Hot

by John Lutz

  Unless Millicent Bing was keeping something from her husband as well as from the outside world.

  That wouldn’t be all that unusual in a wife. And it was no business of Carver’s.

  Unless the something concerned drugs and Walter Rainer.

  22

  “YOU FIGURE THE GOOD doctor’s being less than candid?” Beth asked, when Carver had returned to the cottage and told her about his talk with Dr. Sam. She was wearing shorts now, and a white T-shirt with just do it lettered on it. Sitting relaxed yet with an odd regality in the porch glider, she was reading by the sunlight filtering in through the trees and the screen. She’d finished Kafka and had tied into something now by Robert Parker. Hmm.

  “I’m not sure,” Carver said. “It’s hard for me to know what academic types are thinking. Dr. Sam might be lying like a politician, bending over backward to make me think there’s no connection between him and Rainer.”

  “Like the hot-to-trot damsel who doth protest too vigorously?”

  “Something on that order. And Katia acts as if everything at the research center’s up-front and honest scientific toil, tainted only by the evils of tourism to help turn a dollar. A dewy-eyed idealist.”

  “Still,” Beth mused, laying aside Parker, “she’s interested in sharks.”

  “Even obsessed by them,” Carver said.

  Beth stretched languidly, long arms, hands, fingers, fingernails, attaining incredible and graceful reach. “If anything is going on at the Rainer place,” she said, “it’s hard to believe somebody at the research center didn’t at least get a whiff of it. Everything can’t be occurring at night, and the view’s too good not to notice what’s happening over there.”

  Carver hobbled across the porch with his cane and lowered himself into the nylon-webbed lawn chair. Flicking a tiny spider off his forearm, he remembered the sun-hazed view across the water from the research center, the clean white hull and gleaming brightwork of the Miss Behavin’ lying beyond the gray and functional Fair Wind. Wealth and leisure contrasting with selflessness and labor. Would workaholics like the Bings and Katia Marsh notice anything outside their immediate range of vision and interest? Did they really care about anything other than their work?

  “What about this Katia and Dr. Sam?” Beth asked.

  Carver knew what she meant. “Neither of them’s the type.”

  “Hah!”

  Well, maybe she was right; she’d been reading Kafka and Parker.

  “Live with a woman who’s the way you describe Millicent Bing,” Beth said, “and a young beauty interested in sharks might seem mighty appealing.”

  Carver said, “She wouldn’t have to be interested in sharks.”

  Beth glared at him and raised an eyebrow. Jokingly, though. He thought. She crossed her bare and beautiful brown legs and leaned back in the glider, not only unconcerned with romantic rivals, but arrogantly confident. He figured she might gibe him with a mock warning not to stray, but she said, “That the phone ringing?”

  He tilted his head to the side and listened, heard faint electronic chirping from inside the cottage. “Phone,” he said, reaching for his cane.

  She knew she could make it inside faster than Carver, so she jumped up and breezed into the cottage. The swinging empty glider lapsed into a paroxysm of descending squeaks behind her, as if objecting that she’d risen.

  He was standing, poised over his cane, when she returned seconds later and told him it was Desoto on the line. Not much small talk between Desoto and Beth.

  “Amigo,” Desoto said, when Carver had come to the phone, “I got some information for you, compliments of contacts in Miami.”

  It was hotter inside the cottage. Carver started to sweat. “Something about the Evermans?”

  “And more. We’ll start with the Blue Flamingo Hotel. It might be a breeding farm for fleas now, but it’s considered to be valuable property because of its potential. That part of South Miami Beach figures to be a major tourist spot when it develops over the next ten years or so.”

  They say it’ll be like the French Riviera,” Carver said. “Croissants and everything.”

  “Mustn’t be so cynical, amigo.”

  “I’ve heard that before.” And noted the cynicism in Dr. Sam. Maybe it was a communicable disease.

