Kiss

by John Lutz

  “Sure,” Carver said. Throw McGregor for a loop with the truth.

  McGregor didn’t act thrown. He picked almost daintily at the gum line of his front teeth with a little finger, keeping his head bowed so he wouldn’t bump it on the car’s sloping roof. “Then I guess you know about the death out there last night.”

  Something cold moved in Carver. He was tired of dealing with McGregor’s selfish, twisted attitude. His callow disregard for people he couldn’t use. Sharks had more compassion.

  “Who died?” Carver asked simply.

  “Old fucker name of Williams. Kearny Williams. Girl out there, little cunt behind the reception desk, said you was a friend of his. Came to see him.”

  “How’d he die?”

  “Oh, some sort of stroke or attack.”

  “What sort?” Carver asked levelly.

  “Aortal aneurysm, the doctor said it was. Fibrulation caused a ruptured wall of the main artery leaving the heart. Heart wore out, is what it all means. Fucking cardiac arrest.”

  “Did Williams have a history of heart problems?”

  “Hey, he’s your friend; you tell me. You say you knew him well enough to go out there and see him. Old Kearny ever mention a bum ticker?”

  “No,” Carver said. “There gonna be an autopsy?”

  “ ’Course not. Law don’t provide. Natural death. Nonviolent. Not at all unexpected, according to the doctor. How come you figure there should be an autopsy? Think the medical examiner’s got time instead of internal organs on his hands?”

  “What if the family requested an autopsy?” Carver asked.

  “That’d be different. Thing is, they was asked if they wanted to have the dear departed laid open and looked into. Talked to them myself just this morning by phone. They said no. Said Kearny Williams’s been living on borrowed time the last five years ’cause of his bad heart. Said let the poor old bastard rest in peace. Not them words exactly.”

  “I bet they felt better after you talked to them.”

  “Cheering up mourners ain’t my job. Protecting the dumb-ass public is. Speaking of which, have you noticed Raffy Ortiz hasn’t tried to crush your windpipe or peel back your fingernails lately?”

  “I owe you for that benign neglect?”

  “Not exactly. But since you and him are, in my estimation, linked in some way possibly illegal, I had him followed the past couple days. He took a short trip. Flew up to New Orleans early yesterday and got back last night. Guess he had more important things to do than bounce you around.”

  “Where’d he go in New Orleans?”

  “That I don’t know. I contacted the New Orleans police and they sent someone to fall in behind him, but they weren’t even out of the airport before Raffy’d slipped away.” McGregor paused for a moment and ducked his head for a better angle to peer out the windshield at a pelican winging past over the ocean. The morning sun was striking sparks off the water, making it hard to stare in that direction. Still squinting at the pelican, McGregor said, “You got any idea why your rough playmate would up and fly to New Orleans?”

  “It’s a big city,” Carver said. “Lots of reasons to go there.”

  “Sure. You can listen to hot jazz, or poke a southern belle, or dine in fine fashion. But hell, you can do all them things right here in Florida and have some fresh-squeezed orange juice before and after.”

  “Maybe Raffy likes Cajun cooking,” Carver suggested.

  “Maybe this is no time for you to be a smart-ass.”

  Carver said, “I don’t know why Raffy went to New Orleans.”

  “Well, you do know he’s back. I just told you. It oughta give you something to think about. He’s a regular wrecking machine. Into martial arts. Knows karate, kung-fu, all that slant stuff that makes people dangerous even if they ain’t natural killers from the get-go. Which, in fact, he is.” McGregor scooted around to face Carver directly. The sickening odor of cologne and stale perspiration was almost overpowering in the stifling car. “Another thing I want you to think about is our last conversation. Anything you find out, I get to learn next and in a hurry. Understand?”

  “Yeah. But will you be able to retain it?”

  McGregor faced forward and folded his long arms across his chest. “Out, assface. Conversation’s over. Go in the house and send my man back out here. I was you, I’d get limping. He’s got a way with the ladies. And you know how some of ’em drop their drawers soon as they see a uniform.”

  “There’s a special place in hell for you,” Carver said. “It’s just like here on earth only it never ends.”

