Hot

5

South of Miami, U.S. Route 1 trails like a thread unraveling from the sleeve of the Florida peninsula. It connects the Florida Keys, a string of small islands that curves gently southwest to end at Key West, only ninety miles from Cuba.

Route 1 was constructed after a hurricane in the thirties had devastated the Keys and swept an Overseas Railroad train and all its passengers out to sea, forever ending rail service from the mainland. The highway, built in part over the remaining railroad trestle, was a safer, more durable way to connect the islands to each other and to southern Florida. For the first several miles from the north, it cuts through flatlands and is mostly a level two-lane road, where passing slower traffic is almost impossible. Farther south it’s flanked by water, the Gulf of Mexico on the west, the Atlantic on the east, and has long four-lane stretches. The islands, some of them almost too small to appear on a map, are sometimes so close together only the highway signs let the driver know he’s bridged open water and passed from one key to the next. Some of the keys, like Marathon and Isla Mirada, are larger and well populated. Even many of the smaller islands support condo developments, retirement communities, and fishing resorts. And tourist shops. Even ahead of fishing, tourism ranks as the Keys’ primary industry.

The bridge from Duck Key to Key Montaigne was a narrow, arced ribbon of concrete that still had the fresh, sunwashed look of new construction. Studying it through the windshield, Carver thought that probably an older bridge had recently been replaced.

Key Montaigne wasn’t exactly kidney-shaped; it more closely resembled a miniature Africa, one that barely showed up on the standard road map. According to the more detailed map Carver had bought when he’d stopped for gas at a Texaco station on Marathon Key, Key Montaigne was slightly more than half a mile across at its widest point, and about a mile from its northern to southern tip. It was flat, like the rest of the keys, and heavily overgrown with lush tropical foliage that concealed the condo developments and single-family residences.

Carver was driving the Olds with the top up and all the windows down. Key Montaigne was hot, but there was a wind off the sea that might be more or less constant, like farther south in Key West. Outlying reefs prevented incoming waves from breaking into surf, leaving the offshore waters calm. And there didn’t seem to be any beach, except for a stretch of public beach that a sign proclaimed was built with sand trucked down from the north. A few sunbathers were lounging on the beach, and two sailboats leaned into the wind not far from shore. In the brilliant sunlight the transplanted sand appeared almost white and looked unnatural in its setting.

It was easy enough to find Shoreline Road, and just a few minutes on it brought Carver to a narrow driveway meandering off through palm trees and undergrowth toward what a rural mailbox proclaimed to be Henry Tiller’s cottage.

Gravel crunched beneath the Olds’s big tires as Carver followed the driveway to the sea and a small weathered structure with a screened front porch and an almost flat roof. He recognized it as the sort of building Key Westers called Conch houses, solid homes built by nineteenth-century ship’s carpenters to withstand hurricane-force winds. Modest but enduring structures that ignored time.

Carver parked the Olds beside the cottage, climbed out and set the tip of his cane in the sandy soil. He squinted out at the Gulf, which was undulating and glittering with silver sparks in the glaring sunlight. To his left the shoreline curved and he could see, some distance away, a manicured stretch of green land sloping gradually to a dock where a large white-hulled private yacht rested as if posing for a postcard. Carver figured it must be the Miss Behavin’, Walter Rainer’s boat.

A mosquito droned close to his ear, and he raised a hand and brushed at it. He hadn’t seen it, but if volume was any indication, it was large enough to fly mail. He wiped the back of his wrist across his perspiring forehead, hoisted his scuffed leather suitcase from the trunk of the Olds, and limped up the wooden steps to the cottage’s front porch. Behind him the cooling metal of the Olds’s engine ticked like a bomb.

The screen door was unlocked. He opened it partway, then shoved it wider open with a corner of the suitcase and stepped up onto the shaded and noticeably cooler porch. The plank floor creaked beneath his weight. There was a green AstroTurf carpet on part of the porch, and a chipped yellow-enameled metal glider. Instead of a porchlight, there was a paddle fan mounted on the rough wood ceiling. Carver used Henry Tiller’s key on the front door and went into the cottage.

The interior was small but neat, with matching white wicker furniture that looked as old and serviceable as the cottage. There was a multicolored braided oval rug on the floor, a bulky old air conditioner mounted in a side window. On the cream-colored walls were oil paintings that were probably done by local artists -a flower arrangement, a stormy seascape, three domestic cats posing in tall grass as if they were a pride of lions. Carver liked that last one. He could see into the tiny kitchen with its dated white appliances. A door led to what he assumed was the bedroom. Another door, half open, was to the bathroom. The air in the cottage was hot and still and smelled like lemon furniture polish. It took the fun out of breathing.

He limped across the braided rug to the air conditioner and switched it on High. It screamed shrilly and went Thunka! Thunka! before the compressor kicked in, then it settled into a steady hum and emitted at stream of moderately cool air he could only hope would grow colder.

