Spark

by John Lutz

  Carver sat in the parked Olds and studied the house. After a while in his business, you developed an instinct. There was something about the house that didn’t feel right.

  Then he realized what it was. There was mail visible in the box by the door, and the screen door was slightly ajar, as if the postman had run out of room in the box and had been stuffing mail inside the outer door.

  As he planted his cane and levered himself up out of the Olds, Carver noticed that the grass, though of uniform height, needed mowing. He limped across the sunbaked lawn in a path directly to the porch, each step raising a cloud of tiny insects, a few of which found their way up his pants legs to where his ankles were bare above his socks. The yard was as unyielding beneath the tip of his cane as if it were concrete; it hadn’t been watered for a long time. There was a medium-size sugar oak near the corner of the house, its leaves perforated until they’d been turned into fine lace by insects. Florida in the summer belonged to the bugs.

  His suspicion was confirmed. The space between the screen door and the green-enameled front door was stuffed with mail. Bills, advertising circulars, a few letters. There was a scattering of small, glossy mail-order catalogs. A pretty blond woman squeezing some kind of exercise device between her thighs was on one cover, smiling up at Carver as if she might be doing something naughty.

  There was a brass knocker shaped like a lion’s head on the door. Carver banged it loudly and waited. He wasn’t surprised when there was no response. The lion roared at him silently.

  He stood on the porch and glanced around. There was no one in sight. He felt like the only living and moving figure in a painting. The orderly retirement community might as well have featured crypts instead of houses.

  He chastised himself for the thought. Get up in your sixties, seventies, or older, it was apparently silence and order you preferred. That was how it seemed to work. He’d know for sure soon enough.

  The slam of a door made him turn.

  A woman had emerged from the house next door. She was heavy and trudged with effort but determination, wearing paint-smeared white overalls and carrying a screwdriver. A pair of rimless glasses rode low on her wide nose and she squinted over them in the bright sunlight. Her bulldog features tried a smile but it only made her uglier as she got near Carver.

  “You David?” she asked.

  Carver shook his head no.

  The woman seemed to have known he wasn’t really David, but she said, “Thought you might be David Crane from Atlanta. Maude’s nephew. She was expecting him. I’m Mildred Klein from next door. Some way I can help you?”

  “I was looking for Maude Crane.”

  “I figured that, you being on her porch and all.”

  Ah, the neighbors watching out for one another. The old tended to band close together like any other minority group. The paranoia wasn’t completely unjustified.

  “Do you know where I can find her?”

  “Maybe she drove on into Orlando to shop,” Mildred said. “She does that now and again.” Her grip on the screwdriver’s yellow plastic handle tightened, as if she were ready to use it as a weapon if necessary. “You selling something?”

  “No, I’m—” Carver suddenly became aware of a sound that had been on the edge of his consciousness, like something electrical buzzing inside the house. “You hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  Carver put his ear to the door. The buzzing was louder. He moved away and leaned on his cane, motioning for Mildred to listen.

  Without taking her gaze from him, she mimicked his actions at the door, pressing her ear close to the wood. She nodded, puzzled. “I hear. Something running in there.”

  “Maybe an electric alarm clock,” Carver said.

  “Maybe.” But Mildred seemed doubtful. It didn’t really sound like an alarm clock.

  “We should look,” Carver said.

  “None of our business.”

  “If Maude left something on, you can turn it off. I’ll wait out here.”

  “What makes you think I can get in?”

  “I figure you’re her closest neighbor, and you came over here looking out for her, so maybe she gave you a key in case of emergency.”

  “You see this as an emergency?”

  Carver stirred the clutter of mail with his cane. The girl with the exerciser between her thighs smiled up at him, trying to reassure him there was nothing in the world worth his worry. “Maude mention to you she was taking a trip?”

  Mildred looked uncertain, sliding her glasses higher on her sweat-glistening nose as if to see Carver better. They immediately slid back down. “She usually tells me when she’s gonna be gone more’n a day,” she admitted.

  Carver said again, “I’ll wait out here if you want.”

