what to ask.”
“Did you go to the police?”
“Yes,” she said. “First thing. They took a picture of Adele and the phone-booth number and said they’d look into it. Nice man, a sergeant, said it would get it posted and go in the computer. I got the feeling Adele was going in a big box with a thousand or more other lost children.”
“I think you’re right.”
I placed the phone number right next to the photograph of the smiling girl on my desk.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“Motel I’m staying at, the Best Western, is just down the street. Came here for a Dairy Queen fish sandwich just maybe fifteen, twenty minutes back. I showed the man who served me the sandwich Adele’s picture. Told him my story. He said maybe you could help.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, looked down and then straightened up. “Who are you?”
“My name is Lewis Fonesca. I used to work for the state attorney’s office in Cook County, Illinois. Investigations. One morning my wife took the car to work. She died in a car accident on Lake Shore Drive. It was winter. I wasn’t going any further up in my job and I’m not ambitious. I was cold and too many places and people reminded me of my wife. Am I telling you too much?”
“No.”
There was more but I didn’t see the need to share it with Beryl. I had come to Sarasota a little over three years earlier, just drove till my car gave out and I felt safe in the sunshine after spending my life in the gray of Chicago. I drove away from the dead-end investigator’s job with the State’s Attorney’s office. Now I made a sort of living finding people, asking questions, answering to nobody. I had a growing number of Sarasota lawyers using me to deliver a summons or find a local resident who hadn’t turned up for court or a divorce hearing. I had a county process server’s license, complete with a full-color card with my photograph on it. It was the same face I saw in the mirror: sad, balding. A short, thin man who definitely looked Italian.
Occasionally, I would turn up some street trade, a referral like Beryl from Dave at the Dairy Queen. I lived in and worked out of a second-floor office in a two-story office building behind the DQ parking lot. Entrance to each of the offices was through a door to the outside. My door, like the others, needed a coat of paint. The metal railing on the balcony was starting to rust seriously.
I had a deal with the building manager. The landlord lived in Seattle. By giving the manager a few extra dollars a month beyond the reasonable rent for a seedy two rooms he referred to as a “suite,” he ignored the fact that I was living in the “suite.” The outer room where I now sat with Beryl was designed as a reception room. I had turned it into an office. The room behind it was a small windowed office, which I had turned into a living space. I had fixed it up to my satisfaction. The clothes I had brought with me from Chicago would hold out for another year or two. I had a narrow bed, an old dresser, a small closet, a television set-with a VCR picked up at a nearby pawnshop-and a low bookcase, which stood next to the dresser and was overflowing with paperbacks and videotapes. To get to the bathroom, which had no bath, I had to walk outside past five offices, accepting whatever the weather had to offer. I showered at the downtown YMCA every morning after I worked out there. Normally, I bicycle to the Y. My bike was standing in the corner behind my new client.
There was nothing but my name printed on the white-on-black plastic plate that slid into the slot on my outer door. The plate didn’t indicate what service I provided.
“Man at the Dairy Queen,” she said, nodding at the door, beyond which was the concrete landing overlooking the Dairy Queen on Route 301, which was also Washington Street, though in my two years in town I never heard anyone call it anything but 301. They also called Bahia Vista “Baya Vista,” and Honore Avenue. was usually referred to as Honor Avenue.
“He said you had feelings.”
She looked at me for about the third time and saw a sad-looking forty-two-year-old man with rapidly thinning hair and reasonable dark looks wearing a short-sleeved button-down blue shirt and gray jeans.
“You’re a detective, like on television,” she said. “Rockford.”
“More like Harry Orwell,” I said. “I’m not a detective. The only license I have in this state is a card with my picture on it that says I’m a process server. But any citizen can make inquiries. That’s what I do. I make inquiries.”
“You ask questions.”
“I ask questions.”
“What do you charge?”
“Fifty dollars a day, plus expenses.”
“Expenses?”
“Phone calls. Gas. Rental car. Things like that. I report to you every night if you want me to. You can stop my services anytime before the next day. My guess is I’ll find Adele in two or three days or tell you she’s not in Sarasota.”
“Okay,” she said, opening her purse once again and pulling out a wallet, from which she extracted five tens. “I will need a receipt.”
I took the money, found a pad of yellow legal-sized paper and wrote out a receipt. She took it and said, “I told you I’m staying at the Best Western. I’m in Room Two-o-four.”
“Well,” I said, handing her my card. There was nothing on it but my name, address and phone number. “You can call me here day or night.”
Beryl took my card, looked at it, put it in her purse, and snapped her purse closed.
“I am not a warm woman,” she said. “I do not show my affections. I did not do so with Adele, but I do love her and I think she knows that. Please find her.”
“I’ll do my best to find her.” I said. “A few more questions. What’s your last name?”
“Tree. My name is Beryl Tree. My daughter is Adele Tree. Took my maiden name back when Dwight walked out, took it back and gave it to my daughter. His name is Handford, Dwight Handford.”
“And he knows you’re in town and where you’re staying.”
“Didn’t tell him where I was stayin’. Just ran into him on the street, coming out of the Waffle House across from the motel. He looked scared, then mad. I asked him where Adele was. He hit me, told me to get back to Kansas or the next time he saw me he’d…”
She stood looking at the humming air conditioner. She had something more to say. I waited.
“He, Dwight, was married before me. Said he divorced her. Had a daughter before he married me. Josh, he’s the sheriff…”
“I know.”
“Josh came checking on him once. Didn’t know what it was about till Adele ran off. Then Josh told me. Dwight spent prison time for… for doing his first daughter when she was twelve.”
I knew what “doing” meant.
“Adele’s a pretty girl,” she said. “Too pretty maybe.”
“I’ll find her,” I said.
And she was gone.
I pulled some Kleenex from my drawer, wiped my head, face and neck, and threw the used tissues into my Tampa Bay Bucs wastebasket. My shirt was sweat-blotched and clinging wet to my back. It was a hot December day in Sarasota, probably about eighty-four degrees and humid-hot for winter, but not unheard of. It was the middle of the snowbird season. Tourists and winter residents rented or owned overpriced houses and apartments on the mainland in Bradenton, Sarasota and all the way up the coast to Pensacola and down the coast to Naples. The winter crowd with real money were in the resorts and condos on the beaches of Longboat and Siesta Keys. All in all, there were about 200,000 people in Manatee and Sarasota Counties combined during The Season.
In Sarasota, south of the airport, there is a strip of low-cost motels on Tamiami Trail. The strip stretches for a couple of miles to downtown and stops just before the theater district. The primary residents of the motels are small-time pimps and prostitutes, mostly runaways like Adele, though in the winter unknowing French and German tourists wander into these motels with their families, swimsuits and cameras. This was where I’d start looking for Adele’s phone booth. If that failed, I’d go south of Bay Front Park and downtown and start my search among the malls, restaurants and shops.
