by John Lutz
He entered the cottage with his towel slung across his shoulders, his feet leaving wet prints on the floor. The scent of freshly perked coffee made him hungry. Beth was standing at the stove, wearing white panties and bra and spraying a frying pan with Pam. So she intended to prepare breakfast as well as coffee. Maybe she’d planned it that way from the moment she’d heard the blaring clock radio. Maybe. She was a difficult one to read. A surprising nest-feathering, domestic streak sometimes surfaced in her, like a sheen of something elemental from deep water. Though not often.
Carver wondered if she’d ever considered becoming a mother. They never talked about that.
He showered, dressed in light gray slacks, a black tee shirt and gray socks, black loafers. Beth was still standing at the stove when he came back. It was getting warm in the cottage. When she saw him, she walked over and switched on the air conditioner. His coffee was already poured and a plate of scrambled eggs, toast, and sausage links was on the breakfast counter. He sat on one of the high stools and sipped coffee. Beth disappeared behind the folding screen that partitioned off the cottage’s sleeping area, then returned and sat across from him, wearing his blue terrycloth robe now. She was carrying her oversized mug with the newspaper captions on it. Carver could see Man Minus Ear Waives Hearing. Maybe this was the real news, that the world made no sense. Steam rose from the mug and caught the morning light like a prism, playing faint colors over the counter.
She said, “Anybody show at Gretch’s apartment last night?”
He buttered a slice of toast and shook his head no. “What about the missing pages in the catalogs? They tell you anything?” He was sure they hadn’t, or she would have told him by now.
“I’m still working at it,” she said somewhat curtly. “So far, I’ve only been able to find two of the current catalogs. I’m driving in to Orlando today and visit a mail-order maniac I know, see if he can get me the other, older ones.”
“What’s on the missing pages you managed to match up?” he asked.
“Men’s sport coats and accessories on one, beachwear on the other.”
“Natty clothes, like a gigolo might wear?”
“Depends on how you view silk jackets with eelskin elbow patches.”
“So maybe the missing pages contain items Gretch ordered from the catalogs.”
“Except the order forms are intact in every catalog that was in his closet. And most of the catalogs look as if they’ve barely been leafed through. I think there’s some connecting thread, and I’ll know it when I see the other catalog pages.”
“Maybe he’s building a secret weapon out of tie clasps and sunglasses,” Carver said.
“Maybe.”
“More likely, he simply ran out of toilet paper now and then.”
Beth lowered her coffee mug and looked thoughtful. It was an explanation she hadn’t considered. She’d been raised desperately poor, and it was a possibility she might take quite seriously.
“Keep matching catalog pages,” he said.
“I intend to.”
“I’m going to give up on Gretch’s apartment for a while and watch Maggie Rourke.” He took a bite of toast and chewed while Beth gazed at him.
“Because she’s fun to watch?” she asked.
He washed down the toast with a long pull of coffee that was still hot enough to burn the back of his throat. “Because, unlike Gretch, she can at least be found.”
Beth turned her back on him and stood up. Leaving her mug sitting on the counter, she walked slowly over to the stove and lifted a sausage from the pan and began nibbling at it, still not looking at him.
Letting him know she didn’t completely believe him.
He wasn’t certain of the truth himself.
Nagging Wife Critical After Hammer Attack, he read on the mug.
16
CARVER DIDN’T BOTHER to knock on the cottage door. He headed for the stepping-stone walkway around the north wall, leading to the beach. When he noticed the dark brown bloodstain on the ground where Beni Ho had bled, his stomach lurched and his grip on his cane tightened. Getting shot in the leg or anywhere else and surviving was also getting shot in the mind, and in a place that never quite healed.
The webbed aluminum lounge chair was still on the beach facing open sea, but beautiful Maggie Rourke wasn’t gracing it today.
