Kiss

by John Lutz

  “Hey, I’d tell you what I know,” Kearny said, “only I don’t really know anything. Just got my suspicions. Like Sam.”

  “Suspicions of what?”

  Kearny shook his head in frustration. “Hell, I ain’t even sure! You believe that? Well, it’s true. I don’t know any more than Sam did.”

  “Okay,” Carver said. “Do me a favor and don’t tell anyone why I was here.”

  “You got it,” Kearny said. “Last thing I want is for Nurse Rule to learn I was jawin’ with a cop.”

  “Who’s Nurse Rule?”

  “Head nurse here. Damn near runs the whole place. Sam didn’t like her.”

  “You don’t either, I guess.”

  Kearny’s features hardened into a seamed mask; his eyes looked inward and back along the years that had brought him to where he was, the people he’d known. “Not many here’d say they like Nurse Rule.”

  “Mind if I come back to talk to you again?” Carver said. “Nobody’d be suspicious. I told them at the desk I was an old friend of Sam’s.”

  “Hey, don’t you be seen talking too much to Birdie!” Kearny said in a hasty, hoarse whisper. “That little thing don’t deserve no trouble. She’s got no idea what goes on around here.”

  “Nobody seems to,” Carver said. This wasn’t going according to his script. The deceased’s best friend was supposed to help try to avenge his death, if something really was wrong at Sunhaven.

  He tightened his grip on the hard walnut crook of his cane and angled toward the door.

  “You can’t blame an old man for being afraid, Carver.” Kearny’s voice was rising again. “You can’t.”

  “I don’t,” Carver said, and went out.

  As he was passing through the lobby, the old woman tied in her rocker with the yellow sheet stared up at him with vague, moist eyes and said, “In ’thirty-two I was elected homecoming queen at Tulane University and my sister Dolly got so jealous she slit both her wrists. Arm flopped outta the bathtub and bled under the door, or Daddy’d never have found her in time to save her. Lord, that was some day! You believe that?”

  “Sure,” Carver said.

  “Well, none of it’s true.” The old woman turned withered hands palms up and feebly extended her own scarred wrists.

  Carver limped faster and pushed through the tinted glass door into the glare and crushing heat outside.

  Sunhaven was a lot like the rest of the world, he decided. Uninhabitable.

  A walk through there did wonders for the mood.

  4

  EDWINA WAS STILL OUT trying to match buyer with condo. Carver got a can of Budweiser out of the refrigerator, popped the tab, and sat at the oak table in the kitchen. He stared out the window at the gulls doing aerobatics over the glittering sea and wondered if they somehow sensed how free they were. Free of a foreseeable future.

  After a while he took a long, cold swallow of beer that made the back of his throat ache. Edwina had phones all over the house; she didn’t want to miss a potential deal because it took her an extra few seconds to answer a call. Carver dragged the one on the kitchen table over to him. It was a functional-looking gray model with oversized buttons. It remembered the last number called; it kept forty numbers in its permanent memory and would reach any of them automatically at the touch of a button; it chirped or rang or buzzed or whistled, however you set the controls. Its taped voice warned you if you punched out too many or too few digits in the number you were trying to code in. It would call someone you didn’t like and give them a shock over the line and then laugh at them. High tech was wonderful. Carver used the phone for the simple task of calling Desoto. It made short work of that.

  “Been to Sunhaven?” Desoto asked immediately.

  “Just got back,” Carver said. “I talked to Kearny Williams.”

  “He’s a sharper old guy than they give him credit for around there,” Desoto said. “What’s he think?”

  “He thinks what your uncle thought.”

  “And you, amigo? What do you think?”

  “That it’s too early even to make guesses.”

  “Ah, you called to tell me you have nothing to tell me.”

  “Not exactly. I called to ask. I need a rundown on some of the people out at Sunhaven. A Nurse Rule—don’t know her first name. She’s the head nurse there. And the receptionist, young girl name of Birdie Reeves.”

  “Don’t forget Dr. Lee Macklin.”

