by John Lutz
When the old guy had finally been booked and taken to a holdover cell, the phone rang, and the desk sergeant held it to his ear briefly then hung up and told Carver he could go back to Desoto’s office.
A couple of plainclothes cops nodded to Carver as he limped along the hall, remembering him from his department days. They’d all been in uniform then.
Desoto was hanging up his cream-colored suit coat when Carver entered through the open door. There was an ornate brass hook on the wall near his desk, where he often hung his coats. Only he never put them directly on the hook, always used a shaped wooden hanger.
“Amigo,” he said, nodding a hello to Carver and sitting down behind his desk as Carver sat. He was wearing a white-on-white shirt with gold cuff links and a gold tie bar, flowered tie with a lot of yellow in it, tan leather shoulder holster. The well-dressed cop’s ensemble. Did Desoto have a different color gun for each outfit? “You’re moving a bit gingerly today.” He didn’t seem to have noticed that about Carver, but he had.
Carver told him why he was moving gingerly.
“So,” Desoto said, when he was finished, “you want to file a complaint?”
“Maybe to complain that filing a complaint wouldn’t do any good.”
“Yeah, we both know how it works. The guy who did a job on you has probably got an alibi and two backup alibis.”
Carver said he knew. “What I want is to find out who he is.”
“Oh, I just bet you do. You wanna let him finish what he started.” Desoto shook his handsome head. His sleek black hair didn’t budge. “You latch onto something like this, you make a pit bull seem like a quitter.”
Carver hoped he wasn’t going to start in with that “obsessive” talk again. Like Beth on the drive over. There was too much psychoanalysis in the world; things were complicated enough without it. Therapy had its uses, but it had also become the narcotic of the law-abiding. Can’t cope? No need to learn. See an expert. Again and again and again. People were taking therapists like Valium.
“Commitment to revenge can be your fuel, amigo, and it can also get you killed.”
“It isn’t only revenge,” Carver told him. “If somebody wants me to turn loose of the Jerome Evans investigation, it’s because there must be something to investigate.”
“That hadn’t escaped me,” Desoto said. “But it won’t make you any less dead.”
“Beth’s waiting for me outside,” Carver said. “Why don’t you feed the tough guy’s description into the process while I examine mug shots?”
“How come she didn’t come in with you?”
“I think you make her nervous.”
Desoto didn’t say anything. Then he stood up. “Can you walk okay?”
Carver said he could. He stood up and leaned hard on the cane.
Desoto led him to a small room not much larger than a storage closet. It contained three chairs and a rectangular oak table. The pale-green walls were grease-stained and badly in need of paint. There were three stacks of thickly bound mug books on the table. The only light was from the single, dust-coated window.
“I’ll leave you here to look for the right photo,” Desoto said. “While you’re doing that, I’ll get the description in circulation.”
Carver thanked him and settled down on a hard wooden chair, making it a point not to groan with discomfort. By the time he’d dragged the first of the large, heavy books over, Desoto had left and closed the door softly behind him.
Carver was alone in the tiny, quiet room with the sun streaming like a celestial spotlight through the incredibly dirty, wire-reinforced window behind him, illuminating the rogues’ gallery in front of him.
As if it were a book of saints.
13
ONLY TWENTY MINUTES had passed before Desoto came back into the room. He was carrying a yellow file folder and some fanfold computer paper with faint dot-matrix printing on it. Hard copy, Desoto called it these days, now that he’d become computer literate.
“You still on the first book, amigo?”
Carver said, “I want to be sure.”
“Well, I can save you some trouble, I think. VICAP had a file on your guy. In fact, there’s a wealth of information about him. He fascinates people, like a lot of predators do. Name Adam Beed strike a chord?”
Carver closed the mug book and shook his head no.
Desoto drew a fax photo from the folder and laid it on the table. The face of the man who’d attacked Carver stared up at him. Yet as he looked longer at the grainy black-and-white image he couldn’t be positive. Desoto laid another photo before Carver; in this one Beed was wearing his black horn-rimmed glasses. No doubt about who it was. He was also wearing the horn-rims in the defiant, chin-up profile shot Desoto placed on the table. He looked more upwardly mobile than criminal.
“Him,” Carver said, feeling something warm and fierce growing in his belly.
Desoto sat down across from Carver at the table. He had his suit coat on but he didn’t appear to be uncomfortable in the stifling room. “I made some calls, amigo, learned plenty about Beed. He was an accountant at a major investment firm, got into trouble with embezzlement six years ago, and did a stretch in Raiford.”
Carver stared at him. “An accountant?”
Desoto smiled. “He had your number, hey?”
“How long’s he been out?” Carver asked.
“Paroled eighteen months ago. When he was in prison he underwent a kind of metamorphosis. Within a couple of years he was nothing like the soft, white-collar type who walked through the gates. Took to weight training, martial arts, lightened up on cocaine.”
“He had a habit?”
