Tropical Heat

by John Lutz

  “Do you think he’s findable?”

  “No, I don’t.” She dropped the lighter back in her purse. “What specifically do you want to talk about?”

  “I want to know more about Willis Davis.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as why is he Willis? Why doesn’t anybody ever call him Willie?”

  Alice smiled—not as bright as her saleswoman smile but definitely more genuine. “A Willie is more casual than a Willis. A Willie might wear a shirt even though it has a stain on it, or he might miss a belt loop. A Willis wears laundered, starched shirts and has a matching belt to go with each pair of pants and never misses a loop. Believe me, Willis was a Willis. He was a fastidious dresser, fastidious about everything he did.”

  “How many times did you see him?” Carver asked, remembering the ketchup stain on the sport jacket. “And for how long?”

  “Oh, a dozen times, I guess. Social get-togethers. Or he’d be there when I went to Edwina’s house to see her. Willis was an okay guy; I liked him. And you could tell he cared a lot about Edwina.”

  “Did Edwina care a lot about him?”

  Alice looked closely at Carver, gauging him. “Edwina cared everything about him. She’s had a tough time with the men in her life, with her former husband. She’s been knocked around some. Abused physically and emotionally. It changed her, gave her a hard veneer. You might say she never met a man before Willis who could match her strengths, or maybe understand her weaknesses.”

  “Do you mean a man she could look up to?” Carver always thought of Wilt Chamberlain when he used that expression.

  “No, I mean a man who wouldn’t need her to be dependent, one she could look upon as her equal. The Edwina I know doesn’t do much looking up to anyone.”

  Carver thought about his broken marriage to Laura. That hadn’t been exactly a fifty-fifty proposition. He’d demanded too much of her, made some classic male mistakes. And now she was living in St. Louis with their son and daughter, and he missed them, all of them at times. He’d needed to let Laura be Laura, but he hadn’t.

  “Despite his kind and quiet manner, there must have been something steely-strong in Willis Davis,” Alice was saying, “because even though they’d only known each other four months before he disappeared, Edwina loved him with complete commitment. She told me that; she used those words.”

  Carver wasn’t surprised. And he remembered that Edwina had told him that she and Willis met six months before. A mistake? An approximation? A lie? “What kind of words did Willis use?” he asked. “Did he seem educated? Did he use a lot of profanity? Did he say throwed and ain’t?”

  “He seemed well educated, now that you mention it. And I don’t think I ever heard him curse. He seemed basically a good man, decent. That was how he struck people, as decent.”

  “What sort of things did he talk about?” Carver asked.

  “He talked about everything—but somehow without really saying anything. Yet he was interesting, even fascinating. He was great at cocktail parties.”

  “How did he treat Edwina?”

  “He was kind to her, attentive. Always the gentleman.”

  “Don’t you find it unusual that a savvy woman like Edwina would fall so hard and so thoroughly for a man after knowing him only a matter of months?”

  “Not at all,” Alice said. “It’s like that sometimes with some women, no matter how knowledgeable they are in other matters.”

  “Did you ever get the impression that Willis was using Edwina?”

  “Not in the sense you mean, not deceptively. She helped to get him his job at Sun South. Edwina’s the one who talked Ernie Franks into hiring Willis, but I wouldn’t call that using her.”

  “I guess not,” Carver said. “And I suppose he could have left her afterward.”

  “Actually, not right away,” Alice said thoughtfully. “From what I know of Ernie Franks, he might have thought badly of Willis if he didn’t stay with Edwina after getting the job at Sun South. Franks has the reputation of an honest, no-nonsense developer, a nice guy but no patsy. And that’s how he impressed me when I did some of the decorating for display units at Sun South. He even made me sign some kind of oath of integrity printed on a picture of the crucifixion.”

  “Did you meet Sam Cahill when you were at Sun South?”

