by John Lutz
Hoping Raffy wasn’t merely driving to the corner for a six-pack of beer, Carver paid for his coffee, left the iciness of Frosty Frieda’s for the oven outside, and crossed the street to Executive Tower.
He limped through a large, glitzy lobby and rode an elevator to the sixth floor. The hall carpeting was thick and spongy and caused his cane to sink deep and drag, so he had to walk more slowly than he wanted to the fancy white door marked “6-D” an inch below its round glass peephole.
He knocked three times, to be on the safe side in case Raffy had left a friend behind in the condo. When there was no answer he tried the brass doorknob and wasn’t surprised to find it locked. Carver had picked locks before, but it was a damned sight harder than it seemed in movies and detective novels, so he glanced around to make sure there was no one else in the hall and then rocked back on his cane and stiff leg and used his good leg to kick the door.
The lock held but the doorjamb gave, and without a great deal of noise. The door swung open. There was an ugly dark smudge from the sole of Carver’s moccasin on its white surface.
Noting with satisfaction that the damage wouldn’t be noticeable at a glance from the hall, he went in and closed the door behind him.
He saw that there were two locks on it beside the cheap mechanism in the knob. One was a thick chain lock that hadn’t been engaged. The other was a Schlage dead bolt, half of which still clung by its screws above the section of wood frame that had been split away and now lay on the floor with shiny brass hardware attached.
Raffy would be pissed off mightily when he saw the damage. Know who’d been here. Carver smiled and went on about his business. The best defense was a good you-know-what.
The condo was furnished even more garishly than Desoto’s. Deep red-orange carpet. Dramatic furniture with lots of glass and metal and pale green leather. On the wall over the marble mantel there was actually a large framed painting of a clown on black velvet. Didn’t look like a Renoir. The scent of recently fried onion permeated the place; Raffy must have eaten a snack or an early lunch.
Carver made his way across the living room to the hall. He almost gagged. Arranged on the hall walls was a series of graphic color photographs apparently taken at a slaughterhouse. Close-ups of the panic in the eyes of the doomed cattle, huge carcasses dangling from steel hooks while workers in bloodstained aprons dispassionately hacked away with long knives. The last shot was a tight one of a cow’s head, with most of the flesh stripped away and the eye sockets empty but for clotted blood. Raffy’s idea of humor, maybe. Or, worse still, something he enjoyed without humor. Carver thought he wouldn’t eat steak for a while.
The centerpiece of the bedroom was a large round water bed with a mirrored canopy. On the walls were framed prints of virginal-looking blond women in flowing white dresses, some of them romping through idyllic fields of wild flowers.
Carver rooted through dresser drawers and found only the expected assortment of socks, underwear, and shirts. Quality material. Expensive labels.
There were more good labels on the coats and slacks in the closet. On the closet shelf was a stack of bondage magazines with photos of women in various stages of agony or ecstasy while constricted by ropes or leather bindings. Some of them looked underage. Next to the magazines were some Polaroid photographs of a slender blond woman, nude except for high heels and held fast to a chair with adhesive tape and suffering various indignities at the hands of a man. Only the man’s arms and hands were visible in the photos. He had his sleeves rolled up a few turns and was wearing a wristwatch with an expansion band. The woman had a rubber ball stuck halfway in her mouth and held by tape, and her eyes had a dazed quality as if she might be on drugs.
The condo’s second bedroom was Raffy’s office. It had the same red carpeting and rough white plaster walls. Also a white leather couch and chair, and a massive cherrywood desk with curved legs. The top of the desk was bare except for a ceramic lamp in the shape of a nude woman with her hands joined above her head, as if she were diving straight up. On a table sat a black push-button phone and a small gray portable electric typewriter. The walls were lined with wooden bookshelves, but instead of books contained a complex stereo system, a portable TV with a video recorder, and stacks of cassettes. Carver looked over the cassettes. Raffy’s taste ran to X-rated movies and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Propped at one end of a shelf was even a signed eight-by-ten publicity photo of Schwarzenegger stripped to the waist and wielding a machine gun. He was wearing a stoic expression and perspiring heavily after a hard day on the set.
