by John Lutz
“I’ll try to avoid him,” Carver said, realizing he’d made up his mind. He was going to call Henry Tiller and tell him he’d investigate whatever might be happening on Key Montaigne.
“You’ll avoid him like a mongoose avoids a snake,” Desoto said. “Still, Henry needs help. After what happened to his son and grandson, he deserves help. If he had anything concrete, the Key Montaigne police, or even the DEA, could jump into the game. But he’s only got his intuition, what he calls his cop’s instincts. That’s enough for me, ’cause I got my own instincts about Henry. But instincts don’t count in court.”
Carver said, “If Rainer’s got two bona fide hard-asses like Hector and Davy working for him, maybe he really is into something illegal.”
“Could be. But there are no outstanding warrants for those two now, so they’re solid citizens in the eyes of the law. In fact, they’ve been clean as soap itself the last three years.”
“Or they haven’t been caught during those years.”
“You’re going to work for Henry, right?” Desoto said.
“Yeah, I suppose I am.”
“Keep me posted and I’ll help when and how I can. Even here in Orlando, I might be able to do something. According to Henry, the Key Montaigne police might not be the most reliable. The chief there, Lloyd Wicke, thinks what he’s got is a case of senility on his hands.”
“Henry acts in a way that makes it seem a reasonable conclusion,” Carver said, watching a tractor-trailer rumble past out on Magellan. The trailer had on its side a vast print from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, the one of God and Adam with their hands almost touching. In this version, God was handing Adam an orange. In Florida that kind of advertising might be meant seriously. How out of touch could Henry Tiller be? “Know anything about Wicke?”
“I checked around. Didn’t find out much, but he’s supposed to be a good cop. I’m not saying he’s wrong about all of this being in Henry’s mind, but after talking to Henry, I’m not so sure. Anyway, like I said, Henry’s got a favor or two coming from the system. In this case, you and I are the system.”
“I’m the one going to Key Montaigne,” Carver pointed out.
“But I’d go if I could,” Desoto said. Carver believed him. “You work on your own, so you got certain advantages.”
“You mean like irregular income?”
“Anyway, amigo, you’re supposed to be a detective, so detect, eh? Worry this till you know everything and too much about it. Isn’t that what you do in life? Your calling?”
“It’s what I do,” Carver said, thinking maybe “calling” wasn’t too strong a word. The music coming over the phone had changed. A woman was singing now; Carver couldn’t make out the words, but it was a sad song with slow, syncopated rhythm.
“Go extra cautious with this one, all right?” Desoto said. There was concern in his voice. Instinct again.
“Sure, always.”
“How’s the lovely Beth?” Ever the gentleman, Desoto was considerate of women, especially beautiful ones. Even though he still wasn’t entirely approving of Beth, her gender alone was enough to earn his gallantry.
“Soon as I get off the phone,” Carver said, “I’m gonna drive up the coast and find out.”
“You’re a lucky man, amigo. But remember, you be careful.”
“I’ll buckle up.”
“I didn’t mean on the highway, my friend.”
Carver was about to ask him what he did mean, but Desoto had hung up.
Carver let the receiver clatter back into its cradle. There was no point in trying to call Henry Tiller until he’d had time to drive back to Key Montaigne.
He removed the life insurance pitch from the envelope Tiller had scribbled his phone number on, stuffed the envelope in his shirt pocket, and used his cane to lever himself to his feet. Then he limped from the office, wincing when he met the June Florida heat, and made his way across the parking lot to his car.
Leaving the canvas top up on the ancient Oldsmobile convertible, he coaxed what he could from the balky air conditioner as he drove north on the coast highway toward his beach cottage and Beth Jackson.
3
CARVER MADE LOVE to Beth before telling her about Henry Tiller’s visit. He knew if he’d told her first, she’d have been distracted. Was that male chauvinism? Maybe. His former wife, Laura, had pointed to that kind of attitude as part of the reason for the dissolution of their marriage. Carver figured she might be right and had tried to modify his thinking. He was still trying.
