Bloodfire

15

Carver had a connection at Florida State University, an entomologist named Fisk who’d helped him identify a certain type of beetle in a previous case. He phoned Fisk and had him check Student Records. Then he sat at his desk and sketched indecipherable shapes on his memo pad. Some of them looked like infants.

Within an hour the phone rang. Fisk. He told Carver there was indeed an Elizabeth Gomez of Fort Lauderdale registered at the university. She was in the correspondence program, six credit hours into her sophomore year, and carrying a 3.9 grade-point average.

Carver thanked Fisk and hung up. So far Beth Gomez had leveled with him. But so far wasn’t very far.

He dragged his cross-directory from a bottom desk drawer and used it to match an address with the phone number Beth had given him in the park. The number was listed in the name of Melanie Beame of 242 Wayfare Lane, Fort Lauderdale. Beth’s friend Melanie, just as she’d said.

Carver glanced at his watch. Past three o’clock, and Fort Lauderdale was over an hour’s drive down the coast. Even if he left immediately, there wouldn’t be much left of the day by the time he got there. On the other hand, what he had in mind might be better accomplished at night, so there was no rush.

He limped from the office, lowered himself into the sunbaked Olds, then drove to his cottage, where he stuffed a change of clothes and a shaving kit into his scuffed leather suitcase. Then he phoned Edwina, but she wasn’t home. She wasn’t in her office at Quill Realty either, and no one there knew how to reach her.

She seemed to be distancing herself from her employer as well as her lover, he thought, weakening her ties as she prepared to cut them. He tried to ignore the hollow sensation around his heart as he punched out her home number again and left a message on her machine, explaining he might have to be gone for a while on business and he’d call her soon as he returned. He said he’d miss her, then added just before he hung up, “This is Fred, by the way.” A joke. He wished he hadn’t said it.

He locked the cottage behind him and tossed the suitcase in the back of the Olds. On the highway, he stopped at a Texaco station and bought gas, a quart of oil, and a pack of Swisher Sweet cigars.

The station’s bell dinged twice as he ran over the signal hose on the way out. A guy in a greasy service uniform and holding a can of oil as if he were going to drink it glared at him, then poked his head back beneath the raised hood of a station wagon.

Carver turned left onto the highway to point the nose of the Olds south toward Lauderdale.

He’d stopped for supper, and it was dusk when he checked into the Pelican Motel, off A1A. It was on a side road and not near the ocean, so it was inexpensive and saved him the time of trying to find a beachside motel with a vacancy.

The Pelican was a rehabbed old tourist court whose individual stucco cabins had been converted to duplexes. All except the first and largest cabin, which was office and living quarters. There was a flying stork painted on the sign by the road, and plastic pink flamingos perched on thin metal legs were stuck into the lawn in front of the office. On the wall behind the desk was a large oil painting of a heron standing on one spindly leg by the sea. Not a pelican in sight. The place probably wasn’t owned or operated by ornithologists, but that was okay with Carver if the sheets were clean.

He registered and paid in advance, and the wry-faced old man behind the desk directed him to the end cabin, then handed him a key attached to a plastic tag in the shape of what looked like a seagull.

Carver drove the Olds to the far end of the gravel lot and parked it in front of the last in the line of small beige stucco cabins. There were only a few other cars parked at the motel, and he’d been told no one was staying in the other half of the cabin, so there’d be no loud TV or crying child to keep him awake. No late-night sounds of lovemaking to cause him to wonder what he was doing here instead of back in Del Moray with Edwina.

He lugged his suitcase to the cabin door, used the key, and pushed the door open with his cane. The air was hot and stale and smelled faintly as if someone had just stubbed out a cigarette. He flipped the light switch, then limped directly to the air conditioner jutting from one of the curtained windows and turned it on. It sounded as if it were trying to commit mechanical hara-kiri, but it shoved out a steady current of cold air,

The cabin was even smaller than it appeared from the outside. There was room for only a double bed, a time-scarred oak dresser with a mirror, a rickety wooden chair, and a TV mounted on a metal bracket that angled from the wall. The tiny bathroom was incongruously modern: white fixtures, white tile, and a white fiberglass shower stall. Black cockroach scurrying out of sight behind the vanity. Carver shut the bathroom door and turned back to the main room. There was only one small closet, standing open, and a bolted connected door to the other half of the cottage.

