Tropical Heat (19 page)

“Fire, huh?” Carver said, feeling the ice of fear trickle down his spine. He thought about the night he almost choked to death in his room at the Tumble Inn, the searing pain in his near-bursting lungs, the panic that had threatened to engulf him and deliver him to mindless, agonizing death.

“Fire and knives and guns and piano wire. Anything that kills,” Desoto said. “It all fits Jorge Lujan’s style. He’s probably heard his equally humanitarian brother Silverio is dead by now.” Desoto’s dark eyes took on a sad seriousness.
“Venganza,”
he said. Vengeance.

“You think Jorge might be after me for killing Silverio?” Carver asked. He didn’t like to think about being stalked, especially by someone with a compelling reason to kill. A reason that ran in the blood.

“Maybe,” Desoto said. “Hot Latin temperament and all that. But not to worry,
amigo
, the DEA will protect you.”

“You’ve met Burr?” Carver asked.

Desoto smiled, white teeth flashing. “Sure, he’s the one who filled me in on the notorious Lujan brothers. They have brief but nasty backgrounds in the U.S., Carver. Burr thinks Silverio Lujan was part of a drug scam in Solarville. But then Burr thinks everybody everywhere is part of a drug scam.”

“Lujan ran with known dealers and users,” Carver said. “According to Burr, that’s all part of being a Marielito. But Silverio Lujan and Solarville don’t necessarily add up to drugs.”

“Marielitos go where there’s money,” Desoto said, “and there is no more money anywhere in Florida than in drugs. Not illicit money, anyway. So a Lujan in Solarville means money for the Marielitos, a drug deal. It means that to Burr, anyway.”

“Burr might be right,” Carver said. He told Desoto about the coffee can with the gun, map, false I.D., and packet of cocaine, hidden behind the access panel beneath the sink in Willis Davis’s apartment.

“We went over that apartment the day after Davis disappeared,” Desoto said. “My men usually check plumbing access panels.”

“Not this time,” Carver said. “Not for a plain old uninteresting suicide.”

“Have you told Burr about this?”

“I thought I’d tell you first, see if you had anything to add. Or subtract.”

Desoto touched the heels of his hands together, then meshed his fingers. “No, you better play straight with Burr,
amigo.
He’s federal; he can put a permanent kink in your cane. He might be a by-the-book pain in the ass, but he’s got us all by the short hairs. And that map with the area marked off in red really might have to do with a drug deal of some kind.” He pulled his hands apart slowly, as if a delicate magnetic field that he didn’t want to break had developed between them, then leaned farther back in his chair and clasped them behind his head. “Does Edwina Talbot still believe so firmly that Willis Davis is alive?”

“Even more firmly,” Carver said. “I think he’s alive, myself. Alive and wandering around somewhere with Ernie Franks’s money.”

“And somebody else’s name.”

“Which brings me to the main reason I came here,” Carver said. “It occurred to me that if Willis used or was prepared to use either of the identities he had stashed in his apartment, he might have been using a false identity when he met Edwina. He might not be Willis Davis.” Very carefully he picked up the black attaché case at his feet and laid it on Desoto’s desk. “Willis’s,” he said. “His prints, or at least a good partial, should be on it somewhere, a smooth section of leather, one of the clasps, glossy paper, the calculator that’s in here. Match them with his prints, which should be all over Edwina’s house, so you know you’ve got Willis’s prints, and run a check on them through the FBI’s master file. Maybe we’ll discover his genuine identity.”

“Such a crafty bastard you are,” Desoto said. “So much more clever than the police.”

“Not really,” Carver said, playing it as straight as Desoto. “It all comes from not regarding Willis Davis as a suicide. I have a different angle of approach. That’s an advantage. I’ll fix it with Edwina so your fingerprint crew can get in her house.”

“Will she cooperate in an attempt to prove her Willis told her another lie?” Desoto asked. “And such a big lie.”

“I think so. She wants the truth. At least some of the time. She’s come that far.”

“Some weaker sex, your Edwina Talbot.”

Carver planted the hard rubber tip of his cane and stood up. “Now you know what I know, and soon I’ll tell Alex Burr so he’ll know.”

“Like a child’s game, eh, Carver?”