  Mildred hefted the screwdriver in her hand. “Who’d you say you were?”

  “My name’s Fred Carver. I’m working for a woman named Hattie Evans.”

  Something shadowed Mildred’s face. She’d heard of Hattie. “Don’t know her,” she said.

  “I need to talk to Maude,” he said simply. “Maybe she’s sick in there and hasn’t been able to get to the door or phone. It happens, doesn’t it?”

  “It happens.” She glared at him as if sizing him up finally, then moved over a few feet and stooped down and picked up one of several rocks lining the flower bed near the porch. It was about six inches in diameter. Apparently she’d found him wanting and decided to crush him.

  But instead of hurling the rock at Carver, she opened it like a hinged box and removed a key.

  “Looks real, don’t it?” she said, as she replaced the now obviously lightweight fake rock.

  “Fooled me.” He stood back as she unlocked the door and shoved it open, poking her head inside to yell for Maude Crane.

  Immediately she backed reeling out onto the porch, as if someone had punched her in the face. The screwdriver clattered on the concrete floor and she stood gaping at Carver, sickened and terrified.

  He caught a whiff of the stench that had struck her like something solid.

  Mildred tried to speak but no sound emerged, only a string of saliva that glistened on her chin in the sun. Carver helped her walk twenty feet away from the door, where she sat down with her legs spread wide on the hard ground and vomited.

  After a while, he rested his hand on her damp back. “You gonna be all right?”

  She nodded, staring at the mess on the grass between her legs. Her glasses had somehow gotten spotted.

  “Don’t try to get up,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Another nod.

  He set the tip of his cane and limped toward the open door, a metallic taste at the edges of his tongue.

  Ten feet away he took a deep breath and held it, then quickened his pace. He shoved the mail aside with his cane and hobbled into the house.

  The air-conditioning was off and the place was even hotter than outside. In here, the faint buzzing he’d heard on the porch was a din, with a frantic rising and falling pitch. This time of year especially in Florida, he knew what it was.

  A dark cloud of flies swarmed relentlessly in the center of the dining room, feeding on something dangling from the chandelier.

  The something was Maude Crane.

  6

  CARVER PARKED THE OLDS in the wide lot of the medical center the next day and limped toward the circular four-story buff building. The morning sun pressed hotly on his shoulders and he knew the top of his head was getting burned. Virility could be a burden. Maybe he’d have to borrow one of Hattie’s lids.

  When he got inside the building, he saw the practicality of its architecture. On each floor, the rooms were off short halls leading like spokes from a hub that was the nurses’ station, so that each patient was only steps and seconds away from the healing hands of mercy.

  The elevator reached the fourth-floor offices, and he limped out and told a redheaded receptionist at a long curved desk he’d like to talk to Dr. Billingsly. She smiled a
nd asked him to please have a seat, which he did, for almost an hour.

  Just as he reached the very brink of Muzak madness, a short, stocky young man wearing a wrinkled green surgical gown and cap entered the waiting area and smiled at Carver. He didn’t look old enough to be a doctor, which made Carver wonder how old he might look to Dr. Billingsly.

  “William Billingsly,” he said, shaking hands firmly with Carver. He had blond hair and a smoothly chubby and intelligent face with shrewd blue eyes, like a grown-up cherub who’d somehow figured it all out. “Mrs. Evans phoned and told me you were coming by.”

  Carver said he wanted to talk with Billingsly about Jerome Evans, and the doctor said, “Sure,” and led him to a tiny waiting room equipped with a small sofa, three chairs, and a TV jutting from the wall on an elbowed metal bracket. There was also a Mr. Coffee on a table in a corner, its round glass pot almost full. The wallpaper looked like burlap. Carver noticed that Billingsly sneaked a glance at his wristwatch as they sat down, Carver in a brown vinyl Danish chair, the doctor on the beige sofa. It was cool and quiet in the room.

  “I don’t think we’ll be disturbed here,” Billingsly said.

  “I’d have gotten here sooner after Hattie Evans’s phone call,” Carver told him, “except for Maude Crane.”

