Spark

by John Lutz

  Carver tapped the rubber tip of his cane soundlessly on the floor, staring at it and nodding. Cops’ instincts. They should be given more official standing. “I picked up the same quality in her,” he said.

  “You going to tell her about Maude Crane’s affair with her husband?”

  “I don’t want to,” Carver said. “That’s why I came here, to reassure myself there’s no connection between Jerome Evans’s death and Maude Crane’s, other than the emotional linkage.”

  “There’s no other connection,” Desoto assured Carver. “This part of the game is exactly as it seems. An old woman lost her husband, another her lover and companion and then her will to live. A world of fighters and quitters. Don’t put the widow, the one survivor of the triangle, through unnecessary pain.” His dark eyes were somber, full of genuine sympathy for Hattie Evans. So unlike a cop sometimes.

  Carver stared at the suicide note on Desoto’s desk, listening to the sounds of the policeman’s world wafting into the office between the notes of the sad Spanish guitar. Gruff voices, sometimes joking; the faint chatter of a police radio; the shrill protests of a suspect being booked. There seemed no need for Hattie to know anything other than what she might read in the newspaper or catch on TV news. Another soul, old and alone in Solartown, had chosen the time and means of deliverance.

  “No reason to tell Hattie about the affair,” Carver said. “I’ll see it as a suicide for now.”

  “Then you’re seeing it as it is, amigo. It shouldn’t get in the way of your job. Am I right?”

  “Sure,” Carver said.

  But he wasn’t sure.

  He drove from the Municipal Justice Building on Hughey back to Solartown and rang Hattie’s doorbell.

  She’d been cleaning. As she ushered him into her cool and orderly living room, he saw a canister vacuum cleaner with a pythonlike hose and attachments resting in the doorway between dining room and kitchen. Hattie was wearing an old gray blouse and a calf-length blue skirt. Carver wondered if she ever wore slacks. Ever cursed like a sailor. Masturbated.

  “Getting things straightened up,” she explained, as she sat down on the sofa opposite Carver, who’d set his cane and lowered himself into a chair. He wondered if she meant her house or her life. He was aware of the acrid scent of just-vacuumed carpet, and there were parallel tracks in the plush pile of the living room. The dishwasher was running, and the soapy fragrance of perfumed detergent drifted from the kitchen. Underlying it all was the subtle scent of roses.

  “I talked to Dr. Billingsly,” he said, “and he assured me there was nothing unusual about Jerome’s coronary, either statistically or from what he observed in the operating room.”

  Hattie nodded distractedly. It was unlike her not to focus in. “Yes, Dr. Billingsly mentioned to me he was present when Jerome’s official death occurred.” She brushed back a wisp of thinning gray hair and suddenly stared directly at Carver. Her seamed, chiseled features would have been a credit to Mount Rushmore. “I heard on the news about Maude Crane’s suicide.”

  Carver didn’t know quite what to say, so he merely nodded.

  She said, “Suicide, my eye, young man!”

  “Why do you say that?” Treading carefully.

  “I know about her affair with my husband, Mr. Carver. Known about it for years.”

  Carver decided that sounded right. Not much got past Hattie. “Was Jerome aware that you knew?”

  She gave him an incredulous look. “Of course not.”

  “I’ve talked to the police, and to Billingsly, about Maude Crane’s death. They’re calling it suicide.”

  “They can be wrong. They’re not infallible.”

  “Are you?”

  “I come closer.”

  Carver leaned forward in his chair, both hands folded over the crook of his cane. “Hattie, if you did manage to convince the police the Crane woman’s death wasn’t suicide, you’d be the prime suspect.”

  “Well, maybe I killed her.”

  “Not likely.”

  “You don’t think I’m capable of such a thing?”

  “I think you’re too logical.”

  She smiled in a way he liked. “I’ve always taken pride in my ability to do whatever’s necessary in any situation.”

