by John Lutz
“Me, too.”
“Scary, huh?”
Carver shrugged. “People like Beed are part of the work we do.”
“The work I do, in this instance.”
“You afraid to take the job?” Carver asked.
Van Meter leaned back on his stool, looking astonished and slightly angry, as if he might pull the Ten Commandments out of a pocket and set Carver straight on a few things. “Fred, Fred, you insult me. I’ll assign someone else to it.”
Carver smiled. “You’re getting smarter as the years pass.”
“Not you, Fred. That’s how come I worry about you. Why I worry about Beth, who seems to suffer from some of the same rash impulses. We need to concern ourselves with Beth, since Adam Beed’s involved in what you’re mucking around in. From what I’ve heard, he’s a kinky kinda homicidal maniac who’s got no love for women. His mother must have drop-kicked him or something. The shrinks might say he looks at a woman, even a woman like Beth, and sees his mother. Sets him off, maybe.”
“I’m not interested in his tortured childhood,” Carver said, “even if he had one and it had anything to do with what he did to that guy’s wife down in Miami.”
“Guess it ain’t really relevant now,” Van Meter admitted. He picked up Carver’s Budweiser bottle and poured beer into the glass in Carver’s hand. “Here, pal, let me put a head on that for you.”
Beth was in his bed when he got back to the motel. Carver wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He remembered what Van Meter had said about rash impulses.
“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” she said.
He shut the door and limped farther into the room. “Not much surprises me anymore, even on my birthday. How’d you get in?”
“Locks don’t concern me much, Fred.”
He leaned on his cane and looked at her in the light of the bedside reading lamp. The air conditioner was humming away on high, and she was lying on her back and covered almost to the neck with the sheet. Her lithe body seemed incredibly long. Her shoulders were bare and he was sure she was nude beneath the white cotton. She’d been reading before he’d arrived; a thick paperback book was propped open on the table that held the lamp. Something by Joseph Conrad.
After his conversation with Van Meter, it bothered him that she’d chanced being seen so they could be together for the night. Besides that, he’d stayed too long at Bixby’s, drunk several more beers and talked too much with Van Meter. He was feeling less than amorous. “It was a risk, you coming here.”
“Everything’s a risk, from birth to death, even if you’re a suburban WASP and you’ve got your life arranged so you don’t know it.”
“You sure nobody saw you?”
“Positive. I float like a shadow through the heart of darkness.”
“Some shadow.”
“It’s almost eleven o’clock, Fred, and I smell beer on you all the way over here. Where you been?”
“Drinking with Lloyd Van Meter.”
“Ah! You hiring him to help locate Adam Beed?”
“Uh-huh. You have any luck finding out about Solartown, Inc.’s major shareholders?”
“I don’t rely on luck, Fred.” She ran a long-nailed finger slowly across her lower lip. “C’mon to bed, lover. Business later.”
He wondered, what could there be about Joseph Conrad? Then he got undressed and joined her, becoming unexpectedly aroused when he felt the heat of her beneath the thin sheet. His knuckles brushed the smooth, warm expanse of her thigh.
Her hand found him and did its magic. “Knew you’d see it my way,” she said, and slid on top of him.
It was morning before he thought again about Jerome Evans or his widow Hattie or Adam Beed or Joseph Conrad. Or anything other than Beth.
She was good at that.
19
While Beth was showering the next morning, Carver drove down the highway to a doughnut shop and bought half a dozen glazed and a large cup of coffee to go.
When he returned, she was wearing panties and bra and drying her hair with a big white towel from the still-steamy bathroom. She sniffed the air and eyed the doughnut bag. “Smells yummy.”
He put the grease-spotted bag and the cup on the desk.
“Only one cup?” she said.
“Only one occupant in this room,” he reminded her. He limped into the bathroom, ripped the plastic sanitary wrap from one of the glasses, and carried the glass back out to the desk. He poured about half of the large cup of coffee into it, leaving it black. “I brought you some powdered cream,” he said, “only the label calls it ‘Mock Milk.’ ”
“Sounds heavenly, if only you remembered a plastic spoon.”
He found himself wondering if she was recalling her luxurious existence with Roberto Gomez, when coffee was no doubt brought to her and the spoons were silver, from the largest serving size down to the tiniest coke spoons worn on delicate neck chains.
When she was finished with her hair, she slipped into a pair of shorts and a clean orange blouse, then dragged over a chair to sit across from him at the desk. She sprinkled cream in her coffee, stirred it gingerly with her finger, and they went to work on breakfast.
“Fresh,” she commented, through a mouthful of glazed doughnut.
“I’m working on that,” he said.
“If I wanted bad comedy,” she told him, “I’d tune in to local news.”
After finishing his second doughnut, he wiped sugar glaze from his hands with a napkin and settled back with his coffee. He said, “Tell me about Solartown.”
She swallowed a last bite of doughnut, then licked a long finger. “The five principal shareholders are all players in the financial major leagues. We’re talking a prestigious investment company, a bank with international holdings, a lumber firm that’s one of the largest in the world, a retail chain with stores in half the states, and an insurance company that has more money than most small countries. All of them, with the possible exception of the bank, are on solid financial footing. Solartown’s a minor part of their overall picture.”