He didn’t bother unpacking, leaving his suitcase lying flat and unopened on the luggage stand at the foot of the bed. There was no way to know how long he’d be in Fort Lauderdale; might be a couple of hours, might be a couple of days. It depended on how things went at 242 Wayfare Lane.

He limped back down to the office and coaxed a Fort Lauderdale newspaper from a battered and stubborn vending machine, then asked the old guy behind the desk if he had a street map of Fort Lauderdale. He got no street map, but was told the drugstore a mile down the road sold that kind of thing and most any other item Carver might want. The old fella got so enthusiastic that Carver wondered if he owned part interest in the drugstore.

Carver returned to his cabin. It was too cool now; seemed the air conditioner’s thermostat wasn’t working. He turned the blower on low and stretched out on the creaking old bed, opened the newspaper, and read about the latest standoff between Congress and the White House, the Irish Republican Army killing a British trooper in Belfast, a man in Miami who’d set himself on fire to protest the rollback in civil-rights legislation. There sure were a lot of people out there with causes, but none with one so simple as that of Roberto Gomez, who had devoted himself to killing his wife. Carver turned to the comic strips and got a yuk out of “The Far Side,” the only sane thing in the paper.

When it was completely dark outside, he left the cabin and drove to the drugstore the old man had told him about. It was a new brick building as spacious as an airplane hangar, with wide aisles and low counters stacked with merchandise. There were T-shirts, luggage, books and magazines, hardware, auto accessories, groceries, housewares, electronics. In one corner there were even drugs, some over-the-counter medicines and a prescription window. Carver bought a detailed Fort Lauderdale street map, then drove into town.

Even in the dark, it didn’t take him long to find Wayfare Lane. It was in the west end of the city, a narrow street that wound beneath ragged palm trees and an occasional sprawling sugar oak.

Number 242 was a flat-roofed clapboard house set back on a small lot and surrounded by shrubbery. It was painted a pale color Carver couldn’t identify by night, and had dark shutters and trim. Light edged out around closed drapes in a front window, where one of the shutters was twisted and dangled like a vestige of a prehistoric wing. The shrubs on the north side of the house were bathed in a faint yellow glow from a side window.

Carver eased his foot off the brake and let the Olds rumble slowly down the street until it had reached a point where he was half a block away but was able to see the lighted side window at an angle. He positioned the car just so, then killed the engine and got his 10x50 Nikon binoculars out of the glove compartment. Slumped low in the seat so he’d be almost invisible in the dark, he focused the binoculars on the window.

There was a bookcase that contained a few books and a lot of stereo equipment and record albums. With the powerful binoculars, he could almost make out the names of some of the albums. A dial on the stereo system was glowing; there would be music in the house. The back of what looked like a brown chair was visible. Also a table with an orange lamp on it. Carver figured he was looking at about a third of the living room.

A shadow passed over the wall, and a slender, red-haired woman came into view. She stood before the stereo for a moment and adjusted something, maybe changed stations, then moved back out of sight. He got the eerie impression she existed only when he saw her in the window, like a character in a play.

With the infinite patience of his trade, Carver stayed where he was for over an hour. He caught a few more glimpses of the redhead. She was wearing a green robe with wide three-quarter-length sleeves, several gold bracelets on her left wrist. Her hair was pulled back and up and lay in a swirl on the crown of her head. She had a pale complexion that made her dark eyes and lipsticked mouth vivid, and despite being too thin, she was attractive.

She didn’t come into view very often, but her shadow was active on the wall. She seemed to sit down for short periods of time in the chair whose back was visible to Carver, then she’d rise and her shadow would flicker across the room.

He pressed the binoculars to his eyes and adjusted the focus as she came into sight again. She stood with her hands on her hips, then her body jerked and she looked toward the front of the house. Someone must be at the door. She moved off in that direction.

When he lowered the binoculars for a moment, he saw the man on the front porch. He drew the dark form into focus just as the door opened. The redhead-Melanie Beame, Carver assumed-stood framed in light that spilled outside to illuminate a short, stocky black man wearing a gray suit. Melanie moved back and he entered the house. The front door closed.

