Stuart Kaminsky - Midnight Pass

“Hurt bad. The Krelwitzes’ son, goes to Manatee Community College. He’ll live, though. I’m the one who got the license number of the pickup truck. Victor can’t see worth diddly-squat, but I’ve got twenty-twenty, laser corrected, two thousand dollars but Medicare covered most of it.”

“That’s good,” I said. “But you said you know where Georgia Heinz is.”

“Of course I do,” she said.

“Would you mind telling me? I have something to give her.”

“Give it to me,” she said, holding out her hand and aiming the hose in the general direction of the tangelo tree.

“I have to give it to Georgia Heinz,” I said.

“I’m Georgia Heinz. You just knocked at Vivian Polter’s door.”

I checked the address on the summons. There had been no number on the door I had gone to, but the house on the other side of it had been one even number lower than the one I was looking for. The summons had been wrong.

I started across the lawn with Georgia Heinz keeping her eyes on me.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Court order,” I said. “For you to testify about what you saw, the license number you took down. The lawyer I work for has a client who’s been arrested for what happened. His pickup truck’s license number doesn’t match the one you gave.”

“Than whose pickup truck was it?” she demanded, holding the summons in her hand.

“I don’t know,” I said, starting back toward my car.

“It was a trick all the time,” she shouted. “You tricked me.”

I was going to turn and reassure her that I hadn’t tricked her when I felt the blast of water on my back. She had turned the hose on me.

I hurried out of range and got in my car. She was advancing across the lawn with her hose aimed in my direction. She had adjusted the stream on the nozzle so that the rainbow was gone and a long thin snake of water spat toward me.

I pulled away from the curb, being careful not to hit anybody who might be walking in the street.

My pants weren’t too bad, but my shirt was drenched. I pulled into the Gulf Gate parking lot and went into Old Navy, where I bought a blue pullover shirt that went with my pants.

I had one more set of papers to serve. I’d worry about them later.

Now, as I pulled into the driveway of the Traskers’ house, I was thinking about the kids in the photograph Severtson had shown me.

The house was big, new, Spanish-looking, with turrets and narrow windows. It was on the water at Indian Beach Drive, not far from the Ringling Museum of Art and the Asolo Performing Arts Center. I’ve seen the outside of both, never felt the urge to go in the first and look at paintings in the second.

I rang the doorbell and waited. In about a minute, the door opened and I found myself facing Roberta Trasker.

Flo could have done a better job of describing her, but Flo was a woman and saw her through a woman’s eyes. I was looking at her through my eyes, which might be even less reliable.

Roberta Trasker was probably well into her sixties and maybe she looked it, but she was the best-looking sixty-plus grandmother I had ever seen. She was model slender, wearing tight black jeans and a silky white short-sleeved blouse. Her face was unlined and beautiful. She reminded me a little of Linda Darnell, except Roberta Trasker had short, straight, gleaming white hair. Plastic surgery was possible but I couldn’t detect it.

“Who’re you?” she asked.

“Lew Fonesca,” I said. “Flo Zink called a little while ago.”

“What do you want?”

“To come in and talk,” I said.

“About what?”

“Your husband,” I said.

“I recognize your voice,” she said. “You called a few hours ago.”

“I did.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Fonseca…”

“Fonesca,” I said. “Lots of people make that mistake.”

“That must be annoying,” she said, now playing with a simple silver band around a slender wrist.

“Depends on who makes the mistake.”

“Did I annoy you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Not because you got my name wrong but because you did it intentionally. But I’m used to that, too.”

She looked at me with her head cocked to one side. I was being examined to see how much if any of her precious time I was worth.

“My husband is out of town on business,” she said.

I could hear that hint of emotion in her voice, the same hint Flo and I had heard on the phone.

“Your husband is missing,” I said. “He is also very ill, too ill, from what I hear, to be traveling on business or pleasure.”

“You are wasting my time, Mr. Fonesca,” she said, starting to close the door.

“I’m here to help find him,” I said.

“And you are…?”

“By trade? A process server. I’m good at finding people. I can find your husband and I can do it quietly.”

“And you want money,” she said.

“No,” I answered. “I’ve got a client. I’m poor but honest.”

“I can see that,” she said. “The poor part.”

I was wearing my freshly washed black jeans, Cubs cap, and a yellow short-sleeved shirt with a collar and a little toucan embossed on the pocket. My socks were white and clean. So were my sneakers.

“Take off your hat and come in,” she said after a long pause.

I took off my cap and little smile lines showed in the corners of her mouth. I wasn’t sure what amused her, my receding hairline or the total picture of a less than threatening, poorly dressed creature.

I stepped in and she shut the door. We were in a massive living room. The floors were cool, tavertine marble. The place was furnished like something out of Architectural Digest, something that a movie star might live in, if the movie star liked early Fred Astaire movies. Everything was either black or white. White sofa and chairs, white bookcases filled with expensive-looking glass animals, black lamps, a black, sleek low table that ran almost the length of the wall across from the bookcases. A stack of unopened mail stood on the table. Over the table was the only real color in the room, a huge painting of a beautiful young woman in a satin white dress, sitting on a black sofa. The woman’s legs were crossed and she leaned forward, her head resting on the fist of her right hand, her other hand dangling languidly at her side.

The room had been furnished to complement the painting. It was also a room that wouldn’t welcome the intrusion of grandchildren with unwashed hands and shoes that tracked in sand from the beach.

“That’s you,” I said, looking at the painting.

“You’re showing your brilliance already,” she said, sitting in one of the white chairs.

“You’re Claire Collins,” I said.

“Now, I am impressed,” she said.

Claire Collins had been a starlet in the late Fifties and early Sixties. She was in a handful of RKO movies, usually as a bad girl with a smoldering cigarette in the corner of her mouth suggesting close encounters of the third kind with the likes of Glenn Ford and Robert Mitchum.

“I’ve seen a lot of your pictures,” I said.

“There weren’t a lot,” she said with a sigh. “There were twelve, none of them big, only three in color.”

I looked at her.

“I think I can name them all,” I said.

“Please, no. I’ll take your word for it,” she said, shaking her head.

“On television, videotape,” I said. “ Black Night in December, Blackmailed Lady, Dark Corridors, When Angels Fall, The Last — ”

“Stop,” she said. “I believe you.”

I was afraid to sit on her white leather furniture so I kept standing.

“Mrs. Trasker…,” I began. “Do you know where your husband might be?”

“No,” she said, “but he can’t be far and I don’t think…”