by John Lutz
“It seemed to me I sniffed a burning smell, too. Like somebody’d just struck a match and lit a cigarette. Hell, I ain’t smoked in years.”
“Maybe that’s why it’s been years.”
“Anyways,” Amos went on, “next morning they found Jim dead in his bed. Stroke, they said took him. It can happen anytime, I guess, but Jim seemed healthy as Hercules the day before he died. Then I got to thinking about that late-night visit, and what I’d seen the night before that.”
“You do a lot of observing at night,” Carver remarked.
“My window looks right out on the parking lot. Besides, I got insomnia.”
Not the wrong pill.
“But I don’t tell nobody,” Amos said. “Had it since I got the same uneasy feeling Sam Cusanelli had that something doesn’t set right around here. They don’t know here I was a cop long time ago. A detective-sergeant, matter of fact, I remember how to investigate. Night before Jim died I heard a car out on the lot and seen Nurse Rule talking to a fella had driven up by the main building. She got in the car with him and they sat and talked for a long time. Then out she climbed and went back in the building. A little later I heard her drive away in her own car.”
“How long did they talk?”
“I’d guess about fifteen minutes.”
“Maybe she met her boyfriend,” Carver said. “Talked with him a while, then came back inside to do some late-night work. See any romance inside that car?”
“Romance? Nurse Rule? You shitting me?”
“I don’t know the woman,” Carver explained.
“Well, I wouldn’t call her homely, but she’s the type might cut off your balls after you put it to her. Know what I mean?”
Carver wasn’t sure if he did. “Was it unusual for her to be here that time of night?”
“ ’Course it was. Why I brought it up.”
“She was never on the night shift?”
“Not Nurse Rule,” Amos said, with the same undercurrent of respect Carver had heard in Kearny Williams’s voice. “She’s the boss.”
“What about Dr. Macklin?”
“Hah! We don’t see much of Dr. Macklin around here. It’s Doc Pauly makes the regular rounds.”
“What kind of guy is he?”
“Good man, Doc Pauly.”
“Good doctor?”
“That, too.”
“Birdie Reeves?”
“Just a real sweet youngster. Reminds me when I was a teenager couple of million years ago. Kinda girl when you’re fifteen you’re sure you’re gonna marry someday.” A change crept into Amos’s worn voice. “Sometimes it even works out that way, but not often. Sure as hell didn’t for me.”
Carver tapped his cane on the carpet, rotated the tip a few times, and stared at the indentation it had made. “That’s it?” he asked. “All you have to tell me?”
“That, and my cop’s instincts are screaming there’s something going down in this place.”
Amos bit off his last word and clamped his lips together. Then he beamed and said, “This is Miss Jane Worthington.” There was something about the way he pronounced her name, like a sailor saying the name of his ship.
An old woman with cottony white hair and parchment skin was standing over them. She looked almost as tall as Amos and had a face from a Renaissance painting, oval and pure and somehow noble. She had the kind of beauty that never faded but instead settled in deeper with the years and made a mockery of superficial attractiveness. It had nothing to do with button noses or long eyelashes; it had to do with what she had been and was now, and how she would play in memory.
Jane Worthington waited a few seconds and saw that Carver wasn’t going to be introduced and wasn’t about to volunteer his name. Without commenting on this breach of etiquette she said, “Amos, you telling your lies to this fine young man?”
Amos didn’t answer. Carver smiled. “What lies are those?”
Her wise gray eyes flicked to his cane but registered nothing. She’d seen handicaps before and knew what they did and didn’t mean.
“I confided in Jane,” Amos said in a near whisper. “Had to tell somebody what I thought. Damn it, I ain’t Catholic-I couldn’t tell a priest.”
Jane shook her head. “Tell you the truth, Amos, I think you got two bolts and a nut loose. But it isn’t hard to understand why. It’s just that we don’t like to think our friends should die and leave us, even in a place like this. It doesn’t seem natural, though it’s the most natural thing in the world.”
“You don’t think there’s anything wrong here?” Carver asked.
“No, I don’t. But I play along with Amos and don’t tell anybody about his harebrained suspicions.”
