Ron Base - Tree Callister 03 - Another Sanibel Sunset Detective

by Ron Base

  Table of Contents

  Also by Ron Base

  Copyright © 2012 Ron Base

  For Ray Bennett

  Map

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  Acknowledgments

  ANOTHER

  SANIBEL

  SUNSET

  DETECTIVE

  a novel

  RON BASE

  Also by Ron Base

  Fiction

  Matinee Idol

  Foreign Object

  Splendido

  Magic Man

  The Strange

  The Sanibel Sunset Detective

  The Sanibel Sunset Detective Returns

  Non-fiction

  The Movies of the Eighties (with David Haslam)

  If the Other Guy Isn’t Jack Nicholson, I’ve Got the Part

  Marquee Guide to Movies on Video

  Cuba Portrait of an Island (with Donald Nausbuam)

  www.ronbase.com

  Read Ron’s blog at

  www.ronbase.wordpress.com

  Contact Ron at

  ronbase@ronbase.com

  Copyright © 2012 Ron Base

  All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval system—without the prior written permission of the publisher, or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, One Yonge Street, Toronto, Ontario, M6B 3A9.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Base, Ron, 1948-

  Another Sanibel Sunset Detective / Ron Base.

  ISBN 978-0-9736955-6-4

  I. Title.

  PS8553.A784A64 2012 C813’.54 C2012-906903-5

  West-End Books

  80 Front St. East, Suite 605

  Toronto, Ontario

  Canada M5E 1T4

  Cover Design: Bridgit Stone-Budd

  Text Design: Ric Base

  Electronic formatting: Ric Base

  Sanibel-Captiva map: Ann Kornuta

  Second Edition

  For Ray Bennett

  Raymundo!

  Map

  1

  It was the night of Freddie’s sixtieth birthday, and they were celebrating at Tour d’Argent, the most famous restaurant in Paris. They sat near the big windows that gave out onto a sixth floor view of Notre Dame at dusk, dramatically cast against a deepening sky that lit the barges on the Seine in a crimson glow. The comfortable purr of people with money murmuring over good food and fine wine filled the perfumed air.

  You could learn to live like this, Tree Callister thought. You could forget all the things that you came to Paris to forget.

  Out loud Tree said, “Francis Macomber has everything, including money and a beautiful wife. Why he probably ate regularly at this very restaurant.”

  “He could be here tonight,” Freddie Stayner said.

  “Francis is on safari in Africa, hunting lions, anxious to test himself, the limits of his courage. But when he is finally confronted with a lion, when it gets right down to it, he turns and runs. Francis is a coward.”

  “You know you tell me the story of Francis Macomber every time we come to Paris,” Freddie said.

  “That’s because of all the things Hemingway wrote, including The Sun Also Rises, his masterpiece—the novel that caused me to fall in love with Paris—I keep coming back to The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”

  “You and Hemingway and Paris,” Freddie said. “What is it about the three of you?”

  “I’m not quite sure,” Tree said. “I think it started when I was a rookie reporter, that’s when I read Hemingway’s Francis Macomber story. It haunted me.”

  “I think it still haunts you,” Freddie said.

  “Maybe you’re right. I keep wondering what would happen if I was in Macomber’s shoes. Would I run from the lion?”

  “If you were smart, you would,” Freddie said.

  “Anyway, from my vantage point in Chicago, Hemingway and Paris looked like the last word in hard-boiled romanticism. In those days, we were all trying to imitate Hemingway, or what we naively thought was supposed to be Hemingway.”

  “Hemingway killed himself,” Freddie said.

  “A few of us even tried to duplicate that part,” Tree said.

  The waiter appeared and Freddie insisted they begin with quenelles de brochet, pike dumplings.

  “The dumplings are made with fish,” Freddie explained when the food arrived. “They originated in Lyon where there are lots of pike.”

  “They’re delicious,” Tree said, digging his fork into the soft flesh of a dumpling.

  “Particularly with the Nantua sauce.”

  “The what?”

  “The creamy sauce that comes with it. I think they used crayfish tonight, although you can use lobster.”

  “Is there anything you don’t know?” Tree said.

  “Too many things,” Freddie answered. “For instance, I don’t know what the future holds. I wish I did. It would make things so much easier.”

  “We are not in Paris for the future,” Tree said, hoping to deflect Freddie from pursuing this line. “Maybe the past, a little bit. But otherwise we live in the moment, and we don’t worry about anything else.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” Freddie persisted. “Wouldn’t you like to know what happens?”

  “I know what happens. We die. That’s what happens. What’s worse, we are closer to the end of it all then we are to the beginning. We know what’s going to happen, and every day we get closer to it—except in Paris. Here, you get the impression you could live forever. At least, I do.”

  She gazed at him for a long time before she said, “In the meantime, we have problems, Tree, and they don’t seem to be going away very fast.”

