by John Lutz
The telephone jangled. Neither of them moved.
It rang again. Twice. Three times. Four.
Persistent.
Women and phones. Edwina touched Carver’s face gently, then stepped aside and lifted the receiver.
She said “yes” three times, hoarsely, then she turned and held out the receiver for Carver. “It’s for you. Desoto.”
Carver twisted his body, took the receiver, and reached out to drop it back in its cradle.
Edwina gripped his wrist, stopping him from hanging up. “He’ll call back,” she said. “Better to talk to him now.” She ran a hand across her stomach, leaving faint scratches from her fingernails. “Maybe it’s not important; get rid of him.”
Carver was staring at the pink tracks on the smooth flesh of her stomach; his heart was racing, his blood roaring like the sea in his veins. He pressed the receiver to his ear and identified himself. Not important, get rid of him.
“Amigo,” Desoto said, with exaggerated geniality. “Feel like looking at more dead bodies?”
Carver made the conversation with Desoto as brief as possible, then clung enthusiastically to life before leaving to look again at death.
CHAPTER 27
“Do you know them?” Desoto asked. “They knew you.” Carver stood beside Desoto and a gum-chewing attendant in the morgue in Orlando. This time it wasn’t so tough. Maybe that was because the spaciousness and business atmosphere of the place made the bodies on the carts, a man and a woman, seem somehow unreal, like wax creations set out for display. Or maybe it was because these were people he hadn’t killed.
“I’m not sure,” Carver said. “They look familiar.”
For an unsettling instant, the two pale, nude cadavers reminded him of himself and Edwina just a few hours ago; he wondered if that accounted for the disturbing sense of familiarity. Every cop knew love had too much to do with death.
The man and woman were both slender, and looked as if they were in their mid-forties when they died. There were cleaned-up contusions on both their foreheads. The woman’s frail body was slightly misshapen, bent, just beneath her pointed breasts. One of the man’s legs obviously had been broken, and his nose was mashed.
Carver breathed in some of the mint-disinfectant scent of the morgue and swallowed. Now this scene was quickly becoming too real for him. Too much death for one day. “How did they die?” he asked.
“Instantly. A one-car accident on Highway 75. They went off the road, down an embankment, and hit a concrete bridge abutment at high speed. There was some heavy vegetation down there and the wreckage wasn’t found until this morning. Time of death is placed as late last night, about when you and Jorge Lujan were trying to teach each other to swim.”
Carver looked away from the bodies, at Desoto. “Is that all that ties this accident with me, the time of death?”
Desoto arched a hand and delicately smoothed his dark hair, almost as if he had a mirror before him. In the presence of the dead, the vain and commonplace gesture was strikingly incongruous. “That, and the woman had your name written on a piece of paper in her attache case. Along with a receipt from the Tumble Inn Motel in Solarville, dated one of the nights you stayed there.”
Recognition rushed at Carver now. “Was the car a black Lincoln?”
Desoto nodded.
Carver looked again at the bodies, tried to reach beyond the impersonality of death and imagine them in life, without their injuries. The man in a three-piece suit, the woman not nude and crushed, but sleek and fully dressed and with a diamond, gimmick wristwatch. People with grand desires and petty grievances and places to go. The executive types he’d seen in the motel restaurant his first night in Solarville. The wealthy tourists.
“I don’t know their names,” he told Desoto, “but I remember them from the motel. They seemed to have money. I pegged them for a rich couple roaming around doing Florida. You know the type: travel as a hobby.”
“They weren’t married,” Desoto said. “Maybe they were sleeping together; people do. He was David Panacho, with a wife and kids in Gainesville, and she was Mildred Kern, single, from Orlando. They were employees of Disney World; the Lincoln was a company car.”
“An exec and his secretary on vacation,” Carver suggested.
“They were both executives. We’re checking now to find out more about them.”
“An accident,” Carver said. “I don’t see how this fits in with me, with Willis Eiler. Or don’t you think it was an accident?”
