Spark (2 page)

“I’ll let you know how it’s shaping up,” Carver said. “I might need your help.”

They’d come to a comfortable arrangement whereby they used each other’s resources in their work. Beth had contacts in Florida’s drug world. She was the widow of drug lord Roberto Gomez and still had reason to fear survivors of his organization. But she’d figured the safest play was for her to go as public as possible instead of hiding, become a journalist whose murder would draw wide media attention. So far it had worked. She’d stayed alive. It didn’t hurt, either, that she and Carver were lovers. Carver had a reputation.

“I get my best stories from you, Fred,” she said, hip-swaying over and touching his bare shoulder. He felt himself tighten at her touch, wanted to hold her, take her down onto the bed. Not the time for that, he told himself.

“I better finish packing,” he said, maybe a bit too crisply.

“I don’t muck around in your cases unless you ask,” she reminded him.

He hoisted the suitcase onto the bed and let it fall open. “When I do ask,” he said, “you’re there. I appreciate it. I’ve come to count on you.” The wind gusted in again, pressing her yellow blouse to her lean torso. “What’ve you got going now?” he asked.

“Doing a piece on police brutality for
Burrow.
Got it about wrapped up.”

“Brutality where?”

“Here in Del Moray.”

Carver wasn’t surprised.

Beth propped her fists on her hips, stretching and arching her back so her surprisingly full breasts jutted out. He wondered if she might be trying to seduce him. It was sometimes impossible to tell with her. “Blood still runs hot in some of those retired folks,” she said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Sounded to me as if you took a liking to this Hattie Evans.”

“Now you’re thinking the way she does,” he said.

A powerboat snarled past out at sea, the tone of its motor wavering whenever it bucked and its prop broke free of the waves. “I’ve seen some things. Maybe she’s seen some of the same things. Blood runs hot in other ways, too, Fred, so you be careful.”

What was she hinting at? She often seemed aware of matters he had no knowledge of, which annoyed him. Her years in the Chicago slums, her high life in Florida with Roberto, all that drug money. But it wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen under some rocks himself. She knew that. They never kidded each other about who was purest.

She said, “Something looks like it’s gonna pop over there in retirement city, you clue me in soon as you can, okay, Fred?”

“I always do.” He leaned on his cane and looked at her. The angry snarling of the speedboat had faded, and the scorching, humid quietude of the coast closed in behind it. More wind pressed in through the window, along with the whisper of surf from the beach. “There’s no reason to remind me,” he said. “What’s wrong, you feeling insecure?”

She kissed him on the lips, barely using the tip of her tongue, stepped away, then lifted his suitcase from the bed and laid it on the floor. She placed his unpacked clothes on top of it. The surf murmured some old, old message she seemed to understand, and she smiled. Peeled off her shorts and panties and stretched out on her side on the bed. Her brown legs looked even better, fashion-model long but as muscular as a gymnast’s. The dark, dark triangle in the fork of her thighs pulled at his gaze. He remembered the touch of her tongue.

She said, “C’mere, Fred. I’ll show you insecure.”

He hesitated a few seconds. Would it make any difference if he got into Orlando an hour or so later? He stood in the wind and sound of the ocean, mulling it over, trying not to think with his genitals. He was in love with Beth but she was a weakness. He loathed weakness in himself. Vulnerability. Christ, he loathed it!

A particularly large wave roared in and slapped and sighed on the beach.

“Fred?”

Well, it wasn’t as if he had a schedule.

“Ah, Fred!”

S
OLARTOWN WAS TEN MINUTES
outside of Orlando, a short drive off of Route 50. Carver had driven past it before but barely noticed it despite its vastness. Now he looked at it with full attention. The billboard on the highway described it as a retirement community. To Carver it looked like the first phase of the leveling process that was death.

On either side of the pale, squared stone columns that formed the entrance on Golden Drive, the pastel pink and white concrete wall surrounding Solartown stretched level in either direction, about five feet tall, with medium-size orange trees planted every hundred feet in shallow alcoves. The trees were precisely the same height. There were oranges on the ground beneath some of them. Two Latinos in blue work uniforms were picking up the oranges and dropping them into sacks strapped over their shoulders.