  “Who’s that?” Carver asked.

  “Sunhaven’s chief administrator.”

  “The doctor who signed Sam Cusanelli’s death certificate?”

  “No,” Desoto said. “A young staff doctor named Pauly signed it”

  Carver looked out at the clouds scudding eastward, away from him, over the wide ocean. “I get the impression you might already have used the resources of the law to check on some of these people.”

  “Only Macklin and Pauly,” Desoto said.

  “And you came up with?”

  “Nothing surprising. Macklin has the sort of background you’d expect. Administrator of a nursing home in Chattanooga before coming here with glowing recommendations. Married. No kids. Pauly, first name Dan, is a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor and earned his medical degree at Washington University in Saint Louis. Did a general medicine internship in Miami, practiced there for a while at a medical clinic, and two years ago opened his own practice in Del Moray. He has a contract with Sunhaven and calls on patients there daily.”

  “It all sounds okay,” Carver said. “Nobody with an arrest record or a mail-order medical degree.”

  “Sounds okay far as it goes. But I don’t have all the answers yet. I’ll feed the names you just gave me into the wonderful world of the computer and see what happens. Shouldn’t take long. You be around wherever you are for an hour or so, I’ll call you back. You home?”

  “Yeah,” Carver said. It still felt odd to realize he, and others, now thought of Edwina’s house as his “home.” Carver’s official home, a ramshackle cottage on the beach twenty miles north, was where he’d lived until he became involved with Edwina. He still slept there occasionally, when he had business in that direction and it was convenient, but less often every month. “I’ll be here till you call.”

  “Get back to you,” Desoto said, and hung up.

  Carver replaced the receiver, shoved the kitchen phone back to its customary place near the wall, and downed the rest of his beer. It was already going flat and warm.

  He’d limped over to the refrigerator and was about to draw out another can when he heard the diminishing snarl of Edwina’s Mercedes as she downshifted to make the turn into the driveway. Then the faint swishing of tires on the hot concrete, soft against hard.

  A car door slammed solidly out near the side of the house. She hadn’t parked in the garage; she was going out again soon.

  Carver decided to forget the second beer. He gingerly shoved the refrigerator door shut with his cane, careful not to dent or scratch its gleaming white surface.

  “Too early to drink,” Edwina said. She’d seen his car parked in the shade alongside the garage and knew he was in the house. And when she’d entered the kitchen she immediately saw the opened beer can on the table.

  “Imagine me a thousand miles east,” Carver said. “It’s later there.”

  “Wetter, too,” Edwina said. “Unless you want me to imagine you on an island.”

  Subject-changing time. “Show the condo?”

  She put down her purse next to the Budweiser can and walked over to the sink. “Looks like I’ve got a contract. I’m supposed to meet the buyer at Quill this afternoon and write it up officially.” Quill Realty was her employer and the beneficiary of her uncommon determination. “It’s a close enough offer I think it’ll be accepted without a counter.”

  “Congratulations,” Carver said.

  “Not yet. Maybe this afternoon. How’d things go at Sunhaven?”

  “It’s a depressing place.”

  “It mi
ght not be that way from the inside.”

  “Oh, it is,” Carver assured her, “despite the cheery decor.”

  “I didn’t mean inside the building,” Edwina said. “I meant inside the heads of the residents. Your outlook and your expectations change when you get old. The things that make you content are different from when you were young.”

  “I’ve noticed that already,” Carver told her. When he knew she was watching he ran his gaze down her body, to the elegant swell of calf and curve of ankle beneath the severely tailored blue suit skirt. “Then, too, there are things that stay pretty much the same.”

  “I only came home for a moment to get my listing book,” she told him.

  “So you say.”

  She gave him a grin he recognized, a sudden flash of wickedness across her strong, serious features. Her gray eyes were direct and challenging. “It’s someplace in the bedroom. Want to come help me find it?”

