Tropical Heat

by John Lutz

  “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.”

  Carver sat silently. He wondered if Willis would have been so understanding and gentle if he hadn’t had an ulterior motive. All that time with a beautiful woman, without sexual union. . . . He didn’t voice that thought to Edwina, who had lived so long with brutality and then found the gentleness she’d sought. Her gentle man.

  Carver understood now why Willis had meant so much to her. And he understood why she’d been vague, why she’d kept this part of her life secret: She’d taken a chance on Willis and lost. She had to know Carver before she could trust him with her past.

  She smiled, a soft smile he was seeing for the first time. “Despite your cynicism and hard exterior, there’s a gentle compassion in you, too.”

  “Is that why you called Willis’s name that night at the motel, when you were with me in my bed?” Immediately he realized the selfish cruelty of his question and regretted it.

  Her smile dimmed and she seemed surprised. She had no answer. Her face was transformed to the familiar mask again, but it wouldn’t hold. Her lower lip began to tremble; the mouth of a ten-year-old beneath those calm and knowing eyes.

  Carver took her hand and drew her to him, gently.

  When they emerged from the house into the heat, Edwina locked the front door behind her and got in the Olds with Carver. She had a leather overnight bag slung by a strap across her shoulder. She worked it free and turned to place it on the backseat.

  “I didn’t pack a lot of clothes,” she said. “How long will we be in Solarville?”

  Carver shrugged and started the engine. “Maybe not long. It depends on how things go. On how right I am.”

  He backed the car away from the small but plush house that had been home to Edwina and Willis, in that simpler world before the truth, then drove north along the coast to his cottage.

  While Edwina waited, he packed a few things in the new suitcase the Tumble Inn had provided after the fire. This time the zipper stuck and he had to wrestle with it, snagging a fingernail before he finally had it zipped all the way around.

  Then he phoned Ernie Franks at home and explained where he was going and why.

  It all sounded good to Franks; the odds on Willis Eiler being found, and at least some of the Sun South money being recovered, had suddenly improved. His elation and hope throbbed in his voice. Franks and Edwina; maybe there was something in sales that eventually engendered desperate faith.

  “Let me know,” Franks said, before hanging up. “When whatever it is that’s going to happen is over, you let me know about it, okay?”

  Carver assured Franks that he would. That was the idea behind their arrangement. That was why Franks had offered him a percentage of the money, wasn’t it?

  As Carver and Edwina drove south, then cut west on 70 toward south-central Florida, Carver watched the lengthening shadows along the flat highway and began to feel the same heightened optimism that Ernie Franks had voiced. Not because of the money, or the possibility of a cracked drug operation, but because it seemed that at last Willis Eiler could be put to rest alive or dead.

  That might be the final stage in the exorcism of a demon.

  CHAPTER 29

  DANINGER SEEMED SURPRISED to see them again at his motel. He smiled, bowed, smiled, genuflected, smiled, smiled, and gave Carver and Edwina adjoining rooms near the deep end of the Tumble Inn’s swimming pool. The possibility of litigation still ran strong.

  Carver slept late the next morning, but he was still awake before Edwina. He left her sleeping and drove into Solarville to check in with Chief Armont. At the rear of the headquarters lot, Mackenzie’s Jeep was parked, its wheels and fenders caked with mud.

  The chief said he was glad to see Carver but didn’t put on nearly as good an act as Daninger. But then, he didn’t have the motivation. He asked Carver what he was doing back in town.

  When Carver told him, Armont didn’t seem to like it. He knew there was plenty of drug trafficking going on in and around Solarville. He also knew that some of the people involved had the influence to cost him his job. He didn’t like the fine line he had to walk; he did what he could without committing professional suicide, kept his town as straight as possible and only looked the other way when he had to. Carver sympathized with him, but at the same time wondered exactly how much Armont did or didn’t know. A man could keep his eyes clenched shut only so long.

  “I didn’t figure you were the sort a few murder attempts would keep away,” he told Carver. “I knew you’d be back. You’re the dog-with-a-rag type: won’t let loose because you can’t.” He sounded as if he were that type himself, only circumstances kept him from acting on instinct and sinking his canine teeth into the rag. His flat, cop’s eyes narrowed. For an instant it was apparent that he envied, and admired, Carver. “You’ve got leeway. You’ll always find a way to get the job done.”

  “I’ll always try, anyway,” Carver said. “You know how it is.”

  Armont nodded. He did know. That was his burden.

  “Have you checked on Sam Cahill?” Carver asked.

  “His house has been staked out. No Sam Cahill anywhere around here lately, if you ask me.”

  And no Willis Eiler, Carver thought. It was possible that the hand Willis and Cahill were playing had folded of its own accord and they’d moved on to new hunting grounds. They were both men who had disappeared with daylight before.

  After leaving police headquarters, Carver drove the short distance down the hot and dusty street to The Flame. He parked on South Loop, directly across from the restaurant, and was starting to get out of the car when he noticed there were few other cars parked nearby and there was no sign of life inside the restaurant’s tinted windows.

