Always Say Goodbye

Three Years and Two Months Later

LEW HAD COME TO SARASOTA more than four years ago wanting no place to go, nothing to do, no people to be responsible for or to be responsible for him.

It didn't happen. He wanted the dark cell of his existence behind the Dairy Queen on 301. Two small rooms overlooking the parking lot, hard to find. Almost none of his business came through the door. He had a Florida process server's license and an arrangement with four law firms to serve papers. Not much money. But more than enough for him.

He wanted each day to be a dark blanket that no one pulled back to let in the light. That seldom happened. And today he was neatly and reluctantly putting aside his search for solitude.

Lew's first stop that morning was the EZ Economy automobile rental down the street. Once there had been two men there. For a couple of years Lew thought they were father and son or two brothers. They weren't.

They were a comedy team whose only appreciative audience was each other. Lew was one of their favorite targets as they drank coffee out of Styrofoam cups or stood with arms folded and negotiated.

The older of the two, Fred, had died a few months ago. Bad heart. Lew had never told him that he shared his name with a hog. Lew thought the company, which had never been a thriving business, would close. But it didn't.

"Lewis Fonesca," Alan, the bulky survivor of the duo, said from behind the desk, feet up, rubbing the sides of the cup. Coffee steamed between his hands. He watched it. "What can I do for you?"

"A car," Lew said.

"Going?"

"Tampa airport. Be gone I don't know how long."

"Business?"

"I'm going to find the person who killed my wife," Lew said.

"Good luck," Alan said. "Take whatever car you want. The Saturn's still in good shape. A few scratches. I think you put a few of them there."

"How much?"

He shrugged and looked for secrets or the face of his dead partner in the coffee cup.

"I don't know," he said. "Twenty-five."

"A day?"

"No, for whatever time you have it. Hell, you can own thedamned thing for fifty bucks. I'm having a going-out-of-business sale."

"Since when?"

"Now."

He reached into the desk drawer, came up with two keys on a small metal hoop and tossed them to Lew.

Lew expected a joke, a jibe, a half-witty insult, but without Fred, Alan couldn't find one.

"Any jokes for me?" asked Lew, who had been assigned by his therapist, Ann Horowitz, to come up with a joke for each of their sessions. Usually Alan and Fred could be relied on for at least a backup.

"No. Not anymore. Papers are in the glove compartment. Bon voyage," Alan said, sitting slumped behind the desk, not looking at Lew.

"I liked Fred," Lew said.

"Who didn't? Wait. I take that back. A lot of people didn't," said Alan. "It's this business."

Alan tightened his lips and looked around.

Lew wanted to tell him that he didn't want to own a car, fill it with gas, have it repaired, have to report it if it were stolen, which was highly unlikely unless the thief couldn't see. Simply put, Lew Fonesca didn't want the responsibility. He didn't want any responsibility. He had spent four years trying to avoid owning or caring for anything. He had succeeded in avoiding everything but people.

He wanted to say something hopeful, helpful to the man behind the desk, who avoided meeting Lew's eyes, but he could think of nothing to say, nothing he was capable of saying that wouldn't be a lie.

Lew would either return the car when he was finished usingit or he would give it away. He would probably return it. He didn't want the responsibility of finding a new owner.

Lew stopped at the DQ lot to get his already packed carry-on duffel bag and drop it on the passenger seat.

Dave, the owner of the DQ, was out on his boat in the water. His arms and face were tanned, lined and leathered from years on the deck. Lew tried going with him once. Once was fine. He handed the girl behind the window a folded note and asked her to give it to Dave. The girl was new, couldn't have been more than sixteen. Her face was freckle-covered, her eyes sleepy, her mouth partly open and her hair struggling to escape the rubber band that held it back.

"There are almost six thousand DQs in the world," said Lew.

The girl, note in hand, looked at him and crinkled her nose.

"Twenty-two countries," Lew went on. "Company started in an ice cream shop in Kankakee, Illinois, in 1938. First franchise was in Joliet, Illinois, in 1940."

The girl's mouth opened a little wider, showing not-quite-even teeth.

"The original DQ motto was 'We treat you right.' Now it's ... ?"

"I don' know," said the girl.

"'DQ something different,'" said Lew. "I prefer 'We treat you right,' and I try to have at least two chocolate cherry Blizzards every week. You do good work."

"Thank you," the girl said. "Almost six thousand around the world you say? Maybe some day I could work at a DQ in England or Japan or some place like that."

"It could happen," said Lew.

The girl was smiling to herself as he left.

He got to the Texas Bar & Grille where the morning crowd was dwindling after plates of barbecue breakfast burritos and Texas fries. No lights were on but the sun spread through the tinted windows. Ames McKinney--seventy-four, tall, lean, white hair, and wearing a flannel shirt--came around the tables and looked down at the seated Lew. Ames was his friend, his protector, but not this time.

"Goin'?" he asked.

"Yes."

He understood. Ames wanted to go with Lew, but he understood.

"Thought anymore 'bout what you're gonna do when you find him?"

"No," Lew said.

"That's one way to go about it," he said.

