“She didn’t hire me,” I said.
“I know. The hell with it. I’ll have a beer.
A beer ain’t drinking.”
It was Edmond O’Brien’s line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, forever to be honored by alcoholics.
Ames rose to get the beer.
“I’ll get the tape back to you,” Viviase said.
“No hurry,” I said. “You ground her?”
“For what? Disappointing me?”
“Guess not.”
“You really think Gerall didn’t kill Horvecki?”
“Yes. And he couldn’t have killed Blue Berrigan. He was in jail.”
“Who says he killed Berrigan?” asked Viviase as Ames came back with three beers.
“The angel of common sense,” I said.
“Only thing holds the two murders together is you,” Viviase said, drinking the beer directly from the bottle. “And I’m reasonably confident that you didn’t kill either one of them, unless you’ve gone Jekyll and Hyde on me.”
“The Gerall boy’s a bad apple, but he didn’t kill anybody,” said Ames.
“Ames and I are partners now,” I explained.
“Partners in what?” asked Viviase, shaking his head. “Operating an illegal office of private investigation.”
“We find people,” I said.
“You find people who commit murder,” Viviase said.
“Sometimes,” I admitted.
“Ames have a process server’s license?”
“Not yet,” he said.
“Not never,” answered Viviase, after nearly finishing his bottle of beer. “He’s a convicted felon.”
“We’ll work on that,” I said. “He’s my partner either way.”
“You and Ames here bothered a Venice policeman, a detective.”
“We talked to Detective Williams,” I said.
“Mr. McKinney here fired a weapon at him after you practically accused him of murder.”
A bustle of businessmen and — women came through the door, laughing and making in-jokes that weren’t funny, but when you want to laugh any flotsam of intended wit will do.
“What does he want?”
“Nothing now, but for you to stay away from him.”
I knew why. If Ames and I were arrested, the story of his aunt and mother being raped would hit the media again.
Viviase finished his beer while Ames and I kept working on ours. He rolled the empty bottle between his hands. No genie emerged. Viviase got up.
“You find anything, let me know,” he said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
He left.
Then Ames and I decided to do something stupid.
II
12
I was holding two pair, jacks and fours, in a five-card stud game. That was the only game being played in the card room of Corkle’s house. The old doctor with the slight tremor was the only one left in the hand with me. The pot stood at four hundred dollars and change. The doctor had a pair of sevens showing. He could have had three of them or, since one of his cards showing was a king, he could have had a higher two pair.
On my left was Corkle, clad in a green Detroit Lions sweatshirt. Next to him was a bulky man who had been introduced as Kaufmann. “You know who he is,” Corkle had said in his initial introduction when I had sat at the table three hours earlier. I didn’t know who Kaufmann was, but about an hour into the game Corkle asked him something about a union meeting. On his left, across from me, was a kid, college age. Corkle introduced him as Keith Thirlane. Keith Thirlane looked like an athlete, a very nervous athlete trying to look calm. He was tall, blond, and wearing black slacks and a black polo. The last player at the table was “Period Waysock from out of town.” Period was about sixty, bald, and slowdown fat. He did everything from betting to going to the snack table with the deliberation of a large dinosaur.
I pushed in another hundred dollars and looked at the steel clock on the wall. It was almost one in the morning.
Ames and I had pooled our money. I had cashed the check from Alana Legerman. We came up with the requisite four thousand, with another thousand borrowed from Flo Zink. We had a slight cushion. Then I had called Laurence Arthur Wainwright, who was one of the poker players Corkle had mentioned and the only one whose name I recognized. Wainwright was a state representative, a lawyer who owned pieces of banks, mortgage houses, property, and businesses worth who knows how much. Wainwright made the local news a lot, partly because he did a lot of donations to charities and looked good in a tuxedo at society dinners. Wainwright, also known as LAW or Law by the Herald-Tribune, was in constant trouble for his business practices, which were often barely legal.
On the phone, I told Wainwright that I had some documents he had been looking for. There are almost always documents a person like Wainwright is looking for.
“What documents?” he had asked.
Ames had gone through past newspaper articles mentioning Wainwright and come up with a list of four prime names. The best bet seemed to be Adam Bulagarest, a former Wainwright business associate who had moved out of Florida before the law could catch up with him.
“Does the name Bulagarest ring a bell?” I asked.
“Is this extortion?”
“I hope so,” I said.
“How did you get these documents?”
“They’re originals taken from papers in possession of Mr. Bulagarest. You can have them for a nominal fee. We will provide you with a signed and notarized guarantee that there are no copies.”
There was no chance Wainwright could check on my tale with Bulagarest. In researching the poker players, Dixie had discovered Bulagarest was serving time in a Thai jail for child molestation.
“How do I get these documents?” Wainwright asked with a tone of clear skepticism.
“Come tonight to the Ramada Inn at Disney World. Register as F. W. Murnau. We’ll meet you at the bar at midnight.”
“To Orlando tonight? What’s the hurry?”
“My associates and I are not comfortable in Florida. Bring one hundred thousand dollars in cash. If you don’t come, we have another buyer.”
“I don’t…” Wainwright said, but I hung up.
People like Wainwright always had piles of cash handy in case the real law was about to knock at their door.
I waited an hour and then called Corkle to ask when there might be an opening at his poker table.
“You have four thousand dollars?”
“Yes.”