“Oh, yes. That was why he embezzled, to support it. He was still on the stuff in prison, but he had to moderate. Despite what the public hears, drugs aren’t all that easy to get inside the walls. Not like out here, anyway. Beed got bigger and stronger, then bigger and stronger again. Then he went about getting even with an inmate who’d raped him when he was new, a tough hombre in for murder. Nothing can be proved, but it seems the fella lost his left arm in a workshop accident. Naturally enough, he won’t talk about what really happened.”
“Maybe Beed broke it off,” Carver said.
“A joke, amigo?”
“I suppose,” Carver said. “I get fed up hearing how tough assholes like Beed are, how they plow over everybody who gets in their way.” Outside in the distance a siren warbled frantically, maybe responding to a call about a crime perpetrated by one of the world’s Adam Beeds. Carver hated the takers in life. Right now, Beed in particular. “Get on with your story,” he said.
Desoto said, “Beed became a sadistic homosexual himself, and rumor has it he murdered his cellmate. Again, nothing provable. Beed can put on an act in front of investigators or a parole board. And he still thinks and acts like an accountant. He’s conservative in dress and manner, the kind of guy you’d trust in a minute to date your daughter or keep your books.”
“Your daughter and books,” Carver said, “not mine. If Beed’s on parole, you must have a current address on him.”
Desoto laughed. “No, my friend. You aren’t hearing what I’m saying about this one. He’s different. This kind of animal breaks parole the first week he’s released, then disappears. It’s predictable, and that’s what happened with Beed. But like I said, he’s cautious. He knew he’d lose big if he got nailed for possession of illegal narcotics in prison, so the word is he replaced his cocaine habit with alcohol dependency. Not his drug of choice, but he had to make do if he didn’t want a lot of years behind bars.”
“Is that all that’s on his sheet?” Carver asked. “The embezzlement conviction?”
“That’s it, amigo. I told you he was different. I said it’s suspected he killed his cellmate, but I didn’t talk about method. The cellmate was a little guy named Kravak, in for a homicide committed while he was burglarizing a drugstore. Prison guards found Kravak dead; he’d been tortured with lighted cigarettes touched to the
bottoms of his feet, his genitals, eyelids, everywhere. Took the prison doctors a while to figure out what killed him, though. A straightened wire coat hanger inserted through his rectum. It pierced everything right up to and including his heart.”
Carver pushed away his revulsion and replaced it with resolve. Some of his fear he left intact; he’d need it to keep an edge, to avoid making a dumb move based on emotion. “So Beed’s an unreserved sadist. You think I don’t know that?”
Desoto’s somber brown eyes were steady. He meshed his fingers, gold rings flashing in the blast of sunlight through the window. “Something else, amigo. They found the cellmate in a storeroom, and in the condition I just described. But also, there were bites out of him.”
Carver felt his stomach pulse against his belt buckle. “Jesus! We talking cannibalism?”
“Probably not. More like old-fashioned cruelty with a disgusting twist. It took the doctors a few days to realize they were looking at bites; things had been done to the wounds with a knife so it’d be impossible to match tooth patterns.”
Carver sat back and watched dust motes swirl in the angled shaft of sunlight bisecting the room. The siren had faded to silence outside. Maybe the bad guy was caught, and a modicum of order had been restored to the world.
“This Beed,” Desoto said, “he’s strong as an Olympic weight lifter, and he’s a psycho. He was a monster in prison, and I was told he’s been taking steroids since his release, maybe even was on them behind the walls, so he’s even more dangerous.”
Carver was getting weary of the buildup. And angry. “The man’s not a goddamn tank.”
“No, he’s much more dangerous. He’s got a brain, he’s more maneuverable than a tank, and meaner. Follow his advice, amigo. Give your apologies to Hattie Evans. Say your good-byes and continue to live.”
“And the law will take over the case?”
Desoto shrugged with elegant sadness. “There are no witnesses to Beed’s attack on you, and as I said, he would have an alibi even if we did manage to locate him and pick him up for violating parole. So there still isn’t enough to warrant an official investigation of Jerome Evans’s death. If it were up to me, maybe, but I have to answer to the higher-ups. That’s why I sent Hattie to you, hey?”
“And now you’re telling me to turn her away.”
“Yes. You can’t bring her husband back to life, which is what she really wants. Instead you’ll join him in death. I know how you think, amigo, how you get fixated.”
“It’s my job to get fixated. That’s the kind of game we’re in and you know it.”
“Maybe that’s how you think of it, like some kind of game. That I understand. But this Beed is much more than an opponent; he’s a force. You should hope he goes somewhere else to cause problems. Or you could wait until a bullet from his dangerous world claims him.”
“But you know he won’t go somewhere else,” Carver said, shifting his weight over his cane and standing up. “And there’s no way to predict the where or when of bullets.”
Desoto stood also, buttoning and smoothing his suit coat. “Which is why you should go back to Del Moray and tend to other business.”
He seemed to be waiting for Carver to agree. Hoping.
“Thanks for this,” Carver said, limping toward the door.
“Amigo, you gonna smarten up and quit this thing? I mean, I’m in a way responsible for what might happen.”
“I’ll think about it,” Carver said. He reached the door and opened it, waiting for Desoto to catch up.
