Spark

7

“Explain,” Desoto said.

Carver was sitting in front of Lieutenant Alfonso Desoto’s desk in his office on Hughey in Orlando. Desoto was elegantly dressed as usual. Pale-gray suit, mauve shirt with maroon tie, gold watch, two gold rings, gold cufflinks. On him it somehow didn’t look flashy. He had the dark and classic looks of a matinee idol in one of the old movies he loved, the one where the handsome bullfighter gets the girl. Those who didn’t know him sometimes guessed he was a gigolo rather than a tough cop. That could be a serious mistake.

Carver explained the connection between Hattie Evans and the late Maude Crane. To wit: the late Jerome Evans.

Desoto leaned back in his chair and flashed his cuff links. Behind him, a Sony portable on the windowsill was playing sad Latin guitar music very softly. “What you’re saying, amigo, is that someone might have murdered Maude Crane?”

“Not exactly,” Carver said. “I guess what I’m doing is asking.”

“If what you say is true about Crane’s affair with Jerome Evans, and Crane was murdered, the prime suspect would be Hattie Evans, your client.”

“Even with Jerome dead?”

“The need for vengeance doesn’t die with the prize,” Desoto said. The breeze from the air conditioner barely ruffled his sleek black hair, Carver couldn’t remember ever seeing Desoto’s hair seriously mussed.

“I don’t even know if Hattie was aware of her husband’s affair, having only heard about it secondhand myself.”

“Secondhand from whom?”

“Her next-door neighbor, Val Green.”

“How would he know?”

“He gets around. He’s a member of the Solartown Posse.”

Desoto absently buffed the ring on his right hand on the left sleeve of his suit coat. The guitar on the Sony was strummed suddenly in swift, dramatic tempo. “That’s the civilian volunteer group that patrols the place, hey?”

“That’s it,” Carver said. He thought Desoto might scoff at the Posse, but he didn’t. Volunteer groups-some might call them vigilante groups-were becoming more and more prevalent as the war on drugs drained law enforcement of resources. The police were beginning to see the good ones as an asset. The bad ones could be the worst kind of liability. “I’m not sure about Val Green, so I’m not sure Jerome and Maude were actually seeing each other behind Hattie’s back.”

“Be sure,” Desoto said. “It was in the suicide note.”

He opened a file folder on his desk and handed Carver a sheet of white paper. Carver rested his cane on his thigh and read. Typed on the cheap white bond paper was a long, pathetic account of how lonely Maude Crane’s life had become, and how she’d prefer death over living without Jerome. Above her typed name was an indecipherable ink scrawl.

Carver laid the note faceup on the desk. His hip was getting numb; he had to shift his weight, move his bad leg. “Anyone might have typed this.”

“But they didn’t.”

“And the signature could have been made by somebody flinging ink from across the room.”

“But it wasn’t. The paper was still in Maude Crane’s Smith-Corona manual typewriter, and her prints and hers alone were on the keys. The signature, vague as it is, matches samples we found among her personal papers. This one is suicide plain and simple, amigo. And the second one this year in Solartown. Sometimes the very old, the very sick and sad, choose it as their way out, hey? You should understand that.”

Carver knew what he meant. It was Desoto who’d helped to prevent him from one day swimming out to sea too far to return, when he was depressed after taking disability retirement from the department with his maimed leg. The reference to past agony irritated Carver. He said, “Why did you send Hattie Evans to me?”

Desoto smiled. He loved women as much as they loved him. Any age, race, nationality. The faded but defiant spirit of Hattie Evans might have gotten to him, caused him to regard her as something more than just another suspicious and fearful old woman. “I liked her, amigo. But more than that, I didn’t think she was the type to become paranoid in her old age. Maybe the facts didn’t warrant me sending her to you; they certainly didn’t warrant a police investigation. Still, I felt there might be something real in what she was saying. Call it more of a character judgment than anything else.”

Carver tapped the rubber tip of his cane soundlessly on the floor, staring at it and nodding. Cops’ instincts. They should be given more official standing. “I picked up the same quality in her,” he said.

“You going to tell her about Maude Crane’s affair with her husband?”

“I don’t want to,” Carver said. “That’s why I came here, to reassure myself there’s no connection between Jerome Evans’s death and Maude Crane’s, other than the emotional linkage.”

“There’s no other connection,” Desoto assured Carver. “This part of the game is exactly as it seems. An old woman lost her husband, another her lover and companion and then her will to live. A world of fighters and quitters. Don’t put the widow, the one survivor of the triangle, through unnecessary pain.” His dark eyes were somber, full of genuine sympathy for Hattie Evans. So unlike a cop sometimes.

Carver stared at the suicide note on Desoto’s desk, listening to the sounds of the policeman’s world wafting into the office between the notes of the sad Spanish guitar. Gruff voices, sometimes joking; the faint chatter of a police radio; the shrill protests of a suspect being booked. There seemed no need for Hattie to know anything other than what she might read in the newspaper or catch on TV news. Another soul, old and alone in Solartown, had chosen the time and means of deliverance.

“No reason to tell Hattie about the affair,” Carver said. “I’ll see it as a suicide for now.”

