Tropical Heat (11 page)

“That’s a predictable philosophy,” she said calmly. “Much less complicated than your lobster analogy, but bullshit nonetheless.”

Carver had no answer for that. She might be right. He used his palm to wipe sweat from his face, dragging his hand painfully downward from forehead to chin. He checked his palm to see if his face was there.

“I’ll join you in Solarville tomorrow,” Edwina said, which didn’t surprise Carver. “When we find Willis, we’ll get to the truth about the money.” She smoothed the material of her gray tailored suit. “I have a business appointment today.”

A business appointment. There it was. Carver saw into her then, saw the way the past few years must have been for her. She was using her work as a shield, probably had been since the end of the jinxed marriage Alice Hargrove had mentioned. It had been effective; Carver knew from experience how work could blunt the pain. Business, keeping ceaselessly busy, could fill the void, absorb the wild energy of volatile depression.

“You shouldn’t go to Solarville,” Carver told Edwina. “That’s why you hired me, to sniff around and get my nose dirty.”

“Phone me at home tonight,” she said. “Let me know where you’re staying and what you’ve learned. I’ll decide whether I’ll join you, when that will be.”

Carver shrugged and nodded. Those were the rules. She was the boss, he was the bird dog. He could overlook her tough act. Everybody who was tough had an act, some better than others.

When she turned to open her car door, he gripped her upper arm, then held it gently.

She looked up at him. She began to cry again and tried to whirl her body away from him. He tightened his grip on her arm, pulled her to him. He would look at her tears, make her blend with reality. It was impossible to be a romantic in today’s world; didn’t she know that?

For a moment she clung to him; he could feel the heat of her body, vibrating against him. He wanted to comfort her, reassure her. With lies, if necessary. Especially with lies. He raised a hand and caressed her hair where the sun touched it; he felt her grasping fingers feel their way down his back, nails sharp and urgent through his shirt.

Then she pulled away, stood up straight, and briskly smoothed her suit again. Her business suit.

Her gray eyes were cool. This hadn’t happened, they said. That woman hadn’t really been Edwina Talbot. Two strangers in another dimension had momentarily felt something that bore no relevance to here and now.

He stepped back, silently agreeing with the eyes, which didn’t quite meet his. The hell with this. He was afraid. He didn’t want this any more than Edwina did. Too soon. Too soon after Laura. He remembered the legalese and pain.

“I’ll be waiting for your call,” she said crisply, and ducked into her car, swiveling gracefully on the seat before pulling the door closed. The pale turn of her ankle below the gray of her skirt was breathtaking.

The Mercedes’ tires spun and caught hold. Gravel pounded against the insides of the fenders; a few small stones flew free and bounced off Carver’s shoes.

Edwina didn’t look back at him as she wheeled the car to the driveway, then out onto the highway.

Carver leaned on his cane in the sultry heat and watched her drive away, pondering the mystery of her. He wondered if part of her appeal might be that hidden chamber of her life, and the fact that she might be manipulating him. He was always one for puzzles.

He felt like following her, but he didn’t. Instead he went home and packed.

I
T WAS EARLY EVENING
when Carver reached Solarville. The flat terrain and endless orange groves of central Florida, geometrically sectioned by flat, dusty roads, had given way to lusher, more tropical country as he neared the northern edge of the Everglades. He exited from the main highway when he saw the sign signaling the turnoff for Solarville and several other small towns. After following a tree-lined side road for ten miles, he turned south on another road and found himself on Solarville’s main street, Loop Avenue.

The town was larger than Carver had imagined; a sign proclaimed that the population was over four thousand. Most of the buildings on Loop Avenue were clapboard, the rest were brick. The heat and humidity had done its work. Almost every painted surface was discolored or peeling. There was the usual string of businesses found in towns that size: a barbershop, two service stations, a small movie theater, several restaurants, a hardware store, variety store, Laundromats, a medium-sized supermarket. Solarville was big enough to boast a McDonald’s halfway down Loop. The golden arches seemed about to sag in the heat.

