Denial: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (Lew Fonesca Novels) by Stuart M. Kaminsky Read Free Book Online Page A

elevator.
    Children’s Services took two floors. The second, where I got off, was big, open and filled with partitioned cubicles you could see over. The room was a dirge of voices, every once in a while a word or phrase coming through. Inside each three-sided cubicle was the work space of a caseworker who did his or her best to keep the few square feet from reverting to nature.
    Sally’s cubicle was to the right. I passed a cubicle in which a short, thin young Hispanic caseworker named Amy Valdez was leaning toward the chair of an even thinner and maybe a lot older and haggard black woman.
    Most of the narrow metal desks in the cubicles were covered with files and notes, and on the walls, almost as if it had been an assigned duty, were photographs of each caseworker’s family.
    It reminded me of the places I used to get my haircuts, the mirrors where young women put photographs of their kids where you could see them. The haircutters wanted to kick the tips up. I never resisted. The last time I had been to one of those places had been more than four years earlier. I cut my own hair, what there was of it to cut.
    The caseworkers, like Sally, put their photos up there to remind them that they had a life beyond the cubicles, the weeping mothers, the addicts, the teen prostitutes, abused babies, creatures who attacked and showed their teeth and were classified as human because there was no box to check for “other.”
    Sally was alone on the phone, her back to me. In a
frame on her desk was a photograph of her two children, Michael, fourteen, and Susan, eleven. Sally said they liked me, though they thought I was a little weird. I wasn’t sure I liked me but I agreed that I was a little weird.
    “This is the third time, Sarah Ann,” Sally was saying.
    Sally and I had been keeping company, nothing more than that, really, for almost three years. Sally was two years older than I, pretty, plump, dark short hair, perfect skin and a voice like Lauren Bacall.
    She worked ten-hour days, half days most weekends, trying to save the threatened children of Sarasota County one by one. There were more losses than saves, but without the people in this office, there would have been no saves but the ones that chance happened to touch.
    “I can’t keep coming there,” Sally said. “It’s almost twenty miles each way, but it’s not the distance. It’s the time. No excuses. Tomorrow. Sometime before noon. Sarah Ann, you be home. You have Jean home. We talk. I take her out and talk to her. You mess up this one and I turn it over.”
    Sally paused, saw me, nodded, listened to whatever Sarah Ann was saying and then said, “Sarah Ann, 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