Lew shook his hand. His grip was hard, tight, sincere.

"You take care," he said. "I'll look in on your goods."

"Thanks," Lew said and then, "Goodbye."

Ames nodded his goodbye and turned back toward the bar and the small room down the narrow corridor next to the kitchen where his room was. Ames had once been rich. Now he was the cleanup man in a bar and he liked it just fine.

Lew's Uncle Tonio once said, "Always say goodbye."

Short absences, long absences. Forever. "Goodbye." God be with you. Any absence might become forever. Lew didn't remember whether he said goodbye to Catherine on the morning of the last day of her life.

He had said his goodbyes to Sally Porovsky last night. Sally, an overworked social worker with two kids, had touched his cheek and said, "Look in your pocket when you get outside. Goodbye."

The Long Goodbye, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, "Goodbye Mama,I'm Off to Yokohama. Goodbye dear and amen, here's hoping we meet now and then," "Every time we say goodbye." They all applied but lately the word goodbye had begun to sound odd to Lew, to look odd on paper. He wanted to make it mean something to him again.

He said, "Goodbye," and Sally closed the door.

In the moonlit parking lot next to her apartment, he took out the sheet of paper she had placed in his pocket. It read, Find him, take care of yourself, come back. Sally.

Lew had said his goodbyes to Flo Zink, the bangle-clad, frizzy-haired, feisty little seventy-one-year-old woman who favored Western clothes and music. Her choices of both were badly out-of-date.

Flo was from New York. Her husband had died, leaving her lots of money and a drinking problem. She had worked out her drinking problem motivated by the prospect of being allowed to take in Adele, a sixteen-year-old girl Lew and Ames had rescued from a daddy-sanctioned life of prostitution. Adele had an infant baby named Catherine. The baby had been named for Lew's dead wife. When he said goodbye at twilight, Flo was holding the baby. Jimmy Wakely and the Rough Riders were singing "When You and I Were Young Maggie Blues" through speakers placed throughout the house. Adele was out but would be back in an hour. Lew couldn't wait.

Flo held Catherine out for Lew. He was afraid to touch her. He didn't have bird flu or the plague but he knew his depression could be infectious.

Finally, Lew stopped back at his office and called Ann Horowitz, his eighty-two-year-old therapist whose main, but not only, virtue was that she charged him only ten dollars a visit. He was, she said, an interesting case.

"Lewis," she said. "You're leaving in the morning?"

"Yes."

"Good. Call me if you need me. You have a joke?"

Getting a joke from a chronic depressive is not that hard. Getting the depressive to appreciate the joke, to smile, to laugh, is almost impossible.

"Yesterday I called the makers of Procrit, Ambien, Lipitor and Cialis and asked them if my doctor was right for me. They all said no."

"Lewis, you make that up?"

"Yes."

"I told you there was hope," she said. "Now go find the man who killed your Catherine."

Thirty-four thousand feet above the Gulf of Mexico, Lew sat in an aisle seat at the very back of the Southwest Airlines plane out of Tampa. The back seats didn't recline, but they were the closest ones to the restroom. There is no real silence on an airplane. The flying machine is constantly roaring, whistling, grinding and changing its mind about the thrust of the engines. Inside the plane, children whine, adults lie to just-met seatmates, a couple hugs, their eyes shut. Flight attendants up and down the aisle pass out cholesterol chips in little bags you can't open.

Ames had given Lew a book to read, A Confederacy of Dunces. It lay in his lap unopened.

The young man next to Lew scratched his cheek as he looked at the screen of his laptop computer and tapped in something. He was wearing headphones and humming a song Lew didn't recognize. The image on his screen was the Warner Brothers black-and-white shield. Then came the words, Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce. Lew closed his eyes,trying not to watch, trying not to say the words as the characters spoke.

He didn't concentrate. He drifted through a dark sky. Lew was floating, tumbling in nothingness. Then sudden panic. He tried to open his eyes. Couldn't.

"You okay?" the young man with the laptop said with concern.

Lew's eyes opened. He was panting. The man was about thirty, with dark curly hair. He was looking at Lew with concern. His left eye was green. His right eye was too, but a darker, lifeless green. The right eye, he could see now, was definitely glass.

"Yes," Lew said, sitting up. "Bad dream."

"Sure?"

"I'm sure," he said, but he wasn't.

When Catherine was alive, he had dreaded flying, had held her hand tightly when they took off and landed, had silently cursed the madness of the other passengers who didn't realize that the odds of their dying were higher than they thought, that they were in a machine, a very heavy machine, that could lose an engine, a single bolt, a stretch of wire, and they would all be dead.

When Catherine died, that had all changed. Flying presented no problems, no fears. The worst that could happen was that the plane would crash. He could live with that. He could die with that.

He must have slept, because the captain was announcing the beginning of the plane's descent into Chicago's Midway Airport. The young man closed his laptop, looked at Lew with his bad and good eye, and smiled. Lew nodded.

When the plane landed, Lew went to the exit, duffel-shaped carry-on in hand, between baggage claim 3 and 4.Outside Lew saw his sister's husband, Franco, in his white Ford tow truck at the curb, looking across at Lew and holding up his hand.

