Tropical Heat

CHAPTER 7

Carver drove around Del Moray for a while, looking at the wide streets, neat rows of palm trees, the rambling, expensive houses. As he drove west, away from the ocean, the streets became narrower, with hills and terraced lawns. The houses were still expensive. Only when he neared the western outskirts of town did he find himself in a poorer section, where the streets needed repaving and the houses repainting and the people hope. Most of the faces he saw on these streets were Latino or black, the maids and gardeners of the wealthier residents in the east end of town. There were shabby-looking night spots here, too, and small and obviously struggling businesses. The poor seemed to be a smaller minority in Del Moray than in most other cities. Still, they were there, and were oddly necessary in a way few would admit. Without the poor, there could, of course, be no rich. It was comforting to some people to have clearly defined rungs on the ladder.

Carver stopped at a drugstore and bought a Del Moray Gazette-Dispatch and a six-pack of Budweiser. He placed the paper and beer on the front seat of the car and got back in.

Ignoring the taunts of a group of young Latinos lounging on a corner near a frozen-custard stand, he made a U-turn, then drove back the way he’d come, toward the highway and home.

The next morning Carver swam for half an hour, then showered and cooked up a big breakfast of eggs, toast, and Canadian bacon. He felt good. He could look at his left leg now and not worriedly compare its size or shape with his right. The exercise regimen the therapist recommended would keep atrophy to a minimum if he followed it faithfully, and that was that-all he could do.

Carrying his third cup of coffee and the Del Moray paper from the day before, he limped out to the cottage’s small wooden porch and sat in the sun in a webbed aluminum lounge chair. The cup balanced okay on the chair’s plastic arm while Carver turned the paper to the classified ads. A glossy bluebottle fly landed on the real-estate section, and Carver watched it wobble down the page to a list of properties for sale by Quill, then take to the air to tend to more important matters.

After a while, Carver took a pen from his pocket, braced the folded newspaper against his thigh, and circled an advertisement for a vacant Del Moray house on Edgewick Avenue listed for an even half a million dollars. If he wasn’t going to buy a house, it might as well be an expensive one.

He tossed the rest of his cool coffee over the porch rail, admiring its bright amber arc, then went back inside and phoned Quill Realty.

The conversation worked out fine. He told whoever answered the phone that he was interested in seeing the house on Edgewick, and that someone had recommended an agent named Alice who had experience as an interior decorator. Alice could give him decorating tips while she was showing him the property.

Within half a minute he was talking to Alice, and they made an appointment to meet at the Edgewick property at ten o’clock.

Until it was time to leave for Del Moray, Carver idly watched a taped Atlanta Braves baseball game on television, mostly commercials. Somewhere in this land did flat-bellied cowboys actually drive dogies, then drive Jeeps to saloons with sawdust floors whereon trod barmaids with perfect teeth who served them diet beer? Carver doubted it. But then he hadn’t been everywhere.

He was secretly glad the game was a high-scoring dull one; he didn’t mind switching off the TV and leaving. He liked pitchers’ duels.

Carver remembered Edgewick Avenue from his drive around Del Moray the day before. It was a wide street with a grassy, palm-lined median, still in the desirable part of town, but only by a few blocks. The size and condition of the houses started slipping in this area, and an occasional Latino face could be seen among the residents. But it was still a prestige neighborhood, even if in one of the older sections of the city.

The house with a Quill Realty sign stuck in its yard was a gloomy stone monster that looked as if it might at any moment venture ponderously down from the hill on which it was so forebodingly perched to devour the smaller houses on Edgewick Avenue. It had cupolas that looked like watchtowers, and windows that resembled malevolent eyes. It was probably old when it was built, Carver decided. Also, it had a lot of damned steps.

Carver was breathing hard by the time he’d made it up to the porch, and stood before the house’s ten-foot-tall heavy oak doors. When he leaned on his cane and extended a hand to ring the doorbell, one of the doors opened smoothly and an attractive thirtyish woman with blond hair framing a roundly pretty, tiny-featured face smiled out at him. He had the strange feeling that she was the maid and would usher him into the den to await the master. Would she curtsy, call him “sire,” and step aside?

“Mr. Carver?” she said crisply, and held out a hand. When he nodded, she said, “I’m Alice Hargrove.” She spoke with the slightest suggestion of a lisp, had dark crescents beneath her eyes, as if she hadn’t slept the night before, and her too-fine short hair had been rudely mussed by the wind. Her smile made everything else about her seem unimportant; it was a light that warmed.

Carver shook the slender cool hand gently, so as not to break fine bones, and stepped into the house. Alice’s blue eyes flicked to his cane, registered no change of expression. He knew she was thinking about all the steps leading up to the house and how she might talk him into ignoring them if he turned out to be a serious prospect. You had to be wily to survive in sales.

