by John Lutz
“Yeah. I better get to the office in case somebody’s been phoning.”
“I thought you said the case you were on was ended.”
He snapped the shorts’ elastic waistband, then glanced around for the rest of his clothes. “All but the murder investigation.”
“Whose murder?”
“Woman named Belinda Jackson. Sister-in-law of my client. I mean, former client.”
“Killed here in Del Moray?”
“No. In Orlando.”
“Desoto’s territory.”
“Yeah.” He sat on the edge of the bed and struggled into his pants. He’d laid them folded on the chair, not carefully enough, because they were very wrinkled. Well, he’d been in a hurry. Barefoot, he limped to the small dresser and got out a fresh pair of socks, then went back to the bed and worked them on. He slipped his feet into the moccasins he didn’t have to bother tying. Shoelaces weren’t much trouble in the mornings, but he hated it when laces came untied in public, and he had to find someplace to sit down and contort his body simply to tie his shoe. The pitying stares made him furious.
He got a clean brown pullover shirt from the closet and yanked it over his head, then stood at the foot of the bed and tucked it into his pants. Smoothing the thick and curly fringe of gray hair around his ears and at the back of his neck, he caught his reflection in the full-length mirror. Dark pants, dark shirt, catlike blue eyes, harsh features with a scar at the right corner of his mouth that lent him a sardonic expression unless he smiled. Left earlobe missing as the result of a knife wound. He looked like a Paris hoodlum, as usual. Didn’t give a fuck, as usual.
Edwina sat up straighter and raked her red-enameled fingernails through her wild hair. It didn’t change anything. “Got time to hang around for breakfast?”
“Better not,” he said. “Sorry.”
“Sure. Well, I gotta get to work anyway. Some choice beachfront property to show.”
“Fat commission?”
“If I sell it.”
“You will.”
She nodded almost solemnly. “Yeah, sooner or later I will.”
He limped around the side of the bed to stand over her, then moved the cane close for leverage, leaned down, and kissed her forehead. Her flesh was damp and cool.
She didn’t move or look up. “ ’Bye, Fred.”
He braced on his cane and got out of there.
Across the street from Carver’s office was the pure white stucco combination courthouse and jail. In the now-glaring sunlight it looked edible, an iced pastry. Beyond it stretched the blue and glittering Atlantic. The view was the stuff of postcards.
The building that housed Carver’s office was cream-colored stucco, low and not very long and with a red tile roof. His was the end office. The other two businesses in the building were an insurance brokerage and a car-rental agency. Customers for all three enterprises came and went, but nobody was getting rich here.
Carver parked the Olds in its usual slot on the gravel lot, closer to Golden World Insurance than to his own office, because the car would be in the shade sooner there as the sun moved across Magellan and behind the building’s roofline.
He raised the canvas top so the vinyl upholstery wouldn’t melt, then limped over and unlocked the office door. Pushed into the anteroom.
The sun hadn’t really gotten mean yet today, and the air conditioning had the place comfortably cool. By two o’clock the office would begin to grow warm. Florida in June, what could he expect? The state really belonged to the reptiles and other coldblooded types.
He picked up the mail that had been dropped through the slot in the door, shuffled the envelopes, and saw nothing that promised a check. Mostly bills and ads. He’d apparently won a video recorder, if only he’d visit a new condominium development in Fort Lauderdale. Sure. He tossed the VCR offer and the rest of the obvious junk mail in the metal wastebasket near the door, then tucked the few remaining envelopes between his first and second fingers and limped across the sparsely furnished anteroom toward the open door to his office. He went inside to sit down behind his desk and check his phone messages and the rest of the mail.
Stopped after two steps and stood staring.
Somebody was already seated behind his desk, leaning back in his chair. Somebody else was standing off to the side, next to the window.
The one behind the desk said, “You look surprised.”
Carver said, “Am surprised.”
“Huh! Huh! Huh!” It was a jackal-like laugh. “Nothing in life should shock you. Not ever. That’s just the kinda world it is, you know?”
Carver knew. He said, “You Robert Ghostly this visit? Or Roberto Gomez?”