Lew knew why he had panicked on the plane. He was going back to Chicago. Now that he was here, the panic threatened to return.

He climbed up into the passenger seat and put his bag on the floor. The interior of the truck smelled of grease and oil.

"Lewie," Franco said, reaching over to hug him. "Lewie."

"Franco," Lew responded.

Lew had known Franco Massaccio since childhood. A barrel of a man with an easy grin. Genius didn't run in Franco's family, but hard work and loyalty did. Franco was loyal and a good husband to Lew's sister Angela. He liked talking religion. He was a reasonably good Catholic. Lew considered himself a reasonably bad Episcopalian.

"You never get used to the smell, huh?" asked Franco. "'I like the smell of the streets. It clears my lungs.' You know who said that?"

"No."

"Bobby De Niro in Once Upon a Time in America," said Franco. "An Italian playing a Jew. Well, listen, what are you gonna do? Right?"

"Right."

"You have it?" Lew asked as Franco looked over his left shoulder and eased into the traffic.

"It's at home," Franco said.

Lew nodded and looked out the window. Standing at the curb was the one-eyed young man with the laptop. He was looking back at Lew.

"Friend or something?" asked Franco. "That guy back there?"

"Something, maybe," Lew said, looking back.

The young man with one eye focused on the back of the tow truck. He was looking at the license plate number.

"Want to know about what's going on in the family, Lewie?"

"Later," Lew said, looking over his shoulder at the one-eyed man who got into a green Buick that pulled up to the curb.

"Want the radio?"

"No," Lew said.

"Want to go into outer space in a Russian shuttle?"

He was looking ahead and grinning. Franco had a strange sense of humor, but at least he had one.

"Would I be alone?" Lew asked, looking at the familiar brick bungalows on Cicero Avenue.

"No, you'd have to go up with the national baton-twirling champion and an abusive long-retired astronaut."

"I think I'll pass."

"Suit yourself," Franco said with a shrug. "Like a miniature Snickers bar left over from Halloween?"

"Yes."

"Glove compartment," he said.

Lew opened the glove compartment and small wrapped bars of Twix, Snickers, Milky Ways, and Twizzlers tumbled out. He leaned over to scoop them up and put them back.

"I'll take a Twix," Franco said.

Lew handed him one and took a Snickers for himself.

"Two things I gotta tell you," Franco said, opening the candy wrapper and popping the mini-Twix bar in his mouth while Lew carefully tore the Snickers bag and took a bite.

"First," he said. "Terri, Teresa, is a freshman at Northern Illinois. Doing great. You know that?"

"No."

Teresa was Angela and Franco's daughter.

"Political science," he said.

The entrance to the Dan Ryan Expressway was right in front of the truck.

"Second, a car is following us," Franco said calmly.

Lew didn't turn around to look.

"Driver's young, big, buzz cut," said Franco. "Passenger is the one who was looking at you at the curb."

Southwest had open seating. The one-eyed man had chosen to sit next to Lew.

They were on the expressway now.

"Want me to push them to the rail?" Franco said. "I'll get out, yank 'em out of the car and find out what the hell they're doing."

"No," Lew said. "But if you can get behind them I'll get their license plate number."

"This have something to do with Catherine?"

"I don't know."

Franco slowed and when the other car was no more than fifteen feet behind them, Franco pulled suddenly into the next lane cutting off an SUV. The driver of the Buick didn't have Franco's skill or experience. Franco cut across lanes, dropped back and then scooted right behind the Buick. Lew wrote the license plate number in his notebook.

"Okay," said Lew.

Franco was grinning and shaking his head.

"I can't believe this, Lewie. You've been here what, five, ten minutes and people are following you. Beneath that beat-down exterior, you are one piece of cake."

"Thanks," said Lew.

Franco picked up the cell phone from the charger on his dashboard and punched in two numbers.

"Rick," Franco said into the phone. "How's with you? Me too. Say, listen, can you run a plate for me and the driver's license ? Great."

Franco looked at Lew who read the plate numbers. Franco repeated them to Rick.

"Got that?" Franco said. "Great. What you say we go for beef sandwiches at Fiocca's for lunch next week? Name the day ... okay. Wednesday at one. Make it fast on those numbers."

He pushed a button on the phone and put it back on the dashboard.

"Now do we stop 'em?" asked Franco.

"Yes," said Lew.

Franco grinned.

"Great to have you back, Lewie."

Franco moved into the lane next to the Buick. Lew could see both the driver and the one-eyed man. They didn't look back at Lew.

Franco checked the traffic behind him and moved the tow truck to within inches of the other car. The driver tried to move forward, but there was another slow-moving car in front of him. Franco gently eased the truck against the Buick at forty miles an hour. The other car started to lose control, regained it, and came to a stop against the rail. Franco parked ahead of the car, looked at Lew and said, "What do you want to know besides why they're following us?"

"They're following me, Franco."

"Same difference. You, me. I'm fuckin' offended."