Desoto shrugged inside his elegant suitcoat. “Who knows for sure about this kind of crash? One car involved, nobody around to see it happen. Someone could have driven them to the edge of the embankment, then sent the car over. Or possibly it was a suicide pact, or suicide and murder. Death by misadventure, amigo. There were no skid marks.”
“Or whoever was driving could have fallen asleep at the wheel and the car went off the road.”
“That’s the hypothesis,” Desoto said. “Whatever’s simplest is most likely. But why would the Kern woman have your name written on a scrap of paper? Nothing else, just your name?”
Carver didn’t answer. He didn’t know. Maybe it all meant nothing. It could be that Desoto was making too much of this. Possibly he’d seen the old movie Out of the Past the night before, the ending where Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer careened to their deaths in a ’46 Chevy.
But he knew Desoto had something else in mind. “You think they were in on the drug deal?” Carver asked.
“It’s not impossible. Burr’s almost convinced of it. He’s looking into their lives right now. Panacho’s wife told him her husband had phoned and had hinted he’d unexpectedly discovered something important. He wouldn’t say what it was about. She said he sounded scared, but that might only be the hindsight of grief. Burr’s on his way to talk to the Disney people: Fearless Fosdick in the Magic Kingdom.”
Desoto nodded to the gum-chomping attendant, who ushered them into the warmer area of the morgue. Carver followed the lieutenant out of the building, onto the hot sidewalk. Deja vu. Carver had had enough of looking at corpses and then going out to stand in the heat. He felt nauseated, chilled despite the sun.
“You okay, amigo?” Desoto asked, staring at him.
Carver nodded. “Yeah, relatively.”
“Not an easy world sometimes.”
“Not easy ever, it seems for some people.”
“Maybe it’s meant to be that way. A test for us.”
“That is a lot of crap perpetuated by the folks who like to wear hair shirts.”
“Oh, probably. You told Edwina Talbot about her Willis, eh?”
“This morning. Just before I drove here.”
Desoto’s features sharpened in concern. “How did the news set with her?”
“I’m not sure yet. It was rough on her at first. She tried not to accept it.”
“But you wouldn’t let her lie to herself. Not anymore. Not you.”
Carver squinted against the lowering sun and stared at Desoto. Sometimes the handsome lieutenant’s perceptiveness surprised him. “That’s how it was,” he said, “and I think she has stopped lying to herself, stopped idolizing Willis. But I’m not sure.”
“You’re going back to her now?”
“Yes,” Carver said. “Then we’re driving to Solarville.”
“Under it all,” Desoto said, “she’s strong. I found that out during her visits about Willis. Someday you’ll be surprised by how strong she is.”
“I hope so,” Carver told him, and left him standing there in the slanted, burning sunlight.
Carver limped across the street and got in the Olds. As he started the engine and pulled away from the curb, he saw Desoto still standing on the sidewalk, thinking. Adding, subtracting, not getting answers, wandering through the obscure and trying to bring it into focus, make sense of it, not having any luck.
Carver knew how he felt. Every turn seemed to lead to more turns; every frustration seemed to beget more of the same. T
he search for Willis Davis had about it a dreamlike quality of quiet madness. Carver felt at times as if he were trying to feel his way through the miasma of nightmares. Then there were times when he seemed to see clearly, but objects on his mind’s horizon simply receded further out of reach as he advanced, eluding him. He wondered how it would be to forget all of this and get a job selling insurance. Or maybe even real estate.
But he only wondered for a moment; he’d never make a salesman. “What other kind of work do you know?” Desoto had asked. Carver knew the answer to that one and had to live with it.
After wending his way out of Orlando and onto the highway, he drove fast back to Del Moray.
