furniture. Nothing. A roach scuttled across the room.
In the middle of the floor was a small pile of paper.
I picked it up. It looked like two very short stories by Lonsberg, complete with his signature. The title of one was “Guilty Pleasures” and the other “He Shall Have Nothing.”
With the stories in one hand, I followed Ames through the almost empty house to the single bedroom. There was a ruffled mattress on the floor in one corner and a note on the mattress. I picked it up and recognized Adele’s writing. It wasn’t signed.
“If I got this right, Mr. F.,” the note said, “Mickey gave me away. Tell him I expected him to and I’m not angry. I expect disappointments. I expect lies. I expect you have the manuscripts in your hand. They aren’t short stories. They are the first twenty pages of two novels. Guilty Pleasures was once five hundred ten pages. It’s now twenty. He Shall Have Nothing was once four hundred thirty-six pages. It’s now twenty. Lonsberg can have these forty pages. That leaves him about a thousand pages to reconstruct, the thousand pages that went out with the garbage two days ago.”
I showed the note to Ames and Mickey. Ames nodded. Mickey looked as if he were about to cry.
“Let’s get Mickey to ER,” I said. “And then we better make a delivery to Conrad Lonsberg.”
11
Things are not always as they seem. Skim milk masquerades as cream.
I don’t remember which Gilbert and Sullivan operetta that’s from but I remember my wife singing it softly in front of the mirror one morning when she was getting into one of her serious suits for the second or third day of a case she was trying. It was a reminder, a mantra for her. I have tried it on myself many times since. It makes more sense each time.
We took Mickey to the ER at Sarasota Memorial and sat in the waiting room while he was being looked at, treated, and then forgotten for about an hour.
While we sat waiting next to a young black woman with two little girls who kept coughing and jiggling, Ames sat back and closed his eyes. I took the paperback copy of Lonsberg’s Plugged Nickels from my pocket and found Chapter Five to read the section Adele had told me to read. I was becoming an odd literary expert on bits and pieces of known and unknown works by Conrad Lonsberg. I read:
He knew something was just a bit tilted to one side from the moment Abel Terelli saw his child for the first time. On the outside the baby looked perfectly normal. The first burp even looked like a smile. But there was an imbalance Abel felt in the not ugly infant being held up by the smiling nurse. Did the nurse smile every time she held up a baby? How many times had this middle-aged nurse smiled at babies and fathers? Was it a real smile? Did the nurse feel that slight tilt inside the child that Abel sensed?
Abel looked at the baby again. No, the tilt, the lack of balance, lay behind those dark eyes that looked about trying to find something or someone on which to focus. They finally found the eyes of her father and Abel, whose imagination was admittedly undisciplined, was confirmed in his opinion that the living, pulsing parts of the baby were not normal.
“Is she all right?” he called to the nurse through the glass window.
“Perfect,” the nurse answered, looking down at the child.
Did the nurse have a checklist of responses? Was “perfect” the best?
Was “fine” something to worry about? What were the other possible answers? “Imperfect, not well, badly damaged.” This was the first day in what Abel Terelli felt, was sure, would be the beginning of that which was worse than a nightmare, the living with a worm of uncertainty that would grow.
Abel was an architect, a creator, a young success, with a beautiful wife, a dark-eyed beautiful child. Then why did the devil, Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Belial, Mastema, the Prince of Darkness, the Lord of Lies, the Accuser, the Evil One, place this child before him? Or was it God testing him? Or was it, as was most likely, the fact that Abel Terelli was slowly, slowly, slowly growing mad?
“He’ll be fine,” came a voice breaking into my reading. I looked up at a male nurse with thin glasses and a shaved head dressed in hospital blues. Next to him stood Mickey who did not look fine to me. He didn’t look tilted like the infant of Abel Terelli, but “fine” was not a word I would have used.
Ames opened his eyes and immediately stood up. It reminded me of that great moment in The Magnificent Seven when James Coburn is sitting on the ground with his back to a post, his hat over his eyes, and he suddenly ruefully agrees after being goaded into proving that he is faster with his knife than his challenger with a gun. Quick, name all seven of the actors who played the magnificent seven, I thought as Ames rose. Ask me that one for a million dollars.
“Thanks,” I said as Ames put a hand under Mickey’s arm to hold him up.
One of the little coughing black girls looked up at me and coughed.
“The desk wants to go over payment again,” the nurse said apologetically. There was something about the nurse that made me think he was gay. I didn’t care. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to worry about the hospital bills of this confused and broken kid.
I walked to the woman behind the desk. We had fished Mickey’s wallet out when we came in and were asked for insurance. Mickey had a Blue Cross/Blue Shield card in his father’s name with Mickey listed as insured.
“Just sign here,” the little woman in white behind the desk said.
I pushed the clipboard in front of Mickey and handed him the pen that went with it. He signed. We left.
“Do you have anything at home, your father’s place, that you have to pick up?” I asked.
“Yes, no. Some clothes. A little money hidden, you know. Other stuff. Most of my stuff is with Adele.”
“Your father home now?” I asked.
“He should be at work,” Mickey said.
“You meant it about not going back to live with him?” I asked.
“I meant it,” he said.
I looked at Ames who nodded and touched the revolver in his pocket. We headed down Bahia Vista past Mennonite churches and the huge Der Dutchman restaurant and just past McIntosh turned into Sherwood Forest and headed toward the cul-de-sac where Michael Merrymen lived and did battle against the world.
We didn’t make it all the way down the street. There were yellow police barricades up blocking the circle at the end of the cul-de-sac. Two police cars were parked just outside the barricade and one was inside the enclosure.
Outside of the Merrymen house three men were talking. Two of them were uniformed cops. One was Detective Ed Viviase. I considered just backing out, but Viviase’s eyes came up and took me in. He recognized the Taurus. He recognized Ames and he may even have seen Mickey in the backseat.
There was no choice. I parked. I suggested that Ames park his Buntline special or whatever it was under the front seat. He did and we got out. The three of us walked slowly between the barricades and headed for the house. Viviase, looking even more solid outdoors than in his office, looked up at the sun and then at us as he came forward to meet us.
“I believe in coincidence,” he said in greeting. “I really do. Seen plenty of it. But it’s not my first choice when I try to explain things. Fonesca, what are you doing here?”
“This is Mickey Merrymen,” I said. “He lives in there with his father.”
“Wrong tense,” said Viviase, looking at Mickey. “Sorry to tell you this, but your father is dead.”
“And the dog?” asked Mickey.
“Dead too. Sorry.”
“No,” said Mickey. “He won’t attack me when I go in and get my things.”
“You don’t seem surprised your father is dead,” Viviase said.
“I don’t care,” Mickey said. “Yes, I do. I feel… I don’t know the word?”
“Happy?” Viviase tried.
“Relieved,” I helped.
“Relieved,” said Mickey. “Yes, relieved. My father was crazy. When my mother died…”
“What happened to your face?” asked Viviase.