“How’d you learn all this?”
“It’s mostly public information, available at the touch of a few computer keys.”
“Your friend Jeff’s computer?”
“His and mine. The laptop I use to compose when I travel has a modem. I also called some contacts I have in various high positions. People I knew from when I was with Roberto.”
“Users?”
She nodded. “But dependable.”
“Not to their employers.”
“None of them runs a train, Fred. Don’t be so damned judgmental.”
“I wasn’t passing judgment, only wondering how good your information is.”
“It’s good as it gets. And what it means is that, unless there’s some small fish with ideas of his or her own, Solartown, Inc. is too friggin’ big to be operating some scam to do old folks outa their houses so they can resell them. That’d be like you and me hanging around schoolyards to swipe lunch money,”
“Lunch money’s stolen every day,” Carver said. “What about Brad Faravelli? He’s in a perfect position to steal from the other kids.”
“He seems okay, but who knows? Forty-two years old, married, three kids, Harvard Business School grad, been with Solartown since it began seven years ago. Before that he was a vice prez at a Wall Street investment company that went belly-up over some questionable bond trading. He wasn’t directly involved in it, by the way.”
Carver said, “Harvard. Wall Street. Jesus!”
“Don’t be a reverse snob, Fred. Anyway, I can get a better feel for it all after I interview Faravelli this afternoon. I told him I’m doing a feature story for Burrow, but it might be published in some other Florida papers, as well.”
“He believed that?” Carver asked.
“It might be the truth, Fred.” She finished her coffee, then wadded her napkin and stuffed it into the empty foam cup. There was a crescent of red from her lipstick on the cup’s rim. “W
hat about you?” she asked. “You were your usual unbleeding, unconcussed self last night, and you’d talked with Van Meter about him locating Adam Beed. So I’m assuming you didn’t run into Beed yourself, or find out much about him.”
He realized for the first time she’d risked coming to his room because she was concerned about him. Not one of her rash impulses at all.
“Beed seems to have really gotten off drugs while he was in Raiford,” he said. “He’s strictly a boozer now.”
“Same thing, different terminology. He’s an addict, if the booze is running him. He’s as outa control as if he were on coke or heroin.”
“It doesn’t seem to have that kind of hold on him.”
“Not yet. But if he’s drinking regularly, it’ll get him.”
“That a prediction?”
“I’ve seen it plenty of times. A junkie shakes the physical dependency and fancies he’s no longer part of the world of drugs, but it’s okay to have drinks with dinner, or duck into a bar now and then for a couple of something cool. All socially acceptable. Then the alcohol takes the place of whatever else he was on, takes him over body and mind just like any other drug.” She tapped a red fingernail on the desk for emphasis. “An addict’s an addict, Fred. Like a cucumber that’s become a pickle. It can never be a cucumber again. Even longtime users sometimes kid themselves they’re cucumbers again, but if they don’t stay away from drugs altogether, including alcohol, it’ll eventually kill them.”
The air conditioner had gone through a short cycle, then kicked off. Carver, sitting in the sudden silence, hadn’t realized it was running. A child began yammering outside, then car doors slammed and an engine started. Tires crunched over gravel as a vacationing family got an early start.
“Eventually, but always,” Beth said.
Carver said, “It’s nice to know that about Beed.”
After breakfast he left Beth preparing for her interview with Brad Faravelli and drove over to see Hattie Evans.
As he was parking, he saw her in the shade of her front porch. She was wearing baggy jeans and an oversize T-shirt with GRAY POWER lettered on it, tending to flowers in a plastic hanging planter she’d taken down from its hook.
“Care to come inside, Mr. Carver?” she asked, not looking at him until he’d limped almost to her.
“Don’t let me interrupt you,” he said. “We might as well enjoy it out here before the sun and the temperature get higher.”
“That won’t take long,” she said, pinching off a dead geranium. “Gotta water these constantly. Florida. It was Jerome’s idea to move down here, not mine.”
“You intend to stay?”
“Not much choice, considering the mortgage arrangement we made with Solartown.”
“Whose idea was that?”
“Jerome’s. He handled all our finances. In retrospect, it was dumb of me to let him do that.”
“You’re a capable woman,” Carver said. “You can set things right.”
“Not this house, But then, I suppose I’m happy enough here in Solartown.”
“When you bought the house, did the salesman give you the hard sell on the reverse mortgage?”
“Not really. There was no deception involved.”
“Did Jerome ever look into another form of financing? I mean, do you know if he consulted with a lender in the months before his death?”
She picked up a gray metal watering can with a daisy design on it. “Not that I know of.” She tipped the can so the long, thin spout was out of sight among the remaining flowers, letting water flow into the pot. “That’s not to say Jerome might not have seen a banker without telling me.” She shot Carver a look he couldn’t interpret. “Seems he did other things without informing me.”
Carver said nothing.
Water flowed over the rim of the pot and along the porch rail.
“I might have to leave town for a while,” he told her, “if someone I have working for me locates a man who could be important to us.”
