Tropical Heat fc-1

by John Lutz

  “I never heard of him until a few minutes ago,” Carver said. “From you. Are you telling me you think Lujan killed him?”

  “I’m not sure what to think right now,” Armont said. “There’s quicksand in that part of the swamp south of town. Sinkholes that go down deeper than imagination. A man could have an accident there, disappear for good. Even a trained naturalist like Mackenzie.”

  “Still,” Carver said, “those sandal prints. It’s possible Lujan knifed him, maybe in a robbery, maybe for twisted sport, and there’s no connection between that and his attempt on my life.”

  “Yeah,” Armont said, “it’s possible.” He didn’t seem to believe it. “Could be we’ll never know, with Lujan dead.” More perspiration dripped from his chin.

  “Thanks for the information,” Carver said. He reached over and shook Armont’s hand.

  Armont stood up straight, so that only his ample stomach was visible out the window. He slapped the canvas top of the car to get Carver’s attention. “You take care now,” he said, loud enough for Carver to hear.

  Carver watched him walk back to the cruiser and get in.

  Armont started the car immediately. Its tires kicked up mud and rock as it swerved back onto the road and accelerated past the parked Olds.

  The chief tapped the horn and waved to Carver, an oddly wistful good-bye.

  Carver sat for a while longer, thinking about what Armont had told him. Something had happened to the naturalist Mackenzie out there in the swamp. Considering Lujan’s history with knives, it wasn’t at all unlikely that Mackenzie and Carver were simply meant to be fellow victims, by chance and nothing more. Or Lujan might have visited the campsite but had nothing to do with Mackenzie’s disappearance.

  Coincidence again? Hah!

  Carver started the Olds and gunned the engine to free the right front wheel from the pull of the swamp.

  It was almost noon when Carver and Edwina drove out of Solarville in the Olds and headed toward the main highway, then north. Not toward Del Moray but toward Orlando. Edwina wanted to get some of her things from Willis’s apartment, she’d said. Carver thought she probably wanted to visit the apartment to get a renewed sense of Willis, to make the ghost more real.

  They stopped for a light lunch at a truck stop that served free orange and grapefruit juice in paper cups, then continued through the grove country with the Olds’s top raised to block the brooding tropical sun. Carver sat disconsolately behind the steering wheel, thinking about the night before and listening to flying insects smack against the windshield and meet sudden, unexpected oblivion.

  In the rented Pontiac that followed the Olds were three men, well dressed in expensive if slightly flamboyant fashion, seated calmly in the air-conditioned oasis of the car’s spacious blue interior. They were large men, and each had about him the perfect stillness of the truly dangerous, the calmness of the carnivore conserving energy for the kill. Two of the men had been on the boat off the shore near Sun South when Carver was talking to Franks.

  The three had spent most of their lives in Cuba. Hard lives, not without violence. They were Marielitos.

  The driver, a bulky man with a receding hairline above a peasant’s sunbrowned face of blunt angles and planes, was Jorge Lujan. Silverio’s brother.

  He liked knives and fire.

  CHAPTER 20

  About an hour after lunch they were close to Orlando. The smiling, sunny presence of Disney World began to make itself felt, radiating far beyond the Magic Kingdom. Signs began to give mileage and directions to the land of Mickey and Pluto and the Monorail. Carver stopped and filled the Olds’s tank at Gas World. A roadside shop with a display of clocks made from waxed slabs of cypress billed itself as Souvenir World. A produce stand not much larger than a phone booth was Citrus World. In the station wagon in front of the Olds, anywhere from four to six children (they were moving around inside the car too fast to count) all wore oversized mouse ears that kept getting knocked crooked on their small heads. The man and woman in the front seat took turns twisting awkwardly and shouting at the kids. Frantic World.

