by John Lutz
“Have you thought any more about the baby?” he asked.
“It’s what I think about even when I’m thinking about something else,” she said, evading what he was really asking.
“Are you positive you’re focused enough to follow Marla Cloy without being noticed?”
“I’m positive, Fred.” She sounded irritated now, almost to the point of attacking him. “It’s not at all the way you think, when a woman’s pregnant.”
There was no way he could dispute that. Better stick to business. “Marla carries a paperback novel around with her and reads it from time to time. I don’t think she’s as involved in it as she’d like anyone watching to believe. And she’s cautious by nature. Make sure you keep your distance from her in public places. And when you follow her in your car-”
Beth hung up.
Carver was left with the receiver pressed to his ear, listening to the distant sigh and static of the broken connection.
He had a few further instructions for her, but he decided against calling her back. Instead, he stretched out his arm and replaced the receiver in its cradle, then cranked up the car window and switched the air conditioner to its highest setting.
For a few minutes he sat with the car’s engine idling, thinking about Beth’s pregnancy. He couldn’t deny he didn’t want to be a father again. It didn’t make sense at his age, in his circumstances. It would cause problems, turn his life upside down and sideways.
But at the same time, he couldn’t deny he was tickled by the prospect.
Nothing’s simple, he thought, and he yanked the transmission lever to drive.
The apartment Marla had moved to after Graystone was a notch down the economic scale. Bailock Avenue was in a rough part of town known for its drug-culture inhabitants and the accompanying crimes of burglary and assault. Kids growing up on Bailock were introduced to guns before getting acquainted with Dr. Seuss, and probably didn’t understand why Sam I Am didn’t simply pack a semiautomatic and force green eggs and ham on anyone he chose.
Driving along the avenue of tired brick-and-frame houses and ruined lives, Carver wondered if Marla Cloy was involved with drugs as user or dealer. It was a possibility everywhere these days, but especially in Florida, home of sun, fun, and gun, and drug smugglers’ port of call.
Her temporary apartment after leaving Graystone wasn’t really an apartment, but half of a small frame duplex. The building needed painting so badly it had been weathered to a dull gray with only traces of its once-white color showing in grainy streaks, as if an incompetent artist had attempted light breaking through an overcast sky.
Carver parked at the curb in front of the duplex, behind a ten-year-old rusty Plymouth that had once been a taxi. Then he climbed out of the Olds and made his way along a cracked and uneven sidewalk to the sagging porch.
The wooden porch floor was so spongy, he was careful not to lean with much weight on his cane; he feared its tip might penetrate a termite-infested plank.
Only half of the duplex was occupied. A middle-aged, dispirited-looking woman responded to his knock and opened the door to the occupied part, the half with curtains. She identified herself as Fern Neptune, the duplex’s owner and manager. Her body odor was horrific and almost overmatched the bourbon fumes she breathed. She had poorly hennaed hair, mottled skin, and a bulbous and veiny nose that fairly or unfairly screamed of alcoholism.
She somehow managed to look haughty and told Carver up front she didn’t have much time for him. She remembered Marla Cloy, of course, but had only rented the other half of the duplex to her for a week or so until she could move out of town. “Cheaper than a motel,” Fern said smugly, and just as anonymously. Not getting to know the tenants was the best way for a landlord, she said. It prevented pain and problems in the long run.
No, Marla hadn’t associated with the neighbors, Fern told him, but that wasn’t unusual in this part of town. No, there were never any late-night goings-on or unusual sounds coming from the other side of the duplex. And no, Marla Cloy didn’t entertain men or throw wild parties or play her stereo too loud-if she even owned a stereo.
“An unusually quiet and well-behaved woman,” Carver commented.
“I don’t know about all her behavior,” Fern said. She smiled and exposed incredibly crooked and yellowed teeth. “What they say’s true, you know, about still water running deep.”
“It can be a breeding farm for mosquitoes, too,” Carver said.
