Kiss

6

What Carver needed was a clearer picture of the people involved in this. What sorts were they? Where and how did they live? What were their interests? Their virtues and vices? Who were their friends? Every problem, almost everything in life, sooner or later came down to people. And what they did to each other and why.

Birdie Reeves lived in an apartment on the west side of Del Moray, away from the beach and the expensive neighborhoods of the young and successful and the wealthy retirees. Her building was on the corner of West Palm Drive and Newport Avenue. It was a low, rectangular structure of beige stucco with a brown tile roof. The stucco had been chipped away here and there by time and weather and needed paint. A large sugar oak grew in the front yard and cast dappled, shifting light over the grounds. Off to one corner a couple of grapefruit trees that long ago had been planted too close together rustled in leafy embrace. The building sat well back from the street, and the entrance was a cedar gate in an ornate wrought-iron arch that served as a trellis for vines on which bloomed brilliant red and yellow roses. The gate, and the curlicued iron arch, also needed paint. Some oil on the hinges, too. There was a piercing squeal as Carver shoved the gate open and pushed into a courtyard overgrown with weeds and more roses. Somebody here liked roses, all right. There were red and yellow ones to match the blossoms over the gate, but these bloomed on bushes instead of vines. Here and there a white rose or a purple hollyhock peeked out from between high weeds that bent over the brick walk.

Careful how he set the tip of his cane on the uneven bricks, Carver limped to a wooden door with a metal D nailed crookedly on it. To the left of the door clung more rose vines; they’d scaled the cracked and patched stucco wall by climbing from one rusty nail to another. The long nails were hammered in a staggered pattern to provide maximum coverage. Someday the wall would be nothing but roses, like a parade float.

In the middle of the D on the door was a round glass peephole. Carver knocked loudly and stood so he was visible to anyone inside. Birdie was working at Sunhaven; he figured the apartment was empty, but there was always the possibility of a roommate or long-term guest. If anyone answered his knock, he was ready with an insurance-salesman cover story to explain his presence. Carver could be full of bullshit when it was necessary.

The only sound came from the unit next door: a radio tuned to an Atlanta Braves day game. A huge mosquito lit on Carver’s arm and drew about a pint of blood before he realized what was going on and slapped at it. He missed. The insect flitted at his nostrils as if angry with him and then droned away.

Carver tried the knob and wasn’t surprised to find the door locked. This was the kind of neighborhood where people pinched their pennies for everything else, but spent lavishly for locks and window grilles. Even if he’d considered breaking and entering, he’d have had a difficult time picking the bulky, shiny Yale dead bolt that had recently been installed. He glanced at the door to the unit where the radio was playing. It had the same kind of apparently new dead-bolt lock.

The sportscaster’s excited voice inside the apartment said, “Deep, deep to left! Back, back, back!..” A much calmer voice behind Carver said, “She ain’t home.”

He turned and was face-to-face with a stocky, sixtyish woman in a limp tan housedress. Her broad face would have been plumply pretty except for half a dozen warts on her cheeks and the sides of her nose, and the glint of suspicion in her narrowed blue eyes. Carver knew he ought to do something to alleviate that suspicion. Muster up some charm.

He smiled. A beautiful smile that came as a surprise on such a fierce-looking man. “Know where she is?”

“At work. I’m Mrs. Horton, the building manager. Didn’t catch your name.”

“Didn’t throw it,” Carver said, still with the smile, “but it’s Elmont. Roger Elmont.” The name of the broker who handled his car insurance. “I’m in the insurance business.” He nodded toward the new heavy-duty lock. “Theft insurance’d be a lot cheaper if more people put that kind of hardware on their door.”

Mrs. Horton’s eyes stayed narrowed; Carver saw they might simply appear that way due to the fleshiness of her florid face. She didn’t offer her first name; she thought of herself as “Mrs. Horton,” and expected Carver to address her as such. Hers was a righteous and proper world.

She said, “We had some burglaries in this area about six months ago.”

“This building?”

“Nope. But right down the block. Fella walked in on two punks ransacking his apartment. They gave him a bash on the head took twenty stitches to close. So I got in touch with the building owner-he lives in Miami-and told him I wasn’t gonna keep living here and managing the place ’less he furnished me and the other tenants with pickproof locks. He didn’t want to at first, but he gave in.”

“A wise move on your part,” Carver told her. “And the owner’s. Statistics show the burglary rate’s up all across the country, but especially here in Florida.”

“All them drugs, I reckon. People hooked on them’s gotta steal to support their habits.”

“That’s a big part of it,” Carver agreed. “It costs my company plenty, I can tell you.”

“That what you wanna see Birdie about? Insurance?”

“Is that what her friends call her? Birdie?”

Mrs. Horton nodded. Her shrewd eyes flicked up and down Carver, lingering for a moment on the cane; he wondered if she thought he should be wearing a dark suit and carrying an attache case full of boring material.

“Actually, all I wanted was to talk to Mrs. Logan about her statement on the crime she witnessed in February.”

Mrs. Horton frowned, sniffed, and backed up a step. “Birdie’s last name ain’t Logan. And she ain’t no missus. Hell, she don’t look any older’n twelve. Little bitty thing, she is.”

Carver gave her his alarmed, then puzzled expression. “Hmm. The main office told me to look up Mrs. Betty Logan, 126 Newport.”

“This building only sides on Newport,” Mrs. Horton said with a hint of triumph, as if they were in a game and she’d made a point by knowing something Carver had gotten wrong. “Address here’s West Palm.”

Carver leaned hard on his cane and wrestled his wallet from his hip pocket. He drew out one of his own business cards and stared at it. He said in an apologetic voice, “What they have written here is West Newport.”

