“Are you in pain, Mr. Fonesca? You look…”
“Minor accident,” I said. “I wasn’t looking and I ran into something. Do you know that Melanie Sebastian is missing?”
“If I didn’t know,” she said, lifting her glasses so they rested on top of her head and closing her notebook, “I wouldn’t be here talking to you. Carl Sebastian called me. He was frantic. Almost in tears. I couldn’t help him. Melanie hasn’t contacted me. I would have thought, as Carl did, that if Melanie did something like this, she’d get in touch with me. I told Carl to call the police. Melanie might have been hurt. She could even be…”
I drank some coffee and took a bite of the croissant. It was pretty good. I really wanted an egg.
“Did they fight?” I asked. “Could that be the reason she ran away?”
“Why don’t you ask Carl?”
“Spouses sometimes don’t want to face certain truths.”
“Yes, I know,” she said.
The trio at the table next to ours laughed. Caroline Wilkerson looked at them somewhat wistfully for an instant and then back to me.
“Fight? The Sebastians?” I reminded her.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “But I can’t be certain. Carl said nothing about a fight and I don’t recall ever seeing them fight or hearing from Melanie that they fought. I’m very worried about her, Mr. Fonesca.”
“Any idea of where she might have gone?”
The pause was long. She bit her lower lip and made up her mind and sighed.
“Geoffrey Green,” she said softly, meeting my eyes. “He’s her analyst and… I think that’s all I can say.”
“Carl Sebastian thinks his wife and Dr. Green might have had an affair, that she may have left to be with him.”
She shrugged.
“I’ve heard rumors that Geoff Green is…”
“Homosexual,” I supplied.
“Bisexual,” she amended.
“You can’t think of anyplace else she might have gone to, anyone else she might be with?”
“No, but I’ll think about it.”
I had finished my croissant and coffee and got up slowly. I handed her one of my cards.
“If you hear from Mrs. Sebastian,” I said, “would you tell her that her husband just wants to talk to her. If she doesn’t want to talk to him, I’d like to talk to her. She can call me at that number. I won’t try to talk her into anything she doesn’t want to do.”
“I hope you find her,” Caroline Wilkerson said. “Melanie has had problems recently, depression. One of her relatives, her only close relative, a cousin I think, recently died. That’s hardly a reason for
… who knows? Frankly, I don’t know what to make of all this.”
At the moment, that made two of us.
“Are you permitted to let me know if you find out anything about where Melanie is and why she’s-”
I must have been shaking my head no, because she stopped.
“I’m sorry,” she said with a sad smile, showing perfect white teeth. “That’s what I would expect if you were working for me.”
When I got to the coffeehouse door, I looked back at Caroline Wilkerson. Her half-glasses were back on and her notebook was open.
Back in the DQ parking lot, I parked the Metro and went to the window for a burger, fries and a chocolate/ cherry Blizzard. It was still early. There was no line. Dawn, an almost nothing of a woman, was behind the window, freshly aproned, smiling.
“Dave not in yet?” I asked after she took my order.
“On the boat,” she said. “Workin’ on it at least. Said he had the need. And I can use the extra hours.”
Dawn was probably in her early thirties and had two small kids, but she looked like a pre-teen. She was sad in the eyes but fresh-faced and never wore makeup. Dave said she had been through a tough time. He let her and her boys live rent free in his one-bedroom rental house off of Orange and north of downtown. With the money she made at the DQ and an additional hundred a month she got from cleaning houses, she got by.
“Ever hear of a guy named Dwight, Dwight Handford or Dwight Prescott?” I asked her over the buzz of the machine as she worked on my Blizzard.
“Know a couple of Dwights,” she said. “But not those two.”
“It’s one guy who uses different names.”
“What’s he look like?”
I told her.
She came to the second window, Blizzard in one hand, burger and fries in a bag.
“Rings a cowbell,” she said. “I’ll think on it.”
I nodded, took my food to one of the red picnic tables covered by a gray and red Coca-Cola umbrella and tried to think while I ate and watched the cars and trucks speed down 301. My stomach hurt with the first shock of cold. Dwight had done a very good job with one punch. I was careful from that point on, but I was determined to finish the drink.
Across the street, a man and a boy in his teens who should have been in school walked into the acupuncture center under the dance studio. On a really quiet day when the traffic was light on this urban stretch of 301, I could even hear the music while I ate at Dave’s. My favorites, which they played over and over, were Eydie Gorme singing “La Ultima Noche,” an orchestral verson of “The Vienna Waltz,” and Tony Bennett singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” People were dancing in the window now. One of the instructors, a thin man with a small, well-trimmed beard, was demonstrating something Latin. He had one hand up in the air and the other on his stomach. His eyes were closed and an old couple were holding hands and watching. I couldn’t hear the music.
There was a tire shop on one side of the acupuncture building and then to the left as I faced it stood a trailer-supply store and then the bar called the Crisp Dollar Bill. On the other side of the bar was the dance studio I could see from my office window. I had never been in the bar. Dave told me that it had been called the Dugout before the White Sox moved their training camp.
“Mr. F.,” Dawn called.
I looked over at her framed in the window.
“Mr. F., I may be nuts or so, but I saw that guy you asked me about, least I think it was him. Could have been. He parked in the lot ‘bout an hour back. Pickup truck with one of those things, you know, for hauling cars. Got out and looked around. I remember him ’cause he didn’t buy anything, just stood around. Morning breakfast was busy. Then he was here, got a coffee, took it off and…”
There was no pickup truck in the parking lot. I took a final bite of my burger, got up as quickly as I could and dumped my early lunch in the garbage can.
“I think I’m wrong, Mr. F.,” she said.
I looked toward the back of the lot and up at my office door.
“I think you’re right. Thanks, Dawn,” I said.
I went past the Geo and headed for the steps, past the spot where Dwight had come out of the bushes. He could have reparked the pickup and waited in his familiar spot. There was no Dwight now. Dawn could have been wrong, but I had a pain in my stomach and a wish for a tire iron that said she wasn’t.
The slightly open door to my office made me sure.
Dwight had probably just looked around, seen no one watching and, when Dawn wasn’t paying attention, come up the stairs and thrown his shoulder against the door. It was no match for him. I stepped in. The lights were on. Dwight had trashed the place, not that there was much to trash. I pushed the door shut. It stayed in place. Drawers were on the floor. The desktop had been swept away. Papers, an empty glass, business cards and things I didn’t remember having were all over the floor. I moved to the other room. Nothing had been touched.
Dwight hadn’t been there just to give me a warning. If he had, he would have caved in the front of my TV with the tire iron that now lay on the floor in the doorway. Conclusion: Dwight had been looking for something, something he found. As far as I knew, the only thing I had that Dwight wanted was the file I kept on Adele. It was on the floor with other debris. I had made a note in it that I had taken Beryl to Flo Zink’s