I knew what “doing” meant.

“Adele’s a pretty girl,” she said. “Too pretty maybe.”

“I’ll find her,” I said.

And she was gone.

I pulled some Kleenex from my drawer, wiped my head, face and neck, and threw the used tissues into my Tampa Bay Bucs wastebasket. My shirt was sweat-blotched and clinging wet to my back. It was a hot December day in Sarasota, probably about eighty-four degrees and humid-hot for winter, but not unheard of. It was the middle of the snowbird season. Tourists and winter residents rented or owned overpriced houses and apartments on the mainland in Bradenton, Sarasota and all the way up the coast to Pensacola and down the coast to Naples. The winter crowd with real money were in the resorts and condos on the beaches of Longboat and Siesta Keys. All in all, there were about 200,000 people in Manatee and Sarasota Counties combined during The Season.

In Sarasota, south of the airport, there is a strip of low-cost motels on Tamiami Trail. The strip stretches for a couple of miles to downtown and stops just before the theater district. The primary residents of the motels are small-time pimps and prostitutes, mostly runaways like Adele, though in the winter unknowing French and German tourists wander into these motels with their families, swimsuits and cameras. This was where I’d start looking for Adele’s phone booth. If that failed, I’d go south of Bay Front Park and downtown and start my search among the malls, restaurants and shops.

Sarasota has hundreds of restaurants catering to retirees, tourists and full-time working residents. It could be a long day or two of work. If she was still in town, I didn’t think Adele would be that tough to find, and I needed the fifty dollars. My backup was to find Dwight Handford. From what little Beryl had told me about her husband, I had the feeling he wouldn’t be found by simply looking in the phone book. I was right. I’d find him if I had to, but I’d go for that phone booth first. How long it would take to find Adele Tree depended on what happened at my meeting in less than half an hour.