  It was Sunday; he’d forgotten. Apparently The Flame was extinguished for the Sabbath. That meant that to talk to Verna Blaney and try to get an inkling if she knew where Cahill had gone, he’d have to drive out to her cabin.

  He got directions easily enough from jug-eared Wilt at the Shell station, then drove to the south end of town and then farther south on a series of narrow, elevated dirt roads that ran through thick swamp, between tall cypress and mangrove trees, their limbs laden with Spanish moss and dangling creeper vines. An otter glared at the car from the side of the road, then disappeared back into the swamp. Carver realized he was inside the red-penciled area on the map he’d found in Willis Eiler’s apartment in Orlando.

  Verna Blaney’s place was in disrepair, but it was more than simply a cabin. It was isolated well off the road, at the end of a long gravel driveway. Low and ramshackle, it had a flat-roofed front porch with three wooden steps leading up to it, and curtains pulled closed at all the windows. The grayish clapboard house sported black shutters and a tall brick chimney. There was a screened-in porch built onto the west side, but the screens were rusty and torn, hanging in flaps as if objects had been hurled through them. Behind and to the left of the house was a crude wooden dock, and near it, resting on dry ground, was one of the flat-bottomed airboats some of the Everglades residents used to navigate the swamp.

  These boats drew hardly any water, and were often powered by a military-surplus aircraft engine or a converted automobile motor, with a propeller above the stern set to blow backward and power the boat over narrow stretches of flat land as we
ll as shallow swamp water. The large propeller whirled inside a wire cage to prevent anyone from accidentally reaching or walking into its blades. Doing that would be like stumbling into a giant blender.

  At full throttle an airboat roared like a plane and gave passengers the sensation that they were flying at high speed an inch off the ground or water. Sometimes they were. Carver remembered that Verna’s father had made his living taking tourists for airboat rides before his death last year. The airboat by the dock was dusty, had thick, leafy moonvine intertwined with the propeller cage, and obviously hadn’t been moved for a long time.

  Not far from the house sat a rusty Ford pickup truck that might have been drivable, but didn’t look as if it had been moved for quite a while, either; but Carver remembered seeing it parked near The Flame.

  He walked across the bare plot of ground in front of the house. The earth was dry and packed hard, without the slightest vegetation, as if weed and grass killer had been sprayed on it to hold back the swamp. Racketing with the screams of cicadas, the swamp bent green and malevolent around three sides of the low house, which seemed to be hunkered down, threatened and cowering.

  “I ain’t never shot nobody before,” Verna Blaney said. “It’d be a new and interesting experience.”

  She was standing on the porch with a double-barreled shotgun cradled in her arms, tucked beneath her high and ample breasts, which were straining the seams of a yellow cotton dress.

  Carver stopped walking and stood very still about fifty feet from the porch steps. Verna was barefoot and had a puffy, sleepy look about her eyes, as if she’d been taking an early afternoon nap and he’d awakened her. Or maybe she’d still been asleep from the night before. Late to bed, late to rise . . . was that the real Verna?

  “What do you want?” she asked. And she asked it as if Carver didn’t have much time to frame an answer.

  “I want to talk.”

  “I don’t want to listen. Get out. Fast. Now!”

  Carver leaned on his cane, didn’t move as if to leave. “You’re being unreasonable, Verna.”

  “I don’t think so. You ain’t the first man to come out here way to hell and gone to see me. And it ain’t because they enjoy the drive, or my company. They don’t have to look at the scar, they figure, or listen much to what I got to say. It’s the body they think is just fine. And a woman like that, with that mark on the side of her face, why she’d be just aching all over for male companionship.”

  Carver was getting the idea. Verna Blaney thought she knew men through and through, the single-track, rutting beasts that peopled her dreams. He thought about her living all these years there alone with her father. He wondered about Ned Blaney. What kind of father had he been to give her that impression of men? What had he done to her? Or maybe there was something to what she said, considering some of the male Solarville natives Carver had seen. Might the Malone brothers have been two of Verna’s crude and carnally intent visitors?

  “I only want to ask you a few questions about Sam Cahill,” Carver said.

  Verna was running a hand down the shotgun’s twin barrels now, curving her fingers around them lightly, almost sensually. Carver couldn’t help it; his eyes flicked downward and up, taking in her ripeness. Something exotic that had grown in the swamp, primitive and dangerous.

  She’d expected his involuntary reaction; it seemed to confirm something. She glared icicles at him. “Put a bag over her head,” she spat. “You ever hear that expression, mister? Put a bag over her head and she’d be a good fuck?”

  “I’ve heard it,” Carver said.

  “So’ve I. Most all my life.” She turned her head defiantly for a moment so Carver had to look at her scar. “Damned propeller from a swamp boat my pa was tinkering with did this, when I was only twelve. They said I was lucky to be alive, still have my head.” She was holding the shotgun at the ready now, aimed at a spot on the ground not far in front of Carver. “I ain’t so sure of that.”

  “The scar isn’t as bad as you think,” Carver said. “And plastic surgery—”

  “Good-bye,” Verna Blaney said in a flat voice.

  “At least you’ve got two good legs,” Carver said.

  Oh-oh, the wrong thing to say, considering what Verna was sure he was thinking.