Carver returned to the front of the cottage and knocked on the door. He stood in the sun, waiting, listening to the faint tuneless music of brass wind chimes. He was going to tell Maggie about Beni Ho being shot in front of her cabin while she was working on her tan, see how she’d react. Then he’d say goodbye and leave, but he wouldn’t go far. Just to where he could watch the cottage unseen. Maybe she’d go someplace, and he’d follow. Either way, he’d see her again, look into those luminous gray eyes. Who knew what might be learned from that?
No one answered his knock.
He glanced around. The black Nissan Stanza that had been parked in the shade yesterday was nowhere in sight. He knocked again, louder, then tried the door.
It was locked.
He hobbled to a front window and peered inside. He could see through dimness to the sliding glass door that looked out on the ocean. The cottage appeared to be empty. He straightened up and watched a large bird that looked like a blue heron flap overhead toward the sea, gaining grace as it gained speed.
Carver got in the Olds, started the engine, and eased the big car over in the shady parking spot previously occupied by the black Stanza. He lowered the canvas top and sat in the faint sea breeze, waiting for Maggie to return. Probably she’d be back soon, he told himself. Maybe she’d run out for a loaf of bread or more sun block, or a good mystery novel in which to lose her grief.
She didn’t return. Occasionally a car would approach out of sight on the coast highway and seem to slow as it neared her driveway, and Carver would reach for his cane leaning on the seat. Then the car would speed past.
When it was almost noon, and getting hotter by the second, he backhanded sweat from his forehead and climbed out of the Olds. Secluded as the cottage was, he didn’t consider it much of a risk to see if he could slip the lock.
He went back over to the front door and tried to slide his Visa card between latch and doorjamb. When he’d succeeded, the door still didn’t open. Apparently the deadbolt above the simple knob lock was holding it firm. He wasn’t surprised. Failure was the usual result of the credit card technique. A set of lockpicks wasn’t much more efficient unless in expert hands, and he wasn’t an expert.
Carver gave up on the front door and went around to the back of the cottage and the sliding glass door overlooking the beach. He saw immediately that there was a sawed-off broomstick resting in its metal track, preventing it from sliding even an inch. The most effective way to lock a sliding glass door.
Leaving the exposed, ocean end of the cottage, he tried the two windows on the south wall to see if they were locked. The second one wasn’t. He managed to slide the window open, then held gauzy lime-green curtains aside and leaned in.
He was looking at a bedroom with pale green walls and furnished with white wicker furniture. Even the ceiling fan was wicker. The bed wasn’t, though. It was a white-enameled four-poster with a fringed canopy and sheer white curtains that draped gracefully to the floor to surround the mattress and act as mosquito netting.
Carver drew in his breath. Someone appeared to be sleeping behind the gauzy white material.
He leaned his cane carefully against the inside wall, then used his powerful arms to work his body far enough inside for him to touch the floor. Walking out away from the window with his arms, he dragged his body across the sill, using his good leg to break his fall so he dropped silently to his hands and good knee on the deep green carpet.
After waiting a few minutes, staring at the still figure in the bed, he levered himself to his feet with the cane. He stood still for a while, then moved quietly to the bed.
He edged closer and extended his free
hand to move aside the diaphanous white curtain.
It took a few seconds for him to realize what he was looking at. Pillows and the white sheet had been arranged to make it appear there was someone lying on the bed. There was a hank of auburn hair visible on the one pillow that was resting crosswise on the bed, but there was simply no room for a head beneath the sheet that had been pulled halfway up the pillow.
Holding his breath, Carver clutched the sheet and slowly peeled it down toward the foot of the bed.
A rubber, flesh-colored doll about ten inches long was resting on the pillow. A child’s doll. It had auburn hair like Maggie’s, even had wide gray eyes like Maggie’s. It looked as Maggie might have looked as a child. At a glance the doll seemed to be in one piece, but a closer look revealed that its limbs and head had been neatly severed and carefully placed within a quarter inch of the torso. Carver nudged it with a finger and it cried once, mechanically and pitifully.