  That had been the idea. But suddenly Carver realized he didn’t really feel like going into the bedroom with Edwina. He was still thinking about the old woman in the rocking chair. About all the misdirection in his world. Well, none of it’s true. Not much about Sunhaven was true, he suspected. The smiles, the soothing designer “up” colors, the lulling sense of bureaucratic routine. Something about the place . . .

  “Fred?”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  His abrupt change of mood puzzled her.

  “I think I’ll take time out for a drink myself,” she said, stalking to the refrigerator in her high heels. She was of average height but appeared taller. She had a marvelous walk. “You want another beer?”

  “No thanks.”

  She gazed into the refrigerator for a while, then poured lemonade into an on-the-rocks glass. She never drank alcohol when she was working, so she didn’t add gin, as was sometimes her practice. She didn’t even bother adding ice.

  After closing the refrigerator door, she stood where she was and downed half the lemonade, as if she’d been parched and hadn’t known it until she’d touched the glass to her lips.

  “You don’t realize what it means to grow old until you visit someplace like Sunhaven,” Carver said.

  Down went the rest of the lemonade. The tendons in her throat worked beneath the smooth flesh as she swallowed. “Tell me about it. Cheer me up.”

  Carver smiled. “Sorry, didn’t mean to be glum. But you go to an old-folks’ home, the experience stays with you for a while.”

  “Retirement home,” Edwina corrected. She put the glass down on the sink counter.

  “Well, that’s the most favorable if not the most accurate thing this one could be called,” Carver said. “You know how voodoo works?”

  “I think so. Someone you believe in tells you you’re cursed and going to die. So you accept it and slowly kill yourself from the inside.”

  “That’s how it seems to be at Sunhaven. The residents are already chalked up, crossed out of life, and it’s only a matter of time before breathing stops and it’s official. Death with a capital D, looking for a place to lie down.”

  “Not everyone’s relatives think of them as already dead when they get past seventy,” Edwina assured him.

  “But too many do,” Carver said. “Too many give them up to time because they know time always wins.”

  “ ’Scuse me,” Edwina said. She left the kitchen and returned a minute later carrying the listing book she’d gotten from the bedroom. “I don’t think I want to hang around here while you’re in this melancholy mood.”

  Carver smiled at her. He knew he was too cynical; he was trying to change that in himself. A lot had happened to him in the past three years. His divorce, the maimed knee and his new occupation, the death of his eight-year-old son. And on the plus side, Edwina. “I don’t blame you for leaving,” he told her. “I’m sorry. Maybe I’m not the right man for this case.”

  “You’re not,” she said, “but you’re the only man. Desoto’s your friend and he trusts you.” She walked over to Carver and kissed him on the mouth. She tasted like lemonade.

  “See you tonight,” she said, and turned and swayed out of the kitchen.

  He heard the side door open and close, and he waited for the sound of her car starting.

  Instead, the side door opened and closed again, and someone walked across the carpet toward the kitchen.

  Something cold moved through Carver, like the ghost of ancient premonition. Something beyond thought.

  Edwina was in the doorway. She was frowning.

  Carver set the tip of his cane and limped toward her.

  “A car coasted down the driveway as I left the house,” she said.

  He stopped and stood near her. Why had what she’d seen upset her?

  “Someone turning around,” he suggested.

  “No, it was far up in the driveway, near the house.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Big? Small? What color?”

  “It was a fairly large car. White. There was only the driver in it. A man. I only saw him for a moment, from the back, so I couldn’t say what he looked like.”

  “Could be someone drove up here to see you, then changed his mind,” Carver said.

  “It’s possible. Only there was something . . . furtive about the way he drove away. The car was just rolling down the driveway, already turned around and pointing that way. As if he’d backed up to where he’d been parked. I’m sure the engine was off.”

  Carver said, “I wouldn’t worry about it. Just one of those things that happen without apparent reason. But if we knew more we’d understand why. Might be a number of explanations. Someone was coming to see you—or me—lost his nerve, and didn’t want us to know he’d been here.”