Carver returned to the desk and searched through the drawers one by one, not bothering to put things back the way he found them. The two bottom drawers were stuffed with martial arts magazines, and in the back of one drawer was a jumble of Oriental weaponry: the obligatory chain with a wooden handle at each end, some star-shaped steel throwing disks for death from a distance, a lead-weighted leather sap that resembled an ordinary blackjack.
The upper drawers were reserved for papers. Raffy usually waited until he’d received a warning notice before paying his electric bill, but he was too smart to leave anything more incriminating than that lying around. There was a small Rolodex but it contained only the phone numbers of local merchants, so if there was an address book that meant something it probably stayed with Raffy.
In the desk’s wide, shallow top drawer was a typed note from Raffy to Raffy, reminding him to pick up cleaning on Wednesday. There were similar typed reminders crumpled and discarded in the wastebasket. Raffy was one of those organized and orderly people who were in the habit of typing themselves messages. A man of compulsions.
Carver felt toward the back of one of the drawers where he’d seen a stack of small boxes. As he’d hoped: spare typewriter ribbon.
The typewriter was the kind that used one-time ribbon on a cartridge. Carver removed the cartridge and slipped in a fresh one. He typed some dots and random letters so the exposed part of the ribbon was used, slipped the old cartridge into his pocket, and was about to leave the room when he heard a soft sound in the front of the apartment.
Fear leaped to his throat and formed a lump there.
Moving silently with the cane, he crept to the office door and peered down the hall into the living room. Blood beat like a drum in his ears.
He saw no one, but again he heard the sound. A soft scuffing noise with something tentative about it. There was no denying what it was—someone walking around in the living room.
Carver was about to turn and look for a place to hide, when a tall blond woman in nothing but a red bikini strutted into view, stood with her hands on her hips near the broken door to the hall, and said in a loud voice, “Jesus H. Christ!” She moved her head from side to side to stare around her, as if in disbelief that someone had entered the condo in such a blatant manner.
Carver stayed perfectly still and she didn’t seem to notice him. But if she moved farther into the apartment there was no way he could avoid being seen by her.
He saw fear cross her beauty-pageant features as she realized whoever had broken in might still be there.
She did a quick deep-knee bend and snatched up a red beach towel from the floor where she’d dropped it. Then she wrapped the towel tightly around herself, as if for the magical protection of terrycloth, and backed out into the hall.
Carver suddenly realized who she was: the blond woman in the Polaroid photos.
She must have been down on the beach.
Now she was probably bustling toward the nearest phone to call the police. Or, more likely, to call Raffy.
Past time for Carver to leave.
He made his way quickly through the living room, poked his head out to make sure the hall was empty, and limped with exaggerated casualness to the elevators. Just a visitor, or maybe one of the new tenants. He longed to toss his cane aside and run. Bolt to safety like a twenty-year-old. He had to remind himself that was impossible.
It seemed an hour before an elevator reached the
sixth floor. It start-and-stop rumbled in its shaft as it sought floor level, then was silent. Carver swallowed hard and heard his throat crack.
When the doors hissed open he half expected to see the blond woman in the bikini, perhaps with a security guard at her side.
But she hadn’t had that much time to organize her thoughts and efforts. The elevator was empty.
Carver rode the plush little cubicle down to the lobby. Dropping from danger, or into it.
No one seemed to pay much attention to him as he limped outside onto the sun-washed sidewalk.
28
BENEATH THE BRIGHT GLARE of the lamp he’d set up, Carver sat at the breakfast counter in his cottage, carefully unwinding and studying the ribbon from the cartridge he’d removed from Raffy Ortiz’s typewriter. He played the ribbon gingerly through his smudged fingers and tried to imagine spaces between words so he could decipher the steady stream of typing. It was more difficult than he’d imagined to make sense of the impressions on the flimsy ribbon.
