Tropical Heat fc-1

by John Lutz

  He drove down the narrow road to the coast highway, then headed south. The Olds was large, with plenty of room for his stiff leg, and driving was no problem with the automatic transmission.

  A mile down the highway was a slow-food restaurant where Carver intended to stop for a big breakfast of hotcakes, sausage, and coffee. He would have a second cup of coffee, and maybe smoke a Swisher Sweet cigar if there was nobody around who looked like they might complain.

  Then he’d drive the rest of the way into Del Moray and talk to Edwina Talbot.

  Her house was small, like his, only it was worth about three times as much. Carver drove up the winding driveway and parked beneath three tall date palms planted in a perfect triangle marked off by fancy red stones. The house was constructed of brownish brick with a red front door and a low red tile roof. Beyond it Carver could see the blue Atlantic merge with a paler blue sky. When he switched off the engine, the sea muttered incomprehensible secrets to him.

  A gate opened in a stone wall that joined the north side of the house, and Edwina walked out. She was wearing a dark blue one-piece bathing suit, Mexican sandals, and was carrying a drink in her right hand. In her left hand was a pair of sunglasses with very dark oversized lenses. Her tanned, slender body was superb but for legs that were slightly bowed. That was the only thing wrong with her legs.

  Mustn’t grade women like cattle, Carver admonished himself, as he gripped his cane and got out of the car.

  “I heard you drive up,” Edwina said, walking closer, looking better, worth the blue ribbon. She didn’t seem surprised to see him; probably not much surprised her. Her dark hair was pulled back and bobby-pinned, emphasizing angular cheekbones and a graceful jawline. The patient intentness was still in her eyes; they were the eyes of a stalking cat. “Have you decided to search for Willis?”

  “Yes.”

  She smiled; the cat had cornered a mouse. “It’s a long drive here from your place. How did you know I’d be home?”

  “I didn’t. I was prepared to wait for you.”

  “You could have simply phoned, Mr. Carver. Or did you want to see me again?”

  “I wanted to see your house. To see how much you might be worth so I’ll know how much to charge you.”

  Edwina laughed low and melodiously. Carver liked the way the tendons in her throat tightened and moved.

  “You’re toying with me, Edwina,” he said. “Checking to see where you might attach strings to me.”

  She sobered. The laugh went silent and became a smile. “I’ll do whatever I have to in order to get somebody with ability to search for Willis.” She dangled the sunglasses, looking down at them. Then she put them on, as if suddenly deciding to effect a disguise. “Come on back by the pool, Mr. Carver. We’ll sit in the shade and talk.”

  She turned and strode through stark shadows back toward the open gate, not waiting for him. Carver limped behind her, watching the switch of her trim hips. He was feeling stronger, getting more competent with the cane.

  They sat opposite each other on wrought-iron white chairs at a metal table with an umbrella sprouting like a mutant tropical flower from its center. Edwina set her glass down on a plastic coaster. Carver guessed that the glass contained grapefruit juice. Or maybe it was a Margarita sans salt.

  “Would you like something cool to drink?” she asked. “Or coffee?”

  Carver declined. He was looking across the small round swimming pool at a brick veranda where another, larger table, with a fringed blue umbrella, was surrounded by four webbed aluminum chairs. Beyond the table was a low, curved brick wall with a long redwood planter on top. There were a lot of colorful flowers in the planter, and something green and viny draped out of one end. On the other side of the low wall the ground sloped gradually to what must have been the drop Edwina had described. They were up high, on a point of land jutting out from the coast. From where they sat, the sea and sky looked incredibly blue and vast.

  “Tell me about Willis Davis,” Carver said.

  Edwina stared at her glass, slowly lifting it just a fraction of an inch off the metal table and putting it back down in its wet ring, as if studying with a scientific eye the amazing adhesion of the water. “Willis is a considerate, gentle man.”

  “Likewise Bluebeard and Theodore Bundy. Tell me about Willis.”

