Sarasota has hundreds of restaurants catering to retirees, tourists and full-time working residents. It could be a long day or two of work. If she was still in town, I didn’t think Adele would be that tough to find, and I needed the fifty dollars. My backup was to find Dwight Handford. From what little Beryl had told me about her husband, I had the feeling he wouldn’t be found by simply looking in the phone book. I was right. I’d find him if I had to, but I’d go for that phone booth first. How long it would take to find Adele Tree depended on what happened at my meeting in less than half an hour.
I had gone three weeks with no work but serving papers twice, thirty-five dollars for each job. Both servings had been easy. They’re not always easy. People who took the court order I handed them tended to see me as the enemy, the messenger for the system, the first step in doing them in. I’ve been slapped, threatened and hit a few times. Usually, though, the recipient was stunned. I always dressed casually, spoke politely and asked if I was speaking to the person I was looking for. If I was, I handed the papers to him or her. If I wasn’t and the person admitted that I had come to the right place, I gave that person the papers. It was legal.
I could simply drop the papers on a table or on the floor.
There are servers who simply tear up the papers they are supposed to serve and swear that the deliveries were made. There are others who carry guns and push through doors and face a knife or a rifle to get the job done. Pride, not money, for these people.
I carried no gun. If things looked really bad on a job, I turned the papers back in and said I couldn’t find the person I was looking for. That didn’t happen much.
The money was running out and I needed Beryl Tree’s fifty or a hundred dollars, and there was a good chance I was on my way to another job.
I knew Sarasota and Bradenton reasonably well now. They were still small towns where a pretty young girl might be remembered. There was also that chance that Adele had used a phone near where she was staying.
I put Adele’s photo and the phone-booth number in my wallet and changed into a clean white shirt and my only sport jacket, a solid navy blue a little too heavy for Florida. My gray jeans didn’t look too bad with the shirt and jacket. This was a casual town. I went down to the Dairy Queen with my bike.
It was a few minutes before noon. I was hungry. I bought a large chocolate-covered-cherry Blizzard and a deluxe burger and thanked Dave for sending me a client.
“Lady needs help,” he said. “Kid running away like that. I see a lot of those kids.”
Dave was probably around my age, but years in the sun working on boats in the bay had tanned his skin dark. His body was hard and strong, but his face had gone to sun-fried hell.
“I think I can find her,” I said while he prepared the burger and shake.
“Kids,” Dave said with a shake of the head.
When my order came up I showed Adele’s photograph to Dave. He looked at it for a while and squinted in thought.
“Yeah, the lady showed it to me. I don’t think I’ve seen her,” he said, “but who knows? She cuts her hair, maybe dyes it, puts on a lot of makeup, orders a Dilly Bar and off she goes. I could have her picture right in front of me and not recognize her. Who knows?”
“Thanks, Dave,” I said, taking my Blizzard and burger.
“Who knows?” he repeated. “You know what I mean?”
• “I know,” I said. “You know anything about a guy named Carl Sebastian?”
“Know of him,” said Dave. “Big money, property, real estate, all over the Herald-Tribune society pages, always in Marjorie North’s column with his wife, a real looker.”
“You read the society pages?”
Dave shrugged.
“What can I say? I’m a reader. I read the Wheaties box in the morning. Read an article in some magazine this morning about the history of cod fishing. You know the Basques used to be great cod fishermen. Read the label on the jar of Dundee marmalade while I was having breakfast this morning. You know, the white jar?”
“Yeah.”
“History of the company right there on the little jar. I read.”
I ate fast and figured that if I took some shortcuts I could pedal the mile or so to the high-rise, high-priced condominium on a quiet street a few hundred yards from Sarasota Bay and maybe be there on time.
I made it with about three minutes to spare. A woman with white hair and a white dog looked at me while I chained my bike to a tree. She looked and then turned her attention back to the dog, who watched me as I walked past and then, assured that he was safe, lifted one leg and aimed for a thin tree with round green fruit that might be oranges.
I stepped into the blue polished granite-floored lobby, pressed the button next to Carl Sebastian’s name and was buzzed in almost instantly. A quiet elevator with well-polished dark-wood panels brought me up seventeen floors, to the penthouse.
The door to the only apartment on the floor was wide open. I stepped in and a man’s voice called, “Out here.”
The living room was big, light but tasteful, with neutral, luxuriously textured furniture as a foil for colorful abstract paintings on the walls. I crossed the room and headed for the man standing at the railing of the balcony beyond. He turned to me.
“How old would you say I am?”
I looked at the dark handsome man standing next to the railing of the balcony overlooking the bay. He was bigger than I am, about six feet and somewhere in the range of one hundred and ninety pounds. His open blue shirt, which may have been silk, showed a well-muscled body with a chest of gray-brown hair. The hair on his head was the same color, plentiful, neat. And he was carefully and gently tanned. He had a glass of something that looked like tomato juice in his hand.
“V8,” he said. “Great drink.”
He offered me the same. I settled for water.
There was a slight accent, very slight, when he spoke. He reminded me of Ricardo Montalban.
“Just guess.”
“What?”
“How old you think I am.”
He looked away from the boats bobbing in the bay and the cars going over the bridge to Bird Key and beyond to Lido and Longboat Keys. He was giving me his profile.
Answering a question like the one he asked could lose me a job, but I hadn’t come to this town to go back to saying “Yes, boss” to people I liked and didn’t like. All I wanted was to make as much money as I needed to stay alive and well supplied with used videotapes. Besides, I had a sure fifty dollars coming from Beryl Tree.
“Sixty,” I guessed, standing a few feet away from him and looking him in the eyes when he turned his head and smiled.
“Closer to seventy,” he said with satisfaction. “I was blessed by the Lord in many ways. My genes are excellent. My mother is ninety-two and still lives in good health. My father died two years ago at the age of ninety- four. I have uncles, aunts… you wouldn’t believe.”
“Not without seeing them,” I said.
Sebastian laughed. There wasn’t much joy in his laugh. He looked at his now empty V8 glass and set it on a glass-topped table.
“Lawrence told you my problem?” he asked, facing me, his gray-blue eyes unblinking, sincere.
“Your wife left. You want to find her. That’s all.”
Lawrence Werring was a lawyer, civil cases, injury lawsuits primarily, an ambulance chaser and proud of it. It had bought him a beautiful wife, a leather-appointed office and a four-bedroom house on the water on Longboat Key. If I knew which one it was, I could probably have seen it from where Sebastian and I were standing.
“My wife’s name is Melanie,” Sebastian said, handing me a folder that lay next to the empty V8 glass. “She is considerably younger than I-thirty-six-but I believed she loves… loved me. I was vain enough to think it was true and for some time it seemed true. And then one afternoon, four days ago to be exact, she…”
He looked around as if she might suddenly rematerialize.
“… she was gone. I came home and clothes, jewelry, gone. No note, nothing. That was, let me see, last Thursday. I kept expecting to hear from her or a kidnapper or something, but-”