Franco was staring at the rearview mirror. The car parked behind him didn't move. No doors opened.

"They might have guns, Franco," Lew said.

Franco opened his tow-truck jacket revealing a holstered weapon.

"Legal," he said. "Glock Twenty-eight ... 380 caliber. Six inches long, a little over an inch wide. Weighs less than twenty ounces. I've got a permit. I'm a tow-truck driver in Chicago."

"You ever shoot anybody?" Lew asked.

"No, you?"

"Once," Lew said, looking at the car which Franco had pinned to the steel divider.

Franco looked at him, waiting. Lew offered no more.

Franco turned on the radio, which was tuned to the police band. He kicked up the volume and got out of the truck, checking traffic.

"Leave your door open," he said, starting toward the other car.

Lew got out. He had almost forgotten the noise of expressway traffic, the clanging, coughing, squealing, braking, screeching agony of bouncing trucks and addicted horn pushers. And then there were the highway fumes. The memory became a reality again.

As Franco approached the Buick, the driver was looking over his shoulder, trying to find room to back up and then get back into traffic. He didn't have time and there were no breaks in the traffic.

Lew's eyes were on the one-eyed young man, who didn't look the least bit concerned that the barrel of a man was lumbering toward him.

Franco reached for the handle of the driver's door. It was locked.

"Open it," he commanded over the noise.

The driver showed no sign of opening the door. Francoreached into the lower pocket of his jeans and came up with a small silver metal hammer. He showed it to the driver who knew what it was, a compact powerful hammer made to go through automobile windows in an emergency.

The driver looked at his passenger, who nodded to indicate that the driver should open the window. The window rolled down.

"We're not--" the driver said.

Franco reached through the window, grabbed the man's jacket and pulled him out. The man was big, not as big as Franco, but a certain two hundred pounds.

"The police are going to be here," the driver panted as Franco pushed him back against the car.

"Take them ten, maybe fifteen minutes," said Franco. "You could both be hurting a lot by then. I'll know when they're coming."

He glanced at the tow truck. The voice on the police band was clear in spite of the traffic that zipped by.

Cars began to slow. There would be a gapers' block in a few seconds. The possibility of seeing death or destruction or someone being beaten because of road rage was too much for most people to resist. They had to slow down, catch a glimpse and drive on, comforted by the fact that it was someone else who was at the side of the road.

The one-eyed man sat calmly, looking forward. Then he made a decision, opened his door, got out and faced Lew.

"Talk to me," Franco said to the driver.

The driver said, "No."

The one-eyed man turned and fixed his only eye on the driver. There was a distinct family resemblance. Brothers, cousins?

Franco looked at Lew who nodded, and he let the driverslump against the door. Lew walked toward the one-eyed man.

"Why are you following me?" Lew asked.

"To keep you alive," he said.

"Men in blue are coming, Lew," said Franco.

In the distance, weaving toward them, a police siren shrieked. Traffic was at a very slow gawker's walk.

"Who wants me dead?" Lew asked.

"Let's just say a very bad person who knew your wife," the one-eyed man said.

"A very bad person," Lew repeated.

The young man pointed to his glass eye, giving a hint of how bad this person could be.

"Here they come," said Franco, standing by the driver who was still shaking.

The police car inched its way through the traffic, flashing its lights. Cars and trucks made room.

"This bad person kill my wife?"

"I don't know," the young man said. "Probably."

The police car pulled in and parked in front of the tow truck.

"Why does he want me dead?"

"You have something he wants," he said, turning his head toward the police car from which two uniformed officers emerged, both black and with weapons in their hands.

"What do I have and why did he wait so long to kill me?"

"He didn't know where you were. He found your name somewhere, an article perhaps on the Internet," said the young man. "Then you bought an airline ticket. If we could find out about that, he can find it. I flew to Tampa and stayed with you from the second you got to the Southwest counter."

"Why do you want to help me?" Lew asked, but before the young man could answer the police were too close to continue.

"Everybody just hold it where you are," said the older of the two cops.

He was lean, homely, dark and serious.

"What's going on?" he asked.

He and his partner, who had television star good looks, moved toward them.

"Roadside assistance," said Franco. "That's my tow truck. He called me."

"That's right," said the driver.

"We got a call saying someone was being pulled out of the window by a man who looked like Mike Ditka."

"Hear that, Lew? Not the first time someone thought I looked like Iron Mike," said Franco with a smile.

"Hey," the older cop called impatiently over the madness of the cars and trucks rushing by in both directions.

"Right," said Franco. "Driver here was in a panic. Froze. Thought his car was about to blow up or something. I pulled him out."

Franco looked at the driver.

"Right," the driver said.

"What's wrong with the car?" the older cop asked, suspiciously looking at Lew and then at the one-eyed man.

"Short," said Franco. "He smelled burning wire. It's fixed now."

"I owe this man," said the driver, glaring at Franco.

The cops looked at each of the four men in front of them. The older cop decided that the group looked a little strange maybe, but not formidable. Both cops holstered their weapons but kept a hand on them.

"Move out," said the cop. "You're tying up traffic."