  “Hey, you think I’m unhappy?”

  “You gotta be miserable being you. Anybody would be.”

  McGregor turned and gave Carver his leering, gap-toothed grin. “You got it wrong. I’m a contented man. I know what I am, and I know the truth about things. Got no illusions. You’re just like me, Carver, only you got illusions. You put yourself on. Sorta guy makes me wanna puke. People are only out for themselves, and that includes the two of us. It’s a shit world. I see it and you don’t. I roll in it and even kinda enjoy it, and you can’t. Your hard luck.”

  Carver suddenly had to get away from McGregor, from the sight and sound and corrupt smell of him. He flung open the cruiser’s door, swiveled on the seat, and planted his cane on the gravel driveway.

  “People are all alike,” McGregor said. “Life teaches you that. Grinds it into you. Ask your feeble friends out at Sunhaven; they been around awhile and they’ll tell you. A shit world, all right. That’s the reason most of ’em are actually looking forward to dying even though they’re scared to piss in their pants.”

  “Jesus!” Carver said. He straightened up out of the car.

  “Him? He was invented for fuckheads like you.”

  Carver slammed the door and limped toward the house.

  McGregor was some way to start the day.

  16

  “WHAT’S MCGREGOR DOING in Del Moray?” Edwina asked when the cruiser had driven away. She was standing at the sink, rinsing the uniform’s coffee cup. Her own cup was still on the table half full, steam rising from it like an unformed thought.

  Carver told her. Then he told her where he was on the Sunhaven case, and the reason for McGregor’s visit.

  “I loathe that man,” Edwina said, not for the first time.

  “Most everyone does. He prefers it that way. As long, as everybody’s his enemy, he can feel justified doing anything to anyone. A foolproof system.”

  Edwina nodded. She understood. Larry, maybe. Or perhaps she was thinking about herself during the first year after her divorce, when she was fighting to establish her own identity and her territory in life. That was when she’d made big mistakes, and then made things right again and became for the first time the real Edwina. It hadn’t been an easy passage.

  After breakfast out on the veranda, Carver phoned Sunhaven and asked Birdie if Dr. Pauly was there. It was Dr. Pauly’s day off, Birdie informed him. No, the doctor didn’t have any practice other than at Sunhaven and he’d probably be at home.

  “Not on the golf course?” Carver asked.

  “Dr. Pauly’s not the golf type,” Birdie said.

  “What’s he usually do on his days off?”

  “I dunno, Mr. Carver. Never heard him talk about it. But I’m not really around him that much; he’s busy when he makes his rounds. Says ‘hi’ and ‘bye’ to me, is all. But he’s a nice man. Always smiles as he hurries on past the reception desk. Now and then gives me a look when a resident does something really crazy, like only me and him understand what’s going on. Stuff like that.”

  “Birdie—”

  “Gotta hang up. Sorry.” The last in a whisper.

  Click . . . buzz.

  Someone must have been approaching her desk. Birdie didn’t want anyone at Sunhaven to know who was on the other end of the connection. Instincts of a survivor.

  Carver had a second cup of coffee, kissed Edwina, and then made his way to the garage, wh
ere the Olds was parked next to her Mercedes; a hulking heavyweight has-been next to a trim young middleweight.

  As he drove from the shadowed garage into the glaring morning, he glanced over at Edwina sitting gracefully at the outdoor table, holding her coffee cup poised while her hair caught the sun and her silk gown flowed with the currents of the breeze. Beauty crystallized in memory.

  For one instant, he felt sorry for McGregor.

  The wooden flower boxes beneath the windows of Dr. Pauly’s Hansel-and-Gretel house were dripping darkly and the geraniums stood at glistening attention. Someone had recently watered the plants. Overwatered them.

  When Dr. Pauly answered Carver’s knock, he was wearing a pair of those leather sandals with recycled tire-tread soles, faded blue jeans cut off just above his knees, and a white T-shirt with “WHY ME?” printed across the chest in black letters. Not the kind of guy you’d want to see stroll into the operating room as you drifted off under an anesthetic, but on the other hand, it was his day off.