He lugged his suitcase into the bedroom and tossed it onto the double bed with its tufted white spread. The bedroom was small, with only a dresser and nightstand in addition to the bed. The walls were the same off-white as the walls in the rest of the cottage. One of them had a dark smear on it where an insect had been swatted. The floor was wood, with a gray throw rug beside the bed. There were a few oil paintings in here, too, but none as good as the one with the cats. Carver was glad to see another window unit, this one smaller but newer, and a ceiling fan like the one on the porch. June nights in the Keys could emulate Hell.

On top of the oak dresser was a display of small framed photographs. Carver stepped closer and examined them. There was Henry Tiller, accepting what looked like an award in front of a group of people, shaking hands with a gray-haired man in a dark suit. There were no women in the photograph, and everyone looked like a cop. Maybe this was Henry retiring. There was a black-and-white shot of a much younger Henry Tiller, standing next to an attractive woman with dark hair and an overwide smile. The ex-wife, perhaps, whom Henry professed not to care about. And there in a bronze frame was Henry about the same age, dark hair like the wife’s, posing with a lanky boy about ten years old in front of a lake. A slightly older Henry with the same boy, this time in his teens and looking something like Henry but with his mother’s smile; they wore heavy coats and there was a half-melted snowman behind them in this photo. Next to it was a shot of a man in his twenties, the boy grown up, with a heavyset blond woman standing next to him, one leg studiously in front of the other to make her appear thinner. She was holding an infant. Son Jerry again, and his wife, and their son Bump years before cocaine and death. All of them now out of Henry Tiller’s dwindling life.

A squeaking sound from the front of the cottage made Carver turn. At first he thought it might have been the ancient air conditioner, but a shadow wavered in the short hall outside the door.

He edged to the side, leaned with a palm against the wall and gripped the shaft of the hard walnut cane just below its crook. He focused his concentration, ready to rumble if he must.

A redheaded girl about five feet tall moved into the doorway and stood with her stick-thin arms crossed. She was wearing shorts, clompy red and white jogging shoes, and a sleeveless blouse, a green sweatband around her forehead. She was in her early teens and was pale and had freckles on every part of her that was visible. She didn’t seem surprised to see Carver, and stared inquiringly at him with guileless and friendly green eyes. Danger would be the farthest thing from her mind, until she grew up. She said, “You Mr. Carver?”

He straightened up and planted the tip of his cane back on the wood floor, feeling slightly silly at having brandished it for use as a weapon if necessary. “I’m Carver.” This had to be Effie Norton, the teenager who did Henry Tiller’s cleaning, but he thought he’d let her tell him that.

She did. Then she said, “Mr. Tiller told me what a great investigator you were, how you were probably better’n anyone in most police departments.”

Maybe Desoto had oversold Henry. Carver said, “Sometimes I can help, sometimes not.”

She grinned, crinkling the flesh around her eyes. Like a lot of redheads, she’d look old before her time, but until then she’d be a coltish charmer. “You’re being too modest.”

He said, “Yeah, Effie, I guess I am.” He wondered how much Effie knew about Tiller’s suspicions. How much she knew about Tiller. Well, there was a direct way to find out. “If you don’t mind my asking,” he said, “what do you think of Mr. Tiller?”

She arched an almost nonexistent eyebrow. “In what way?”

“Any way you feel like talking about.”

She uncrossed her arms and let her hands dangle at her sides, standing like a schoolgirl getting ready to recite in front of the class. “He’s nice. He reminds me of my grandfather, who’s been dead three years now. When I say something, he listens. He don’t treat me like some kinda feeb just because I’m young. Hey, did you see him in the hospital?”

“Yeah, for a short time.”

“So how is he?”

“Some broken bones, and the surgeons are gonna do some work on him tomorrow. But I think he’ll be all right.”

“I sure hope so.” She was plainly concerned, maybe recalling the pain of losing her grandfather. Fourteen was young, all right.

“Do you think there’s anything to Mr. Tiller’s suspicions?” Carver asked.

“Suspicions?”

“About something being wrong here on Key Montaigne.”

“Of course there’s something to those suspicions.” Now she propped her fists on her narrow hips, ready to defend Tiller. “Mr. Tiller used to be a policeman, you know, in Milwaukee and then in Fort Lauderdale.”

“I know.”

“I mean, if he sees smoke-”

“Okay, okay. Then you believe he’s-thinking okay these days?”

“Ha! I know what you mean, but you take the trouble to listen and wait when Mr. Tiller tells you something, you’ll see how smart he really is. He sorta stops and starts and gets off on side roads when he talks, but don’t you ever bet he don’t know what he’s saying.”

Carver remembered Desoto’s bus-in-traffic analogy. Henry made a lot of U-turns, too.

“The person who ran over Mr. Tiller,” Effie said, “you think they did it on purpose?”

“I’m gonna find out,” Carver told her. “In fact, if anybody asks you, that’s what I’m here to investigate-Mr. Tiller being hit by a car that kept going.”

“You bet!” Her eyes widened brightly; she liked secrets.

“Have you discussed Mr. Tiller’s suspicions with anybody else?”

“Oh, no! He asked me not to. Only ones who know about them are Mr. Tiller, me, and the police chief, Lloyd Wicke. Mr. Tiller said it’d be best not to let anyone know somebody was suspicious of em; that way they’d destroy evidence or whatever, and might even sue for slander.”