  “He’s a soft touch who probably got in trouble helping someone. So soft, in fact, that, to tell you the truth, it’s difficult for me to imagine him as a salesman. But on the other hand, there’s something tremendously persuasive about him. I’ve seen him use that persuasiveness on a customer. If he believes in a product, he might be able to sell it better than a dozen high-pressure types like me.”

  “You don’t strike me as high-pressure,” Carver said. “High-voltage, maybe. It could be you’re not as hard as you think.”

  “You haven’t seen me trying to close a real-estate deal.” She looked up from her drink. Her eyes were barely visible behind the green-tinted lenses. “I don’t mean pushy; that’s not what I am. Maybe I’m not exactly high-pressure at that. But I am relentless. That’s part of what I saw in Willis-a quiet, calm relentlessness.”

  “Do you have a photograph of him?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Edwina shrugged. “I didn’t know it was required by law. Some people are camera bugs, some aren’t. I never took his photograph; I don’t even own a camera.”

  “Don’t real-estate salespeople around here photograph the houses they list?”

  “No, a professional photographer hired by the company does that.”

  “So describe Willis.”

  Edwina drummed her fingertips on the metal table. The sound annoyed Carver. He could feel the subtle vibrations with his own hand, which was resting on his side of the table.

  “He’s difficult to describe,” Edwina said finally. “He’s about your height-maybe five-foot-ten. Where you’re lean and muscular, Willis is well built but maybe a few pounds overweight. Still, he doesn’t have a stomach paunch and isn’t soft.”

  “What color are his hair and eyes?” Carver asked.

  “His hair is medium brown. His eyes are what you might call hazel. He’s sort of average-complexioned, with handsome, regular features. He has no distinguishing marks that I can think of. Oh-he has a scar on his right shoulder, in front, from an operation he had when he got hurt playing high-school football.”

  “A shoulder separation?” That was the most common football injury that would leave the kind of scar Edwina had described.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What high school?”

  “A private school up north. He was the team’s quarterback.”

  “Where exactly is Willis from?”

  “Orlando.”

  “I mean, before that.”

  “He never said. He did mention that he’d lived a while in the Midwest.”

  “Did you get the impression he was a Florida native?”

  “Nobody is a Florida native. Willis has a kind of nonregional accent. Which is no accent at all, if you know what I mean.”

  “Sure. Like one of those talking-suit network TV anchormen: coast-to-coast bland. But what sort of dresser is Willis? Does he favor flashy clothes? Does he wear plaid socks and striped shorts?”

  “He’s a conservative dresser,” Edwina said. “His suits are mostly gray and blue, with vests. He wears white shirts and ties that aren’t loud. His jackets don’t even have patterns in the material.”

  “Expensive clothes?”

  “Some cost a lot, some didn’t. He doesn’t wear thousand-dollar suits, but he mentioned once having a tailor.”

  “You don’t have the tailor’s name, I suppose.”

  “No.”

  “Who are his friends in Orlando?”

  “I never met any of them,” Edwina said. “It wasn’t that long after we met before he moved in with me here. Del Moray is where we spent most of our time together.”

  “Where did
Willis work?”

  “At Sun South, just outside of Del Moray. Where I was working when we met. He sold time-share units. Do you know what those are?”

  “I’m from Florida,” Carver said. Time-share projects were big in Florida. The customer bought the privilege of spending one or more weeks every year in an apartment, usually by the ocean. If he bought one week, he was in effect purchasing one fifty-second ownership of the apartment. Two weeks, one twenty-sixth. And so on. Time shares were a popular way to own at least a piece of valuable beachfront property that might continue to appreciate and be sold at a profit. Might.

  “Who was Willis’s boss at Sun South?” Carver asked.

  “Ernie Franks, the developer who built the project. Willis liked and admired him.”

  Carver thought it was convenient to have his questions anticipated. Edwina seemed to be ahead of him; he wondered how far ahead. He stood up, bumping his head on the umbrella, and walked around the pool and onto the veranda.