After a while it became grinding work that made Carver’s back ache and his vision swim. Raffy used his typewriter to send routine household correspondence and countless of his terse reminders to himself. There were dozens of addresses with zip codes. Also a few phone numbers, but a check of Carver’s Del Moray cross-directory showed them to be numbers of merchants in the vicinity of Executive Tower.
His own phone rang, causing his body to jerk and his mind to bob up from the depths of concentration. He pinched a slight kink in the ribbon to indicate where he left off, then grabbed his cane and crossed the cottage to snatch up the phone on the fifth ring. He said hello and stared through the wide front window at the glimmering Atlantic and at distant sails leaning against the wall of a stiff easterly breeze. A few high, white clouds were racing each other out to sea.
“McGregor here, Carver,” came the assertive voice over the line. “Thought you oughta know we got a call about a break-in over in Executive Tower on Ponce de Leon.”
“That the tall, ritzy condo looks like an office building?”
“Looks like all the other beachside condos in Florida,” McGregor said.
“Right across the street from a shopping center?”
“Now you got it. Somebody was in there prowling around Raffy Ortiz’s unit.”
“No kidding?”
“Uh-hm. His girlfriend phoned us. Blond cunt name of Melanie Star. Real name, too, though she said it used to have two r’s in it.”
“So Raffy’s place was burglarized. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving victim.”
“When I heard the squeal,” McGregor said, “I got myself over there like a good public servant while the uniforms were still making the prelim and taking information. Raffy was there, all angry and ugly with his muscles bunched up and fire in his eye.”
“Well, can’t blame him. Somebody break in and steal your whips and chains, you’d feel the same way.”
“Oh, nothing was taken. I could tell that what Raffy was actually sore about was two things. First, that somebody’d been nervy—and stupid—enough to B and E his condo. Second, that the Star bitch was dumb enough to phone the police.”
“He’s got an aversion to the law, that guy.”
“Like so many. Hey, Carver, what were you doing late this morning, say about eleven or quarter after?”
“Vacuuming dust balls behind my sofa. You sure nothing was taken from Raffy’s?”
“I’m sure ’cause he’s sure. He looked around very, very carefully. Whoever broke in there didn’t try to disguise the fact. Smashed the shit outta the door. Then left things in mild but unmistakable disarray, you might say. I mean, didn’t really tear up the place, but left it just messy enough so Raffy’d know somebody’d been there rooting around. Almost like the guy that busted in didn’t mind if Raffy got pissed off. Mighta even wanted it. Got some kinda death wish, I guess, not to leave poison like Raffy alone. Our housebreaker oughta know better, huh? Always a chance the victim’ll come up with a name and inflict great bodily harm on whoever it was broke in the place. Wouldn’t be surprised what Raffy’d do. For that matter, I wouldn’t wanna be in that Melanie Star’s shoes.”
“I doubt they’d fit,” Carver said. He noticed, far out at sea, a huge oil tanker. It was fixed on the horizon like a motionless gray island, but he knew it was making its way south along the coast. It was like a different world passing by, without the problems of this one. He wondered if the residents at Sunhaven could see it.
“Real reason I phoned,” McGregor said, “was to tell you I saw a few people, made a few phone calls about Brian Macklin. He’s a painter, all right. Supposed to be real talented and gets his stuff displayed all over the state. He’s sixty-four and got an arrest record from back in the sixties and seventies when he was mixed up in the peace movement.”
“Anything interesting on the record?”
“Yes and no. Fucking commie sympathizer’s what he was. Maybe still is. Usual garbage on his sheet: resisting arrest, destruction of government property, that kinda thing.”
“What sort of government property?”