"One second," Franco said. "He hasn't paid me yet."

Turning to the driver, Franco said, "That'll be fifty dollars. Cash."

The driver looked at the one-eyed man who reached into his pocket and came up with two twenties and a ten. He handed them to Franco. Lew had a lot to ask the one-eyed man but he had moved into the car along with the driver. Franco tapped Lew on the shoulder and Lew followed him to the tow truck.

"Now that was fun, huh, Lewie?" he asked, hitting his horn, easing into traffic.

"One couldn't wish for more," Lew said, reaching into his duffel bag and pulling out his Cubs cap.

"Still got that?"

"Still got it," said Lew who put the cap on his head.

Ann Horowitz had said that Lew wore the cap for many reasons. She said that one obvious reason was to cover Lew's balding head. "That," she had said, "is good. It shows that you still care about how you look to the world and how you look to yourself. It's a sign of ego. It's a very small tear in your precious depression. If it is, I want to find the tear and sew it up. Don't worry. We'll apply a very local anesthetic."

Lew felt that his depression was too important to him to lose. Ann knew this and knew about what he might have to deal with if it were gone.

Ann also believed that the cap was an attempt to hold onto something positive from the past, memories of Banks, Williams, Santo, Dawson, Sosa, Cey, Sandberg. Lew liked that interpretation. Whatever the cap might mean, he always felt a little better, a little more protected, when he wore it.

Franco's cell phone, now back in the dashboard charger, buzzed. Franco asked Lew to get it as he worked his way toward the outer lane.

"Hello," Lew said.

"Hey, where's Franco?"

The caller, who had a raspy voice like Lew's Uncle Tonio, was chewing on something.

"Driving. Traffic on the Dan Ryan's backed up. I'm Franco's brother-in-law."

"Hey, Lewie? Is that Lewie?"

"Yes."

"I'm Rick. Heard you went nuts."

"Yes."

"You better now?"

"No," Lew said.

"Hey, it happens. Think you're nuts, you should see my sister-in-law. She's like fruitcakes all the time, you know?"

The outer lane was moving and they were on their way. Lew could no longer see the one-eyed man's car.

"Got a pencil, something?" asked the voice.

"Yes," Lew said, taking out his notebook.

"Car belongs to a John Pappas."

Rick gave him the owner's address and said he was faxing a copy of Pappas's driver's license to Franco's house.

"I'm looking at it now," said Rick.

"What's he look like?" Lew asked.

"Fifty, maybe a little more, maybe closer to sixty," said Rick. "Hair white. Looks a little like that guy on Law and Order , Dennis whatever. Guy that used to be a Chicago cop."

Pappas was definitely not the driver Franco had pulled out of the window.

Franco reached for the phone. Lew handed it to him.

"Hey way, Rick," he said. "That lunch's gonna be on me."

He paused, listening, nodding his head, smiling and then said, "Ditkaland forever. See ya."

He handed the phone back to Lew. Lew hung it up.

"Rick's not a cop," Lew said.

"No, but his daughter Maria, thirteen, smart, knows how to use the Internet like you wouldn't believe," said Franco.

"It's not legal," Lew said.

"So's jaywalking. You care?"

"No."

"We'll find him," Franco said. "The son of a bitch who killed Catherine. We make a good team, huh?"

"Yes," Lew said.

"In the compartment between us, in the armrest, I've got packages of that spicy beef jerky."

Lew opened the compartment and found about twenty wrapped thin ropes of dark red jerky. He took one and handed one to Franco.

"Love those things," he said, opening the wrapping of his jerky with his teeth. "Hey, give Angie a call. Tell her where we are."

Talking to his sister would be another step into the past. He had only been in Chicago for about an hour and had had already taken dizzying steps.

"Just hit forty-seven," Franco said, pointing at the phone.

Lew picked up the phone and hit the numbers. One ring and Lew's sister was on the phone.

"Franco, you got him?"

"Angela, I'm back."

John Pappas stood at the window on the second floor of his house in suburban River Grove, "the Village of Friendly Neighbors." In one hand he held a white porcelain cup and saucer. Next to the cup was a still warm, honey-covered sliceof baklava. His mother had finished baking the treat less than an hour ago. Her phyllo was almost see-through thin, the nuts and raisins it held touched the right edge of sweetness and memory.

Pappas, hair white and full, his face a sun-etched almost-almond, slightly pocked, reminded most people of someone they had met, although they couldn't recall who.

Pappas looked across the lawn to the tree-lined street with fall leaves falling and little traffic. He sipped the thick coffee and took a comforting bite of pastry, careful to avoid any honey that might drip off and stain his white shirt. He wore a fresh white long- or short-sleeved dress shirt every day.

He stood thinking of Andrej Posnitki, known as Posno. Posno was never far from his mind. Posno was the reason Pappas was nearly imprisoned in this house. Posno was the reason his son Stavros had lost an eye. John Pappas took the last morsel of his delicacy, licked his honey-dappled fingers and imagined what Posno might be doing at this moment.