  At first Billingsly didn’t seem to know what Carver was talking about. Then it registered in his canny blue eyes. “Ah! You know about that.”

  “I’m the one who discovered her body.”

  “Ah!” Billingsly looked over at Mr. Coffee and pointed. His hands were small, with stubby, manicured fingers. “Care for a cup, Mr. Carver?”

  Carver told him no thanks, then watched as Billingsly got up and poured himself some coffee, tore open a paper packet and added powdered cream that had probably never known a cow, and sat back down. “I’m afraid suicide’s all too common here in Solartown, as it is in all retirement communities of this size. The old get despondent.” He took a sip of coffee and made a face as if it didn’t taste good. “Sometimes I don’t blame them.”

  “How long had Maude Crane been dead?” Carver asked.

  Billingsly shook his head. “I wasn’t present when she was brought here, only heard about it. They say several days. Death by hanging, and with an electrical cord. Asphyxiation, accompanying severe subcutaneous and cartilage trauma. The family wants an autopsy, which will be performed tomorrow. Then more will be known, but I’d guess not much more. Suicides by hanging are rather obvious. Discoloration, ruptured eye capillaries. The indications were observable, even with the damage inflicted by the flies and the heat.”

  “Do you know as much about Jerome Evans’s death?”

  Billingsly smiled boyishly at his coffee. “Oh, yes. I was his personal physician, in the operating room when he expired.”

  “Hattie Evans said he died at home at the kitchen table.”

  “For all practical purposes, she’s right. But there were still faint vital signs when he was brought in. Nothing could have been done for him, Mr. Carver.”

  “Did you sign the death certificate?”

  “No. Dr. Wynn, our chief surgeon and hospital administrator, signed it, as he signs most death certificates. He was in the O.R. at the time of death, too.”

  “Hattie Evans has doubts about her husband dying of a heart attack.”

  “I’ve heard her express those doubts. And I can understand why she might feel that way, since he had no history of coronary problems. But I saw the evidence, and it was classic. A massive blockage resulting in fibrillation and rupture of the aorta. In other words, a heart attack brought on by a blood clot. The postmortem confirmed that beyond doubt.”

  “Is something like that common in a patient Jerome’s age?”

  “All too common, coronary history or not. Mr. Carver, we have only so much time on this earth, and some of us have more difficulty than others accepting when it runs out for us or those we love. Believe me, Jerome Evans’s death was caused by a massive coronary. I’ve seen it before, and I’ll probably see it again within the next few weeks. And, like poor Mrs. Evans, the widow will wonder how it could have happened. For a while she might resist believing it.”

  “Resist as strongly as Hattie Evans?”

  Billingsly smiled again. “Ah! Mrs. Evans is a strong woman.” He took a long pull of coffee and glanced at his watch. “I like her, which is why I was glad to agree to talk with you. To reassure her that, like so many other women in this land of dietary idiocy, she lost her husband to a heart attack. It’s cruel, but it’s simple reality. She’ll simply have to adapt, and I’m sure she will.” He stood up and drained his foam cup, then tossed it into a plastic-lined wastebasket near the coffee machine. Another discard whose time had run out.

  Carver planted his cane and stood, also. He thanked Billingsly for his time.

  “Tell Mrs. Evans I said hello,” the doctor told Carver, as he bustled out of the waiting room. Carver watched him hurry down the hall and disappear beyond the busy, circular counter that was the nurses’ station. One of the nurses glanced after Billingsly, then at another nurse, and both women smiled.

  Carver poured himself a cup of coffee and sat back down, watching a gray and withered man in an oversized blue robe shuffle along the hall while pushing a portable steel stand with a transparent envelope dangling from it. The sack of clear liquid was joined to the back of his hand by a coiled plastic tube and an IV needle.

  The old get despondent, the wise young Dr. Billingsly had said.

  Maybe Hattie Evans clung to her craving for justice rather than sink into that despondency after her husband’s sudden and unexpected death. She was a willful woman who would cling fiercely and not be easily dislodged. Definitely the last-leaf-upon-the-tree type.

  Obsession was preferable to suicide. Carver knew that.

