Stuart Kaminsky - Midnight Pass

“Nothing else you want to tell me?”

“No.”

“I talked to the kids,” he said. “Girl was asleep. Boy can’t remember anything.”

“We’re not talking about murder here,” I said.

“Doesn’t look like we’ve got a case there, does it?” he said. “But she did run away with the kids, did shack up with a man with a record, probably screwed him in front of the kids. Husband wants to take the kids and leave her here. And…”

“And?”

“Why did Stark want to kill himself?” Tenns asked.

“Drunk, depressed, suddenly saddled with responsibility, guilty about running away with his partner’s wife. Maybe the ME can do some exploratory and find out he was dying of something.”

“Maybe,” Tenns said. “I checked. Stark was single. Wife divorced him twenty years ago and moved to San Diego. Business he was in with Severtson is booming. No confirmation so far that he was alcoholic. Some evidence from people the Sarasota police checked with that he wasn’t. Some evidence from the same people that Stark wasn’t the kind to feel guilty about running away with his partner’s wife. People he worked with say Janice Severtson wasn’t the first wife to spend a weekend with Andrew Stark. But with two kids along, it looks like Stark was in for a lot more than a weekend.”

“And what does Mrs. Severtson say?”

“Dialogue right out of one of the soaps my wife watches when she isn’t selling costume jewelry,” he said with a sigh. “Janice Severtson says she thought she loved Stark, but then again maybe she was just running away with him to get away from her husband.”

“You’ve been busy.”

“Very,” he said. “I’m faxing a report to the Sarasota sheriff’s office. I’m sending the Severtsons home. I’m telling them not to think about moving out of the state. I’m signing off on this as a probable suicide but I’m keeping the file open. My board’s full. I’ve got a bruised thigh. I couldn’t sleep last night and there’s a drooling drug dealer with an attitude in another room waiting to tell me lies. I’ll get back to Stark’s death when I get a chance, and I will get a chance.”

Tenns got up, scrunched his empty coffee cup, and threw it in the wastebasket near the Coke machine.

“I checked a little deeper on you, Fonesca,” he said, turning and looking at me over the tops of his glasses. “Lost your wife, went a little nuts, quit your job with the state attorney’s office, wound up in Sarasota.”

I sat. There was still some coffee in my cup. I was getting hungry.

“So anyway, your story checks out with hers. I’m letting her go.”

“I’d like to see her,” I said.

“Go back to the waiting room. She’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Sergeant, know any jokes?”

“Cop jokes,” he said. “Why?”

A few minutes after I was in the waiting room, looking at wanted posters, Janice Severtson came through a metal door. Her hair had been brushed but not well. Her makeup had been applied but not well. Her clothes had been put on but not neatly.

She spotted me and I got up as she moved quickly in front of me.

“They told me Kenneth took Sydney and Kenny,” she said. “Where are they?”

“Probably on the way back to Sarasota. You hungry?”

“I don’t know,” she said, running her fingers through her hair.

“Let’s get something to eat,” I said.

“I’ve got to get back to Sarasota,” she said. “Talk to Kenneth. Oh, those poor babies. What’ve I done to those poor babies?”

Everyone in the waiting room was listening to us. Most were looking. Some probably had tales a lot worse than Janice Severtson’s. I guided her out the door, down the steps, and to my car, which had about two minutes left on the meter.

We stopped at a nearby Shoney’s. She had a salad and a reasonably well-controlled cry. I had a chicken sandwich and a strong desire to be alone.

“You want me to talk to your husband?” I asked while we ate.

“Yes.”

“I will,” I said, reaching for a sagging fry.

I found a phone near the cash register and called Kenneth Severtson’s cell phone.

“You have the kids?”

“Yes, I’m on I-75 just passing exit 42. We’re going home. What about Janice?”

“You know the First Watch on Main Street?”

“Yes.”

“Can you be there at ten Saturday morning, without the kids?”

“I can get a sitter, but…Yes.”

“I want your wife with you.”

I thought I heard the voice of a small boy over the phone but the words weren’t clear. I hung up and went back to Janice. She had finished her salad and was shredding a napkin.

“I talked to him. I think you can go home, at least for now.”

I drove her back to her car where it was still parked at the hotel. I waited for her to get out of my car, but she just sat.

“I killed a man,” she said.

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t feel real.”

“I know.”

“My God, can you really just kill people and get away with it?” she said.

“Happens every day,” I said.

I told her to be at the First Watch Saturday. I watched her get into her car, start it, and pull out of the hotel lot. She held up a good-bye hand to me. I returned the gesture and headed for the highway.

When I got back to my office, it was a little before one. I thought about calling Dixie for more help but decided I wanted to do this one the old-fashioned way. If that didn’t work, there was always Dixie.

It took two phone calls and two lies and I had my answer, not as complete and detailed as Dixie would have given me but enough for me to do what I was going to do.

I can be fooled, but I’m not a fool.

I called Ames McKinney at the Texas Bar and Grill. I told him to bring a gun, something not conspicuous.

I sat at my desk, thinking, listening to the window air conditioner, and looking at the small painting of the dark jungle and small orchid. I knew that over my shoulder Charlton Heston and Orson Welles were looking down at me.

“Do what must be done,” Heston’s Vargas character said with conviction.

“Take care of your ass,” said Welles’s Hank. “No one else will, partner.”

I got up and changed into my best work clothes: an old, only slightly frayed pair of blue slacks, well-ironed; a colorful pink-and-white short-sleeved shirt, my best; and the most expensive item I owned, my black patent leather shoes with dark socks.

It took Ames McKinney less than ten minutes to get to me. I was back in the chair behind my desk when I heard his motor scooter come into the DQ lot and park below. I didn’t hear him climb the metal stairs to the second floor or hear his footsteps approach my door. Ames McKinney was polite, born seventy-three years ago, a child of polite, God-fearing Methodists in Texas near the Oklahoma panhandle. Ames knocked. I told him to come in. Ames had once been close to rich and had lost it all. He had trailed the partner who had cheated him to Sarasota, where the partner had changed his name and grown even richer, a steel pillar of philanthropy and high society.

I found Ames’s partner, and the two of them, in spite of my attempts to reason or threaten them out of it, had an old-fashioned shoot-out on the beach in the park at the far south end of Lido Key. Ames was the better shot. The former partner took a bullet in the heart. Ames served eight months for having an unregistered weapon and engaging in a duel, a law that still existed in Florida. Ames’s age and the evidence of what his former partner had done and my eyewitness testimony about the gunfight had kept the sentence reasonably short.

Now Ames lived in Sarasota, in a room with a bed in the back of the Texas Bar and Grill on Second Street. Ames’s job was to keep the place from being broken into at night and see to it that the owner Ed Fairing’s gun collection was maintained. Ames got the room, food, and a very small salary. It didn’t cost Ames much to live, but even shopping at Goodwill, the motor scooter needed gas, and once in a while a man needs a new toothbrush.