  Willis Davis’s apartment was on Escalera Street, in an Orlando neighborhood of newer brick apartment buildings interspersed with older stucco two-story structures with terra-cotta roofs, wrought-iron balconies, and unkempt gardens. Most of the stucco was cracked, missing in spots, its pastel colors faded from the sun. The brick buildings were clean-lined and functional and looked as if they might have been built two hours ago. It was a fascinating juxtaposition of old and new. Willis’s apartment was in one of the new brick buildings, on the third floor, front.

  He had virtually moved out of the place, long ago. A very fine layer of dust covered everything, evenly settled, like dust on waxed fruit in a bowl. It seemed not so much to make things dirty as to remove their luster, make them something less than real.

  The furniture was fairly new, traditional and nondescript. A couple of outdated magazines lay on a round coffee table; a bookshelf near the window held a stereo tape deck and two speakers, and some more magazines, Time and Real Estate Weekly, stacked in a jumble down below. The wall hangings looked like dime-store prints, and most of them listed sharply in the same direction, as if the building had been tilted slightly by a curious giant, then straightened.

  Edwina switched on a lamp to make the place brighter. It didn’t help much; the fine dust seemed to absorb the illumination. She looked around, breathed in deeply, then walked toward a hall leading to the bedroom, which Carver could see from where he stood.

  Carver found the thermostat and turned it to Cool, then he followed her. Air rushing from a ceiling vent in the hall brushed the back of his neck. “When’s the last time the police looked around in here?” he asked.

  “Unless they used the landlord’s passkey, they were only here the day after Willis disappeared.”

  Carver thought that was about right. The apartment of a probable suicide wouldn’t be subject to as much attention as that of a suspect in a crime. The Orlando police had probably given the place a quick but thorough once-over, searching for a note or anything that had suggested self-destruction.

  While Edwina was rummaging through mostly empty dresser drawers, Carver walked around and did some nosing about of his own. Obviously Willis hadn’t lived in the apartment for months, and had visited it only occasionally while he was living with Edwina in Del Moray. The medicine cabinet held nothing but a rusty Gillette razor and a dehydrated stick of deodorant. The soap in the tile dish by the bathtub was also dry and cracked. One of the tub’s faucets was dripping loudly and steadily; the sort of thing that would get on Carver’s nerves if he let it. He bent down and turned the faucet handle tight, but the water still dripped at the same rate.

  Carver went into the kitchen, where he could still barely hear the steady tap! tap! tap! of water hitting the tub. The refrigerator held two cans of Budweiser and what had once been a tomato. The cupboards contained a sparse assortment of half boxes of cereal and crackers, a few cans of Campbell’s soup.

  In the bedroom, Edwina was still going through drawers. She’d found a necklace and a pair of black spike-heeled shoes. “We spent some time here before Willis moved in with me,” she explained. She checked a bottom drawer and pulled out a wrinkled, man’s tie. Holding it high to examine it, she quite consciously caressed it before laying it back in the drawer. Something of Willis.

  “Did you expect to find some sign that he’d been here?” Carver asked.

  “I don’t know. Possibly I did. It would at least tell me that he has some choice in his movements, that he’s reasonably well, and whatever danger he might be in has left him still alive.”

  “If he’s in danger.”

  Edwina shot him a brief glare. She began to speak and then stopped, her lips trembling. She’d been about to defend Willis but seemed to realize that her carefully managed composure might crack under the pressure of emotion.

  Carver limped over to the closet and slid open the door. A gray
suit with wide lapels was draped over a hanger, out of style. Willis hadn’t figured it worth taking with him to Edwina’s. The shelf above the hanger bar was empty. Carver went through the suit pockets. They were empty, too.

  He walked over to the window, his cane leaving quarter-sized depressions in the plush, rose-colored carpet. For a while he stared down at Escalera Street, thinking. If Willis had anything in his possession he hadn’t wanted Edwina to find, he might have left it there in the apartment, well hidden. And if he hadn’t been able to predict the precise time when he had to fake his suicide and disappear, whatever might be hidden could still be there. It was possible he’d returned to get it-if there was an “it.” But he might not have needed to return for it. The kind of hiding place Carver had in mind was one that wouldn’t be uncovered by less than a major police search, perhaps not even by new tenants.

