Stuart Kaminsky - Retribution

“I brought her bad news.”

“It happens,” Sally said.

Sally is and will always be a year older than I am. She is solid, ample, and pretty with clear skin, short wavy hair, and a voice that always reminded me of Lauren Bacall.

“Ready to order now?” asked a beautiful Thai waitress in a yellow and white silk dress.

“You look terrible,” Michael said, turning toward me.

Neither of Sally’s kids disliked me. I think I puzzled them. I never made jokes, didn’t work at making them like me. And I’m sure they wondered what their mother found in the soulful, balding man who reached for the tea and said, “You guys?”

“Crispy duck,” said Sally.

“The same with a Thai iced tea,” said Michael.

“Another one. Thai iced tea too.”

“I’ll have the tofu pad thai,” I said.

The pretty waitress smiled and walked away.

“So,” said Sally. “How was your day and how can you afford this?”

“New clients,” I said. “Two of them.”

“Your cheek?” she said.

“Someone slapped me.”

“You deck him?” Michael asked.

“It was a woman,” I said.

“Did you deck her?” asked Susan.

“She was a lot bigger than I am,” I said.

“Most people are,” said Susan. “That doesn’t mean you should let them hit you.”

“It’s part of my job,” I said. “I slap people with a summons. They slap me with their hands.”

“It’s more than that,” Sally said, looking into my eyes.

Yes, I thought, I’ve just come from discovering a dead man, almost certainly murdered. I not only found him, I pounded his head three or four times when I tried to open his door.

“There’s more,” I said. “Later.”

During dinner, Susan did most of the talking, mainly about a friend named Jackie who may have decided she no longer wanted to be friends with Susan. Jackie’s transgressions were numerous. I know one was that Jackie had begun sitting at a different table at lunch. I don’t remember the others. I don’t remember eating. I sort of remember paying the check with some of the crumpled bills from Marvin Uliaks. I sort of remember Sally asking the waitress to pack up the pad thai and rice I hadn’t touched and put it in a little white carton for me to take home.

I do remember being in the parking lot where Sally told the kids to go to her car and she walked me to my rental and handed me the brown bag of rice and pad thai.

“What is it?” she asked as we stood in the parking lot.

Some kids came running out yelling and laughing from the 7-Eleven at the end of the small mall. I looked at them and back at Sally.

I had been seeing Sally for a few months. We were friends. Well, maybe we were more than friends, but nothing intimate, not yet. I couldn’t. I hadn’t been able to find a safe place for the memory of my dead wife. I didn’t know if I ever would even with Ann Horowitz’s help.

And Sally had been a widow for more than four years, too busy for men, not interested in becoming involved, not really being pursued. We were friends. She was also a family therapist and at the Children’s Services of Sarasota. Adele had been and officially still was one of her cases.

“Adele,” I said.

I looked over at Michael and Susan quarreling over something in the backseat of her decade-old Honda.

“What happened?” Sally asked calmly.

“You know about her and Lonsberg?” I asked.

“What she told me. What Flo told me,” she said.

“Adele’s missing,” I said. “It looks as if she ran away with a kid named Mickey Merrymen. You know the name?”

“No,” she said. “What does this have to do with Lonsberg?”

“Adele and Mickey may have stolen a roomful of Lonsberg’s unpublished manuscripts.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it gets worse. I’m not sure you want to know the rest.”

“I’ve got to find Adele,” she said. “I need to know whatever there is to know.”

“You don’t have much free time to search for missing girls,” I said. “Not with your caseload.”

“I get a little help from the police when I need it,” she said.

“And from your friends,” I said. “Mickey Merrymen’s grandfather is dead. Murdered, I think. Ames and I found his body about an hour before I came here.”

“Which accounts for your lack of appetite.”

“Which accounts for my lack of appetite,” I agreed. “Can you forget this conversation for a few days while I look for Adele?”

“No,” she said, glancing over at Michael and Susan who were now looking at us impatiently.

“They thought you were coming over for Trivial Pursuit,” Sally said.

“Not tonight. Can you forget?”

“No,” she said. “But I can lie and say we didn’t have this conversation. I lie a lot. It’s part of my job. Sometimes, too often, you have to lie to kids to give them a chance to survive. Call me. If you don’t, I’ll call you.”

She moved forward and kissed my cheek slowly, the side that hadn’t been slapped by Bubbles Dreemer, and then she headed for her car.

I drove back to the DQ parking lot, the smell of Thai food battling with the odor of a decade of indifferent cleaning and those little yellow cardboard things that you hang from your mirror to override whatever has been dropped or invaded the upholstery.

It was definitely a Joan Crawford night. I was always ready for Mildred Pierce, but tonight I’d go for Woman on the Beach. I knew just where the tape was in the pile next to my television set.

The DQ was still open but I didn’t feel like doing any more talking. This had already been the kind of day I had been trying to avoid for the last five years. I told life to leave me alone. It refused to stop knocking at my door, calling me on the phone, and slapping me in the face.

I walked up the concrete steps and moved along the rusting metal railing on one side and the dark offices on the other. When I came to my door, I found an envelope stuck into it with a push pin. The only word on the envelope in penciled block letters was “ FONESCA.”

I dropped the envelope in my brown bag, opened the door, turned on the lights, and moved to my desk where I put down the bag and opened the envelope.

The single white sheet inside bore a simple, short message in the same block letters as my name on the envelope.

STOP LOOKING FOR HER. ONE INNOCENT PERSON IS DEAD AND GONE. LET IT BE AN END. LET THIS BE A WARNING.

It was unsigned. I put the brown paper bag on the ledge of my office window and went into my small office, which was really what passed for home, a single cot, which I made up every day with an old comforter and two pillows. A chest of drawers. A tiny refrigerator. A closet. A fourteen-inch black-and-white television with a VCR and a stack of tapes and a folding wooden television table. It had taken me minutes to move in three years ago. It would take me ten minutes to move out when the time came.

I found Woman on the Beach and did my best not to think, not to think about the murdered man, not to think about Adele, not to think about the pleading face of Marvin Uliaks. I succeeded when the tape came on. The dream world on the tube was mine. Swirling behind it in my mind, deep but hard and always ready to scream, was the image of my wife being hit by that car on Lake Shore Drive. I hadn’t been there but I had imagined, dreamed about what it had looked like, about what she might have had time to think, to feel. Each dream was just a bit different. I wanted one solid one to hang on to, but my imagination refused to cooperate, to tell me the truth or a lie I could believe.

Joan Crawford smiled, but there was a troubled look behind that smile. I knew why. I had seen this picture many times. It never changed. Only my dream changed.