by John Lutz
Carver limped outside into the sun and left Dr. Pauly to his housework. Dust to dust.
17
Carver returned to Edwina’s and found she was away on the job. The echoing house was silent except for the breathing of the ocean. This must be what it was like inside a seashell.
He made a few phone calls, then piled some of his clothes as neatly as possible on the backseat of the Olds. Hot work. Sticking his head inside the car was like poking it into an oven set on Bake. He hoped none of his polyester shirts would melt.
Damp with perspiration, he went back inside the house and got a can of Budweiser from the refrigerator, downed it quickly, then opened another can and carried it into the spare bedroom Edwina used as an office.
The blinds were closed and it was dim in there, so he switched on the desk lamp. It was one of those banker’s lamps with a green glass shade and cast a sickly light. He rolled a sheet of blank paper into the Olympia portable Edwina used when she typed real-estate contracts. Between sips of beer, he used his forefingers to peck out a letter to her. He tucked the letter in a white business envelope, wrote her name on it in blue felt-tip pen, and returned to the living room.
After laying the letter on the table near the front door, where she couldn’t miss seeing it, he girded himself against the heat and limped back outside. He made sure he locked the door behind him.
Birdie Reeves was behind her receptionist’s desk in Sunhaven’s bright pastel lobby. She was engrossed in one of her checkout-counter tabloids and didn’t pay much attention to the tap, tap of his cane; plenty of canes and aluminum walkers at Sunhaven. When she did glance up and see him, she smiled, then the country sweetness of the smile was clouded over by worry.
“I’m s’posed to tell Nurse Rule if you show up here, Mr. Carver.”
“I didn’t show up,” Carver said. “You were busy with your work and must not have seen me pass.”
“Mr. Carver-”
“It’ll be all right, Birdie.” He patted the hand that held the headline about a New England fishing village invaded by porpoises with legs, and sidled away to head for Amos Burrel’s room.
A completely bald old man in a pink vinyl chair beamed at Carver and said, “Wha’cha know, young fella?”
Good question, Carver thought. He shrugged and said, “Not much,” and moved on.
He knocked on Amos’s door. No answer. He rotated the knob and pushed the door open. There was a minty, medicinal scent in the room.
Amos didn’t look scared. Didn’t look angry. Looked disinterested. He was wearing blue-and-gray-striped pajamas, sitting in a severe, straight-backed wooden chair that might have been made by Shakers to punish themselves for sins real or imagined. He was staring out his window at the slope of sun-browned grass that led to the parking lot. His long face seemed to sag even more, loose skin draping to the wattles beneath his jaw. It was as if the bone structure beneath the flesh were gradually disintegrating and soon there would be nothing to hold form. Amos’s face, his entire body, would melt away like tallow.
Carver said hello and sat down on the edge of the bed. The springs squeaked; the mattress was surprisingly soft.
“Hot outside?” Amos asked.
“Hot.”
“Looks hot.”
“Kearny Williams died last night,” Carver said.
Amos nodded, still staring at the bright sunlight outside the window. A jay fluttered down on the brown grass, decided it was too hot to strut around searching for nonexistent worms, and took to the air again.
“What do you think about it?” Carver asked.
“Think I ought not to talk to you,” Amos said.
“Why not? Nurse Rule?”
Amos’s scrawny chest rose and fell beneath the striped pajamas. “You gotta understand, Carver. Game I’m in here, I ain’t got a lotta cards to play.”
“Point is,” Carver said, “you’re in the game to stay. You don’t have any choice about it.”
“Yeah.” Amos drew out the word as if it tasted bad sliding over his tongue.
“You hear anything last night?” Carver asked.
Amos pursed his lips. Regular Sphinx.
“Sooner you tell me, sooner I’ll get outta here,” Carver said.
There was logic in that. Amos wrung his narrow, withered hands. They were dry and Carver could actually hear them rubbing together. He didn’t like the spot he’d put the old man in, but he was in a spot himself. The world seemed to work that way too often, robbing us of the best part of ourselves little by little.
