Kiss

by John Lutz

  She’d heard the clatter of his cane on the wooden steps. When he reached the third floor she had her door open and was standing waiting for him.

  Linda Redmond was in her late thirties. She’d been pretty once, possibly beautiful. Time had taken care of that, worked on her lean face and frame as it worked on ancient artifacts; it hadn’t left a major mark, but in a myriad of minor ways it had exacted its toll. Her straight blond hair was thinned and lank, her blue eyes faded, her pale cheeks too sunken even for the gauntest of fashion models. Carver wondered if she’d lost most of her molars to disease or violence. She was wearing an untucked white blouse above raggedy cutoff jeans that reminded him of Dr. Pauly’s. But her legs were thinner and better-looking than Pauly’s, even though there were scars around her knobby knees, as if she’d done a lot of kneeling on rough surfaces.

  Slightly unnerved by his appraising stare, she said, “Mr. Carver?”

  He said he was. She smiled. It was a placid, attractive smile. All her teeth were there, but they were badly yellowed. A fine network of lines, like those seen on old folding money, spread around her eyes and the corners of her lips. Carver immediately liked her, felt almost as if he knew her, but he wasn’t sure why.

  She stepped aside to let him pass and then closed the door behind him. She was out in front of him again, moving with loping strides that suggested surprising strength. She had on rubber thongs that flopped softly, loose at the heels but held tight on her feet by toes like talons. “Sit down, please. Get you some tea or coffee?”

  Carver declined the offer of something to drink as he lowered himself into a round, wicker basket chair; he hadn’t seen one of those in years. Now that he’d heard the word coffee he noticed the scent of it, pungent, as if it had been freshly brewed. He crossed his good leg over his bad and laid his cane sideways in his lap, looked around.

  The apartment had bare hardwood floors and was cheaply and sparsely furnished. The windows had Venetian blinds with missing slats and no curtains. There was a bookcase stuffed with paperbacks on one wall. Updike, Bellow, James Baldwin, a Flannery O’Connor short-story collection. One of the windows held a gray box fan that was ticking away and creating a cool breeze through the warm apartment. Stapled to the wall near the window was an unframed museum print of pastel water lilies on a foggy pond, an idealistic rendering of reality. Near the door to the kitchen a bicycle’s front wheel leaned against the wall; the bike chained in the vestibule was Linda Redmond’s.

  She crossed thin arms and stood with her weight on one leg. One of her rubber thongs had slipped half off her foot. “You mentioned Beatrice Reeves on the phone.”

  “Birdie Reeves, actually. That’s what she calls herself now.”

  Linda lowered her chin and fixed a frank and studious blue gaze on Carver. “What’s your interest in Beatrice?”

  “I’m not searching for her,” Carver said truthfully.

  “You said on the phone you were a private investigator. You working for the welfare authorities?”

  “No. Birdie—or Beatrice—is only incidentally involved in what I’m working on.”

  “Then why should I talk to you, Mr. Carver? Why should you want to talk to me?”

  “I know where Birdie is.”

  Linda’s arms came uncrossed and dangled at her sides. Then she sat down on a low, green sofa and absently caressed one bony hand with the other. She knew she had little choice about talking to Carver, if she didn’t want Birdie’s whereabouts revealed. She leaned forward and said, “She all right?”

  “Yeah, I suppose you could say she is. But there might be trouble at the place where she works.”

  “Trouble’s in everybody’s life. Think she’ll come out of it okay?”

  “Possibly unemployed. And the law might delve into her past and find out who she really is.”

  “She’s never had any trouble with the police. That what she’s got now?”

  “No, not the kind you mean. You still a social worker?”

  Linda laughed and tilted her head in a practiced way. Probably a sexy little move long ago. Sunlight glinting off golden locks. Now her lank blond hair swayed without the body or bounce so often mentioned in shampoo commercials. “I haven’t had anything but temporary office work for six months. Laid off because of government funding cutbacks. Instead of me, the taxpayers get another guided missile.”

  “You must have handled a lot of cases, though. Got to know plenty of hard-luck kids. How come you seem to regard Birdie as special?”

  Linda clasped her hands over one of her knees and rocked back. “There is something special about Beatrice, a kind of spirit I didn’t often see in the sad cases I handled. Despite the fact that fate kept shitting on her, she kept fighting. She has intelligence and courage, but at the same time a kind of innocence and vulnerability it seems a sacrilege to have violated. Things were bad for her, and they kept getting worse. Finally she broke and ran, but I can’t blame her.”

  Carver shifted his weight. Wicker creaked. “What about her family?”

  “Her father, Clement Reeves, is dead—which strikes me as justice. He should burn in hell for two eternities for what he did to her. The mother’s a sometime waitress, sometime prostitute out in Waverly. She’s a fulltime boozer.”

  “How about the foster father who molested Birdie?”

  “That bastard? He’d have been tried and convicted if she’d stayed around to testify against him. He and his wife moved out of town not long after Beatrice disappeared. They went to Cincinnati, I think. The prosecuting attorney, with his usual perseverance in such cases, was content to let him leave.”

