Tropical Heat

CHAPTER 3

Carver was awake at five-thirty the next morning, lying in bed in the dimness, turning over in his mind the day six months before when he’d been injured. The kid had taken careful aim and shot him in the knee for the perverse thrill of it. Probably he’d heard about the Irish Republican Army punishing informers by shattering their kneecaps with gunfire, and thought now that he had a cop cornered it might be fun to try this imaginative and permanent imposition of his will. The kid was doing ten to twenty years now in Raiford Prison for armed robbery and assault. Sometimes Carver wished another con would stick a knife in the kid; other times, more and more often now, he didn’t much care and had to remind himself that he should lust for vengeance.

He did wish he hadn’t dropped his revolver as commanded when the second holdup man had stepped out of the back room of the all-night grocery store.

Carver had been off duty that evening and stopped at the store for a pound of ground beef, when he realized a robbery was going down. Realized it by the studied nonchalance of the only other customer, a young Latino with his right hand in his jacket pocket. Realized it by the rubbery features and scent of fear of the old man behind the counter. The Latino youth had sensed cop, panicked, and begun to run, and Carver drew his revolver, yelled that he was police, and ordered the fleeing suspect to halt. All by the book. And the book worked. The suspect stopped abruptly and raised his hands.

That’s when the book failed Carver. A soft voice behind him said, “Drop the piece, Wyatt Earp, and nobody gets their guts shot out.” It was the kind of voice Carver had heard a few times before, not scared when it should have been scared, and with a touch of gloating, sadistic humor. Carver let the comforting weight of his revolver drop to the floor. His heart fell with it.

The second gunman had been in the back room. He was a skinny black kid about twenty, with a scraggly bandito mustache and a frantically active protruding Adam’s apple. When he walked around Carver on his way to the door, gripping a grocery sack full of money in one hand and a cheap oversized revolver in the other, he lowered the aim of the pistol, and blasted away Carver’s kneecap. It was as if he’d done that sort of thing almost every day of his life; as natural as zipping up his pants.

Carver was on the floor before he knew what had happened, aware of nothing but a numbness in his leg. And within a few seconds came the pain that was to be Carver’s close companion-the blinding, encompassing pain. Pain that absorbed him and shut out the rest of the world. He was unaware that the woman who had been knocked unconscious in the back room had come to and phoned the police, unaware that both youthful holdup men, including the skinny black one with the gun stuck in his belt, had been stopped in the parking lot and arrested. Unaware of anything but the searing everything of the pain, sickening him, sending him in a terrifying plunge down a black well that was bored to the center of the earth.

Then the hospital room. White. Everything white. Clean.

Safe.

And the infuriating news about his leg.

For a moment Carver thought he was back in the hospital. Then he realized he was in his own bed at home, squeezing the beaded edges of the mattress so hard that his fingers ached. The sea made soothing whispering sounds outside his open windows, telling him to relax, the pain had ended. Maybe that was why he’d really moved there, for the mothering, comforting sound of the sea.

Carver swiveled to sit on the edge of the mattress, then reached for his cane and stood up. He was dizzy for a few seconds, and sweating heavily, though the morning hadn’t begun to heat up. Nude, he limped across the room to the bathroom, hung his cane on the doorknob, and stepped into the shower stall.

The blast of cold water jolted him awake cruelly and lodged his mind firmly in the present. When he was chilled and began to shiver, he turned on the hot tap. He was spending too much time alone since the injury, that was for sure. Planted in the past.

Vegetating.

When he’d finished showering, Carver shaved for the first time in three days. After rinsing the lather from his face, he liked what he saw in the fogged mirror a little better. But only a little. He had never been a handsome man, but now his face had taken on a new, predatory gauntness. He was dark, almost swarthy, except for his sun-bleached eyebrows and pale blue eyes. And he was practically out of hair now, gleamingly bald on top but with thick grayish curls around his ears and growing well down the back of his neck. The line of his nose was long and straight; his mouth was full-lipped and resolute, turned down slightly at one corner by a thin, boyhood scar. Ugly dude. Mean dude. The best you could say about his features was that they were strong.

