Stuart Kaminsky - Bright Futures

“No. I saw the other man do it.”

“You actually saw him do it?” asked Ames.

“Yes. He was all bloody. He was there earlier. Had words with my father, who called him a ‘shit-bastard-cocksucker.’ ”

“And you didn’t recognize the killer?” I asked.

“I had a little dog and his name was…?” she said with a smile.

“Blue,” said Ames.

“Yes,” she said.

“Old song,” said Ames.

“New suspect,” I said.

“Please take me to Ronnie now, after I pee,” Rachel said.

Victor got the washroom key and walked with her to the rear of the Hob Nob, where he waited outside the door.

“Lady’s on a cloud,” said Darrell finishing off his burger. “What time’s the next cloud? I might want to hitch a ride.”

“Believe her?” Ames asked.

“You?” I answered.

“She didn’t see Berrigan kill her father, just heard it,” said Ames.

“Or maybe didn’t hear it. Or maybe just wants to get her husband off the hook and the murder of her father blamed on a dead man.”

“She’s just acting?” asked Ames.

“If she is, she’s really good.”

“Ain’t nobody that good,” said Darrell.

“Yes,” I said. “There is.”

He’s too smart for that, the little bastard,” Detective Ettiene Viviase said.

He was seated behind his desk at police headquarters on Main Street. Ames and I were across from him, in wooden chairs that needed a complete overhaul and serious superglue to forestall their inevitable collapse.

Victor and Darrell were at Cold Stone ice cream store, across the street and half a block away.

Viviase was talking about Dwight Torcelli.

His door was open. Voices carried and echoed from the hallway beyond, where the arrested and abused sat after they got past the first line of questioning and into the presence of a detective.

“The weapon we found in Torcelli’s apartment is a now-bloody wooden meat pounder.”

“Tenderizer,” I said.

Viviase was working on a plastic cup of coffee of unknown vintage.

“The girl makes little in the way of sense.”

“Some things she said make sense,” I said.

“What?”

“Berrigan.”

“Says her father knew Berrigan, used him as a greeter at a weekend sale at his Toyota dealership in Bradenton.”

“He owned a Toyota dealership?” I said.

“Now she owns it and if luck or you turn up something to keep Torcelli from going to jail, the Horvecki estate will be his too. And weirdest goddamn thing is that they both really seem to like each other. She said she’d remarry him.”

I said nothing. I didn’t want to open the door to Alana Legerman and possibly to Sally and possibly to who knows how many others.

“Treats her like a nine-year-old,” said Viviase, finishing his coffee and looking into the cup to see if he had missed something.

“She says Berrigan killed her father,” I said.

“Convenient,” Viviase said, looking into his empty cup for some answers.

He dropped the cup into the garbage can behind his desk.

“Williams and Pepper,” I said.

“You make them sound like a law firm, a men’s clothing store, or a mail-order Christmas catalog.”

Someone screamed down the hall, not close, but loud enough. I couldn’t tell if it was a cackle, a laugh, or an expression of pain.

“Williams and Pepper both have solid alibis for the times of death of both the Horvecki and Berrigan murders.”

“They weren’t each other’s alibis, were they?”

“I’m in a good mood, Fonesca. Truly. I don’t look it, but I’m in a good mood. My daughter, I’ve discovered, has not been fooling around with our heartthrob prisoner.”

“That’s good.”

“No,” he said. “She’s been fooling around with a high school senior. She assures me and her mother that ‘fooling around’ is all that she’s been doing, whereas if she were fooling around with Ronnie the words would take on a whole new meaning. So, I’m in a good mood. I’m waiting for a DNA report on Horvecki and the blood on the meat pounder.”

“You checking Berrigan’s DNA too?”

“We are.”

“I think the blood on the tenderizer is Berrigan’s, not Horvecki’s.”

“Why would our boy want to kill Berrigan?”

“Maybe he wouldn’t, but somebody else might and then hide the murder weapon where it was sure to be found in Torcelli’s apartment.

“Life is complicated,” I said.

“Life is uncooperative.”

“Yes.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“He doesn’t want to see you. He’s only talking to his wife and his lawyer-the lawyer courtesy of your very own D. Elliot Corkle and his daughter, the same daughter who put up the charming Ronnie’s bail.”

The first words Ames uttered since we entered Viviase’s office were, “We’d best go.”

“Fine,” said Viviase, turning to me. “Let me know if you and your sidekick find more of Ronnie’s or Torcelli’s wives or girlfriends kicking around.”

His eyes didn’t meet mine but I sensed something and that something was the name of Sally Porovsky.

Rachel didn’t want a ride. She asked the receptionist at the jail to call her a cab so she could be taken to the nearest hotel, which happened to be the Ritz-Carlton on Tamiami Trail just outside of downtown. The Ritz-Carlton was about a three minute ride from the jail. She told Ames, who was waiting for her, that her husband had reminded her she was rich and could now stay anywhere she liked and didn’t even need to pick up the clothes she had left at her father’s house.

“How did she seem to you?” I asked.

“Something on her mind wherever her mind was,” Ames said as he, Victor, Darrell, and I walked over to the pizza shop next to the Hollywood 20 Movie Theaters on Main Street.

“So,” said Darrell, “who killed those two guys and who shot at me and you, Fonesca?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“But you think?” said Darrell.

“Yeah,” I said.

Victor said nothing. Victor was extending his silence. He was waiting for something, something for me to say or do, or something he had to decide to do, or something that came down from heaven or up from hell.

“Movie?” asked Darrell as we all shared a large sausage pizza.

“Next week,” I said.

“When’s the last time you went to a movie, Fonesca?” Darrell asked.

It had been June 6, 2003. Catherine and I went to see Seabiscuit at the Hillside Theater. We both liked it. We usually liked the same movies. Since then the only movies I had seen were on videotape or television, almost all made before 1955, almost all in black and white.

“I don’t remember,” I said.

“We’re right next door to the fucking place,” Darrell said. “They’ve got Saw 8 or 9 or something. And you Ames McKinney, what was the last time you went to a movie in a real, honest-to-god theater?”

“Can’t say I remember,” Ames said. “Maybe forty, fifty years ago.”

“I need some help here,” said Darrell. “Victor, you, when? Or don’t they have movies in China?”

“I’ve never been to China,” said Victor. “I went to this movie the night before last.”

“That settles the issue,” said Darrell. “The Chinese guy who’s not from China and me are going to see Saw.”

“No,” said Victor. “I won’t see movies in which women or children are killed.”

“Fonesca, I’m pleading with you,” said Darrell.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll go.”

“I guess I will, too,” said Ames.

“Depends,” Victor said.

We spent two hours in darkness watching beautiful women with too much make up saying they were witches and trying to kill bearded guys who looked like Vikings by sending monkey-faced creatures riding on short but fast rhinos with short fire-spitting spears in their hands. Darrell drank a seemingly gallon-sized Coke and a giant popcorn.