Stuart Kaminsky - Always Say Goodbye

Lew tucked his Cubs cap deeper into his pocket.

“I’m looking for a man who works here who drives a red sports car.”

Lew had looked at the more than one hundred cars parked in the company’s parking lot. Eighteen sports cars, two of them convertibles, none of them red. He had checked all of the sports cars to see if they had been repainted and if they were old enough to have been the one that killed Catherine. They were not.

“Why?” asked Keen.

“I’m a process server,” Lew said, taking out his wallet and handed him his card.

Keen looked at the forlorn face on the card and at Lew.

“You’re from Florida,” Keen said. “You can’t serve papers outside the state.”

“I’m not here to serve him papers. I need some information from him.”

An elevator pinged open behind the desk. A man and a woman in their thirties, carrying identical briefcases, both smiling, came out. The man said something. Lew thought it was, “Chestnuts.”

Keen nodded to the couple who signed out in the black leather-bound book on the desk. The couple looked at neither Lew nor Keen. When they had gone, Lew said, “He’s Asian, the guy who has the red sports car.”

“Asian? Four hundred and seven people work here, about one hundred are Asians. Biologists, microbiologists, immunologists, geneticists. What’s he look like?”

“Asian,” said Lew.

“Narrows things down,” said Keen. “You don’t know his name?”

“No.”

“Never seen him?”

Lew shook his head no.

“Your lucky day, Fonseca,” Keen said, handing the laminated ID card back to Lew.

“Fonesca.”

“You got me on my last day,” Keen said. “I’m retiring.”

“Congratulations.”

“Yeah. I’m officially retiring tomorrow, but I won’t be coming in. You know why?”

Keen’s hands were folded in front of him now, thick knuckles white.

“You don’t like goodbyes,” Lew said.

“You got it,” Keen said. “You get called into the cafeteria. Everybody is standing there. There’s a cake. It says: Thirty-four Years, Owen Keen, We’ll Miss You.”

“That’s a lot of words to put on a cake,” said Lew.

“Yeah. They’ll smile at me, be taking peeks at their watches and the wall clock. Avery Nahman will make a little speech, hand me a bronze plaque that I’ll stick in a box in my garage. I’ll have to say a few words that no one wants to hear. No, I won’t be there. Today’s my last day. Why am I telling you all this?”

“I’m listening.”

“You are that,” said Keen. “Go over to that wall, the one with the photographs.”

Lew moved to the wall, eight rows across and seven down of seven-by-nine-inch color photographs of people, about half of them Asian. On the bronze plaque above the

photographs it read: EMPLOYEES OF THE QUARTER.

“Like Wal-Mart or something if you ask me,” said Keen, still seated behind the desk.

“What am I looking at?” asked Lew.

Keen pointed and said, “Third row down, second photograph.”

“Victor Lee,” Lew read.

“Yeah, when some of them say it, it sounds like Victory. Not Dr. Lee. No accent. Good guy.”

“He has a red sports car?” asked Lew, staring at the lean, dark-haired man with glasses and a smile that was something less than a smile.

There was a familiar look of something, maybe sadness in Victor Lee’s face.

“Had a red sports car. Alfa Spider. Years ago. Had it and then one day he came in and didn’t have it, switched to a Kia SUV, sort of gray.”

“Is he here?”

“Signed out half an hour ago. Ask me he looked like a turtle turd, wiped to shit. That picture on the wall was the last high for Victor. Started to stop even faking a smile after that.”

“When?”

“Don’t remember. Three, four years ago. Funny, when my wife was alive we all the time planned to go south, New Orleans. Now there’s no Ophelia. Hell, there’s no New Orleans. My wife had a sense of humor. Said her claim to fame was that they had named a hurricane after her.”

Keen laughed. Lew smiled.

“Fonesca, I’m retiring in two hours and I don’t know what the shit I’m going to do or where I’m going. I’d move in with my brother, but he has a damn cat that… hell, I’ve only known you five minutes and you’re my goddamn best friend. Everyone else I knew, family, friends, they’re back in Philly or getting skin cancer in Florida. Our only kid, Dennis, got killed skiing when he was twenty-one.”

“I’m sorry.”

Keen looked up and said, “Yeah, I’ll be damned, you really are. She was a good woman. He was a good kid. And I’ve always been a tough asshole. Now I’m old and I’m just an asshole.”

“You have an address for Lee?”

“Hmm?”

“An address. Lee.”

Keen nodded, punched open a pop-up address book and came up with an address in Oswego.

“I think I’ll find an apartment around here someplace, settle things and then maybe try Florida. Where is it you live?”

“Sarasota,” Lew said, writing the address in his pocket notebook.

“That where they have the race track?”

“That’s Saratoga. Sarasota has greyhound racing.”

“You like greyhound racing?” Keen said with some interest.

“Never went.”

Keen nodded and looked down.

“Sarasota,” said Keen to himself. “Might try it.”

Twelve hundred miles away, in Sarasota, the phone rang on Lew’s desk. There was no answering machine. At the urging of Ann Horowitz, he had installed one for a while, but had dreaded the flashing red light that intruded on his sanctuary and refused to stop blinking.

Now the phone rang six times before Ames McKinney picked it up and said, “Yes.”

Ames was making his daily stop at Lew’s office-home to pick up the mail, see if anything needed fixing or cleaning up. Ames’s scooter was parked in the Dairy Queen lot about thirty feet from the bottom of the concrete stairs and rusting railing of the two-story building. Lew had helped Ames when he had shot an old betraying partner on South Lido Beach. They had been friends since and just two days before Lew had left for Chicago, the two had sat at a table in the Texas Bar and Grille where Ames worked keeping the place clean and where he lived in a small room next to the exit near the kitchen. They had celebrated Ames’s seventy-fourth birthday with a beer. No one else had been invited. No one had been told. Lew had given Ames the latest biography of one of Ames’s heroes, Zachary Taylor.

“Fonesca?” said the man on the phone.

“No.”

“Is he there?”

“No.”

“Will he be there soon?”

“Don’t know.”

“Where is he?”

“Couldn’t say for sure.”

“Can I reach him? It’s important, very important.”

“Name and number,” said Ames.

“Earl Borg. Tell him dogs and hogs. He’ll know.”

“Dogs and hogs,” Ames wrote on the pad of lined paper he had brought and placed next to the phone.

Lew worked with worn-down pencils, writing on the backs of envelopes and flyers. His notes, including addresses and phone numbers, were stacked neatly in the bottom drawer of the desk.

Borg gave Ames the phone number and address.

“It is extremely urgent. A life is… just have him call me.”

“You got troubles, maybe I can give you a hand till he gets back.”

“You are…?”

“Ames McKinney.”

“And you…?”

“Work with Lewis sometimes,” said Ames.

A double beat and then Borg hung up.

Ames looked around the room, the outer room. There wasn’t much to do. There wasn’t much in the room to clean, straighten or fix. Ames had turned the window air conditioner on low when he had arrived. He had swept and straightened the lone painting on the wall, the painting by Stig Dalstrom was of a dark jungle with a hint of a moon blocked by black mountains. The only color was a small yellow-and-red flower. The painting was Lew. No doubt.