Carver evened his sideburns and said the hell with it. He didn’t want to pose for calendars. He was forty-five and liked fortyish women who had a few nicks and scars themselves. Stretch marks were kind of sexy; they indicated that the mind had been stretched, too.

He dressed in a blue-and-gray-striped pullover shirt that had some kind of animal embroidered above the pocket, clean navy blue dress slacks, dark socks, and well-worn loafers. The Paris hoodlum look. Then he walked outside to his car.

It was a 1973 Oldsmobile convertible, and Carver had left the top down when it rained. But that was okay; the car had been rusty already and the rain that had gone in the top had run out the bottom. The leather interior was dry and warm and purified by the sun. Carver got in and the Olds started on the first try, as if to confirm that appearances deceived and it could still do its stuff.

He drove down the narrow road to the coast highway, then headed south. The Olds was large, with plenty of room for his stiff leg, and driving was no problem with the automatic transmission.

A mile down the highway was a slow-food restaurant where Carver intended to stop for a big breakfast of hotcakes, sausage, and coffee. He would have a second cup of coffee, and maybe smoke a Swisher Sweet cigar if there was nobody around who looked like they might complain.

Then he’d drive the rest of the way into Del Moray and talk to Edwina Talbot.

Her house was small, like his, only it was worth about three times as much. Carver drove up the winding driveway and parked beneath three tall date palms planted in a perfect triangle marked off by fancy red stones. The house was constructed of brownish brick with a red front door and a low red tile roof. Beyond it Carver could see the blue Atlantic merge with a paler blue sky. When he switched off the engine, the sea muttered incomprehensible secrets to him.

A gate opened in a stone wall that joined the north side of the house, and Edwina walked out. She was wearing a dark blue one-piece bathing suit, Mexican sandals, and was carrying a drink in her right hand. In her left hand was a pair of sunglasses with very dark oversized lenses. Her tanned, slender body was superb but for legs that were slightly bowed. That was the only thing wrong with her legs.

Mustn’t grade women like cattle, Carver admonished himself, as he gripped his cane and got out of the car.

“I heard you drive up,” Edwina said, walking closer, looking better, worth the blue ribbon. She didn’t seem surprised to see him; probably not much surprised her. Her dark hair was pulled back and bobby-pinned, emphasizing angular cheekbones and a graceful jawline. The patient intentness was still in her eyes; they were the eyes of a stalking cat. “Have you decided to search for Willis?”

“Yes.”

She smiled; the cat had cornered a mouse. “It’s a long drive here from your place. How did you know I’d be home?”

“I didn’t. I was prepared to wait for you.”

“You could have simply phoned, Mr. Carver. Or did you want to see me again?”

“I wanted to see your house. To see how much you might be worth so I’ll know how much to charge you.”

Edwina laughed low and melodiously. Carver liked the way the tendons in her throat tightened and moved.

“You’re toying with me, Edwina,” he said. “Checking to see where you might attach strings to me.”

She sobered. The laugh went silent and became a smile. “I’ll do whatever I have to in order to get somebody with ability to search for Willis.” She dangled the sunglasses, looking down at them. Then she put them on, as if suddenly deciding to effect a disguise. “Come on back by the pool, Mr. Carver. We’ll sit in the shade and talk.”

She turned and strode through stark shadows back toward the open gate, not waiting for him. Carver limped behind her, watching the switch of her trim hips. He was feeling stronger, getting more competent with the cane.

They sat opposite each other on wrought-iron white chairs at a metal table with an umbrella sprouting like a mutant tropical flower from its center. Edwina set her glass down on a plastic coaster. Carver guessed that the glass contained grapefruit juice. Or maybe it was a Margarita sans salt.