  Carver identified himself.

  Dr. Pauly smiled. “I know who you are. You’ve been out at Sunhaven a few times. Caused something of a stir.” He was a fortyish man with dark hair that had receded. There was no way to know how far, because it was combed straight down onto his forehead in sparse bangs, Roman emperor style. His features were sharp but pleasant, with gray eyes deep-set and friendly beneath symmetrical bushy black brows. His chin was as sharply pointed as his nose; when he got very old, like his patients at Sunhaven, chin and nose would strive to meet.

  “Stir?” Carver said.

  “Maybe that’s an exaggeration,” Dr. Pauly said. “C’mon in where it’s cool.” He stepped back to let Carver move inside.

  The tiny house’s living room was neat now, but through an open door Carver could see into a bedroom strewn with clothes and newspapers. A corner of a bed with tangled sheets was visible. There was a large wicker laundry basket heaped with wrinkled clothes next to it, with a wadded pair of gray sweat-socks on top as if for dour decoration. In the doorway to the kitchen stood an upright vacuum cleaner and a maze of spiraled hose and attachments. A faint pine disinfectant scent hung in the air, probably from some sort of cleaner or floor wax. Apparently Dr. Pauly cleaned house on his day off, working front to back.

  Carver sat down on a small brown sofa and propped his cane against his leg. Dr. Pauly stood smiling with his hands clasped behind his back, at military parade rest, and said, “Rumor has it you think something’s wrong out at Sunhaven.”

  “Is there something wrong?” Carver asked.

  “Sure.”

  Carver waited, aware he’d edged forward on the sofa. A picture of expectation.

  Should have known better.

  Still smiling, Dr. Pauly said, “But not any more wrong than at any other nursing home, Mr. Carver. Old age can be a trial sometimes, but we try to make it as pleasant as possible. That means ‘merely endurable’ for those in a badly deteriorated condition. Oh, I know how younger people feel walking through a place like Sunhaven. The depression, the sympathy. There’s something personal working there because we all know we’re going to get old ourselves. But believe me, in general the residents are contented. At least as contented as we can make them.”

  “I understand Kearny Williams died last night.”

  Pauly’s bushy dark eyebrows almost knitted together for a moment in a look of surprise and concern. “How’d you know that?”

  “I was told by the authorities. You signed the death certificate.”

  Dr. Pauly nodded, then raised his very expressive eyebrows and said, “You’re not suggesting there was anything suspicious in the way old Kearny Williams died, are you? Good Lord, is that the sort of thing you mean by ‘something wrong at Sun-haven’?”

  “Not suggesting,” Carver said. “He died of heart failure?”

  “Pure and simple, Mr. Carver.” The eyebrows formed a severe V again, this time in obvious frustration, “You’ve got to understand, these people are aged; the human body wears out, develops afflictions.” Did Pauly glance at Carver’s bad leg? “Kearny Williams’s death was anything but unexpected. His medical records will attest to that, even from before he came to Sunhaven.”

  “What do you know about a man named Raphael Ortiz?” Carver asked.

  Dr. Pauly brought his hands around in front of his body, tucked his thumbs in the side pockets of his cutoff jeans, and stood hipshot. It was a defensive posture. He looked more like a street-corner lounger than a doctor. “Mr. Ortiz came to me as a patient in Miami a few years ago.”

  “What was wrong with him?” Carver asked. “Bearing in mind the Hippocratic Oath.”

  “He’d suffered a series of deep cuts.”

  “From a knife fight?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “You must have asked how he’d gotten hurt.”

  “I did. All he’d say was that it was accidental.”

  “Could the wounds have been sustained in a knife fight?”

  “I don’t think I’ll answer that one, Mr. Carver. Mr. Ortiz has seen me since, and he’s still my patient. He was more or less forced to see me the first time; you have to understand, a man like that, he’s suspicious of doctors. Once he went to one, though, he became grateful for the treatment. He developed an excessive idea of my capabilities. I’m the only doctor he’ll see. It’s something of a fixation, actually, and not uncommon in people like Mr. Ortiz.”