She glanced pointedly at her wristwatch, then faded back into the dimness of her duplex’s interior and closed the door halfway, letting Carver know she was finished talking to him. He was afraid she was going to inform him that time had flown.
“Let me give you my card,” he said. “Will you call me if you learn or think of anything else about Marla Cloy?”
“No,” she said flatly, ignoring the card he’d extended to her. “I don’t gossip about my tenants, past or present. Wouldn’t be in the landlord business long if I did that.”
“I guess you’re right,” he said, thinking it might be to his advantage in the future to stay on Fern’s good side-insofar as she had one.
He could feel her staring at him as he carefully negotiated the tilted, uneven sidewalk to return to his car.
After starting the Olds, he jockeyed around the old Plymouth parked in front of it, then accelerated along Bailock. The stale odor Fern Neptune had exuded seemed to cling to his clothes.
He cranked down the driver’s-side window and let warm but fresh air swirl into the car, barely noticing the black minivan that fell in behind him almost a block back, riding low and listing to the left to accommodate the great weight of the massive man behind the steering wheel.
14
Sleepy Hollow, the trailer court where Wallace and Sybil Cloy, Marla’s parents, lived, was almost twenty miles outside Orlando. Carver saw a sign featuring the cartoonlike silhouette of a headless horseman, slowed the car, and turned right onto Crane Drive.
Trailer courts in Florida were unlike those in other parts of the country. One difference was that their residents usually insisted on the term “mobile home” rather than “trailer.” Carver, who had once lived in one himself and rather liked it, still thought of them as trailers even as he called them mobile homes.
Sleepy Hollow’s streets were alphabetized and apparently all intersected Crane Drive. The lots were landscaped and relatively large, with established trees and shrubs. The trailers themselves were mostly double-wides, with artfully concealed wheels and an air of permanence about them.
The Cloy trailer was a block off Crane on L Street. It was a white double-wide with wooden latticework around the undercarriage, a porch with a blue-and-white striped metal awning over it, and a small backyard enclosed by a four-foot-high chain-link fence. Though there was no carport, there was a concrete driveway that ended abruptly near the north side of the trailer. A late-model blue Oldsmobile was parked in the driveway up close to the trailer. Beyond it Carver could see a black kettle-style barbecue smoker and two blue-webbed aluminum lawn chairs on the grass that began at the driveway’s end. Next to one of the chairs was a Coors beer can in a coiled metal holder at the top of a rod stuck in the ground.
He parked the Olds behind its newer, smaller cousin, then got out and limped over the hard ground toward the porch with the awning roof. Tiny insects swarmed into the air each time the tip of his cane entered the grass.
The Cloys had heard him arrive. He was about to knock on the white metal door with his cane when the knob rotated and the door opened. A tall, thin woman in a salmon-colored, loose-fitting dress looked at him in a way that asked what he wanted. She was in her late fifties, with gray-streaked black hair and deeply etched lines around blue eyes that seemed to strain for focus. Her face conveyed a kind of amiable strength lent by classic bone structure. “You can tell she was once a beautiful woman,” they would say about her someday when she was laid out for view in her casket. The beauty of her youth lay immortal just beneat
h the surface of time.
“Mrs. Sybil Cloy?” Carver asked.
She nodded, smiling, obviously wondering who he was.
“Detective Fred Carver,” he said. “I’m here to ask a few questions in regard to your daughter Marla’s complaints about Joel Brant.” Let her assume he was with the police. Let them all assume it, as long as he didn’t actually say it.
Sybil chewed on her lower lip and looked confused. “What kind of complaints?”
Carver was surprised Marla hadn’t confided her fears to her family. But maybe they weren’t close. “She says Brant is threatening her.”
“About what?” Sybil asked.
“She doesn’t know. He seems to be stalking her.”
Sybil turned her head toward someone behind her. “It’s a detective,” she said, “saying some man is threatening Marla.”
“Then she hasn’t mentioned this to you?” Carver asked, making sure.