8
CARVER SAID, “I THOUGHT I locked the door.”
Gomez smiled. He was wearing a white suit and a pale blue shirt open at the collar. A thick gold chain glinted among his dark chest hairs. He didn’t look like a hardworking salesman now. Gomez wore his hair differently, too, from when he’d visited Carver on the beach. It was combed straight back now, greased down almost flat. The slick hairstyle made him look like a lounge lizard, and it made his dense, dark eyebrows seem even more pasted on and out of synchronization. “We don’t pay much attention to locks,” he said.
Hell with this. Carver limped over to the desk. The man standing didn’t actually move from where he leaned with his back against the wall, but an alertness came over his tall, slender body, like a low-wattage current of electricity. He was in his mid-fifties, with a long, loose-fleshed face and sad blue eyes, wearing a dark blue pinstripe suit with a vest. Though it wasn’t warm in the office, sweat was rolling down his flabby, somber face. It didn’t seem to bother him. One of the two, probably the big one standing, gave off the rancid odor of the unwashed.
“Want something?” Gomez asked, leaning back and gazing up at Carver. As if it were his office.
“My chair,” Carver said. He gripped the crook of his cane hard and took a little weight off the tip, ready to use it as a weapon.
Gomez looked amused, but his dark eyes had the flat, emotionless lack of expression Carver had seen on passionless killers. “You serious, my man?”
“About wanting my chair? Yeah.”
Gomez worked his eyebrows. His cheek muscles. As if he were holding back a good loud laugh. “Listen, Carver, I give the word and Hirsh starts breaking your small bones. When I’m in a room, I sit where I fucking want. That clear?”
Carver looked over at Hirsh, who looked bored. Also older than Carver had first thought. Gray hairs sprouted from his nostrils and ears, and the black hair on his head looked dyed.
“I asked if that was clear,” Gomez said. He didn’t look amused now. His tough-guy act was in full swing.
Carver said, “Get up.”
Gomez looked surprised. Zoom, zoom went the eyebrows. “Holy fuck! You raised on John Wayne movies or something? Don’t you know who I am? Who you’re fucking talking to?”
“There’s a line I heard in a lot of movies,” Carver said, “that ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ thing.”
Gomez glanced over at the silent and sober Hirsh. “You wanna do a job on this guy?”
Hirsh shrugged. “Don’t matter to me one way or the other.”
Gomez looked back at Carver and said, “He means it. It really don’t matter diddlyshit to him if he pulls you apart like a plucked chicken or if he don’t. Hirsh is like that. Then we go out and get something to eat. I tell you, his appetite stays the same either way.”
“Gonna get up?” Carver asked.
Gomez folded his hands on Carver’s desk, then bowed his head as if thinking about Carver’s request. Like a key executive considering a supplicant employee’s plea for a raise.
Then he looked up. His eyebrows were high on his forehead and in line with each other. He was grinning; this wasn’t worth going to war over, and he had some sort of use for Carver, otherwise he wouldn’t be here. “So siddown, my man.” He got up and moved aside in exaggerated fashion
so Carver would have room to pass. “You’re a fucking gimp, so I oughta mind my manners, right?”
Carver didn’t say anything as he limped to his chair and sat down. It was still warm from Gomez; he didn’t like that, but other than that it felt good to be sitting. He set his cane off to the side, propping it against the desk where he could grab it if Hirsh or Gomez made a threatening move. He looked at Gomez, who was standing in front of the desk now with his fists on his hips, still smiling, as if he thought Carver was really a hoot. Hirsh was still staring at Carver with his bloodhound gaze, but there might have been a watery glimmer of amusement in his sad blue eyes.
“So why’d you come and see me?” Carver asked Gomez. It was his office again; he was in charge. Sort of.
Gomez stopped smiling. “My wife’s sister got herself killed. You were there.”
“She didn’t get herself killed,” Carver said. “Somebody shot her. But, yeah, I was there.”
“It go down like the news said? A bullet comes through the window and zaps her?”
“That was it,” Carver said. “Sniper with a high-powered rifle.”
“You see anything at all?”
“Saw your sister-in-law’s head explode. That’s about it.”
