“I’m at a motel in Golden Shores,” Nolen said, looking at Moran again. “It’s not bad, three bills a month, it’s fairly clean. The thing is, I’d like very much to give you the business-”
“I think you are,” Moran said.
“But even your off-season rate, thirty bucks a day, and you know, come on, that’s not only steep it’s unrealistic. Maybe not for transients, no. But what I’m offering you is the assurance of a permanent tenant.”
“How permanent?”
“What have you got? With the lovers and the secretaries you got about four units out of twelve rented, am I right? And it’s like that I bet eight nine months of the year. Okay. For a fair rate you’ll have guaranteed occupancy of Number Five the year ’round. I’ll even help you out keeping the place up. Skim the pool, cut the grass-”
“We don’t have any grass.”
“Feed the chickens-I don’t know what you do around there. You tell me.”
“Six hundred,” Moran said.
Nolen said, “George, six hundred, I can get a furnished two-bedroom apartment for six hundred.”
“Maybe over at the Seminole Indian Reservation. Not on the beach you can’t.”
“How about three? For old time’s sake, the Dominican Republic,” Nolen said. “I’ll entertain the secretaries, teach ’em how to sit up and roll over. Listen, I’ll even sign a year’s lease.”
And leave in the dead of night, Moran thought. But what would he be out? He liked Nolen. He didn’t trust him especially, but he didn’t have to. Moran said, “Okay, but no smoking in bed. You promise?”
Saturday Nolen Tyner moved into Number Five with everything he owned. Two old suitcases and several cardboard boxes loaded with magazines, letters, glossy photographs of himself in different outfits and poses, a hair dryer. A liquor case that held bottles of scotch, vodka and rum, most of them nearly empty. A lot of clothes, soiled-looking, out-of-style shirts, trousers and sport coats doubled up over bent hangers. A big Northern tissue box of sporty shoes, tan ones and white perforated ones that caught Jerry’s eye and Nolen told him he could have any pair he wanted if they fit. The man’s life was in cardboard boxes he carried from one motel to another.