Stuart Kaminsky - Bright Futures

“I’ll take the scooter.”

“Do you know the first line of a book, any book?”

“ ‘The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of German, as not of impossible occurrence.’ ”

I asked her to repeat it slowly. She did, while I wrote on a pad from my desk drawer.

“The book?” I asked.

“ Frankenstein, ” said Victor.

“That’s right,” said Elisabeth. “We had to memorize a paragraph from a novel on our reading list. I picked Frankenstein.”

“Because it’s scary?” I tried.

“Because it was written by a woman,” she said.

“You want to be a writer?”

“I want to be an FBI agent,” she answered. “But don’t-”

“Tell your father.”

“He’s not ready for it,” she said. “And I might change my mind.”

I got up to show I had nothing more to ask or say. She stood and headed for Ames and the door. She paused at the door and said, “You won’t tell my-”

“I won’t tell,” I said.

Ames and the girl left. I was making some assumptions. I assumed the timing was such that my investigation of the Horvecki killing, the bullet through the window of Augustine’s car, the shooting of Darrell Caton, and the murder of Blue Berrigan were all tied together. What if I were wrong? I had two suspects I hadn’t yet spoken to, Essau Williams, the cop in Venice, and Jack Pepper in Cortez Village-two people whose names were in files in a cabinet in the mobile home of an ex-Cincinnati cop named Pertwee. Both had sworn to make Philip Horvecki pay for what he had been accused of, the rape of Essau’s mother and aunt when they were young girls and the attempted rape and beating of Pepper, whom Horvecki had tried to sodomize. Pepper lived north, just outside of Cortez Village, and Williams south, in Venice.

When night came, I lay in bed silently for I don’t know how many minutes listening to traffic on 301, thinking of something I could say or do to induce Sally to stay.

I had nothing to offer. Armed with addresses that I had gotten from Pertwee’s files, I got up just before six in the morning and asked Victor, who was cross-legged on his bedroll reading a book, to tell Ames I was going to Cortez Village and that I’d be back in a few hours.

There are no hills in Florida south of Ocala unless we’re talking about man-made ones. Construction is constantly going on in Sarasota-streets torn up and widened, new streetlights, hotels, mansions, developments, high-rise apartments, new malls. From time to time a pile of dirt resembling a fifteen-foot hill will rise and occasionally a dazzled teen or preteen will climb up and be knocked down or even buried in a small dust-raising avalanche. The flat landscape of Sarasota County is paled over with nonnative palm trees and trees that thrive on enough water to drown most other fauna and with tall, sometimes fat condominium buildings that present a view of heavily trafficked roads and other condos.

I passed a mess of construction heading north on Tamiami Trail. Wooden yellow-and-black traffic horses and dingy red cones created a minor maze that slowed vehicles and made ancient drivers, pregnant mothers, and slightly drunken men mad with the challenge.

It took me almost an hour to make the trip to Cortez Village. Ames had installed a third-hand junkyard radio in the car. It worked just fine, so I was accompanied by the soothing voice of a man with a Southern accent. The voice wasn’t strident; he was confident and sounded as if he were smiling as he spoke. I had been told when I called Jack Pepper’s phone number that he was at the studio doing his show. The woman told me the address of the station’s studio and number on the dial where WTLW could be found. I found it and listened as I drove.

“You know, friends,” the man said, “the Jewish people are holy. They are the people chosen by God to redeem the land of Israel, the sacred land of our Lord Jesus Christ. We must support the Jewish people in their quest to survive against heathen hordes. Palestine does not belong to the Arab. Palestine comes from the Biblical word Philistine. The Philistines were neither Arab nor Semite. The Emperor Hadrian designated the land as Palestine. The Arabs can’t even say the word. They call it ‘Palethtine.’ ”

He almost sounded as if he were crying.

“We can’t let the Jewish people be pushed into the sea. We cannot let the land of Israel once again go into the hands of those who would make of it an unholy land. If there need be another Crusade, we must march in it armed with truth.”

And a lot of heavy firepower, I thought. Pepper was just getting warmed up.

“There will come a time,” he said, “when our Savior returns and those who have believed in him will be saved and shall sit in the house of the Lord and bask in the warmth of Christ.”

And what about the Jews? I thought, but Jack Pepper let it hang in the air.

Cortez Village, on the Gulf of Mexico, still has a few small fishing companies and some independent fishermen making a living pretty much as fishermen have been doing there for more than a century. The air was salty with the smell of fish.

The radio station was a little hard to find. It was about thirty yards down a narrow dirt street, at the rear of a small frame church on a white pebble-and-stone parking lot. Four cars were parked in the lot. A four-foot sign indicated that I was indeed not only in the parking lot of the Every Faith Evangelical Church but, that, if I followed the arrow pointing toward the rear of the church, I’d find radio station WTLW, THE LORD’S WORD.

There was a seven-foot-high mesh steel fence with three strands of barbed wire surrounding the lot. Inside the fence there was a patch of crushed white stone and shell about the size of my office. About twenty yards beyond the enclosure was a three-story steel radio tower.

On the patch of grass on my side of the fence was the door with a freshly painted white cross about the size of an ATM machine. Next to the cross was a gate with a button and a speaker just above it. I pushed the button. The clear but speaker resonant voice of a woman said, “Who is it?”

“Lew Fonesca. I’m here to see Jack Pepper.”

“Reverend Pepper,” she reprimanded.

“Reverend Pepper,” I said.

“Why?”

“Philip Horvecki,” I said.

Long pause. Long, long pause.

“Why?”

This time it was a man’s voice, the same voice I had just been listening to on the radio.

“Detective Viviase of the Sarasota Police suggested I talk to you,” I lied.

Another long pause.

“I do not wish to testify,” he said.

“Ronnie Gerall may not have done it,” I said.

I could hear the man and woman talking, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. One of them must have put a hand over the microphone. I could tell that the woman sounded insistent and Pepper sounded resigned.

“Come in,” said Pepper. “Close the gate behind you.”

Something clicked and I pushed the gate open.

The door at the end of the path was painted a bright red. It looked as if a new coat of paint had been applied minutes earlier. The station’s call letters were painted in black in the middle of the door with a foot-high brown cross under them.

“Come in,” came the man’s voice.

I opened the door.

“Take off the hat please,” the man said. “This station is part of the House of the Lord.”

I took off my Cubs cap, stuffed it in my back pocket, stepped in, and closed the door behind me.

The room was about the size of a handball court. There were three desks with chairs lined up side by side on the left, and on the right stood a narrow table with spindly black metal legs. The table was covered in plastic that was meant to look like wood, but it looked like plastic. On the table there sat a computer and printer and boxes of eight-by-ten flyers I couldn’t read from where I stood. There were eight folding chairs leaning against the wall. Beyond all this, through a large rectangular window, I could see a studio barely big enough for two people. In fact, two people were in there. One had a guitar. One was a man. One was a woman. They were obviously singing. They were smiling. I couldn’t hear them.