Beth lay beside him now on her back, her hands clasped behind her head, considering what he’d said. The window was open and the breathing, sighing sound of the surf was in the room, punctuated by the lazy metallic ticking of the slowly revolving paddle fan on the ceiling above the bed. A breeze was playing over their nakedness, evaporating perspiration and purging the room of the musky afterscent of sex. Carver looked over at Beth’s smooth, dusky body, long and lean as a high-fashion model’s but with an obvious wiry strength. There was firm definition to her stomach muscles, and her long thighs curved with the musculature of the distance runner. She’d been running when Carver first met her, from her drug-czar husband who’d been bent on killing her.
Staring at the ceiling, she said, “Tell you about the war on drugs, Fred, it obscures other things. People in power use it to advance their own agendas. The news media give the public wrong images, wrong impressions.”
“What’s obscured, for instance?” Carver asked. He was aware Beth knew plenty about drugs, having been married to the infamous late Roberto Gomez. She’d grown up in a Chicago slum and gotten out the only way she’d known how—with her sex and beauty. Then slowly she’d turned her life around, even while living with Gomez and regrets, got an education, escaped from Gomez and his world bought by drug money, and fell in love with Carver. Called herself Jackson again, her maiden name. It bothered Carver sometimes that what she’d seen in Gomez, she might see in him.
“Main thing that’s obscured,” she said, “is the fact there is no drug problem.”
Carver wasn’t surprised; she was always saying things like that, setting little conversational traps, and he’d learned not to jump in and argue. He said, “Explain.”
“The powers that be act like there’s some substance, some stuff, causing all our problems, and if we just stop most of it at the border, things’ll get better. They say guns don’t kill people, people do, then they think it’s the junk itself that’s causing drug addicts. Get rid of the white powder and the weed that can be smoked, and the problem’ll be solved.”
“Hasn’t worked so far,” Carver said.
“’Cause it’s bullshit. You stop most of the drugs, and their street price’ll go up and so will the crime the addicts commit to pay for their habits. Stop every bit of drugs and people’ll grow their own, or develop new designer drugs. Hell, a good chemist could walk around this place and figure out some way to cook up something gets folks high. And there’s always somebody who’ll buy it and sell it. Problem’s not drugs, problem’s that people wanna do whatever to escape the reality of their lives.”
Carver thought her reasoning was sound. He propped himself up on his elbow and stared at her dark, highlighted features. There was a softness to them, a gentleness, that belied how tough she was. Toughness from deep down wasn’t always obvious.
She stopped looking at the ceiling and glanced over at him. “So the government declares war on drugs by saying, ‘We’re gonna come down hard on you people if you don’t stop using that stuff we’ve made illegal ‘cause you can’t stop using it.’ Makes no sense. An addict’ll check in for a cure only after hitting absolute bottom, Carver, and then they put him on a waiting list so he has months before he can get treatment. So he goes back to drugs and thinks everything’s fine again, and he’s no longer interested in treatment. Big surprise. Thing they do then is arrest and convict him and toss him in jail with some real hard cases that’ll teach him tricks and stay in touch wi
th him the rest of his life. Turn him into one of them. Sometimes I wonder who those government assholes talk to when they get their ideas about drugs.”
Carver said, “They talk to each other.”
“What I’m trying to tell you,” Beth said, “is whenever drugs might be involved, don’t take for granted things are what they seem. Or even that they’re about drugs at all. What they’re about is somebody getting money or getting elected or both. That’s the way it is. I goddamn know.”
“I love you,” Carver said, “because you’re so ambivalent.”
“It’s just that I happen to know about drugs and what goes on around them.”
“I guess you do.”
“So what you’re getting into here might be more dangerous than you think. You best be careful.”
“That’s what Desoto kept telling me.”
“He’s your friend, and I’m more’n that to you. So listen to us. We care about your hide more’n you do. You’re like a combination bloodhound and pit bull, and that’s unhealthy.”
Carver said, “Grrrr,” and pretended he was trying to bite her right nipple. Well, not entirely pretending.