The house was bare and needed a lot of interior work. The walls were faded and paint was peeling from the ornate woodwork. A kidney-shaped water stain marred the high ceiling. There was a large stone fireplace in the room they were in, flanked by bookcases beneath fancy stained-glass windows that muted the sun and did wonderful Technicolor tricks with the light.

“As you can see,” Alice said, “the place needs work but has tremendous potential.” Her voice bounced around in the emptiness.

Carver tapped the hardwood floor with his cane. The clatter might have been heard for miles. “I plan on putting some heavy manufacturing equipment in this room,” he said. “We build locomotive engines. Do you think the floor will support the weight?”

For only a second she was confused. “Mr. Carver, I don’t think the zoning on this property…” She stopped talking. An expression of fear, then admirable determination and cunning subtly transformed her round, sweet features. She tried not to move her eyes toward the door; he was between her and it, and that might mean everything. Here was the real-estate lady’s nightmare. “You’re not actually interested in buying this property, are you, Mr. Carver? Or is Carver your real name?”

“Relax, Alice,” Carver said reassuringly. “I’m not interested in anything you’d object to. Anyway, you could outrun me if I tried anything.”

She exhaled slowly and seemed slightly more at ease, looking dubious, waiting.

“My time is pressing and this is the surest way I could get to talk to you,” Carver explained. “My name really is Fred Carver. I’m a detective.”

“Police?”

“No, private.” Carver got out his wallet and showed her his investigator’s license.

Still dubious. He hoped she wasn’t the type who carried Mace.

“I’m working for a friend of yours,” he said. “Edwina Talbot. I think you might be able to help me help her. You can tell her about this conversation when we’re finished.”

“We could have met in a more conventional way, Mr. Carver. I’d say that the reason we didn’t was that you didn’t want me to know beforehand that the conversation was going to be about Edwina.” Perceptive lady. “Were you afraid she and I might agree on some sort of lie?”

“No,” Carver said. “It’s true that I didn’t want you and Edwina to talk before I met you, but only because what she told you might color what you’d tell me.”

“Is it so important to you that I don’t have any preconceived notions?”

“It is. I’m probing for nuances as well as hard information.”

“I thought detectives dealt only in facts.”

“We do, but first we have to catch the slippery things. That’s why I need your help.”

Alice breathed in and out noisily, got a filter-tipped cigarette from her purse, and began to pace. Beneath one of the stained-glass windows, she turned. The softened light made her twenty again. “You’re trying to find poor Willis.” She flicked a dainty silver lighter and touched the bluish tip of its flame to her cigarette in a lingering way that suggested the cigarette might enjoy it.

“Do you think he’s findable?”

“No, I don’t.” She dropped the lighter back in her purse. “What specifically do you want to talk about?”

“I want to know more about Willis Davis.”

“Such as?”

“Such as why is he Willis? Why doesn’t anybody ever call him Willie?”

Alice smiled-not as bright as her saleswoman smile but definitely more genuine. “A Willie is more casual than a Willis. A Willie might wear a shirt even though it has a stain on it, or he might miss a belt loop. A Willis wears laundered, starched shirts and has a matching belt to go with each pair of pants and never misses a loop. Believe me, Willis was a Willis. He was a fastidious dresser, fastidious about everything he did.”

“How many times did you see him?” Carver asked, remembering the ketchup stain on the sport jacket. “And for how long?”

“Oh, a dozen times, I guess. Social get-togethers. Or he’d be there when I went to Edwina’s house to see her. Willis was an okay guy; I liked him. And you could tell he cared a lot about Edwina.”

“Did Edwina care a lot about him?”

Alice looked closely at Carver, gauging him. “Edwina cared everything about him. She’s had a tough time with the men in her life, with her former husband. She’s been knocked around some. Abused physically and emotionally. It changed her, gave her a hard veneer. You might say she never met a man before Willis who could match her strengths, or maybe understand her weaknesses.”

“Do you mean a man she could look up to?” Carver always thought of Wilt Chamberlain when he used that expression.

“No, I mean a man who wouldn’t need her to be dependent, one she could look upon as her equal. The Edwina I know doesn’t do much looking up to anyone.”

Carver thought about his broken marriage to Laura. That hadn’t been exactly a fifty-fifty proposition. He’d demanded too much of her, made some classic male mistakes. And now she was living in St. Louis with their son and daughter, and he missed them, all of them at times. He’d needed to let Laura be Laura, but he hadn’t.

“Despite his kind and quiet manner, there must have been something steely-strong in Willis Davis,” Alice was saying, “because even though they’d only known each other four months before he disappeared, Edwina loved him with complete commitment. She told me that; she used those words.”

Carver wasn’t surprised. And he remembered that Edwina had told him that she and Willis met six months before. A mistake? An approximation? A lie? “What kind of words did Willis use?” he asked. “Did he seem educated? Did he use a lot of profanity? Did he say throwed and ain’t?”

“He seemed well educated, now that you mention it. And I don’t think I ever heard him curse. He seemed basically a good man, decent. That was how he struck people, as decent.”