CHAPTER 28
Edwina looked put together, in control. She’d brushed her dark hair, put on a blue cotton blouse and a crisp tan skirt. She was wearing blue socks, and the kind of jogging shoes they sew a lightning streak on so they can jack the price up to forty dollars. The outfit made her appear young, interested and interesting. There was an awareness in her calm gray eyes that offset the sadness.
She was holding a drink in her right hand, a whiskey sour in a stemmed glass. As she let him into the house, Carver looked closely at her. She didn’t appear at all sloshed.
“Want one?” she asked.
He said that he did and sat down in the cool living room. Beyond the sheer curtains over the wide window, the still-bright evening continued to simmer. The only intrusion from outside was the whisper of the sea. Everything was neat and in place, clean, as if she’d dusted and straightened the room, the house, while he was gone. A life in order, at least on the surface.
He wondered how she was now, how what had happened played on her mind while he was away. Sometimes there was a delayed reaction to the kind of information he’d thrown at her. Carver felt miserable about what he’d done. Doing the tough but essential tasks in this world exacted a price. Someone once said that sooner or later every man had to shoot his own dog. Carver felt as if he’d been shooting his own dog all his life.
Edwina returned with another whiskey sour, handed it to him, then sat down across from him in a low chair. She said, “Who’s dead?”
“Two people,” Carver said. “Man and a woman. A car accident on Highway 75.”
“How does that concern you?”
“I saw them when I was in Solarville. They were staying at the Tumble Inn.”
“Do they have anything to do with Willis?”
“I’m not sure. My name was written on a slip of paper in the woman’s briefcase. They were both Disney executives. Her name was Mildred Kern; the man was David Panacho.” He watched Edwina’s face as he spoke; she gave no sign that she recognized the names.
“Maybe the Kern woman saw you in Solarville,” Edwina suggested, “found out you were a private detective, and wrote down your name with the intention of hiring you someday. Were the two lovers?”
“Possibly. They appeared as if they might be, but I can’t be sure. And Solarville is the kind of out-of-the-way place two employees of the same company would go for a romantic tryst if they didn’t want corporate gossip to affect their careers.”
“It could be that one or both of them are married,” Edwina said. “You might eventually have been contacted by the woman and asked to follow a spouse, to learn about another affair in order to temper a divorce settlement.”
“Or follow a child or a business associate or a mother or father or find something that was stolen… maybe a black bird. I’ve thought about the possibilities. It’s a futile exercise. The woman is dead, so we’ll probably never know what she was doing with my name written down, what she intended.”
Edwina sipped her drink deliberately, then slowly lowered her glass. He watched her, concerned, wondering. She looked as if she felt fine, as if crush had led to bounce, but you never could tell about people. And he needed to be sure about her. He parted his lips to speak.
“I’m all right,” she said, before he could ask.
He smiled and tapped the cane on the blue carpet. It made no sound.
“Really,” she said, smiling back. “I have wounds, but they’re healing. This is the other world with different, sweeter songs, isn’t it?”
“It can be if that’s what you want.”
“I do want it that way,” she said.
He believed her, but he wasn’t so sure she could bring it off. Not by herself, anyway. He hoped Desoto was right about her surprising him with her strength.
Outside, some sort of bird wheeled close to the window and screamed, as if it wanted in. Like madness circling. Edwina winced at the sound. Carver decided he wanted her with him. He wanted to help her, to protect her, even if she did think she’d made the necessary painful adjustment and had managed some kind of peace with herself. He wished he could be sure about her.
“We’re going back to Solarville,” he said.
“When?”
“Unless you can’t make it, when we’re done with these drinks. We’ll drive by my place so I can get a few things, and we can be in Solarville within a few hours.”
“I can make it,” she said.
She finished her drink and placed the glass on a table by her chair. There was a steady calmness about her now, a sureness of movement and a directness in her eyes. Carver didn’t know if that was good or bad. The ongoing disillusionment she’d suffered since Willis’s disappearance had to have taken a serious toll. He knew it was important to keep her oriented, stable.
