“Anything else?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, looked down and then straightened up. “Who are you?”

“My name is Lewis Fonesca. I used to work for the state attorney’s office in Cook County, Illinois. Investigations. One morning my wife took the car to work. She died in a car accident on Lake Shore Drive. It was winter. I wasn’t going any further up in my job and I’m not ambitious. I was cold and too many places and people reminded me of my wife. Am I telling you too much?”

“No.”

There was more but I didn’t see the need to share it with Beryl. I had come to Sarasota a little over three years earlier, just drove till my car gave out and I felt safe in the sunshine after spending my life in the gray of Chicago. I drove away from the dead-end investigator’s job with the State’s Attorney’s office. Now I made a sort of living finding people, asking questions, answering to nobody. I had a growing number of Sarasota lawyers using me to deliver a summons or find a local resident who hadn’t turned up for court or a divorce hearing. I had a county process server’s license, complete with a full-color card with my photograph on it. It was the same face I saw in the mirror: sad, balding. A short, thin man who definitely looked Italian.

Occasionally, I would turn up some street trade, a referral like Beryl from Dave at the Dairy Queen. I lived in and worked out of a second-floor office in a two-story office building behind the DQ parking lot. Entrance to each of the offices was through a door to the outside. My door, like the others, needed a coat of paint. The metal railing on the balcony was starting to rust seriously.

I had a deal with the building manager. The landlord lived in Seattle. By giving the manager a few extra dollars a month beyond the reasonable rent for a seedy two rooms he referred to as a “suite,” he ignored the fact that I was living in the “suite.” The outer room where I now sat with Beryl was designed as a reception room.