Andrej Posnitki, in his own apartment on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, looked out his window at a sailboat on Lake Michigan, driven by a gust of wind.

Short, broad, head shaved, skin almost white, he could be described as either a barrel or a crate. He weighed almost three hundred pounds and every ounce could and had been delivered many times though his fists. He preferred his hands to a blade or a gun, but he had been known to use whatever was available to threaten, maim or slay his enemies.

He had no family. He had no friends.

"The devil always provides," he said.

Posno worked alone. His fees were fixed and no one who hired him questioned or failed to promptly pay.

His appearance was calculatingly menacing, but his voice was calm and he had a passion for poetry. He read it, listened to it on CDs, even gave occasional open microphone readings of his own work at a small bookstore and coffeehouse within walking distance on Broadway.

One of Posno's enemies, his primary enemy, was John Pappas. Not long ago the two had been inseparable, partners.

Pappas had been in the kitchen at the back of the Korean restaurant on Clark Street when Posno had picked up a butcher knife, its blade still carrying globules of animal fat. He had brought the blade down at the weeping man kneeling in front of him. The man had tried to cover his head. Two severed fingers spun past Posno's face. Blood gushed from the Korean's split head, turning the man's apron from dirty white to a moist splotch of red.

Pappas stayed in the corner, watching. No blood touched him.

Pappas had been in the hallway behind Posno who rang the bell. The tones inside played the first nine notes of "Anything Goes." This was followed by footsteps and a woman's voice behind the door saying, "Who is it?" Pappas had answered, "Your neighbor upstairs."

"Mr. Sweeney?" she had asked.

"Yes, I need some wine, any kind, for a dish my wife has just started cooking."

She opened the door. The man who stood in front of her was definitely not Mr. Sweeney. It was Posno, who stepped forward quickly, and put his thick hands around her neck before she could scream. Pappas had stayed outside.

And there was Jacobi, right on Maxwell Street, among the crowd in front of a shop that sold shoes, seconds. Shoes, paired and tied together by their shoestrings, were piled high on a cart in front of the store. Posno had a thin, sharply pointed steel rod up his sleeve. Jacobi was rearranging shoes to keep the stack from falling. When Posno struck, deep under the man's ribs, the shoes came tumbling as Jacobi grabbed the side of the cart. Posno had jumped out of the way. The heel of a shoe hit him above his right eye. He knew the thin rod was leaving a wet trail inside his sleeve that he would have to clean himself. Pappas had watched. He had no jacket to clean, no blood on his hands.

Yes, they had been partners. Pappas had the connections, could get the clients, but Pappas couldn't kill. It had been a good partnership.

Pappas came from a large, extended Greek family, a tradition, a culture. Posno had arrived from nowhere, alone, throbbing with anger balanced by poetry.

Pappas had distanced himself, came close to ending his very existence. They both knew that if the Fonesca woman had left her evidence file and it was found, it would be Posno who went down. He would take Pappas with him. He would be better off if there were no Pappas and he knew Pappas would be better off without him. The two men had much that separated them but much more in common than either liked.

Posno turned from the window, reached into his pocket, took out his mini tape recorder, pressed a button and slowly spoke, not knowing whether the words were his own or something that had fixed to his memory, something waiting for this moment.

Speak not of tomorrow or how long a manmay be happy. Change, like the shifting flight of the hummingbird or the dragonfly, is swift and sudden.

He hit the pause button and, still watching the sailboat heading toward the horizon, pushed it again and said, "Catherine Fonesca."

Chapter One

Three Years and Two Months Later

Lew had come to Sarasota more than four years ago wanting no place to go, nothing to do, no people to be responsible for or to be responsible for him.

It didn’t happen. He wanted the dark cell of his existence behind the Dairy Queen on 301. Two small rooms overlooking the parking lot, hard to find. Almost none of his business came through the door. He had a Florida process server’s license and an arrangement with four law firms to serve papers. Not much money. But more than enough for him.

He wanted each day to be a dark blanket that no one pulled back to let in the light. That seldom happened. And today he was neatly and reluctantly putting aside his search for solitude.

Lew’s first stop that morning was the EZ Economy automobile rental down the street. Once there had been two men there. For a couple of years Lew thought they were father and son or two brothers. They weren’t.

They were a comedy team whose only appreciative audience was each other. Lew was one of their favorite targets as they drank coffee out of Styrofoam cups or stood with arms folded and negotiated.

The older of the two, Fred, had died a few months ago. Bad heart. Lew had never told him that he shared his name with a hog. Lew thought the company, which had never been a thriving business, would close. But it didn’t.

“Lewis Fonesca,” Alan, the bulky survivor of the duo, said from behind the desk, feet up, rubbing the sides of the cup. Coffee steamed between his hands. He watched it. “What can I do for you?”

“A car,” Lew said.

“Going?”

“Tampa airport. Be gone I don’t know how long.”

“Business?”

“I’m going to find the person who killed my wife,” Lew said.

“Good luck,” Alan said. “Take whatever car you want. The Saturn’s still in good shape. A few scratches. I think you put a few of them there.”

“How much?”