As he turned his ancient Olds convertible onto Golden Drive, Carver saw that the houses, like the orange trees, were all exactly the same height, the same distance apart. They were single-story ranch houses with attached double garages, shallow-pitched roofs with air-conditioning units on top, small porches, and bay windows in what were probably the dining rooms. Some of the garages were on the right, some on the left; that seemed the only difference in the houses other than color. And though colors varied, most of the clapboard-and-stucco structures were painted in pastels, with blue and pink predominating. The shingled roofs were all pale gray to reflect the sun. Most of the yards were a combination of lawn and colored gravel, and most had palms and decorative citrus trees growing in them. There were occasional lawn ornaments, from artificial flamingos and miniature windmills to religious icons. Carver drove along the flat, smooth pavement to K Street, then went east until he reached Pelican Lane, where Hattie Evans lived and grieved.

After checking house numbers, he turned right. There wasn’t another car in sight, except occasionally in the shadows of garages whose doors had been left open. The heat and lack of shade made it vehicular brutality to park a car outside in the driveway or street. There were golf carts hooked up to chargers in some of the garages. Solartown’s billboard had boasted of a golf course as well as a restaurant, community entertainment center, and medical facilities. One could eat, golf, and play bocce ball and never leave here right through to the end.

The way Jerome Evans had.

Carver squinted through the windshield to make sure the address number on the pale-blue house was Hattie’s, then parked the Olds in the driveway. The canvas top had been up and the air conditioner blasting and it was cool in the car. When he got out and stood supported by his cane, the heat attacked him as if he’d just flung open a blast furnace door. It was the curse of air-conditioning, he decided, that when you left it the heat was doubly vicious, as if trying to make you suffer for your temporary escape.

The Olds’s big engine, hot from the drive, ticked in the sun as he limped up the driveway to the small concrete porch and pressed the doorbell button with his cane. Inside the house, barely audible, Westminster chimes imitated Big Ben half a world away in a cooler clime.

After a few searing minutes even in the shade of the jutting porch roof, the door, a slightly darker blue than the rest of the house, eased open and Hattie Evans stared out at Carver.

She said, “Have you found out anything?”

“Found my way here,” Carver said. He limped past her, in from the heat. “Sun’s tough on us baldheaded guys.”

She closed the door. “I know. My Jerome lost most of his hair twenty years ago. Virile men lose their hair earliest in life.”

“That’s absolutely true,” Carver said, catching a sweet whiff of roses and thinking about his conversation with Beth that morning, wondering fleetingly about Hattie Evans.

He was in a small but well-furnished living room. The furniture was light oak and teak. There was a low, cream-colored sofa, a matching Lazy-Boy recliner with its footrest raised. In one corner was a tall display cabinet full of plates, not the collector kind with Norman Rockwell scenes, or likenesses of John Wayne or Elvis, but mismatched dinner and luncheon plates of elegant designs and patterns. On another wall was a bleached wood entertainment center that contained mostly books and framed photographs, but also a television with a cable box on top. It was cool in the living room. Felt good.

Hattie said, “Baby oil.”

“Pardon?”

“Try baby oil on your bald head,” she said. “It’s good for one end and the other. Keeps you from getting sore when you’re outside in the sun. Jerome used it and hardly ever wore a hat. You couldn’t get that man in a hat any sooner than you could get him to wear a tie.” The hard, handsome lines of her face softened as she remembered her husband.

Through the window, Carver saw a big blue Lincoln pass like a mirage in the sun-washed street. It hadn’t made a sound, and he found himself surprised he’d seen it, almost wondering if it had been real. He said, “Not much goes on around here, does it, Hattie?”

“Not out where it can be seen, anyway. This is a retirement community, so the people who run it don’t encourage children or any kind of raucous behavior. A buyer has to be at least fifty-five years old to become a home or condo owner in Solartown, and the presence of children is definitely discouraged, even as guests.”

“You sound as if you disagree with that policy,” Carver said.

Hattie smiled sadly. “I wouldn’t mind it if some nice young couple with children moved in next door. On the other hand, I understand why some residents want their hard-earned peace to remain undisturbed.”

