I got the tire iron from the closet, brought it back to my desk, reached for the telephone and the folder Carl Sebastian had given me. It was almost nine. It felt like a washed-out midnight. I made my call. An answering machine kicked in with a male voice repeating the number and politely asking me to leave a message.
“My name is Lew Fonesca. I’m working for Carl Sebastian. I’d like to speak to Caroline Wilkerson. When she-”
“This is Caroline Wilkerson,” she said, picking up the phone.
Her voice was light, cultured.
“I’d like to talk to you about Melanie Sebastian,” I said.
“Are you all right, Mr…?”
“Fonesca,” I said. “Aside from suffering from depression and having recently been punched in the stomach by a very big man, I’m fine.”
“Have you been drinking?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Forgive me. I’m a little under the weather and the moon is full.”
“You have been drinking,” she said with irritation.
“No. I’m sober and I’m looking for Melanie Sebastian. Mr. Sebastian suggested that I talk to you.”
The pause at her end was long. I tried not to gasp from the pain as I waited.
“Cafe Kaldi, tomorrow morning at nine,” she said.
“Sounds fine,” I said, fairly sure that I would be in no condition to work out at the Y.
“And Mr. Fonesca, please leave your sense of humor, if that’s what it is, at home.”
“I’ll do that, Mrs. Wilkerson,” I said.
We hung up.
I thought of Sally Porovsky at her desk brushing back her hair, adjusting her glasses. I didn’t want to think about Sally Porovsky. I had her card. I had her phone number. I thought about calling her and making an excuse and forgetting about seeing her tomorrow for dinner. I pulled the card from my wallet, looked at it, put it down on the desk and knew I was going to go through with it. I made a few notes in my file on Adele. There was a lot to write. I kept it simple.
I watched an old tape of The Prince and the Pauper. The tire iron lay next to my bed. A bottle of Advil kept it company. I wondered what happened to the Mauch twins who starred in the movie. I wondered, but not enough to find out.
I wondered about my guardian angel. Who had sent him to protect me? Why? I heard my grandfather’s mandolin. He was playing “Darktown Strutter’s Ball,” one of his favorites.
When the twins stopped smiling at the end of the movie, I leaned back and fell asleep. One of my recurrent dreams came deep but with a new twist. My wife’s car was driving in the right-hand lane. Night. She was heading home. The water of Lake Michigan off to her left. I was there. Standing in the median strip, watching her come toward me. A pickup truck suddenly appeared, red, fast, hit her hard crushing her car a few feet in front of me. The pickup sped past. The driver was Dwight Handford. He was smiling at me like the Mauch Twins.
6
Putting on my jeans and a loose-fitting black T-shirt was painful now that the punch to my stomach from Dwight Handford had settled in. I’ve been punched before, usually when I delivered or attempted to deliver a summons to someone who decided that since I was the only one available, he or she would take out their wrath on me.
I had learned that showing a gun wouldn’t stop an infuriated recipient from attack. I had tried the gun bit- using an unloaded weapon-once when it looked as if the large Hispanic man standing in his doorway with the summons I had delivered in his hand was going to do something angry, violent and out of control. He had spat at the gun, taken it from me and tried to shoot me. When it didn’t fire, he threw it at me, hitting me in the face. He had then run into his apartment shouting in Spanish and looking, I was sure, for something lethal-at the very least a large knife. I picked up the gun and ran like hell to my car. Eight stitches later, I vowed never to try the gun bit again.
I pushed the chair out form under the doorknob and, carrying the tire iron at my side, went outside, where I was greeted by a small lizard on the metal railing. He cocked his head in my direction. Nothing new about lizards in Florida. There were usually three or four scuttling along the concrete and the railing. This one seemed to sense that things were a little different this morning. He looked at me, puffed out the sac under his neck, and watched as I made my way down to the rest room, each step a painful reminder of the reality of the previous night.
The rest room could only be opened by a key, or so I had been told. Once in a while, when the weather really got bad, meaning heavy rain, I found a homeless man curled up under the sink. There was no one in there this morning. I laid my tire iron across the sink, shaved, washed, brushed my teeth and looked at my face. I am not formidable. I thought about Sally Porovsky and tried out a smile. It wasn’t hideous, but it wasn’t winning. I’m not ugly. I’ve been called pleasant, plain, interesting. My wife always said I had hidden appeal, Mediterranean hidden appeal.
My grandparents on my father’s side had met in Viareggio, not far from Florence. My grandfather had been a waiter. My grandmother had been a chef’s assistant. They came to the United States in 1912 and made their way to Chicago, where they opened a small neighborhood restaurant on the Northwest Side. They were officially retired by the time I was born. My maternal grandparents came from Rome. My mother’s father was a reporter for a newspaper. My maternal grandmother worked at a bakery near the newspaper office. When they came to America, she stayed at home and had children and my grandfather split his time between working as a furniture upholsterer and writing for an Italian-language newspaper. He had a political column and a bad temper.
When my parents married, they left the Catholic Church and became Episcopalians. I don’t know why. They have never told me, and when I asked, as a child or an adult, they said the equivalent of “Some things are personal, even for parents.”
There are times I’ve thought of becoming a Catholic like my grandparents, but I’ve never had the religious calling. It just seemed like something I might want to do, which is not a good reason for becoming a Catholic. It is probably a good reason for going to a basketball game or ordering a banana split, but a bad idea for becoming a Catholic.
I tucked my soap, toothbrush and Bic razor in a desk drawer and, tire iron in hand, went down to the Metro. Getting in was painful. Getting out after finding a parking space on Main Street was even more painful. I didn’t take the tire iron with me to the Cafe Kaldi.
Caroline Wilkerson was already there. I had no trouble finding her even though the coffeehouse tables were full. She sat alone inside, not at one of the outside tables, an open notebook in front of her, a pair of half-glasses perched on the end of her nose. She was writing in a large notebook. A cup of coffee rested nearby. I recognized her from the society pages of the Herald — Tribune. I picked up a cheese and onion croissant and a large coffee and made my way back to her table. I didn’t want to bite my lower lip when I sat, but my sore plexus insisted.
When I sat across from her, she looked at me over her glasses, took them off, folded her hands on the table and gave me her attention.
The widow Caroline was a beauty, better in person than in the papers. She was probably in her late forties or early fifties, with short, straight silver hair, a wrinkle-free face with full red lips that reminded me of Joan Fontaine. If she had spent time with a plastic surgeon, the surgeon had done one hell of a good job.
She wore a pink silky blouse with a pearl necklace and pearl earrings and a lightweight white jacket and no friendly smile.
“Mr. Fonesca?”
“Yes,” I said.
She nodded and took a sip of her coffee.
“She didn’t. No way,” someone said.
A pretty girl with long blond hair and a silver ring through her left nostril had uttered the words of disbelief. The girl began to laugh. So did the girl with short dark hair with her and the boy with a little beard and a baseball cap worn backward.