car.
The detectives put on white plastic gloves, took out flashlights, reached over the dead man and looked into the car. They popped the trunk with the switch on the floor. Without touching anything, they came to the same conclusion, except for the blood, the car was clean, not even a gum wrapper or a bitten-off fingernail. And, except for one of those plastic spare tires, the trunk was even cleaner. For more, they would have to wait till someone from the crime scene division showed up.
“People walk by and don’t see a dead man on the street?” Longworth asked the crowd.
“He wasn’t on the street,” said Franco. “Not till I opened the door.”
“You have the key?” asked Traihairn.
“Don’t need one,” said Franco, looking across the street where Angie, dressed for work, was standing in the doorway with a cup of coffee in her hand.
“Who’re you?” asked Trahairn.
“Tow-truck driver.”
Lew’s second call from the phone booth at Shoney’s was a little trickier. He couldn’t reverse the charges. He had a pile of quarters piled next to the phone, five dollars in quarters.
“Texas,” said Big Ed when he answered the phone at the Texas Bar amp; Grille in Sarasota.
“Fonesca.”
“You back?”
“No.”
“Things interesting?”
“Yes.”
“You are a payload oil gusher of information, amigo. I’ll get Ames.”
Lew watched a stringy woman in her sixties paying her bill at the cashier’s counter. At her side was a rotund boy about four years old. His hair was thin and the color of corn. His cheeks were pink. His beltless pants were slipping and his principal task was keeping them up. The boy looked at Lew.
“McKinney,” came Ames’s deep raspy voice. “You okay?”
“I’m okay.”
“You find him?”
“Yes.”
“Turn him in? Shoot him? You in jail?”
“No to all three questions.”
Ames knew where the line was between what he should and should not ask his friend.
“Earl Borg, remember him?” said Ames.
Lew remembered the man, the name, the sight of the dying boar and the snarling pit bill, the happy little girl, the smell of blood, sweat, tobacco. Lew remembered Earl Borg.
“Yes.”
“Wants to see you. Says now isn’t soon enough and yesterday might even have been too.”
“Tell him tomorrow,” Lew said.
“Told him that yesterday.”
The fat little boy was holding his pants up with both hands and staring at Lew, who stared back. Then the woman took the boy’s hand. The untended right side of his pants drooped. As they walked away, the boy smiled over his shoulder at Lew, who did his best to smile back. He held the smile, turned and examined it in the mirror on the wall. He saw the face of regret.
“I’ll tell him again,” said Ames.
“I’ll call him as soon as I get to Sarasota.”
There should be more to say, to tell, but Lew couldn’t do it. Ames would listen and somewhere inside him he would judge. His code was simple, right out of John Wayne. There was right. There was wrong. You didn’t need a god or a devil to tell you that. Ames would judge in silence and support his friend. The listener who did not judge, Ames knew, was Ann Horowitz.
“Good enough,” said Ames.
They hung up.
By the time Lew parked the car back at Toro’s and walked to Cabrini Street, the dead man in the car across from Angie and Franco’s house had been taken away, and the car towed. The small crowd was gone. Franco and Angie stood in front of their house, coffee mugs in hand.
“Cold?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said. “Think it’s too early to call Terri?”
“Nah. Let’s do it.”
They had just hung up when Lew came through the door.
“Lew,” Angie said. “You look…”
“I need a shower. Franco, are you busy today?”
“I’m as busy as I want to be,” said Franco. “If I wanna hustle, there’s always plenty of work. You need a ride or something?”
“A ride and something,” said Lew, heading for his niece’s room.
Lewis,” Angie said. “A man was killed in a car across the street last night.”
“Looks like the drawing you’ve got of that Posno,” said Franco. “They’ve even got ID.”
“And the police know about those other two,” said Angie. “That they were looking for you before they got killed.”
“Santoro and Aponte-Cruz,” said Franco. “Manny had to tell the detectives.”
“I know,” said Lew. “I think I’ll take a shower now.”
In his office-home in Sarasota, Lew had no bath, no shower, just a sink and a toilet stall that he shared with other tenants in his building and whatever homeless person may have made his or her way there. He did his showering at the YMCA, where he worked out. Teresa’s shower, however, had something his building and the Y didn’t have: privacy.
He shaved, soaped, rubbed and shampooed, hoping to not lose more hair, and rinsed. He dried himself with the towel Angie had laid out for him, then brushed his teeth, and brushed back his hair. Showers had their own sense of humor. When water pelted, the mirror told Lew that his hairline had decided to beat another hasty retreat. The battle line was moving back.
He put on fresh clothes, packed, called the airline to change his ticket, put on his Cubs hat and met Angie and Franco in the dining room. There was half a lemon cake on the table. Angie cut a slice for her brother and put it on a plate.
“I’m going back tomorrow,” Lew said, accepting the fork his sister handed him.
“And the guy who killed Catherine?” she asked. “You don’t have to be here to testify or something?”
“No.”
He dug into the cake. The taste and smell brought memories without images.
“Guy’s got to be punished, Lewie,” said Franco. “Taken down, put away.”
“He’s punishing himself.”
“Something happened here this morning,” Angie said, nodding in the general direction of the street. “Before you got here, remember?”
“ID., photo,” said Franco. “It was Posniti.”
“Posni tki,” Lew corrected.
“Right,” said Franco.
Lew nodded, ate and asked if he could use the phone. Before he could, Angie said, “Someone broke into the locker in Uncle Tonio’s warehouse. He didn’t see who but he almost shot him.”
“Uncle Tonio’s okay?”
“He’s fine.”
“It ends today?” Angie said. “I mean what you came back to do?”
“It ends today.”