Carver had the top up on the Olds. He drove through town slowly, ignoring the pedestrians who glanced at him as he sized up Solarville through the bug-splattered windshield. He’d passed a citrus processing plant a few miles before reaching town; he supposed that was where many of the residents worked.

Not far from McDonald’s was the city hall, a small stone building with an elaborate, weathered dome on it, an architect’s scaled-down dream that had probably been built with federal money during the thirties. Directly next to city hall was police headquarters, not nearly so grand: a low, white-shingled building with a sand-and-gravel lot next to it. There was a dusty blue patrol car parked on the lot, and not far from it a pickup truck with oversized tires, and a winch mounted on the front bumper. The word
traffic
was lettered on the truck’s door, and on the front near the winch in smaller letters was painted
Ditch Bitch.
Considering the swampy terrain off the roads, Carver figured the Ditch Bitch had hauled many an errant motorist’s mistake from the muck.

At the end of town, where Loop fulfilled its promise and began its curve back to the alternate highway, the swamp began and some of the buildings were elevated on stilts. The neighborhood was shabbier there, where people existed closer to brackish water, hordes of mosquitoes, and maybe even an occasional alligator that wandered over to see how the vertical creatures lived.

Carver turned the Olds away from the gloom of the swamp and drove back the way he’d come, to a sign with an arrow that pointed down a side road to the Tumble Inn Motel.

The Tumble Inn was a tan brick two-story structure less than a mile outside of town, built in a U as if to embrace its small rectangular swimming pool. A pimply-faced kid who introduced himself as Curt blinked bulbous blue eyes at Carver as if it were a first for anyone to be checking into the place, then accepted Carver’s Visa card, had him sign a registration form, and gave him a tagged key and directions to room 17, the end room on the north leg of the building. “Near the ice machine,” Curt told him conspiratorially, as if ice were the gold of the region and he’d done him a special favor.

It wasn’t a bad room. Clean. And not so musty once Carver figured out the controls on the air-conditioner and got it humming. The place was decorated in shades of beige, with motel-modern furniture that had been stamped out at some factory where they must make all cheap motel furniture.

Carver pulled the beige drapes closed, tossed his suitcase up on the beige bedspread and opened it, then rummaged around until he found a clean shirt. He didn’t know how long he’d be staying, so he didn’t unpack; everything he’d brought would resist wrinkles and the press of humidity through the miracle of polyester.

He entered the tiny, tiled bathroom, rinsed his face with cold water that carried the faint, rotten-egg smell of sulfur, then changed shirts and left the room to drive back into Solarville.

Carver drove past police headquarters. He’d decided it might not be wise to contact the local law yet; he didn’t want anyone tipping Sam Cahill to the fact that someone was in town watching him. He stopped at a self-service Shell station, filled the thirsty Olds’s tank, then went into the office to pay a greasy little guy with jug ears who was standing behind a greasy counter.

“Where can I find a local real-estate office?” he asked the jug-eared man, whose uniform name tag identified him as Wilt. Carver peered closely at the sewn-on tag. Yep, Wilt—not Walt. “I’m interested in looking at some property around here.”

“There’s several places here in town sell real estate,” Wilt said. He punched the keys of a jangly old cash register until the drawer popped open, deposited Carver’s twenty-dollar bill, and handed Carver back his change, two slippery quarters.

“Which is the closest?”

“Bain Realty, just down the street,” Wilt said, scratching an oily, protruding ear. “But they’d be closed now. Then down a few blocks the other way is World Real Estate. They’re mostly commercial stuff, though. Or is that the kinda property you’re lookin’ for?”

“Is that a fairly new phone directory?” Carver asked, ignoring the question and pointing to a pay phone and its slender directory dangling beneath it by a chain.

“Just a few months old,” Wilt said. He rubbed a greasy forefinger on the right side of his nose, leaving a dark smudge to match the one near his left nostril. He did like oil. Liked it a lot.

Carver thanked him and stepped over to the phone. Sam Cahill would have to put up some sort of respectable front to satisfy the law here. Carver leafed through grease-marked pages, and there was Cahill listed as a broker along with half a dozen other real-estate agencies. Cahill’s home and office address was on Pond Road. Carver asked greasy Wilt where that was.