  “Briefly. The fast-shuffle type. Full of glib talk and easy promises to get a client’s name on a contract. And he had big ideas. Wanted to get financing and start some kind of development of his own in central Florida.”

  “With Willis Davis as a partner?”

  “They talked about it. The usual slow-salesday gab to pass the time. I’m sure nothing ever came of it. I think they knew nothing would when they were tossing out their grand ideas.”

  “You’re the one who phoned the police about Willis’s disappearance,” Carver said.

  “Yes.” She told him about going to see Edwina, getting no answer at the front door, then walking around to the veranda and seeing the jacket and shoes at the edge of the drop.

  “What went through your mind at the time?” Carver asked.

  “There was something about the way he’d neatly folded the jacket and laid it on top of the shoes. Something final. As soon as I saw them near the drop’s edge, I thought he’d jumped.”

  “Do you still think so?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry about it—for Edwina, for Willis—but that’s what I think, that he’s dead.”

  Carver was running out of questions. Sometimes that was when he asked his best ones. “Is there anything in particular about Willis that sticks in your memory?”

  Alice considered that one, drawing again on the long filter-tipped cigarette and frowning. “No,” she said at last, slowly, “there’s nothing.” She raised her head slightly. “It was kind of touching, the way Edwina talked about him at times. She often referred to him as a gentle man. Not gentleman, but the two words separated.”

  “Considering her past treatment,” Carver said, “that’s not surprising.” He shifted his weight and moved his cane a few inches to the right; he’d been standing too long in one spot and was getting uncomfortable. His good leg was falling asleep. “Are you going to tell Edwina about this conversation?”

  Alice stared at him through a haze of exhaled smoke, a pleasant, moon-faced woman who would always seem young at first glance. “No,” she said. “I want to help her get over Willis. I think the way to do that is to keep quiet and help you.”

  “I get the feeling Edwina isn’t playing exactly straight with me. Is there anything about her that I don’t know but should?”

  “You’d have to ask her about that.”

  “Does she confide a great deal in you?”

  Alice watched a wisp of cigarette smoke curl in the muted light, then said, “There’s a part of Edwina she keeps private. I respect that and have never pried, and I don’t intend to start now.”

  “All right.” Carver braced himself with the cane and moved toward the door.

  Alice was standing rigidly with her arms folded, watching him. He paused at the door, turned, and looked around the cavernous bare room.

  “Half a million dollars seems a little high,” he said. “Do you suppose they’d dicker?”

  Alice smiled. It was a lot like the smiles he’d seen at Sun South. After leaving Alice Hargrove he drove down Palm Street toward the ocean. The morning was heating up. There were a few clouds in the west, blowing in from the gulf, making soft and empty threats of rain. Ahead of Carver, the sky was a flawless blue backdrop for the gulls to soar against. The scent of the sea wafted into the Olds with the increasing humidity.

  When Carver saw a phone booth, he stopped, called his home, and listened to the messages on his answering machine. There were only two. The first was a recorded sales pitch promising a free book of tickets to Disney World with an appointment for an estimate on home remodeling; a recorder talking to a recorder. It reminded Carver of the old question about whether a sound was made i
f a tree fell in the woods when there was no one around to hear it. The second message was Ernie Franks suggesting that he and Carver talk again about Willis Davis. He claimed to have some important information for Carver.

  Carver used the back of his hand to wipe perspiration from his forehead. Then he called Franks’s office, made an appointment to see him, and drove in the direction of Sun South.

  Above the coast highway, the gulls seemed to soar and circle deliberately in front of the Olds, vying for Carver’s attention with unintelligible screams he could barely hear over the sounds of the motor and the wind.

  Screams like shrill warnings.

