I’m forty-four, on the thin side, losing my hair and usually broke or close to it. I’d come to Sarasota two years earlier, just drove till my car gave out and I felt safely in the sunshine after spending my life in the gray of Chicago. I had driven away from a wife who had dumped me and a dead-end investigator’s job with the State’s Attorney’s Office.
Now, I made my living finding people, asking questions, answering to nobody. I had a growing number of Sarasota lawyers using me to deliver a summons or find a local resident who hadn’t turned up for a court or divorce hearing. Occasionally, I would turn up some street trade, a referral from a bartender or Dave the owner of the Dairy Queen next door to the run-down two-story office building where I had my office and where I lived. I had a deal with the building manager. The landlord lived in Seattle. By giving the manager a few extra dollars a month beyond the reasonable rent for a seedy two-room suite, he ignored the fact that I was living in the second room of a two-room office. The outer room was designed as a reception room. I had turned it into an office. The room behind it was a small windowed office which I had turned into a living space. I had fixed it up to my satisfaction and the clothes I had brought with me from Chicago would hold out for another year or two. I had a bed, an old dresser, a sink in the corner, a television set and an aging green sofa and matching armchair. The only real inconvenience was that the office, like all the others, opened onto a balcony with a rusting railing facing a parking lot shared with the Dairy Queen and, beyond it, the heavy traffic of Route 301. To get to the bathroom, which had no bath, I had to walk past five offices and take whatever the weather had to offer. I showered every morning after I worked out at the downtown YMCA.
There was nothing but my name printed on the white-on-black plastic plate that slid into the slot on my door. I wasn’t a private detective, didn’t want to be. I did what I know how to do, ask questions, find people.
“Just a guess,” Raymond Sebastian asked again, looking away from the beautiful sight of the boats bobbing in the bay and the busy bridge going over to Bird Key.
Answering a question like that could lose me a job, but I hadn’t come to this town to go back to saying “yes, boss” to people I liked and didn’t like.
“Sixty,” I guessed, standing a few feet away from him and looking him in the eyes.
“Closer to seventy,” he said with some satisfaction. “I was blessed by the Lord in many ways. My genes are excellent. My mother is ninety-two and still lives in good health. My father died when he was ninety-four. I have uncles, aunts… you wouldn’t believe.”
“Not without seeing them,” I said.
Sebastian laughed. There wasn’t much joy in his laugh. He looked at his now-empty V-8 glass and set it on a glass-top table on the balcony.
“Lawrence told you my problem?” he asked facing me, his gray-blue eyes unblinking, sincere.
“Your wife left. You want to find her. That’s all.”
Lawrence Werring was a lawyer, civil cases, injury law suits primarily, an ambulance chaser and proud of it. It had bought him a beautiful wife, a leather-appointed office and a four bedroom house on the water on Longboat Key. If I knew which one it was, I could probably see it from where Sebastian and I were standing.
“My wife’s name is Miriam,” Sebastian said handing me a folder that lay next to the now-empty V-8 glass. “She is considerably younger than I, thirty-six, but I believed she loved me. I was vain enough to think it was true and for some time it seemed true. And then one afternoon…”
He looked around as if she might suddenly rematerialize.
“…She was gone. I came home and her clothes, jewelry, gone. No note, nothing. That was, let me see, last Thursday. I kept expecting to hear from her or a kidnapper or something, but…”
I opened the folder. There were a few neatly typed pages of biography. I skimmed them. Miriam Latham Sebastian was born in Utah, earned an undergraduate degree in social science at the University of Florida and moved with her parents, now both dead, to Sarasota where she worked for a Catholic services agency as a case worker till she married Sebastian four years earlier. There was also a photograph of Miriam Sebastian. She was wearing red shorts, a white blouse and a great smile. Her dark hair was long and blowing in the breeze. She had her arm lovingly around her husband who stood tall, tan and shirtless in a pair of white trunks looking at the camera. They were standing on the wide sands of a Florida Gulf Coast beach, a few apartments or condos behind them.
“Pretty,” I said closing the folder.
“Beautiful,” he corrected. “Exquisite. Charming.”
“Any guesses?” I said. “About what happened?”
He shrugged and moved from the balcony back into the penthouse apartment. I followed as he talked. We stopped in front of a painting of his wife on the wall over a big white sofa. The whole room was white, but not a modern white. There was a look of tasteful antique about the place. Not my kind of home, but I could appreciate it.
“Another man perhaps, but I doubt it,” he said. “We have had no major quarrels. I denied her nothing, nothing. I am far from a poor man, Mr. Fonesca and…”
He paused and sighed deeply.
“And,” he continued composing himself, “I have checked our joint checking and savings accounts. Most of the money has been removed. A little is left. I have my corporate attorney checking other holdings which Miriam might have had access to. I find it impossible to believe she would simply take as much money as she could and just walk out on me.”
“You had a little hitch in your voice when you mentioned another man,” I said having decided the chairs in the room were too white for me to sit on.
“She has had a good friend,” he said gently. “This is very difficult for me. I am a proud man from a proud family.”
“A good friend?” I repeated.
“For about the last year,” he said, “Miriam has been seeing a psychiatrist, nothing major, problems to be worked out about her childhood, her relationship to her parents. The psychiatrist’s name is Gerald Bermeister. He’s got a practice over one of those antique stores on Palm Avenue. I’m not a young man. I am not immune to jealousy. Gerald Bermeister is both young and good looking. There were times when I could not determine whether my suspicions were simply that of an older man afraid of losing his beautiful young wife or were valid concerns.”
“I’ll check it out,” I said.
“Miriam was a bit of a loner,” he went on. “But because of business connections we belong to a wide variety of organizations, Selby Gardens, Asolo Angels, charity groups, and we’re seen at balls and dances. Miriam said that in three years we had been on the Herald-Tribunes society page eleven times. In spite of this, Miriam had no really close friends with one possible exception, Caroline Wilkerson, the widow of my late partner.”
“And what do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Find her, of course,” Sebastian said turning from the painting to look at me.
“Has she committed a crime?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” he said.
“So, she’s free to go where she wants to go, even to leave her husband, take money out of your joint accounts and wander away. It may be a boyfriend. It may be a lot of things.”
“I just want you to find her,” he said. “I just want to talk to her. I just want to find out what happened and if there is anything I can do to get her back.”