Stuart Kaminsky - Vengeance

My grandparents on my father’s side had met in Viareggio, not far from Florence. My grandfather had been a waiter. My grandmother had been a chef’s assistant. They came to the United States in 1912 and made their way to Chicago, where they opened a small neighborhood restaurant on the Northwest Side. They were officially retired by the time I was born. My maternal grandparents came from Rome. My mother’s father was a reporter for a newspaper. My maternal grandmother worked at a bakery near the newspaper office. When they came to America, she stayed at home and had children and my grandfather split his time between working as a furniture upholsterer and writing for an Italian-language newspaper. He had a political column and a bad temper.

When my parents married, they left the Catholic Church and became Episcopalians. I don’t know why. They have never told me, and when I asked, as a child or an adult, they said the equivalent of “Some things are personal, even for parents.”

There are times I’ve thought of becoming a Catholic like my grandparents, but I’ve never had the religious calling. It just seemed like something I might want to do, which is not a good reason for becoming a Catholic. It is probably a good reason for going to a basketball game or ordering a banana split, but a bad idea for becoming a Catholic.

I tucked my soap, toothbrush and Bic razor in a desk drawer and, tire iron in hand, went down to the Metro. Getting in was painful. Getting out after finding a parking space on Main Street was even more painful. I didn’t take the tire iron with me to the Cafe Kaldi.

Caroline Wilkerson was already there. I had no trouble finding her even though the coffeehouse tables were full. She sat alone inside, not at one of the outside tables, an open notebook in front of her, a pair of half-glasses perched on the end of her nose. She was writing in a large notebook. A cup of coffee rested nearby. I recognized her from the society pages of the Herald — Tribune. I picked up a cheese and onion croissant and a large coffee and made my way back to her table. I didn’t want to bite my lower lip when I sat, but my sore plexus insisted.

When I sat across from her, she looked at me over her glasses, took them off, folded her hands on the table and gave me her attention.

The widow Caroline was a beauty, better in person than in the papers. She was probably in her late forties or early fifties, with short, straight silver hair, a wrinkle-free face with full red lips that reminded me of Joan Fontaine. If she had spent time with a plastic surgeon, the surgeon had done one hell of a good job.

She wore a pink silky blouse with a pearl necklace and pearl earrings and a lightweight white jacket and no friendly smile.

“Mr. Fonesca?”

“Yes,” I said.

She nodded and took a sip of her coffee.

“She didn’t. No way,” someone said.

A pretty girl with long blond hair and a silver ring through her left nostril had uttered the words of disbelief. The girl began to laugh. So did the girl with short dark hair with her and the boy with a little beard and a baseball cap worn backward.

“Are you in pain, Mr. Fonesca? You look…”

“Minor accident,” I said. “I wasn’t looking and I ran into something. Do you know that Melanie Sebastian is missing?”

“If I didn’t know,” she said, lifting her glasses so they rested on top of her head and closing her notebook, “I wouldn’t be here talking to you. Carl Sebastian called me. He was frantic. Almost in tears. I couldn’t help him. Melanie hasn’t contacted me. I would have thought, as Carl did, that if Melanie did something like this, she’d get in touch with me. I told Carl to call the police. Melanie might have been hurt. She could even be…”

I drank some coffee and took a bite of the croissant. It was pretty good. I really wanted an egg.

“Did they fight?” I asked. “Could that be the reason she ran away?”

“Why don’t you ask Carl?”

“Spouses sometimes don’t want to face certain truths.”

“Yes, I know,” she said.

The trio at the table next to ours laughed. Caroline Wilkerson looked at them somewhat wistfully for an instant and then back to me.

“Fight? The Sebastians?” I reminded her.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “But I can’t be certain. Carl said nothing about a fight and I don’t recall ever seeing them fight or hearing from Melanie that they fought. I’m very worried about her, Mr. Fonesca.”

“Any idea of where she might have gone?”

The pause was long. She bit her lower lip and made up her mind and sighed.

“Geoffrey Green,” she said softly, meeting my eyes. “He’s her analyst and… I think that’s all I can say.”

“Carl Sebastian thinks his wife and Dr. Green might have had an affair, that she may have left to be with him.”

She shrugged.

“I’ve heard rumors that Geoff Green is…”

“Homosexual,” I supplied.

“Bisexual,” she amended.

“You can’t think of anyplace else she might have gone to, anyone else she might be with?”

“No, but I’ll think about it.”

I had finished my croissant and coffee and got up slowly. I handed her one of my cards.

“If you hear from Mrs. Sebastian,” I said, “would you tell her that her husband just wants to talk to her. If she doesn’t want to talk to him, I’d like to talk to her. She can call me at that number. I won’t try to talk her into anything she doesn’t want to do.”

“I hope you find her,” Caroline Wilkerson said. “Melanie has had problems recently, depression. One of her relatives, her only close relative, a cousin I think, recently died. That’s hardly a reason for

… who knows? Frankly, I don’t know what to make of all this.”

At the moment, that made two of us.

“Are you permitted to let me know if you find out anything about where Melanie is and why she’s-”

I must have been shaking my head no, because she stopped.

“I’m sorry,” she said with a sad smile, showing perfect white teeth. “That’s what I would expect if you were working for me.”

When I got to the coffeehouse door, I looked back at Caroline Wilkerson. Her half-glasses were back on and her notebook was open.

Back in the DQ parking lot, I parked the Metro and went to the window for a burger, fries and a chocolate/ cherry Blizzard. It was still early. There was no line. Dawn, an almost nothing of a woman, was behind the window, freshly aproned, smiling.

“Dave not in yet?” I asked after she took my order.

“On the boat,” she said. “Workin’ on it at least. Said he had the need. And I can use the extra hours.”

Dawn was probably in her early thirties and had two small kids, but she looked like a pre-teen. She was sad in the eyes but fresh-faced and never wore makeup. Dave said she had been through a tough time. He let her and her boys live rent free in his one-bedroom rental house off of Orange and north of downtown. With the money she made at the DQ and an additional hundred a month she got from cleaning houses, she got by.

“Ever hear of a guy named Dwight, Dwight Handford or Dwight Prescott?” I asked her over the buzz of the machine as she worked on my Blizzard.

“Know a couple of Dwights,” she said. “But not those two.”

“It’s one guy who uses different names.”

“What’s he look like?”

I told her.

She came to the second window, Blizzard in one hand, burger and fries in a bag.

“Rings a cowbell,” she said. “I’ll think on it.”

I nodded, took my food to one of the red picnic tables covered by a gray and red Coca-Cola umbrella and tried to think while I ate and watched the cars and trucks speed down 301. My stomach hurt with the first shock of cold. Dwight had done a very good job with one punch. I was careful from that point on, but I was determined to finish the drink.