“What sort of things did he talk about?” Carver asked.

“He talked about everything-but somehow without really saying anything. Yet he was interesting, even fascinating. He was great at cocktail parties.”

“How did he treat Edwina?”

“He was kind to her, attentive. Always the gentleman.”

“Don’t you find it unusual that a savvy woman like Edwina would fall so hard and so thoroughly for a man after knowing him only a matter of months?”

“Not at all,” Alice said. “It’s like that sometimes with some women, no matter how knowledgeable they are in other matters.”

“Did you ever get the impression that Willis was using Edwina?”

“Not in the sense you mean, not deceptively. She helped to get him his job at Sun South. Edwina’s the one who talked Ernie Franks into hiring Willis, but I wouldn’t call that using her.”

“I guess not,” Carver said. “And I suppose he could have left her afterward.”

“Actually, not right away,” Alice said thoughtfully. “From what I know of Ernie Franks, he might have thought badly of Willis if he didn’t stay with Edwina after getting the job at Sun South. Franks has the reputation of an honest, no-nonsense developer, a nice guy but no patsy. And that’s how he impressed me when I did some of the decorating for display units at Sun South. He even made me sign some kind of oath of integrity printed on a picture of the crucifixion.”

“Did you meet Sam Cahill when you were at Sun South?”

“Briefly. The fast-shuffle type. Full of glib talk and easy promises to get a client’s name on a contract. And he had big ideas. Wanted to get financing and start some kind of development of his own in central Florida.”

“With Willis Davis as a partner?”

“They talked about it. The usual slow-salesday gab to pass the time. I’m sure nothing ever came of it. I think they knew nothing would when they were tossing out their grand ideas.”

“You’re the one who phoned the police about Willis’s disappearance,” Carver said.

“Yes.” She told him about going to see Edwina, getting no answer at the front door, then walking around to the veranda and seeing the jacket and shoes at the edge of the drop.

“What went through your mind at the time?” Carver asked.

“There was something about the way he’d neatly folded the jacket and laid it on top of the shoes. Something final. As soon as I saw them near the drop’s edge, I thought he’d jumped.”

“Do you still think so?”

“Yes. I’m sorry about it-for Edwina, for Willis-but that’s what I think, that he’s dead.”

Carver was running out of questions. Sometimes that was when he asked his best ones. “Is there anything in particular about Willis that sticks in your memory?”

Alice considered that one, drawing again on the long filter-tipped cigarette and frowning. “No,” she said at last, slowly, “there’s nothing.” She raised her head slightly. “It was kind of touching, the way Edwina talked about him at times. She often referred to him as a gentle man. Not gentleman, but the two words separated.”

“Considering her past treatment,” Carver said, “that’s not surprising.” He shifted his weight and moved his cane a few inches to the right; he’d been standing too long in one spot and was getting uncomfortable. His good leg was falling asleep. “Are you going to tell Edwina about this conversation?”

Alice stared at him through a haze of exhaled smoke, a pleasant, moon-faced woman who would always seem young at first glance. “No,” she said. “I want to help her get over Willis. I think the way to do that is to keep quiet and help you.”

“I get the feeling Edwina isn’t playing exactly straight with me. Is there anything about her that I don’t know but should?”

“You’d have to ask her about that.”

“Does she confide a great deal in you?”

Alice watched a wisp of cigarette smoke curl in the muted light, then said, “There’s a part of Edwina she keeps private. I respect that and have never pried, and I don’t intend to start now.”

“All right.” Carver braced himself with the cane and moved toward the door.

Alice was standing rigidly with her arms folded, watching him. He paused at the door, turned, and looked around the cavernous bare room.

“Half a million dollars seems a little high,” he said. “Do you suppose they’d dicker?”

Alice smiled. It was a lot like the smiles he’d seen at Sun South. After leaving Alice Hargrove he drove down Palm Street toward the ocean. The morning was heating up. There were a few clouds in the west, blowing in from the gulf, making soft and empty threats of rain. Ahead of Carver, the sky was a flawless blue backdrop for the gulls to soar against. The scent of the sea wafted into the Olds with the increasing humidity.

When Carver saw a phone booth, he stopped, called his home, and listened to the messages on his answering machine. There were only two. The first was a recorded sales pitch promising a free book of tickets to Disney World with an appointment for an estimate on home remodeling; a recorder talking to a recorder. It reminded Carver of the old question about whether a sound was made if a tree fell in the woods when there was no one around to hear it. The second message was Ernie Franks suggesting that he and Carver talk again about Willis Davis. He claimed to have some important information for Carver.

Carver used the back of his hand to wipe perspiration from his forehead. Then he called Franks’s office, made an appointment to see him, and drove in the direction of Sun South.

Above the coast highway, the gulls seemed to soar and circle deliberately in front of the Olds, vying for Carver’s attention with unintelligible screams he could barely hear over the sounds of the motor and the wind.

Screams like shrill warnings.