  CHAPTER 8

  CARVER WALKED ALONGSIDE Ernie Franks down some concrete steps leading to a man-made, landscaped plateau below the level of the Sun South towers but above the level of the beach. They strolled slowly along a walkway above the beach, through brilliant sunlight and stark shadow. Beyond the protective metal railing bordering the walk, Carver could see half a dozen sunbathers lounging on the pale sand. The heads of a few adventuresome swimmers bobbed out beyond where the waves began to rise for their rush and break onto the beach. Farther out, a small boat with a canvas-topped flying bridge lazily trolled for deep-sea fish. The strip of ground where Carver and Franks walked was grassy and dotted with small palm trees whose trunks had been painted white halfway up. At random between the palms, lush and colorful tropical flowers, like bright exotic birds perched on stems, swayed in the warm ocean breeze.

  Sunk in the side of the hill was a sign, the words Sun South lettered with seashells that had been artistically and elaborately set in concrete. As he walked past the sign, Franks absently extended his hand and let his fingertips brush the shell-letters. In so large and powerful a man, the gesture seemed oddly gentle and pathetically possessive.

  “I talked to Lieutenant Desoto about you,” he said. “And I did some checking into your background.”

  Carver said nothing, watched the white surf rage beneath them on the beach.

  “You were a good cop. And you’re an honest private cop now. Bad luck about the injury.”

  “It’s the sort of thing that happens to good cops,” Carver said, not without a touch of bitterness. Edwina would arch an eyebrow at him if she were there. Cynical Carver. Pessimist. Maybe she was right. It took a while to get over a bullet. Catching one wasn’t like catching a cold.

  He watched a teen-age boy hop up from where he’d been stretched out on a towel and run to dive with splashing abandon into the surf. Carver thought about how he had to enter the water. How he had to crawl.

  Then he thought about how he might be dead now, how the kid at the grocery store might have aimed higher with the junk revolver. The jasmine scent of the flowers became sharper, sweeter.

  Franks stopped walking, leaned on the iron rail, and gazed out over the beach and ocean, his domain on the edge of the world. Disney didn’t have a monopoly on magic kingdoms in Florida; they were dotted up and down the coasts. “There’s something I didn’t tell the police when they asked me about Willis,” he said. “I’ve decided to confide in you.”

  “Why me?”

  “Practicality. My sources tell me you can be trusted, and you’re already into this thing, already searching for Willis.”

  “Then you don’t think he’s dead either?”

  “I’m not sure,” Franks said, “but my bet would be on him being alive. Your earlier visit helped me to decide that. I think he knew it was time to get out, so he faked his suicide and went into hiding.”

  “Time to get out of what?” Carver asked.

  Franks straightened up from the railing. Still looking seaward, he lit a cigar, shielding the flame of his gold lighter expertly with a pale, cupped hand. He exhaled heavily; the breeze shredded the smoke and whisked it away. There was pain on his seamed, congenial salesman features. The gray, suave guy was suffering; this wasn’t going to be easy for him. “For each Sun South unit there are, of course, only a maximum of fifty-two potential buyers, one for each week of the year. I discovered that Willis was selling some of the units more than fifty-two times, writing contracts to different customers for time shares for the same prime weeks. He’d collect their down payment or earnest money, in some cases a large percentage of the time-share price, and deposit the money in a secret Sun South bank account that operated on his signature.”

  “What was supposed to happen when two or more ‘owners’ showed up at the same time to claim their week in the same unit?”

  “Willis planned to have disappeared by then. He made sure the weeks he sold were for next winter, or for units still under construction that wouldn’t be completed until then, so he had months to work his scheme before he had to get out.”

  “How did you discover what he was doing?”

  “Two days after he disappeared, someone at the bank where he had the account contacted me on routine business, keeping up personal contact so Sun South would continue to use the bank. He thought we were happy with their service, and he was surprised when we’d drawn out so much money without explanation. He was even more surprised when I told him we didn’t have an account at his bank. Then I was surprised when he told me Sun South had carried an account there for the past four months, and had drawn out over a hundred thousand dollars the previous week.” Franks smiled helplessly around the cigar, puffed some more smoke, then withdrew the cigar from his mouth and flicked gray ash for the wind to take. “He told me the account’s balance was two hundred dollars.” Franks tried to laugh; it caught like a barb in his throat. “Just enough to keep the account open and not attract too much suspicion.”

