front of his desk holding both of her cold hands in his large firm ones. There was nothing covert in the hand holding, but I couldn’t tell if he was playing comforting attorney, good friend or something closer.
I’d need a car. I made a decision and biked back to Washington Street, took my bike up to my office, went back out past the DQ and a small line of storefronts on the west side of the street and walked to the driveway of the car rental agency I did business with when I needed four wheels.
EZ Economy Car Rental is a half block north of the DQ. Once, long ago, it was a gas station. That was before I came to Sarasota. It still looked like a gas station without the pumps. The lot was small but there was space behind the whitewashed office for a dozen cars in addition to the four parked beyond the two open sliding doors where once oil was changed, tires repaired, engines overhauled and grease-covered hands cut with the lids of opened cans.
Inside the small office, Alan, a big, bulky man in his late forties, drank two-handed from a pink cup that had the word MOCHA running in large letters facing me. He was leaning back against one of the two desks.
His partner, Fred, in his sixties, big belly, wasn’t in sight.
“Fonesca,” Alan said with a sigh. “I’m not sure I’m up to the challenge. I’d ask you to try smiling a little, but I don’t think I could take it.”
He pushed away from the desk and looked down at whatever was in his cup. Alan was known, as Fred put it once, to “tipple” from time to time. “Nothing serious,” Fred had said. “Takes the edge off.”
“Edge of what?” I had asked.
“Edge of the weary life we all bear,” Fred had said. “Weighs heavier on him than most with the possible exception of Lewis Fonesca, whose very presence proclaims the end of days.”
“Where’s Fred?” I asked Alan.
“Where’s Fred?” Alan repeated. “I’ll tell you where Fred is. He’s in his third day at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. Third day. Third heart attack. Man’s had three wives, three kids. Now he’s had three heart attacks. What he needs is three wishes.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Alan shrugged.
“Makes the days long. Coffee?”
“No thanks.”
“Transportation then?” said Alan, taking a slow sip from his cup.
“Yes.”
“Take the Saturn,” he said, tilting his head toward the window. “Gray one, ninety-eight, right out in front.”
“How much?” I asked.
“Whatever you want to pay Lewis, bringer of light and joy, bearer of good spirits,” he said, toasting me with his coffee.
It was a little after ten in the morning. Alan wasn’t smashed, but he was sloshing down the road to oblivion.
“Same as last time?” I asked.
“Whatever. You caught me depressive,” he said with a shrug. “I try to stay manic. Right now, I don’t think these walls can hold the power of depression you and I can generate.”
“Keys?” I said.
“On the board,” he said, nodding his head at the Peg-Board on the wall to his right. “Help yourself.”
I found the right keys.
“You all right?” I asked.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “I’m hoping the manic stage will kick in, but I don’t think it will, not for a while. When I’m manic, I can rent an oil-leaking ninety Honda that shits rust and farts oil to Mr. Goodwrench. Can’t stop, but this…”
“I know,” I said.
“Fred keeps me above the line,” he said. “Costello was no good without Abbott. Hardy wasn’t much without Laurel. Jerry Lewis… you get it. I need a straight man.”
I reached for my wallet. Alan, cup to his lips, saw me and held up his right hand.
“No,” he said. “I don’t feel like doing the paperwork, writing a receipt. Just take the car. Belonged to a secretary in the biology department at the University of South Florida. Standard shift.”
“Fine,” I said.
The door opened. A couple, Mexican, maybe in their late thirties, both plump, both serious, with a boy about twelve at their side, came in. They didn’t quite look frightened, but they didn’t look confident either.
“That little car outside for sale?” the man said. “Sign says eight hundred dollars?”
Alan sighed.
“The Focus? Six hundred,” he said. “Gala sale day.”
I went outside and got into the Saturn. It was clean, smelled a little musty, and the window at my left rattled as I pulled onto 301.
Stuart M. Kaminsky
Denial: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (Lew Fonesca Novels)
3
I took a chance. It wasn’t a big one. I drove past downtown a few blocks away and turned onto Sixth Street past city hall and parked across from the Texas Bar amp; Grille.
The lunchtime regulars at the Texas, lawyers, cops, construction workers, shop owners on Main Street, lost tourists and snow birds, were about an hour from coming through the door.
A lone guy with three chins and a business shirt with a morning beer and The Wall Street Journal sat at a table by the window. Ed Fairing, white shirt, black vest, flowing dark mustache, hair parted down the middle, sat at a table to the right, a book in his hand. Ed was from Jersey, living out his dream of being an old-fashioned barkeep and saying, “What’ll it be?” a few hundred times a day.
The Texas was known for its one-pound burgers and beer on tap. Ed was known for his esoteric knowledge of bars of the Old West. The walls of the Texas were covered with old weapons kept in working condition by Ames McKinney, and photographs and drawings of some bars, including the Jersey Lilly with Judge Roy Bean, lean and glinty-eyed, one hand on the bar behind him, the other clutching a thick book that Ed said contained the laws of Texas. Another showed the Suicide Table in Virginia City, Nevada. Ed had been to Virginia City, a pilgrimage, had seen the Suicide Table, where three men were reported to have killed themselves after losing small fortunes.
“Lewis,” Ed said, looking up over the top of his rimless glasses.
“Ed,” I said.
“If you’ve come to collect for the United Jewish Appeal, I gave at the blood bank,” he said.
I’m not Jewish. Neither is Ed. Ed thinks he has a sense of humor. I wouldn’t know. He had given me a joke to tell Ann Horowitz. It had something to do with aardvarks walking into a bar. I had forgotten the punch line.
“Ames is out back,” Ed said. “Garbage pickup this afternoon.”
I walked past the bar at the rear, down the narrow hallway, past the small kitchen that smelled of grease and sugar, past the rest rooms and through the rear door.
Ames, tall, wearing a red flannel shirt in spite of the seventy-degree weather, was hoisting a fat green plastic garbage bag into a yawning Dumpster.
“Busy?” I asked.
He wiped his hands on his jeans and turned toward me.
“Last one,” he said, nodding at the Dumpster.
That’s all we said. Nothing more was needed. Ames was seventy-four now, lean, still over six-four, long white hair, a Gary Cooper face of suntanned leather.
Four years ago he had come to Sarasota to find his partner, Jim Holland, who had run away with every nickel he could steal from their company in Arizona, moved to Sarasota, changed his name and became a pillar of society,
