Hot

by John Lutz

  “Why do you have to?” Katia asked, staring at him with red-rimmed eyes.

  “Because Dr. Sam’s death might be linked to Henry Tiller’s.”

  “Henry Tiller was struck by a hit-and-run driver, and Dr. Sam committed suicide.”

  “Henry was murdered,” Carver said.

  “Maybe. But I still don’t see the relevance.” The skeptical scientist in her.

  “I don’t know that there actually is any,” Carver admitted. “But I’m asking you to understand I need to make sure.”

  Katia shrugged, apparently not understanding, but also not wanting to argue. “I found him in there,” she said, motioning with her head toward a closed door. “It’s a storeroom. I unlocked and opened that door to get something, and there—I mean, the first thing that happened was I smelled the stench.” She bowed her head. Carver distinctly saw a glittering tear fall from her cheek to the floor, where it seemed to shatter like crystal. Beth moved close to her and wrapped a long brown arm around her. Carver had seen hangings. He knew the doctor’s sphincter had relaxed during death and his bowels had released. “Then I saw his legs, one stockinged foot, a black silk sock. He’d kicked off one of his shoes when he shoved away the boxes he’d been standing on. He was suspended by a rope around his neck, hanging from one of the steel beams up near the ceiling. I saw his face and backed away. Got out of there.” She buried her face in her hands and sobbed for a minute while Carver and Beth said nothing. Carver felt like hugging the girl himself, assuring her that grief would pass, or at least become tolerable with time. But he knew he couldn’t. Shouldn’t. Felt helpless. He truly hated moments like this. Beth held her tighter, patting her gently and rhythmically on the back.

  Finally Katia composed herself, lowering her hands and standing up straight, managing a kind of tear-streaked dignity Carver admired.

  “You mentioned the door was locked,” he said.

  “It usually is locked, but it must not have been this morning. When I turned my key in the lock, it must have already been unlocked and I didn’t notice. Or maybe it was locked; Dr. Sam might have locked the door from the inside.” She clenched her teeth, making her jaw muscles dance. “God, does it really make any difference? This is like some sick game!”

  “Can I have a look at the room?”

  Katia nodded, walked to the door and unlocked it with a brass key on a ring of at least half a dozen keys. Instead of opening the door, she shied away from it, returning to her work at the tide pool displays. Beth stood near her, watching her, not looking at Carver.

  Carver opened the door. The room wasn’t much larger than a closet, and the smell of human feces still permeated the warm, motionless air. The hum of whatever was running was louder in here. He found the light switch and flipped it upward. A fluorescent ceiling fixture fought through its birth pangs and winked on.

  The police were finished with the death scene, and the rope Dr. Sam had used was removed from the steel girder supporting the concrete ceiling. The small room was lined with metal shelving that held cardboard boxes. Two boxes that contained computer paper sat on the concrete floor, probably the boxes Dr. Sam had stood on, then kicked away after slipping the noose over his head.

  Carver examined the door and saw that the only way to lock it from the inside was with a key. Interesting. Maybe meaningful. He switched off the light, stepped outside and closed the door, glad to be out of the close, oppressive room. Here the air was cooler and didn’t smell of death.

  Carver limped over to where Katia was now sprinkling flakes of food into one of the trays, balanced nutrient, read the label on the otherwise plain white box. “How’s Millicent Bing taking her husband’s death?” he asked, watching the irregular flakes float like debris on the surface, glad he wasn’t a fish.

  Katia didn’t look up. “I think she’s still in shock. I offered to go over and stay with her, but she said she’d rather be alone. Said that was how she handled grief.”

  “Did Dr. Sam leave a suicide note?” Carver asked.

  Katia shook her head no.

  Carver thanked her for talking with him, then said, “You gonna be okay here?”

  She put down the balanced nutrient and forced a smile. “Yeah, I think so. I’ll stay busy. That’s how I handle my grief.”

  “What’ll happen to the research center now?” Beth asked.

  “I don’t know,” Katia said. “I haven’t thought about it yet.”