“Then you’re seeing it as it is, amigo. It shouldn’t get in the way of your job. Am I right?”

“Sure,” Carver said.

But he wasn’t sure.

He drove from the Municipal Justice Building on Hughey back to Solartown and rang Hattie’s doorbell.

She’d been cleaning. As she ushered him into her cool and orderly living room, he saw a canister vacuum cleaner with a pythonlike hose and attachments resting in the doorway between dining room and kitchen. Hattie was wearing an old gray blouse and a calf-length blue skirt. Carver wondered if she ever wore slacks. Ever cursed like a sailor. Masturbated.

“Getting things straightened up,” she explained, as she sat down on the sofa opposite Carver, who’d set his cane and lowered himself into a chair. He wondered if she meant her house or her life. He was aware of the acrid scent of just-vacuumed carpet, and there were parallel tracks in the plush pile of the living room. The dishwasher was running, and the soapy fragrance of perfumed detergent drifted from the kitchen. Underlying it all was the subtle scent of roses.

“I talked to Dr. Billingsly,” he said, “and he assured me there was nothing unusual about Jerome’s coronary, either statistically or from what he observed in the operating room.”

Hattie nodded distractedly. It was unlike her not to focus in. “Yes, Dr. Billingsly mentioned to me he was present when Jerome’s official death occurred.” She brushed back a wisp of thinning gray hair and suddenly stared directly at Carver. Her seamed, chiseled features would have been a credit to Mount Rushmore. “I heard on the news about Maude Crane’s suicide.”

Carver didn’t know quite what to say, so he merely nodded.

She said, “Suicide, my eye, young man!”

“Why do you say that?” Treading carefully.

“I know about her affair with my husband, Mr. Carver. Known about it for years.”

Carver decided that sounded right. Not much got past Hattie. “Was Jerome aware that you knew?”

She gave him an incredulous look. “Of course not.”

“I’ve talked to the police, and to Billingsly, about Maude Crane’s death. They’re calling it suicide.”

“They can be wrong. They’re not infallible.”

“Are you?”

“I come closer.”

Carver leaned forward in his chair, both hands folded over the crook of his cane. “Hattie, if you did manage to convince the police the Crane woman’s death wasn’t suicide, you’d be the prime suspect.”

“Well, maybe I killed her.”

“Not likely.”

“You don’t think I’m capable of such a thing?”

“I think you’re too logical.”

She smiled in a way he liked. “I’ve always taken pride in my ability to do whatever’s necessary in any situation.”

“Me, too,” Carver said.

“I sensed that in you. That’s why I hired you. I also assume you’re smart enough to see that my killing Maude Crane would have been in no way necessary. Before Jerome died, maybe. Certainly not now.”

“She killed herself,” Carver said, not sure if he believed it. “I saw the suicide note.”

“Did it tell about her and Jerome?”

“Yeah, so the police know about the affair, and your possible motive.”

“I don’t blame Jerome for the affair,” Hattie said. “Did the note say something about his cold and unresponsive wife?”

“Words to that effect,” Carver admitted.

“Hmph! Well, Jerome had his reasons to stray, and perhaps sex was one of them. But we were married forty-three years, Mr. Carver. That creates bonds that couldn’t be broken by Jerome occasionally having his way with some lonely widow in the dark. Maude Crane was a fool if she believed otherwise, like foolish other women down through time.”

“People not married forty-three years might not understand that,” Carver said.

“Do you?”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“I’m in some ways responsible for the furtive and disgusting extramarital affair, and if I thought Maude Crane actually killed herself, I’d feel partly responsible for her death.”

Carver didn’t want to hurt her even more deeply, but he decided he’d better lay out the cards faceup for her. “You’re telling me you think Jerome’s and Maude Crane’s deaths were murder, which would mean there’s some kind of conspiracy. But what evidence there is points in the opposite direction. You’ve got to realize the police will write your ideas off as the suspicious nature that often accompanies advanced age.”

“You mean they’ll figure me for an addle-brained, paranoid old woman.”

“Well, yes.”

“I hired you to think otherwise. Do you?”

He grinned. Hattie wasn’t one to hesitate laying down her own cards faceup. “Yeah, I think otherwise, or I wouldn’t be letting you spend your money on my services. But I have to tell you, I’m not as sure as you are that there’s something irregular going on.”

“Was the Crane woman’s suicide note handwritten?”

“No, it was typed and signed in pen.”

“Hmph!”

Carver sighed.

Hattie said, “Keep digging, Mr. Carver. You’re an honorable man and you’ll earn your money. That’s all I ask.”

“I’ll pick up the threads and follow them,” Carver told her, “but I can’t guarantee you’ll like where they lead.”

“If they lead to the truth, Mr. Carver, I’ll be satisfied. Now, would you like a glass of lemonade?”

Carver told her yes, that would be fine, and they sat in her screened-in “Florida room” attached to the back of the house and sipped lemonade from tall frosted glasses.

“Freshly squeezed fruit from my own trees,” Hattie told him with satisfaction.

He wasn’t surprised to find it unsweetened.