Stuart Kaminsky - Bright Futures

“Corkle’s daughter, too?”

“Why not?”

We drove silently for a few minutes, and then he said, “I’m not supposed to drive till I get another driving test. Hell, I can drive better with one eye than all these old farts with two.”

“Someday you may be an old fart,” I said.

“Great, an old fart with one eye.”

He went to Laurel and turned left. A minute later he parked in front of my new home, the one with rooms too big and visitors too many.

“I’m cashing Corkle’s check and heading for the Tampa airport,” he said. “I’ll work in commercials if I’m lucky, dinner theater, wherever a one-eyed character actor is wanted. Who knows? This…,” he said, pointing to his patched eye, “may be the opening of new career opportunities.”

“Who knows?”

“We both do,” he said with a smile as bitter as orange peel.

I got out of the car.

“Watch yourself, Cub fan,” he said.

I touched the brim of my cap in a gesture of good-bye. He tore down the street with a drag racer’s abandon. The tires weren’t his. The car wasn’t his. It was too bad the Dairy Queen two blocks down was closed and torn down. He could have had a Blizzard to ease the rush hour trip to Tampa.

“Let’s go,” Ames said when I went through the door.

He was standing to my left, near the wall. Victor, in his Chicago Bulls sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, was seated on the floor, his bedroll wrapped neatly in the corner. Ames was wearing black corduroy pants, a red-dominated, plaid shirt, and boots.

“Where this time?” I asked.

“To see a man,” said Ames. “Brought you this.”

He held up a wooden plank about the size of a rolled up newspaper. Burned into its dark, grainy surface were the words LEWIS FONESCA.

“So people will know you’re here,” said Ames. “I can mount it outside somewhere.”

“I don’t want any more people to know I’m here,” I said.

“Suit yourself,” he said, placing the plank faceup on my desk. “Let’s go. Victor’ll drive us.”

In response, Victor Woo got up from the floor.

“Where are we going and why?” I asked.

“I found a man who knows all about Philip Horvecki.”

Victor chauffeured. Ames and I sat in back. Ames gave Victor directions. They weren’t easy. We drove up I-75 to the University Parkway exit and headed east. Ames gave clipped driving directions like, “Next right,” and Victor drove without speaking.

“Fella came into the Texas a few hours ago,” said Ames. “Heard him talking. Sheriff’s Deputy. Talking about the murder. Told another fella that the detectives should ask Pertwee about it. I asked him who this Pertwee was. He told me.”

Ames went silent. Long speeches were not his medium.

After telling Victor to go down a narrow dirt road, Ames went on.

“Seems Pertwee knows a lot about old crimes in the county,” said Ames.

Silence again, except for the bumping tires and the rat-tat of pebbles against the undercarriage of the car.

“How do you know where to-” I started.

“Came out here on my scooter when the deputy gave me directions,” Ames interrupted.

We had gone almost twenty miles from my apartment. On a scooter, going over this road, one would have to be very determined.

“Look out on the right over ahead. Hardly see it, but there’s a low wooden fence and an open gate.”

Victor turned into a rutted path even narrower than the dirt road. Ahead of us about fifty yards was a mobile home with a small addition. It was a house of aluminum waiting for a hurricane to wash it away.

The closer we got the better it looked. The place was recently painted white. A small, umbrella-covered metal table with three wrought iron chairs sat in front of the mobile home’s door.

Victor parked. We got out as a man lumbered through the door and held the sides of the doorway to keep from slipping on the two steps to the ground. He was short, with a sagging belly. He wore jeans with suspenders over a blue striped polo shirt that was sucked into the folds of his neck. He was about sixty years old.

He looked at the three of us with amusement.

“A visit from a formidable trio,” he said. “A cowboy, a chink, and a gingerbread man. What brings you, and would you like a beer?”

We all said no. Pertwee shrugged and said, “So be it. What brings you here?”

“Deputy I met said you know a lot about Philip Horvecki,” said Ames.

“That I do,” said Pertwee. “And who did you say you were?”

“My name is Lewis Fonesca and I-”

“Lewis Fonesca,” he said. “Formerly an investigator in the state attorney’s office in Cook County, Illinois. You came here four years back after your wife was killed in a hit-and-run on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. The driver of the red convertible that killed her was an Asian man who has yet to be found by the police.”

“This is the man,” I said, nodding toward Victor.

Pertwee bent forward and looked up at Victor. Not much could happen that would surprise him.

“And this is Ames McKinney,” I went on.

“Four years ago, beach at Lido,” said Pertwee. “You shot your ex-partner. Fonesca was there. You did a little time. I sit out here, keep track. Retired detective, Cincinnati Police. Come on in.”

We followed the wobbling Pertwee into his house. The living room was larger than I had expected. It had the musty but not unpleasant odor of dried leaves. Family portraits hung on the walls, and the sofa and matching chair were each covered with a bright blue knitted blanket. Beyond the living room and down a step into the one-room addition to the home was an office lined with file drawers. A computer with a large screen sat next to a printer and a fax machine. There was a duplicate of the sofa in the other room complete with knitted blanket, only this blanket was brown.

“Wife’s in town at a photography class at Selby Gardens,” Pertwee said. “Won’t be back for a long while. She’ll have a portfolio full of photographs of flowers and trees when she walks through the door.”

He nodded toward the wall over the sofa. Color photographs were mounted one after another, all around the room. All the photographs were of flowers or bright fish in a pond.

Pertwee sat in front of the computer and pressed the power button. While the machine was firing up, he rose and waddled to a file cabinet, opened it, rummaged in a lower drawer, and came up with a manila file folder.

“Cold cases,” he explained as the image of a red flower appeared on his computer screen. “Sheriff’s office lets me see what I can find. Won’t find stuff like this on the Internet.”

“Horvecki was involved in a cold case?” I asked.

Victor had sat on the sofa. Ames stood at my side looking at the screen. Pertwee’s face was red with the reflected color of the flower before him.

“Two cold cases,” said Pertwee, opening the file folder and placing it on the table next to him. “First case was back in 1968. Young Horvecki was but a stripling. “Two fourteen-and sixteen-year-old black girls were raped and beaten. They were found wandering the byways. Both girls identified Horvecki as the attacker. Both later changed their minds. Case still open. Both girls are grandmas now. One’s a great grandma. One has a son who is not fond of Mr. Horvecki and has been known to speak ill of the now deceased. Son’s name is Williams, Essau Williams. Detective in the Venice Police Department. Detective Williams has been given disciplinary warnings because Horvecki claimed Williams has been stalking him for years.”

“And the other case?” I asked.

Pertwee said, “Ah” and flipped pages until he found what he was looking for.

“Here ’tis, 1988, same year Cynthia and I arrived in the State of Florida and purchased this little bit of heaven. Costs almost as much to get an Internet hookup and dish TV as it cost to buy Buddenbrooks.”