Somehow we made it through lunch. I pushed the small talk. Movies, the weather. Ruddle offered curt responses and Pellerin sucked down margaritas, stared out the window, and doodled on a napkin. After Ruddle had paid the check, I steered Pellerin outside and, to punish him, dragged him on a brisk walk about the pool. He complained that his legs were hurting and I said, “We need to get you in shape. That game could go all night.”
I walked him until he had sweated out his liquid lunch, then allowed him to collapse at a poolside table not far from the lifeguard’s chair. They must have treated the water earlier that day, because the chlorine reek was strong. In the pool, a huge sun-dazzled aquamarine with a waterfall slide at its nether end, packs of kids cavorted under their parents’ less-than-watchful eyes, bikini girls and Speedo boys preened for one another. Close at hand, an elderly woman in a one-piece glumly paddled along the edge, her upper body supported by a flotation device in the form of a polka-dotted snail. The atmosphere was of amiable chatter, shrieks, and splashings. A honey-blonde waitress in shorts and an overstrained tank top ambled over from the service bar, but I brushed her off.
“You got a plan?” Pellerin asked out of the blue.
“A plan? Sure,” I said. “First Poland, then the world.”
“If you don’t, we need to start thinking about one.”
I cocked an eye toward him, then looked away.
“That’s why I played Ruddle like I did,” Pellerin said. “So you could get a line on his security.”
“We do what Billy tells us,” I said. “That’s our safest bet.”
Three boys ran past, one trying to snap the others with a towel; the lifeguard whistled them down.
“I did have a thought,” I said. “I thought we could tell Ruddle what Billy’s up to and hope he can protect us. But that’s a short-term solution at best. Billy’s still going to be a problem.”
“I like it. It buys us time.”
“If Ruddle goes for it. He might not. I’m not sure how well he knows Billy. He might be tight with him, and he might decide to give him a call.”
A plump, pale, middle-aged man wearing a fishing hat and bathing trunks, holding a parasol drink, negotiated the stairs at the shallow end of the pool, stood and sipped in thigh-deep water.
“I’ll check out Ruddle’s security. It may give me an idea.” I put my hands flat on the table and prepared to stand. “We should look in on Jo before you start playing.”
Pellerin’s lips thinned. “To hell with her.”
“You two got a problem?”
“She lied to me.”
“Everyone fibs now and again.”
“She lied about something pretty crucial.”
I suspected that Jo had told him he hadn’t always been Josey Pellerin. “Mind if I ask what?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I mind.”
I watched him out of the corner of my eye. His features relaxed from their belligerent expression and he appeared to be tracking the progress of something through the air. I asked what he was looking at, half-expecting him to claim that he had discovered a microscopic planet with an erratic orbit, but he said, “A gnat.” Then he laughed. “A gnat with a fucking aura.”
“You see that shit all the time?”
“Auras? Yeah. Weirder stuff than that.”
“Like what?”
“Shadows.” He fumbled in his pocket and fished out a wad of bills, napkins, gum wrappers—there must have been thirty or forty hundreds mixed in with the debris; he selected a twenty, tossed the rest on the table and hailed the blond waitress. “Margarita rocks,” he told her. “Salt.”
“Better slow down,” I said. “If you’re going to play poker, that is.”
“You kidding me? I need a handicap to play with those old ladies.”
I let my thoughts wander, vaguely mindful of the activity in the pool, speculating on the rate of skin cancers among the patrons of the Seminole Paradise, reflecting on the fact that I had not seen a single Seminole during our stay, if one omitted the grotesque statue of Osceola in the lobby, fashioned from a shiny yellowish brown material—petrified Cheese Whiz was my best guess. The waitress set Pellerin’s margarita down on the table; her eyes snagged on the cash strewn across it. She offered Pellerin his change and he told her to keep it. He tilted his head, squinted at her name tag, and said, “Is waitressing your regular job, Tammy, or just something you do on the side?”
Tammy didn’t know how to take this. She flashed her teeth, struck a pose that accentuated her breasts and said, “I’m sorry?”
“Reason I ask,” said Pellerin, “I wonder if you ever done any hostessing? I’m throwing a party up in my suite tonight. Around ten o’clock. And I was hoping to get a couple of girls to help me host it. You know the drill. Take care of the guests. See that everyone’s got a drink. You’d be doing me a huge favor.” He reached into his other pocket, peeled what looked to be about a grand off his roll and held it out to her. “That’s a down payment.”
A light switched on in Tammy’s brain and she re-evaluated Pellerin. “So how many guests are we talking about?” she asked.
“I’m the only one you’d have to worry about.” Pellerin gave a lizardly smile. “But I can be a real chore.”
“Why, I think we can probably handle it.” Tammy accepted the bills, folded them, stashed them next to her heart. “Around ten, you say?”
“I’m in the Everglades Suite,” said Pellerin. “Wear something negligible. And one more thing, darling. It’d be nice if your friend was a Latina. Maybe a Cuban girl. On the slender side. Maybe her name could be… Tomasina?”
“Why, isn’t that a coincidence! That’s my best friend’s name!” Tammy turned and twitched her cute butt. “See ya tonight.”
As she sashshayed off, Pellerin slurped down half his margarita and sighed. “Ain’t freedom grand?”
“What was that bullshit?” I said. “You’re in the Everglades Suite?”
“Three nights from now, we could be lying in a landfill,” he said. “I booked myself a suite and I’m going to have me a party.”
“This isn’t wise,” I said. “Suppose she gets a look at your eyes?”
“Did you get a load of the brain on that girl? I could tell her I was down in the Amazon and got stung by electric bees, she’d be fine with it.”
I wasn’t too sure about that, but then I was distracted from worry by thinking about Jo all alone in Room 1138.
“Yeah, boy!” said Pellerin, and grinned—he’d been watching me. “What they say is true. Every cloud has a silver lining.”
I made no response.
“Hell, if Jocundra don’t do it for you,” he said, “I’m sure Tammy and Tomasina wouldn’t mind accommodating another guest.”
“That’s all right.”
“On second thought, I believe you’re the kind of guy who needs that old emotion lotion to really get off.”
“Shut your hole, okay?”
Pellerin finished his margarita, signaled Tammy for another. I was through cautioning him about his drinking. Maybe he’d drop dead. That would let us off the hook. More people had jumped into the pool—it looked like a sparkling blue bowl of human head soup. There came a loud screech that resolved into “The Piña Colada Song” piped in over speakers attached to the surrounding palms. I was half-angry, though I couldn’t have told you at what, and that damn song exacerbated my mood. Tammy brought the margarita and engaged in playful banter with Pellerin.
“Does your friend want a friend?” she asked. “Because I bet I could fix him up.”
“Naw, he’s got a friend,” said Pellerin. “The trouble is, she ain’t treating him all that friendly.”
“Aw! Well, if he needs a friendlier friend, you let me know, hear?”