There was something else about it. It was one of those anatomically correct dolls, and a long nail had been inserted in its vagina.
Carver backed away, leaving the doll as he’d found it, and moved to examine the rest of the cottage, bracing himself for what he might encounter.
He didn’t find the doll’s human counterpart, as he’d feared. He was the only human alive or otherwise in the place.
Now that his fear had left him, he realized it was hot in the cottage; none of the window units was running. He went back into the bedroom and examined the closet. Half a dozen simple but expensive dresses were draped on hangers. The dresser drawers contained panties, bras, folded blouses. There was a pair of well-worn Reebok jogging shoes in a corner near the dresser, white sweat socks balled nearby on the carpet.
He checked the bathroom next. The tub and walls of the shower stall were damp, and there was a mushy bar of soap near the drain. A turquoise towel on a brass rack was damp. A one-piece black swimming suit tied by its straps to another towel rack was dry. On the tub’s edge was a green plastic bottle of shampoo without a cap.
When Carver opened the vanity drawers, he found an electric hair drier and bottles of makeup and nail polish, an emery board, a large red comb, and an unopened box of tampons. On the washbasin was a clear glass tumbler containing a red toothbrush and a tube of Colgate toothpaste. He ran a finger across the toothbrush’s bristles and found they were soft and damp. He sniffed them and smelled toothpaste.
He went to the phone he’d noticed in the cottage’s main room. It was a gimmick one that looked like a tennis shoe, complete with untied laces. He picked it up and pressed the heel to his ear. After Information gave him the number of Burnair and Crosley, he called it and asked to speak with Maggie Rourke.
He hadn’t really expected her to be there and was slightly surprised when he was put on hold. The Muzak was Mozart. Class. How could anyone lose money at a place that played Mozart?
“I thought you were taking time off work,” he said, when Maggie had come to the phone and abruptly stopped Mozart so commerce might commence.
She thought he might be a client. Carver told her he wasn’t interested in commerce.
“Who is this?” Her voice had an edge to it. Fear?
“Fred Carver. Remember? We talked yesterday about Donna and Mark Winship. That’s when you told me you were taking your vacation time.”
“I remember. I changed my mind about using my vacation days. The solitude at the cottage was getting on my nerves, making me feel things more deeply. Things I didn’t want to feel.”
“What about the shooting?”
“Shooting?”
“Beni Ho, the Oriental man I asked you about yesterday, needed to be shot.”
After a static-filled pause, she said, “That’s a curious way to phrase it.”
“He’s a curious kind of guy.”
“So are you. Who shot him?”
“I did,” Carver said. “Outside your cottage. But only in the leg.”
“I think I should call the police.”
“I’ve already been to see them.”
“What was this Ho person doing at the cottage? Did he follow you there?”
“Seems so.”
“Why did you call me, Mr. Carver?”
That was a tough one. He wasn’t exactly sure of the answer. “I wondered if anyone had told you about the shooting. You were sunbathing down on the beach and didn’t hear it over the sound of the surf, and Ho and I both drove away afterward.”
“If he could drive, you must not have hurt him very bad.”
“Bad enough, only he was even badder. Didn’t you notice the blood on the ground near where you park your car?”
“I noticed it. I assumed a cat or dog had caught and killed a small animal, maybe a squirrel. There are a lot of squirrels around there.”
Carver considered asking about the dismembered doll on her bed, but she wouldn’t like the idea of his nosing around inside the cottage. He said, “I think you and I should talk some more.”
“I don’t see why.”
“A lot about the Winships is still up in the air.”
“Since they’re both dead, I don’t understand why it should have to come down.”
“Maybe I could explain.”
She muffled the phone and said something indecipherable to someone in the office. Or maybe she was putting on the busy act. No more time for Carver. “Let me think about it,” she said into the phone. “Call me some other time.”
He settled for that and hung up the shoe that played Mozart.