“I told you Sam Cusanelli had the same suspicions. Somebody else around here does, too. I ain’t alone in this, Jane.”
“I know you’re not. It’s the kind of thing that spreads. An undercurrent of gossip.”
“Some gossip’s true.”
“Most isn’t. That’s why it’s called gossip.”
“See enough smoke,” Amos said gloatingly, “and you look and you’ll find a fire.”
“And sometimes an arsonist.”
Amos put on a huffy expression and leaned back in the sofa. He clearly didn’t like being one-upped. This was a difficult woman for sure.
“I’ve heard enough and played enough games for today,” Jane Worthington said. “Morning, Mr. Carver.”
She left them, moving regally, her tall, lean body still graceful and not acknowledging her years.
Amos looked embarrassed. “Well, I did tell her who you were and that I’d invited you here to talk. She’s the kinda woman you talk to and secrets sorta slip out.”
“Amos, I think you’ve got a crush on Miss Jane Worthington.”
The old man’s long face turned tomato red. “Piss on you, Carver! I was married to Mrs. Burrel forty-three years before she died of a liver infection in ’eighty-two. Besides, Jane’s too young for me. There’s damn near five years’ difference in our ages. I thought you’d take what I had to say serious instead of funning around.”
“I do take it seriously,” Carver said. “But what if I take what Jane Worthington says just as seriously? According to her, you tend to exaggerate now and then. Lies, she called them. But I don’t figure you for a liar.”
Amos’s face creased into a grin. “Then you believe me?”
“I do more or less. You’re the second person I’ve talked to who thinks Sunhaven’s something other than it should be. And we’ve got to include Sam Cusanelli’s opinion.”
“Sam seen the fella once, too,” Amos said.
“What fella?”
“Why, the fella Nurse Rule was talking to in the big white Cadillac night before Jim died. One you said mighta been her boyfriend.”
Amos suddenly drew in his breath in a gasp and his eyes fixed on something behind Carver and then wavered and dropped. He was staring at his lap as if he’d just spilled food there.
“Who’s your friend, Amos?” a crisp female voice inquired. Without looking up, Amos said, “This is Mr. Fred Carver, Nurse Rule.”
Though she was stockily built, she didn’t give the impression of being a large woman; yet she filled her space in the world. She was wearing a white uniform with a squared blue collar and carrying an empty clipboard with a pen clamped to it. Brown hair, narrow blue eyes, very thin lips that were probably always curved in a smile that meant nothing. A face like a lumpy potato, yet, as Amos had said, for some reason not exactly homely. Her hands were surprisingly small but strong-looking. Square-fingered and without nail polish. Functional tools of her trade.
She trained her dead but bright eyes on Carver and he felt a current of cold, primal knowledge; she was the stuff of black widow spiders and feral animals. She repelled and frightened and fascinated people more as they got to know her and depend on her.
“Are you a relative?” she asked Carver.
“He’s a friend,” Amos mumbled. The son-
from-Syracuse story was forgotten. It wouldn’t wash with Nurse Rule.
She stared at Amos, her flat, bland features registering mild curiosity. “Amos?”
His head trembled on the stalk of his neck, but he looked up at her with effort.
Her curved lips arced in a wider smile that gained no warmth. “Have a nice visit, Amos.” Her gaze swung to Carver again. It meant something when she looked at people, every time, or she wouldn’t have bothered. “You, too, Mr. Carver.”
She walked away. A no-nonsense stride, no excessive arm-swinging and very little hip motion. Her white shoes trod soundlessly on the earth-colored carpet.
“Why are you so afraid of her?” Carver asked.
“My bath…” Amos said, still obviously shaken by the possibility of having been overheard by Nurse Rule.
“What about your bath?”
“Last time my back went out and I couldn’t move, I wrote a letter of complaint to the state about the way I was ignored all night when I kept ringing for help. Nurse Rule gave me my bath the morning after that and threatened to scald me bad if I wrote any more letters. She’d say it was an accident, something wrong with the hot-water thermostat. She’d get away with it, too; you can be damned positive of that.”
Carver wasn’t sure he was hearing right. “She what?”
