“No,” she said. “But I gave Mrs. Tree his current name. I think you heard it.”
“Prescott,” I said.
She said nothing.
“Dwight Prescott,” I said.
“Got to get back to work,” she said. “See you tomorrow night.”
John Detchon waved to us from behind his receptionist’s desk as we left the building. He seemed to be reasonably happy. I wasn’t sure how I was feeling.
5
Gus Zink had died more than a year ago. Natural causes. I understand the distinction between murder, manslaughter and accident and natural causes- breakdown of the body, invasion by disease. But it all seems natural in a screwy kind of way. Murder is natural. Usually wrong, but natural.
Gus had come to Sarasota with his wife, Flo, more than a decade ago. He was retired, had money, got elected to the city council as an independent, made enemies and had gone out swinging.
During his campaigns, necessary public talks, lunches, dinners and various appearances, Gus had done his best to make excuses for the absence of his wife. She was ill or she was touring Europe or visiting one of her brothers or sisters in Alaska, Montana, California or Vermont. The Zinks had no children.
Just before he died, Gus, already more than just sick, was kidnapped to keep him from a key council vote on where to put a branch library. There was big money on the line, big enough to make some landowners and contractors want to insure the location.
I had been hired by the city’s only black councilman to find Gus Zink. I had found him. Gus started to fail fast after that last council meeting. He and Flo had gone north, to Vermont, where Gus had been raised. When he died, Flo came back to their house in Sarasota. The house was on the bay but on the mainland, not one of the Keys.
Flo Zink answered the door, a familiar glass of amber liquid in her hand. She looked at me, grinned, winked at Ames, who nodded, and turned her attention to Beryl Tree. A woman sang plaintively inside the house. I recognized the voice and the song. It was Patsy Cline.
Flo was in her late sixties. She was dressed in a black silver-studded skirt and vest over a blue denim shirt. She wore boots and looked as if she were on her way to do some line dancing. She was a barrel of a woman, with too much makeup, large earrings, and the distinctly vacant look of a heavy drinker. Even through her generously applied perfume there was a smell of scotch, probably good scotch. Flo, I had learned from personal experience, held her alcohol well, but once in a while there was a scotch overdose and the well-rounded widow Zink turned honest and foul-mouthed.
“I’m Flo,” she said to Beryl Tree. “Come on in and let’s get friendly. You can tell me your story. I’ll tell you mine.”
Flo put her free arm around Beryl and guided her into the house. Ames and I followed.
Flo led us into the living room with a view of the bay. The furniture around the room looked as if it belonged on the set of a Clint Eastwood western. Wood, old brown leather, a rough-hewn table made from a thick slice of redwood, and animal skins for rugs. Two paintings on the wall were authentic Remingtons- galloping cowboys, Indians riding bareback.
Flo moved to the double-speakered stereo against the wall and turned Patsy Cline down but not off.
“What are we drinking?” asked Flo. “I know Lew is beer, which I don’t consider drinking, and McKinney here is straight whiskey, which he doesn’t drink till the sun goes down, so he’s having…?”
“You have Dr Pepper?” asked Ames.
“I have every drink known to man or beast,” said Flo, holding up her glass to take a drink and purse her heavily painted lips. “Dr Pepper is coming up. And you, Ms. Tree?”
“Beryl,” she said. “Just water.”
“Suit yourself, my dear,” said Flo. “And have a seat. I’ll put your bag in your room.”
Flo pointed to a leather chair with arms made from the antlers of something from the far north. Beryl sat.
“Something to eat?”
“We ate at the Texas,” I said.
“That phony cowboy, Fairing, makes a decent bowl of chili. I’ll give the son of a bitch that.”
Flo picked up the small suitcase and left us in the living room listening to Patsy Cline sing about how much her lover was hurting her.
Flo wasn’t gone long. When she returned, she was carrying a tray with four drinks in tall glasses. The ice in the glasses clinked as she put the tray on the low redwood table.
“This is my special,” Flo said. “You can drink Dr Pepper, beer and water and any other piss you want at the Texas. At Flo Zink’s you go with the special when the sun sinks its ass into the water, which is what it will be doing in about ten minutes. Now, if you want to sit and hold it while the ice melts and the sun disappears, you go right ahead, McKinney.”
We all took a glass.
“Here’s to getting through the shit,” said Flo, holding out her glass in a toast.
I knew Flo’s special. We drank. Ames didn’t make a sound and his weathered face didn’t change. Beryl Tree choked and caught her breath.
“You get used to it,” said Flo.
“I like it,” said Beryl, taking another sip.
“I’m gonna love this woman,” Flo said to me and Ames.
I took a drink, steeling myself from the memory of the last time I had a special. It burned and tasted like sweet molten plastic. Flo was almost finished with her drink.
“I’ve got to go,” I said after forcing down another small sip.
Beryl continued to drink. Maybe she needed it.
“She’ll be safe here,” said Flo. “At least from everybody but me.”
I was familiar with Flo’s arsenal of weapons. They hung on wall racks or were displayed in cabinets in her gun room. I knew some of the guns were loaded. I didn’t know which ones.
I turned to go.
“You’ll find Adele,” said Beryl, fortified with Flo’s special, which seethed its way quickly into the nervous system.
“I’ll find her,” I said. “I’ll call you in the morning.”
“Not too early,” said Flo. “We’re going to be talking most of the fuckin’ night. Sorry about my language, Beryl.”
“I’m a waitress in a truck stop,” Beryl said. “I don’t think you could come up with anything I haven’t heard every day for the last twenty years.”
“I can try,” said Flo, smiling sweetly.
I dropped Ames back at the Texas and asked him to see if he could get any leads on Adele or Dwight. He nodded, got out and went inside. I headed back to that which passed as home.
It wasn’t too late. The DQ parking lot was busy but not full. I parked toward the back of the lot, locked the Metro and headed toward the concrete stairs.
I didn’t see him standing back in the shadows of the building and bushes near the stairway. But I did hear him when my hand touched the railing.
“Where is she?” came the voice from the dark. It was a raspy voice, the voice of a man who might have played an outlaw or a tough sheriff on an old radio show. Or maybe Flo and Ed Fairing had just put me in a western mood.
I stopped and looked toward the voice.
He came out of the shadows. He was big. Boots, badly faded jeans, a short-sleeved button-down white shirt with green stripes. His hair was dark, long, tied back in a small ponytail. My first impression was that he was good- looking and dangerous. Some women, maybe a lot of women, liked that. Most men didn’t.
