Tropical Heat

CHAPTER 27

“Do you know them?” Desoto asked. “They knew you.” Carver stood beside Desoto and a gum-chewing attendant in the morgue in Orlando. This time it wasn’t so tough. Maybe that was because the spaciousness and business atmosphere of the place made the bodies on the carts, a man and a woman, seem somehow unreal, like wax creations set out for display. Or maybe it was because these were people he hadn’t killed.

“I’m not sure,” Carver said. “They look familiar.”

For an unsettling instant, the two pale, nude cadavers reminded him of himself and Edwina just a few hours ago; he wondered if that accounted for the disturbing sense of familiarity. Every cop knew love had too much to do with death.

The man and woman were both slender, and looked as if they were in their mid-forties when they died. There were cleaned-up contusions on both their foreheads. The woman’s frail body was slightly misshapen, bent, just beneath her pointed breasts. One of the man’s legs obviously had been broken, and his nose was mashed.

Carver breathed in some of the mint-disinfectant scent of the morgue and swallowed. Now this scene was quickly becoming too real for him. Too much death for one day. “How did they die?” he asked.

“Instantly. A one-car accident on Highway 75. They went off the road, down an embankment, and hit a concrete bridge abutment at high speed. There was some heavy vegetation down there and the wreckage wasn’t found until this morning. Time of death is placed as late last night, about when you and Jorge Lujan were trying to teach each other to swim.”

Carver looked away from the bodies, at Desoto. “Is that all that ties this accident with me, the time of death?”

Desoto arched a hand and delicately smoothed his dark hair, almost as if he had a mirror before him. In the presence of the dead, the vain and commonplace gesture was strikingly incongruous. “That, and the woman had your name written on a piece of paper in her attache case. Along with a receipt from the Tumble Inn Motel in Solarville, dated one of the nights you stayed there.”

Recognition rushed at Carver now. “Was the car a black Lincoln?”

Desoto nodded.

Carver looked again at the bodies, tried to reach beyond the impersonality of death and imagine them in life, without their injuries. The man in a three-piece suit, the woman not nude and crushed, but sleek and fully dressed and with a diamond, gimmick wristwatch. People with grand desires and petty grievances and places to go. The executive types he’d seen in the motel restaurant his first night in Solarville. The wealthy tourists.

“I don’t know their names,” he told Desoto, “but I remember them from the motel. They seemed to have money. I pegged them for a rich couple roaming around doing Florida. You know the type: travel as a hobby.”

“They weren’t married,” Desoto said. “Maybe they were sleeping together; people do. He was David Panacho, with a wife and kids in Gainesville, and she was Mildred Kern, single, from Orlando. They were employees of Disney World; the Lincoln was a company car.”

“An exec and his secretary on vacation,” Carver suggested.

“They were both executives. We’re checking now to find out more about them.”

“An accident,” Carver said. “I don’t see how this fits in with me, with Willis Eiler. Or don’t you think it was an accident?”

Desoto shrugged inside his elegant suitcoat. “Who knows for sure about this kind of crash? One car involved, nobody around to see it happen. Someone could have driven them to the edge of the embankment, then sent the car over. Or possibly it was a suicide pact, or suicide and murder. Death by misadventure, amigo. There were no skid marks.”

“Or whoever was driving could have fallen asleep at the wheel and the car went off the road.”

“That’s the hypothesis,” Desoto said. “Whatever’s simplest is most likely. But why would the Kern woman have your name written on a scrap of paper? Nothing else, just your name?”

Carver didn’t answer. He didn’t know. Maybe it all meant nothing. It could be that Desoto was making too much of this. Possibly he’d seen the old movie Out of the Past the night before, the ending where Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer careened to their deaths in a ’46 Chevy.

But he knew Desoto had something else in mind. “You think they were in on the drug deal?” Carver asked.

“It’s not impossible. Burr’s almost convinced of it. He’s looking into their lives right now. Panacho’s wife told him her husband had phoned and had hinted he’d unexpectedly discovered something important. He wouldn’t say what it was about. She said he sounded scared, but that might only be the hindsight of grief. Burr’s on his way to talk to the Disney people: Fearless Fosdick in the Magic Kingdom.”

Desoto nodded to the gum-chomping attendant, who ushered them into the warmer area of the morgue. Carver followed the lieutenant out of the building, onto the hot sidewalk. Deja vu. Carver had had enough of looking at corpses and then going out to stand in the heat. He felt nauseated, chilled despite the sun.

“You okay, amigo?” Desoto asked, staring at him.

Carver nodded. “Yeah, relatively.”

“Not an easy world sometimes.”

“Not easy ever, it seems for some people.”

“Maybe it’s meant to be that way. A test for us.”

“That is a lot of crap perpetuated by the folks who like to wear hair shirts.”

“Oh, probably. You told Edwina Talbot about her Willis, eh?”

“This morning. Just before I drove here.”

Desoto’s features sharpened in concern. “How did the news set with her?”

“I’m not sure yet. It was rough on her at first. She tried not to accept it.”

“But you wouldn’t let her lie to herself. Not anymore. Not you.”

Carver squinted against the lowering sun and stared at Desoto. Sometimes the handsome lieutenant’s perceptiveness surprised him. “That’s how it was,” he said, “and I think she has stopped lying to herself, stopped idolizing Willis. But I’m not sure.”

“You’re going back to her now?”

“Yes,” Carver said. “Then we’re driving to Solarville.”

“Under it all,” Desoto said, “she’s strong. I found that out during her visits about Willis. Someday you’ll be surprised by how strong she is.”

“I hope so,” Carver told him, and left him standing there in the slanted, burning sunlight.

Carver limped across the street and got in the Olds. As he started the engine and pulled away from the curb, he saw Desoto still standing on the sidewalk, thinking. Adding, subtracting, not getting answers, wandering through the obscure and trying to bring it into focus, make sense of it, not having any luck.

Carver knew how he felt. Every turn seemed to lead to more turns; every frustration seemed to beget more of the same. The search for Willis Davis had about it a dreamlike quality of quiet madness. Carver felt at times as if he were trying to feel his way through the miasma of nightmares. Then there were times when he seemed to see clearly, but objects on his mind’s horizon simply receded further out of reach as he advanced, eluding him. He wondered how it would be to forget all of this and get a job selling insurance. Or maybe even real estate.

But he only wondered for a moment; he’d never make a salesman. “What other kind of work do you know?” Desoto had asked. Carver knew the answer to that one and had to live with it.

After wending his way out of Orlando and onto the highway, he drove fast back to Del Moray.