  “If you change your mind about how you want to handle your grief,” Beth said, “phone me and I’ll come over.”

  This time Katia’s smile was genuine even if fleeting. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

  “We’ll find our way out,” Carver told her. Beth followed him as he limped up the steel stairs to the ground-level exhibit.

  Outside in the brilliant sun, Beth said, “The girl thought a lot about her employer.”

  “More than she should have?” Carver asked.

  “Think there was more than something fishy going on there?” Beth said.

  “It was a serious question.”

  “Okay, Fred. Bad joke. I didn’t pick up that Katia and the doctor were romantically involved, but it’s not impossible. Might not mean anything even if they did have something going.”

  “Far too many mights in this world,” Carver said. He lowered himself into the Olds as Beth walked around and got in on the passenger side.

  As soon as he started the engine, he switched the air conditioner on High.

  Beth crossed her long bare legs, then stretched the front of her shirt to pat perspiration from her forehead. “Think Dr. Sam really committed suicide?” she asked.

  “Might have,” Carver said.

  32

  MILLICENT BING HADN’T answered the phone when Carver called to offer condolences and ask if he could come over and talk with her. He suspected she was home, though, so he left Beth at the cottage and drove to the Bing house. Mr. Persistence.

  The breeze still pushed steadily in from the sea, the leaning palm tree’s fronds still rattled on the green tile roof, and if she was inside the house, Millicent wasn’t making herself available.

  Carver stood for a while in the heat, keeping an eye on the bees in the bougainvillea, occasionally knocking on the door, finally leaning on the bell’s brass push button and listening to the rolling repetition of chimes from inside the house. Then he gave up and headed back to the Olds.

  As he jockeyed the big car down the driveway, he braked near the mailbox, wondering. Carver cranked down the car window and lifted the mailbox’s aluminum door. He pulled out two sun-warmed envelopes.

  One was an advertisement for life insurance—too late. The other was personal, addressed to Millicent Bing in pencil. It had a Forest, Ohio, postmark, and the return address was a rural route number.

  Carver looked at the neatly scripted address, remembering a hated fifth-grade teacher who was a disciple of the Palmer penmanship method. Then he pried open the envelope’s flap carefully, tearing it only once and very slightly.

  Inside was a sheet of lined notepaper on which a letter was composed in the same light pencil and precise handwriting that was on the envelope. The letter was dated three days ago. It asked how “Milly” was, and by the way how was brother Sam. Then it told about the successful removal of a brain tumor from someone named Dwayne, complained about federal farm policy, mentioned new furniture in the den, and expressed the wish that Milly and Sam would come up for a visit. Milly should lean on Sam about driving north, it said. It was signed “Love, Sandy.”

  After copying the return address, then licking what mint-flavored glue remained and resealing the flap, Carver replaced both envelopes in the mailbox. He glanced back at the house. There was no sign of anybody peering from the one visible window. He’d taken a chance, tampering with Millicent’s mail, but surely if she’d seen him she would have stormed out of the house and objected. Or phoned the police. But he’d had to risk it; there was always the possibility Dr. Sam had written
a note and mailed it to his wife. Suicides did that sometimes, trusting the postal service more than whoever might discover the body. The uniform, maybe.

  If Millicent had seen him and phoned the law, Carver would soon find out. He accelerated along Shoreline, keeping pace with and then outdistancing a large white gull winging parallel to the coast. He was curious as to what Chief Wicke would have to say about Dr. Sam’s suicide.

  “Autopsy?” Wicke said, leaning back in his desk chair and clasping his hands behind his head. “Why the fuck should there be an autopsy? Man died of asphyxiation brought about by the rope around his neck. Hell, the only thing more purple than his face was his tongue.”

  “I’m not suggesting it wasn’t suicide,” Carver said, “or that Bing didn’t die of strangulation. But what about bruises or marks on the body indicating he didn’t just climb up on those boxes, slip the noose over his head, and kick away his life?”

  Wicke looked at Carver with exaggerated tolerance and shook his head. “You saying Dr. Bing was made to hang himself?”

