Always Say Goodbye: A Lew Fonesca Mystery Read Free Page A

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 Her choices of both were badly out-of-date.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