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chronological order. I certainly hadn’t started on my drunk with the intention of meeting Lou and checking into the Glades Hotel with her. I hadn’t even been thinking of Lou when I’d walked away from the house.
    Then how had Mantin known how to find me? How had Mantin known I was checked into the Glades Hotel?
    I reviewed our bathroom conversation. After talking to me, wherever we had talked, at some point in my drunk, the little man with the lined face had met someone he called the ‘captain,’ before coming to the hotel. An hour, two hours, possibly even more time had passed. Meanwhile I’d been swaggering up and down the beach. From Pass-a-Grille to Clearwater. A distance of twenty miles. Moving from bar to bar. Making an ass of myself.
    So how had Mantin known where to find me?
    I closed my eyes and tried to remember seeing Mantin before he had knocked on the door. I concentrated until sweat stood out on my body like beads. What had happened between the redhead and the Bath Club was a blank. Except for the crowing of a rooster and yelling, ‘Hiya, baby,’ at Lou.
    I wished I knew more about psychiatry. In the hope of getting ahead, perhaps getting a raise from Kendall, I’d taken a course in Abnormal and Criminal Psychology. At the Junior College, in a night class open to adults. One week the lad teaching it had talked a lot about something he called traumatic amnesia. As an example he’d told about a girl who had witnessed a particularly brutal murder followed by necrophilia. Horror at what she had seen had completely driven the facts from her conscious mind. As if the murder had never happened. At the time it had sounded like a lot of crap to me.
    Now I began to wonder.
    What if I’d killed someone?
    My throat was tight. I realized I was breathing through my mouth. On the other hand, Mantin hadn’t given me ten thousand dollars to pay me for something I had done. He was paying me to do something.
    What?
    Traffic began to creep along the street below the open window. A party of early rising tourists boasted about the fish they intended to catch. I got out of bed gently, without waking Lou, and went in and took a cold shower. I showered for a long time. The cold water cleared my head of the last of the whiskey.
    But the brown manila envelope was still lying on the basin.
    The only thing I could see to do was backtrail myself along the beach until I located the spot where I’d first met Mantin. Perhaps someone there would know who he was. They might know where he lived, what we had talked about.
    I’d go to his house or his hotel. I’d give him back his money. I’d explain that I’d been drunk. I’d tell Mantin I wasn’t a big shot. I’d admit I was only a sixty-two-dollar-and-fifty-cents-a-week lawyer’s runner. Without even a job. And that would put me in the clear again. I hoped.
    The room phone rang as I reached for a bath towel. I wrapped it around me and opened the bathroom door. As I did, Lou raised on one elbow and picked the phone from its cradle.
    “Yes?”
    A girl’s voice said, crisply, “Good morning, Mrs. Smith. It is exactly seven-thirty.”
    Lou dropped the phone back in its cradle and sat on the edge of the bed, yawning. I toweled myself dry, then ran my fingers through my hair. Funny. The little things that plague a guy. When he’s already worried to death. My hair was getting thin on top. I walked into the other room. Lou had her stockings on.
    She said, “Excuse me,” and used the bathroom.
    I put on my shorts and skivy and began to work on my socks.
    When Lou came out of the bathroom again, her face looked older, harder than it had in the half light. She still was as cute as hell. But there was a cynical twist to her lips. Lou sat on the edge of the bed and put on her open-toed shoes with three-inch spike heels.
    “Well, Mr. Smith,” she said. She looked up at me through the cascade of brown hair partially covering her face. “Imagine meeting you here.”
    I felt