“The Gerall boy’s a bad apple, but he didn’t kill anybody,” said Ames.
“Ames and I are partners now,” I explained.
“Partners in what?” asked Viviase, shaking his head. “Operating an illegal office of private investigation.”
“We find people,” I said.
“You find people who commit murder,” Viviase said.
“Sometimes,” I admitted.
“Ames have a process server’s license?”
“Not yet,” he said.
“Not never,” answered Viviase, after nearly finishing his bottle of beer. “He’s a convicted felon.”
“We’ll work on that,” I said. “He’s my partner either way.”
“You and Ames here bothered a Venice policeman, a detective.”
“We talked to Detective Williams,” I said.
“Mr. McKinney here fired a weapon at him after you practically accused him of murder.”
A bustle of businessmen and — women came through the door, laughing and making in-jokes that weren’t funny, but when you want to laugh any flotsam of intended wit will do.
“What does he want?”
“Nothing now, but for you to stay away from him.”
I knew why. If Ames and I were arrested, the story of his aunt and mother being raped would hit the media again.
Viviase finished his beer while Ames and I kept working on ours. He rolled the empty bottle between his hands. No genie emerged. Viviase got up.
“You find anything, let me know,” he said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
He left.
Then Ames and I decided to do something stupid.
II
12
I was holding two pair, jacks and fours, in a five-card stud game. That was the only game being played in the card room of Corkle’s house. The old doctor with the slight tremor was the only one left in the hand with me. The pot stood at four hundred dollars and change. The doctor had a pair of sevens showing. He could have had three of them or, since one of his cards showing was a king, he could have had a higher two pair.
On my left was Corkle, clad in a green Detroit Lions sweatshirt. Next to him was a bulky man who had been introduced as Kaufmann. “You know who he is,” Corkle had said in his initial introduction when I had sat at the table three hours earlier. I didn’t know who Kaufmann was, but about an hour into the game Corkle asked him something about a union meeting. On his left, across from me, was a kid, college age. Corkle introduced him as Keith Thirlane. Keith Thirlane looked like an athlete, a very nervous athlete trying to look calm. He was tall, blond, and wearing black slacks and a black polo. The last player at the table was “Period Waysock from out of town.” Period was about sixty, bald, and slowdown fat. He did everything from betting to going to the snack table with the deliberation of a large dinosaur.
I pushed in another hundred dollars and looked at the steel clock on the wall. It was almost one in the morning.
Ames and I had pooled our money. I had cashed the check from Alana Legerman. We came up with the requisite four thousand, with another thousand borrowed from Flo Zink. We had a slight cushion. Then I had called Laurence Arthur Wainwright, who was one of the poker players Corkle had mentioned and the only one whose name I recognized. Wainwright was a state representative, a lawyer who owned pieces of banks, mortgage houses, property, and businesses worth who knows how much. Wainwright made the local news a lot, partly because he did a lot of donations to charities and looked good in a tuxedo at society dinners. Wainwright, also known as LAW or Law by the Herald-Tribune, was in constant trouble for his business practices, which were often barely legal.
On the phone, I told Wainwright that I had some documents he had been looking for. There are almost always documents a person like Wainwright is looking for.
“What documents?” he had asked.
Ames had gone through past newspaper articles mentioning Wainwright and come up with a list of four prime names. The best bet seemed to be Adam Bulagarest, a former Wainwright business associate who had moved out of Florida before the law could catch up with him.
“Does the name Bulagarest ring a bell?” I asked.
“Is this extortion?”
“I hope so,” I said.
“How did you get these documents?”
“They’re originals taken from papers in possession of Mr. Bulagarest. You can have them for a nominal fee. We will provide you with a signed and notarized guarantee that there are no copies.”
There was no chance Wainwright could check on my tale with Bulagarest. In researching the poker players, Dixie had discovered Bulagarest was serving time in a Thai jail for child molestation.
“How do I get these documents?” Wainwright asked with a tone of clear skepticism.
“Come tonight to the Ramada Inn at Disney World. Register as F. W. Murnau. We’ll meet you at the bar at midnight.”
“To Orlando tonight? What’s the hurry?”
“My associates and I are not comfortable in Florida. Bring one hundred thousand dollars in cash. If you don’t come, we have another buyer.”
“I don’t…” Wainwright said, but I hung up.
People like Wainwright always had piles of cash handy in case the real law was about to knock at their door.
I waited an hour and then called Corkle to ask when there might be an opening at his poker table.
“You have four thousand dollars?”
“Yes.”
“You’re in luck. One of our regulars can’t make it.”
Two hours into the game, I was ahead about three hundred dollars. After three hours I was ahead by almost eleven hundred dollars. It wasn’t that I was a particularly good player. They, including Corkle, were all incredibly bad, but I was learning that in a five-handed game, the odds of one of the bad players getting lucky was fairly high. Besides, I had to remember that I wasn’t there to win, just to keep the players busy.
From time to time, when they were out of a hand, the others at the table either ambled to the snack table in the corner for a plate of nuts and a beer or to the toilet just off the room toward the front door.
I didn’t meet the first raise on the next hand and moved toward the small restroom. It was a minute or two after one. Law Wainwright was sitting in a hotel room at Disney World with one hundred thousand dollars or a pistol with a silencer in his lap. I didn’t care which.
I looked back. The players were bantering, betting, acting like their favorite television poker pros. I moved past the restroom, turned a corner and went to the hall beyond to the front. I opened it quietly. Ames, flashlight in hand, stepped in. I closed the door and pointed to a door across the hallway. He nodded to show that he understood and showed me the Perfect Pocket Pager, one of the gifts Corkle had given us. I had an identical one in my pocket. Both Ames’s and my pager were set on vibrate. Each pager had originally been offered not for $29.95 or even $19.95, but for $9.95 with free shipping if you ordered now, but the “now” had been a dozen years ago and, until we had tested them, we didn’t know that they would work.
On the way back to the poker table, I reached in and flushed the toilet. The same hand was still being played, but only Corkle, who never sat out a hand, was still in it against Waysock from out of town. The pot, a small mountain of crisp green, looked big.
Corkle won the hand with a pair of fours. Both men had been bluffing.
I was worried about Ames. He wasn’t carrying a gun. I didn’t want a shoot-out and Ames was not the kind of man to give up without a fight. Ames and I were partners now. I was, I guess, senior partner. I know he felt responsible for me and to me. I felt the same.
Ames was going through Corkle’s office in search of the evidence Corkle had mentioned-evidence that might tell us who had killed Blue Berrigan and Philip Horvecki. Or maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe it was just another invention proceeding from Corkle’s heat-oppressed brain.