“You heard,” Amos said softly. “I ain’t never told anybody till now. Not even Jane.” He stared into Carver with eyes that had completely lost their glint of defiance. “My back goes out from time to time. Never can tell when. Jesus, it makes me feel helpless! I’m counting on you, Carver.”
Carver stood up and leaned on his cane. He rested a hand on Amos’s thin shoulder but withdrew it hastily when the shoulder began to quake. Amos quickly shoved something into the hand. A damp scrap of white paper, tightly folded.
“What’s this?” Carver asked.
Amos wasn’t going to answer. Wasn’t going to look up from staring at his lap again. He was crying soundlessly when Carver limped away.
Was Jane Worthington right about Amos’s overactive imagination and his suspicions? Was the story about Nurse Rule and the bath true? Maybe Carver had wasted his time listening to the paranoid delusions of an old man haunted by the past.
An old man who’d seen Nurse Nora Rule sitting with someone in a white Cadillac.
Or thought he had.
The sun was still beating down outside, but Carver was chilled.
In the parking lot, he stood near the Olds and laboriously unfolded the scrap of paper Amos had given him. Scrawled in light pencil was a series of numbers. Carver knew immediately where Amos had copied it from.
A license plate.
11
When Carver left Sunhaven he drove south on Route 1, then west on the Bee Line Expressway toward Orlando. He left the convertible’s top up to block the sun, but all the windows were cranked down and the wind whirled and roared like a hurricane in the speeding car, whistling through the cracked windshield, slapping taut canvas against the steel struts above Carver’s head. Mach one! Mach two!
At much slower speed, he maneuvered the Olds through downtown traffic in Orlando to the tan brick and pale stone Municipal Justice Building on Hughey. He parked in the side lot, near a row of dusty tan patrol cars.
When he went inside to talk to Desoto, he was told by a desk sergeant named Markus that the lieutenant was at lunch. Carver knew Markus slightly from his time on the force, and Markus wanted to pass the time of day with cop talk, but Carver had things to do and got out of there as soon as he could.
He limped from the building and made his way toward Orange Avenue, where he was sure he’d find Desoto in Rhonda’s Restaurant. Heat rose in waves from the city’s baked concrete, which never cooled completely this time of year, except in the early morning hours or after late rains.
It wasn’t much of a walk, even for a man with a cane, but by the time Carver pushed open the door to Rhonda’s and basked in the rush of cool inside air he was soaked with sweat and felt slightly light-headed. He wondered how people had managed to live in Florida before air conditioning. And why. Heat, alligators, and mosquitoes weren’t much by way of attractions. Standing just inside the door, he back-wristed perspiration from his forehead, then looked around in the dimness.
Rhonda’s specialized in spicy Italian food, a weakness Carver and Desoto shared. The restaurant had a small bar off to the left and about twenty white-clothed, round tables arranged along the walls. There were half a dozen more tables on a raised area accessible by three wide, carpeted steps. The lunch crowd was still evident; there were only three or four empty tables.
As the headwaiter was angling over to seat him, Carver heard Desoto say, “Your aging eyes going bad as your leg, amigo?”
Desoto was sitting alone at a table not five feet from Carver. He’d finished eating; dishes were spread out in front of him, pushed back on the table, and he was enjoying a stein of beer. It was dark beer with no head on it.
Carver waved the waiter away and sat down opposite Desoto. He decided not to acknowledge that crack about his eyes. Sure, it wasn’t really so dim in Rhonda’s, but he’d trudged all the way up here from Hughey in bright sunlight. Because it took a while for his eyes to adjust didn’t mean they were going bad, that he was getting old. But it occurred to him that everyone was getting old. Nobody got off the treadmill. And the treadmill never stopped.
“Had lunch?” Desoto asked.
“Don’t want any. Too hot to have an appetite.”
“It is hot out there. You’ve worked yourself into a lather pursuing my case, eh?”
“Exactly.”
A waitress popped out of nowhere, a middle-aged woman with a dour expression and gray-brown hair bunched with oversized bobby pins in a bun like a bird’s nest on the back of her head.