“Ain’t no West Newport. Street runs north and south.” She was smiling faintly; she was even one up on the bigger brains at the main office. Not a bad day for her.

Carver shook his head and gnawed his lower lip, as if suddenly irritated. He stuck the business card back in his wallet, the wallet back in his pocket. “I’ve wasted a lot of time.”

Mrs. Horton shrugged and backed away a few more steps, allowing Carver room to move around her toward the gate. There was no mistaking the gesture. Obviously he’d wasted some of her time, too, and she was calling a halt to it.

He probed for firm ground with the cane and moved around her. She was wearing cheap, cloying perfume that mingled with the stale smell of perspiration. “At least I’ve seen some beautiful roses,” he told her.

“Manager before me planted ’em,” Mrs. Horton said. “Damn things come back year after year.”

“Perennials,” Carver said.

“I ain’t sure what kind they are. Don’t know one rose from another.”

He apologized again for invading her iron-fenced domain to see a tenant who wasn’t home and had a different name and lived on a different street and was someone else’s tenant. He stopped short of telling her there was no Betty Logan on Newport Avenue. It would have been small satisfaction.

The landlady seemed to feel the same protectiveness toward Birdie Reeves that Kearny had displayed at Sunhaven. Maybe it was because of Birdie’s youth and country-girl naivete. Or maybe she was simply the kind of vulnerable kid who brought out the parental instinct in people over fifty. He wished he could get Mrs. Horton drunk and pump her for information about Birdie, but he doubted that she drank anything stronger than grapefruit juice squeezed from the fruit of the two trees at the south corner of the building. And that without sugar.

As he played the cane over the brick walkway and awkwardly sidestepped around the inward-swinging gate to the street, he was sure Mrs. Horton was watching him from the other end of the wild garden. They weren’t her roses. He shouldn’t be her thorn. She was glad to be rid of him.

Nurse Nora Rule lived in a different sort of apartment, on Osprey Avenue in the opposite end of town. It was a tan, three-story brick building constructed in a U around an oval swimming pool. The place was well tended and clean and the rent had to be high. There was a long, low carport along the west side of the building, shaded by a line of palm trees planted five feet apart. The trunk of each tree was painted white, the paint ending evenly about four feet above the ground. No one had ever given Carver an adequate explanation as to why people would want to paint the bottoms of tree trunks white. He’d stopped asking.

Each tenant had an assigned parking space. The carport was stocked with late-model cars, a few of them expensive Porsches and the omnipresent Cadillacs and Lincolns. Carver watched a blue Lincoln with darkly tinted windows back from its parking slot and drive away. Windshields and chromed bumpers that weren’t shaded by the carport’s roof glinted in the brilliant sun and hurt the eye.

As he limped toward Nurse Rule’s apartment, he saw that the people poolside were mostly middle-aged and prosperous-looking. Sleek, tanned women lounged about with feline haughtiness in designer swimsuits and sunglasses. Some of the men wore gaudy matching beach outfits of trunks and pullover shirts or light jackets.

A few of the pool people interrupted their chatting and splashing to glance at Carver, but no one said anything about, or to, the gimpy guy dressed like a Paris hoodlum.

A blond woman with short, spiked hair, wearing a skimpy red suit over a deep brown tan, paused on the end of the diving board and grinned with toothy wickedness at Carver, then did a neat swan dive into the pool. Nifty. Hardly made a splash. She surfaced still grinning, but made it a point to ignore him as she swam toward the shallow end of the pool, where a couple of preteenagers were swatting around a white-and-yellow-striped beachball. She had a nice stroke. Nice everything.

There was an empty brass mailbox next to Nurse Rule’s door with “Nora Rule, #3” neatly lettered on a white card under clear plastic set in a slot. All the units had similar fancy mailboxes. A large bee droned about the mailbox momentarily, saw that no one had sent any pollen, and buzzed away in concentric circles toward a flower bed in front of the unit next door. Wondering if anyone at the pool was watching him, Carver rang the doorbell.

No one came to the door. What a surprise.

A few minutes passed, and he casually stepped off the walk and stood shielding his eyes from the sun while he peered in through the front window.

The furniture looked new and expensive; it was modern, lots of glass and chrome on the tables, sharply angled arms and legs on the low, cream-colored sofa and matching chairs. One of those metal-shaded floor lamps that resembled bulging eyes on long, curved stalks arced above one end of the sofa, as if eager to read over someone’s shoulder. Carver could see into part of the kitchen: a wooden table with gleaming steel legs, an uncluttered sink counter, fancy oak cabinets with brass hardware. There was a gigantic wall clock above the sink, pale blue and shaped like a frying pan, whiling away empty time with its red, oversized second hand. The apartment had about it a decorator’s touch and an almost military neatness.

Carver pushed down on his cane and leaned away from the window. He glanced at his watch, as if he’d had an appointment with Nora Rule and was curious as to why she hadn’t answered his ring. Then he shrugged and made his way back toward where he’d parked the Olds.

No one around the pool paid any attention to him. The kids at the shallow end were arguing over the striped beachball; the woman with the blond spiked hair was standing hipshot, busy sipping a tall, green drink with an orange peel splayed on the glass rim. She was listening raptly to a gray-haired, paunchy guy who apparently swam wearing half a dozen gold chains draped around his neck. Across the street, beyond the palm trees gently swaying in the breeze, lay the white-flecked, undulating blue of the ocean. A few sailboats and expensive cruisers were visible frolicking beyond the breakers.

Sun, sand, sails, drugs, God, and the army of the retired. Social Security checks worth hundreds of dollars, and execution-style murders over millions.

Ah, Florida!