“Only when you win,” Carver said. “The losers don’t see it as a game.” He started toward the door.

“You take care,
amigo
,” Desoto said. “What you’ve gotten yourself into can be dangerous.”

“Marielitos are bad-asses,” Carver said, “but they’re not possessed and protected by the devil.”

“I wasn’t talking about Marielitos,” Desoto said. “They might kill you, but there are slower, more exquisitely pleasurable ways to die.”

Edwina again. “Sooner or later, one way or the other, everybody dies,” Carver said.

He looked back as he limped out the door.

Desoto was grinning his erotic-romantic’s grin.

A
FTER LEAVING
D
ESOTO,
Carver drove the relatively short distance to the University of Florida and managed to catch the dean of the science department still in his office. Professor Raymond Mackenzie was on sabbatical, the dean said. He didn’t know the purpose of Mackenzie’s trip to the Everglades, but he assumed it was to gather information for a scientific paper. It was publish or perish in academia.

The university supplied Carver with Mackenzie’s address. Carver hadn’t mentioned the student Mackenzie was living with; he wasn’t sure what the dean’s attitude was about that, or even if the university knew that one of its faculty was dallying with a co-ed. That might be perfectly acceptable, or it might be a sticky point with the dean. It all depended on the circumstances.

Mackenzie lived in an apartment development in Catanna, a small town less than an hour’s highway drive from the university. Carver was told by the apartment manager which building the professor lived in. Mackenzie’s name, along with a Lottie Kenward’s, was typed on a white card and slipped into the slot above 2-C’s mailbox. Lottie must be Mackenzie’s live-in co-ed, probably a middle-aged professor’s youth fantasy.

Carver punched the elevator button with the tip of his cane. On the second floor, he went a short distance down the hall and then knocked on the door to 2-C.

Almost immediately he heard movement inside the apartment. He wondered if Mackenzie himself might answer, if he’d for some crazy reason left his Jeep and camping equipment and returned home to hearth and co-ed.

The woman who opened the door was hardly the bubble-gum ingénue Carver had naively expected. She was tall, slender, attractive, black, and at least thirty-five. She was wearing a bright blue dress of some kind of silky material that draped gracefully from her wide shoulders.

“I’m . . . uh . . . looking for Professor Raymond Mackenzie,” Carver said.

“He isn’t here,” the woman answered. Her voice was velvet and deep. Her large dark eyes were steady, inquisitive yet guarded. They didn’t blink. “Who wants him?”

“Fred Carver. Who am I talking to?”

“Lottie Kenward. I live here. With Professor Mackenzie. He’s out.”

“I know that he disappeared from his campsite in the Everglades,” Carver said. “I’m a private detective, Miss Kenward. It’s possible that Mackenzie’s disappearance has something to do with a case I’m on.”

Breath trailed from Lottie in a soft sigh. She stepped back to let Carver enter.

The apartment was small, but well furnished and clean. Sliding glass doors opened out to a balcony that overlooked the swimming pool. There was a long leather sofa, glass-topped end tables, chrome-framed wall hangings. A stereo was set up unobtrusively in one corner. Everything was modern. In good taste.

“What do you know about Ray’s disappearance?” Lottie asked.

Carver leaned on his cane on the soft carpet. “Nothing you don’t know, I’m afraid,” he said. “He seems to have suddenly gotten up and walked away from his campsite.”

Lottie shook her head and sat down on the sofa. She crossed long and elegant legs. “Ray doesn’t do rash things like that.”

“How long have you known him?” Carver asked.

“Three years. We met when he was in Chicago for a Save the Whooping Crane seminar.” She didn’t smile.

“You were that interested in saving whooping cranes?” Carver asked.

She looked at him levelly. “Yes. I still am. They’re worth saving. I’m interested in most of the things that interest Ray. Except for the swamp; I wouldn’t go with him there. It gives me the creeps.”

“But he liked the swamp.”

“He loves it,” Lottie said, neatly changing tenses. “Do you know that there’s plant life in the Everglades that can be found nowhere else in the country? Hurricane winds blow the spores over from Cuba and the West Indies. Ray’s fascinated by the variety of vegetation there.”

“Did he go into the swamp often?”

“No, not really. He was spending most of his sabbatical here, with me, working on his book. He’s writing a novel. A mystery. I was doing some of his typing. Then he got the phone call.”