Carver asked for a draft beer. Not much of a tip in that, the woman’s face seemed to convey, as she nodded and ambled away on sturdy legs to place the bar order.
After she’d returned with his drink, Carver brought Desoto up to date on everything that had occurred since they last spoke. He described in detail his morning visit with Amos Burrel.
Desoto listened without once interrupting, his head slightly bowed and his dark eyes serious. It was as if something on the tablecloth had gripped his attention. Now and then he sipped at his beer. When Carver was finished, Desoto signaled the dour waitress for another drink.
“Did Sam ever mention Amos Burrel?” Carver asked.
Desoto shook his head no. He held what he was going to say until the waitress had delivered the fresh beer and then left, juggling an armload of dishes as she waddled toward the back of the restaurant. “This Amos. From what you say he sounds like some of the others I met out at Sunhaven.”
“What others?”
“Residents. Friends of Uncle Sam. Some of them, I tell you I don’t know about. Sad. People get old, they begin suspecting everyone’s out to get them. They think people are talking about them, stealing from them. I know Sam wasn’t like that, but the others I’m not so sure. Old age can be like a curse, amigo. Primitive societies used to think old people got irrational because in their enfeebled state they became possessed by demons. Some religious folks here in Florida still believe that. You believe in God and his angels, it follows there’s a devil and his demons, eh? It divides the world nicely and makes things simple.”
“I can’t judge whether Amos is senile,” Carver admitted. “He’s suspicious and unpredictable, but maybe he’s been that way all his life. Maybe he’s telling the truth right on the mark and has good reason to be afraid.”
Then he told Desoto about the folded scrap of paper Amos had thrust into his hand as he was leaving. He gave the paper to Desoto, who studied it, shrugged, and excused himself.
Carver watched him, a tapered, elegant figure that turned female heads, walk to the end of the bar and ask to use the phone. He was going to run a make on the license number. It wouldn’t take long.
Fi
ve minutes later, Desoto-pale suitcoat buttoned, tie neatly and securely knotted, looking like the coolest thing in the room-returned to the table and said, “White ’eighty-seven Cadillac sedan registered to Raphael Ortiz. Address in Del Moray.”
Desoto sat back down, tried a sip of beer, and then set the stein in the center of the table as if the taste disagreed with him. “This Raffy-as he’s called-is a major-league bad-ass, amigo.”
Carver was surprised by the distress in Desoto’s voice. “How bad can he be?” he asked.
“Ah, you might say he’s almost a legend. Anyway, I and many others know him by reputation. He’s a Marielito who came over in the boat lift from Cuba. Computer says in Cuba he was convicted of murdering his brother. Then, while in prison, he gouged out a guard’s eyes with a broken bottle, and his sentence was changed so he could never be released. He built himself up with weights in prison-not weights like Nautilus equipment; he used stones. Then he became an expert in martial arts. Made himself into the baddest of hombres. No one would cross him. He ran the place-the warden, the guards, everything. Castro must have been overjoyed to be rid of him. That’s Raffy Ortiz.”
Carver waited, his wrist resting on the curve of his cane.
Desoto leaned forward and his handsome face took on a somber look. “Now, there’s something I know that isn’t common knowledge or part of Raffy’s sheet. Four years ago in Miami a crooked pharmacy was robbed of some designer drugs. Ecstasy, Eve, that kinda crap. A hostage was taken, young girl who was working behind the counter and was the wife of one of a rival faction in the drug trade. She was found in the swamp a week later. Usual things had been done to her, the M.E. said, but also some unusual things. While she was alive. Miami said she had to have been looking forward to finally dying. Said they had it on good authority it was Raffy’s work. But there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him.”
“Means he’s sick, not tough,” Carver said.
Desoto tilted back his head and arched a dark eyebrow; he wasn’t finished talking. “The dead woman’s husband went berserk and vowed revenge, went looking for Raffy. The story is Raffy came to him. With Raffy’s buddies looking on, Raffy and the husband had their left wrists tied together and commenced to carve themselves up with knives. You know the ceremony: test of machismo. We of Latin temperament do that kinda stuff. Some of us.”