“Few days, no more, probably. Can’t be sure, but not long.”
“Would a bonus persuade you to put this other work aside?” he asked, tapping the checkbook against his side.
“No.”
“Anything could have happened to Melanie,” he said. “Doesn’t that mean something to you?”
“I can recommend someone else you can contact about the job,” I said. “There are about eight licensed private investigators in Sarasota. Another handful in Bradenton. A few in Venice. Maybe three of them are reasonably good.”
“Are you independently wealthy, Mr. Fonesca?”
“No, but I don’t have to be wealthy to be independent.”
“Do you have any idea of what it’s like to lose a wife?” he asked with a catch in his voice.
“Yes,” I said.
“Okay,” he said without pursuing the loss of my wife. “I’ll give you a chance. Larry said you’re good. He also said your fee is negotiable. I’ll write out a check. If it’s acceptable, you have the job. If not, hand it back, give me the folder and the name of a reliable private detective and we’ll shake hands and go on about our business.”
He put the checkbook on the desk, opened it, pulled a glistening gold pen from his pocket and wrote. He wrote fast, tore out the check and handed it to me.
I looked at it. Five hundred dollars.
“Consider that is for your fee and expenses. If anything is left, you can apply it to a daily payment of one hundred and twenty dollars a day. Of course I’ll want an itemized bill before final payment. If you run out of money, come back to me and we’ll work it out.”
I nodded to show that I agreed and put the check in the folder.
“How long do I keep on looking? I can probably find her but it might be hard and it might be easy and it might even be impossible if she’s really smart.”
He touched my arm fleetingly and directed me back into the living room.
“Let’s say we reevaluate after three days if it goes that long,” he said. “But I want her back if it’s at all possible. I want to find her soon. I’m too old to start again. I don’t want to be alone and I love Melanie. You understand?”
I nodded, tucked the folder under my arm and let him lead me to the front door. Usually in a situation like this I would have to ask for some information, numbers of any credit cards they shared, the tag number and make of her car and various other things to make my job easier. But Carl Sebastian, or maybe his friend and attorney Lawrence Werring, had anticipated well and the information was in the folder.
“My card is in the folder,” he said, opening the front door. “My office phone and cell phone numbers are on the front. My home number is written on the back. Keep me informed. Call anytime. As often as you like.”
He waited with me at the elevator.
“Anything else I can tell you?” he asked.
“Your wife have any living relatives?”
“No, it’s all in the folder. Her background. All she has is me. And I don’t think she’s gone far. We’ve traveled all around the world, but she considers the Gulf Coast her home. I could be wrong. Where will you start?”
The elevator hummed to a stop and the doors opened silently.
“Her friend Mrs. Wilkerson or maybe the psychiatrist, Green.”
“Good,” he said, putting out a hand to keep the door open while I got on. “I don’t know what Caroline can tell you that I haven’t. Yet, maybe there was something said, some… I don’t know.”
I stepped into the elevator, turned to face him and did my best to smile confidently at Carl Sebastian as the doors closed. He looked a little older than he had when I first saw him on the balcony.
2
“Tell me something important and ask me a question.”
Ann Horowitz, Ph. D., sat forward in her upright chair to reach for her white foam cup of coffee and the chocolate biscotti I had brought her from Sarasota News and Books a block away.
Ann was almost eighty. A small woman with a tolerant smile, she was given to bright dresses. Her hair was gray, straight and short enough to show off her colorful bright yellow and red stone earrings.
Her office was small, neat, a desk on one side, another desk across from it and three chairs, blue and comfortable. There were two windows to let in light but they were high on the wall. From where I sat I could see blue skies and white clouds and in the past I had seen an occassional gull.
Ann had retired to Sarasota with her husband, Melvin, a sculptor, ten years ago. She had left her writing and her practice as an analyst and devoted herself to her son and his two young children, who lived in town. She also devoted herself to a passion for history. She had grown bored after five years and opened a small office practice.
Every time I came to see her she handed me a magazine or a book and told me about a fascinating chapter or article on how the Seminoles had won the war against the United States or how a small town of immigrant Mayans in Texas was thriving economically because they had retained the knowledge and the lessons of their history.
“I have enough money to pay you what I owe you for today and last session,” I said.
“Good. Pay after we talk. You’ve told me something. Now the question.”
“You know a psychiatrist named Geoffrey Green?”
She nodded her head as she chewed a reasonable piece of biscotti.
“I’ve met him a few times. Have a few of his former patients.”
“What can you tell me about him?”
“That is a second question and is part of your hour,” she said, “in spite of the coffee-and-biscotti bribe.”
I held out my hands to show that I accepted her condition.
“He’s good. He’s expensive. He is young. But then, to me almost everyone is young.”
“Even in Sarasota?”
“Less so here, but the world is vast. My favorite opening of a book is Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s something like ‘The universe is very, very big.’ I am amused by understatement.”
“He mess around with his female patients?”
She paused mid-drink and put down her cup. She folded her hands in her lap and gave me her full attention.
“You have reason to believe he does?” she asked.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Well, I will answer you enigmatically. You may be half right.”
“I don’t understand.”
“When you do, let me know. I can say no more. Subject is dropped. Now, to you.”
“You don’t want to talk about some lost tribe in the wilds of Indonesia?”
“I do not. What are you doing for fun?”
“Watching movies, videotapes.”
“And?”
“Working, eating, trying not to think, dreaming.”
“You have a good dream for me, Lewis?”
“Maybe.”
“Every time you come to see me you have a dream the night before. Tell me.”
She reached for the coffee.
“Worms in my ear,” I said.
“In your ear?”
“You sure you want to hear this while you’re eating?”
“I could make you violently ill with stories I have heard and continue to eat,” she said, working on the