“What was the poor dumb cunt doing in our condo?”
“She didn’t say. She’d packed some clothes in a suitcase, probably to take to your wife.”
“You didn’t talk to her?”
“There wasn’t time. Fast bullet.”
Gomez walked over toward the window, squinting for a moment into the angled, brilliant sunlight. He shot a look at Hirsh, then came back to stand facing Carver and put on a sincere expression. “Her dying was a mistake. You get what I’m saying?
“Somebody dies that way, it’s always a mistake.”
“That ain’t what I mean, Carver.”
“You figure the killer thought she was your wife.”
“Yeah. And that’s how it looks, right?”
Carver nodded. It did look that way to him. There were only a few black tenants in Beau Capri, and the two sisters would resemble each other through a telescopic sight, especially in Elizabeth Gomez’s living room. The killer had probably been waiting patiently for Beth to come home. Maybe he’d never seen her before and only had a description, then made a mistake most people would have made. Most killers. Carver said, “The police’ll wanna talk to you.”
“That’s okay,” Gomez said. “There’s no warrants out on me. I’ll go in and talk, but when I fucking get around to it.”
“Police’ll get lucky and find you sitting at a desk down at the station house and talking mean, huh? Just like here?”
“You might be surprised, my man. You got the right legal counsel and you can talk mean even in the cop shop. Fucking constitutional rights up the ass. And I got the right attorney.”
“Bet you do. Does he know you’re here?”
Gomez winked. “Confidential information, Carver.”
“If you came here to find out more than was on the news about Belinda Jackson’s death,” Carver said, “I can’t help you. It was quick and simple. The only good thing about it.”
“That ain’t the purpose of me being here,” Gomez said. “I want you to keep looking for Beth. It’s obvious she’s in danger, and I want her found before something happens to her.”
“The police can find her.”
“I don’t want the police in on it.”
“Why not?”
“Nature of my business and all, it ain’t a good idea.”
Carver saw his point. But he said, “I’m done with you, Gomez. I’ll give you back your retainer.”
“I won’t take it back.”
“Okay. I’ll spend it. But that changes nothing.”
“Why do you want out, Carver?”
“You come to me with a shitpot fulla lies, hire me under false pretenses, and I wind up standing next to a woman when a high-power slug tears into her.”
“Coulda been you instead, huh? That it? You chickenshit, my man?”
“Believe it.”
Gomez’s eyebrows did their dance and he flashed sharp white teeth. “I don’t believe it. I do research before I hire somebody, Carver. You got humongous balls, they tell me; they clank when you walk. That’s why I wanted you and not some sleazy keyhole-peeper’d piss in his pants first time something serious happened.”
“Somebody getting shot in the head, that’s serious,” Carver said. “Serious enough to discourage me, anyway.”
Gomez crossed his arms and planted his feet wide. Ultimatum time. “Let’s put it this way, Carver: You keep searching for Beth, or Hirsh here’ll see they’ll be searching for your fucking remains.”
Carver looked at Hirsh, who gave him a slow smile and a nod. There was a thick gold watch chain draped across his vest, emphasizing a stomach paunch. Hirsh had about him the air of a rough-hewn thug who’d somehow lived long enough to become half a gentleman.
Gomez said, “People I hire, they don’t quit.”
“Then I’ve broken new ground.”
“Under the fucking ground’s where you’ll be.”
Carver said, “I still quit.”
“Stubborn fucker!”
“Sure. Those humongous balls.” He closed his hand on the cane, ready to lash and stab with it if Hirsh came away from the wall with malice in mind.
Gomez wriggled and jiggled his eyebrows. He seemed puzzled. “Sure you wanna do this, Carver?”
“It’s done.”
“Don’t make goddamn sense.”
“Does to me.”
Gomez stared at him. “Tell you, in a way I gotta fucking admire you.”
“Just business,” Carver said. “I don’t work for clients who aren’t straight with me.”
“Well, maybe I can see that. Business is something I understand.”
“I’ve heard that about you.”
“Huh! Huh! Huh!” The annoying nasal laugh again. “I just bet you heard plenty, if you asked the right people.”
