Tropical Heat

CHAPTER 21

It rained hard at three o’clock, but not for long. The sun was out again immediately afterward, making up for lost time, reheating the concrete so that shimmering waves of vapor rose and formed a low, multicolored haze, like a rainbow that had fallen and lost form but hadn’t dissolved.

It was much hotter outside than in Desoto’s office; the window had fogged up like a medicine-cabinet mirror after somebody’s steaming bath. It made Carver feel confined, as if there were no outside world. Nothing except the low and crackling metallic voice of the dispatcher on the radio in the squad room, the clacking of a teletype or printer, the inexorable official stirrings of the law. This was Police World, with nothing beyond.

Desoto leaned back behind his desk, held up a paper clip he’d bent, and stared at it with a kind of wonder, as if it were a piece of surrealistic sculpture. “Have you gotten on better than friendly terms with Miss Edwina Talbot?” he asked.

“You have a dirty mind,” Carver told him, shifting in his chair.

“You bet. It’s fun. I think of myself as an erotic romantic.”

“You think of yourself,” Carver said.

Desoto seemed glad that he’d irritated Carver. He smiled. He speculated. “Do you sleep with that cane?” he asked.

Carver glared at him, told himself to calm down. This was Desoto, who had always been like this and wouldn’t change until his glands did. If they ever did. Carver suspected he was looking at a dirty old man in the making. Desoto would serve out his time on the force, retire, get collared for lascivious conduct in the park.

“Why do you think this Silverio Lujan tried to knife you?” Desoto asked. No more men-of-the-world talk; time for business. The DEA had been in touch with Desoto.

“Who knows?” Carver said. “He was a Marielito, and a tough one. A guy like that, maybe he just felt mean. Maybe he hadn’t stabbed anybody for a while.” He told Desoto about the missing naturalist and the matching sandal prints.

“It’s possible that Lujan knifed Mackenzie and hid the body in the swamp,” Desoto said.

“Some insight,” Carver told him. “Have you got anything more on Lujan?”

Desoto shrugged and shook his head. “He only goes back to 1980, after the boat lift. There’s no way to get a line on him for when he was in Cuba. He and his two brothers came over here together on the same boat.”

“Brothers?”

“Jorge and Alejandro,” Desoto said. He pronounced the names with a Spanish flare, made them sound beautiful, not the names of thugs. “Alejandro was killed in gang warfare in Miami.”

“What about Jorge?”

“Who can say?” Desoto adjusted his white cuffs. “Marielitos don’t notify the post office when they change address. The last anyone seems to have heard of Jorge was when he was arrested for torching a tavern in Daytona. Doused the place with gasoline and set fire to it, customers and all. He’d been in a scrap, got outfought because he was outnumbered, then left and came back fifteen minutes later with a can of gas and a match, mad at everybody. What a sore loser. Fortunately there was a back door to the place, so everyone got out. A few people were burned, one of them seriously. Jorge was tried for the crime, but witnesses declined to testify and there wasn’t enough evidence to convict.”

“Fire, huh?” Carver said, feeling the ice of fear trickle down his spine. He thought about the night he almost choked to death in his room at the Tumble Inn, the searing pain in his near-bursting lungs, the panic that had threatened to engulf him and deliver him to mindless, agonizing death.

“Fire and knives and guns and piano wire. Anything that kills,” Desoto said. “It all fits Jorge Lujan’s style. He’s probably heard his equally humanitarian brother Silverio is dead by now.” Desoto’s dark eyes took on a sad seriousness. “Venganza,” he said. Vengeance.

“You think Jorge might be after me for killing Silverio?” Carver asked. He didn’t like to think about being stalked, especially by someone with a compelling reason to kill. A reason that ran in the blood.

“Maybe,” Desoto said. “Hot Latin temperament and all that. But not to worry, amigo, the DEA will protect you.”

“You’ve met Burr?” Carver asked.

Desoto smiled, white teeth flashing. “Sure, he’s the one who filled me in on the notorious Lujan brothers. They have brief but nasty backgrounds in the U.S., Carver. Burr thinks Silverio Lujan was part of a drug scam in Solarville. But then Burr thinks everybody everywhere is part of a drug scam.”

“Lujan ran with known dealers and users,” Carver said. “According to Burr, that’s all part of being a Marielito. But Silverio Lujan and Solarville don’t necessarily add up to drugs.”

“Marielitos go where there’s money,” Desoto said, “and there is no more money anywhere in Florida than in drugs. Not illicit money, anyway. So a Lujan in Solarville means money for the Marielitos, a drug deal. It means that to Burr, anyway.”

“Burr might be right,” Carver said. He told Desoto about the coffee can with the gun, map, false I.D., and packet of cocaine, hidden behind the access panel beneath the sink in Willis Davis’s apartment.

“We went over that apartment the day after Davis disappeared,” Desoto said. “My men usually check plumbing access panels.”

“Not this time,” Carver said. “Not for a plain old uninteresting suicide.”

“Have you told Burr about this?”

“I thought I’d tell you first, see if you had anything to add. Or subtract.”

Desoto touched the heels of his hands together, then meshed his fingers. “No, you better play straight with Burr, amigo. He’s federal; he can put a permanent kink in your cane. He might be a by-the-book pain in the ass, but he’s got us all by the short hairs. And that map with the area marked off in red really might have to do with a drug deal of some kind.” He pulled his hands apart slowly, as if a delicate magnetic field that he didn’t want to break had developed between them, then leaned farther back in his chair and clasped them behind his head. “Does Edwina Talbot still believe so firmly that Willis Davis is alive?”

“Even more firmly,” Carver said. “I think he’s alive, myself. Alive and wandering around somewhere with Ernie Franks’s money.”

“And somebody else’s name.”

“Which brings me to the main reason I came here,” Carver said. “It occurred to me that if Willis used or was prepared to use either of the identities he had stashed in his apartment, he might have been using a false identity when he met Edwina. He might not be Willis Davis.” Very carefully he picked up the black attache case at his feet and laid it on Desoto’s desk. “Willis’s,” he said. “His prints, or at least a good partial, should be on it somewhere, a smooth section of leather, one of the clasps, glossy paper, the calculator that’s in here. Match them with his prints, which should be all over Edwina’s house, so you know you’ve got Willis’s prints, and run a check on them through the FBI’s master file. Maybe we’ll discover his genuine identity.”

“Such a crafty bastard you are,” Desoto said. “So much more clever than the police.”

“Not really,” Carver said, playing it as straight as Desoto. “It all comes from not regarding Willis Davis as a suicide. I have a different angle of approach. That’s an advantage. I’ll fix it with Edwina so your fingerprint crew can get in her house.”

“Will she cooperate in an attempt to prove her Willis told her another lie?” Desoto asked. “And such a big lie.”

“I think so. She wants the truth. At least some of the time. She’s come that far.”

“Some weaker sex, your Edwina Talbot.”

Carver planted the hard rubber tip of his cane and stood up. “Now you know what I know, and soon I’ll tell Alex Burr so he’ll know.”

“Like a child’s game, eh, Carver?”

“Only when you win,” Carver said. “The losers don’t see it as a game.” He started toward the door.

“You take care, amigo,” Desoto said. “What you’ve gotten yourself into can be dangerous.”

“Marielitos are bad-asses,” Carver said, “but they’re not possessed and protected by the devil.”

“I wasn’t talking about Marielitos,” Desoto said. “They might kill you, but there are slower, more exquisitely pleasurable ways to die.”

Edwina again. “Sooner or later, one way or the other, everybody dies,” Carver said.

He looked back as he limped out the door.

Desoto was grinning his erotic-romantic’s grin.