“Heard nothing,” Amos said. “I was hung over this morning. Still hung over. I think they mighta put something in my food to make me sleep through whatever happened. I sniffed an odd smell through the vent this morning, though. Like something had been burned. Like somebody’d struck a match maybe to smoke a cigarette.”
“You mentioned a burned smell after Jim Harrison died,” Carver pointed out.
“Did I?”
“Did Kearny Williams smoke?”
“Hell, no! Damn near nobody smokes in Sunhaven, Carver. Not the staff. Not any of the residents except them so desperate for tobacco they can’t help themselves, and so rich they can’t be tossed outta here. Think I ain’t wanted to fire up a pipe now and again? Had a collection of meerschaum pipes. Gone now.”
“Is it a strict rule? No smoking at Sunhaven?”
“Strict as that kinda rule can be. Straight from the top. Dr. Macklin figures smoking’s the greatest evil in the world since sex. She don’t do neither, way I figure it.”
Carver remembered the Medallion Motel and the cigarette lighter inside Dr. Macklin’s glove compartment. He wondered about the wisdom that was supposed to come with age. “Any of the staff smoke on the sly?”
“Not as I know of. One of the things they ask here before hiring attendants or anyone else is whether they smoke. Discrimination, you ask me. People like that, they look for a wisp of smoke the way censors keep an eye skinned for a snippet of pornography so they can fly into a righteous rage. Zealots, is what they are. Zealots is what’s got the world screwed up. Radicals. Extremists. Oughta stand ’em all up against a wall and shoot ’em!”
Carver could see that Amos was torn. On the one hand he didn’t want Carver in his room, but on the other it was so nice to have an ear to bitch into.
Worry won out over loneliness. “What I told you, Carver, that’s all I know. Period. Jane was right. We had a long talk, and she convinced me that even if there is something bad going on here I oughta mind my own business unless I got facts and proof of what I think. It’s my best interest she’s got at heart. She’s an angel of mercy come late into my life, that woman.”
“What exactly did she tell you?”
“I’m sorry, but she made me agree not to say what we talked about. It’s private, between me and Jane. She don’t want to be part of spreading rumors, she said. I think she’s right about that, Carver. Right about a lotta things. Makes me wonder how my life woulda been if I’d met her years ago.”
“Everybody wonders those kinds of things,” Carver said.
“I wish you’d go now. Really do wish that,”
“Okay, Amos, I understand. Thanks.” Carver stood up and took the necessary two steps to the door. “You need anything, phone me. All right?”
Amos looked away from the window and smiled at Carver. “Okay.” The smile suggested he was grateful for the invitation but probably wouldn’t call.
On his way back through the lobby, Carver stopped at the receptionist’s desk long enough to ask Birdie if any of Sunhaven’s staff smoked.
“That’s like strictly forbidden here, Mr. Carver.” Her eyes roamed from side to side as if she and Carver were talking about political assassination.
“What about socially?” Carver asked. “Away from Sunhaven?”
“I don’t see many of the staff away from here,” Birdie said “None of them smokes, far as I know.”
“Isn’t that sort of unusual?”
/> “Getting less and less. And I’m sure a few of them are sneaking a puff now and then, but I don’t know which.”
Carver thanked her and moved toward the door. A bent, gray woman in a wicker rocker gave him a lustrous if broken-toothed smile and said, “Beautiful day, eh?”
Carver agreed that it was.
“Don’t rain all the time here in Florida the way it does in Seattle,” the woman observed.
“Guess not,” Carver said.
“Seattle was nice, but this here is lovely.”
Carver wished he could stay for a moment and chat with the woman, but he knew he shouldn’t. Miles to go and promises to keep.
He listened to the rhythmic creaking of the rocker’s runners as he limped the rest of the way to the door. It was an oddly reassuring sound that suggested there was some simplicity and goodness in the world.
Nurse Rule was waiting for him outside.
