Spark

19

While Beth was showering the next morning, Carver drove down the highway to a doughnut shop and bought half a dozen glazed and a large cup of coffee to go.

When he returned, she was wearing panties and bra and drying her hair with a big white towel from the still-steamy bathroom. She sniffed the air and eyed the doughnut bag. “Smells yummy.”

He put the grease-spotted bag and the cup on the desk.

“Only one cup?” she said.

“Only one occupant in this room,” he reminded her. He limped into the bathroom, ripped the plastic sanitary wrap from one of the glasses, and carried the glass back out to the desk. He poured about half of the large cup of coffee into it, leaving it black. “I brought you some powdered cream,” he said, “only the label calls it ‘Mock Milk.’ ”

“Sounds heavenly, if only you remembered a plastic spoon.”

He found himself wondering if she was recalling her luxurious existence with Roberto Gomez, when coffee was no doubt brought to her and the spoons were silver, from the largest serving size down to the tiniest coke spoons worn on delicate neck chains.

When she was finished with her hair, she slipped into a pair of shorts and a clean orange blouse, then dragged over a chair to sit across from him at the desk. She sprinkled cream in her coffee, stirred it gingerly with her finger, and they went to work on breakfast.

“Fresh,” she commented, through a mouthful of glazed doughnut.

“I’m working on that,” he said.

“If I wanted bad comedy,” she told him, “I’d tune in to local news.”

After finishing his second doughnut, he wiped sugar glaze from his hands with a napkin and settled back with his coffee. He said, “Tell me about Solartown.”

She swallowed a last bite of doughnut, then licked a long finger. “The five principal shareholders are all players in the financial major leagues. We’re talking a prestigious investment company, a bank with international holdings, a lumber firm that’s one of the largest in the world, a retail chain with stores in half the states, and an insurance company that has more money than most small countries. All of them, with the possible exception of the bank, are on solid financial footing. Solartown’s a minor part of their overall picture.”

“How’d you learn all this?”

“It’s mostly public information, available at the touch of a few computer keys.”

“Your friend Jeff’s computer?”

“His and mine. The laptop I use to compose when I travel has a modem. I also called some contacts I have in various high positions. People I knew from when I was with Roberto.”

“Users?”

She nodded. “But dependable.”

“Not to their employers.”

“None of them runs a train, Fred. Don’t be so damned judgmental.”

“I wasn’t passing judgment, only wondering how good your information is.”

“It’s good as it gets. And what it means is that, unless there’s some small fish with ideas of his or her own, Solartown, Inc. is too friggin’ big to be operating some scam to do old folks outa their houses so they can resell them. That’d be like you and me hanging around schoolyards to swipe lunch money,”

“Lunch money’s stolen every day,” Carver said. “What about Brad Faravelli? He’s in a perfect position to steal from the other kids.”

“He seems okay, but who knows? Forty-two years old, married, three kids, Harvard Business School grad, been with Solartown since it began seven years ago. Before that he was a vice prez at a Wall Street investment company that went belly-up over some questionable bond trading. He wasn’t directly involved in it, by the way.”

Carver said, “Harvard. Wall Street. Jesus!”

“Don’t be a reverse snob, Fred. Anyway, I can get a better feel for it all after I interview Faravelli this afternoon. I told him I’m doing a feature story for Burrow, but it might be published in some other Florida papers, as well.”

“He believed that?” Carver asked.

“It might be the truth, Fred.” She finished her coffee, then wadded her napkin and stuffed it into the empty foam cup. There was a crescent of red from her lipstick on the cup’s rim. “What about you?” she asked. “You were your usual unbleeding, unconcussed self last night, and you’d talked with Van Meter about him locating Adam Beed. So I’m assuming you didn’t run into Beed yourself, or find out much about him.”

He realized for the first time she’d risked coming to his room because she was concerned about him. Not one of her rash impulses at all.

“Beed seems to have really gotten off drugs while he was in Raiford,” he said. “He’s strictly a boozer now.”

“Same thing, different terminology. He’s an addict, if the booze is running him. He’s as outa control as if he were on coke or heroin.”

“It doesn’t seem to have that kind of hold on him.”

“Not yet. But if he’s drinking regularly, it’ll get him.”

“That a prediction?”

“I’ve seen it plenty of times. A junkie shakes the physical dependency and fancies he’s no longer part of the world of drugs, but it’s okay to have drinks with dinner, or duck into a bar now and then for a couple of something cool. All socially acceptable. Then the alcohol takes the place of whatever else he was on, takes him over body and mind just like any other drug.” She tapped a red fingernail on the desk for emphasis. “An addict’s an addict, Fred. Like a cucumber that’s become a pickle. It can never be a cucumber again. Even longtime users sometimes kid themselves they’re cucumbers again, but if they don’t stay away from drugs altogether, including alcohol, it’ll eventually kill them.”