He shrugged and looked for secrets or the face of his dead partner in the coffee cup.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Twenty-five.”

“A day?”

“No, for whatever time you have it. Hell, you can own the damned thing for fifty bucks. I’m having a going-out-of-business sale.”

“Since when?”

“Now.”

He reached into the desk drawer, came up with two keys on a small metal hoop and tossed them to Lew.

Lew expected a joke, a jibe, a half-witty insult, but without Fred, Alan couldn’t find one.

“Any jokes for me?” asked Lew, who had been assigned by his therapist, Ann Horowitz, to come up with a joke for each of their sessions. Usually Alan and Fred could be relied on for at least a backup.

“No. Not anymore. Papers are in the glove compartment. Bon voyage,” Alan said, sitting slumped behind the desk, not looking at Lew.

“I liked Fred,” Lew said.

“Who didn’t? Wait. I take that back. A lot of people didn’t,” said Alan. “It’s this business.”

Alan tightened his lips and looked around.

Lew wanted to tell him that he didn’t want to own a car, fill it with gas, have it repaired, have to report it if it were stolen, which was highly unlikely unless the thief couldn’t see. Simply put, Lew Fonesca didn’t want the responsibility. He didn’t want any responsibility. He had spent four years trying to avoid owning or caring for anything. He had succeeded in avoiding everything but people.

He wanted to say something hopeful, helpful to the man behind the desk, who avoided meeting Lew’s eyes, but he could think of nothing to say, nothing he was capable of saying that wouldn’t be a lie.

Lew would either return the car when he was finished using it or he would give it away. He would probably return it. He didn’t want the responsibility of finding a new owner.

Lew stopped at the DQ lot to get his already packed carry-on duffel bag and drop it on the passenger seat.

Dave, the owner of the DQ, was out on his boat in the water. His arms and face were tanned, lined and leathered from years on the deck. Lew tried going with him once. Once was fine. He handed the girl behind the window a folded note and asked her to give it to Dave. The girl was new, couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Her face was freckle-covered, her eyes sleepy, her mouth partly open and her hair struggling to escape the rubber band that held it back.

“There are almost six thousand DQs in the world,” said Lew.

The girl, note in hand, looked at him and crinkled her nose.

“Twenty-two countries,” Lew went on. “Company started in an ice cream shop in Kankakee, Illinois, in 1938. First franchise was in Joliet, Illinois, in 1940.”

The girl’s mouth opened a little wider, showing not-quite-even teeth.

“The original DQ motto was ‘We treat you right.’ Now it’s . . . ?”

“I don’ know,” said the girl.

“‘DQ something different,’” said Lew. “I prefer ‘We treat you right,’ and I try to have at least two chocolate cherry Blizzards every week. You do good work.”

“Thank you,” the girl said. “Almost six thousand around the world you say? Maybe some day I could work at a DQ in England or Japan or some place like that.”

“It could happen,” said Lew.

The girl was smiling to herself as he left.

He got to the Texas Bar & Grille where the morning crowd was dwindling after plates of barbecue breakfast burritos and Texas fries. No lights were on but the sun spread through the tinted windows. Ames McKinney—seventy-four, tall, lean, white hair, and wearing a flannel shirt—came around the tables and looked down at the seated Lew. Ames was his friend, his protector, but not this time.

“Goin’?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He understood. Ames wanted to go with Lew, but he understood.

“Thought anymore ’bout what you’re gonna do when you find him?”

“No,” Lew said.

“That’s one way to go about it,” he said.

Lew shook his hand. His grip was hard, tight, sincere.

“You take care,” he said. “I’ll look in on your goods.”

“Thanks,” Lew said and then, “Goodbye.”

Ames nodded his goodbye and turned back toward the bar and the small room down the narrow corridor next to the kitchen where his room was. Ames had once been rich. Now he was the cleanup man in a bar and he liked it just fine.

Lew’s Uncle Tonio once said, “Always say goodbye.”

Short absences, long absences. Forever. “Goodbye.” God be with you. Any absence might become forever. Lew didn’t remember whether he said goodbye to Catherine on the morning of the last day of her life.

He had said his goodbyes to Sally Porovsky last night. Sally, an overworked social worker with two kids, had touched his cheek and said, “Look in your pocket when you get outside. Goodbye.”

The Long Goodbye, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, “Goodbye Mama, I’m Off to Yokohama. Goodbye dear and amen, here’s hoping we meet now and then,” “Every time we say goodbye.” They all applied but lately the word goodbye had begun to sound odd to Lew, to look odd on paper. He wanted to make it mean something to him again.

He said, “Goodbye,” and Sally closed the door.

In the moonlit parking lot next to her apartment, he took out the sheet of paper she had placed in his pocket. It read, Find him, take care of yourself, come back. Sally.

Lew had said his goodbyes to Flo Zink, the bangle-clad, frizzy-haired, feisty little seventy-one-year-old woman who favored Western clothes and music. Her choices of both were badly out-of-date.