  “Me, too,” Carver said.

  “I sensed that in you. That’s why I hired you. I also assume you’re smart enough to see that my killing Maude Crane would have been in no way necessary. Before Jerome died, maybe. Certainly not now.”

  “She killed herself,” Carver said, not sure if he believed it. “I saw the suicide note.”

  “Did it tell about her and Jerome?”

  “Yeah, so the police know about the affair, and your possible motive.”

  “I don’t blame Jerome for the affair,” Hattie said. “Did the note say something about his cold and unresponsive wife?”

  “Words to that effect,” Carver admitted.

  “Hmph! Well, Jerome had his reasons to stray, and perhaps sex was one of them. But we were married forty-three years, Mr. Carver. That creates bonds that couldn’t be broken by Jerome occasionally having his way with some lonely widow in the dark. Maude Crane was a fool if she believed otherwise, like foolish other women down through time.”

  “People not married forty-three years might not understand that,” Carver said.

  “Do you?”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “I’m in some ways responsible for the furtive and disgusting extramarital affair, and if I thought Maude Crane actually killed herself, I’d feel partly responsible for her death.”

  Carver didn’t want to hurt her even more deeply, but he decided he’d better lay out the cards faceup for her. “You’re telling me you think Jerome’s and Maude Crane’s deaths were murder, which would mean there’s some kind of conspiracy. But what evidence there is points in the opposite direction. You’ve got to realize the police will write your ideas off as the suspicious nature that often accompanies advanced age.”

  “You mean they’ll figure me for an addle-brained, paranoid old woman.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “I hired you to think otherwise. Do you?”

  He grinned. Hattie wasn’t one to hesitate laying down her own cards faceup. “Yeah, I think otherwise, or I wouldn’t be letting you spend your money on my services. But I have to tell you, I’m not as sure as you are that there’s something irregular going on.”

  “Was the Crane woman’s suicide note handwritten?”

  “No, it was typed and signed in pen.”

  “Hmph!”

  Carver sighed.

  Hattie said, “Keep digging, Mr. Carver. You’re an honorable man and you’ll earn your money. That’s all I ask.”

  “I’ll pick up the threads and follow them,” Carver told her, “but I can’t guarantee you’ll like where they lead.”

  “If they lead to the truth, Mr. Carver, I’ll be satisfied. Now, would you like a glass of lemonade?”

  Carver told her yes, that would be fine, and they sat in her screened-in “Florida room” attached to the back of the house and sipped lemonade from tall frosted glasses.

  “Freshly squeezed fruit from my own trees,” Hattie told him with satisfaction.

  He wasn’t surprised to find it unsweetened.

  8

  THE WARM SANDS MOTEL, where Carver had made reservations, was just off the Orange Blossom Trail, miles from the nearest ocean. But it had an artificial white sand beach surrounding a small lake, and it was built of artificial driftwood so it looked as if someone shipwrecked and with carpenter skills had built it. Someone high on fermented mangoes.

  Despite the rustic exterior, Carver’s room was what might be called castaway luxurious, with crude-looking but expensive driftwood-gray dresser, desk, and headboard, and Winslow Homer seascape prints on the walls. The room had plush gray carpet and heavy, sea-blue drapes that matched the bedspread. From his window he could see the small kidney-shape swimming poo
l with several tanned and weary-looking adults lounging about on webbed chairs as if the sun had drugged them. He could hear but not see children playing in the lake and in the sand that had been trucked in.

  He pulled the drapes closed, then undressed and took a long, lukewarm shower. After toweling off with rough terry cloth, he got his cane from where it was leaning against the toilet tank and limped back into the cool room. He put on Levi’s, gray sweat socks, and soft brown moccasins, a gray pullover shirt with a pocket for his sunglasses. Then he limped back into the bathroom and brushed his hair, studied himself in the mirror and decided he looked like the same guy only a shade older. That was okay; he had no illusions about time. His bald pate was deeply tanned and a little tender, but it didn’t seem as if it would peel. Reasonably satisfied with his mirror image, he left the room and limped outside and down past the office to the Warm Sands Seagrill Cafe for an early supper. Compensation for having skipped lunch.