She apparently felt the same need for orientation. “You think Willis is in Solarville,” she said. “Why?”
Carver finished his own drink, then he sat back, toying with the damp, cool glass. “Willis pulled out of Sun South early,” he said. “Franks found out about the time-share scheme only because the bank contacted him, and that happened only because Willis drew virtually all the money out of the secret account. Willis had the opportunity to steal even more money from Sun South customers without any real danger of discovery. Which means he probably left when he did because he had enough money to suit his purpose.”
“Which is what?” Edwina asked. The bird made another pass and screamed again, louder, as if it desperately wanted something. Carver wished it would hunt up a worm.
“To make even more money,” he continued. “It has to be a drug deal. And it probably had to be financed by a certain date, which also helps to explain why Willis abruptly pulled out when he had slightly more than the nice round figure of a hundred thousand dollars. The red-penciled area on the map hidden in his apartment is swampland just south of Solarville. And it’s in Solarville that Willis’s old friend and fellow dreamer Sam Cahill is living beyond his means and selling backwater real estate. I think Willis and Cahill are partners who needed the hundred thousand to make a drug buy, possibly to take place when the Malone brothers receive a shipment. It could be that the drugs will be smuggled in by plane and dropped into the red-penciled area of the swamp, then picked up and sold to Willis and Cahill.” Carver stopped handling the glass and set it aside. “Which means that Willis Eiler must be somewhere around Solarville, waiting with Cahill for the deal to be consummated.”
Edwina sat back and seemed to think about what Carver had told her, finding it easier to digest than it would have been the day before, when she hadn’t known that Willis Davis hadn’t really existed, that he was an act, a production, Willis Eiler.
She said, slowly, “There’s something I have to tell you. Something it’s past time to tell.”
“There’s no need for any kind of confession,” Carver said. But he suspected there was a need, in Edwina.
“Because it isn’t required, I want to tell you. I was married for five years to a husband who beat me. Badly. Systematically. It took a broken collarbone and blood transfusions finally to convince me I had to leave Larry.” She laughed softly, deep in her throat, and shook her head. “Sounds dumb. The battered-wife syndrome. Classic, huh?”
“Classic,” Carver agreed, watching her with a neutral expr
ession.
“The trouble was, when I left Larry I found that what he’d done to me went with me. At first I didn’t know what to do. I was terrified being alone. I’d hole up in my apartment; the walls seemed to scream at me. I learned how lonely someone could be. After a while I tried the singles bars. I started going out with men, too many men, looking for a lover who didn’t exist, looking for him in a lot of lovers.”
There was no apology in her voice when she said this. Carver liked that.
“Finally I realized what was happening, how hopeless it was. I quit craving love, sex, men, almost everything. I was repulsed by what I’d become; I thought hard about suicide. A year of analysis helped to pull me out of my depression. And my work helped. I went into real estate as much for therapy as to make a living; that’s why I got so good at it so fast. Still I had problems, with men, sex. I didn’t want to get involved; I was afraid.” She bowed her head slightly, not looking at Carver.
“Then I met Willis,” she said, “just the way I told you, at a time when I thought I might be ready again for one more try at a relationship, my last. And he turned out to be the lover I’d only dreamed existed, the one I’d searched for after playing punching bag for Larry, before my illness. He knew exactly what I needed. He was gentle and compassionate.”
“It was his business to know what you needed,” Carver said softly.
She looked directly up at him. “I know that now; I can face it. When I told you about going up to Willis’s room with him at the sales convention, that was true. But we didn’t make love. I told him about me. Everything. About how the violence and shame had made sex impossible for me with other men. And he understood, held me to him all that night. He was the only man who ever stayed with me without sex. He didn’t demand, didn’t rush things. He had more patience with me than my therapist had shown me during analysis.” She drew a deep breath, then said, “The only time Willis and I made love was the night before he disappeared. That’s how I know it was a good-bye, Carver. It was the only time.”