  Carver walked away from the railing, to a small concrete bench in the shade of a palm tree, but he didn’t sit down. He looked from the shade out into the sun, where Franks was standing just a few feet away as if he sought the heat to help purge him of what had been done to him.

  “He was an even better salesman than I thought,” Franks muttered. He bowed his head for a moment, saddened by his capacity to trust. A virtue in his faith, a weakness in the world of commerce.

  “So Willis is gone, along with a hundred thousand dollars,” Carver said. That answered and also raised some questions.

  “One hundred twelve thousand dollars exactly,” Franks said. “I have a copy of the signed withdrawal slip. It carries Willis’s signature, along with a phony signature of a make-believe Sun South treasurer.”

  Carver asked the most obvious of the recently raised questions. “Why didn’t you tell the police?”

  Franks shook his head, as if the police had never been one of his alternatives. “I decided there was a better way,” he said. “Time-share projects already don’t have the best reputation in Florida; public knowledge of what Willis did would put me out of business. It would be especially bad because I’m a member of the Florida Real Estate Commission; there wouldn’t be anything left of my reputation after the news media finished with me. I’m an honest man, Carver, but that wouldn’t make any difference to the wolves who are just waiting to attack another crooked land developer.”

  “It’s not easy being honest these days,” Carver said.

  “Or inexpensive,” Franks added. “I got the names of the customers Willis had bilked, contacted them personally, and returned their money or gave them deals on other time-share units. It’s about all I’ve been doing these last two weeks. That and worrying.”

  “If you’ve satisfied the victims,” Carver said, “why are you so concerned about negative publicity?”

  “I’m not sure I found all the victims. Maybe there are more whose money was placed somewhere other than in the bogus bank account. They could rear up and bite me any time. Ruin me.” Franks had lost interest in his cigar. He let it go out by itself and held the butt, unwilling to drop it and desecrate the pure landscaped world he’d created. “Willis—if he’s still alive—is the only one who can set my mind at ease as to whether there are more victims. I want to hire you to find him, and to recover what’s l
eft of my hundred thousand dollars. You can tell Willis I won’t prosecute if he returns the money and a complete list of the buyers he bilked.”

  “I already have a client who wants Willis,” Carver said.

  “Edwina Talbot, no doubt.”

  “Did you ask her about Willis and the missing money?

  “No. I definitely don’t want anyone else to know about it. Anyway, I trust Edwina and don’t think she was involved, despite her relationship with Willis. And her hiring you convinced me she doesn’t know his whereabouts.”

  Carver hadn’t actually said Edwina had hired him, but he didn’t bother to point this out to Franks.

  “You can inform your client about me,” Franks said. “I don’t care. Or let’s just say I’m hiring you to recover the money. The duplication of effort should make things easier for you. And I’ll pay you half of whatever money you recover. It’s a dead loss otherwise.”

  It didn’t take Carver long to work basic mathematics and make up his mind.

  “I want to make it clear to you that I already have a principal client when it comes to locating Willis Davis,” he said. “Your offer to find Davis, and the recovery of the money, are secondary to my first client’s interests. It has to be that way.”

  Franks smiled. “Your ethics could prove costly.”

  “Yours already have proved costly.”

  There went the smile. “Maybe I can give you a starting point,” he said. “Sam Cahill.”

  “Do you think he was in on the racket with Willis?”

  “No, Sam would never be involved in anything of that magnitude. But he and Willis were friends, and I never trusted Cahill completely. I had to fire him when I found out he’d been supplying cocaine to some of the other employees. But it was small, recreational amounts; I don’t think Sam was actually dealing. It was just something I had to stop or the law might have.”