  “Under the circumstances, I wouldn’t take anything for granted.”

  “I seen hanging suicides before,” Wicke said, now with an edge of impatience. “Believe me, Bing did it to himself without any help.”

  “But you didn’t have the M.E. check the body for any sign of coercion? Any results of a struggle?”

  Wicke dropped forward in his chair, propping his elbows on his green felt desk pad. When he did that, the breeze from the air conditioner sent a strong whiff of deodorant and perspiration across the desk. “I looked over the body myself, Carver, at the death scene and later.” He brought his hands together and laced his thick fingers. “No marks.”

  “No note, either?”

  “Dr. Sam didn’t leave a note, not unless he mailed it.”

  Carver saw no change of expression at the mention of mail. Apparently he hadn’t been seen at the Bing mailbox. He said, “Were there any keys on the body?”

  “You’re thinking about the girl saying she unlocked the door,” Wicke said. “Well, there were keys in Bing’s pants pocket, and one of them fit the lock to the storage room. The girl said she couldn’t be sure if the door was actually locked when she inserted her key and turned it, but so what? Bing coulda let himself into the room and locked it from the inside so he wouldn’t be disturbed. Maybe he knew his assistant would open the door in the morning, wanted her to discover him instead of having his wife go to the research center looking for him and finding him like that. Does that make sense, Carver?”

  “Kind of.”

  “So forget keys, forget Walter Rainer, forget Henry Tiller. Dr. Sam’s death’s got nothing to do with either of them.”

  “Any thoughts on why he did commit suicide?”

  Wicke shrugged, as if to say it wasn’t his business to harbor curiosity. “Who knows why people kill themselves? Sometimes there’s some big problem in their lives plunges them into depression, other times it just seems to come on them like a black mood and they give up on life and slit their wrists or jump in front of a train or string themselves up like Dr. Sam. You were a cop; you oughta know suicides can be unpredictable as lightning.”

  “Sometimes people close to the victim have an idea why it happened,” Carver said. “You talk with Millicent Bing?”

  “An hour after Dr. Sam’s body was discovered,” Wicke said. He frowned. “I was the one broke the news to her.”

  “How’d she take it?”

  “Like I just told her her husband was dead.”

  “I mean, she have any idea why he might have killed himself?”

  “About as many ideas as you and me.”

  “You got any inkling at all about it? I’m not talking facts, I’m asking about your cop’s instincts.”

  “Ho-ho! Like Henry Tiller’s instincts?”

  “Just like.”

  “Okay. Maybe Dr. Sam’s business was going bad, maybe he had something hot going with the young assistant and it turned cold, maybe his sex life at home was all messed up, maybe it was male menopause. Point is, who gives a fuck now? I mean, the man’s dead. Better to have worried about all this when he was alive and prevented him from hanging himself. But it’s too late for that now, so it’s on to other business for me. And that oughta be the way you look at it. You been in your line of work long enough to know the world don’t screech to a halt for any one person’s death.”

  “It does for the person who’s dead.”

  “Well, there’s no sense getting all overwrought about it after the fact.”

  Carver gripped his cane and stood up. “You’re probably right.”

  Wicke smiled dubiously at him. “Now, why are you telling me that, Carver?”

  “Because I believe it.” He thanked Chief Wicke for his time and limped toward the door.

  “Carver,” Wicke said behind him, “don’t get any ideas about looking over the body. Dr. Sam’s remains are already on the way to his family in Ohio.”

  Carver opened the door, paused and looked back. “How come everybody dies here gets shipped north? Isn’t anybody ever buried on Key Montaigne?”

  “We got sandy soil here,” Wicke said. “They come back up when the tide’s in.” He wasn’t smiling. Man could probably play good poker.

  Carver said, “I sorta lean toward that male menopause theory.”

  Wicke said something to him after he’d closed the door and was limping away, but he wasn’t sure what.