He was parked in the Olds across the street from Burnair and Crosley at noon, near the park where he’d spoken with Beverly Denton. There was a chance Maggie would cross the street to have lunch with the squirrels and pigeons, or walk or drive to a restaurant where Carver could follow.
He raised the car’s canvas top for what shade it provided and sat in the heat and suffered, waiting and watching the building.
She didn’t emerge from the tower of reflecting planes until after two o’clock. By then the back of Carver’s shirt and the seat of his pants were molded by perspiration to the Olds’s vinyl upholstery. He wondered from time to time what it would be like to ply his trade in Minneapolis.
Maggie looked crisply businesslike and stylish in a pale blue skirt and blazer, a white blouse, and blue high heels. A black leather purse was slung by a strap across her shoulder. Gripped in her right hand and swinging at her side was a flat brown attaché case.
She strolled down to the corner, drawing men’s admiring glances, then crossed the street and walked toward where he was parked. Her skirt clung to her thighs with each step, making it difficult for Carver to avert his gaze. Never had he been more appreciative of static cling.
She showed no inclination to enter the park. He was afraid she was going to approach the Olds, but instead she stopped and appeared to get into a car that was parked out of sight in front of a van half a dozen spaces away. Carver sat up straight and started the Olds’s engine. Ahead of him, a shimmering haze of exhaust fumes drifted from in front of the van.
Seconds later, Maggie’s black Stanza with the rose on its antenna pulled away from the curb to join the bright flow of traffic on Atlantic Drive, and Carver followed.
17
MAGGIE ROURKE DROVE north on Atlantic, then turned west on Gull, all the time sitting stiffly behind the wheel and seemingly staring straight ahead. She drove fast but not recklessly, and with a disdain for stop signs that had to garner her several moving violations per year. Maybe she knew somebody with more clout than ethics, so she didn’t worry about traffic tickets. Maybe she knew McGregor.
She’d mentioned the cottage where she’d been staying belonged to someone else. Carver thought she might drive to her own address in Del Moray, but she was headed in another direction. Gull Avenue ran straight west away from the ocean, into the poorer part of town.
In a declining neighborhood near the Cuban section, Maggie pulled the Stanza to the curb lane and parked in the middle
of the block.
It was a block lined with small shops, many of them bankrupt and boarded. Among those still in business were a tiny pharmacy whose door and windows were protected by heavy mesh curtains that could be lowered and locked at night, an occult bookstore, a barbershop that looked as if it might feature dog-eared back issues of Hustler, a plumbing supply shop, a tattoo parlor, and a lounge whose red neon sign, drab in daylight, proclaimed it to be S ELLIE’S.
Carver was surprised. This wasn’t what he’d expected when classy and upscale Maggie had driven away from her well-paying job at Burnair and Crosley.
He was surprised again when she climbed from the Stanza, keeping her knees modestly together as the skirt of her business suit worked itself up, and after carefully locking her car, walked into S ELLIE’S.
Carver sat in the Olds and studied the place. It looked as if it occupied the entire ground floor of an aged four-story brick building. Curtains and yellowed shades indicated that there might be seedy apartments on the top three floors. Probably the lounge drew business from the warehouses of several small trucking companies Carver had noticed three or four blocks to the east. Even as he pondered this, two men in work clothes strolled down the street from that direction, talking animatedly with each other in what seemed to be a good-natured argument. One was tall and blond and was carrying a black lunchbox. The other was shorter and muscular and appeared to be Hispanic. They also entered S ELLIE’S.
After deciding the lounge was probably fairly large inside and he might be able to enter without being noticed by Maggie, Carver got out of the Olds. He didn’t lock the door on the driver’s side. That way if the Olds was stolen the thief might not slash the canvas top to gain access. That could prove expensive, if Carver got the car back. The minimal insurance he had wouldn’t cover it. He crossed the street and saw the darkened outline of the missing letter on the neon sign, making it SHELLIE’S.