  “I had a title search done in Miami,” Desoto said, “and it seems the ownership of the Blue Flamingo’s a hazy maze of paperwork. Owner of record’s something called B.F. Holding and Investment Company, but try to find out who owns that. Thing is, there’s a possibility the hotel’s actually owned by organized crime, but not necessarily the good old-fashioned mafia. More likely one of the South American drug cartels.”

  “And you told me not to be cynical. Is there any way to be positive about ownership?”

  “Oh, sure. Enough lawyers, enough time, we could follow the paper trail and find out. I don’t know what it’d exactly mean one way or the other, though. All that drug money’s gonna be invested somewhere. It buys hotels, food franchises, politicians, stock in major corporations. The money gets cleaner the farther away it gets from the source. Lots of drug money gets dropped into collection plates at church. Ask your friend Beth.”

  Carver let the remark about Beth pass without comment. “I don’t have lawyers and time,” he said.

  “The Blue Flamingo’s a low-cost hotel that’s used now and then to temporarily house welfare recipients,” Desoto told him. “Which brings us to the Evermans, amigo. State welfare’s got no record of them on their rolls. Course, it’s not unusual for some of the poor or homeless to become confused or to lie about their status after they’ve been dropped from the system. And it’s also possible the Evermans are running a scam and collecting welfare checks under other identities. The kinda entrepreneur couple Republicans love.”

  “Can’t we find out?”

  “It’d be up to Welfare to investigate, and as usual they’re underfinanced and understaffed. We got a zillion billion poor, and Welfare’s only a single point of light.”

  “Any kinda arrest sheet on either of the Evermans?” Carver asked.

  “Nothing kicked out by computers here or in Washington. But then, I only had their names to work with, and those’re probably false. Get me some fingerprints, and I’ll bet the computers’ll go wild printing out priors on the Evermans.”

  “Maybe I’ll have to do that,” Carver said. “Or maybe I’ll talk to them again.” His palms were wet; he switched hands on the phone.

  “However you play it, amigo, be extra careful. All that anonymity’s kinda scary.”

  “Isn’t it, though?” Carver said.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you more, my friend. Or at least something heartening and more definite. The hotel’s possible link to big drug money can’t be good. Might even be dangerous. Anyway, I regret bearing bad news.”

  “Don’t,” Carver told him. “If I know all the news possible, it’s less likely to jump up and surprise me.” He thanked Desoto and hung up.

  “So what’s the deal?” Beth asked. She’d come in from the porch and was standing just inside the door, her book at her side with a finger inserted between the pages to keep her place.

  Carver told her.

  “Some days it doesn’t pay to pick up the phone,” Beth said, just as the phone rang again.

  Carver lifted the warm plastic receiver and pressed it to his ear.

  A voice from Faith United Hospital in Miami informed him that Henry Tiller was dead.

  23

  “WE GOT MURDER now,” Beth said, when Carver had hung up and told her about Henry Tiller. She might have been informing him they had mice. Her deep dark eyes were fixed on him, but there was nothing in them to indicate what she was thinking. Death was something she’d seen from a lot of angles.

  He told her then about the Blue Flamingo Hotel and there being no welfare records on the Evermans.

  “Shouldn’t surprise you, people like that’d lie to you,” Beth told him. “The system fuc
ks them over enough for telling the truth, lying seems the wise thing to do even if the truth’s just as harmless.”

  “Question is, what else might they’ve been lying about?”

  She shrugged. “That’s a question you’d have to put to them.” A smile. “Not that they mightn’t lie.” She strode over to the sofa and sat down, crossed her legs. “Going back to Miami?”

  “Gonna have to, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, not much choice.” She didn’t seem pleased. “I guess that means I spend time in the brush again tonight with my thermos of coffee and my Captain Midnight binoculars.”

  “’Fraid so.”

  “When you leaving?”

  “Now.”

  She smiled very faintly. “That’s what I like about you, Fred, you’re direct.”

