The golden years of ex-AP reporter Kicklighter are at best gilded. For him, making ends meet is a full-time job: clipping coupons, eating at odds hours to avail himself of early-bird specials, engineering senior citizen discounts on everything he can. Not that his life is all work, however. When winter rolls around, life at Truman's home, the Fountain of Youth Residential Hotel, in St. Petersburg, takes on a festive air as a passel of old friends from up north arrive for the winter and the local dog track opens its gates for the season. Tragedy intrudes on this idyll, though, when Truman's best friend, Mel Wisnewski, just in from Pennsylvania, is found in the track's parking lot, huddled over the corpse of Rosie Figueroa, a tout whose dead-on betting tips have made her the darling of the dog track.