Or what messages will be hung on our doors, I thought. Tim released Jesse’s wrist though he couldn’t have held it if she hadn’t been willing to cooperate in the first place.
“Jesse,” I asked, reaching for half a sandwich. “You know a Mickey Merrymen?”
Jesse was a pretty pale girl on the thin side. Her blond hair was short and her look was that of a kid who had a two-year-old at home and another on the way. Jesse’s primary claim to respectability was that she was married. Her husband, Paul, also known as The Chink, was a mechanic right across the street in the Ford Agency. The two- year-old, Paulie Jr., was in day care every other day when Jesse wasn’t working. Jesse was finishing high school through the mail. Jesse was and looked tired all the time.
“Freak time. Geek time,” she said. “Yeah, I know him.”
“What do you know about him?” I asked while Tim shook his head and pointed at yet another article to substantiate his world view that, as a matter of fact, was mine too.
“Mickey’s a weird bird, an X-man mutant,” she said. “Smart, a little nuts, not bad-looking when he cleans up, but a weird bird.”
“Get in trouble?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“Look at this. Look at this,” Tim said, finding some new truth in the Herald-Tribune in front of him. Tim spoke with the quiet resignation of one who knew everything he found would vindicate his philosophy. Tim was a true believer who moved from coffee during the day to the whiskey he must have kept secreted in his room at night and which was still not fully masked by Eckerd mouthwash in the morning.
“Mickey,” I reminded Jesse.
“I think he graduated last year, works at the Burger King up the Trail,” she said. “Says he’s going to college. Or used to say it. Massachusetts Institute of Technicals or something. Father’s nuts.”
“That’s all you know about Mickey Merrymen?” I said, finishing the first half of the sandwich.
“Merrymen?” asked Tim. “Michael Merrymen?”
Jesse and I looked at Tim who smiled and said, “Man’s in the paper almost as much as that doctor who’s always suing the hospital or someone,” said Tim. “Classic paranoid. Sues Albertson’s, Barnes amp; Noble, neighbors, gets himself listed in the crime reports, noise levels, guns. Name it. He’s your man. Even tried to run for City Council a few years ago. Couldn’t come up with even twenty signatures on his petition. My theory, if you ask me, is he saw the light one morning, maybe turned on his television and saw something or found a rattlesnake in his mailbox and realized the world wasn’t a safe place to live in.”
“Everyone’s out to get him,” I said.
“At this point,” said Tim, turning a crinkly page of the paper, “he’s probably right.”
“Adele Hanford,” I tried on Jesse who pursed her lips.
“We hung out a little for a while,” she said, “before I dropped out. She was wild but straightened out. Won some kind of writing prize even. It was in the paper or somewhere.”
“She and Mickey going together?” I asked.
Jesse laughed.
“Anything can happen,” she said as a customer came through the door, a nervous-looking woman in a hospital blue uniform, a cigarette in her hand.
“Anything can happen,” Tim repeated. “Anytime.”
Jesse moved away and I finished my sandwich.
Anything could happen. Anytime. A woman could be driving home from work one night, her husband at home checking on the pasta, and a car the shape and color of grinning death could cut her in half, crumple her into nothingness.
“Anything,” I said, not bothering to finish the last bite of my sandwich. “Anytime.”
“Watch out for yourself,” Tim said as I dropped three dollars on the counter. “Probably doesn’t make any difference but it can’t hurt.”
“You’ve brightened my morning,” I said, getting off of the red-leatherette stool.
“Glad to help,” said Tim.
Ames was waiting for me in front of the Texas Bar and Grille. The temperature had already reached the eighties according to the not-very-bright bantering talk-show abuser out of Tampa who I was listening to on the radio. I can take almost any defect in a car but it has to have a radio. I need voices, sounds. I can deal with thoughts at a second level but I needed noise, voices filling the void of consciousness on the surface. B.J. and M.J. in the morning talking to women who had hit policemen with toilet plungers, Dr. Laura failing to listen to people nearly in tears trying desperately to tell their tales, even the threatening voices of southern-born-again or born- into-it Christian broadcasters telling me what the Scriptures really said. I liked the Sunday morning black Baptist preachers going hoarse with warnings and promises of an afterlife far better than the one Tim from Steubenville read about in the papers.
Ames was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, jeans, and boots. He also wore a thin blue zipper jacket under which, I was sure, rested a weapon of not recent vintage.
He climbed in.
I took Osprey down to Tamiami Trail and turned left when I got the light. Traffic was reasonably heavy for what was now lunch hour for most people.
“We’re going to Osprey,” I said.
Ames nodded.
I explained about Marvin Uliaks, the note left on my door, Conrad Lonsberg’s children in Venice. Ames nodded. I told him what I knew about Bernard Corsello whose body we had found. Ames nodded.
“Adele,” he said.
“Right,” I agreed. “We’re looking for Adele.”
He nodded in agreement. As we passed Sarasota Memorial Hospital, I pushed the AM button on the radio and got WGUL, the oldies station which I knew was Ames’s favorite. We listened to Frankie Laine doing “Ghost Riders in the Sky” as we moved slowly past Southgate Plaza and then crossed Bee Ridge.
“Read some of Lonsberg’s stuff last night,” he said.
“Me too.”
“Rereading, I guess,” he said.
“And?”
We went over the bridge at Phillipi Creek as Johnny Mercer sang “The Waiter and the Porter and the Upstairs Maid.”
“Not my kind of book,” he said. “Pushes the knife too deep. Feels sorry for himself. Least he did.”
I resisted the urge to turn to Ames in astonishment or to say something about this historic moment when Ames Mc-Kinney decided not only to carry on an extended conversation, but to criticize a book. Maybe he was the pod who had replaced Uncle Ira in the old Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
I wondered what Ann Horowitz would say about Conrad Lonsberg feeling sorry for himself. I had come to Ann feeling sorry for losing my wife, my life. She had told me that I was feeling sorry for two things, for the loss of the wife who defined who I was and for myself. Ann had said that both feelings were reasonable and that there was no hurry to get rid of either of them. Was Conrad Lonsberg like that? Or had he been when he was a young man and had written those books that met the feelings of a generation of people who felt they had lost something but were never quite sure what it was? Lonsberg gave them something to feel lost about. Were his missing manuscripts all about learning to live with failure?
In Osprey we turned on Bay Street off of Tamiami Trail at the Exxon station and then turned left at the next corner, Patterson. The house we were looking for was about two blocks down. We couldn’t actually see the house. It was deep behind trees and bushes huddled right up to the paved street that had no sidewalk. The mailbox was black, looked almost freshly polished, and had a red metal flag tucked down to show there was no mail to be picked up. The house number was in clear white letters on the box along with the name “Dorsey.”
I pulled onto the narrow stone driveway between the trees and drove slowly, leaves and branches slapping against the windshield and top of the car suggesting that visitors weren’t frequent.
We came to a clearing after about thirty yards after the assault of the flora. To the left was a blue Ford, vintage 1950 with collector’s license tags. I parked next to it and got out.
We turned to face a man at work and a woman reading. They were in front of a building, or rather a
