14
“We should go.” Ames spoke softly, seated next to me, looking straight ahead as I drove down Tamiami Trail.
“In the morning,” I said.
“Suit yourself.”
Ames wanted to go to Manatee Community College and track down the bearded philosopher. I wanted to eat something very bad for me, full of carbohydrates, maybe a couple of Big Macs or a chocolate cherry Blizzard. Maybe both. Or maybe I’d try something different. Then I wanted to put on a clean pair of underwear and go to sleep. It was just before five at night.
We said nothing as we made the turn at Fruitville just past the quay. I turned on the radio. Someone on WLSS was interviewing a woman named Sunny who ran a shelter for stray cats. She had several hundred of them, knew all their names, played them symphonies to keep them calm, assured all listeners that she wasn’t a crazy cat lady.
“Roland and I keep the yard clean,” the woman named Sunny said, as if she were the happiest person in Sarasota, possibly the world. “And there are temperature-controlled little nooks for all of them.”
Sunny didn’t want money. She had plenty. Her husband, Roland, was a retired CEO of a corporation called InterTelex.
I imagined a hundred cats grinning, pawing, leaping, fighting, cuddling, rolling and jumping. Orange, black, white, striped, furry, hairless.
For a minute or two I managed to push reality from my mind, put it in a green fragile bubble and let it quiver away to wait. Catherine had wanted a cat, but neither of us was home during the day and she didn’t think it would be fair to a cat to leave it alone.
A week or so before she had died, I made up my mind to surprise her on her birthday with two cats. I’d get them from the humane society on Halstead, or maybe it was Broadway. I wouldn’t name the cats and I wouldn’t use whatever name the humane society had tagged them with. I would let Catherine name them.
I lost Sunny’s bouncing voice and the cats faded away. The bubble came floating back and for an instant I imagined a baby.
“Easy up,” said Ames, reaching out and turning the steering wheel as I drifted into the left lane just before we came to 301.
I stopped imagining and straightened out as Ames changed the station. The golden oldies station came on. Cyndi Lauper was belting out “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” She sounded too much like Sunny the Cat Lady. I turned off the radio and turned right.
We made it to the DQ parking lot, where Ames’s motor scooter was chained against a metal post.
“I could go it on my own,” he said.
“No, I’ll go with you in the morning.”
“Lock your door tonight,” he said as he got out and then leaned back through the door, his hand open, the derringer lying in it. “Two shots. Pellets are already loaded.”
“I don’t need it,” I said, looking at the tiny weapon.
“Someone trying to kill you?”
“Looks that way,” I said.
“Want me camping out in front of your door all night?”
“No.”
He reached farther into the car, the gun inches from my hand. I took it and nodded.
Ames closed the door and headed for his scooter while I parked in an open space closer to my office home.
Dave was at the DQ window. Dark tan, wrinkled skin, bleached-out hair from hours on his boat in the Gulf, he said, “Lewis, you look like a bulimic manatee.”
Even at my best I doubted if I could come up with the image of a bulimic manatee.
Dave owned the DQ franchise and four others on the Gulf coast. He filled in from time to time to remind himself of what it meant to work the counter and to prove to himself that he was still working at making a living.
“Chili and a Blizzard,” I said.
“Chocolate cherry?”
“Surprise me,” I said. “No, don’t surprise me. Chocolate cherry. Large.”
“I’m thinking of calling the sizes tall, grande and venti,” he said. “Like Starbucks. Think they’ll sue?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Hope so,” he said. “Great publicity. They ask me to stop. I tell the newspapers, argue that they don’t have trademarks on words like tall, grande and venti. Then I get the publicity free, business picks up. I reluctantly give into the pressure and come up with different names, maybe have a contest to name the sizes. What do you think?”
“Donald Trump and Warren Buffett will both come to you with big offers.”
I paid him.
“Dreams don’t cost anything, Lew,” he said, turning to prepare my chili and Blizzard.
Oh yes, they do, I thought. Dreams could be very expensive.
A pair of teen girls were behind me. I moved out of the way and stood in front of the pickup window. The girls were talking about someone named Shelly. Like Yolanda Root, the two girls used the word like at least once every other fragment of a sentence. They were wearing almost identical jeans and T-shirts with words on them that I didn’t recognize.
It took me about fifteen seconds to figure out that the “Shelly” they were talking about was the dead poet.
“Like, he’s got these great metaphors,” said one girl.
“He is so cool,” said the other.
“‘The moonbeams kiss the sea’” said the first girl. “‘What are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me?’”
“Can you imagine, like, Bill Sherman saying something like that?” said the second girl.
“As if,” said the first girl. “Bill Sherman is a carved-out empty hunk.”
“Bingo,” said the first girl.
They both laughed. I shuddered once. The second girl glanced in my direction. They were both looking at me now, aware that I had been listening to them. I turned to the window as Dave came up with my order. He looked up at the sky and said, “Tomorrow should be clear. Want to go out with me on the boat for a few hours?”