She laughed and shoved him away, and they both lay still for a moment. Then she moved languidly in the bed, rustling the cool sheets, and kissed him, using her tongue. One of her long dark legs curled over him, warmer than the breeze. Her foot hung off his side of the bed.
She rested her head on his chest and said, “You gonna need me?”
He knew she wasn’t talking about, more sex.
Beth sometimes acted as Carver’s business partner as well as lover. She’d gotten tough during her hard years, knew martial arts, could handle firearms. He didn’t need to worry much about her. But he remembered what Desoto had said about Davy Mathis.
“I’m not sure,” he told her. “Let me sniff around down on Key Montaigne for a while, get some sense of things.”
“If that’s what you want. But when you’re ready to tilt at the windmill, let me know.” She unwound herself from him and stood up. Stretched, arching her back. “I’m gonna take a shower.” She padded barefoot across the plank floor, her slender body undulating like dark flame. Carver enjoyed watching her walk. He wondered how she’d look in a light summer dress, luxuriating in the wind. Again he wished he could paint. Maybe he’d take it up. She stopped and turned, smiling at him. “You coming?” she asked.
After showering together, they drove in the Olds to the Happy Lobster, a restaurant on the coast highway. It was a place where Carver and Edwina Talbot, the previous woman in his life, had often spent time, but that didn’t bother Carver or Beth. Neither was the type to wallow in sentiment.
Carver ordered the swordfish steak, and Beth devoured a lobster with mannered and precise enthusiasm.
Over coffee and cheesecake she said, “From what you’ve told me, it seems possible this Henry Tiller’s mind has been affected by age.”
“Desoto doesn’t think so, and he’s seen more of Tiller than I have.”
“What do you think?”
“I’m not so sure, but I trust Desoto enough that I need to go to Key Montaigne and find out.”
“I’m not as devout a believer as you are in those cop’s instincts you talk about. I’ve seen them wrong plenty of times.” Her dark, dark eyes became serious. “I’ve seen them get cops killed.”
Carver stared out the wide, curved window at the darkening Atlantic. The horizon was almost indistinguishable from the gray-green sea. So much distance out there, so much emptiness. Anything might be lost in it. Anything.
Beth took another bite of cheesecake. Chewed, swallowed, then sipped her coffee. She extended her little finger when she sipped from a cup. Where had she learned that? Not in the slums of Chicago, or from Roberto Gomez.
She placed her cup in its saucer with a faint and delicate clink, then reached across the table and rested her long, graceful fingers on Carver’s bare forearm. She dug in slightly with her painted nails, demanding his full attention. “You need me, you’ll call me. Promise?”
“I promise,” he said. “But first I better call Henry Tiller and tell him I’m driving down to see him in the morning.”
But back at the cottage, when Carver punched out the number scrawled on the envelope from his office, it wasn’t Tiller who answered the phone. It was a woman’s voice that uttered a tentative hello.
“Can I talk to Henry?” Carver asked. Beth was leaning on the breakfast counter, pouring a couple of after-dinner brandies and staring at him.
“No way. I mean, I’m afraid you can’t do that,” the woman on the phone said. She sounded young now, maybe a teenager.
“Why not?”
“He ain’t home. He’s in the hospital.”
“What hospital?”
“Faith United, in Miami.”
“Who is this?” Carver asked.
“My name’s Effie. Sometimes I come in and clean for Mr. Tiller. You Fred Carver?”
“I am.”
“Mr. Tiller said you might call. I was to tell you he’s in Faith United. A car hit him. I think he’s in serious condition.”
“Car hit him how?” Carver asked.
“I ain’t sure. All I know is he said he stopped and ate supper in Miami, and he was crossing the street to go back to his car and got run down.”
“Who was the driver?”
“I dunno. You could talk to the Miami police, I guess. Or the hospital.”
“Did Mr. Tiller himself phone you?”
“Yeah. We’re friends. He trusts me, and he knew I’d be here cleaning up.”
