“I gotta call homicide, tell „em Tagliani?s missus went across. I?ll he a minute. You?re stayin? at the
Ponce, right?”
“Right.”
“Nice digs.,” Dutch said.
He went into the ICU office, made two phone calls in the time it took me to straighten my tie, and
came back.
“1 hear you know the town,” he said as we headed for the parking lot.
“1 do if it hasn?t changed in twenty years,” I answered.
He laughed, but it was a sardonic, humorless laugh. “You?re in for a surprise,” he said. “Follow me
over to the hotel. You can plant your car and run out to the Warehouse with me.”
“The Warehouse?”
“That?s what we call our layout.”
I told him that was damn white of him and we headed out into the hot, rainy night.
2
SIGHTSEEING
It was only a few blocks back to the hotel but I saw enough through the windshield wipers and rain to
tell me what twenty years had done to Dunetown. These were not the wrinkles of time; this was a
beautiful woman turned whore. Tagliani?s death had started the worms nibbling at my stomach. One
look -at downtown Dunetown turned the worms to writhing, hissing snakes, striking at my insides.
Twenty years ago Ocean Avenue was a dark, romantic, two-lane blacktop, an archway of magnolias
dripping with Spanish moss, that meandered From Dunetown to the sea, six miles away. Now it was
Ocean Boulevard, a six-lane highway that slashed between an infinity of garish streetlights like a scar.
Neither tree nor hush broke up the eerie green glow, but a string of hotel billboards did, their flashing
neon fingers beckoning tourists to the beach.
Front Street was worse. I was so shocked by what had happened here that I stopped the car, got out,
and stood in the rain, staring at a street gone mad. It was so far from the Front Street in my freeze
frame, I couldn?t relate to it.
The Front Street I remembered was like the backdrop of a Norman Rockwell painting. There were
two old movie houses that showed double features. There was Bucky?s drugstore, which had a
marble-top soda fountain where you could still get a milkshake made out of real ice cream and sit in
an old-fashioned wire-back chair to enjoy it. And there was the town landmark, Blame?s Department
Store, which filled an entire block. The people of Dunetown once got everything from their diapers to
