Spark (20 page)

He waited until the man and woman had gotten into their ersatz convertible and departed. It was wise not to let anyone see him leave Beth’s room, even an apparently vacationing couple from out of state.

The lot was deserted now in the thick morning sunlight. He nodded good-bye to Beth and slipped out the door. Heard her say, “Later, lover,” as the latch clicked solidly behind him.

He twisted the knob both directions to make sure the door was locked.

The Olds was parked on the edge of the lot, in partial shade from a grouping of date palms. The hazed plastic rear window of the canvas top, the overlaying jagged shadows of the palm fronds, kept Carver from noticing until he was almost to the car that there was a figure on the passenger side of the front seat.

He stopped and planted his cane in loose gravel, feeling his adrenaline kick in as if he’d just downed a jolt of hundred-proof liquor. The Colt was in its belt holster beneath his untucked, baggy tropical shirt, multicolored flowers and birds of paradise on a black background. He touched its comforting bulk, keeping his thumb beneath the hem of the wild shirt so he could get the gun out in a hurry if necessary.

A breeze built up with a sound like a sigh and rattled the palm fronds overhead, causing the shadows to waver and making it even more difficult to see in through the Olds’s back window. Carver moved forward, changing course slightly so he could approach the car from a different angle.

Through the clearer side window he saw that the figure in the Olds was familiar.

It took a few seconds for the penny to drop.

Roger Karl.

Carver raised his shirt enough for his hand to make contact with the checked butt of the Colt, limping closer to the car.

Karl didn’t move. If he’d heard Carver’s approach with the cane on the gravel, he gave no indication. He continued to sit slumped with his head down, as if he might be studying something in his lap.

A few feet from the Olds, Carver recognized the perfect stillness of his passenger, the subtle but chilling difference between the animate and inanimate. Roger Karl’s category in Twenty Questions had changed from animal to mineral. Carver glanced quickly about and limped to the passenger-side door and opened it.

Karl sat with his knees apart and his ankles crossed. His head was bowed as if it had become unbearably heavy, his jaw slack. His hands were folded limply in his lap. The fingers were as pale as bone. His white shirt front and the lap of his pastel yellow slacks were crusted with blood, but there was very little blood on the seat, and only half a dozen flies were feasting on what had been Roger Karl; he’d been dead when he was placed in the car. His open mouth was filled with coagulated blood and his lips and chin were caked with darker dried blood. Despite the relaxed position of his body, there was agony and horror in his wide eyes and the pitiful twist of his brow. In his mouth, on his chin, even in the blood on his shirt, was a lumpy substance he’d vomited, and throughout the crusted scarlet-brown mess tiny glass splinters glinted like shards of diamond.

Carver had seen this before in Karl’s kitchen, the dead dog by the stove. Not long ago, Roger Karl had been forced to eat hamburger laced with ground glass.

Gently closing the car door, Carver spat out the tainted, coppery taste in his mouth. He couldn’t spit out the fear. He limped toward his room.

The door looked okay but he entered with the Colt drawn, prepared to use it, his senses buzzing.

But the room was empty, cool, deceptively calm and restful, as if nothing unusual had happened and there wasn’t a dead bagman outside in Carver’s car.

He went to the phone, pecked out the number of Beth’s room, then told her what had happened and to stay where she was with her door locked.

Then he phoned Hattie Evans and told her he’d be late but didn’t tell her why.

Then he placed the Colt in the back of a dresser drawer and called Desoto.

T
HE UNIFORMS ARRIVED FIRST,
and in a hurry, two of them in a dusty Orlando patrol car with siren warbling and red and blue roof-bar lights winking feebly against the bright sun. Then an ambulance. No need for that. Then Desoto and a short, blond plainclothes cop Carver recognized as Captain Harvey Metzger. The captain had joined the department not long after Carver had been pensioned into civilian life, and he’d soon gained the kind of reputation Heinrich Himmler would have envied.

The uniforms had gotten the story from Carver, not too complicated as Carver told it, warming up for what he knew was coming. A morning surprise, a dead man in his car. Yes, he knew the man’s identity. Roger Karl. Carver explained to them how he was investigating the death of Jerome Evans, and he’d seen Karl in Fort Lauderdale with a big man who’d beaten him—Carver—so he’d followed Karl to his apartment, gone there later to confront him, and found he’d left, and that was about all he knew concerning Karl until this morning.