  “Hard to get a guilty verdict without a victim,” Carver said.

  “People know that and take advantage of it with children. See to it that they’re afraid to testify, or too confused to be believed.” There was a rush of feeling behind the words. It was obvious that Linda loved underdogs and identified with victims.

  Carver said, “Who’d want Birdie back here in Indianapolis?”

  “The state. She’s officially a ward of Indiana and a runaway child. Until she’s eighteen.”

  “That’s a few years away,” Carver said. “What if she turned up at your door?”

  “Well, what if she did?”

  “Ever think about that happening? What you might do?”

  “Yeah, I’ve thought. Look around this place. Look at me. Figure out how much I could help her.” The tendons in Linda’s lean neck worked like cables as she swallowed.

  “And you’d be sheltering a fugitive,” Carver pointed out.

  “I know the law.”

  “Would you break the law for Birdie?”

  “If I thought it’d help her. But it wouldn’t. Don’t you understand, Carver? The other side’s got me. I’m one of the hard-luck cases I used to be able to help.”

  Carver knew she was right. Linda Redmond had enough problems, and little to offer Birdie other than moral support. And there was always the possibility that the authorities would find out she was illegally sheltering Birdie.

  “Where is Beatrice, Mr. Carver?”

  “I’ll tell her you asked, give her your phone number.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Carver stood up out of the basket chair. Creeeak!

  “Everything wrong that can happen to a child,” Linda said, “happened to Beatrice. A man can’t possibly understand what it means when a girl’s father molests her over a period of years. Then, she was supposed to have been granted sanctuary, another molestation. That bastard poured gasoline over her legs and threatened to set her on fire if she didn’t do exactly what he wanted.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Carver said.

  Linda tucked her chin into her scrawny neck again and shook her head, as if shaking off a mood. “She’s had a crappy life. She deserves a break or two.”

  Carver started toward the door, but Linda got up and stood next to him, her fingertips lightly touching his shoulder, “Why’d you come here to talk to m
e about Beatrice?” she asked. “I mean, really.”

  “I see the storm coming. It bothers me what I should do about her.”

  “She has layers and strengths not many people know about. What she’s gone through’s given her that, along with the nightmares.”

  He looked into Linda’s weary, faded eyes. They had no depth, as if they were mere reflections of the crushing world about them.

  “I want to do what’ll turn out all right for her,” he said. “She might be cut from her moorings again, partly because of me. Nowhere’s going to be easy for her. At least in Indianapolis she knows people, you among them. Has some support. I don’t know, should I let her be sent back here?”

  “No, Mr. Carver. Anyplace but here.”

  She turned away from him.

  Carver left her that way, standing and staring out her window at the drab buildings across the street. The woman who’d been traded for a guided missile.

  25

  HE WAS LEANING HARD on the cane, trudging toward his cottage by the sea, his carry-on leather suitcase slung by its shoulder strap and jostling against his hip, when he stopped and stood in the heat, staring. Behind him the ocean pounded like a heartbeat.

  Someone had been digging. Carver could see the edge of what appeared to be a mound of dirt alongside the cottage, toward the back and almost out of sight.

  After depositing the suitcase on the porch, he walked around the side of the cottage to where he’d seen the dirt.

  He stood quietly, looking down. There was a mound of loose, sandy earth heaped next to a freshly dug hole. Stuck in the mound was a new shovel, shiny through the dirt on its blade and with a price sticker still affixed to its wooden handle. The hole was rectangular, about three feet wide, six feet long, and six feet deep. Very neat and symmetrical. Carver knew immediately that it was a grave. Knew who’d dug it, and who was meant to lie in it. If I make up my mind you’re dead, then you’re dead.

  Fear he tried to deny came to life in Carver’s brain. He pushed the cold, quiet scream of it to a corner of his mind and went back around the cottage to the porch and inside.

  He dropped the suitcase just inside the door, turned the air conditioner on high, and thumped with his cane into the kitchen. A clear drinking glass rested upside down on the sink. He rinsed it and filled it with cold tap water, then hurriedly drank it empty. He filled the glass again and drank deeply from it. As if he were trying to drown something within himself. Then he splashed the rest of the water down the drain, replaced the glass too hard, upside down again, with a loud clink!, and pushed himself away from his leaning position on the sink.

  Carver limped into the main room and sat down next to the phone. He didn’t think, didn’t move, until the window unit had stirred enough stale air to make it reasonably cool in the cottage.

  Then he phoned Dr. Lee Macklin and made an appointment to see her late that afternoon at Sunhaven.

  Dr. Macklin saw Carver not in her office but in her home on Sunhaven’s grounds. It was a flat-roofed extension of one of the garish Plexiglas cubes, out of sight from the highway. Built of cedar, it was rather plain from the outside but opened up inside into spacious and surprisingly luxurious quarters. There was a living room, furnished modern with a lot of polished steel and glass, carpeted in dove gray and containing matching charcoal gray sofa sections in a sunken area—what used to be called a conversation pit. A white concert-grand piano looked right at home near the powder blue drapes that lined the back windows. The lid was down on the piano, and there was a vase of fresh-cut flowers on it. White and yellow roses.