  “So if he happens to skin a knuckle on somebody’s teeth, he runs to you for treatment.”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way,” Dr. Pauly said. “But I guess maybe it is that way.”

  “Then you’re aware of his history of trouble with the law in Cuba and then here? What he does to get his money? The kind of man he is?”

  “What Mr. Ortiz does is none of my business. A man comes to me in need of treatment, I’m not going to interrogate him before administering to him. I don’t moralize or sit in judgment before I set broken bones or stop bleeding. That’s not what being a doctor’s all about.”

  “ ’Course not,” Carver said. “But what if he came to you with, say . . . a gunshot wound?”

  “Mr. Ortiz has never asked me to treat a gunshot wound. If he did, I’d be suspicious and notify the police according to law.” He frowned, made a thin, straight line of his mouth, and searched for words, “Mr. Carver, there’s nothing unethical about my treatment of Raphael Ortiz. Nothing unethical happening at Sunhaven, either.”

  “That you know of.”

  “Well, sure. But I think if there were, I would know it. I’m the doctor the patients see most frequently; they trust and confide in me. And I know the rest of the staff quite well. They have their individual characteristics and personal problems, but they’re professionals and damned good at their work.”

  “Including Nurse Rule?”

  “Especially Nurse Rule. So she’s not every man’s idea of the ideal dinner date. She runs Sunhaven’s nurses and attendants with the uncompromising efficiency of a Prussian officer. Is that bad?”

  “Not if the Prussians are on your side.”

  “You’ve met the enemy and it’s not Sunhaven, Mr. Carver. It’s old age. It’s hardened blood vessels and stiff rheumatic joints. And suspicion that’s had enough incubation time in the brain to hatch paranoia. It’s senility. It’s loneliness and constant discomfort.”

  “You talk as if you don’t want to grow old,” Carver said.

  “But I do. What I just described is the dark side; not all residents are that way. For most of them these really are their golden years. We do everything possible to see to it. Their responsibilities are behind them, their families visit them frequently, and Sunhaven relieves them of their anxieties. If they’re in reasonably sound health for their age, they’re happy, Mr. Carver. Happier than they’d be anywhere else, for the most part. I’m not saying some of the residents aren’t leading miserable lives; it happens, and, eventually, to most of them—until death puts an end to it
. That’s the sad reality of the world. But if you think Sunhaven’s hell, drive through the bad side of town, any town, and catch glimpses of the aged who are homeless and in obvious need of attention they aren’t going to receive.”

  Carver thought the doctor had a point.

  Pauly withdrew his thumbs from his pockets. He scratched his chest through the T-shirt. Seemed nervous.

  “They pay you well at Sunhaven?” Carver asked.

  “None of your business, of course, But I feel I’m fairly compensated. Though as you can see, I’m a long way from wealthy.”

  “What do you know about Dr. Macklin?”

  “She’s competent and kind. I enjoy working under her supervision.”

  “Would you say she needs somebody like Nurse Rule to actually run Sunhaven? I mean, an assistant tough enough for the dirty details?”

  Dr. Pauly didn’t know what to do with his hands, so now he slid his fingertips into the jeans pockets and stood erectly with his elbows pointed out. He looked like a space shot ready to be launched. “Oh, I wouldn’t describe it as that kind of arrangement. Dr. Macklin can be quite firm when it’s necessary. Nurse Rule never usurps Dr. Macklin’s authority. I’d say they have a good working relationship.”

  “Are you aware that Nurse Rule went to the police so they’d question me about my talking to Sunhaven residents?”

  “I am,” Dr. Pauly said. “And to be frank, I think she acted needlessly. She’s a bit of a zealot about her job, Mr. Carver. Many managing nurses are. It’s what makes them good at their work, and what sometimes causes problems. At times they tend to overreact. You’ll find at least one Nurse Rule in almost every major medical facility.”

  Dr. Pauly sighed loudly and ran a hand over his face. It was suddenly too warm in the small living room. He walked over and adjusted the thermostat for more air conditioning. There was a soft click, and a low hum from the back of the house. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Carver . . . I’ve been up most of the night and I’m pretty much exhausted.”