“That Adam Beed?”
He nodded.
Hattie set the watering can down and removed her green vinyl work gloves. The gloves had oversize cuffs with the same daisy design that was on the can. “The people involved in this made a mistake trying to scare you off the case, didn’t they?”
“Looks that way,” he said.
“Can’t say I’m shocked that you’re still on the job. You reminded me immediately of some of my problem students who regarded intimidation as merely a temporary condition. Much as I regretted their presence in my classes, after all the years they’re the ones I remember.”
“Memory’s a strange thing,” Carver said.
“A precious thing,” she said, surprising him.
“Your emotions are showing, Hattie.”
She gave him a sad smile, standing there erect and holding her gloves folded in one hand as if she were a military officer. She said, “I missed out on some things in life, Mr. Carver; I’ve come to accept that because I understand it. Now I need to know about my husband’s death, so I can accept it through understanding and lit it peacefully in my past. So I won’t wake up before sunrise every morning thinking about it for the rest of my life.”
“I see what you mean,” Carver said.
“I believe you do.” She lifted the watering can again and gently doused the blossoms themselves.
“Where’s your neighbor Val Green today?”
She glared at him. “How should I know? Why should I care about the old busybody?”
He almost smiled. “Better not talk that way; you might wilt those flowers.”
“He tells me if I need anything to call him or come get him, as if I need the likes of him to take care of me. As if I need anyone.”
“You’re not being fair to him. He’s not a bad sort.”
“Oh, I suppose he’s all right,” she said. “In his place. I expect he’s sleeping. I think he was driving around last night playing policeman.”
“You don’t think much of the Posse?”
“I think they’re a bunch of old fools who’ve regressed to childhood, playing cops and robbers again. Now Val, he even wants to play doctor.”
Carver laughed. Some of the water sloshed out of the long-spouted can and splashed near his shoe. Not an accident, he was sure.
“Well, it happens to be true.” Hattie put down the can and concentrated hard on rehanging the planter on its eye hook. Either her eyesight wasn’t up to it, or the hook was moving.
Carver thought about offering to help, then decided she might resent it. He waited until the planter was dangling safely on its chain.
“If I have to disappear for a while, I’ll call you,” he assured her.
“You’d better. I hired you.”
She stretched to take down an identical plastic planter from the opposite side of the porch, and he said good-bye and left her there.
As he drove away he glanced over at her. She wasn’t watching him. She was plucking dead blossoms.
20
On the drive back to the motel, Carver detoured past Maude Crane’s house. There was a red and white Solartown Realty FOR SALE sign reflecting sun in the neatly mowed front yard. He wasn’t sure if that meant Maude had bought on the reverse mortgage plan and ownership of her house had reverted to the company. It was something worth looking into.
At the Warm Sands, Carver found that Beth had already left for her interview with Brad Faravelli, and there were no messages either from her or Van Meter.
The room felt cool and he realized he was sweating. He limped into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. When he glanced at himself in the mirror he saw that his normally deep tan was even deeper from running around Solartown and environs asking questions. The possibility of future skin cancer leapt to mind, all those TV talk shows and infomercials, and he felt himself moving closer to seriously considering Hattie’s advice about headwear to cover his bald pate. But then, he had Adam Beed to deal with before measuring a future
in years instead of days.
He put on a fresh shirt and decided to go see Desoto, offer to buy him lunch and then pump him to find out if he knew anything else about Beed or Solartown. What friends were for.
But Desoto, perched on the edge of his desk and just hanging up his phone, said he was busy. There’d been a homicide out near the Orlando Country Club; he’d just returned from there.
“A shooting that left a hole in one?” Carver asked.
Desoto gave him a fierce and pitying look that let him know this was no time for cop humor, not even the kind that saves sanity. Carver felt microscopically small when Desoto explained what had happened.
A teenage girl had been raped and strangled, not necessarily in that order. Desoto was charging around barking orders, his dark eyes sad and furious. It upset him when any crime of violence was committed against a woman. Something like this, involving a young girl, really set him off. He wouldn’t have time for Carver today. Carver didn’t blame him. Desoto had seen the body.
The day was heating up to near-record temperatures, and Carver hated himself for his insensitivity and was feeling frustrated. He loathed spinning his wheels, and so far today he’d found no traction. He left the Olds parked on Hughey near police headquarters and walked up to South Street to eat lunch at a restaurant he remembered.
Halfway there he realized he was limping along faster than most people were walking, drawing stares and working up a sweat that ran in rivulets. Breathing hard, too. Punishing himself. He made himself slow down, determined not to let the futility of the day get to him. It had been one of the hardest things in life for him to learn, not to be his own enemy. Sometimes he still forgot the lesson.
He had chili for lunch, another wrong decision. When he left the restaurant, he found a public phone at the corner and stood miserably in the exhaust fumes and terrible sun. He called the Warm Sands Motel and asked for Beth’s extension.
Ah! She’d returned from her Faravelli interview.
“Faravelli spent most of our time together bragging about Solartown,” she said. “A real PR guy. He made the most of the interview.”