“Busy,” I said. “Rain check.”
The last time I had gotten on a boat in the bay, the owner, complete with white captain’s hat, had tried to kill me.
I moved past the girls with my bag and didn’t look at them.
Were they fourteen like Kyle McClory? Did they know him? Were they closer to sixteen, like Adele? Did they know her? Did they think about vulnerability or mortality? I was afraid the answer was yes.
In my office, the phone was not ringing.
Maybe I should get that answering machine.
I sat at the desk, ate and drank, and tasted nothing. “Bingo,” I said out loud.
The word meant something. It was the key to the question that had been coming back to me, the question whose answer I needed if I were to… what? Prove Dorothy right? Find the truth about the bearded philosopher?
Nothing more came. Then I noticed both the chili and the Blizzard were gone. I didn’t remember enjoying or finishing them. Comfort food had failed to comfort.
It was almost six. I was in my white boxer shorts with the little red valentines. I wore my extra-large University of Chicago T-shirt. The phone had not rung. I was too tired to turn on the television and the VHS player and push in a tape. Covers over my head, I closed my eyes.
A knock.
Not here, I thought.
Another knock.
I’ve not returned.
Two short hard knocks.
I pushed back the covers, pulled on my pants and went to the door. It was Arnoldo Robles.
“I tried to call,” he said.
I stepped back so he could enter and closed the door.
“I remembered something,” he said.
“Have a seat,” I said.
“No time. Got to get back to El Tacito. I could be making it up or imagining it or maybe even dreaming it,” he said. “But that other person in the car, the one that killed that boy, I think she was smiling at me through the back window just when the car hit the boy, big kind of goofy smile like she was happy to see me.”
“You just remembered this?”
He
sighed and shook his head.
“No, everything happened just like that and I thought maybe I was seeing things,” he said. “Maybe I thought the police would think I was making it up.”
“You could recognize her again if you saw her?”
“It’s crazy,” he said, running the fingers of his right hand through his thick hair. “I had this feeling that I’d seen her before, or her twin brother or sister or something.”
“Where did you see this twin?”
“Don’t know,” he said. “But I’ll think about it. You find the driver yet?”
I considered saying that the driver had found me, but if I told him the story of the bearded philosopher, Arnoldo Robles might begin to wonder if the man might have the key witness against him on his hit list. It was, in fact, a possibility.
“No,” I said. “But I think I’m close. I’ll let you know.”
“Could have been my kid on that street,” he said. “I keep thinking about that, you know?”
“Yes,” I said.
We stood for a few seconds. There wasn’t anything else to say.
“Well,” he said. “I better go.”
I opened the door and as he walked through the door said, “Thanks for coming.”
“Sure,” he said and turned left toward the stairs.
I dreamt of cars. Cars and cats. The cars were in a demolition derby on Main Street. Cats dashed and leaped out of their way. Clowns, little people, Charlton Heston, Sammy Sosa. Women, children and someone who might have been me dashed from door to door trying to get away from the metal on metal, metal on flesh. The doors were all locked. I didn’t see them but I knew they were there, Adele with the baby in her arms, Flo in her Western boots, Ames on his scooter.
There was a parting of cars for an instant and two cars were coming at each other, the same two cars that had collided down the street with me in the middle. In the middle of reality. In the middle in my dream.
I stood frozen. It wasn’t fear. It was more like resignation. The cars missed me by inches, plowed into each other, spraying my back with tiny shards of glass from a broken window.
On the sidewalk were the two girls at the Dairy Queen and Dorothy Cgnozic with her arms around them. Together they yelled, “Bingo,” and I woke up.
I dressed in my clean second pair of jeans and a short-sleeved denim shirt and picked up a clean towel, soap and razor and headed barefoot for the door. When I opened it, Darrell Caton was standing there, or rather he was leaning against the metal railing five feet from my door. I didn’t trust the railing. I didn’t trust Darrell either. His arms were folded. The last time I had seen him, his mother, whom he resembled, was standing in the same pose in Sally’s cubicle.
Darrell was thirteen, thin, black and angry. He had been given a choice. Shape up or go into the system, juvenile detention, maybe a series of foster homes. His mother was twenty-eight years old and reluctantly ready to give up on him.
He was wearing an unwrinkled pair of dark pants and a clean, dark blue T-shirt.
Darrell, who for all I knew was still a lookout for a crack dealer in Newtown, said nothing.
Sally had conned me into being Darrell’s Big Brother. It was difficult to tell if the idea appealed less to Darrell or to me. Our lack of enthusiasm for the experiment was the one bond we had.
“Darrell,” I said.
“Well, you got that right,” he said.
“What…?”
“Saturday,” Darrell said. “It’s Saturday. Nine in the morning.”
“Saturday,” I repeated, shaking my head knowingly.
“You forgot,” said Darrell flatly.
“That it was Saturday or that you were supposed to be here?” I asked.
Darrell said nothing, just waited.
“I forgot both,” I said, realizing that there was no point in going out to Manatee Community College. There probably wouldn’t be anyone there on the weekend.