  “And don’t bother coming back,” she said sternly. She took a step toward him and aimed the shotgun.

  Carver felt the flesh bunch up on the back of his neck. He used the cane more nimbly than he thought he could and backed up several steps, staring at the black eternity inside the gun barrels. This was a tortured woman he’d caught at a bad time, one who saw before her a member of the sex she feared and distrusted. And she’d obviously had experience in handling a gun. A body sunk in the swamp’s quicksand might never be found.

  The shotgun’s long barrels didn’t waver.

  It was too nice a day for death. Carver continued his retreat.

  When he was on the gravel driveway, near his car, he finally turned his back on Verna Blaney. He opened the door and tossed his cane on the seat.

  “Mister!” Verna called, as he was about to lower himself into the Olds.

  He turned, standing balanced by supporting himself on the open door, one hand on the warm chrome windshield frame.

  “I don’t know anything about Sam Cahill,” she said. “Haven’t seen him in a long spell. Don’t want to. Don’t want to see you again, neither.” She raised the shotgun and fired a blast into the treetops. Birds screeched and flapped into the sky, like a scene from an old Tarzan movie; something Carver didn’t recognize gave an animal scream deep in the swamp.

  He climbed the rest of the way into the Olds and drove away from there in a hurry. Verna Blaney still had the shotgun’s other loaded barrel to use against her fear and pain, and Carver’s flesh and blood.

  He’d known women like her; she wanted male companionship more than she would admit to herself, and she hated men for that persistent desire, and for shunning her because of her scar. For what one or more men had done to her. Making her different. She was twisted and agonized in her loneliness.

  And maybe able to kill.

  When Carver got back to the Tumble Inn, he found Edwina sunning herself by the pool. She and two skinny, preteen boys in the deep end were the only ones there. One of the lads appeared to have an erection.

  “Where have you been?” she asked, lowering her oversized sunglasses and peering coolly up at Carver above the frames.

  “I wanted to talk to Verna Blaney.”

  “And did you?”

  “Not in any way productive. She ran me off her property. Threatened to shoot me. I would say she hates men.”

  “Or would like to think so,” Edwina said. Savvy. Catty.

  “I thought she might have some idea where Sam Cahill is, but if she does, she isn’t willing to share it.” Carver felt a bead of perspiration play over his temple, run down his cheek to tickle the side of his neck. Like an insect. He wanted to get in out of the heat. “Had lunch?” he asked.

  “I was waiting for you.”

  “Get dressed and we’ll drive into town,” Carver said. “Have us a bite. Maybe talk to Chief Armont again.”

  Edwina hitched up the top of her suit and stood up from the chaise longue. The two boys splashing around at the other end of the pool took time out from any pretense and gaped at her in unabashed admiration. Carver thought they were developing good taste young.

  Armont laughed when Carver told him about his encounter with Verna Blaney. “She usually reacts with disfavor toward men who drive out there uninvited to sweet-talk her, but I’ll admit she’s been a little extreme this time.”

  “I wasn’t there to sweet-talk her.”

  “Sure, but she don’t usually give her surprise callers a chance to say what they want, just runs them off. Generally she only uses shouts and threats, though, not a shotgun. You want to press an assault-with-a-deadly-weapon charge?”

  “No,” Carver said. “Has Verna ever been rea
lly serious about a man?”

  “She’s had her beaus,” the chief said, “but not for long. She doesn’t have any illusions about what men want from her. That scar disfigured her inside as well as out. Her daddy’s fault; he should have had the damn thing stitched up right after it happened. But he didn’t, cantankerous old asshole, and now it would cost a fortune to have a plastic surgeon fix that scar, and even then there’d be no guarantee. At least that’s what old Ned Blaney used to say whenever anybody brought up the subject.”

  “What kind of man was her father?”

  “Nobody really knows,” Armont said, pecking out a rhythm with a pen point on his desk. “Kept to himself, ran his airboat rides for tourists who were driving by on the main highway and got steered to his place by the signs he had up and down the road. I think he was fond of Verna, and a good father in his way, but crude. Too crude to realize how deep a scar like that might run in a pretty young girl.”

  Carver thanked the chief and turned to Edwina.

  “You two looking for a place to eat lunch,” Armont said, “The Flame should be open now.”

  “I drove by there this morning and it was closed,” Carver said.

  “They only serve lunch and supper on Sundays,” Armont explained. “Folks like to sleep in late or go to church Sundays in Solarville, depending on what they been up to the night before.” If there was irony in his voice, Carver couldn’t catch it.

  He and Edwina left Chief Armont and had salads and coffee at The Flame. There weren’t many customers, but people were wandering in at a steady pace. Soon the place would be crowded. Emma and the horsey waitress were on duty, but not Verna Blaney.

  When Carver asked Emma about Verna, she said that Verna wouldn’t be in that day or any other, except possibly as a customer. She’d quit the day before yesterday, and rumor had it that she’d sold her house and ground and was moving away. She’d had enough of Solarville, she’d said. Couldn’t blame the woman, the waitress confided in a lowered voice. Emma cautioned Carver that what she’d just told him was only rumor.