He kept facing Carver and backed slowly toward the door. “C’mon, Hirsh.”
Hirsh straightened up away from where he’d been leaning, then ambled over to stand by the door like a theater usher. He was wearing French cuffs, black in contrast to his white shirt. He had incredibly long arms. Huge, gnarled hands with thick, splayed fingers, like sausages flattened at the ends.
“So you think about it,” Gomez said, fading toward the anteroom while Hirsh watched Carver and everything else in the office.
“Nothing to think about,” Carver said. “It’s done. I already quit, sure as Nixon.”
“Think about it,” Gomez said again. “There’s a guaranteed twenty thousand dollars in it for you if you keep looking for Beth, whether you find her or not.” He edged past Hirsh and started to cross the anteroom. Hirsh smiled sadly at Carver and followed.
After they’d gone, Carver stayed sitting behind his desk for quite a while, thinking about Gomez’s offer, and what Gomez’s guarantee was worth.
He decided he really had quit, and he had every reason to stay quit. Nothing about the case called to him.
“Fred Carver?” said a voice from the anteroom.
9
CARVER STOOD UP and limped over to the office door. A short, stocky man stood military-erect in the anteroom, holding a white snap-brimmed straw hat in both hands. He was wearing a neat brown suit, brown shoes, white shirt with a dark brown tie. His visage was stern, his jaw was firm, and he wore his brown hair in a bristle cut. There was an indentation around his head where his hat had pressed. When he saw Carver he said again, “Fred Carver?”
“Me.”
“I’m agent Dan Strait, Drug Enforcement Administration.”
“I know.”
“How?”
“You have the look.”
Strait smiled. He still looked stern. “It’s a handicap sometimes. I just walk into a place and toilets flush.”
“Well, I’m clean
,” Carver said. “You can search the office for illegal substances.”
For a moment Strait seemed to consider the offer. Then he said, “I need to talk to you about the Belinda Jackson murder.”
Carver said he’d figured that. He invited Strait into the office and stood aside to let him pass. Strait walked as if he were leading a parade that was behind schedule.
Carver sat back down behind his desk. Strait flashed his official ID, just as a matter of form, then took the small black vinyl chair. He unbuttoned his brown suit coat and crossed his legs, laid his hat in his lap. “I read the police report on the case. You were in the condo when Miss Jackson was shot, right?”
Carver said that was right. A truck rumbled past outside on Magellan, shifting gears and sending mild vibrations through the office. Carver imagined he could smell exhaust fumes.
Strait said, “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why were you in the condo?”
“The owner hired me to find his wife. She disappeared from home, so that’s where I thought I’d start looking.”
“Ah, yes. And your client is—”
“Was,” Carver interrupted. “He was in here ten minutes ago and I told him I was off the case.”
Strait looked surprised. He tapped the stiff brim of his hat with the fingertips of both hands. “Roberto Gomez was here ten minutes ago?”
“Why? You looking for him?”
“We want to talk to him about the death of his sister-in-law. And we usually know where he is.”
“Now you know where he was. Along with a guy he called Hirsh.”
“And you gave him back his money and bowed out of the missing-wife case, huh?”
“He wouldn’t take his money, but I bowed out anyway.”
Strait smiled. “Sounds like Gomez; money means nothing and everything to him.
Carver said, “That’s not unique. This Gomez as bad as they say?”
“I don’t know what they say, but he’s as bad as they come. Drug money does that to people.”
“What about Hirsh?”
Strait kept his legs crossed. He stopped tapping the hatbrim and crossed his arms. “Hirsh has a record as an enforcer in New Jersey. That’s where he hooked up with Gomez, who’s from Brooklyn and was a punk criminal in the Northeast before he got into drugs and went south and into the big time. Hirsh is in his sixties, but he’s still rough as a cob and not to be fucked with. He does most of Gomez’s heavy work. And that’s all it is to Hirsh, a job of work. Gomez is a sadistic bastard and gets his jollies watching, but Hirsh might as well be shooting a paper target as a human being. He’s a strange man. He brings a kind of dignity to being a killer for pay, but he’s still nothing but exactly that: a hired thug.”