  Edwina clutched her purse close to her body, as if she’d heard pickpockets were all around her. “Doesn’t that strike you as a bit peculiar?”

  “Sure. It’s a peculiar world. Maybe your condo customer wanted to see how the saleslady lived. Maybe somebody at the office has a crush on you. You know how beautiful women attract this sorta thing.”

  Edwina didn’t seem soothed by that line of reasoning.

  He kissed her this time. Gently. On the forehead. “It’s okay,” he told her.

  “Has to be, I guess.”

  She pushed a dubious smile his way and left the house again.

  He listened closely. This time she got in the Mercedes and drove away. He followed the wavering sound of the car’s engine until she’d turned out of the driveway and accelerated.

  Edwina’s house wasn’t visible from the coast highway. Someone who’d followed him here from Sunhaven might have wanted to get a look at what was at the other end of the long, winding drive Carver had turned onto. Seeing Edwina steer her car into the driveway shortly afterward might have piqued his curiosity and provoked action. Contemplating a quick getaway, the watcher might indeed have turned his car around and backed up the drive toward the house, then parked near enough for observation but far enough away so the sound of the engine wouldn’t reach whoever was inside.

  A pro would do it that way. That concerned Carver.

  The phone jangled, startling him.

  Probably Desoto.

  5

  BUT THE CALLER WASN’T Desoto; it was Alice Hargrove, a real-estate agent from Quill, trying to get in touch with Edwina. Carver had met Alice a few times, the first a long time ago when he’d pretended to be a customer so he could talk to her about Edwina’s former lover Willis Davis. Willis was dead now, which was a condition he deserved.

  Carver told Alice she’d just missed Edwina, made some polite and inane small talk, and hung up. He hated small talk.

  A few hours later, he was dozing on the sofa with his shoes off when the phone brought him quickly awake. In his stocking feet, without his cane, he balanced himself with a palm on the sofa arm and lunged the few feet to where the ringing phone sat on an end table. Half asleep, he’d momentarily forgotten he
was crippled.

  This time the caller was Desoto. Carver could hear Latin music pulsing softly from the portable radio the lieutenant kept on the windowsill behind his desk. A sad guitar backing a woman’s melodic lament. Love was full of drama on Desoto’s station.

  “Nurse Rule is Nora Rule,” Desoto said. He told Carver her address in Del Moray. “She’s been working at Sunhaven three years. Before that she worked at a medical clinic in Miami.”

  “Wait a minute,” Carver said. “Not—”

  “Not the same clinic where Dr. Pauly practiced,” Desoto interrupted. He began to read directly, apparently from his computer printout. Cop voice, cop talk. “Single female Caucasian, brown and blue, thirty-seven, five-feet-six, a hundred fifty pounds, born Camden, New Jersey. Father and mother deceased since she was twelve. They died in an auto accident.”

  “How can you know so much about her?” Carver asked.

  “Told you, amigo, computers.”

  “Computers shit,” Carver said.

  “Okay, so she was in the military. They got records on her. The army. She was a sergeant. That’s where she learned nursing. Got out in ’seventy-six and furthered her education, got a job, wound up with a better job at Sunhaven. The American way, to be upwardly mobile.”

  “What about the others?” Carver asked.

  “Ah, there we weren’t so lucky, my friend. Kearny Williams seems to be what he says he is: a retired over-the-road trucker from New Orleans. Ask me, everything about Kearny sets right. Nothing more pertinent on the doctors Pauly or Macklin. And nothing at all on Birdie Reeves.”

  Carver wasn’t surprised about Birdie. The check did reveal she’d never been arrested. Someone that young, if they hadn’t been in the military or been fingerprinted by the law or worked for the government, had nothing on them in the data banks that fed law-agency computers.

  “Got any idea what her real first name is?” Desoto asked. “Surely can’t be Birdie.”

  “Wouldn’t think so,” Carver said. “I’ll find out.”

  Desoto read in his police lieutenant’s monotone the addresses of the principal staff at Sunhaven. Then he said, “What now?”