Stuart Kaminsky: Midnight Pass

“I am,” I said, opening the door and stepping in, with him behind me.

I flicked on the air conditioner, pulled up the shade to let some light in, and sat behind my desk. He looked around my office clearly as unimpressed with it as he was with me.

My office is a cube about the size of a small Dumpster. One small, scratched desk, a wooden chair-no wheels, no swivel-behind it, and two chairs-simple, wood, secondhand-in front of it.

Thumbtacked on the wall behind my desk was a Touch of Evil poster, a reproduction of the original with Charlton Heston and Orson Welles glaring at each other. The poster was beginning to curl. On the wall across from my desk was a painting about the size of an eight-by-eleven mailing envelope. Flo had given the painting to me as a Christmas gift. The artist worked at the Selby Gardens on the Bay. There was an orchid in my painting. The Selby specializes in orchids, but that didn’t tell you what you needed to know about the painting.

“Looks like you,” she had said when she handed it to me.

And it did. It was a dark, almost ebony jungle with black jagged mountains and dark clouds in the background. The only touch of color was a small yellow orchid on a gnarled tree in the foreground. The dark jungle, night sky, and the gothic mountain was definitely me, and the small touch of living color was about the right size.

I got to meet the artist, Stig Dalstrom, one afternoon at Patrick’s restaurant on Main Street. He specializes in paintings like the one Flo had given me but Flo said he also did commissions.

Dalstrom was taller than me, a little broader, with glasses, a slightly receding hairline, dark blond hair, and an echo of his dark paintings in his eyes. He had a slight Swedish accent.

Our conversation had been brief and I wondered what haunted his past. I wondered how much one of his paintings or prints would cost. I told him I’d like to look up from behind my desk and see more of that haunting darkness and those little touches of light.

I was deep inside that tiny orchid when I heard a voice.

“Mr. Fonesca, are you all right?” the man across from me said, and I brought myself back from the jungle.

“You’re…?” I asked.

“Severtson, Kenneth Severtson. She took the kids,” he said to me to open the conversation.

“Nice to meet you,” I answered.

“She had no right,” Severtson said, leaning toward me and staring into my eyes without a blink.

I don’t play “who blinks first.” I didn’t speak. He waited. It was my turn. I wasn’t playing.

“You’ve got to find her.”

He won.

“Who do I have to find?”

“My wife, Janice, and the children.”

“I’m a process server,” I said. “You want the police.”

“There’s no crime, not yet.”

I was about to give him my standard line about needing a private detective.

“You find people,” Severtson said.

“That’s what a process server does,” I agreed.

“Find my wife and children.”

“Mr. Severtson, I don’t do that kind of thing.”

That was a lie. The truth was that whatever “that kind of thing” was I had probably done it when someone pushed the right tender buttons of my despair.

“Sally Porovsky said you might be able to help.”

“How do you know Sally?”

He turned his head away and lowered his voice.

“There was an incident about a year ago,” he said. “Janice and I had an argument. The neighbors called the police. The police called child protection. Sally Porovsky was the caseworker. She saw us a few times. So when Janice left three days ago, I called Sally. She told me to wait a few days and then come to see you if Janice and the kids didn’t show up.”

I held up a hand to stop him, reached over, picked up the phone, and dialed Sally’s cell phone.

“Hello,” she said, her voice cell-phone crackly.

“Kenneth Severtson’s here,” I said.

“He’s in your office?”

“Yes.”

“Can you help him?”

“Can you?”

“No,” she said. “But my deep-down instinct is that if you don’t help him, he’ll try to help himself, and I think he has the kind of personality that could snap.”

“Professionally put,” I said.

“If I put it into social-work babble, it would say the same thing but you wouldn’t understand it. I doubt if the people I write reports for understand them. I doubt if they even read the reports. Lewis, you are starting to depress me.”

“I have that effect on people,” I said.

I looked at Severtson, who strained to figure out what was going on. I didn’t say anything.

“Lew, you still there?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well?”

“You want me working instead of spending the afternoon in bed with Joan Crawford.”

“Something like that,” she said.

“Dinner Sunday? My place,” she said. “Seven?”

“I’ll bring the pizza.”

“Kids want Subway sandwiches. They like the ads on television.”

“What kind of sandwiches?”

“Your choice. Seven?”

“Seven,” I said.

“Call me later,” she said. “I’ve got to run down to Englewood.”

I hung up the phone.

“You like movies?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said cautiously.

“Old movies?”

“Sure, sometimes.”

“Really old movies,” I pushed. “From the Thirties and Forties?”

“Not particularly.”

He was beginning to look at me as if he had come to the wrong place, which was fine with me. He didn’t move so I pushed ahead.

“How old are your children?” I asked, looking at Severtson, taking off my hat, and putting it on the desk. “You have recent pictures of them and your wife?”

“Yes,” he said, reaching into his inside jacket pocket. “Sally said I should bring them.”

He handed me a brown envelope with a clasp. I opened it and looked at the three pictures. There were individual color photos of a boy and a girl. Both were smiling. Neither looked at all like their father. The third photograph told me who they looked like. The kids stood on each side of their mother, who wore jeans and a white shirt tied about her belly to reveal a very nice navel. Her hair was blond, just like both kids, and all three had the same smile.

“My daughter’s name is Sydney, after my father. She’s four. My son is Kenneth Jr. He’s six. He says he has a loose tooth.”

“Nice family,” I said, returning the photographs to the envelope and placing it in front of me.

“Used to be,” he said. “Then… wherever Janice has the kids, Andrew Stark is probably with them.”

“Friend of your wife?” I asked.

“More than a friend,” Severtson said.

He looked as if he were about to cry.

“I see,” I said.

“Stark is my partner,” he said. “We own S amp; S Marine on Stickney Point Road. Upscale boats.”

“I’ve seen it,” I said.

“I caught them on the phone. Janice didn’t deny it. She says it’s my fault, that I’ve changed, that she needs attention not grunts.”

“Have you?”

“What?”

“Changed,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “We’ve been married eleven years. I gained about four pounds a year. It’s in my genes. So now Andy Stark is in my wife’s jeans.”

“You talk to him about it?”

“They were gone before I could,” he said. “Janice left me a note saying she wants a divorce and that she’ll get back to me as soon as she’s settled somewhere. That’s what she says she wants.”

“What do you want?”

“My kids back,” he said. “I’d probably even take Janice back if she’d come. She’s going through some midlife thing or some woman’s thing. I don’t know. But she has no right to run away with Andy and take the kids. I want you to find them and bring them back.”