“Want me to go back home?” he asked.
“How did you get here?”
“Walked,” he said.
He lived just off Martin Luther King Drive in Newtown, about two miles away.
“No, give me a minute. I’ve got to clean up.”
He looked puzzled.
“Bathroom, down there,” I said.
“You sleep in your office last night?”
“I live in my office,” I said. “Just go in and wait. I’ll be right back.”
He unfolded his arms, pushed away from the railing and stepped past me without a hint of energy or enthusiasm. I closed the door behind him and moved down to the bathroom shared by the tenants of the building and, until recently, by Digger, who had frequently spent nights there stretched out, head on a folded jacket or sweater.
The building had no name, just an address. I had nodded or avoided nodding at a few of the other tenants over the past four years as we passed each other. This was not upscale Sarasota property, but it wasn’t ready just yet to be knocked down and trucked away to make room for a bank. Not yet.
There was a level above mine with offices probably just like mine. I’d never been up there, though I had seen a few people go up the stairs and come down them, leading me to believe there was something resembling life up there.
The office next to mine, toward the stairs, was almost always dark. A white plastic sign on the door with black chipped letters claimed the office was that of Walters Estate Planning amp; Investments. If the Walters people couldn’t do better than this location, I wondered how anyone would have any faith in their financial advice.
On the first of each month, I dropped a rent check in an envelope through the mail slot of Walters Estate Planning amp; Investments. The check was made out to Marciniak Properties, Inc. for $320. When I rented the office, I had called the number on the FOR RENT sign.
The person, a man with an accent I couldn’t place, told me the office door was open; the key was on the windowsill inside. All I had to do was drop a check for the first month’s rent made out to Marciniak Properties through the Walters slot and the place was mine. No lease. No conditions.
“You pay on the first of each month,” the man on the phone had said. “You don’t pay, the lock is changed and you are out. You understand?”
“Yes,” I had said.
“You’ve got any problems, make a note, stick it through the mail slot. Don’t call me. You understand?”
“Yes.”
He hung up. I never saw him, never saw anyone going in or out of Walters Estate Planning.
I washed and shaved. I was hurrying, nicked my chin with the twice-used disposable Bic and spent a couple of minutes stopping the dot of blood. While I administered to my wound, I tried to think of what I would do with Darrell Caton.
I had the bearded philosopher to find and the person who had murdered the still-unidentified and unlocated Seaside Assisted Living victim and whoever had tried to run me down a few hundred feet from where I was now standing. More important, who might take another shot at me. If Darrell was with me when I got killed, the mourning period for both of us would probably be very brief.
When I got back to the room behind my office, Darrell was looking through my videos.
“Never heard of any of this shit,” he said.
“A gap in your education,” I said.
“This stuff all black-and-white?” he asked, holding up the box for Beat the Devil.
“Most of it,” I said as I put towel, soap and shaving things on a shelf.
Darrell was shaking his head.
“And you live here?” he said, looking around.
“Yes,” I said, sitting on the cot and putting on my socks and shoes.
“My mom and I are shit poor and we got more room than you. We got our own bathroom too.”
“Sounds nice,” I said.
“It’s shit nothing,” said Darrell emotionlessly.
“Man.”
“What?”
“How you supposed to help me? White guy who l
ives like this?”
“You want me to help you?”
I was dressed now. I picked up my Cubs hat and fitted it on my head.
“You gonna wear that?”
“I’m already wearing it,” I said.
“Anybody I know see me with you and they gonna laugh at me right out on the street or kick my ass when they get me alone,” he said.
“You want me to help you?” I repeated.
“No,” he said. “I want you to keep my ass out of the system is what I want. You want to help me?”
“I like your mother,” I said.
Darrell pointed a finger at me.
“Man, you don’t know my mother.”
“Saw her at Sally’s office,” I said. “All I needed to see. She endures.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Anything you want to do today?”
“You got money?”
“Some.”
“Eat something, go see a movie,” he said. “That’s what Sally said we might be doing.”
“Fine. You like DQ?”
“It’s okay.”
“What kind of movie you like?”
He shrugged and said, “Ones where people get shot and stuff.”
“A concise and well-defined aesthetic,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I was being a smart-ass.”
“Whatever. You’re bleeding.”
I had folded DQ napkins in my pocket. I took one out and dabbed it on my shaving wound. There wasn’t much blood.
I sat on the cot. Darrell put the tape down and turned to me. There was a knock at the door. It was probably the first time since I had moved into these two small rooms that I welcomed a knock at the door.
I got up and let Ames in. He was wearing his yellow slicker, no hat. The slicker suggested that he was hiding a weapon with considerably more kick than the derringer he had given me.
“Ready?” he asked.
“I’ve got-”
The slicker parted; a shotgun I recognized appeared suddenly in Ames’s hands. It was leveled just past me. I turned. Darrell stood there with the derringer in his right hand.
“No,” I said, pushing the shotgun barrel away. “That’s Darrell.”
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