“No,” I said. “Jim and I are friends. We were out drinking last night. I was having my eyes checked across the way and I thought I’d stop by and give him my half of the bar tab. I left before he did and just forgot.”
“Your name?”
“Lew Fonesca.”
“I’ll see if he can see you,” she said, pushing a button on the phone as she picked it up.
My question was answered. The good doctor was in.
“Yes, Doctor,” she said, after giving him my name. “He says he’d like to see you for a second. He owes you money. Okay.”
She put one hand over the mouthpiece and said. “The doctor says you can leave the money with me. He’s busy now.”
“Can’t do that,” I said, and took four quick steps to Obermeyer’s office door and opened it before the receptionist could stop me.
“Wait a minute,” she called from the outer office, as I let the door close behind me and moved past two examining rooms, one on my right and one on my left. I found Obermeyer in his comfortable, carpeted office complete with leather chairs, a leather love seat, prints made by pressing inked dead fish against canvas on two walls, and all of his degrees, titles, and awards framed on the wall behind him.
He looked up from behind his desk. He was wearing a clean, white smock and a hangover.
“I have a very low tolerance for alcohol,” he said, sitting up and blinking his eyes as he tried to focus on me.
Then it came to him.
“I remember,” he said, pointing a finger at me. “Kevin Hoffmann’s. You wanted me to-”
“Help get William Trasker out of that house.”
“Mr. Trasker is a very sick man. He should not be moved.”
“What would happen to him if he were moved?”
“I wouldn’t want to be responsible,” he said.
“So he’s too sick to be moved?”
“That’s my opinion, yes,” he said, putting a palm against his forehead to determine if he might need an aspirin.
The phone buzzed. He picked it up, listened for a few seconds, and said, “No, Carla. It’s all right. Do not call the police.”
He hung up and looked up at me.
“What happens to you if the police find a way to get a couple of specialists to look at Trasker and it turns out that he’s sick but there wouldn’t be any problem moving him?”
“Professional difference of opinion,” he said, looking around for something. “I’d have to stand by my diagnosis.”
I pulled my notebook out of my pocket and read, “James Ryder Obermeyer, B.S. in physiology, North Dakota State University, M.D. from the University of Utah. Certified in internal medicine, practiced in five different towns in North Dakota before you came to Sarasota six years ago. Malpractice suits, seven. Complaints to American Medical Association, sixteen.”
“That’s not uncommon for a physician in today’s litigious world,” he said.
“How about six DUI arrests and three accidents while under the influence?” I asked. “In one of those accidents in Ogden, Utah, a teenage girl was injured, lost her left leg. Your malpractice-insurance rate went up to something near the annual budget of the states of North Dakota and Utah combined.”
“Are you threatening me?” he asked with indignation.
“Happens to me all the time,” I said. “No, my point was that your professional opinion might not hold up particularly well against a cancer surgeon.”
“I stand by what I’ve said,” Obermeyer insisted with very little confidence and a distinct beading of perspiration on his upper lip.
“Mrs. Trasker was murdered. Kevin Hoffmann’s holding Mr. Trasker against his will. You could wind up as accessory to a murder.”
“I think you can leave now, Mr. Fonseca,” he said.
“Fonesca. I’ll call you later,” I said. “Have Trasker ready to leave Hoffmann’s house or I throw you to the American Medical Association, the AARP, the Florida Medical Ethics Board, the County Medical-”
“Stop,” he said. “You can’t intimidate me and you don’t frighten me.”
“Channel Forty, SNN television, the Longboat Key Observer, the Planet,” I continued. “The…You get the idea.”
His face had turned red. He looked distinctly intimidated and frightened.
“You wouldn’t do that,” he said. “I’d sue you.”
“I don’t think so but if you did, it would be a waste of your time and money. I don’t have anything. I could have ten thousand dollars if I take Kevin Hoffmann’s money to be quiet about Trasker and get out of town. I wonder how much he’s paying you.”
“Do not come back here,” he said with a quiver in his voice, “or the police will be called.”
I considered pushing him a little further, but I remembered what he had told me about his bad heart.
I left the office, closing the door quietly before he could say anything more. I half hoped he would follow me into the hall and do some bargaining.
Carla the receptionist gave me a glance and then looked down at whatever she had been doing.
I stopped at the Texas Bar and Grill too early for lunch and not hungry. Ames was in his room in back. Ed Fairing was behind the bar, talking to a pair of black men in their fifties who could have been twins.
There were people at a few of the tables, early lunch birds, all-day drinkers with nowhere else they wanted to be, a woman in a sweat suit drinking coffee and reading a book.
“Ames?” I called to Ed, who nodded toward the narrow hallway next to the bar.
“Fonesca,” Ed said, stopping me as I started to walk past the bar. “Listen, I’m thinking of making this place a little more upscale. Lot of pressure on me from some of the downtown business people. Jerry Robins, you know him? Know what he said to me? ‘Ed,’ he said, ‘you’ve got a really funky place.’ I said, ‘Yes, thanks,’ and he said, ‘I hate funky.’ You understand where I’m going with this?”
“No,” I said.
“I don’t want to change the Texas,” he said. “I’m thinking about it but I don’t want to do it. I like it just the way it is.”
“Funky,” I said.
“I guess,” he agreed, “but that’s not the way I see it. I see it as authentic. You know people, right?”
“People?”
“You know what I mean,” he said confidentially. “People who might be persuaded to get people like Jerry Robins to leave me alone. People like Trasker and Hoffmann. People on the City Council or Board of Commissioners. People who might owe you a favor, might see the Texas as kind of a landmark.”
“That kind of person can’t be bought for what you could afford to pay, Ed.”
Ed touched the corners of his handlebar mustache to be sure they were still there and properly upturned.
“I’m not talking about bribing anybody,” he said. “I’m talking about your maybe calling in some markers.”
Markers. He sounded like Dean Martin in Rio Bravo.
“I’ll talk to someone,” I said.
“Thanks,” said Ed with a small, gentle punch of my arm. “A beer?”
“Maybe later,” I said.
I went down the hallway past the ladies and men’s rooms and the utility closet and knocked at a door on the right.
“Who is it?” Ames asked.
“Lew. Want me to wait for you at the bar?”
He paused a long pause and said, “Come in.”
I had never been in Ames’s room before. He liked his privacy, not as much as I loved my isolation, but enough