The air conditioner had gone through a short cycle, then kicked off. Carver, sitting in the sudden silence, hadn’t realized it was running. A child began yammering outside, then car doors slammed and an engine started. Tires crunched over gravel as a vacationing family got an early start.

“Eventually, but always,” Beth said.

Carver said, “It’s nice to know that about Beed.”

After breakfast he left Beth preparing for her interview with Brad Faravelli and drove over to see Hattie Evans.

As he was parking, he saw her in the shade of her front porch. She was wearing baggy jeans and an oversize T-shirt with GRAY POWER lettered on it, tending to flowers in a plastic hanging planter she’d taken down from its hook.

“Care to come inside, Mr. Carver?” she asked, not looking at him until he’d limped almost to her.

“Don’t let me interrupt you,” he said. “We might as well enjoy it out here before the sun and the temperature get higher.”

“That won’t take long,” she said, pinching off a dead geranium. “Gotta water these constantly. Florida. It was Jerome’s idea to move down here, not mine.”

“You intend to stay?”

“Not much choice, considering the mortgage arrangement we made with Solartown.”

“Whose idea was that?”

“Jerome’s. He handled all our finances. In retrospect, it was dumb of me to let him do that.”

“You’re a capable woman,” Carver said. “You can set things right.”

“Not this house, But then, I suppose I’m happy enough here in Solartown.”

“When you bought the house, did the salesman give you the hard sell on the reverse mortgage?”

“Not really. There was no deception involved.”

“Did Jerome ever look into another form of financing? I mean, do you know if he consulted with a lender in the months before his death?”

She picked up a gray metal watering can with a daisy design on it. “Not that I know of.” She tipped the can so the long, thin spout was out of sight among the remaining flowers, letting water flow into the pot. “That’s not to say Jerome might not have seen a banker without telling me.” She shot Carver a look he couldn’t interpret. “Seems he did other things without informing me.”

Carver said nothing.

Water flowed over the rim of the pot and along the porch rail.

“I might have to leave town for a while,” he told her, “if someone I have working for me locates a man who could be important to us.”

“That Adam Beed?”

He nodded.

Hattie set the watering can down and removed her green vinyl work gloves. The gloves had oversize cuffs with the same daisy design that was on the can. “The people involved in this made a mistake trying to scare you off the case, didn’t they?”

“Looks that way,” he said.

“Can’t say I’m shocked that you’re still on the job. You reminded me immediately of some of my problem students who regarded intimidation as merely a temporary condition. Much as I regretted their presence in my classes, after all the years they’re the ones I remember.”

“Memory’s a strange thing,” Carver said.

“A precious thing,” she said, surprising him.

“Your emotions are showing, Hattie.”

She gave him a sad smile, standing there erect and holding her gloves folded in one hand as if she were a military officer. She said, “I missed out on some things in life, Mr. Carver; I’ve come to accept that because I understand it. Now I need to know about my husband’s death, so I can accept it through understanding and lit it peacefully in my past. So I won’t wake up before sunrise every morning thinking about it for the rest of my life.”

“I see what you mean,” Carver said.

“I believe you do.” She lifted the watering can again and gently doused the blossoms themselves.

“Where’s your neighbor Val Green today?”

She glared at him. “How should I know? Why should I care about the old busybody?”

He almost smiled. “Better not talk that way; you might wilt those flowers.”

“He tells me if I need anything to call him or come get him, as if I need the likes of him to take care of me. As if I need anyone.”

“You’re not being fair to him. He’s not a bad sort.”

“Oh, I suppose he’s all right,” she said. “In his place. I expect he’s sleeping. I think he was driving around last night playing policeman.”

“You don’t think much of the Posse?”

“I think they’re a bunch of old fools who’ve regressed to childhood, playing cops and robbers again. Now Val, he even wants to play doctor.”

Carver laughed. Some of the water sloshed out of the long-spouted can and splashed near his shoe. Not an accident, he was sure.

“Well, it happens to be true.” Hattie put down the can and concentrated hard on rehanging the planter on its eye hook. Either her eyesight wasn’t up to it, or the hook was moving.

Carver thought about offering to help, then decided she might resent it. He waited until the planter was dangling safely on its chain.

“If I have to disappear for a while, I’ll call you,” he assured her.

“You’d better. I hired you.”

She stretched to take down an identical plastic planter from the opposite side of the porch, and he said good-bye and left her there.

As he drove away he glanced over at her. She wasn’t watching him. She was plucking dead blossoms.