“Yolanda?” he asked, looking at her and then at me.
“He’s a customer, Grandpa,” she said.
“What’s he buying?” asked Elliott Maxwell Root.
“A key chain,” I said, plucking a chain from a cardboard display on the counter. It had a little laser light on the end that went on when you pressed the blue plastic sides.
“Two dollars and twenty-seven cents,” Yolanda said.
I took three dollars from my wallet and handed them to her under Grandpa’s watching eyes. She gave me change and a receipt. Grandpa’s eyes were watching to see if I was looking at Yolanda in places or ways that might be inappropriate. I considered suggesting that Yolanda might be issued a uniform that covered her, but even in an oversize blue smock, that sexual challenge would burn through.
“Take care,” I said to her.
I meant it. She understood.
“I will,” she said softly. “Thanks.”
Before I headed back to Sarasota, I made two notes in my notebook and checked one I had written earlier. First, where was Kyle’s cell phone? Second, according to his sister, Kyle and his friend Andy Goines were into minor vandalism. The note from earlier read: Robles said there was a passenger in the car that hit Kyle, maybe a kid.
I stopped at a Walgreens and picked up a disposable cell phone. Then I headed to a camera shop in Northgate Plaza off 301. I had a little trouble finding it A truck loaded with wooden planks was parked in front. A couple of sweating men wearing work gloves were removing the planks and piling them up. I moved past them into the shop.
It was small; cameras in locked glass cases lined the walls to my right and behind the counter to my left. A young man, maybe twenty-five, grinned at me. He was about six feet tall and couldn’t have weighed more than 120 pounds. His grin was cadaverous.
“Wayne Bennett?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
I took out the summons and handed it to him. He looked at the envelope and then at me.
“This what I think it is?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think it is?”
He placed the envelope on the counter and wiped his palms on his shirt.
“They want me to tell what I saw Jesse doing,” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know who Jesse is.”
“Jesse will kill me,” he said. “No, I mean he might really kill me. You try to help a friend…”
“Your friend Jesse might want to kill you?”
“He hates prison,” said Bennett.
“Most people do,” I said.
“Not more than Jesse,” he said.
I had nothing to say.
“What am I going to do?” he asked.
“Be where it tells you to be when they tell you to be there,” I said.
I left without looking back. If I paused, he would tell me his story. I couldn’t handle any more stories. They filled the air wherever I went, invisible, ghostly. Ann was right. There was no hiding from ghosts, mine or other people’s.
My next stop was on Longboat Key, one of the high-rise, high-priced condos on the bay. I pulled up to the guard gate and an old man in a khaki uniform and a matching cap came out of the small shack with a clipboard.
“You’re here to see…?”
“You Benjamin Strayley?”
“Yes,” he said, puzzled.
I handed him the envelope.
“She did it,” he said with a sigh. “She really did it, didn’t she?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“The bitch,” he said, shaking his head. “Sorry, I don’t usually use language like that but… the bitch did it. You know how long we’ve been married?”
He looked as if he really expected an answer or a guess.
“Forty-one years,” he said.
Catherine and I had been married nine years when she died. There was no point in telling this to Benjamin Strayley, who slid the envelope under the clip on his board.
“Forty-one years,” he repeated. “I didn’t even want to move down here. Her idea. All my friends, family are in Danville.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
There was a car behind me.
“I’ll open the gate,” Strayley said. “Turn around and you can go right out.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He went back in the shack.
I bypassed my office, parked in front of Gwen’s diner, ordered two grilled cheese sandwiches and a chocolate shake and found out that Gwen had taken Digger on as a fill-in short-order chef.
A few people knew that Gwen’s real name was Sheila. Her mother had been Gwen. When her mother died, people saw the sign on the roof of the one-story building and assumed the woman who owned it and bustled behind the counter and in the kitchen and from table to table was Gwen. She accepted without correcting.
Tim from Steubenville was sitting at the counter. I joined him. Tim was a regular, close to ninety. He lived in an assisted living home a short walk away at the end of Brother Geenen Way. He spent as much time as he could at Gwen’s reading the newspaper, shaking his head and trying to get people into conversations about eliminating the income tax, abolishing drug laws, ending almost everything the “damn government” was involved in besides having an army, paving the highways and providing a police force.
There was very little left of Tim from Steubenville beyond his convictions. Blue veins undulated over the thin bones in his hands as he drank his coffee from a white mug.
“I tried Digger out,” Gwen said. “He can cook the easy stuff, good enough for breakfasts. He’ll make enough to live on if he’s careful, and the food’s free if he doesn’t overdo it.”
I thanked her.
“No favor,” she said. “I can use the extra help in the morning now that my firstborn is out producing grandbabies.”
Gwen was buxom and full of energy with curly brown hair that she was constantly brushing back with her arm. She poured me a cup of coffee. I put in two Equals and a lot of milk from the small metal pitcher.
“Banana cream?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said.
She winked and went off to get me a slice of pie.
“She shouldn’t pay him more than the free market will bear,” said Tim. “Minimum wages are an infringement of free enterprise. If the market says she has to pay him twenty dollars an hour, so be it. If the market says she only has to pay him four dollars an hour, so be it. Free market.”
He held up his mug as if he were toasting what he had just said. I held my mug up too.
When I finished the pie, I felt better, but better is a comparative term; better than what? Better than when? Gwen was talking to two men at a booth who looked like truckers. Something she said made them laugh. I put four dollars on the counter and got up.
“I say,” said Tim, looking at his almost empty coffee mug, “almost every damn government agency should be shut down. Now, tomorrow. That’s what I say.”
I knew. He had said it before. The next thing he would do if I didn’t escape would be to go through the list of government departments that should be dismantled. He usually started with OSHA, but sometimes the FDA came first.