“Not far outside of town. Forks off to the west, where Loop starts to curve.” He pointed vaguely to the south end of town.

Just then a raggedy-haired fat woman pushed through the door and asked to buy a can of Valvoline. She’d come to the right place.

Carver gave Wilt a casual half salute and limped back outside to his car. He got a Kleenex from the glove compartment, wiped the grease from his fingers, and drove toward Pond Road.

It took him less than five minutes to turn the Olds onto Pond. The homes there were well kept up, separated from each other by trees and high swamp brush. They were low ranch-style houses that had the same basic character, probably built within months of each other. Medium-priced houses, but nice ones considering they were in a backwater town like Solarville. Cahill’s address was one of the models with a two-car garage. A four-wheel-drive Jeep was parked in the driveway, the ideal vehicle for showing customers the kind of property Cahill was selling in that area. The garage’s overhead door was open. Inside was a low-slung red Corvette with a chrome luggage rack on its trunk. The car was polished to a high gloss, gleaming like a ruby set in the dimness.

Carver parked down the road, off to the side, where he could watch the house but where his car wouldn’t be noticeable.

As darkness fell, no lights came on in the house. Apparently Sam Cahill had a third vehicle that he’d driven away in, or he was away with someone else who had driven.

There was little point in staying parked there. Carver wondered it he should talk to some of the neighbors, ask them if Cahill stayed alone at his home and office, or if they’d seen another man, one fitting Willis Davis’s description.

He decided that wouldn’t be wise. It probably would net him nothing, and might alert Cahill to his presence in Solarville. And it wasn’t likely that Willis Davis would make himself so easy to find, even if he was in the Solarville area.

Carver drove back into town and had supper at the motel restaurant. One of the side dishes he ate was unidentifiable, but it was tasty. Something from the swamp? He decided not to ask the waitress.

In the booth across from him sat a man and woman in pinstripe business suits that might have been fashioned by the same tailor. The man had the side dish Carver had eaten, but he’d pushed his plate away after a few exploratory bites. The woman, a cool, scrubbed-looking blonde with unblinking green eyes, had played it safe and ordered a roast-beef sandwich. The two of them looked out of place sitting in the vinyl booth in a second-rate motel in a backwater town. The expensive cut and fabric of their conservative clothes, the woman’s subdued but quality jewelry, and their refined but alert behavior suggested that they were high-level executives on a slumming expedition. Maybe corporate lovers getting away to a place where no one they knew would spot them. They didn’t seem the sort to have business other than of a very private nature in Solarville. Lawyers in love? Corporate copulation? Unlikely, but possible.

Carver shook off that kind of baseless musing, futile speculation. Dirty occupation, dirty mind. He was beginning to think too much like the kind of private detective that kicked open motel doors and snapped photographs. These two were probably nothing more than wealthy tourists driving around the state with time and money to waste. Their type wasn’t unusual in almost any corner of Florida.

When he got up to pay his bill and leave, the woman glanced at her watch. Carver noticed that it was an expensive-looking Mickey Mouse watch, with what appeared to be diamonds set in each of Mickey’s hands. He walked past the man and woman toward the cashier, wondering what it would be like to have enough money to live and to buy so frivolously.

Outside he smoked one of his infrequent after-meal cigars, then he drove into town and had a few beers at a local tavern that featured a stuffed alligator suspended by wires above the bar. He said nothing, listened to the conversation around him, and learned nothing. This kind of sleuthing worked mostly on TV and in novels. Or in Desoto’s old movies.

At nine o’clock he got up and left. He was older now but no wiser. The alligator had been a nothing. If the beer and the air-conditioning hadn’t been frosty cold, the evening would have been a complete waste.

He walked around town for a while, then bought a
Solarville Bugle
from a newspaper vending machine and drove back to the Tumble Inn.

When he got to his room, he phoned Edwina and let her know where he was staying. She told him she’d join him in Solarville sometime the next day. He tried to talk her out of coming, but she was in no mood to be talked out of or into anything.

When Edwina had gotten off the line, Carver called Desoto and asked him to check with Records on Sam Cahill.