up. It looked like two very short stories by Lonsberg, complete with his signature. The title of one was “Guilty Pleasures” and the other “He Shall Have Nothing.”
With the stories in one hand, I followed Ames through the almost empty house to the single bedroom. There was a ruffled mattress on the floor in one corner and a note on the mattress. I picked it up and recognized Adele’s writing. It wasn’t signed.
“If I got this right, Mr. F.,” the note said, “Mickey gave me away. Tell him I expected him to and I’m not angry. I expect disappointments. I expect lies. I expect you have the manuscripts in your hand. They aren’t short stories. They are the first twenty pages of two novels. Guilty Pleasures was once five hundred ten pages. It’s now twenty. He Shall Have Nothing was once four hundred thirty-six pages. It’s now twenty. Lonsberg can have these forty pages. That leaves him about a thousand pages to reconstruct, the thousand pages that went out with the garbage two days ago.”
I showed the note to Ames and Mickey. Ames nodded. Mickey looked as if he were about to cry.
“Let’s get Mickey to ER,” I said. “And then we better make a delivery to Conrad Lonsberg.”
11
Things are not always as they seem. Skim milk masquerades as cream.
I don’t remember which Gilbert and Sullivan operetta that’s from but I remember my wife singing it softly in front of the mirror one morning when she was getting into one of her serious suits for the second or third day of a case she was trying. It was a reminder, a mantra for her. I have tried it on myself many times since. It makes more sense each time.
We took Mickey to the ER at Sarasota Memorial and sat in the waiting room while he was being looked at, treated, and then forgotten for about an hour.
While we sat waiting next to a young black woman with two little girls who kept coughing and jiggling, Ames sat back and closed his eyes. I took the paperback copy of Lonsberg’s Plugged Nickels from my pocket and found Chapter Five to read the section Adele had told me to read. I was becoming an odd literary expert on bits and pieces of known and unknown works by Conrad Lonsberg. I read:
He knew something was just a bit tilted to one side from the moment Abel Terelli saw his child for the first time. On the outside the baby looked perfectly normal. The first burp even looked like a smile. But there was an imbalance Abel felt in the not ugly infant being held up by the smiling nurse. Did the nurse smile every time she held up a baby? How many times had this middle-aged nurse smiled at babies and fathers? Was it a real smile? Did the nurse feel that slight tilt inside the child that Abel sensed?
Abel looked at the baby again. No, the tilt, the lack of balance, lay behind those dark eyes that looked about trying to find something or someone on which to focus. They finally found the eyes of her father and Abel, whose imagination was admittedly undisciplined, was confirmed in his opinion that the living, pulsing parts of the baby were not normal.
“Is she all right?” he called to the nurse through the glass window.
“Perfect,” the nurse answered, looking down at the child.
Did the nurse have a checklist of responses? Was “perfect” the best?
Was “fine” something to worry about? What were the other possible answers? “Imperfect, not well, badly damaged.” This was the first day in what Abel Terelli felt, was sure, would be the beginning of that which was worse than a nightmare, the living with a worm of uncertainty that would grow.
Abel was an architect, a creator, a young success, with a beautiful wife, a dark-eyed beautiful child. Then why did the devil, Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Belial, Mastema, the Prince of Darkness, the Lord of Lies, the Accuser, the Evil One, place this child before him? Or was it God testing him? Or was it, as was most likely, the fact that Abel Terelli was slowly, slowly, slowly growing mad?