  After the swordfish steak dinner and two cups of coffee, he went outside and wrestled an Orlando Sentinel from a vending machine. He sat on a bench in the shade, listening to the kids screech and splash down on the artificial beach by the artificial lake while he read about real violence all over the world. Seen as part of the big picture, Jerome Evans’s death seemed relatively unimportant. Which Carver supposed it was—except to Hattie Evans.

  Mosquitoes found him, notified the rest of the squadron, and began to go to work on him, sometimes seeming to attack in formation. But he doggedly read on, checking the sports page to see how the Braves did last night, scanning the comics section to see how Charlie Brown was doing in his running conflict with Lucy. They’d both lost.

  When he was finished with the paper, he limped back into his room, sat on the edge of the bed with the phone in his lap, and called Beth.

  “I need you to do something for me,” he said, when she’d picked up in Del Moray.

  “Sure you do, Fred,” she said in a husky voice. “You miss me already.”

  “That all you think about?”

  “No, but I think about it a lot.”

  “Think about using the resources of Burrow and your own limitless resourcefulness to do some research for me. Might involve some computer work. That possible?”

  “My, my. Butter wouldn’t melt.”

  “Will you do it?”

  “Sure. Burrow’s got computer people working for them who make NASA seem like hackers. What you need to know? How to get the Ninja Turtles past all those obstacles?”

  He listened to the voices of the young from down at the beach. Listened to the rush of traffic over on the Orange Blossom Trail, not so unlike the eternal sigh of the sea. “I need to know how the death rate at Solartown compares with the rates at similar retirement communities.”

  She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “It’d all be public record, in state data banks. It’s the kind of information Jeff could come up with.”

  “Jeff?”

  “Jeff Mehling, computer guy at Burrow. He’s part microchip himself.”

  “How long would it take this Jeff to do the job?”

  “Nanoseconds, if he knows what keys to punch. He’s hooked into the office with his home computer, so I can probably call you back with the information tonight.”

  Carver told her he’d be waiting, she should take as many nanoseconds as she needed.

  “There a story in this for Burrow?” she asked. “That’d be part of the bargain.”

  “Our bargain?”

  “It’s what Clive’ll ask.” Clive Jones was the founder and managing editor of Burrow, an intrepid former ACLU lawyer who wore conservative business suits while riding a motorcycle with suicidal abandon. “What should I tell him?”

  “Say that if there’s a story, you’ll be the one to get it.”

  “What Clive’ll say, Fred, is that I oughta be where you are, covering this thing firsthand.”

  “There’s nothing yet to cover with any hand.”

  “But there will be, right?” She was like a radar-homed missile.

  “My sense of it is there will be,” he admitted. “Why don’t you drive here tomorrow, meet me at the motel about noon.”

  “So, you need my help in more ways than one.”

  “Many more ways.”

  “You need many ways, I got ’em.”

  “I miss you,” he said, scratching a mosquito bite.

  “That all you think about?”

  He said, “No, but I think about it a lot.”

  “We got a lunch date,” she said, and broke the connection.

  He hung up the phone and stretched out on his back on the bed, thinking about it.

  The room was dark when the phone’s persistent ringing hauled him up from deep sleep.

  The first thing he realized was that he had an erection. The second was that his head throbbed with pain each time the phone jangled. The second realization had taken care of the first by the time he’d dragged the receiver to him and mumbled a hello.

  “You been sleepin’, Fred?”

  Beth.

  He shook his head, trying to rattle sleep from his brain. “Just resting my eyes.” The room was cool and dim. He peered at the glowing red numerals on the TV clock radio: 10:30. “Jesus!”

  “Whazza matter, lover?”