He was running through this again but in greater detail for Desoto and Captain Metzger, when a blue Chevy with a SOLARTOWN POSSE bumper sticker drove into the lot and parked. An elderly guy in a green golf shirt, sagging Levi’s, and white sneakers climbed out and talked to one of the uniforms.

As Carver watched, the old guy clenched his fists, jutted out his jaw, and looked righteous and angry. A murder, right here on the edge of Solartown and practically under the Posse’s noses. He was as outraged as if an adult movie theater had opened up.

Everyone stopped talking as the police photographer and technicians stood back and Karl’s body was removed from Carver’s car and zipped into a plastic body bag. Even where they were standing fifty feet away, the ratchety sound of the zipper ripped through the air and gave Carver a chill.

“We’re gonna have to keep your vehicle for a while,” Metzger said to Carver. He was one of those military-erect short men who seemed to feel that every vertical inch was precious and stood as if suspended by a string attached to the top of his head. Hattie’s counterpart in posture. His blue eyes were shrewd and ornery in his fortyish, pockmarked face. He had an underslung chin and an oversize, pointed nose that lent him a birdlike, predatory expression. “It’ll be towed. You can ride with us into Orlando so we can get your statement officially.”

Carver leaned on his cane and nodded, not feeling so good. Desoto, as always a fashion plate at the crime scene, stood with his hands in the pockets of his cream-colored suit and looked unconcerned yet thoughtful, like a leading man between takes on a movie shoot. Desoto was in a delicate position now, Carver knew, and it would be best not to bring up Adam Beed’s name in connection with Karl’s death. The only thing wrong with that, Carver reflected, slapping at a mosquito that had lit on his sweaty forearm, was that Beed was probably the killer.

Desoto glanced over at Carver, and Carver saw the message in his somber brown eyes: Metzger wouldn’t understand. Well, Desoto was doubtless right about that. Carver had heard plenty about Metzger. The little martinet captain wasn’t the type to look lightly on a kink in investigative procedure, however well intentioned. In Metzger’s book, the means justified the means.

After prudently holding his silence during the drive in to the city, Carver gave his statement in Desoto’s office in the Municipal Justice Building. A tape was running, and Captain Metzger was standing at parade rest with his head tilted slightly to the side, listening to Carver as if trying to pick up something at a decibel level the recorder might miss.

Carver went into his highwire act for the police. He told them about being in Beth’s room. They’d want to get her statement, but that was okay. She’d had experience in fencing with the law, in the useful art of deflecting the truth without exactly lying.

It was an art Carver was trying to practice now, as he sat in a chair before Desoto’s desk, speaking naturally, knowing the sensitive microphone would get every word, every breath, occasionally answering a question from Metzger or Desoto, but for the most part relating in his own words his version of the morning and what had led up to it. Working without a net, carefully placing one word in front of another and trying not to fall.

As he spoke, he didn’t look at Desoto, who sat impassively in his desk chair. The portable Sony on the windowsill, usually throbbing with soft Latin background music, was silent. Desoto’s dark eyes were deep and concerned, seeing a future that might not be what he’d planned. Carver didn’t so much mind being up against the wall with the police, but he hated having drawn Desoto into the mess.

So he did what so many of the best liars do—he told the truth, but selectively. What needed to be put into his story, he included, and accurately. He told the recorder about being hired by Hattie Evans, about probing into the matter of Jerome Evans’s death, summoning Beth to come to Solartown to work with him, being beaten up. He left out identifying his assailant, and Desoto’s involvement. He said that, while in Lauderdale, he’d seen the man who’d beaten him having breakfast with Roger Karl. Carver omitted Dr. Jamie Sanchez, talked about following Karl, being roughed up by the giant in bib overalls, then going to Karl’s apartment on Morning Star and discovering Karl had left and taken his clothes with him. Cut to this morning then with Beth, but no mention of computers or stolen medical files, and then finding Karl’s body in the Olds after leaving Beth’s room at the Warm Sands.

There. That brought things up to date. He felt perversely proud. He’d wrapped up his statement without having lied, and without having mentioned the involvement of Val or Desoto.