“Would you like something cool to drink?” she asked. “Or coffee?”

Carver declined. He was looking across the small round swimming pool at a brick veranda where another, larger table, with a fringed blue umbrella, was surrounded by four webbed aluminum chairs. Beyond the table was a low, curved brick wall with a long redwood planter on top. There were a lot of colorful flowers in the planter, and something green and viny draped out of one end. On the other side of the low wall the ground sloped gradually to what must have been the drop Edwina had described. They were up high, on a point of land jutting out from the coast. From where they sat, the sea and sky looked incredibly blue and vast.

“Tell me about Willis Davis,” Carver said.

Edwina stared at her glass, slowly lifting it just a fraction of an inch off the metal table and putting it back down in its wet ring, as if studying with a scientific eye the amazing adhesion of the water. “Willis is a considerate, gentle man.”

“Likewise Bluebeard and Theodore Bundy. Tell me about Willis.”

“He’s a soft touch who probably got in trouble helping someone. So soft, in fact, that, to tell you the truth, it’s difficult for me to imagine him as a salesman. But on the other hand, there’s something tremendously persuasive about him. I’ve seen him use that persuasiveness on a customer. If he believes in a product, he might be able to sell it better than a dozen high-pressure types like me.”

“You don’t strike me as high-pressure,” Carver said. “High-voltage, maybe. It could be you’re not as hard as you think.”

“You haven’t seen me trying to close a real-estate deal.” She looked up from her drink. Her eyes were barely visible behind the green-tinted lenses. “I don’t mean pushy; that’s not what I am. Maybe I’m not exactly high-pressure at that. But I am relentless. That’s part of what I saw in Willis-a quiet, calm relentlessness.”

“Do you have a photograph of him?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Edwina shrugged. “I didn’t know it was required by law. Some people are camera bugs, some aren’t. I never took his photograph; I don’t even own a camera.”

“Don’t real-estate salespeople around here photograph the houses they list?”

“No, a professional photographer hired by the company does that.”

“So describe Willis.”

Edwina drummed her fingertips on the metal table. The sound annoyed Carver. He could feel the subtle vibrations with his own hand, which was resting on his side of the table.

“He’s difficult to describe,” Edwina said finally. “He’s about your height-maybe five-foot-ten. Where you’re lean and muscular, Willis is well built but maybe a few pounds overweight. Still, he doesn’t have a stomach paunch and isn’t soft.”

“What color are his hair and eyes?” Carver asked.

“His hair is medium brown. His eyes are what you might call hazel. He’s sort of average-complexioned, with handsome, regular features. He has no distinguishing marks that I can think of. Oh-he has a scar on his right shoulder, in front, from an operation he had when he got hurt playing high-school football.”

“A shoulder separation?” That was the most common football injury that would leave the kind of scar Edwina had described.

“I don’t know.”

“What high school?”

“A private school up north. He was the team’s quarterback.”

“Where exactly is Willis from?”

“Orlando.”

“I mean, before that.”

“He never said. He did mention that he’d lived a while in the Midwest.”

“Did you get the impression he was a Florida native?”

“Nobody is a Florida native. Willis has a kind of nonregional accent. Which is no accent at all, if you know what I mean.”

“Sure. Like one of those talking-suit network TV anchormen: coast-to-coast bland. But what sort of dresser is Willis? Does he favor flashy clothes? Does he wear plaid socks and striped shorts?”

“He’s a conservative dresser,” Edwina said. “His suits are mostly gray and blue, with vests. He wears white shirts and ties that aren’t loud. His jackets don’t even have patterns in the material.”

“Expensive clothes?”

“Some cost a lot, some didn’t. He doesn’t wear thousand-dollar suits, but he mentioned once having a tailor.”

“You don’t have the tailor’s name, I suppose.”

“No.”

“Who are his friends in Orlando?”

“I never met any of them,” Edwina said. “It wasn’t that long after we met before he moved in with me here. Del Moray is where we spent most of our time together.”