  He remembered Roberto Gomez had been the direct type, too. In his business, that often involved someone’s untimely death. There must be a lot Beth hadn’t told him. The thought made him uncomfortable. Made him perspire even more. The cottage’s window units weren’t keeping up with the heat and humidity today.

  “You don’t seem awed by the fact we’re dealing now with a homicide,” he said.

  “I’m not. I always thought the object of running over Henry Tiller was to take him out of the game.”

  “Still,” Carver said, “this raises the stakes, increases the danger.”

  “I suppose.”

  “I can’t read you sometimes,” Carver told her.

  She said, “You like that about me.”

  “Now and then you sound like Desoto.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s always psychoanalyzing me, calling me obsessive, seeing ulterior motives and subconscious drives, making it all more complicated than it really is.”

  “I like Desoto. I know he doesn’t approve of me, but I like him.”

  “He’d approve of you if he knew you the way I do,” Carver said.

  “I’m sure he would.” There was no mistaking the lascivious look in her eye.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Uh-huh. Maybe that subconscious thing.”

  Well, maybe. If it was subconscious, how would he know? He was amusing her and didn’t care for that; he’d had enough of this game. “When you go to the blind tonight and take up surveillance,” he said firmly, the dominant male in command, “you be extra careful.”

  She said, “You watch out for your balls in Miami.”

  It was late afternoon when Carver entered the sweltering dimness of the Blue Flamingo’s lobby. Hell of a place to have to live, he thought. To play out the last days of a dwindling life in what advertisers called the golden years. No fun to be stuck here as a welfare transient, either.

  He took the elevator to the fifth floor and knocked on the cracked enameled door of Room 505, listening for some sound from inside. He could hear something, not polka music, a soft and wavering whirring. When he knocked again, louder, the sound stopped abruptly.

  The woman who opened the door wasn’t Selma Everman. She was Latin, in her forties, with an emaciated figure and flecks of gray in her long black hair. She had wide-set brown eyes that seemed immense in her creased and narrow face. Her left cheek was hollowed unnaturally, as if most of her molars were missing on that side. She slipped her hands into the back pockets of her jeans and smiled at Carver, the hollow in her cheek deepening.

  He said, “I’m looking for Mr. and Mrs. Everman.”

  The woman’s smile became puzzled and she shook her head, made a helpless gesture with her hands. “Español,” she said.

  Great, she didn’t speak English. Beyond her Carver saw an old Hoover canister vacuum cleaner on wheels and remembered the whirring noise he’d heard. He stepped into the room and saw that it was orderly, not cluttered as it had been when he’d visited the Evermans. The bed was made with military fastidiousness. There were wide tracks on the worn carpet from the Hoover.

  “You’re the maid?” he asked, starting with the obvious, as if he or the woman were an idiot. Language barriers caused that kind of behavior.

  Her smile widened and she nodded.

  “Are the Evermans gone?” He lifted his cane for a moment and used it to make a gesture that took in the room and ended in a wave at the door.

  “They check out,” she said, nodding.

  “When?”

  She lifted her shoulders and shook her head.

  “Hoy?” he asked.

  “Si.”

  Which could mean this morning or this afternoon, not last night. He wasn’t really getting anywhere. He limped farther into the room and looked around. The maid didn’t attempt to stop him, only stood looking at him with amiable curiosity.

  If the Evermans had cut and run, they would have done everything possible to remove any sign of themselves. And what details or fingerprints they might have missed, the industrious maid would have cleaned away.

  “Have you done the bathroom?” Carver asked.

  She nodded. He wasn’t sure if she’d understood.

  He went to the door and looked in at the sparkling white porcelain. There was a yellow rubber bucket full of cleaning supplies on the floor near the toilet bowl, which had a paper sanitary strip across its rough wooden seat.

  “You do good work,” he said despondently, and limped around her and back out into the hall. She grinned at him as if unsure she’d been complimented. Leaving the door open, he started toward the elevators. Behind him the vacuum cleaner began to whine again.