  “I’m going to look around,” he told Edwina.

  “Isn’t that what you’ve been doing?”

  “I mean more thoroughly.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know. Probably there isn’t anything to be found. But there are places to hide things, and I might as well check them.”

  “Another one of those bases that need to be touched?” Edwina asked.

  “Maybe home plate,” Carver said. “The winning run. Who can tell about Willis?”

  He thought she’d reply that she could, but she knew better. She silently checked the drawer in the nightstand.

  Carver started with the bedroom. He removed light bulbs to see if anything was hidden in the sockets. Using a dime for a screwdriver, he checked the cavities behind the switchplates. Then he went over the mattress and springs, tested the corners of the carpet to make sure it hadn’t been peeled back and replaced, made sure the hanger rod in the closet wasn’t hollow.

  He found nothing in the bedroom and moved on to the bathroom. By this time Edwina had finished retrieving her things and was sitting patiently on the living-room sofa. All she had found were the shoes and necklace, which were beside her on the cushion. When Carver glanced in at her, she crossed her legs and looked unhappy. He wondered how she’d look in the black spiked heels and necklace, nothing else.

  Back to business, he told himself.

  Or maybe without the necklace.

  The bathroom took only about ten minutes, and yielded nothing of interest other than an unusually large palmetto bug that scurried into the woodwork. Carver moved on to the kitchen. He would do the living room last. Room after room, by the book.

  In the kitchen, he had luck. When he removed the access panel to the plumbing, at the back of the cabinet beneath the sink, he discovered a coffee can attached to the water pipes with electricians’ tape so it wouldn’t fall between the walls.

  He removed the can and pried the lid from it.

  Inside were a snub-nosed. 38 Colt revolver, a clear plastic packet of white powder, and several credit cards, library cards, driver’s licenses, and Social Security cards. There was also a folded piece of gray paper.

  Carver set the gun aside, opened the packet, and looked closely at the fine white powder. He wet his finger, touched it to the stuff, and tasted a few particles. Cocaine. He resealed the packet and examined the cards. The Social Security cards looked forged and probably were. Maybe Willis had used them to obtain the rest of the phony identification.

  When he sorted through the cards, Carver found that they were made out to two names: Arnold Givers and David Verrac. Carver guessed that Givers and Verrac were names pulled from Willis’s imagination, or from old gravestones so Willis could contact local government agencies and obtain genuine birth certificates to start the chain of false I.D. s. Building a new identity link by link was easy if you knew how.

  Carver unfolded the gray paper. It was a detailed map of Solarville, with an area of swamp south of town neatly circled in red pencil. He refolded the map and put it with the gun.

  “What’s all that stuff?” Edwina asked. She had approached quietly behind Carver and was staring over his shoulder where he sat on the floor in front of the sink.

  “That’s a gun,” he said, pointing to the revolver.

  “I mean the rest of it.”

  “Ever hear of Arnold Givers or David Verrac?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He gathered everything in his right hand, beneath his right arm, and stood up with difficulty using the cane. Edwina didn’t move to help him. He spread out the gun, the cocaine, the map, and the phony identification on the butcher-block counter and watched her step close and peer at the revealing display.

  “What does it all mean?” she asked finally.

  “It suggests that Willis was up to something you didn’t know about. That Solarville was in his thoughts. That he tooted or dealt in coke. And that he used several identities for whatever he did in life. He might be living somewhere now under an assumed name, if he isn’t dead. When you get involved with dope, guns, and false identities, usually you’re also involved with people whose flip sides are dangerous.”

  Edwina walked back to the sofa and sat down; Carver watched her through the kitchen doorway.

  He returned the can with its contents to where he’d found it, screwed the painted plywood access panel back on, and went into the living room to join her. His good leg was aching from all the straightening and stooping, and the awkward position he’d had to hold under the sink. He was perspiring; the air-conditioning he’d switched on when they’d entered the apartment hadn’t caught up with the heat.