  33

  CARVER HAD STOPPED for a few beers at the Key Lime Pie’s bar after leaving Chief Wicke, thinking he might overhear something significant about Dr. Sam’s death. But none of the natives was discussing it. Maybe they’d already talked themselves out on the subject, or maybe everyone knew who Carver was and thought it safest to stay silent, therefore uninvolved and still alive, unlike Dr. Sam.

  When he returned to the cottage, he phoned Katia Marsh and asked her if she’d again arrange for him to talk with Millicent Bing.

  “You’re too late,” Katia told him. “She’s gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “From Key Montaigne, and she’s not coming back. She wouldn’t tell me where she was going. I assume it’s wherever Dr. Sam’s funeral’s going to be. I wanted to go to the funeral, but she told me it’d be better if I didn’t, that Dr. Sam’d want me to stay here and take care of the research center. And of course somebody has to do that; the exhibits require constant care.”

  Carver wiped his hand over his perspiring forehead, touching the burned part of his nose with his wrist and causing instantaneous pain. “Don’t you have any idea where Dr. Sam’s going to be buried?”

  “Someplace in the Midwest, I think.”

  “Ohio?”

  “It’d make sense. That’s where he was from. Both he and his wife, in fact. She’s from Columbus and he was from some little farming town. Can’t think of its name. So far from the ocean; maybe that’s why the sea fascinated him.”

  “I heard he had a sister.”

  “I don’t know. It’s possible. He never talked much about his family or early life. It seemed his life started when he went to college at Ohio State, then did postgrad work at the University of Michigan and Florida State.” Her voice took on a sad tone. “He was a pure scientist, Mr. Carver, a dedicated researcher. Why somebody like that—” Her voice broke, and he thought she was about to break into sobs, but after a moment she said, “Damnit! I’m sorry.”

  He told her not to be, he understood. He wondered if he did. The relationship of Dr. Sam and Katia still wasn’t clear to him.

  “I went to Millicent’s house to try and comfort her,” Katia said. “She told me good-bye. A truck was there and two men were loading it with boxes of possessions. Millicent said she’d arrange to have the furniture put in storage before listing the house with a real estate agent. She told me she never wanted to see Key Montaigne again.” Another pause, but not to compose herself. “She was grief-stricken, of course, but something else, too.
I got the impression she was scared, Mr. Carver.”

  “Of what?”

  “I have no idea. But she was definitely unwilling to tell me where she was going.”

  Carver knew whom Millicent Bing was afraid of, but he wasn’t sure of the reason for her fear. “You gonna be okay?” he asked Katia.

  “Me? Sure. Florida State’s been in touch. Some of our grant money flowed through them. They assured me the research center would stay open. I might even be in charge, carry on Dr. Sam’s work with sharks. Nothing would please me more. We were learning so much . . .”

  Carver left her to her future and hung up.

  He sat by the phone for a while, thinking. If Millicent did travel to Ohio for Dr. Sam’s funeral, her fear might cause her to leave immediately afterward and he might never locate her.

  He limped in to where Beth was slouched on the sofa watching the world going to hell on CNN news. “Wanna do something for me?” he asked. On the TV screen a missile screamed into an ancient radio-controlled aircraft and exploded.

  She smiled at him and struck a suggestive pose with only the slightest shifting of her lean body, more a change of attitude than position. “I ever turn you down?”

  “Comes under the category of work,” he said, watching the debris of the plane flutter down from a lingering cloud of black smoke. The CNN correspondent, a pretty blond woman in combat fatigues, was saying. “. . . Pinpoint accuracy and complete destruction. Smart weapons, Bernie.”

  “I only do it for love,” Beth told him with mock disdain.

  “Detective work. I need you to find the phone number of a Sandy in Forest, Ohio. Last name might be Bing.”

  “Relative of the late Dr. Sam?”

  “Sister.”

  “Shouldn’t be too hard,” she said, using the remote to switch off the TV. “Forest can’t be a very large place. When I find the number, want me to call it?”

  “No, I better do that. But later. Right now I’m going over to Millicent Bing’s house while there’s still plenty of light.” He’d learned how quickly darkness could fall in the Keys.