Stuart Kaminsky - Retribution

“Story on Sarah Taylor’s fall?”

“Listed as accident. That’s all I can get. And I can’t track down a Charles or Vera Lynn Dorsey, not in Ohio, not anywhere. I’ll keep on it. But I can tell you where to find Clark Dorsey, Charlie’s brother.”

“Where?”

“Retired,” Harvey said. “Former fireman in Arcadia. Lives in Osprey, right off Old Venice Road. Open your white pages. He’s listed.”

“Thanks, Harve.”

“Let me know how it comes out,” he said. “Holy piss. I’ve just broken into the Pentagon files.”

“I thought you already did that,” I said.

“But they keep changing passwords and access codes. Gets harder all the time.”

“Have a good day, Harve,” I said.

“It already is,” he said.

I pulled out the sheet Lonsberg had given me with the phone numbers and addresses of his son and daughter. Osprey is on the way to Venice, no more than half an hour away, and Venice another ten minutes.

With the neatly folded threat that had been posted on my door tucked into my shirt pocket, I called Ames McKinney and asked him what his day was like.

“Cleaning and contemplation,” he said.

I told him the police might be talking to him about our discovery of Corsello’s body and told him what I had said. Then I asked him if he wanted to take a ride to Osprey and Venice.

“Armed?”

“Lightly,” I said.

“When?”

“Pick you up in ten minutes.”

“Can you make it an hour?” he said. “I’m working on the grill.”

I agreed and walked over to Gwen’s Diner. It was a little early for lunch but I was hungry. Gwen’s is a holdover from a few years before the day Elvis supposedly came in in the 1950s. I looked over at Elvis. He was still smiling. There were two booths open. I went to the counter. If you looked out the window from any seat in Gwen’s, you could watch the collisions where 301 met the curve at Tamiami Trail.

There was a nonsmoking section in Gwen’s, not a real one, just a couple of tables set aside. People in the neighborhood called the place Gwen’s II. The original Gwen, if she ever existed, was now long gone. The place was run by a woman named Sheila and her two teenage daughters, one of whom was about to graduate from Sarasota High School a block away, the other was seventeen and working on her second baby. Jesse, the younger one, short, blond, round with child, came up to me when I sat at the counter next to Tim from Steubenville. Tim was a regular, close to ninety. He lived in an assisted living home a short walk away at the end of Brother Geenen Way. He spent as much time as he could at Gwen’s reading the newspaper, shaking his head, and trying to get people engaged in conversation over anything from the price of gasoline to the latest school shooting.

There was very little left of Tim from Steubenville. Blue veins undulated over the thin bones in his hands as he turned pages of the Herald-Tribune and shook his head.

“Fonesca,” he said as Jesse poured me a coffee and waited.

“Fried egg sandwich,” I said. “White toast.”

“Tomato and onion?” she asked.

“Tomato, I’m working today.”

“Fonesca,” Tim from Steubenville repeated, tapping my arm.

It was a little after eleven. The place was empty except for me, Tim, and four guys who looked like air-conditioning repairmen in a booth drinking coffee and eating pie.

“Tim,” I said.

“You see about this guy in Nebraska,” he said, poking a finger at an article in the newspaper awkwardly folded. “Someone stuck a rattler in his mailbox.”

“Did it bite him?” I asked.

“No, scared the shit out of him though,” Tim said thoughtfully. “How’d you like to get up some morning, walk out to your mailbox expecting your pension check or AAA card, and find a rattlesnake.”

“I don’t have a mailbox,” I said. “Just a slot in the door.”

“Not the point, Fonesca.”

He shook his head at my density and sipped at his sixth or seventh cup of coffee.

“Point is,” he said. “You can be going along, minding your own business, thinking about some old song by Perry Como or Peggy Lee or what you might have for lunch, and bango-bamo, you got a snake hanging on your goddamn nose. Anything can happen. That’s the truth of the news, what it really tells you. People don’t understand. We don’t have to know when there’s a train derailed in Pakistan or a drug dealer gets knocked off in Colombia. Who needs to know that?”

I could think of some people but I just nodded at Jesse as she placed a mug of coffee in front of me.

“Point is that the newspapers are telling us that anything can happen, anytime. Careful doesn’t take care of half of that. The newspaper is like the goddamn Bible. The Bible says God can do whatever He damn well pleases without giving a reason or making sense. We have to learn to take whatever comes and like it. Arguing with God is like arguing with the news. Same lesson.”

“I agree,” I said. ‘Tim, you’re a philosopher.”

“Used to be a printer,” he answered, looking back at the newspaper for more disasters and surprises. “Nothing’s changed. Not in thousands of years. Just put in engines, make bigger guns, take the taste out of our food, and why?”

“Why?” I asked as Jesse delivered my egg sandwich cut neatly down the middle with two pickle slices on the side.

Tim reached out and grabbed Jesse’s wrist so she would hear the answer. Jesse patiently paused. There were no customers waiting and Tim was the diner’s resident character.

“People think they can change things,” he said softly. “They can’t. They can make bigger, faster, even keep you alive a few years longer, but we all go through the cycle and never know if a rattler’s going to come out of the mailbox.”

Or what messages will be hung on our doors, I thought. Tim released Jesse’s wrist though he couldn’t have held it if she hadn’t been willing to cooperate in the first place.

“Jesse,” I asked, reaching for half a sandwich. “You know a Mickey Merrymen?”

Jesse was a pretty pale girl on the thin side. Her blond hair was short and her look was that of a kid who had a two-year-old at home and another on the way. Jesse’s primary claim to respectability was that she was married. Her husband, Paul, also known as The Chink, was a mechanic right across the street in the Ford Agency. The two-year-old, Paulie Jr., was in day care every other day when Jesse wasn’t working. Jesse was finishing high school through the mail. Jesse was and looked tired all the time.

“Freak time. Geek time,” she said. “Yeah, I know him.”

“What do you know about him?” I asked while Tim shook his head and pointed at yet another article to substantiate his world view that, as a matter of fact, was mine too.

“Mickey’s a weird bird, an X-man mutant,” she said. “Smart, a little nuts, not bad-looking when he cleans up, but a weird bird.”

“Get in trouble?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“Look at this. Look at this,” Tim said, finding some new truth in the Herald-Tribune in front of him. Tim spoke with the quiet resignation of one who knew everything he found would vindicate his philosophy. Tim was a true believer who moved from coffee during the day to the whiskey he must have kept secreted in his room at night and which was still not fully masked by Eckerd mouthwash in the morning.

“Mickey,” I reminded Jesse.

“I think he graduated last year, works at the Burger King up the Trail,” she said. “Says he’s going to college. Or used to say it. Massachusetts Institute of Technicals or something. Father’s nuts.”

“That’s all you know about Mickey Merrymen?” I said, finishing the first half of the sandwich.