  Edwina followed him. As if she thought he might stumble and she should be there to catch him. He didn’t like that. She sensed it and fell back.

  Carver stepped over another low wall and walked toward the edge of the drop above the sea.

  “Be careful, Mr. Carver,” Edwina called behind him. She had stayed on the veranda and was staring out at him with what on her stony features passed for alarm.

  “Don’t worry,” Carver tossed back over his shoulder, “I used to be in show business, diving into shallow water from a high platform in the circus.”

  “Really?”

  “No.” Carver inched nearer the edge of the outcropping of land and looked down. Diving experience wouldn’t help him here anyway; the sea foamed around unevenly piled jagged rocks directly below, and the water didn’t appear to be more than a few feet deep. His stomach took the plunge, beckoning Carver to follow. He declined and dizzily moved back from the drop, then turned to face Edwina. “Where were Willis’s jacket and shoes found?”

  She pointed to a spot on the ground a few feet to Carver’s left.

  The bare, rocky soil told him nothing. He started back to the veranda. By the time he got there, Edwina was seated in one of the webbed chairs at the table, waiting for him.

  “Where are the shoes and jacket?” he asked.

  “The police kept them.”

  Carver sat down in one of the other chairs. He saw that his pants were dirty from when he’d struggled over the low walls around the veranda. He brushed at the loose earth and it fell away. “What else can you tell me about Willis?” he asked.

  “He loved me.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Is it important to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sure. One other man loved me in my life. It was the same way it was with Willis. I don’t want the result to be the same.”

  Carver stared at her, sensed pain. There was something pertinent she wasn’t telling him. “Okay,” he said. He stood up, bumping his head on that umbrella as he had on the one by the pool. It felt about the same.

  Edwina removed her sunglasses and looked up at him, appraising him with a pawnbroker’s squint. She had a way of seeming to see to the center of things.

  “You look better than when we met at your place,” she said. “Almost as if you don’t mind being alive. It’s because you have a job now. A challenge.”

  “I’m not a victim of the work ethic,” Carver told her, knowing better. He was like Edwina; he needed an obsession, maybe even one that carried moral obligation, so he could push himself until he was satisfied that he’d done the job: an illusion of forward motion in life. But he had his doubts about whether Willis Davis was worth all of that. “When I find out anything important, I’ll let you know,” he said. He got a firm grip on his cane and started back around the pool to go to his car.

  Edwina walked next to him, her sandals making soft slapping sounds against the bottoms of her feet. Her slow pace was Carver’s normal one, with the cane. She didn’t open the gate for him, or the car door.

  Carver settled in behind the steering wheel, twisted the ignition key, and the Oldsmobile’s big V-8 engine growled and rumbled like the dinosaur it was. He felt its powerful vibration in his thighs and buttocks, throughout his body.

  “We haven’t discussed your fee,” Edwina said, standing alongside the car.

  “We’ll discuss it when I find Willis. If I don’t find him, you can cover my expenses and that’s all.”

  “That’s fair to the point of being dumb.”

  “That’s me for you,” Carver said. He drove away.

  CHAPTER 4

  Carver took interstate 95 south, then drove west on the Bee Line Expressway into Orlando. As soon as he got off the highway, he pulled to the curb and raised the Oldsmobile’s canvas top; the June Florida sun was high now, beating down on vinyl, flesh, and metal. There would be no sixty-mile-per-hour breeze to cool him now that he had to drive at a slower speed in the city. He switched on the air-conditioner before accelerating back out into traffic.

  A van with more windows than a house, and half a dozen Disney World stickers pasted on its rear doors and bumper, honked at Carver for pulling in ahead of it, then whizzed on past the Olds about twenty miles per hour over the speed limit. It seemed that half the cars that passed Carver going north had Disney stickers on their bumpers or trunks. People not letting go of their vacation in Disney-dominated, enchanted central Florida, carrying the good times home with them. Someday it might be comforting to scrape the snow off that bumper and see the sticker.