“I’ll call him at the hospital,” Carver said.
“I don’t think you can. He told me he was about to be operated on, that’s why he wanted me to let you know where he was and why. He left a message on your office answering machine, he said, but he was afraid you wouldn’t get it. Mr. Tiller don’t trust anything with a microchip in it.”
“Me, either,” Carver said.
He thanked Effie the cleaning girl and hung up. Told Beth what had happened.
“Still driving to Key Montaigne?” she asked, crossing the room and handing him a brandy snifter.
“First thing tomorrow,” Carver told her, passing the glass beneath his nose and breathing in the sharp alcohol scent, like a head-clearing warning. “With a stopover in Miami.”
4
FAITH UNITED HOSPITAL was on Hoppington Avenue in west Miami. Its main building was a five-story arrangement of pale concrete and arched windows, but onto this had been added long, three-story wings of pink brick and darkly tinted glass. The architecture clashed, making it look as if an old building had dropped from the past and landed in the center of a modern one.
At the information desk in the lobby, which was in the original building, an elderly woman behind a marble desk told Carver that Henry Tiller was in Room 504 and could have visitors, but Carver was to stop at the nurses’ station and let someone know he was there.
Carver thanked her, limped past a hideous piece of steel modern sculpture looming in the lobby, and rode the elevator to the fifth floor.
He didn’t like hospitals, and this one was no exception. The hall smelled faintly of disinfectant, and there was a hushed and impersonal efficiency in the midst of disease and suffering, as if Death were merely a member of the staff. White-uniformed nurses and occasionally people in pale green surgical gowns bustled meaningfully about the halls. Patients’ relatives slumped in plastic chairs and read dog-eared magazines, or wandered about with studiously nonchalant expressions, trying to come to terms with the realities of institutionalized illness. Carver told himself at least it was cool in here; outside it was ninety degrees even though it was only eleven o’clock.
There were two beds in 504, but Henry Tiller was the room’s only occupant. His upper body was slightly elevated, and his right leg was in a cast and raised on a thin cable draped over a stainless steel pulley contraption above the bed. A thin white sheet covered his lower b
ody, and he had on a blue hospital gown tied with a drawstring at the neck. There was an opaque plastic tube fitted through one of his nostrils, and something clear was being fed to him intravenously. His eyes were closed, and he didn’t seem to be in any pain. He was much paler than he’d appeared in Carver’s office yesterday. Carver thought he looked dead, only his chest was rising and falling.
Carver stepped all the way into the room, which smelled like spearmint and was dark green on the bottom and pale green from halfway up the walls to the white ceiling. A nightstand with a phone sat beside the bed, and nearby was a traylike arrangement on a stand with wheels. A green plastic pitcher sat on it, and an upside-down clear plastic glass. There was a beige vinyl chair near the foot of the bed, with a pillow and folded blanket on it. Outside in the hall a couple of nurses hurried past, giggling softly. A job was a job.
Carver approached the bed, stood leaning on his cane, and Henry Tiller sensed he was there and opened his eyes.
Carver said, “I got your message. The girl, Effie, said you’d been hit by a car.”
“Effie Norton.”
“Guess so. She didn’t tell me her last name, only about you and the car.”
“Goddamned hit and run,” Tiller said. His voice was slow, a bit slurred, but his eyes seemed focused and knowing. He was making sense—for Henry Tiller anyway. “I was crossing the street after I stopped for supper, out shoots this big car away from the curb, and ka-blam! I was on the pavement ‘fore I knew what’d happened. Hell of a jolt, I can tell you.”
“I’ll bet. Get a glimpse of the license plate?”
“Didn’t even think about it till it was too late,” Tiller said disgustedly. “Figured it was an accident, then I realized the bastard drove off and left me.”
“Might still have been an accident,” Carver said. “Driver might have panicked.”
“Or knew just what he was doing,” Tiller said. He was probably right. “It was a Chrysler New Yorker or Fifth Avenue, all white, like the ones car rental agencies got by the thousands here in Florida. White, I said.”