“Phone call?”

“Yes. He wouldn’t tell me who from. Said he’d explain later. And we weren’t getting along, not as well as we thought we would be with all this time together. He told me he was going into the field, somewhere in the Everglades near a town called Solarville. Then he left.”

“He didn’t tell you why?”

Lottie ran a hand through her mop of black hair and shook her head. “No, he was supposed to phone me from Solarville, but he didn’t.”

“Are you one of his students?” Carver asked.

“I was last year. My required science course. Four years ago I quit the business world and decided to become a teacher. Just got fed up with all the lying and all the crap and swimming against the current. They make it tough.”

“Because you’re black and a woman?” Carver asked.

She raised an eyebrow in surprise. “No, I’ve been black all my life. Female, too. I didn’t really experience discrimination I had trouble coping with until I began living in Florida with a white man. Chicago’s no cosmopolitan paradise, Mr. Carver, but this place has a way of castigating interracial couples. Stiff-backed, fundamental religion rules down here. Even the places you do business with identify themselves with God. Honestly, some of the people here, their idea of God is like He’s president of some celestial chamber of commerce.”

Carver thought about Ernie Franks and his crucifixion oath for Sun South employees.

“The way the people in this area, the neighbors especially, looked at us, treated us . . . it put a strain on our relationship that hadn’t been there before. A couple of the tenants even paid us a visit one night and hinted that they were Ku Klux Klan members, suggested we move out. Ray got mad and told them he had a shotgun and if they tried anything he’d put holes in their sheets.”

Carver was beginning to like Ray. He shook his head slightly. The Klan and Mickey Mouse and drugs and the Bible and sunshine and murder and palm trees. Florida had become some state. “Why do you live here?”

“Ray’s work at the university. And the swamp. He’s doing ongoing research on its vegetation.”

“Ongoing can be a long time,” Carver said.

“You’re dead right about that.”

“Did Mackenzie ever mention my name?”

Lottie thought for a few seconds before answering. “Not that I can recall.”

“Do you have a photograph of him?”

She stood up and walked lithely into the bedroom. Carver could see an unmade bed beyond the door. She walked around it, letting her long fingers drag along the bunched sheets at the foot of the mattress. There was something infinitely sensuous in the gesture. The women men sought and then left. What the hell was wrong with his gender? Carver wondered. What was Mackenzie doing in the swamp instead of here?

Lottie swayed back into the living room a minute later with a photograph of a thin, mustached blond man in his early fifties. He was grinning and touching the frames of his round-lensed glasses, as if he were about to peel them from his head in the manner of people who put on and remove reading glasses frequently. He was wearing a checked flannel shirt and there was a rock formation and some pine trees behind him.

“I took that shot in Colorado,” Lottie said, “and had it enlarged.”

Carver stared at the photograph. He was sure he’d never seen Raymond Mackenzie or his likeness before this moment.

“Did you try to find out exactly why he was going into the swamp this time?” Carver asked.

She put the photograph down, faceup on an end table. “At first I did. But he wouldn’t say. If things had been better between us just then, maybe he’d have told me. But we’d just come from the bank, where he tried to get a loan for a new Jeep. He made the mistake of taking me in with him. The loan officer wanted to know more about me, about us, than whether Ray could afford the payments. Too many of the questions were personal. I excused myself and left. It was no big deal compared to the kind of bigotry that goes on around this place, but Ray was mad at me for not telling off the loan officer. Things had piled up; this happened right after the Klan conversation. Ray and I had an argument. The next day he took the old Jeep and his camper trailer and left. He didn’t phone me when he got where he was going. And he never called anyone at the university, either. I kept on them over there, finally got them to get someone in Solarville to investigate. Then I learned that Ray had disappeared.”

“Has he ever dropped from sight like this for any length of time before?” Carver asked.

“He’s not the type just to up and disappear,” Lottie said. “Not even for a few days. He’s no adventurer except when it comes to saving whooping cranes or snail darters.”

Carver thanked her for answering his questions, assured her the Solarville police were still looking for Mackenzie, and limped toward the door.

“You’ll let me know right away if you find Ray, won’t you?” Lottie asked. Desperation drew her words taut.