She was standing in the sun near his car. She’d been there for a while; her white-and-blue uniform was damp with perspiration. A mustache of moisture glistened above her upper lip, which at the moment was contemptuously curled in reaction to Carver. Her feet were planted wide and her sturdy body looked immovable; her breasts swelled with firm assurance beneath her blouse. For an instant Carver thought about her with Dr. Macklin at the motel.
“Were you considering moving into Sunhaven?” she asked, motioning with her head toward the clothes piled on the backseat of the Olds. The car might have belonged to a gypsy.
“Maybe in the fullness of time,” Carver said. “How come you object to my presence?”
“You’re causing unease among the residents.”
“It’s because of unease among the residents that I’m here.”
“I have the authority to have you forcibly removed from the premises, if that becomes necessary.”
Carver looked beyond her to see two burly attendants standing side by side with their arms crossed. As if Mr. Clean had been cloned.
“Were you here last night when Kearny Williams died?” he asked.
“Mr. Williams’s death doesn’t concern you.”
“But it does,” Carver said. “And apparently it concerns Raffy Ortiz.”
She glared coldly and directly at him, as if she were diagnosing cataracts. Carver understood how she’d sapped the fight from Amos Burrel. She said, “Just how’s Kearny Williams of any interest to Mr. Ortiz?”
“I’ll eventually be able to answer that question,” Carver said. He adjusted the position of his cane and opened the car door. He patted his pockets. “Spare a cigarette?”
“I don’t smoke, Mr. Carver. Smoking blackens the lungs with tar and causes death by cancer. If I had a cigarette, I’d give it to you. But you wouldn’t smoke it here at Sunhaven. It’s absolutely forbidden.”
“You seem to live in a world of absolutes,” Carver said.
“It’s the kind of world I prefer. I’d also prefer that you weren’t part of it.”
Carver lowered himself behind the steering wheel and shut the door. The window was cranked down. He started the engine, then looked up at Nurse Rule. “If anything happens to Amos Burrel,” he said, “I won’t rest till I learn everything about it.”
“Mr. Burrel suffers from paranoid delusions, which is why I want you to stay away from him.”
Carver said, “Uh-huh.” He slipped the Olds’s shift lever to Drive and pulled out of the lot. In the rearview mirror he saw that the two attendants, disciplined as harem eunuchs, hadn’t changed position in the searing sun. If they ever left Sunhaven, they could always find work as gateposts.
As soon as he was half a mile down the highway, he fished his pack of Swisher Sweet cigars from the glove compartment and fired one up,
He couldn’t remember enjoying a cigar more. Might have something to do with Nurse Rule. Puff! Puff!
18
From Sunhaven Carver drove to Del Moray police headquarters to keep the appointment he’d made by phone with McGregor.
Going to see McGregor was never an act that lifted the spirit. Carver found himself driving a few miles per hour under the speed limit. The Olds was passed by tractor-trailers and motor homes. By vans and station wagons loaded with children Disney World-bound. Tires sang on the highway as miles and minutes ticked away; despite Disney, the children would find themselves in the real world all too soon.
McGregor was sitting behind his gray steel desk, thoughtfully rolling the eraser of a pencil over his chin, when Carver entered. The lieutenant pretended he was still alone. His visitor was scarcely worth acknowledging. That was how McGregor saw life; he was three-dimensional and everyone else was cardboard.
Carver sat down in the chair near the desk and held his cane loosely with both hands. Since the central air conditioner did a poor job of cooling the tiny office, McGregor had improvised. There was now a portable unit in the one window; it chugged away with an irritating clinking sound and didn’t seem to do much to provide relief from the heat. McGregor was sweating. He had on a short-sleeved shirt and wasn’t aware of the scrap of paper sticking to his left elbow as he sat rolling the pencil and putting on a show of deep thinking. It really was a crummy office; Carver could see why McGregor wanted to move up in the department.
“You decide it was time to include me in your plans?” McGregor finally asked.
“That’s it,” Carver said.
