the cabinets.”
Marvin shook his head “no.”
“No, thanks,” I told Billy. “Marvin and I are old friends.”
Actually, I had known Marvin for a couple of years, but we weren’t friends. He did odd jobs in the three-block stretch of stores on 301 from Main Street to the Tamiami intersection, basically my neighborhood. Marvin washed windows, ran errands, swept up in exchange for food from the restaurants, an old pair of shoes or pants from a shoe or clothing store, a dollar from other businesses, and a place to sleep behind the sagging Angela’s Tarot and Palm Reading shop down the street from where I worked and lived.
I was now engaged in the longest conversation I had ever had with my friend Marvin.
“I got a confession, Mr. Fonesca. I got drunk. Just a little. To get up the nerve to come find you. Then I was ashamed of being drunk so I sobered. So now my head is hurting fierce.”
I gulped the last of my beer, patted Marvin on the shoulder, slid out of the booth, and got up.
“She’s gone, Marvin,” I said. “Get some sleep.”
“I’ve got money,” he said, digging into the pockets of his old denim jacket. Crumpled singles, fives, and tens appeared in his gnarled fists. He dropped them on top of the open album and kept digging into his pockets.
“See, I can pay.”
Like a kid doing magic tricks Marvin continued to produce bills from his pants pockets, shirt pocket, the cuffs of his socks.
Lincoln and Washington looked up at me from the top of the heap of bills.
“We got a discrepancy there?” Billy called.
Marvin was hyperventilating now, his large eyes fixed on my face waiting for the answer to all his prayers.
“Almost all my life’s savings,” he said, his face pressing against an imaginary window of expected failure. “Just about all I’ve got. I’m not asking for favors here. Oh, no. I’m hiring you just like any other Joe. You too busy now? Okay, but I’m a… a…”
Marvin wasn’t sure of what he was and I wasn’t going to tell him.
“Billy,” I called. “You have a paper bag?”
Billy looked over at the pile of bills.
“For that?”
“Yes.”
“Paper or plastic?”
“Paper,” I said.
Billy pulled a paper bag from under the bar, came around, and handed it to me. I shoved Marvin’s money into it and handed Marvin the bag. He pushed it back at me.
“I’m saying ‘please,’” Marvin said. He looked as if he were going to cry.
“Twenty dollars a day,” I said with a sigh. “If I don’t find Vera Lynn in five days, I give it up and you promise to give it up. Deal?”
Marvin went stone still.
“Give me forty in advance for two days,” I said. “Most it can cost you is a hundred. I’ll need the album and the letter.”
He nodded and smiled.
“That’s business,” he said, holding out his hand. We shook and he dipped into the paper bag to pull out four tens. He handed them to me. “All’s you got to do is find her, tell me where she is. I’ll do the rest. It’s important.”
“I’m closing up for an early lunch, Mr. F.,” called Billy, closing the newspaper. “Meeting some people at Longhorn. Place’s like a morgue this morning anyway.”
I assumed both Marvin and I were prime contributors to the funereal atmosphere.
I closed the album, tucked it under my arm, went to the bar, and handed Billy one of the four tens Marvin had put in my hand. Billy nodded and Marvin followed me into the street.
Traffic was moving slowly, but there was a lot of it. I wanted to cross the street, go to my room, and watch The Shadow, but I knew I’d be looking at Marvin Uliaks’s album.
“Anything else you can tell me about her?” I asked.
“All in the book,” he said, tapping the album. “All the answers I got. Like the Bible. Got the answers. You just have to figure out what they mean. I never could, not in the album, not in the Bible, not in any book pretty much even when I was a kid. But you know how to find me. Right now I’m going to Lupe’s Resale to do some work unless you want me to come with you.”
“Go to Lupe’s,” I said. “I’ll find you if I need you.”
He stood on the sidewalk while I waited for a break in traffic and jogged across the street, past the DQ, through the parking lot, and up the stairs to my office. When I turned around, Marvin was standing where I had left him looking up at me. I motioned for him to go to Lupe’s. I pointed in the right direction. He shook his head in understanding and walked to his right while I entered my office.
Home. The day was cool. A little over seventy degrees. Typical winter in Sarasota. I didn’t need the air- conditioning, which was good because I don’t have any. The ancient air conditioner that came with the office had given out. Ames McKinney had kept it alive for more than a year. We had buried the window unit in the Dumpster at the DQ with Dave’s permission.
I opened the windows, pulled the chains on the Venetian blinds, flipped on the fluorescent light, and listened to it crackle as I sat down at my desk with Marvin’s album in front of me.
There wasn’t much in the office to distract me. There was a single chair across the desk. A wastepaper basket with a Tampa Bucs logo under the desk and facing me on the wall was a poster, the only decoration in the room, an original Mildred Pierce. Joan Crawford looked across at me feeling my pain and Mildred’s. Tomorrow was Friday. I’d watch my tape of the movie tomorrow night in the next room where I had my cot, television, and VCR. Tonight I was watching The Shadow.
The beer and Marvin’s appearance had taken a little of the sting from my cheek. Not enough, just a little.
Except for a possible call from a lawyer with papers to serve and dinner that night with Sally Porovsky and her kids at the Bangkok, Marvin Uliaks’s album was the only obligation on my schedule for the week. It was more than I would have wanted, except for Sally and the Bangkok, but I had taken the forty from Marvin. I touched the cover of the album and glanced at my answering machine.
I got the answering machine from a pawnshop on Main Street. It was so old it would probably be worth taking to the Antiques Road Show in another few years. But it worked. I didn’t want to talk to people, not to old friends and acquaintances in Chicago, not to my own relatives, certainly not to the Friends of the Firefighters or someone claiming they could save me money on my phone bills. So, I never answered my phone, even when I was in my office or my room. If I was there and I was willing to talk to the person who started to leave a message, I would pick up. My answering machine message to callers was eloquent in its simplicity: “Lew Fonesca. Leave a message.”
I put a tentative finger on my cheek where Bubbles had slapped me. My cheek didn’t appreciate the touch. There were two messages on the machine.
Message one: “This is Richard Tycinker’s assistant Janine. Mr. Tycinker has an order for appearance at a deposition for you to serve, maybe two if I get the paperwork and court date set this afternoon.”
Message two: “Lew? Flo here. Give me a call. Adele’s… It’s about Adde.”
Tycinker could wait. I didn’t like the way Flo sounded.
I had known Flo Zink for about three years. She was loud, vulgar, sixty-eight years old, in love with country and western music, and very rich. Flo lived in a big house on the coast with a great view of Sarasota Bay. When her husband Gus had died two years earlier, Flo, who had developed a friendship with gin decades earlier, made it a love affair. Adele Hanford was an orphan who had been through more hell in her sixteen years of life than most families would experience in five generations.
Adele had run away from her mother to join her father in Sarasota. Her father had not only sexually abused her but turned her over to a cheap pimp on the North Trail who had in turn sold her to a middle-time slug named John Pirannes. Adele was an orphan because her father had murdered her mother who had tried to protect Adele.
