tomorrow, before noon. There is nothing more to say. There are no more chances. Good-bye.”
Sally hung up.
“She won’t be there, will she?” I asked.
“You could tell?”
I shrugged.
“She might,” said Sally, swiveling around to face me, “but she won’t the next time or the time after that. This one will go to court. And given the judges on the bench, odds are exactly three to one the kid will go back to her mother.”
“Drugs?”
“And men. And… who knows?”
“I have an idea for an ad,” I said. “Television. You find real addicts, young ones, put the camera on them, black and white, and on the screen you put their ages, first names and the drugs they use. Off-camera voice just asks them questions, which they mess up, and the kids who see the ads know that they are watching people whose minds are-”
“You’ve given this some thought, huh, Lew?”
Then it hit me. I must have shown it.
“What’s wrong?”
“It wasn’t my idea,” I said. “It was… my wife’s. I’d forgotten until…”
“Have a seat,” Sally said, pulling the chrome-and-vinyl chair out of the corner.
I sat and took off my cap.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what? I’m getting off at seven. Kids want to go to Shaner’s for pizza.”
“Sure,” I said.
“You have a car?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Pick us up at the apartment at seven-twenty,” she said, smoothing the folds in her green skirt. “Or pick up the pizzas and we’ll have them at the apartment. Now, what can I do for you?”
“Kyle McClory,” I said. “Name mean anything?”
“You mean, is he in the system?”
“Yes.”
She turned, moved the mouse next to her computer, punched in the name, found a file and opened it.
“Not much,” she said. “In fact, not anything.”
“Try Andrew Goines,” I said.
She did.
“Nothing there either,” she said. “Anything else?”
“Try Kyle Root. His mother is Nancy Root.”
“The actress?”
“Yes.”
Sally did some more clacking of the keyboard and turned to me.
“No Kyle Root,” she said. “But there is a Yolanda Root. Let’s see. She… yes, her mother is Nancy Root. Yolanda has a long sheet. Drugs, men and boys, even attempted blackmail on a local businessman when she was thirteen. Went into his office, took off her clothes and demanded money. She picked the wrong guy. Gay. He called the police. Yolanda is, let’s see, eighteen now.”
“Where is she?”
“Last known address is her grandmother and grandfather, mother’s parents, in Bradenton. Grandfather owns a hardware store. You know I’m not supposed to be doing this.”
“I know,” I said.
“Could lose my job,” she said.
“I know.”
“You’re helping someone, right?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the worst that could happen? I’d wind up in an office or managing a fast food franchise. Regular hours and no bad dreams about the day.”
“And the kids would get all the free leftover junk food they could eat,” I added.
“That supposed to be a joke, Fonesca?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Good. Don’t forget about Saturday,” she said.
“Saturday?”
“Darrell Caton,” she said with a sigh.
Darrell was a fourteen-year-old Sally had conned me into seeing once a week. Big Brother plan. Darrell had no faith in the idea. Neither did I, but we had both agreed to start this week.
“I remembered,” I said.
“Sure you did. I’m busy, Lewis,” she said wearily. “See you tonight.”
She touched my hand, turned her back and picked up her phone.
John Gutcheon was on the phone when I got off the elevator. He waved at me with a stapler and I went into the afternoon.
I parked in the DQ parking lot and went up to my office, where the phone began ringing as soon as I opened the door.
“Lew Fonesca,” I said, picking it up.
“No more,” came a man’s voice, low, a little raspy.
“Let it end here,” he said.
“What?”
“What happened to the boy, Kyle McClory,” he said.
“You know.”
“Yes, yes,” he said so low that I could barely hear him. “You have to stop looking.”
There was no threat in his voice, just exhaustion.
“You did it?” I asked.
“Someone who doesn’t need any more pain, doesn’t deserve any more pain will suffer if you don’t let it just end here,” he said.
I took the phone and looked out the window as I said, “I can’t.”
Whoever it was had either been lucky and called the second I reached my door or he had watched me and called from a cell phone when he saw me get to the office. There were four cars in addition to my rental in the DQ lot. Across Washington three cars were parked, the sun bright on their windows, so I couldn’t see if anyone was inside.
“You don’t understand,” the man said. “I’ve got to stop you.”
“Why?”
“Seneca said, ‘The final hour when we cease to exist does not itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death process.’ We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way.”
My eyes were still on the cars in the lot and on the street.
He hung up. One of the cars, a late-model compact, pulled out of the space on Washington and into traffic.
I went across the street to the Crisp Dollar Bill. The bar was dark and smelled of beer. The bar and the smell reminded me of Mac’s Tavern a block from our house in Chicago. My father used to send me there with a glass jar for Mac to fill with draft beer on Saturday nights. There was no music at Mac’s, just the silent black-and-white image on the ten-inch screen of the old DuMont television that sat on a shelf and the loud voices of the Irish and Italian neighborhood working men who came to complain, brag and declare the superiority of one nation over another, one baseball team over another. I was informed by my father that no Republicans were allowed in Mac’s.
In contrast to those memories, the expensive acoustical system of the Crisp Dollar Bill was playing
