Tropical Heat

CHAPTER 8

Carver walked alongside Ernie Franks down some concrete steps leading to a man-made, landscaped plateau below the level of the Sun South towers but above the level of the beach. They strolled slowly along a walkway above the beach, through brilliant sunlight and stark shadow. Beyond the protective metal railing bordering the walk, Carver could see half a dozen sunbathers lounging on the pale sand. The heads of a few adventuresome swimmers bobbed out beyond where the waves began to rise for their rush and break onto the beach. Farther out, a small boat with a canvas-topped flying bridge lazily trolled for deep-sea fish. The strip of ground where Carver and Franks walked was grassy and dotted with small palm trees whose trunks had been painted white halfway up. At random between the palms, lush and colorful tropical flowers, like bright exotic birds perched on stems, swayed in the warm ocean breeze.

Sunk in the side of the hill was a sign, the words Sun South lettered with seashells that had been artistically and elaborately set in concrete. As he walked past the sign, Franks absently extended his hand and let his fingertips brush the shell-letters. In so large and powerful a man, the gesture seemed oddly gentle and pathetically possessive.

“I talked to Lieutenant Desoto about you,” he said. “And I did some checking into your background.”

Carver said nothing, watched the white surf rage beneath them on the beach.

“You were a good cop. And you’re an honest private cop now. Bad luck about the injury.”

“It’s the sort of thing that happens to good cops,” Carver said, not without a touch of bitterness. Edwina would arch an eyebrow at him if she were there. Cynical Carver. Pessimist. Maybe she was right. It took a while to get over a bullet. Catching one wasn’t like catching a cold.

He watched a teen-age boy hop up from where he’d been stretched out on a towel and run to dive with splashing abandon into the surf. Carver thought about how he had to enter the water. How he had to crawl.

Then he thought about how he might be dead now, how the kid at the grocery store might have aimed higher with the junk revolver. The jasmine scent of the flowers became sharper, sweeter.

Franks stopped walking, leaned on the iron rail, and gazed out over the beach and ocean, his domain on the edge of the world. Disney didn’t have a monopoly on magic kingdoms in Florida; they were dotted up and down the coasts. “There’s something I didn’t tell the police when they asked me about Willis,” he said. “I’ve decided to confide in you.”

“Why me?”

“Practicality. My sources tell me you can be trusted, and you’re already into this thing, already searching for Willis.”

“Then you don’t think he’s dead either?”

“I’m not sure,” Franks said, “but my bet would be on him being alive. Your earlier visit helped me to decide that. I think he knew it was time to get out, so he faked his suicide and went into hiding.”

“Time to get out of what?” Carver asked.

Franks straightened up from the railing. Still looking seaward, he lit a cigar, shielding the flame of his gold lighter expertly with a pale, cupped hand. He exhaled heavily; the breeze shredded the smoke and whisked it away. There was pain on his seamed, congenial salesman features. The gray, suave guy was suffering; this wasn’t going to be easy for him. “For each Sun South unit there are, of course, only a maximum of fifty-two potential buyers, one for each week of the year. I discovered that Willis was selling some of the units more than fifty-two times, writing contracts to different customers for time shares for the same prime weeks. He’d collect their down payment or earnest money, in some cases a large percentage of the time-share price, and deposit the money in a secret Sun South bank account that operated on his signature.”

“What was supposed to happen when two or more ‘owners’ showed up at the same time to claim their week in the same unit?”

“Willis planned to have disappeared by then. He made sure the weeks he sold were for next winter, or for units still under construction that wouldn’t be completed until then, so he had months to work his scheme before he had to get out.”

“How did you discover what he was doing?”

“Two days after he disappeared, someone at the bank where he had the account contacted me on routine business, keeping up personal contact so Sun South would continue to use the bank. He thought we were happy with their service, and he was surprised when we’d drawn out so much money without explanation. He was even more surprised when I told him we didn’t have an account at his bank. Then I was surprised when he told me Sun South had carried an account there for the past four months, and had drawn out over a hundred thousand dollars the previous week.” Franks smiled helplessly around the cigar, puffed some more smoke, then withdrew the cigar from his mouth and flicked gray ash for the wind to take. “He told me the account’s balance was two hundred dollars.” Franks tried to laugh; it caught like a barb in his throat. “Just enough to keep the account open and not attract too much suspicion.”

Carver walked away from the railing, to a small concrete bench in the shade of a palm tree, but he didn’t sit down. He looked from the shade out into the sun, where Franks was standing just a few feet away as if he sought the heat to help purge him of what had been done to him.

“He was an even better salesman than I thought,” Franks muttered. He bowed his head for a moment, saddened by his capacity to trust. A virtue in his faith, a weakness in the world of commerce.

“So Willis is gone, along with a hundred thousand dollars,” Carver said. That answered and also raised some questions.

“One hundred twelve thousand dollars exactly,” Franks said. “I have a copy of the signed withdrawal slip. It carries Willis’s signature, along with a phony signature of a make-believe Sun South treasurer.”

Carver asked the most obvious of the recently raised questions. “Why didn’t you tell the police?”