  “I know that,” he said. “But it’s your birthday and Paris is our escape together, so let’s concentrate on that.”

  “Paris doesn’t seem to be working its magic this time,” Freddie said.

  Tree saw the unexpected tear run down her cheek. He took her hand in his. The noise of the rich eating and laughing and having the time of their lives rose up around them.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I shouldn’t have had that second glass of wine.”

  “You haven’t had a second glass.”

  “Well, don’t let me order one.” She wiped the tears away. “Then I really will be out of control.”

  He held her hand tighter. “Let’s just enjoy ourselves tonight,” he said. “Tonight there is only us in Paris.”

  She forced a smile as she lifted her wine glass. “To Paris,” Freddie said. “Where there are no problems. There is only Paris.”

  “More than enough for anyone,” Tree said.

&
nbsp; “At least for tonight,” Freddie said.

  “Happy birthday, my darling,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, and tried to sound happy when she said it.

  They touched their glasses together, and kissed, and the servers chose that moment to arrive with their main courses: the sole farcie for him; the roti for her. They finished dinner without further discussion of problems, real or imagined. Tree asked their waiter to take a photograph, the two of them holding hands, staring wide-eyed into the camera. When he looked at the photo later, Freddie’s smile appeared plastered on, as if someone had attached it to an unhappy face. Her eyes looked dead. Or was he imagining that?

  They floated out of the restaurant and down the elevator onto the street where they proceeded to walk hand in hand along the Seine, Paris all around them, now cast in a deep evening blue, the light provided by passing bateaux mouche and the lamps along the quays and on the bridges.

  On a night like this, your stomach full of good food, holding the hand of the woman you loved more than any other single person in the world, you were supposed to be happy, without a care in the world, feeling the lightness and joie de vivre of Gene Kelly in An American In Paris.

  But Freddie’s outburst only served to confirm the cloud that hovered over the evening, a cloud that not even walking beside the Seine could lift. Tree tried not to think about the recent traumatic upheavals in their lives on Sanibel Island, Florida, and their effect on their marriage. Seismic changes had occurred since an aging ex-newspaperman, desperate to reinvent himself, had decided to become a private detective. All that was for another time.

  That’s what he tried to tell himself.

  When it was finally dark, they found a cab that transported them through narrow streets to the apartment they had rented for the week. It was located in a part of the city known as Montorgueil, haunt of the so-called Bobos, according to Freddie, a contraction of Bourgeois and Bohemian, the new fashionables of Paris, young people with a lot of money pretending they had no money at all. No wonder Tree felt out of place. He was a person with no money, in Paris pretending he had a lot of it.

  Their apartment was off Rue Montorgueil, along a cobblestoned thoroughfare full of shops now closed for the night. They climbed the three floors to their combination sitting room and bedroom, with French windows that opened to the street. A gentle breeze stirred the curtains. Somewhere below a passerby sang at the top of his lungs.

  The nameless song drifted away as Freddie and Tree made the sort of love you can only make in Paris—the kind of love that drives all the bad things away, that lodges forever in memory.

  Paris love.

  2

  Late the next afternoon, after a day of sightseeing, they returned to their apartment, and Freddie finally admitted she was feeling awful. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she said.

  She lay down on the bed and allowed Tree to place a blanket over her. She murmured thanks and seconds later fell into a deep sleep.

  When she awoke again, it was eight o’clock. Tree got her some water. She said she was feeling better, just tired and wanting more sleep. She wasn’t hungry, she said. But if he was, he should go out for something.

  “I don’t want to leave you.” Tree said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Freddie said. “You don’t have to starve yourself to death for me.”

  “I’ll grab something fast, and come right back,” Tree said.

  “Take your time. All I want to do is sleep.”

  Was that all she wanted? Tree wondered. Maybe she also desired time alone without him. He splashed water on his face and put on a blazer. By then Freddie was sound asleep again.

  Trying to shake off the unease he had been feeling practically since their plane landed, not at all helped by Freddie’s abrupt exit from the evening, he walked along rue Dussoubs to rue Montorgueil. The streets were filled with young people, everyone seemingly preoccupied with their cell phones. It struck Tree that he was not young and he did not have his cell phone with him. He felt suddenly downright elderly and out of place and curiously vulnerable. Being on the town in Paris by himself lacked the appeal it once had.

  He spotted that rarest of things in Paris at night—a taxi without a passenger. Suddenly, he knew where he wanted to go. When you could find no comfort in the present, the best thing was to escape to the past.

  Tree jumped into the cab.

  ________

  Curious how memory plays its tricks.

  Tree remembered the bistro side of La Closerie des Lilas being much larger than the intimate dark wood ship’s cabin that confronted him. It had been years since he was last here and during that time, Lilas had expanded in his mind to accommodate constantly growing memory.