Until it merges with the peace of the grave, Carver thought, then chastised himself for being morbid.

“Contrary to what some people might believe,” Hattie said, “retired schoolteachers miss children.”

Carver shifted his weight more heavily over his cane and nodded. He’d have thought otherwise.

“I’ve forgotten my manners,” Hattie said, as if surprised. “Please sit down, Mr. Carver, and I’ll prepare some cool drinks. We—I have orange juice, grapefruit juice. Pepsi-Cola if you don’t mind diet.”

“Nothing, thanks,” Carver said, not moving to sit down. “What I’d really like is for you to come with me in my car and show me around Solartown.”

“If you’re going to continue standing there leaving a dent in the carpet from the tip of your cane, then let’s go.”

She was already moving toward the door, a woman of decision and action.

Properly chastised, Carver followed.

“What exactly do you want to see?” she asked, pausing at a closet near the door to get a navy-blue pillbox hat and plunk it on her head. Carver wondered if she wore hats because her hair was thinning.

“Oh, I just want a general view of things. So I can get a feel for the place.”

“Very good, Mr. Carver.” Her tone suggested she was voicing approval of his preparation for a test.

Maybe that was how she meant it exactly.

Hattie sat on the passenger side of the Olds’s wide front seat while Carver drove. She directed him along streets with names like Reward Lane, Restful Avenue, Pension Drive. They were the north-south streets. The streets that ran east and west were lettered alphabetically.

After weaving among side streets with their middle-class, attractive but monotonous pastel houses, navigator Hattie directed Carver south on Golden Drive. They rolled past Z Street and beyond A South, B South, all the way past M South, where Golden was divided by a grassy median and widened to run toward a complex of low beige brick buildings.

“That’s the community center,” Hattie said. “Want to stop and look it over?”

Carver parked in front of a clean beige structure with
RECREATION CENTER
lettered in gold on a dark-brown sign. “Lead on,” he said, turning off the engine.

She did.

He limped behind Hattie into the cool rec center. A few feet inside the glazed-glass double doors was a bulletin board with notices pinned to it announcing schedules for weaving, flower arrangement, exercise classes, literary discussion groups, swimming parties, a golf and tennis tournament. There was also a smattering of 3 × 5 cards advertising cars, golf carts, and household items for sale.

Hattie smiled and nodded hello to several gray-haired women as she led Carver along a wide, cool central corridor, past a small and busy bowling alley, past windows overlooking an Olympic-size pool where half a dozen older men and women were splashing about like kids, beyond rooms where various arts and crafts classes were in progress. Near the back of the center they stood at a floor-to-ceiling window and looked out at tennis courts, and beyond them a well-tended eighteen-hole golf course. Two golfers were jouncing on a yellow golf cart toward a distant green. On the third green, not far from where Hattie and Carver stood, a pudgy man in checked pants and a tight red pullover stood very still and studied a six-foot putt. Carver and Hattie were silent, as if their voices might disturb the golfer even at this distance and behind glass. Finally he tapped the ball neatly into the cup. Carver thought he should enter the tournament.

“Nice setup,” Carver said, waving his arm in a motion that took in the rec center and outside facilities.

“That’s why Jerome and I decided on this place to retire to,” Hattie told him.

“Did Jerome golf?”

“Sometimes, but he wasn’t a fanatic. Not like some of these retired fools who’d try to play right through a heart attack.”

Beyond the trees on the far side of the course rose a circular, four-story building with a lot of windows winking in the sunlight. It seemed to be constructed of the same beige brick as the rec center. Carver asked Hattie if it was part of Solartown.

“That’s our medical center,” she said without emotion. “Where Jerome died.”

They turned away from the view and she showed Carver the restaurant, which was like a Denny’s only fancier and with more tables. “Food’s not bad,” she said, “and sometimes they have fashion shows here. Older male and female models wearing the kind of apparel bought by the people here in Solartown.”

Apparel, Carver thought. The schoolteacher making itself evident again in Hattie. He said, “I think I’ll drop you off at home, then drive by the medical center and talk to Jerome’s doctor.”