Franks shook his head, as if the police had never been one of his alternatives. “I decided there was a better way,” he said. “Time-share projects already don’t have the best reputation in Florida; public knowledge of what Willis did would put me out of business. It would be especially bad because I’m a member of the Florida Real Estate Commission; there wouldn’t be anything left of my reputation after the news media finished with me. I’m an honest man, Carver, but that wouldn’t make any difference to the wolves who are just waiting to attack another crooked land developer.”

“It’s not easy being honest these days,” Carver said.

“Or inexpensive,” Franks added. “I got the names of the customers Willis had bilked, contacted them personally, and returned their money or gave them deals on other time-share units. It’s about all I’ve been doing these last two weeks. That and worrying.”

“If you’ve satisfied the victims,” Carver said, “why are you so concerned about negative publicity?”

“I’m not sure I found all the victims. Maybe there are more whose money was placed somewhere other than in the bogus bank account. They could rear up and bite me any time. Ruin me.” Franks had lost interest in his cigar. He let it go out by itself and held the butt, unwilling to drop it and desecrate the pure landscaped world he’d created. “Willis-if he’s still alive-is the only one who can set my mind at ease as to whether there are more victims. I want to hire you to find him, and to recover what’s left of my hundred thousand dollars. You can tell Willis I won’t prosecute if he returns the money and a complete list of the buyers he bilked.”

“I already have a client who wants Willis,” Carver said.

“Edwina Talbot, no doubt.”

“Did you ask her about Willis and the missing money?

“No. I definitely don’t want anyone else to know about it. Anyway, I trust Edwina and don’t think she was involved, despite her relationship with Willis. And her hiring you convinced me she doesn’t know his whereabouts.”

Carver hadn’t actually said Edwina had hired him, but he didn’t bother to point this out to Franks.

“You can inform your client about me,” Franks said. “I don’t care. Or let’s just say I’m hiring you to recover the money. The duplication of effort should make things easier for you. And I’ll pay you half of whatever money you recover. It’s a dead loss otherwise.”

It didn’t take Carver long to work basic mathematics and make up his mind.

“I want to make it clear to you that I already have a principal client when it comes to locating Willis Davis,” he said. “Your offer to find Davis, and the recovery of the money, are secondary to my first client’s interests. It has to be that way.”

Franks smiled. “Your ethics could prove costly.”

“Yours already have proved costly.”

There went the smile. “Maybe I can give you a starting point,” he said. “Sam Cahill.”

“Do you think he was in on the racket with Willis?”

“No, Sam would never be involved in anything of that magnitude. But he and Willis were friends, and I never trusted Cahill completely. I had to fire him when I found out he’d been supplying cocaine to some of the other employees. But it was small, recreational amounts; I don’t think Sam was actually dealing. It was just something I had to stop or the law might have.”

“You told me you didn’t know where Cahill had gone when he left Sun South.”

“After you told me Willis might be alive, I found out. Through the real-estate commission. Sam kept up his Florida broker’s license and is selling backwater property in and around a little town called Solarville, on the edge of the Everglades. At least he was a week ago. If he’s moved on, you should be able to locate him.”

“Do you think Willis Davis might be in the same area?”

“I doubt it. Davis is too smart to stay in Florida. But Cahill might know where he is.”

“He might,” Carver agreed. He felt a subtle heightening of his senses, a racing of his blood. A cop’s hunch, a hunter’s instinct, the sort of thing a department-bound policeman often had to ignore, but that a private cop couldn’t. Carver wanted badly to find Sam Cahill.

Franks somehow gauged Carver’s piqued interest, took a deep breath and let it out slowly, as if in relief. “Then we have a deal, Mr. Carver.” He switched the dead cigar to his left hand and held out his right. The acrid scent of tobacco rose with the hand. Along with the perfumed scent of the flowers, it got to Carver’s stomach, made him a little nauseated.

Carver pumped Franks’s hand a few times, sensing that the handshake was as binding as a written contract. But also knowing that Franks’s money would be in his possession first, for him to deduct his percentage before turning it over to Franks. Cynical Carver again, jaded by his job. He found himself wondering if Franks’s signature was on that crucifixion oath.

Carver didn’t feel quite right about this new aspect of the case, and he wasn’t sure why. He’d have to be a fool, or someone who couldn’t figure percentages, to turn down Franks’s offer. As Desoto often pointed out, Carver hardly had the financial means to discriminately choose his clients and remain in the private-investigation business. This was an occupation, not a series of causes. And Desoto was right about Carver not knowing any other line of work. Not wanting any other. But Carver, even as a cop, had relied too much on hunches, on the subtle stirrings at the back of his mind. And there was a silent and persistent something back there now that kept telling him he was getting deeper into where he didn’t belong, and he might have no way to climb back out.

He realized he had lived with that feeling since he’d met Edwina.

As he followed Franks back up the zigzagging flights of concrete steps to Sun South’s main grounds, he resolved not to be so unceasingly suspicious. It was unrealistic. Unhealthy.

Half a mile out to sea, the man on the canvas-shaded flying bridge lowered his binoculars and shouted an order in Spanish. A shirtless man on the deck reeled in the trolling lines, and the boat turned away from the beach.

It chugged and pitched into the waves, then gained speed and headed south along the coastline.