“The phone,” I said.
“We have no phone.”
Dorsey sat cross-legged on the floor cradling his dead wife’s head in his lap. The dust in the house and the taste of death got to me. I went for the door and into the sun. The bright day had gotten brighter. The warm sun had grown hot and the children across the street had stopped jumping rope and were looking at me, probably wondering about the gunshot but maybe not too surprised to hear it in this neighborhood.
Ames came out behind me holding Dorsey’s weapon by the barrel.
“You got a phone?” I asked.
“Sure, yes,” said the girls.
“Go call the police. Nine-one-one. Tell them there’s been a shooting at…” I turned my head to look at the number on the house. “Three six two Collier. Can you do that?”
“Sure,” said the tallest girl.
She turned and ran into the nearest house. One of the remaining girls called, “Anybody dead?”
“Most of the people who ever lived,” I said.
Before the Vanaloosa police arrived, Ames hid his gun in some bushes behind the Dorsey house. Then we came back and we waited. The police were in no hurry to get to this neighborhood. When two policemen in their thirties, one black, one white, trying to show that cop look that said, “I’ve seen it all,” arrived, Ames turned Dorsey’s gun over to them and they were careful not to touch the grip.
“Didn’t want to leave it where he could get at it,” I explained.
He nodded, looking down at the dead woman and the pleading face of the old man on the floor.
“She’s a big one,” the cop whispered, turning back to us. “What happened?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “Mr. Cleveland was a friend of my father back in…”
“This your father?” he asked, looking at Ames and noting the clear differences between us.
“No, Mr. Minor is just a friend. My father asked me to stop in and say hello. We’re headed up to Chicago. We could hear noises when we got to the porch and then a shot. We went in and found them like that.”
I nodded at the tableau on the floor.
Dorsey was too far out of it to contradict me or pay any attention. He had been waiting and planning to go mad for almost half his lifetime. His moment had come.
“That the way it was, Mr. Cleveland?” the policeman asked.
Dorsey shook his head “yes,” tears in his eyes.
“You shoot her, sir?” he asked.
“I shot her,” Dorsey agreed.
The young policeman closed his notebook.
“We’ll leave the rest for a detective,” he said.
“We can stay around town for a day or so if you need us,” I lied. If we didn’t have to give up our names or anything that might lead them to us, I had no intention of being anywhere but Sarasota by that night.
“Wouldn’t think so,” the young cop said. “You didn’t actually see him shoot?”
“No,” I lied.
“Then…” the cop said with a shrug. “This kind of thing happens around here, only they’re not usually white and sometimes it’s the husband who gets it and most times it’s not as clean as this.”
I said nothing. Both cops talked for a while.
“All right if we leave?” I asked.
“You know next of kin, any family?” he asked.
” ‘Fraid not,” I said with regret. “Just a name and an address where I was supposed to stop and say hi.”
The cop turned his back on us and looked down at the weeping Dorsey. Ames and I walked to the door at a normal pace and tried to keep from running when we got outside.
One of the little girls, the one who had telephoned, asked, “She dead?”
“She’s dead,” I said, getting in.
“Ding dong, the witch is dead,” one of the girls behind her said. It gave them all an idea. They picked up their rope. This time one of the smaller girls jumped while all three chanted the song from The Wizard of Oz turning it almost into rap.
We were back in Sarasota by nightfall. We stopped twice. Once to get gas, another time to pick up a sack of tacos and drinks from a Taco Bell. We didn’t say a word on the way back. I dropped Ames at the Texas with his duffel lighter by one gun.
“Sorry about the gun,” I said.
“I’ll go back for it maybe someday,” he said. “Maybe not. I guess maybe not.”
I parked in the DQ lot and crossed the street to the Crisp Dollar Bill. The place was fairly crowded, at least for the Crisp Dollar Bill. About a dozen people, drinking, talking, laughing, looking up every once in a while at a tennis match. B. B. King was singing “Ain’t That Just like a Woman” above the soundless television as I sat in a booth, not my usual one. That was taken. I was in the one in front of it.
Billy gave me a questioning look and I returned an answering one. He brought me a Beck’s.
“Crazy Marvin’s been looking for you,” he said.
I nodded “yes” and drank some beer. When I looked up a few minutes later, Marvin Uliaks entered, spotted me, and moved forward eagerly to sit across from me.
“Figured I’d find you here when you weren’t in your office. Saw that black car you been riding parked at the Dairy Queen.”
“You figured right,” I said.
“Any luck, Mr. Fonesca?” he asked, squirming.
“Not for Vera Lynn,” I said. “She’s dead.”
“What?”
“You’re too late, Marvin,” I said. “You can’t kill her. She’s dead.”
“Kill her?” he asked, those eyes wide with confusion. “I didn’t want to kill her, Mr. Fonesca. I wanted to tell her I forgave her, about Sarah. I was bad to Vera Lynn a long time ago. I was dumb. I said some bad things to her and Charlie Dorsey. I just wanted to find her and tell her I was sorry. All these years. I didn’t know how to find her. I just wanted to forgive her.”
“For what she did to Sarah?” I asked over a burst of laughter at the bar and B. B. King now doing “Early in the Morning.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Now I lost two sisters, Mr. Fonesca. Sarah and Vera Lynn. I lost ‘em.”
I looked at Marvin and I could see from his battered face that he was telling the truth. Charles and Vera Lynn Dorsey had spent two decades running away from nothing but their own guilt.
“I guess I got no sisters now,” Marvin said.
“You’ve got change coming, Marvin,” I said, pulling out my wallet.
He put his hand on top of mine to stop me.
“No favoring,” he reminded me.
I put my wallet back in my pocket.
“Let me buy you a drink,” I said.
“Just a Pepsi will do,” said Marvin, sitting up with dignity. “You got any sisters, Mr. Fonesca?”
“No,” I said, trying to get Billy’s attention behind the bar.
“Too bad,” said Marvin softly. “Too bad.”
I hardly heard him. The air was full of music.
14
When I got back to my place, the answering machine told me I had three messages. I couldn’t listen to them. I went into my room, took off my clothes, put on clean underwear, and went to bed. I fell asleep, waking in the morning from a nightmare I couldn’t fully remember though I knew it had something to do with a huge inflated white balloon chasing me on a beach. The ringing of my phone woke me from the dream as something punctured the balloon. The balloon was still screaming as the phone rang.
The answering machine kicked in and I could hear Adele’s voice. I got up quickly but was too late. She had hung up after a very short message.
I fast-forwarded past the three messages before it and heard Adele’s voice say, “Lew, I read the paper yesterday morning. Meet me at Spanish Point at noon.”
My watch said it was a little after eight and the sun coming through the window confirmed the fact. I turned to the window and saw Digger’s face pressed against it. Being pressed against the glass actually improved his battered features. He was squinting in, looking toward me, leaving fingerprints on the window. I scratched my head and still in my underwear opened the door.
“Is this a bad time?” he said.
“It’s a bad day,” I said, heading back to my answering machine.
“I brought you somethin’,” he said, reaching into his pocket.