Stuart Kaminsky - Bright Futures

“You ever play the Music Man?” I asked.

“Yes, dinner theater. You want me to sing ‘Seventy-Six Trombones’?”

“Maybe later.”

“How’s the investigation going? Corkle wants to know.”

“I’m working on it.”

“I know. You’re in the home of one of Philip Horvecki’s few friends.”

I looked at Zo who, with pursed lips, appeared to be deciding if a burp were in order.

“My eye aches,” said Augustine.

“I’m sorry. You should take something for it.”

“I am. I’ve got a container of painkillers that begin with the letter B. Make my life easier. Tell Corkle you can’t find anything so I can go back to simply taking care of his nuttiness. I’m in pain and may never have three-dimensional vision again. I’m in desperate need of a Corkle Pocket Fishing Machine.”

“You are?”

“No, but I still seem to have something resembling a sense of humor.”

“I don’t have a sense of humor,” I said.

“It’s my turn to be sorry. Do we understand each other? Do we share the common language of English? Corkle wants to protect his grandson from anyone who might be unhappy about his paying you to look for an alternative to jolly Ronnie Gerall. We’ve been over this.”

“We have. Can I buy you a cup of coffee or a sandwich?” I asked. “The Hob Nob is five minutes away. Great sandwiches.”

“I’m supposed to be threatening you,” Augustine said. “I can’t do it if you feel sorry for me and offer me coffee and sandwiches. Tell the little man I’m sorry.”

“For what?” I asked.

“Playing the role,” he said.

Augustine turned off his phone before I could ask him what he meant. I turned back to Zo Hirsch. It couldn’t have been more than ten seconds later that a rock came through the window, showering the room with glass. I turned to the window again and watched Augustine drive out of sight to the metallic clank of a piece of dragging undercarriage.

I handed the phone back to the stunned Zo Hirsch who seemed to be baffled by the gift. Then he hung it up.

“What did he do that for?” Zo asked.

“His job,” I said. “Sorry.”

“His job is to throw… forget it. It’s just another piece of crap thrown at me.”

“Want another beer?” Hirsch asked, looking at the rock near his feet.

“No thanks, but I do have a question.”

“Ask.”

“You were a friend of Philip Horvecki?” I said.

“Phil the Pill, Phil the Eel,” he said, sitting down in what appeared to be his favorite chair. “Much beloved by all who knew him. He was almost a saint.”

He looked at me and waited.

“I’m lying,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

“Phil Horvecki was an asshole.”

“You weren’t friends?”

“He was on the bowling team I manage,” said Zo. “Zo’s Foes. Phil Horvecki was a man of many alibis, always ready to criticize the play of others. He will be easily replaced. I wish he had had a funeral so I could stand up and say it. Rest in peace you A-number-one asshole. I did have an occasional beer with him and some of the other bowlers. Small group got together at Bennigan’s on Monday nights after our league games.”

“Was he friendly with any of the bowlers?”

Zo was smiling now.

“The cost of further information is your forgetting to deliver your papers till the end of the week.”

“What papers?” I said.

“Just me,” said Zo. “But I wouldn’t call the relationship friendly. We shmoozled.”

“Shmoozled?”

“Talked.”

“About?”

“Who knows? We have a deal?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“He told me about people he had cheated out of property. He didn’t think it was cheating. He went after old people, mostly.”

“Old people who might want to kill him?”

“Old people who have sons or daughters who might be mad enough to do some killing. Phil the Pill had a restraining order against two such offspring who threatened to kill him.”

“You know their names?”

“No,” he said. “I’ve been dreaming about my wife. Bad dreams.”

I moved toward the door.

“Ever meet Horvecki’s daughter?” I asked.

“Once,” he said. “She stopped by the bowling alley and just sat there watching. Skinny thing. Big scared eyes. I didn’t talk to her. Horvecki didn’t even introduce her, just said, ‘My daughter,’ once when he saw me looking.”

“How did he say it?”

“Say what? ‘My daughter’? I don’t know. Almost as if he were apologizing or something.”

I had no response, so he continued as I opened the door.

“I’ve been thinking about killing Vezquez, but there are too many damned Vesquezes out there and too much killing.”

“The phone book probably has a couple of columns of Vezquezes,” I said.

“I don’t mean people named… forget it. Leave me with my thoughts of Roberto Clemente.”

I offered to help him clean up the mess, but Zo just looked at it and said, “I’ll take care of it.”

“Can I…?”

“No one can,” he said.

I left him. I had another appointment, maybe another client.

I sat on my bike and called Dixie Cruise at the coffee bar on Main Street where she served espresso and kept the Internet-connected patrons happy and their electronics running. Dixie was slim and trim, with very black hair in a short style. Dixie lived in a two-room apartment in a slightly run-down twelve-flat apartment building on Ringling Boulevard, a block from the main post office. The apartment was almost laboratory clean, neat, and filled with computers and electronic gear.

“Working on it, Mr. L.F.,” Dixie said in her down-home Florida accent. “Lady knows her stuff. Horvecki’s daughter Rachel seems to have migrated to an alternate universe. Since her father’s murder, she hasn’t used a credit card, written a check, flown on an airplane, booked a room at a motel or hotel, or rented a car, at least not in her own name. She’s running on cash and another name. Every Sarasota business, from dry cleaners to Red Lobster, has no record of her having been there.”

“Keep looking,” I said.

“You keep paying in cash, I keep looking. I’ve got bills to pay and things to buy for my wedding.”

“You’re getting married?”

“Didn’t I tell you?”

“No.”

“Wedding’ll be in June. First Baptist. Reception after at Cafe Bacci. You and the cowboy are invited. You’ll get an invitation.”

“New address,” I said, and gave her the address.

“My beau’s name is Dan Rosenfeld. He’s an airplane mechanic at Dolphin.”

“Congratulations,” I said.

“Thanks. I’ll keep looking for her. Today, I check on unidentified bodies found from North Carolina to Key West.”

I would have forgotten about the appointment if I hadn’t written it on one of the three-by-five index cards I carried in my back pocket. The call had come in early the day before. With everything going on, I had almost forgotten about it. The index cards got dog-eared quickly from my sitting on them, but I wrote my notes to myself in clear block letters and had no trouble reading them.

At the age of forty-three, I was having trouble remembering simple things like why I was going to the refrigerator or what I was planning to do when I opened the medicine cabinet in my bathroom.

The card read:

Bee Ridge Park softball field. 11 a.m.

Monday. Ferris Berrigan

The bike ride to Bee Ridge Park was long. It was made longer by my expecting that someone might pull alongside me, roll down a window, and take a few shots, or that someone would run me into oncoming traffic on Beneva Road. It would be fitting, to die the same way Catherine had, but I wasn’t really ready for that. Progress, Ann would say. I no longer welcomed accidental death.