“You do this a lot?”
“I’ve never done anything like this before,” I said.
“Never?”
“I swear,” I said. “I’m not completely sure why I’m doing it now. Say no and that’s it, back to business. I’ve got references who will swear under oath that I don’t do things like this.”
She looked up at me for what seemed like a very long time.
“You seem harmless, but… we can talk about it after you bring Adele’s mother to see me,” she said. “I really have work to do.”
I wanted to keep listening to her voice and looking at her. I thought she was probably right if she thought I had gone crazy. Maybe my session with Ann Horowitz had pushed me over the top.
She swiveled around to face her computer again and I headed for the elevator.
“All done?” asked John Detchon, who was still stuffing envelopes.
“For now,” I said. “I’ll be back at four-thirty.”
“I’ll call out the color guard,” he said.
I pushed through the door to the street and wondered why I had done what I had just done. Was I trying to please Ann Horowitz? Maybe. Did Sally Porovsky remind me of my wife? No. Maybe a little. Of my mother? No. Was it her voice? Partly. Was I coming back to life? Hardly. I’d return with Beryl and act as if I had never gone mad in front of Sally Porovsky. I’d walk away and forget the moment of insanity and she would adjust her glasses and, I hoped, do the same.
When I got to the Best Western hotel and found Beryl Tree’s room, I knocked.
“Who is it?”
“Lew Fonesca,” I said.
The door opened. A man stood before me with a gun in his hand.
4
The man with the gun was Ames McKinney. I’ve already told you about Ames. Tall, long white hair, grizzled, lean, brown and seventy-four years old. Ames was not supposed to bear arms. It was a right he had lost after using an ancient Remington Model 1895 revolver to kill his ex-partner in a duel.
The first time I met Ames was an hour after he called me the first week I moved into town. His Sam Elliott gruff voice had simply said, “You know a place called The Round-up. On 301, just up from Fruitville.”
“Yes,” I had said.
“Be there in half hour?”
“Yes.”
“Names McKinney. Lean, old, can’t miss me.”
The Round-Up was one of the many odd-ball restaurants in Sarasota, a town known more for its well-heeled tourists and wealthy retirees who lived on the offshore Keys than its cuisine. There are some good restaurants, and there is a hell of a lot of variety, including the Round-Up, which boasted on a red-on-white sign in the window, “The Best Chinese Tex-Mex in Florida.” Few challenged this claim, especially not the homeless who wandered past every day.
The Round-Up is gone now. Owner Round Harry was carrying too much weight. He died and the place was boarded up. Six months later it was and still is a shoe-repair and tailor shop run by a couple from Colombia who speak almost no English.
Restaurants come and go fast in this town. So does money.
Sarasota is rich, but even the rich need maids, supermarkets, police, firemen, tailor shops and shoes-tores. There is a middle class and a lower class in Sarasota and everyone, even the snowbirds, the well-to-do who came down only in the winter from as far north as Canada and as far east as Germany, knew it.
Parking was not rough in front of the Round-Up, not in the summer. Parking isn’t rough anywhere in Sarasota in the summer. There’s plenty of parking and no lines at the restaurants or movies.
The Round-Up wasn’t packed but it wasn’t empty and there was good reason. The food was cheap and spicy, the service fast, and no one hurried you out. You could nurse a beer or even an iced tea with a pitcher in front of you while you watched the Atlanta Braves on cable. The Round-Up was not a quiet place. Harry wheezed when he walked; the Braves game bellowed; drunks poured drinks for each other with shaking hands; and a pride of lawyers, sales managers, real estate dealers and knowing locals talked deals loud enough to be heard.
I spotted Ames McKinney in ten seconds, the time it took my eyes to adjust from the sun to the near darkness. The place wasn’t big but the tables weren’t jammed together. There was leg and elbow room and the smell of beer and something frying. The Round-Up had the universal look of a run-down bar and grill. The grizzled old man sat at a two-chair table in the corner, his back to the wall-Wild Bill covering himself from a sneak attack after drawing Aces and Eights.
He looked up at me from what looked like a plate of chop suey over nachos. I pegged his age at about ten degrees below the temperature outside. His hair was white and cut short. His eyes were light, probably blue-gray, and as I walked toward him I saw none of the telltale red or yellow in the whites that gave away the lifetime drinker.
“Fonesca,” I had said stopping in front of him.
He pushed his chair back and got up holding out his hand. His shirt was a red flannel with the sleeves rolled up and his jeans were faded but clean. I couldn’t see his feet but I was sure he was wearing boots.
“Ames McKinney,” he said, sounding more like George C. Scott than he had on the phone. “Anyone every tell you you look like that guy in the movies?”
“Charles Bronson,” I tried.
“Other guy,” he said. “Skinny sad guy. Don’t remember his name. Have a seat.”
I sat.
“Order something,” he said. “On me, no strings, no obligations. Food’s kinda nuts but it’s not bad.”
I nodded at Round Harry, who was sweating in spite of the almost cool air. He wiped his hands on his apron and shouted, “What’ll it be?”
“I’ll have what he’s having,” I shouted, pointing at Ames McKinney.
“Suit yourself,” Harry shouted and went about his business.
Ames McKinney wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and looked at me.
“I know people,” he said. “Mostly. Get it wrong sometimes.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Got your name from a lawyer in a bar,” he said ignoring me. “Not much choice. Small town. Could have had more choice in Bradenton, but I’m on one of those mopeds so I decided to stay cheap and local. Your listing was the smallest.”
“I appreciate your confidence,” I said.
“Don’t joke on me, Mr. Fonesca,” he said gently. “I’m country, but I’m no dolt. We can laugh together but not at each other. You can’t stop yourself then we can just have us a lunch, talk about the gators and the blue water and white sand and say good-bye.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m big city. Sometimes I don’t know when I’m doing it.”
“Apology accepted,” said McKinney, taking a bite of whatever it was Harry now placed in front of me in a steaming blue metal bowl along with a glass of dark beer.
“Special,” said Harry. “Mandarin Nacho Supreme.”
He departed and I looked at McKinney.
“You in a hurry?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“You gonna talk to me straight?”
“I’ll try,” I said, drinking some beer and looking down at the brown stuff in the bowl.
“How’s business?”
The Braves must have done something interesting. Harry and some of the customers groaned, and one shouted, “You see that?”
“Business is bad,” I said.
McKinney nodded.
“Then you got time to concentrate on what I’m gonna give you.”
“Depends on what it is,” I said.
“How old you, Mr. Fonesca?”
“Call me Lew,” I said. “I’m forty-one.”
“Your people? Italian? Mex?”
“Italian.”
He nodded and ate some more.
“You a good man?”
I shrugged.
“No, but I’m an honest one. I can prove it. You can see my office.”
“Lots of crooks are broke,” he said. “They just don’t know how to do thievin’ right. But I believe you,” he said, wiping the bottom of his plate with a wad of sourdough bread.
“Thanks,” I said. “What is it you want me to do?”
What he wanted was for me to find his former partner, a man named Amos Sprague, who Ames had tracked to Sarasota.