  A friend had brought him for lunch the first time he was in Paris in the early eighties, another of those places that had drawn Tree because it was a Hemingway hangout.

  Since then, the brasserie had become something of a Paris touchstone for him although he wasn’t certain why. Nothing particularly remarkable had ever happened to him here. The food was good without being memorable. Still, in the glow produced by the tiny wall lamps, with the piano player at the entrance tinkling away at Gershwin’s “Summertime,” Tree relaxed, feeling much more at home swimming in the nostalgia of his past than he was among the young of rue Montorgueil.

  Tonight, with everyone on the terrace enjoying the summer evening, Tree pretty much had the interior of the brasserie to himself. Just him and whatever ghosts of Hemingway lingered. He occupied a stool at the end of the bar near the brass plaque marking the place Hemingway used to sit.

  For a moment, Tree was tempted to order a kir royale, his drink of choice in the old days. He dismissed the impulse, asked for sparkling water and a menu. He would eat something at the bar, briefly inhale nostalgia, and then get back to poor, sick Freddie.

  “Wait a minute,” he said to the bartender.

  “Monsieur.”

  “I’ve changed my mind. A kir royale, si’l vous plait.”

  Why not? he thought to himself as the bartender nodded and went away. I’m in Paris, after all, and for a single night reliving long-ago youth—a youth that would include a kir royale at La Closerie des Lilas. Or maybe two.

  The bartender returned and placed a glass filled with a bright liquid the color of a pale rose on the bar in front of him. Tree stared at it for a time and then lifted the kir royale until it glittered in the light of the Closerie. He placed the edge of the glass to his lips and took a deep swallow.

  The sweet, biting taste filled his mouth, and then made its way languidly through his body, as if to warm him with the memory of what it was like to sit here with a few of these inside him. Of course, it was never the first that got you into trouble. It was always the second and then the third.

  Well, he thought, putting the unfinished glass back on the bar, he wasn’t going to get into any trouble tonight. Those days were long over.

  “You are in my seat,” a voice behind him said.

  He turned to find a young woman standing there. He had a sense of blonde hair tumbling around bare shoulders, a short skirt and long legs.

  “Is this where you sit?” he said.

  “It’s where Hemingway sat, so that’s where I have to sit.”

  Tree got off the stool to make room for her, taking his glass with him.

  “You’re sure you don’t mind?”

  “I’ve sat there many, many times,” he said.

  “I’m Cailie Fisk,” she said, offering a slim hand.

  He took her hand. “Tree Callister.”

  “Tree? That’s an interesting name.”

  “It’s short for Tremain. When I was growing up the kids all called me Tree.”

  “Nice to meet you, Tree.”

  She perched on the stool, very still, closing her eyes as though attempting to draw in the essence of Hemingway. Her eyes popped open again and she looked at him. “I wonder if he really did sit here. I mean, how does an
yone really know?”

  “I’ve thought the same thing many times.”

  “He does talk about the Closerie in A Moveable Feast, so I suppose the chances are pretty good that his elbow must have nudged this part of the bar, however inadvertently.”

  “I’m surprised someone your age is even interested in Hemingway.”

  “I’m fascinated by all things Paris,” she said. “When you’re growing up in St. Louis, that’s a million miles from Paris, so I embraced all the clichés. The Eiffel Tower. The impressionists. Hemingway in Paris. The unrealistic, romantic view they keep for the tourists. But then I’m the kind of girl who gets to London and rushes over to see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Old things, but enduring. I like that.”

  The bartender came over and arched an eyebrow? “Madame?”

  She ordered a kir royale.

  Tree looked at her. “Why a kir royale?”

  “I don’t know. I read somewhere that if you came to La Closerie des Lilas you should order a kir royale. So here I am at the Closerie ordering a kir.”

  “That used to be my favorite drink.”

  “Used to be?”

  “Back in my drinking days in Paris.”

  “What’s that you’re holding?”

  “It’s a kir royale,” Tree said.

  She smiled. “Your drinking days appear to have returned.”

  “Nostalgia overcame me for a minute there,” Tree said.

  “How did it taste?”

  “Not quite the same.”

  “It never does, I guess. You came here for work?”

  He said, “I was a newspaperman in Chicago.”

  “But you’re not anymore?”

  “Not for a long time.”

  “What do you do now?”

  What to say to that? “Now I’m a private investigator on Sanibel Island in Florida.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Some days I wonder,” he said.

  The bartender placed the kir royale in front of her. “What’s in this?” she said.

  “It’s crème de cassis which is a black currant liqueur. An ordinary kir is topped with white wine. With a kir royale, they add champagne.”

  She lifted the glass off the bar. “To Hemingway and nights in Paris,” she said.

  He touched his glass to hers. “To Hemingway,” he said.