  “Willis didn’t do dope,” Edwina said, staring up at him.

  “Not in front of you, maybe,” Carver said. “Or maybe he didn’t do drugs at all but had something in common with people who did.” He wondered if the packet in the coffee can might be a sample in a major narcotics deal. A hundred thousand dollars would buy a lot of cocaine or pure heroin near the source. It was all beginning to point that way. Willis Davis dealing in all kinds of dreams, romantic and otherwise.

  “Maybe the coke belongs to somebody else,” Edwina said.

  “Maybe,” Carver said, rolling with her optimism.

  She stood up, started to pace, then turned to him and said, “God damn it, Carver.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But you should have thought about where whatever I learned might take you. Take us.”

  Edwina looked away from him. He suspected she was crying. The Willis Davis she knew was dissolving in front of her. Fading like someone who’d never quite existed for her from the beginning. He was too good, and then too bad, to be true. But she couldn’t turn loose her idea of him. Drugs? Guns? Fake I.D.? Hidden in his apartment? Not her Willis. Like hell not!

  “There has to be a logical explanation,” she said, turning again to face him, trying not to think about the actual logical explanation. Her eyes were moist, her mouth soft and unsteady. She bit her lower lip and swallowed. Pressure, pressure. Carver could almost see her shell cracking.

  “It might be an explanation you won’t like,” he said, pushing it. He felt mean now. Let her get a clear look at reality. Shake her past, shake Willis, forever.

  Then she was pressed against him, sobbing. He hadn’t expected that. He could feel the wet heat of her tears through his shirt.

  He stood still and held her close for a long time. Her back and shoulders eventually stopped quaking, then began moving steadily with her regular breathing. She was in control again, but barely, hanging on in a tumult of emotion that might snatch her away again any second.

  Carver ran his hand down her back, aware of the firmness of one of her breasts pressing against his side. Firm yet soft. She raised her reddened face, said, “Carver-”

  He kissed her. She hesitated, then leaned hard into him. Maybe he was Willis just then, maybe not. He moved his mouth, his tongue, over her tear-streaked face. She clung to him, staring up blankly at him, something deep turning in her eyes.

  Carver moved as gracefully as he could with the cane, leading her toward th
e bedroom. He was breathing rapidly, faintly grinning. Willis’s bedroom, Willis’s bed, Willis’s woman. Carver anticipated the next half hour with perverse pleasure. This is what happens when you play dead, Willis. You wrongheaded asshole. You lose. Big. At least for a while.

  But he knew that really he was about to lie down with Edwina and Willis. A threesome. Carver knew that should matter to him more than it did. The hell with it. He didn’t care. And right now Edwina didn’t seem to care. Maybe this would help to ease the bastard from their lives.

  The cane was a hindrance. By the time they reached the bedroom door, she was ahead of him.

  CHAPTER 21

  It rained hard at three o’clock, but not for long. The sun was out again immediately afterward, making up for lost time, reheating the concrete so that shimmering waves of vapor rose and formed a low, multicolored haze, like a rainbow that had fallen and lost form but hadn’t dissolved.

  It was much hotter outside than in Desoto’s office; the window had fogged up like a medicine-cabinet mirror after somebody’s steaming bath. It made Carver feel confined, as if there were no outside world. Nothing except the low and crackling metallic voice of the dispatcher on the radio in the squad room, the clacking of a teletype or printer, the inexorable official stirrings of the law. This was Police World, with nothing beyond.

  Desoto leaned back behind his desk, held up a paper clip he’d bent, and stared at it with a kind of wonder, as if it were a piece of surrealistic sculpture. “Have you gotten on better than friendly terms with Miss Edwina Talbot?” he asked.

  “You have a dirty mind,” Carver told him, shifting in his chair.

  “You bet. It’s fun. I think of myself as an erotic romantic.”

  “You think of yourself,” Carver said.