  A small blond kid who might have been male or female stared for a moment out a sticker-papered rear window, just before the van cut across the bow of a truck and took a turnoff toward downtown. Carver followed the van, watching it pull away at high speed. He was on his way downtown, too. He hoped he wouldn’t see the van wrapped around a tree on the way.

  Carver found Lieutenant Alfonso Desoto in his office on the second floor of police headquarters. The lieutenant didn’t get up from behind his cluttered gray metal desk when Carver entered, but he smiled and waved a hand in invitation for Carver to sit down in one of the wooden chairs in front of the desk. A portable radio on the window sill behind Desoto was playing “Guantanamera.” In the other window a refrigeration unit purred away, causing a couple of yellow ribbons tied to its grill work to flutter merrily. The office looked cool but felt too warm.

  Carver hooked his cane around the back of one of the chairs and pulled it to him, then sat down. He looked at Desoto without speaking. The lieutenant was as handsome as ever, and would have looked more at home in a bullfighter’s suit of lights than in his gray business suit. Desoto was over six feet tall, broad of shoulder and waspish of waist, with flashing white teeth, liquid brown eyes, and a noble Aztec profile. He was only half Mexican, Carver knew, on his father’s side. His mother was Italian. Desoto had inherited the best of the gene pool.

  He was the first to speak. “You look good, amigo. The rich and idle life of the private cop apparently agrees with you.”

  “Only apparently,” Carver said. “I’d rather be back on the job.”

  Desoto nodded somberly. “I know. But life is change, and we all have to adapt. Sad, but that’s the way of things.”

  “Don’t give me that crap.”

  “Okay.”

  The music on the radio stopped, and a commercial blared from the tinny speaker, a rehearsed conversation among a group of kids praising the qualities of a popular brand of pudding. Somewhere big business had gotten the idea that cuteness translated into profit. Carver wished they’d hurry up and get some other idea.

  “You mind turning that off?” he asked Desoto.

  Desoto raised an eyebrow in matinee-idol fashion. He didn’t look like the tough cop he was. “You don’t like pudding, amigo?”

  “I don’t like cute. It makes me want to spit.”

  “Ah, you’ve gotten cynical, bitter.” But Desoto’s hand reached out and switche
d off the radio. The room abruptly seemed unnaturally quiet, with only the purring of the air-conditioner and the distant, unintelligible crackle of a dispatcher’s voice on the police radio somewhere outside the office, droning relentlessly: Orlando keeping up in crime. “But what about Miss Edwina Talbot?” Desoto asked. “That one is beyond mere cute, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Is that why you sent her to me, Desoto? To cheer me up?”

  “I thought you might need something to make your pecker as stiff as your leg.”

  “I only need one crutch,” Carver said. “You sent me Edwina because the Willis Davis suicide doesn’t smell right.”

  “I didn’t tell her that.”

  “You wouldn’t. And you wouldn’t tell her that you can’t waste money and manpower on a case that probably would end up a fat zero. That the higher-ups on the force wouldn’t let you, even if you wanted to take a run at finding Willis Davis or what’s left of him. You wouldn’t tell her, but she knows.”

  “Sure, the woman’s no fool. I realized that as soon as I stopped looking at her and started listening. And there’s something else about her. She isn’t nearly as tough as she acts.”

  “Oh?” It interested Carver that Desoto had come to the same conclusion he had. “Then why does she act tough?”

  “You don’t understand the female of our species, amigo. This one has been hurt, badly.”

  “Sure. Willis left her.” Carver was prodding. He wanted to hear what Desoto had to say about this, his area of expertise.

  “No, no, I mean before that. Beyond that. She must have been. That’s why she pretends to be so cold.”

  “So you decided she should be my client,” Carver said. “Good psychotherapy for both of us.”

  “You were going to rust and ruin out there by the ocean, hadn’t worked in a month; I heard it from a lot of people. And what other kind of work do you know, huh, viejo? You’ve been a policeman almost all your so-called adult life.”