Carver aimed the binoculars again at the side window and saw nothing. Not even moving shadows.

Lowering the binoculars, he studied the layout of the neighboring houses and yards. There was a spot where he might conceal himself in some shrubbery in the yard next to Melanie’s and have a more comprehensive view into the living room. It would be risky, but he didn’t see that he had much choice.

He climbed out of the Olds. Had to stand for a minute and stretch his cramped back muscles before closing the car door quietly and limping away.

A few porch lights were glowing, but no one was on the dark street. He was sure he wasn’t seen as he made his way over the neighbor’s sparse lawn to the dense mass of shrubbery.

There were fragrant blossoms on the bushes, but no thorns. He settled down among the branches and brushed away an insect that skittered across his bare arm, almost dropping the binoculars, catching them by the strap. In the distance a dog was barking frantically, but Carver was sure it had nothing to do with him. The sweet scent of the blossoms tickled his nose, and for a moment he had to resist the urge to sneeze.

He glanced around at the darkness, then raised the binoculars to his eyes and focused on Melanie Beame’s living room. He didn’t like this kind of thing; it made him feel like a voyeur. He wouldn’t want to try explaining his actions if someone saw him and called the police to report a peeping Tom.

Ah! He forgot his uneasiness as Melanie and the black man came into clear view. There was a blanket-draped crib in the room, and Melanie leaned over it and lifted out a baby that looked like Adam Gomez, but Carver couldn’t be sure. Infants tended to look alike to him, miniature old men with fat cheeks. This one had to be Adam, though. The black guy stood by Melanie and stared at the baby, then grinned and moved away.

Melanie put the baby back down. She fiddled around with it, then straightened up and stood for a moment staring down into the crib. The black guy came up behind her and gripped her waist with both hands, as if he might be trying to make his fingertips meet. She turned around, smiling, and he kissed her on the lips. It was a long kiss. Then Melanie and the black guy clung to each other for a while, until he pulled away, said something, and walked out of sight. She yanked the sash of her robe tight and went to the chair Carver could see all of now, plopped down in it, and began reading a glossy magazine. Looked like a Cosmopolitan.

After about ten minutes her head jerked around and she laid the magazine, still open, on the table with the lamp. Carver knew what was going on; there was somebody else at the front door. He couldn’t see the porch from here, so he stayed focused on the window.

This time it was Beth Gomez, wearing the same khaki pants and white blouse she’d had on when she’d talked to Carver. She said something to Melanie, then walked directly to the crib and gazed down at Adam. She bent low and looked as if she kissed him. Then she stood up straight and tucked in her blouse in back, causing her heavy breasts to strain against the material of the blouse. Carver could see now that Melanie was much shorter than Beth, probably no more than five feet tall, as the two women stood and talked.

They both turned around, away from him; the black guy must have come back into the living room, but Carver couldn’t see him. Melanie walked out of sight. Beth sat down in the chair near the crib and crossed her legs. She picked up the magazine, then put it down almost immediately, as if it bored her. She sat there and stared at Adam.

Carver watched her until she got up and left the room. Lights winked on behind lowered shades in the rear of the house.

He let the binoculars dangle from their leather strap around his neck, grabbed his cane with both hands, and levered himself to a standing position. Listening to his own rapid breathing, he glanced around and then limped back to the Olds.

He sat for a while behind the steering wheel, listening to the screams of a thousand crickets and not moving, itching from the bushes and feeling a rivulet of perspiration trickle down the side of his neck.

So somebody else, the black guy, knew about Beth and Adam staying with Melanie. Beth hadn’t told Carver everything. But she’d been truthful about the rest of it, he figured. She’d really taken courses at the university. And she’d taken a chance by giving him Melanie Beame’s phone number.

He started the Olds, turned it around in a driveway, and returned to the Pelican Motel.

After draping a towel over the air conditioner’s vents to stifle the flow of cold air into the chilled room, he slept nude beneath a single sheet.

Early the next morning, he lowered the Olds’s canvas top and drove fast beneath a swollen gray sky to Orlando.