But when he looked around he saw Desoto leaning back against the table with his arms crossed, his ankles crossed, losing the crease of his expensive slacks. He was gazing at Carver with infinite sadness.
He said, “You lied to me, my friend, when you said you’d think about quitting. Am I right?”
“No. I’ll think about it. Anybody would.”
“But you won’t quit.”
“Probably not.”
“Would it kill you to quit?”
“Part of me.”
“Isn’t that better than all of you dying?”
“No.”
“Hmph!”
Carver supported himself with a hand on the doorknob, passing the tip of his cane back and forth over the floor in a compact, sweeping motion. Desoto knew why he’d come here. Knew what he’d do with the information. Now, because the information was more volatile than he’d imagined, he was pressuring. The way higher-ups in the department pressured him. He should understand that.
Carver said, “They ever find that arm?”
Desoto didn’t smile, but then Carver hadn’t expected him to.
He limped from the room.
Behind him, Desoto said softly, “Then stay in touch. Stay alive.”
14
BETH HAD FIGURED THE time right and was leaning on the LeBaron when Carver crossed Hughey. The late-afternoon sun highlighted her bold features, prominent cheekbones, elegant sinewy neck and arms. She looked like an Ebony model posing for a car ad. Her score was perfect; every passing male motorist did a double take.
Carver leaned on his cane in the heat and brilliance that she seemed to radiate and said, “You’re liable to cause a traffic accident.”
She said, “It’s happened before.”
They got in the car and she started the engine, switched on the air conditioner, but didn’t drive away. “Get what you wanted in there, Fred?”
He sat back and let cool air from the vents flow over him like water. “Yes and no.”
“What’d Desoto have to say?”
“He tried hard to impress upon me what a bad boy Adam Beed is.”
“Beed the guy did the job on you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So where’s that leave you?”
“Trying to impress upon you what a bad boy Beed is.” He told her what Desoto had said about Adam Beed, watching her profile as he spoke. His words didn’t seem to be making an impact. Nothing in her expression changed; she’d heard a lot, seen a lot, long before she’d met Carver.
“Some of this isn’t new to me,” she said when he’d finished. “I heard of Beed when I was with Roberto. He’s different for sure. You oughta be scared of him, Fred.”
Carver felt something in his gut tense. Muscle working on dread. “Beed know who you are?”
“No, he was making his reputation in Raiford, and Roberto was dead by the time he got out. He insulted a man who used to work for Roberto. Roberto passed the word and had one of his thugs behind walls work over Beed. About six months later, the man lost an arm. Roberto knew Beed was responsible and tried to have him killed, but Beed had changed in some spooky way and even the worst of the other inmates wouldn’t mess with him. Roberto kept track of him, learned more about him, and decided to leave him alone.” She turned her head to look straight at Carver for a moment. “Roberto never did that with anyone else. Never even considered it.”
Carver knew what she meant. Roberto Gomez had been vicious in the manner of big-time drug dealers who’d achieved success the hard way, and it was a point of honor and good business to make people pay for even the slightest affront. Once he’d set out to teach Beed a lesson, it had cost him plenty to back off. Yet he had. Beed must be something.
“You even a little bit considering walking away from this, Fred?”
“No.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“What about you going back to Del Moray?”
“I think not,” she said. She drummed long, red-enameled fingernails on the steering wheel, watching the traffic on Hughey streaking away from them. “What now? We gonna try to convince each other?”
He thought about it. “No,” he said. “You’re too stubborn. Here’s how we play it. You work under the cover of doing a feature article on Solartown for Burrow. That way you can be around, do some probing, and it’ll seem unconnected with what I’m doing.”
“That’s sensible enough, Fred. You think Beed will be watching you?”
“Beed or somebody else.”
“We been seen together already.”
“I don’t think we have by the wrong people. Beed’ll give it a few days before checking to see if I heeded his warning. The best thing for him would be if I faded quietly away. He might enjoy trouble, but from what I’ve heard he’s too smart to want it. He’ll combine business with pleasure only if there’s no other way.”
“I expect you’re right. Man can’t be a fool, more like a mean machine with a brain.”
“And if anybody does ask, say we met at the motel and you interviewed me about being a private detective. Always a subject of interest to those who never had to piss in a bottle on stakeout.”
“One hitch, here. I’m supposed to keep on with the interview while we’re sleeping together?”
“Won’t come up,” Carver said. “Register at the Warm Sands, so we can get together easily and talk, but we won’t share a room.”
She put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb, cutting off someone who reacted with a long, angry blast of the horn. She seemed not to hear. “Just what I always wanted to be, a celibate spy.”
“Best kind,” Carver said. “Can’t be blackmailed.”
“Until one night.”
“Drop me off by my car before you register at the motel,” Carver said. “I’m gonna go see Hattie and find out if Jerome Evans and Adam Beed might have been connected in any way.”
She drove silently for a few minutes. Then she said, “Since it’d be safer if you found Beed rather than vice versa, I can put out the word with some of my old contacts in the drug business, maybe learn where he can be found these days. He wouldn’t have to know who’s doing the asking.”