“That’s it, Mr. Carver?” Metzger asked. He didn’t look or sound dubious. Which meant nothing.

“It,” Carver said.

“A busy time for you.”

“And painful.”

Metzger pulled a pack of Salems from an inside pocket and touched the flame of a silver lighter to a filter-tip cigarette. As he clicked the hinged cap back down on the lighter, he held the pack out toward Carver.

Carver told him no thanks.

“You don’t smoke?”

“A cigar now and then,” Carver said.

“Explains the ashes in your car’s ashtray.”

Carver glanced at Desoto, who looked remotely amused. Metzger was putting on the clever act to show how futile it would be for Carver to lie. Scare him into thinking he might be in deep trouble if his statement didn’t hold up.

“Anything at all in your statement you might want to change before we have it transcribed?” Metzger asked. “Before we hang it around your neck and make it yours forever, to float or to sink?” He said this with a straight face.

“No,” Carver told him, “it’s as accurate as my memory can make it.”

“Good. I figured you’d be straight with us. You and Lieutenant Desoto know each other well, right?”

Carver said that was right. Desoto said nothing.

Metzger inhaled, exhaled. He held his cigarette between thumb and forefinger, with the burning end in toward his cupped palm, as if shielding the ember from the wind. “You were on the force here, I’m told. I don’t remember you.”

“It was before you came here,” Carver said.

“I’ve been here almost five years.”

“I’ve been gone five.”

“Well, yeah, I recall now hearing about you and the shooting at that little market. Off-duty, too. A shitty thing to happen. You had the reputation of a good cop.”

Carver said, “I was careless that time.”

“That’s how I saw it, too.” Metzger nodded toward the cane leaning against Desoto’s desk, pointing at it with the dead end of his cigarette. “You pulling disability for the leg?”

“Some.”

“Good.” Metzger walked over and extended his hand to Carver. “We appreciate your help, Mr. Carver. And we’ll get finished with your vehicle soon as possible. You need transportation back to your motel?”

Carver grabbed his cane and stood up over it, shaking hands with Metzger in the same motion. “No, I’ll pick up a rental car here in town.”

“I’ll phone when you can have the car back,” Desoto said. “You gonna be out at the same motel?”

“For a while,” Carver said.

Metzger said, “That’d be a good idea.”

“You gonna let me know what you find?” Carver asked.

Metzger studied the glowing tip of his cigarette. “In the car, you mean?”

“Anywhere.”

“If it concerns you.”

“It’ll concern me,” Carver said. “A dead man sitting in my car, I see that as some sort of message.”

“There’s a possibility hasn’t escaped us,” Metzger said.

“You take care,
amigo
,” Desoto said, trying to hurry Carver out the door before the fragile pane of professional civility was shattered. Metzger was one of those tightly wrapped types with a temper. Frustration became rage became explosion. The sequence was inevitable; the trick was not to be around him when he detonated.

Carver said he’d take care and limped from the office, wondering if Metzger’s intense stare would leave burn marks on the back of his shirt.

He phoned before driving the rented Ford over to Desoto’s condo that evening.

Desoto was wearing a blue sport shirt open at the collar, a gold neck chain, well-cut beige slacks, and beige loafers with silver-tipped tassels on them. His sleek black hair was impeccably combed as always, probably would be if you woke him up at three in the morning. He smiled but at the same time appeared sad as he invited Carver in.

The condo’s living room had deep-red carpeting and drapes. The furniture was made up mostly of black leather or vinyl, stainless steel, high-gloss laminated wood. The carpeting and drapes were deep red. There was an expensive Fisher stereo on a wall shelf, softly pumping out somber Latin music. Not the kind of music Carver would want to listen to if he needed cheering up, but then he wasn’t Desoto. Had never tangoed, and never would.

“Want a drink,
amigo
?” Desoto asked.

Carver said he didn’t and settled into a black leather sling chair with gleaming steel arms. He noticed a painting on the wall behind the sofa, a watercolor of a black man strumming a guitar and grinning fiercely before a backdrop of dark and decrepit slum buildings. Desoto was heavily into art as well as women and Latin music, and, of course, catching the bad guys. Something about this painting drew and held the eye and the conscience. “New one, huh?” Carver said, pointing at it with his cane.