“Ask him in, why don’t you?” a man’s voice said inside the trailer,
“Of course,” Sybil said, smiling like a hostess who’d made a faux pas. “Please come inside out of the heat.” She looked uneasily beyond him as she spoke, as if something that lived in the heat posed a danger.
Carver climbed the two steps and entered the trailer. It was cool and bright inside, with dark blue carpeting and comfortable-looking early American furniture. Dividing walls were cleverly offset so there was no sensation of being inside two trailers attached together side by side. The interior was paneled in light oak to make it seem more spacious.
A short, bald man wearing blue denim cutoffs and an untucked flowered short-sleeved shirt sat a small table. He was older than the woman and had a moon face, a deeply cleft chin, and very dark eyes beneath bushy black eyebrows. There was a beer can in front of him, and a complex-looking jigsaw puzzle half assembled to display startled and wary deer in snowbound woods. A glass containing ice and a clear liquid sat on a coaster on the other side of the puzzle.
“I hope I’m not interrupting,” Carver said, pointing toward the puzzle with his cane.
“It’s only a hobby,” the man at the table said. “I’m retired and got nothing else to do.”
“I’ve come to enjoy puzzles, too,” Sybil said. “Didn’t at first, but Wally got me interested. Now we’re both puzzle enthusiasts.”
“I’m Wallace Cloy,” the man at the table said. “Marla’s father. He tugged at his ear, tucked in his chin, and stared at Carver. “Threatened, huh?”
“The man’s been warned, and we think everything’s under control,” Carver said, “but it still bears some investigation.”
Wallace absently touched a forefinger to the cleft in his chin, as if it were an old wound that was still sore. He had wide, square hands with very broad fingers. There was something menacing about him. “Marla never mentioned any of this to us. You say a man is bothering her?”
Carver said again that was the situation. “Does Marla talk with you often?”
“Not as often as we’d like,” Sybil said.
Wallace glanced at her, but said to Carver, “Who is this guy?”
“Name’s Joel Brant. He’s a home builder over in Del Moray. Apparently he’s developed some kind of fixation on Marla. It’s not because of anything she’s done.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” Wallace said.
“Some men have that compulsion and settle on a particular woman for their own reasons. Marla said she didn’t even know who Brant was until he started harassing her. Have either of you ever heard of him?”
“I haven’t,” Sybil said.
“We wouldn’t know Marla’s friends,” Wallace said.
He picked up a potato chip from a bowl Carver hadn’t noticed on a counter within reach of the table, then bit into it almost savagely and began chewing noisily. When he’d bent over to reach the bowl, Carver could see behind him into the kitchen, where what looked like a complicated water filter with coiled white hoses was attached to the sink faucet. The Cloys seemed adequately protected from impurities.
“We’re very proud of Marla,” Sybil said. “We read all her work whenever it’s published, and last year she gave us that photograph.” She pointed behind Carver, and he turned around and saw an oak desk with a brass-framed color photo of Marla propped on it. It was a head shot, tilted so she appeared to be peeking around a corner while smiling. She was wearing makeup and had her hair styled in bangs. The Marla in the photo was wearing a demure white sweater and looked much younger and even prettier than the Marla that Carver knew. Prom queen material.
“Has Marla ever had any other problems with men harassing her?” he asked.
“She’s been harassed some, but no more than any other pretty girl,” Sybil said.
“She don’t send out the kinda vibes that’d turn a man onto her like that.” Wallace attacked another chip, then took a sip of beer to wash down the wreckage.
“Does she have any severe money problems that you know of?”
“What’s that got to do with it?” Wallace asked.
“Probably nothing.”
“We help her out now and then,” Sybil said. “She doesn’t ask often. She’s trying to make her living in a very difficult business.”
“Has she asked for financial help lately?”
“No. Not in over a year.”
“Has a man phoned here for her recently?”
“Men don’t phone here for her at all,” Wallace said.