  The paunchy desk clerk with the dyed black hair and the ugly mole beneath his eye was on duty again today. Though he was wearing a tightly knotted wide blue tie, his white shirt was untucked, as if he’d settled on a compromise over whether to dress businesslike or casual this morning. He was standing at the end of the desk, drinking coffee and eating a jelly doughnut. When Carver had stood at the desk for several seconds, the clerk looked at him, washed down a bite of doughnut with a slug of coffee, and made a face as if he’d burned his tongue. Said nothing.

  “I’d like to know when the Evermans checked out of five-oh-five,” Carver said.

  Still without talking, the man took a huge bite of doughnut, getting jelly on his fingers, and walked down to where Carver was standing on the other side of the desk. He reached low and carefully fished up a blue clothbound book and leafed through it, getting sugar and jelly on the pages even while handling it with a gentle reverence; the record of his days and nights as well as the names of guests and the dates and times of their arrivals and departures. The Book of His World.

  Carver waited while he finished chewing and swallowing the bite of doughnut. It took a while, but then what was time at the Blue Flamingo? Not money, that was for sure.

  “Early this morning,” the man finally said. He ran his tongue quickly over his molars; it moved beneath his cheek like a mouse under a carpet. He stared at the book again. “Was five after eight, to be precisely exact.”

  “Welfare pay for the room?” Carver asked.

  The desk clerk looked at him oddly. “Uh-uh, not that one.”

  “Who paid?”

  “The . . .” He consulted The Book yet again; it held all the answers he’d need in life. “. . . Evermans themselves.”

  “Check or credit card?”

  The desk clerk laughed. There was doughnut stuck between his yellowed front teeth. “You kidding? We don’t get a lotta American Express types here. And I don’t see many checks other’n Social Security. People was in five-oh-five paid cash. They took the room on June seventh.”

  “How’d they act? I mean, did they spend a lotta time here in the hotel? Did they disappear for weeks at a time? Did they have a pet lion?”

  “Listen, mister, I don’t pay attention to what any of the guests here does.” He squared his shoulders and tried for an imperious attitude but didn’t come close. “The place ain’t the Holiday Inn, but one thing the money buys is privacy.”

  “What if I told you I was police?” Carver said.<
br />
  “You’re not.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You’da already told me. Wouldn’t make any difference anyway. I got no reason to lie. I’m telling you how it is, and if you don’t like it, tough shit.”

  Carver didn’t like it. The Evermans had come and gone like ghosts, and no one knew why or even who they were, and he’d been standing in the same room with them and now they were lost to him. Maybe they’d sensed trouble after his visit and simply disappeared, as they’d often done in life. Or maybe there was something they weren’t telling him about their son’s death.

  As he planted the tip of his cane and turned to leave, the desk clerk ambled back to where his coffee and the rest of his jelly doughnut were and took another greedy bite of doughnut. This time jelly squirted down his tie and the front of his white shirt. He seemed unaware of it and Carver didn’t tell him.

  It felt good to leave the Blue Flamingo, as if the bright heat outside could purge whatever poverty and despair might have clung to him. Carver registered up the street at a Howard Johnson’s, then spent most of that evening wandering up and down Collins like a tourist and watching for Frank and Selma Everman.

  He never saw them, but he saw plenty of people like them. Middle-aged or older, and poor, in a neighborhood that was moving upscale and gradually cutting them adrift.

  After nursing a beer for a while in the Howard Johnson’s lounge and watching a Yankees game on television, he went upstairs and slept straight through until nine in the morning.

  It was past one o’clock when he got back to Henry’s cottage. Beth was still asleep after being up all night watching the Rainer estate. The air conditioner had been on a long time and the bedroom was cool as well as dim. Carver looked at the contours of her body beneath the light sheet. One of her legs had worked its way out and appeared remarkably lithe and tan against the white linen.

  He felt like holding her to him, kissing her, but he decided to let her rest. He’d stretch out quietly beside her and catch some sleep himself.

  Then he noticed the bruise on her cheek and the deep cut on the side of her forehead.