Stuart Kaminsky - Retribution

“No, it’s true. He’s alive. He’s here.”

“I believe you,” she said. “That’s interesting. Want another diet Coke?”

I declined, paid my bill, left her a twenty-percent tip, and got back in the white Cutlass. The drive down Tamiami Trail to Blackburn Point Road took me less than fifteen minutes. I turned right on Blackburn Point, crossed the small bridge over Little Sarasota Bay, turned right again, and kept going on Casey Key Road past houses great and small, many hidden by trees and bushes.

Flo’s directions had been perfect. The walled-in fortress of Conrad Lonsberg was down a paved culde-sac. There was a gate. I parked just past it and walked back. There was no name on the door, not even an address, but there was a bell semihidden in the stone wall on my left. I pushed it, heard nothing, and waited. Nothing. I pushed it again. Nothing. Then I saw the camera. It was on the right at the top of the wall, its lens pointing straight down at me, camouflaged by a plant with big leaves.

I wasn’t sure if I could be heard but I said, “My name is Lew Fonesca. I’m a friend of Adele Hanford’s. Could I talk to you for a few minutes?”

I don’t know why but I held up my copy of Fool’s Love for the camera.

Nothing happened. I stepped back and noted that the camera lens didn’t follow me. I got in the car, turned around, and parked where I could watch the gate. The Gulf was behind me. I turned off the engine, opened the windows, and listened to the surf. A few gulls drifted by, most of them made their squawking sound. A few said, “It’s me.”

I opened Fool’s Love and began to read:

By the time Sherry Stephens hit State Highway 71 at Weaver’s Texaco station, she had become Laura Or-dette. She shifted her full duffel bag, the green one her brother George had given her when he got back from Korea, into her left hand.

Laura Ordette didn’t look back. Laura Ordette was not the kind of woman to look back. Sherry Stephens would probably be crying now walking along the roadside of Martin’s Lagoon Street, probably be looking back, thinking about what she was leaving. Sherry Stephens would be thinking about the small room she shared with her sister. Sherry Stephens would be thinking about her sister and her mother. Her mother was at work now answering calls at Rowlinson’s Real Estate. Sherry’s mother had a good telephone voice, deep and friendly. Those who actually met Grace Stephens were often surprised to see a small, serious woman in no-nonsense suits. Sherry’s father? Was he worth thinking about? Not by Laura Ordette. He was a red-faced, red-necked slab of beef who drove trucks across six states. Sherry would be worrying about missing school. Not Laura Ordette. Sherry was fifteen. Laura was eighteen and had three hundred dollars in her pocket. Sherry had saved it working after school at Pine’s Drug Store. Well, she had worked for most of it. About half she had taken from the cigar box in the bottom drawer of her father’s dresser.

A car passed going in her direction. It stopped. “Want a ride?” the man asked. He was as old as her father. He smiled like he meant it but she knew he didn’t. He might be harmless. He might be hoping. Sherry would have said “no” and kept walking without looking at him. Laura looked, appraisingly, sighed, and said, “What kind of car is that?”

“Buick.”

“I don’t ride in Buicks,” Laura said. “My parents died in one.”

The old guy drove on mumbling something.

Laura Ordette knew many things besides the fact that the duffel bag was heavy. She knew that all adults were liars. She knew that most kids were liars. She knew Reverend Scools, the pastor at her church, was a liar and stupid. The only people who didn’t lie, who didn’t have to, were the smart ones with money and power. They didn’t have to lie though maybe they did it for fun. She knew that she would grow old and die. She knew that when she died she was not going to go to heaven or hell. You just died. That was it. The rest was shit. She knew that men and boys who were old enough looked at her thinking what it would be like to have her tits pressed against their naked chests, their tongues in her mouth, their wang tall and hard inside her. Yucch. Laura Ordette was above that. If people were all animals, and that’s what she believed, the ones who were worth breathing were the ones who stayed above being breeding animals distracting themselves while they waited to get old and die.

Laura Ordette was going to New York. She knew the bus schedule. She had called to be sure there would be a seat. Laura Ordette was going to New York, the daughter of a wealthy Concord family who disdained their money and pleas and walked out to make it on her own. She would become a writer, a Broadway ticket seller, a greeter at some big art gallery on Fifth Avenue. She would go for that job in her one good dress, all made-up, tell them how she was going to New York University at night, and get the job. She was going to get her own room. She was going to meet rich, smart people, see a real play, speak in a voice nothing like that of Sherry whose name she was already forgetting as she had forgotten what her father had done to her, what her mother had said. No, not her father. That Sherry’s father, that weak, whining Sherry’s father and mother. Laura Ordette’s parents were upstanding, supportive, there for her if she wanted to go back.

When she hit State 70 she put the duffel bag down. It had D. Stephens stenciled on it in black. Laura would get rid of it when she got to her home in New York. About two blocks down she could see the sign for the bus station. She lifted the duffel bag again and waited till the traffic let her cross.

She was happy. She was on her way. Then why was she crying?

Two hours had passed and I was almost finished with the book. I stopped after the scene in which Laura dumps the fully clothed drunken high school English teacher into his bath of cold water.

No one had come in or out of the Lonsberg fort. I headed for the nearest pay phone. That took me all the way back to a gas station on the Trail. I called the Texas Bar and Grille on Second Street. Big Ed Fairing answered the phone.

“Ed, is Ames there?”

“He’s here. I’ll call him.”

I heard Ed bellow for Ames above the late-afternoon beer and burger crowd.

“He’s coming,” said Ed. “You know they’re creeping up on me, Fonesca?”

“Who?”

“Developers,” he said. “This used to be a perfectly respectable run-down street with some character. Now, art galleries, Swedish tearooms, antique shops. They’re creeping up. The upscaling of downtown is taking away its character. We’ll be looking like St. Armand’s Circle in two years. People have no sense of history. You know what they’re putting in next door? I mean, right next door where the cigar store was?”

“A tanning salon?” I guessed.

“No, Vietnamese fingernail place,” he said. “That’ll bring in a lot of business. Here’s Ames.”

“McKinney,” Ames said in his deep and slightly raspy western Sam Elliott drawl.

Ames is tall, white-haired, grizzled, lean, brown, and almost seventy-five years old. Ames was not supposed to bear arms. It was a right he had lost after using an ancient Remington Model 1895 revolver to kill his expartner in a duel on the beach in the park at the far south end of Lido Key. Ames had hired me to find his expartner who had run away with all the money in the bank and everything he could sell from the company he and Ames owned, a company worth forty million dollars. Ames was ruined. The bank took the company. Ames with a few thousand dollars in his pocket had tracked the partner for more than a year on buses from Arizona to St. Louis and then to Sarasota. I had found the partner. I tried to stop the two old men from dueling. I failed but I was there when it happened and testified that the expartner had fired first. Ames got off with a few minor felony counts and two months in jail. He now believed that he owed me. He never got any money back but he felt that I had helped him regain his self-respect.