Sybil smiled. “Would you care for something to drink?” she asked Carver.
“No, thanks. I’m almost ready to get out of your lives and leave you alone.”
“We don’t mind,” Sybil said, “if we can help Marla.”
“Do you know a friend of Sybil’s named Willa Krull?”
“Never heard of her.”
Carver glanced over at Wallace, who was shaking his head no.
“Okay,” Carver said. He thanked them for their time, smiling and easing toward the door. “This sure doesn’t feel like the inside of a trail- of a mobile home.”
“We don’t think of it as a mobile home at all,” Wallace said. “Except when there’s a tornado warning.”
Sybil opened the door for Carver. He caught a whiff of lilac perfume as he slid past her and made his way down the oddly angled steel steps with his cane.
She waited until he was all the way outside, then leaned forward out the door, as if she didn’t want Wallace to overhear her. “If there’s any way we can help you, help Marla, let us know.”
“I will,” Carver said. “And don’t worry too much about this. It’s not so serious that Marla even mentioned it to you.”
“I worry about Marla. A mother worries.”
“Most of them, anyway.” Carver turned toward his car, watching a swarm of insects rise around his cane. “Good luck with the puzzle.”
“Good luck with your own puzzle,” Sybil told him.
15
When Carver entered the cottage, he saw the note tucked beneath the salt shaker on the breakfast bar, where he and Beth customarily left messages for each other.
She was staking out Marla Cloy’s house and would return late that night.
The note also told him there was pressed turkey in the refrigerator. He found it, along with mayonnaise and lettuce, then built himself a sandwich on rye bread and ate it with a cold Budweiser. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was. He made himself another sandwich, and while he ate it he finished a small bag of barbecue potato chips Beth had eaten most of, then sealed with a wooden clothespin. He wondered where she’d obtained such a domestic item. She looked like a beautiful tribal queen. He couldn’t imagine her hanging wash.
After returning the turkey and mayonnaise to the refrigerator, he propped his sandwich plate in the dishwasher, then opened another beer. He carried the beer can and the cordless phone out onto the porch, sat down in a webbed lounge chair, and leaned his cane against the cottage wall.
He sat sipping beer and looking out at the oc
ean for a long time, watching a high bank of clouds move out to sea as gulls cried and wheeled in the dying light. Then he smoked a Swisher Sweet cigar, picked up the cordless phone, and called Vic Morgan.
“It’s Carver,” he said, when Morgan had answered the phone.
“You sure, Fred? You sound like you’re talking from the bottom of a barrel.”
“It’s this cordless phone.” Carver was often frustrated by technology that kept getting newer as he grew older. “I’m on a weak channel or something.”
“Then change the channel.”
“It does that automatically. I paid extra for that feature.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Can you hear me well enough?”
“Sure. As long as I just take your word for it that it’s you.”
“Given that it’s me,” Carver said, “I’d like to ask what you know about Joel Brant.”
“The guy who’s got the nutcase woman after him?”
Carver could tell where Morgan’s sympathies lay. Like a lot of cops, he’d developed a negative view of women from his years on Vice. “Same Brant. He’s my client now.”
“I don’t know anything about him personally,” Morgan said. “But I had the strong sensation he was telling me the truth. And you know how it goes when a woman’s accusing a man of anything these days. He’s got a hell of a problem even if he’s innocent. I thought you’d be the guy to get to the bottom of why this Cloy woman is out to get him.”
“Assuming he’s telling the truth.”
“You think he’s lying, Fred?” Morgan sounded surprised.
“I didn’t at first, but now I’m not so sure.”
“Hmm. That’s odd. I’ve developed a feel for these things over the years, and I’d bet the ranch and all the livestock he’s telling it straight. For some reason the Cloy broad is out to get him.”
“What if she’s the one telling the truth?”
“Then he kills her. That’s the way the law works, Fred. Can’t arrest a man for thinking about a crime-he’s got to commit it.”