  “Didn’t realize it was so late.”

  “Well, you gave your eyes a good long rest. Other parts of you might get tired, but those eyes are probably good for all night.”

  Carver was awake enough now to be irritated. “You call to aggravate me, or do you have that information?”

  “Called ’cause I’m doing you a favor, remember?”

  “Yeah, I recollect.” He switched on the lamp, wincing as the light assailed his eyes. “Sorry.”

  “You’re a bear when you first wake up, Fred.”

  He waited in bearish silence. There was a terrible taste in his mouth. Possibly the fur on his teeth.

  “Jeff accessed various data banks, did some checking and cross-checking. He worked this out on a per-capita basis, deaths per thousand people in various age groups. Compared to other retirement communities in Florida, California, and Arizona, the Solartown death rate is nine-point-eight percent higher across the board.”

  “Across the board? That mean in every age group?”

  “Jeff said there’s less than a three-tenths of a percent difference in the rates within age groups. Of course, the higher the age bracket, the more annual deaths per thousand residents.”

  Carver didn’t know what to think. “That seem reasonable, that nine-point-eight percent difference?”

  “Jeff thought it was high, but within the realm of a statistical fluke. Might mean something or nothing. In Solartown, out of a population of over four thousand, there were two hundred twenty natural deaths. So you’ve got an extra twenty-one-point-something people died there over the average. That mean anything to your investigation, Fred?”

  “Not necessarily. It doesn’t mean there’s a serial killer operating in Solartown, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t. It might simply have been a bad year for fatalities.”

  “Bad couple of years. These figures cover twenty-four months.”

  “Jeff’s thorough. Tell him I said thanks.”

  “Sure. Remember our lunch date.”

  Carver assured her he would, then hung up. He lay back down on the bed but left the light on. It would be interesting to know how many of Solartown’s 220 deaths last year were due to heart attacks, and how many of them were male. How many widows were created.

  It was time to talk with Dr. Arthur Wynn at the medical center.

  Rather, it would be time tomorrow. Carver knew he had a better chance of meeting the subject of a séance than convincing a medical doctor to talk with him at ten-forty in the evening.

  He dragged the phone over to him and rested it on his chest. Remembering the number on the POSSE bumper sticker on Val Green’s car, he pecked it out with his forefinger.

&n
bsp; An elderly female voice told him which part of Solartown Val was patrolling.

  Carver thanked her, then replaced the phone, got up, and went into the bathroom. He rinsed his face, brushed his teeth, then limped outside into the warm night to where the Olds was parked.

  He wanted to find out what Val Green had to say away from Hattie’s presence and influence.

  Val was doubtless an honorable and tight-lipped man, but Carver was reasonably sure he could bribe him with free coffee and doughnuts. Make him feel like a real cop.

  9

  VAL INVITED CARVER TO park his car and ride with him on patrol. “It’ll be a quiet night,” Val promised, “like all the rest of ’em.

  Carver lowered himself into the passenger’s side of Val’s five-year-old green Dodge and rested his cane between his legs. The car’s air conditioner worked well. There was a CB radio mounted below the dash with a microphone hooked into a bracket. The Dodge was a stick shift. Val let it wind out in first gear, then shifted with a clunk! and a jerk into second, then almost immediately into third. The little car whined but responded peppily to this abuse.

  “Gotta keep an eye out over on N Street,” Val said, glancing at Carver from the corner of his vision. The glow of the dashboard lights made the white of his eye gleam. “There was a spate of vandalism over there last week. Woman reported her citrus trees bent, all the fruit on the ground.”

  Sounds serious, Carver thought, if you’re an orange.

  “Kids from the city, way I figure it,” Val said. “Come cruising through here now and then, mostly looking for something to do. Don’t generally amount to much, but it’s the kinda thing’s gotta be contained.”

  Carver said, “You like doughnuts?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t make it a habit to eat while I’m on duty.”