  Maybe that explained it all, he thought, watching the old man with the portable IV disappear into one of the rooms.

  Or maybe it explained nothing.

  7

  “EXPLAIN,” DESOTO SAID.

  Carver was sitting in front of Lieutenant Alfonso Desoto’s desk in his office on Hughey in Orlando. Desoto was elegantly dressed as usual. Pale-gray suit, mauve shirt with maroon tie, gold watch, two gold rings, gold cufflinks. On him it somehow didn’t look flashy. He had the dark and classic looks of a matinee idol in one of the old movies he loved, the one where the handsome bullfighter gets the girl. Those who didn’t know him sometimes guessed he was a gigolo rather than a tough cop. That could be a serious mistake.

  Carver explained the connection between Hattie Evans and the late Maude Crane. To wit: the late Jerome Evans.

  Desoto leaned back in his chair and flashed his cuff links. Behind him, a Sony portable on the windowsill was playing sad Latin guitar music very softly. “What you’re saying, amigo, is that someone might have murdered Maude Crane?”

  “Not exactly,” Carver said. “I guess what I’m doing is asking.”

  “If what you say is true about Crane’s affair with Jerome Evans, and Crane was murdered, the prime suspect would be Hattie Evans, your client.”

  “Even with Jerome dead?”

  “The need for vengeance doesn’t die with the prize,” Desoto said. The breeze from the air conditioner barely ruffled his sleek black hair, Carver couldn’t remember ever seeing Desoto’s hair seriously mussed.

  “I don’t even know if Hattie was aware of her husband’s affair, having only heard about it secondhand myself.”

  “Secondhand from whom?”

  “Her next-door neighbor, Val Green.”

  “How would he know?”

  “He gets around. He’s a member of the Solartown Posse.”

  Desoto absently buffed the ring on his right hand on the left sleeve of his suit coat. The guitar on the Sony was strummed suddenly in swift, dramatic tempo. “That’s the civilian volunteer group that patrols the place, hey?”

  “That’s it,” Carver said. He thought Desoto might scoff at the Posse, but he
didn’t. Volunteer groups—some might call them vigilante groups—were becoming more and more prevalent as the war on drugs drained law enforcement of resources. The police were beginning to see the good ones as an asset. The bad ones could be the worst kind of liability. “I’m not sure about Val Green, so I’m not sure Jerome and Maude were actually seeing each other behind Hattie’s back.”

  “Be sure,” Desoto said. “It was in the suicide note.”

  He opened a file folder on his desk and handed Carver a sheet of white paper. Carver rested his cane on his thigh and read. Typed on the cheap white bond paper was a long, pathetic account of how lonely Maude Crane’s life had become, and how she’d prefer death over living without Jerome. Above her typed name was an indecipherable ink scrawl.

  Carver laid the note faceup on the desk. His hip was getting numb; he had to shift his weight, move his bad leg. “Anyone might have typed this.”

  “But they didn’t.”

  “And the signature could have been made by somebody flinging ink from across the room.”

  “But it wasn’t. The paper was still in Maude Crane’s Smith-Corona manual typewriter, and her prints and hers alone were on the keys. The signature, vague as it is, matches samples we found among her personal papers. This one is suicide plain and simple, amigo. And the second one this year in Solartown. Sometimes the very old, the very sick and sad, choose it as their way out, hey? You should understand that.”

  Carver knew what he meant. It was Desoto who’d helped to prevent him from one day swimming out to sea too far to return, when he was depressed after taking disability retirement from the department with his maimed leg. The reference to past agony irritated Carver. He said, “Why did you send Hattie Evans to me?”

  Desoto smiled. He loved women as much as they loved him. Any age, race, nationality. The faded but defiant spirit of Hattie Evans might have gotten to him, caused him to regard her as something more than just another suspicious and fearful old woman. “I liked her, amigo. But more than that, I didn’t think she was the type to become paranoid in her old age. Maybe the facts didn’t warrant me sending her to you; they certainly didn’t warrant a police investigation. Still, I felt there might be something real in what she was saying. Call it more of a character judgment than anything else.”