Stuart Kaminsky - Always Say Goodbye

Angie, Franco, Uncle Tonio would try to get him to go to the cemetery, but Lew wouldn’t go. Catherine was not there, only broken bones and decaying body.

If there was a soul, it wasn’t hanging around her grave. He hoped it wasn’t. If there was a soul, as he had been taught and rejected by the time he was ten, it would come to him. He would welcome it, but he didn’t expect it.

Lew slowly put the report on the pile, returned the documents to the envelope, put the envelope in his carry-on and went through the door. The smell from the kitchen was a kickback memory to better times, his grandmother’s garlic pasta with shrimp. He followed the smell and the sound of a young woman’s voice into the kitchen.

Angie and Franco were at the table watching CNN where someone who looked like Catherine was saying that thirty-one people had been killed by terrorists in New Delhi. Angie and Franco looked up at Lew, whose eyes were fixed on the woman reading the news. She was a young, pretty, long-haired blonde with perfect skin and a very red mouth. She really didn’t look like Catherine. She only blurred his memory of his wife.

“You okay?” asked Angie, getting up.

He nodded yes and said, “Garlic pasta and shrimp?”

“When do you want to eat?” she said.

“When Franco and I get back I think I need to do something first.”

“When you get back?”

“When I get back,” Lew said.

Franco pushed back his chair and got up.

She wanted to ask Lew where they were going, but held back. Franco would tell her everything when they returned.

When they left the house, Franco asked, “Okay if we take the truck or you want me to get one of the cars from Toro’s?”

“Truck’s fine.”

“Good,” he said.

The sun was still up. No clouds. Cool October Chicago weather. The next day the temperature could rise or fall twenty degrees. It might even snow.

When they got in the truck, Franco asked, “Where to?”

“Pappas.”

Franco grinned, drove past Cabrini Hospital, made a left on Racine.

“Angie’s office,” he said, leaning over Lew to point out the sign, ANGELA MASSACCIO, REALTOR, in black letters on the window above Gonzalez’s Hardware Store.

“She’s doing great,” Franco said. “Want the radio?”

“No.”

When Lew had to drive, he liked to drive alone or with Ames McKinney who was silent unless Lew asked him a question. Lew liked to listen to a voice, any voice turned low. No music. Talk. Evangelists, Pacifica Radio, NPR, Limbaugh, Springer, any talk show. Company he could ignore or turn off.

“Think I need a haircut? Angie thinks I need one.”

Lew looked. Franco could use a haircut. Lew told him. Lew cut his own hair, what remained of it, with a comb, scissors and disposable razor. His father had taught him how, saying only “Like so. Like so. Like so,” as he cut, clipped and combed. For the past four years he had given himself haircuts looking into the pitted mirror of the men’s room of the building he lived in behind the Dairy Queen on 301 in Sarasota.

Ten minutes later they were heading west on the Eisenhower Expressway.

Franco knew Pappas’s address, remembered it from the fax Rich had sent him, but he wanted to be asked.

“You remember the address? I do.” Franco beamed.

“My job. Hey, I know the streets. You know how to find people. We’re gonna be a great team.”

Lew didn’t remember becoming part of a team.

“Yes,” Lew said.

Lew thought about Rebecca Strum, wondered if when she was a young girl in a concentration camp they had given her a tattooed purple number.

“What do we do when we get there?” Franco asked.

“We talk. We listen.”

“That’s the plan?” asked Franco.

“There is no plan.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Franco, adding, “Yellow light on?”

“Why not,” Lew said.

“Indeed,” Franco said, flicking a switch on the dashboard.

The spinning light on top of the roof of the truck flicked yellow on the truck’s hood. Franco began to weave through early rush-hour traffic. Lew tightened his fists and looked at the dashboard clock. Three in the afternoon. The time when Catherine was killed. Lew fought to hold onto that memory of Catherine’s face, smiling as if she had a secret. He fought to hold onto it, knowing that another image of her was forming, an image of her crushed and bleeding face.

He tried. He lost.

The house was surrounded by a ten-foot-high wall of stone painted a conservative burnt ash. The metal gate was simple, wrought-iron painted black, each spike sharply pointed and level with the wall. There was a white button in the wall to their left. Lew pushed it and a man’s voice from nowhere said, “Yes?”

“We’re looking for John Pappas,” Lew said.

“State your business and leave,” the man said.

Franco leaned over and whispered in Lew’s ear, “That’s from The Twelve Chairs.”

“Two men driving your car were following me this morning,” Lew said.

“So?”

“I’d like to know why.”

“Idle curiosity,” came the voice, “or are you going someplace with this?”

“My name’s Lew Fonesca. I want to know who killed my wife.”

“I don’t know who killed your wife,” came the voice. Something in the voice, even filtered through the speaker, made Lew say, “But you know who did.”

“Come in,” the voice said wearily. “I’m clicking. Just push the gate and be sure it clicks locked behind you.”

Franco and Lew pushed the gate open, stepped inside and Franco pushed the gate closed behind them.

“I’m supposed to be impressed,” said Franco as they walked down a wide brick-lined path toward the big two-story wood-frame house set back on a broad green lawn with a spotting of orange and yellow leaves from a nearby tree. A breeze rustled. More leaves floated down.

“I’ve seen bigger houses with cars in garages that looked great and had to be towed because there was crapola under the hood and the owners were always afraid of what it would cost to fix ’em.”

“You don’t like rich people,” Lew said.

“Not until and unless I become one,” said Franco. “Then I’ll join ’em.”

Franco reached down and touched the gun tucked in under his jacket.

While Lew was knocking the second time, the door opened.

Standing in front of them was the driver who Franco had pulled from the car on the Dan Ryan. He didn’t look surprised to see them. He motioned for Franco and Lew to come inside. The house smelled of something baking, something sweet and familiar.

They followed the driver up a flight of highly polished light wood stairs. On the landing, he went to a closed door and knocked.

“Come in,” came a deep voice with the touch of an accent. “Come in.”

Sitting in an armchair, hands on his lap was the one-eyed young man. At the window, his back turned, was a man with white hair, wearing dark slacks and a yellow sweater over a white shirt with a button-down collar.

The room was a combination den and office-antique wood desk and chair, two matching armchairs, a sofa that challenged the rest of the room but seemed right. There were three painted portraits on the wall to the right, all of one woman.

“John Pappas,” Lew said.

The man at the window slowly turned. He was lean, dapper, had a weathered face and too-perfect false teeth as white as his equally full head of white hair. According to his driver’s license, Pappas was fifty-seven years old.

“Have a seat,” he said with a smile, pointing a hand at the sofa.

Behind them the driver, arms folded, leaned back against the wall near the door. The one-eyed man in the armchair looked at him and then back at Pappas.