“Something to remember,” Carver said. “Mr. Tiller must trust you a lot.”

Her freckled chin lifted. “He does.”

Carver smiled. “I guess I will, too, then.”

“You gonna be staying here awhile?”

“Probably.”

“I been coming in to clean three days a week. What I dropped by for was to ask if you wanted me to keep doing that.”

“Sure,” Carver said. “That’s what Mr. Tiller would want.”

She smiled and started to back away.

“Effie,” Carver said, “you never did tell me what you figured was wrong on Key Montaigne.”

She looked thoughtful. “I only know Mr. Tiller thinks there’s something. Could be a lotta things, I guess.”

“Drugs?”

“Huh?”

“Is there much drug use on the island?”

She didn’t hesitate. “There’s some, even among kids my age. I don’t know as there’s more here than anyplace else, though.”

“What about the boy they found drowned, washed up on the beach? He was about your age.”

“He was lots younger.” She sounded indignant. “At least a year. And I didn’t know him. He was from up north.”

“Miami,” Carver said.

“I only drove-been driven through-Miami now and again. Don’t know a solitary soul there.” When she saw he was finally finished questioning her, she started backing away again. Maybe shyly, but Carver wasn’t sure; few things were harder to read than a fourteen-year-old girl. She wore her joggers untied, with the shoelaces trailing. He wondered how she kept from tripping over them. “I got a door key,” she said, “so you don’t have to worry about letting me in if you wanna be someplace else. And my number’s circled in Mr. Tiller’s directory in by the phone, case you make a mess and need spur-of-the-moment cleaning. I live not far down Shoreline and can get here on my bike pretty fast.”

“You charge extra for emergencies?” Carver asked, half jokingly.

She took him seriously and a calculating expression came over her freckled, girlish features. She’d apparently never considered the idea of overtime pay. “No,” she said, “cost is just the same.” Youthful virtue had conquered greed.

He grinned. “Okay. See you later, Effie.”

She crossed her arms again, stood the way she’d been standing when he first saw her. “If you need any help around Key Montaigne, I mean, need to know anything only somebody lives in this place might be able to tell you, I’ll be glad to help that way, too, Mr. Carver.”

“You can do that right now,” Carver said. It was almost five o’clock; he’d taken care of some business by phone from Miami, had a long but light lunch with an old friend, then hadn’t stopped except for gas on the drive south. “Where’s a good place in town to eat supper?”

She gnawed her lower lip a moment, considering. “Ain’t a lotta choices, but mine’d be the Key Lime Pie. That’s what they call it, like the actual pie only it’s a restaurant.”

“Thanks, I’ll try it.”

She smiled, bobbed up and down on her thick-soled jogging shoes as if building momentum, then swept away in a dash. He heard the reverberating slap of the screen door echoing out over the water.

He walked to the window and watched her mount a balloon-tire Schwinn bike with a rusty wire basket attached to its handlebars, then build up speed, her boyish body whipping back and forth as she stood high on the pedals.

Carver removed slacks and shirts from his suitcase and put them on wire hangers from Henry Tiller’s closet. Henry had one of those space-saving fold-down multihanger plastic gizmos in his closet; it came in handy. Carver hung it on a brass hook on the outside of the closet door and placed all the hangers on it so his clothes were draped in descending layers. Neat, he had to admit. He left socks and underwear in the suitcase and placed it in a corner with the lid closed but not latched. His shaving kit he carried into the bathroom and set on top of the vanity, over to the side, where it wouldn’t get wet. There was a large white towel embossed with suncrest motel folded over a rack in the bathroom, that had on it stitched in red, “Hi, I’m Mr. Towel and I live here. If you take me away from home, please bring me back.” Henry must have abducted Mr. Towel. Carver saw himself smiling in the medicine cabinet mirror, a tan, bald man with a fringe of curly gray hair that had grown too long in back. Lean, with a powerful upper body from exercise and walking with the cane. A scar at the right corner of his mouth. Pale blue eyes that were oddly catlike. As soon as his strikingly beatific smile faded, his was a brutal face rather than handsome. He knew the abrupt contrast could be unsettling.

He went outside and stood in the heat for a while, gazing across the expanse of glimmering water at the Miss Behavin’ rocking gently at her moorings. He could only see about half of the back of the large white clapboard house with red canvas awnings, a corner of a swimming pool behind a chain-link fence, a round blue table with a fringed umbrella sprouting from it at an angle. There was no sign of anyone at the Rainer estate.

Listing sharply over his cane, Carver shielded his eyes from the sun with his cupped hand and looked westward over the Gulf. A pelican flapped low above the surface, seeking its dinner. A large vessel that had the look of a cruise ship haunted the hazy, distant horizon like a wavering ghost. Henry Tiller had retired to beauty if not peace.

The sun wouldn’t be setting for a long time, but Carver was hungry.

He locked the cottage door, then he drove toward Fishback to look over the town in daylight. After that, he’d eat an early supper at the restaurant Effie had recommended.

There were a number of things he wanted to find out. One of them was why anybody would name a town Fishback.