“Where did Willis work?”

“At Sun South, just outside of Del Moray. Where I was working when we met. He sold time-share units. Do you know what those are?”

“I’m from Florida,” Carver said. Time-share projects were big in Florida. The customer bought the privilege of spending one or more weeks every year in an apartment, usually by the ocean. If he bought one week, he was in effect purchasing one fifty-second ownership of the apartment. Two weeks, one twenty-sixth. And so on. Time shares were a popular way to own at least a piece of valuable beachfront property that might continue to appreciate and be sold at a profit. Might.

“Who was Willis’s boss at Sun South?” Carver asked.

“Ernie Franks, the developer who built the project. Willis liked and admired him.”

Carver thought it was convenient to have his questions anticipated. Edwina seemed to be ahead of him; he wondered how far ahead. He stood up, bumping his head on the umbrella, and walked around the pool and onto the veranda.

Edwina followed him. As if she thought he might stumble and she should be there to catch him. He didn’t like that. She sensed it and fell back.

Carver stepped over another low wall and walked toward the edge of the drop above the sea.

“Be careful, Mr. Carver,” Edwina called behind him. She had stayed on the veranda and was staring out at him with what on her stony features passed for alarm.

“Don’t worry,” Carver tossed back over his shoulder, “I used to be in show business, diving into shallow water from a high platform in the circus.”

“Really?”

“No.” Carver inched nearer the edge of the outcropping of land and looked down. Diving experience wouldn’t help him here anyway; the sea foamed around unevenly piled jagged rocks directly below, and the water didn’t appear to be more than a few feet deep. His stomach took the plunge, beckoning Carver to follow. He declined and dizzily moved back from the drop, then turned to face Edwina. “Where were Willis’s jacket and shoes found?”

She pointed to a spot on the ground a few feet to Carver’s left.

The bare, rocky soil told him nothing. He started back to the veranda. By the time he got there, Edwina was seated in one of the webbed chairs at the table, waiting for him.

“Where are the shoes and jacket?” he asked.

“The police kept them.”

Carver sat down in one of the other chairs. He saw that his pants were dirty from when he’d struggled over the low walls around the veranda. He brushed at the loose earth and it fell away. “What else can you tell me about Willis?” he asked.

“He loved me.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Is it important to you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sure. One other man loved me in my life. It was the same way it was with Willis. I don’t want the result to be the same.”

Carver stared at her, sensed pain. There was something pertinent she wasn’t telling him. “Okay,” he said. He stood up, bumping his head on that umbrella as he had on the one by the pool. It felt about the same.

Edwina removed her sunglasses and looked up at him, appraising him with a pawnbroker’s squint. She had a way of seeming to see to the center of things.

“You look better than when we met at your place,” she said. “Almost as if you don’t mind being alive. It’s because you have a job now. A challenge.”

“I’m not a victim of the work ethic,” Carver told her, knowing better. He was like Edwina; he needed an obsession, maybe even one that carried moral obligation, so he could push himself until he was satisfied that he’d done the job: an illusion of forward motion in life. But he had his doubts about whether Willis Davis was worth all of that. “When I find out anything important, I’ll let you know,” he said. He got a firm grip on his cane and started back around the pool to go to his car.

Edwina walked next to him, her sandals making soft slapping sounds against the bottoms of her feet. Her slow pace was Carver’s normal one, with the cane. She didn’t open the gate for him, or the car door.

Carver settled in behind the steering wheel, twisted the ignition key, and the Oldsmobile’s big V-8 engine growled and rumbled like the dinosaur it was. He felt its powerful vibration in his thighs and buttocks, throughout his body.

“We haven’t discussed your fee,” Edwina said, standing alongside the car.

“We’ll discuss it when I find Willis. If I don’t find him, you can cover my expenses and that’s all.”

“That’s fair to the point of being dumb.”

“That’s me for you,” Carver said. He drove away.