Flo was from New York. Her husband had died, leaving her lots of money and a drinking problem. She had worked out her drinking problem motivated by the prospect of being allowed to take in Adele, a sixteen-year-old girl Lew and Ames had rescued from a daddy-sanctioned life of prostitution. Adele had an infant baby named Catherine. The baby had been named for Lew’s dead wife. When he said goodbye at twilight, Flo was holding the baby. Jimmy Wakely and the Rough Riders were singing “When You and I Were Young Maggie Blues” through speakers placed throughout the house. Adele was out but would be back in an hour. Lew couldn’t wait.

Flo held Catherine out for Lew. He was afraid to touch her. He didn’t have bird flu or the plague but he knew his depression could be infectious.

Finally, Lew stopped back at his office and called Ann Horowitz, his eighty-two-year-old therapist whose main, but not only, virtue was that she charged him only ten dollars a visit. He was, she said, an interesting case.

“Lewis,” she said. “You’re leaving in the morning?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Call me if you need me. You have a joke?”

Getting a joke from a chronic depressive is not that hard. Getting the depressive to appreciate the joke, to smile, to laugh, is almost impossible.

“Yesterday I called the makers of Procrit, Ambien, Lipitor and Cialis and asked them if my doctor was right for me. They all said no.”

“Lewis, you make that up?”

“Yes.”

“I told you there was hope,” she said. “Now go find the man who killed your Catherine.”

Thirty-four thousand feet above the Gulf of Mexico, Lew sat in an aisle seat at the very back of the Southwest Airlines plane out of Tampa. The back seats didn’t recline, but they were the closest ones to the restroom. There is no real silence on an airplane. The flying machine is constantly roaring, whistling, grinding and changing its mind about the thrust of the engines. Inside the plane, children whine, adults lie to just-met seatmates, a couple hugs, their eyes shut. Flight attendants up and down the aisle pass out cholesterol chips in little bags you can’t open.

Ames had given Lew a book to read, A Confederacy of Dunces. It lay in his lap unopened.

The young man next to Lew scratched his cheek as he looked at the screen of his laptop computer and tapped in something. He was wearing headphones and humming a song Lew didn’t recognize. The image on his screen was the Warner Brothers black-and-white shield. Then came the words, Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce. Lew closed his eyes, trying not to watch, trying not to say the words as the characters spoke.

He didn’t concentrate. He drifted through a dark sky. Lew was floating, tumbling in nothingness. Then sudden panic. He tried to open his eyes. Couldn’t.

“You okay?” the young man with the laptop said with concern.

Lew’s eyes opened. He was panting. The man was about thirty, with dark curly hair. He was looking at Lew with concern. His left eye was green. His right eye was too, but a darker, lifeless green. The right eye, he could see now, was definitely glass.

“Yes,” Lew said, sitting up. “Bad dream.”

“Sure?”

“I’m sure,” he said, but he wasn’t.

When Catherine was alive, he had dreaded flying, had held her hand tightly when they took off and landed, had silently cursed the madness of the other passengers who didn’t realize that the odds of their dying were higher than they thought, that they were in a machine, a very heavy machine, that could lose an engine, a single bolt, a stretch of wire, and they would all be dead.

When Catherine died, that had all changed. Flying presented no problems, no fears. The worst that could happen was that the plane would crash. He could live with that. He could die with that.

He must have slept, because the captain was announcing the beginning of the plane’s descent into Chicago’s Midway Airport. The young man closed his laptop, looked at Lew with his bad and good eye, and smiled. Lew nodded.

When the plane landed, Lew went to the exit, duffel-shaped carry-on in hand, between baggage claim 3 and 4. Outside Lew saw his sister’s husband, Franco, in his white Ford tow truck at the curb, looking across at Lew and holding up his hand.

Lew knew why he had panicked on the plane. He was going back to Chicago. Now that he was here, the panic threatened to return.

He climbed up into the passenger seat and put his bag on the floor. The interior of the truck smelled of grease and oil.

“Lewie,” Franco said, reaching over to hug him. “Lewie.”

“Franco,” Lew responded.

Lew had known Franco Massaccio since childhood. A barrel of a man with an easy grin. Genius didn’t run in Franco’s family, but hard work and loyalty did. Franco was loyal and a good husband to Lew’s sister Angela. He liked talking religion. He was a reasonably good Catholic. Lew considered himself a reasonably bad Episcopalian.

“You never get used to the smell, huh?” asked Franco. “‘I like the smell of the streets. It clears my lungs.’ You know who said that?”

“No.”

“Bobby De Niro in Once Upon a Time in America,” said Franco. “An Italian playing a Jew. Well, listen, what are you gonna do? Right?”

“Right.”

“You have it?” Lew asked as Franco looked over his left shoulder and eased into the traffic.

“It’s at home,” Franco said.

Lew nodded and looked out the window. Standing at the curb was the one-eyed young man with the laptop. He was looking back at Lew.

“Friend or something?” asked Franco. “That guy back there?”

“Something, maybe,” Lew said, looking back.

Copyright © 2006 by Double Tiger Productions, Inc. All rights reserved.

Excerpted from Always Say Goodbye by Stuart M. Kaminsky
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.