  Beyond the living room was a slightly raised level bordered by a natural wood railing. Several doors led from that area to what Carver assumed was the kitchen, dining room, and bedrooms. In one corner of the vast living room there was actually a small, round pond bordered by mosaic tile and groupings of lush potted tropical plants. Light streaming in through the wide front windows was transformed by the pond into a gently wavering luminescence that played over the room and was oddly restful. Oil paintings lined the walls, mostly psychedelic seascapes, with oversized suns rising or setting for color. The ocean was there in all its moods, from placid to stormy, but in no particular order. And looking like something dreamed by Van Gogh after a bout with a bottle.

  Dr. Macklin stepped down ahead of Carver into the sunken area of the living room and motioned elegantly for him to have a seat on one of the sofa sections that were arranged more or less in a square around a low, glass-topped table with chromed legs. She was out of her work mode, apparently, wearing a graceful blue silk dress. Her long dark hair was combed back sleekly and then slung forward over her right shoulder, its feathery edges resting lightly just above her breast. She was slender and beautiful, with cover-girl features and complexion. Her dark eyes were made up skillfully to appear even larger than they were.

  Yet at the same time there was a businesslike air about her, a crispness and economy of movement that suggested authority, and that somehow reminded Carver of Edwina. A woman of contrasts, obviously.

  As she sat down opposite Carver, a man about sixty stepped through one of the doors beyond the wood railing and smiled at them both. He was short and had a stomach paunch, and wore baggy khaki slacks and a wrinkled but expensive yellow cotton shirt with flaps on the pockets and with epaulettes. A pair of gold-rimmed glasses protruded perilously far from one of the shirt’s breast pockets, as if the exposed round lens were chancing a wondrous peek at the world.

  He said, “I’m going to drive down to Vanessa’s and take advantage of the marvelous light.”

  Carver realized he meant the soft early evening light favored by painters and photographers.

  Dr. Macklin seemed compelled to make introductions. “This is my husband, Brian, Mr. Carver. Brian, Fred Carver.”

  “Nice meeting you, Mr. Carver, but I’m afraid I have to run. Someone’s waiting for me to pick them up.”

  “Your work?” Carver asked, motioning with his cane to take in the numerous wild oil paintings on the walls.

  “ ’Fraid so,” Brian Macklin said, strangely apologetic.

  “Very nice,” Carver said.

  Brian nodded his thanks.

  “Don’t let Brian’s modesty fool you,” Dr. Macklin said. “His work’s been displayed all over the South. He sells his paintings regularly and has his own show in Miami next month.”

  “Which I’d better get to work on now, if I expect to be prepared.” Brian grinned almost impishly. He had a round, scrubbed-looking face with even features. An aged, gone-to-seed cherub. His gray hair was cut short on the sides, but it was longer and still thick on top, so it lay in a mass of loose curls. It was the hairstyle of a much younger man, say one about his wife’s age.

  “Remember to be home by nine, dear.”

  “Not to worry,” Brian said. “Ciao.” He went back through the door. Carver heard movement in another room, and what sounded like furniture being shoved around. Then he heard the front door close. Felt a stirring of air.

  “My husband’s studio’s behind that wall,” Dr. Macklin said, gesturing vaguely with a red-nailed hand. She sounded genuinely proud of whatever success Brian enjoyed. Florida was full of would-be artists, most of whom had never sold a canvas or had their paintings displayed publicly.

  “He does excellent work,” Carver said.

  “Do you know art?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I.” She crossed her magnificent legs; Carver heard the swish of nylon against nylon and felt a tightening in the core of him. He remembered Dr. Macklin with Nurse Rule at the Medallion Motel, how they’d kissed. The unmistakable possession and passion. Nurse Rule! Jesus! “Why did you set up this appointment, Mr. Carver?”

  “I think you know I’m looking into a matter concerning Sunhaven.”

  “Let’s not be cute or evasive. You’re looking into Sunhaven itself. Why?”

  “Some of the residents feel there’s something wrong here.”

 
“I won’t ask which residents. I will ask what they think is wrong.”

  “They’re not sure. Which is why I was hired.”

  “By one of the residents?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Be exact, Mr. Carver.”

  “All right. Some people think there’s something wrong with the deaths that have occurred here in the past several months.”

  “This is an old-folks’ home, Mr. Carver. Old people live to get a little older, and then they die. Death’s part of the package, I’m afraid. Unless you believe in earthly immortality. Old people imagine things. Sometimes they get unreasonable, even paranoid. Don’t you have a grasp of that?”

  “I’m not old, not paranoid.”

  “Ah, and what have you seen here that disturbs you?”

  “Raffy Ortiz.”

  The beautiful, intelligent face was blank for a moment. “That man who comes here occasionally to see Dr. Pauly?”

  “That one,” Carver said.

  “He’s Dr. Pauly’s patient.”

  “He needs another kind of doctor. He’s a sicko who’s dealt in drugs and death all his life.”

  “That might well be, but it’s no concern of mine.”

  “Isn’t it?”