“So there’s something the law should know about, hey?”
“Why I’m here.”
McGregor let the pencil drop on the desk, where it bounced three or four times with a rattling sound before rolling onto the floor. Carver sat quietly and let the lieutenant find his way to where he was going. McGregor was looking at him now. That was a start.
“Let’s agree I’m the only representative of Del Moray law you confide in,” McGregor said. “For the sake of efficiency and containment of knowledge. After all, there could be leaks to the media; innocent people might be put in jeopardy. How ’bout it? I painting the situation correctly?”
Carver smiled. “Let’s say a trade might be worked out.”
McGregor leaned his long body way, way back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his neck. The odor of perspiration and days-old underarm deodorant wafted to Carver and hit him hard in the stomach. “Didn’t think you came here to give away something for free, Carver. Comes right down to it, you ain’t so different from me.”
“What if I lie to you?” Carver asked. “What if we make an agreement and I break it?”
McGregor flashed his lurid grin and played the tip of his tongue behind the space between his front teeth. “Here’s what, fuckhead: I’ll drop on you like a forty-story building.”
“We’re no different in that respect,” Carver told him. “Don’t cross me.”
“You threatening the law, shit-for-brains? Actually threatening the law?”
“Sounds that way.”
“Now you made that point,” McGregor said, his grin twisting into a sneer, “tell me your information and I’ll tell you if it’s worth what you want in return.”
“We’ll talk about what I want first,” Carver said.
“Selfish, selfish. But go ahead; if you didn’t have your balls in a wringer you wouldn’t be here.”
“Protection for Edwina,” Carver said.
McGregor pulled his hands out from behind his long neck and dropped forward in his chair. He propped his bony elbows on the desk; the paper that had been struck to his damp left arm peeled away and fluttered unnoticed to the floor to land near the pencil. The lukewarm air from the window unit caught it and skittered it away beneath the desk. McGregor said, “She in some kinda danger because of her hero?”
“Can you assign some manpower to keep a watch on her?”
“With her knowing it?”
“Without. It’d be easier that way. She might object to being watched over.”
McGregor ran his tongue around the inside of his cheek, pretending to think about what Carver had reques
ted while he luxuriated in his authority. He was such a prick.
“This is sure a crappy little office,” Carver observed, motioning in a sweeping gesture with his cane.
“I got the clout to give you what you want, Carver; you know that. Thing is, what you give me better make it worthwhile, or your ass is grass and I’m the lawnmower. Edwina’s safe soon as I pick up that phone.”
“You gonna pick it up or not?”
McGregor made a nodding gesture of acceptance, not just with his head but with his entire upper body. Only a very tall man could have managed it. “We got a deal. Now spill your guts.”
Carver told him everything. Almost. He didn’t mention the lesbian relationship between Dr. Macklin and Nurse Rule. And he omitted the fact that Birdie Reeves was a runaway. McGregor was the type to blackmail the two women and adopt Birdie for illicit purposes.
“It ain’t much,” McGregor said when Carver was finished talking. “Lotta circumstantial evidence, really. Mostly smoke without any guarantee of fire.”
“More than smoke,” Carver said. “You can feel the heat and see the red glare of the flames.”
“That’s opinion.”
“Most everything is, including a jury verdict.”
“So what’s your plan now?” McGregor asked. “I’m flying to New Orleans to talk to Kearny Williams’s family.”
“New Orleans, hey?” He was obviously thinking about Raffy Ortiz’s recent trip to the city. “That’s why you want Edwina protected; you’re gonna be outta town for a while.”
“That’s it,” Carver said. “And I’m moving back into my cottage until this thing’s resolved. No sense having Raffy Ortiz visit me at her place when she’s there.”
“Or visit her when you’re not there. Ortiz does very imaginative things to women, way I understand it. Abuses everything they got every which way. Maybe some ancient Oriental shit he picked up with all that martial arts training. Got it from the folks who gave us the Chinese water torture and the death of a thousand cuts.”