“Hah! Everything from a fence around a missile site to his tax form. He was one of them longhairs that stirred up so much shit back then. Now they’re artists and lawyers and whatever. Got secret drug habits and live in expensive condos with their wives, who used to wear love beads and fuck everything had pants with a zipper in front. Sophisticated, they call themselves these days. Junkies is what I call ’em.”
“I heard he had a drug problem.”
“Word I get is he does, but not a big one. Mostly pot. A little crystal meth. What the hell you expect, Carver, guy’s an arteest. Makes me wonder, too, what a used-up ex-hippie like that’s doing with a young goodie like the Macklin cunt.”
“You mean Dr. Lee Macklin.”
“Yeah. Sure as hell he ain’t hitting it like he should. Old pothead probably can’t even get his dong up anymore. Way I see it, theirs is a marriage for appearances only and hubby’s actually a closet fruit wants a sharp wife to show off to the world and help him financially with his career. I mean, hey, she’s a doctor; she’s busy looking down throats and up assholes and ain’t interested in sex anyway, so it works out nice for both of them.”
“Sound reasoning,” Carver said. He rolled his eyes. “Give me a call if you find out anything else about Brian.”
“Sure. And you call me if you find out anything about anything. But I guess you ain’t interested if we catch the guy broke into Raffy’s condo.”
“Only if it’s Brian,” Carver said, and hung up.
He plucked a Budweiser from the refrigerator and sat down again at the counter, where the ribbon from Raffy Ortiz’s typewriter was unfurled and draped onto the floor. He took up where he’d left off.
Near the end—or what to Raffy would have been the beginning—of the ribbon, his attention was heightened by a series of numerals, one of which had a slash typed through it: 5034543-9876.
It didn’t take Carver long to figure out he was looking at a phone number preceded by an area code. The “3” key had been mistakenly struck instead of the “4” and then crossed out. The area code was 504.
Carver phoned the long-distance operator and was told the 504 area code included the city of New Orleans. He depressed the cradle button, then direct-dialed the area code and phone number.
The phone at the other end of the connection in New Orleans rang six times.
When it was answered there was music in the background, a trumpet solo. And voices. A shout, a woman’s laughter.
Then a vaguely familiar male voice said, “Melba’s Place in the Quarter.”
Carver said, “Oops, wrong number,” and hung up.
But his harsh features wore a predator’s smile. It hadn’t been a wrong number at all.
It couldn’t have been more right.
There was a subtle change of light in the cottage, the faintest of sounds from the front porch.
Carver gr
abbed his cane, went as quietly as possible to his dresser, and removed the Colt .38 from where he’d placed it beneath his socks in the top drawer. He worked the action and there was a solid metallic double click as a round was fed from the clip into the chamber, then he moved toward the front of the cottage.
For an instant he caught a glimpse of someone peering through a window, then the image was gone.
Footsteps on the porch.
The doorknob rotated.
The door opened.
Edwina.
“I’ve been trying to catch you here,” she said. She noticed the gun but didn’t change expression. Always so cool.
“You and maybe somebody else,” Carver said.
“You’re in a shitty line of work,” she told him. She’d been working her own job; she was wearing a tailored gray business suit with a white blouse and oversized black bow tie. The skirt was short and slit up one side, showing off the fullness of her calves and a neat turn of nyloned ankle. In her right hand was her blue leather attaché case. No doubt stuffed with hot contracts.
Carver said, “Maybe we both work too hard.”
Edwina smiled. “Not tonight, though, okay? We go have a quiet dinner someplace, then we go home—to my place.”
“I’m staying here because I don’t want to be seen at your place,” Carver explained. It sounded lame. He suddenly felt as if he’d been caught by a grown-up while playing a child’s game. It seemed absurd and adolescent. He was scared of a bully and didn’t want his girlfriend hurt if there was a showdown. Very dramatic.
But he knew that Raffy Ortiz and whoever else was involved in the Sunhaven deaths were more than mere bullies playing schoolyard games. Something other than a bloody nose was at stake.