“He doesn’t want to kill me. He thinks he might have to.”
“Why?”
“He’s afraid.”
“Damn right,” said Viviase.
“Not for himself,” I said.
“He told you that?”
“No,” I said. “I heard it in his voice.”
Viviase put his hand to his forehead and said, “You know you’re a little nuts, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s what keeps me sane. Can I buy you a Dilly Bar?”
“You can,” he said, “but you may not. I can have your process server’s license revoked. You know that?”
“Will you?”
“No,” he said. “I’ve got to go. There are people out there who want to be helped.”
He got up, went to the door, turned back as if he was going to say something, changed his mind and left.
When Ames knocked at the door about twenty minutes later, I told him to come in. He did and moved to the window air conditioner and turned it on.
“You’re sweating,” he said.
I touched my forehead. He was right. Ames stood in front of the desk, his hands folded.
“Want me to go back to the college tomorrow?” he asked.
“We’ll find him tomorrow.”
“Sure about that?”
“You know who George Santayana was?”
“Philosopher.”
“Our man is probably a philosophy professor or maybe classics or English. His Taurus definitely has a dented fender now, right side. He has white hair, a white beard, tall.”
Ames nodded. We would go to the departmental offices at the college, ask the right questions, find the man who both wanted to be found and didn’t want to be found, who was willing to kill me but didn’t want to, who was in anguish I fully understood.
“Why don’t we go now?” he asked. “Just stop by the Texas and I’ll get a dogleg.”
I wanted to tell him that I didn’t plan on moving for hours, maybe not till the next morning, and only then because I had been seduced by responsibility.
Someone had tried to run me down. No doubt about it. But if it wasn’t the philosopher on the phone, who was it?
The phone rang again. I stared at it and for a few seconds wondered if it was really ringing or I was just imagining it. It rang five times. Ames looked at me and then at the phone.
“Gonna answer it?” he asked.
I picked it up and said, “Yes.”
I really meant no, no to almost anything.
“Mr. Fonesca, I’ve been trying to call you for hours.”
“I’ve been busy,” I told Nancy Root.
“What have you found?”
Her voice was steady, strong, clear, but with an underlying effort.
What had I found? That the world is without form and void, that nothing is predictable, that the just and the unjust, good and bad, suffer or survive at about the same rate. That my mother’s God, if he was out there, had played a major game with us. He had built in an impulse, no, a drive, to survive, even when common sense told us that survival was, ultimately, impossible and painful. From her voice, from what had happened to her, I had the feeling that Nancy Root would understand, but I didn’t say any of this.
“It’s only been a few hours. I told you I should have some answers for you soon,” I said.
“The man who killed my son is insane,” she said.
“It might be a woman,” I said.
“No, he called me.”
Ames leaned against the wall near the door, watching me.
“What did he say?”
“That he was sorry,” she said. “He was crying. I couldn’t understand all of it. He told me to make you stop looking. He… pleaded with me. He was so pathetic.”
“You’ve changed your mind about wanting him dead?”
She ignored my question and went on. “He said he had to see me. That I’d understand if he could just talk to me. Then he hung up in the middle of a sentence. I had the feeling that he wasn’t just feeling frightened, sorry for himself, that there was something else at stake.”
“My question,” I reminded her.
“Yes,” she said. “I still want him dead. Nothing he can say would bring Kyle back and you did tell me that he had intentionally run down my son.”
“That’s what the witness says.”
“Then-”
I heard a voice behind her. She said something I couldn’t make out and then came back on the phone.
“There’s someone at the security desk who says he has to see me,” she said. “Corrine says he’s a big man with a white beard. It might be
…?”
“It might be,” I said. “How good is the person on security right now?”
“Ron? He’s a retired policeman. He’s at least seventy and-”
“Tell him to have the man wait. Tell him you’ll see him in a little while. Tell him you’re in the middle of a show.”
“I am,” she said. “It’s Friday. Matinee. Intermission. I have to go back on in a few minutes.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” I said. “Do you have a gun?”
“No,” she said.
“Don’t do anything,” I said.
“Are you worrying about his hurting me or my hurting him?”
“Both,” I said.
She hung up.
“We rolling?” asked Ames.
“We’re rolling,” I said.
13
I explained to Ames as we drove up 301 to DeSoto and then went west past the greyhound track on our left and then the airport on our right. There was a long wait at the light at Tamiami Trail. The Ringling Museum of Art sat about three hundred yards in front of us behind the iron fence. The light changed. I went across the Trail and made a right turn into the Florida State University Asolo Center.
The parking lot was almost full, with visitors to the museum and to the matinee performance. I drove past the large box, which housed the theater, the Sarasota Ballet and the Florida State University graduate program for acting students.
I found a parking spot near the backstage entrance, pulled in and got out with Ames coming around and joining me as I moved up the concrete steps toward the door. It had taken less than fifteen minutes.
I had tried to think about what I would do when I stood in front of the man who had wept on the phone, but nothing would come. Whatever happened would happen. I had no plan. I glanced at Ames and saw that he had a plan; it consisted of showing me a very small pistol in the palm of his right hand.
“Double derringer,” he said. “A forty-one-caliber rimfire.”
