“Politically correct,” Desoto observed, “and possibly correct all the way down the line. When you eliminate the improbable, whatever’s left, however probable, must be the answer.”
“From the same movie as the monkeys and coconuts, I’ll bet.”
“Yes, the same Amazon adventure. What it means is that what you’re mixed up in could be precisely as it appears, a woman being stalked by a psycho with a deadly compulsion, and Beth’s sized it up accurately.”
“Maybe she’ll change her mind,” Carver said.
“Tell her to be careful. I mean, a fire and three dead people.” Desoto languidly waved a hand, flashing a gold cuff link. “Who knows what might happen?”
Desoto had never before asked him to urge Beth to be careful. It struck Carver as odd that he’d worry so about Beth, a woman he accepted only grudgingly because she was Carver’s lover. It was eerie. Desoto had instincts like sensitive radar, especially when women were involved. He seemed somehow to know something, to sense that Beth needed particular protection and care.
Strangely enough, that even more than the doctor’s diagnosis brought home to Carver the unalterable and monumental fact of Beth’s pregnancy.
“You all right, amigo?”
“Sure. Heat’s been getting to me, is all.”
Carver held up the file folder and thanked Desoto, then made for the door.
“You take care,” Desoto said behind him in a concerned voice. “This kind of heat, you’ve got to baby yourself.”
12
Carver ordered a hamburger and a draft Budweiser for lunch in a restaurant on Robinson Street and sat in a booth by the window, examining the contents of the file Desoto had given him. It was cool in the restaurant, in pleasant contrast to the sunbaked street and sweltering traffic on the other side of the window. The exhaust fumes of passing cars rose in shimmers of refracted light, beautiful even as they slowly poisoned the air. A heavyset man in a sweat-stained blue T-shirt, wearing a bandana around his neck, trudged past outside and glanced in at Carver’s beer mug with an expression of pure longing. Carver finished his hamburger, drained the contents of the mug, and ordered another beer.
When the second full and frosty mug was placed before him, he took a sip, then bent over the opened file with increased concentration.
Marla Cloy’s present address was there, as well as her previous addresses in Orlando. The license number of her 1987 Toyota Corolla was listed. The extent of her criminality was that she’d pled guilty and paid a fine for a speeding ticket last year. Bonnie Parker she wasn’t.
Her parents’ address was in the file. Carver planned on talking to them. But first he’d check out Marla’s address on Graystone, the apartment building that, according to the file, had suffered a serious fire several months ago that resulted in the deaths of three tenants. He lifted a page and found the names of the victims: Rita and David Kern, a married couple, and a woman named Gail Rogers.
The later address on Bailock might provide some information, though Marla had stayed there only a week before relocating to Del Moray. It was the Graystone address, and the fire, that Carver’s gut told him might yield the most insight.
He closed the file folder, finished his beer, then left a ten- and a five-dollar bill on the table to cover lunch.
As he pushed open the restaurant’s thick oak door, humid heat closed in and enveloped him like warm water. Remembering the way the guy in the blue shirt and bandana had gazed longingly at his cold beer, he limped reluctantly outside. All the way to where the Olds was parked, he could feel heat from the sidewalk radiating through the thin soles of his moccasins, softening the leather so that he was aware of even small objects and imperfections in the concrete.
The Graystone Avenue apartment building showed no sign of having been burned. It was a three-story, beige brick structure with three small, obviously nonfunctional, decorative dormers spaced evenly on its roof. The dormers’ windows were mere framed wooden panels painted sky blue with white horizontal streaks, as if they were reflecting light. The building’s real windows were flanked by narrow black shutters that were no more functional than the dormers. The door to the vestibule was tinted glass and topped by a fan-shaped transom with black spokes. A thick, jagged crack that obviously had been recently tuck-pointed ran like a lightning streak from just beneath one of the building’s front windows down the foundation to disappear behind low-lying thick shrubbery. Carver thought it might be evidence of the fire; he’d seen brick walls wave, crack, and crumble in the intense heat of a major fire. It was an old building, but well kept, in a block of similar buildings not so well maintained. Most of the small front lawns needed mowing and were browned by the sun. Though the lawn in front of Marla’s previous address had brown patches, it was mowed and trimmed, and there was an oleander tree in the front yard that had been neatly pruned.
Carver left the Olds unlocked, as he always did in questionable neighborhoods, so car thieves wouldn’t slash the canvas top to gain access, which guaranteed a major expense if the vehicle was later recovered. He waited for a dusty black pickup truck to rattle and rumble its way down Graystone, then he crossed the street and passed through the dappled light beneath the oleander tree and approached the door with the fan-shaped transom.
The vestibule was mostly pink marble with a gray vein, crisscrossed with fine cracks that suggested antiquity. According to Desoto, Marla Cloy had lived in apartment 3-B. Carver checked the names above the mailboxes and saw that a D. Thatcher lived there now.
The building didn’t have an elevator. Steel stairs, painted beige, that probably had replaced the original wood stairs, angled upward toward brilliant light streaming through a window on an upper-floor landing.
As he set his cane’s tip and began climbing, Carver decided to leave D. Thatcher for last. It was the neighboring apartments that interested him most.
He was in excellent physical condition except for his permanently locked left knee. But the higher he climbed, the more stifling the building became. Ascending toward the pure, blinding light made going up the stairs seem like a near-death experience. He hoped it wasn’t.
By the time he reached the third floor, he was slightly short of breath and perspiring.
After waiting a minute until he’d cooled down, he made his way to apartment 3-C, directly across the hall from Marla Cloy’s old apartment.
He knocked, got no answer, and moved across the hall to 3-A. He could hear a radio or TV playing inside, so he rapped loudly with the crook of his cane.
The muffled music and voices inside were suddenly quiet, as if Carver had surprised transgressors at play.
The door opened, the smell of onions cooking emerged, and a stooped, gray-haired woman in her sixties cocked her head and stared inquisitively at Carver.
“I’m looking for Marla Cloy,” he said. “I was told she lived at this address, but I’m not sure which apartment’s hers.”
“Her name downstairs on the mailboxes?” the woman asked.
“Couldn’t find it.”
“Then you probably got the wrong address. I couldn’t help you much, anyways. Only lived here two months. But I never heard of any Norma Cloy.”
“Marla,” Carver corrected, and apologized for disturbing her.
He got similar results from the occupants of 3-D and 3-G. Apparently the building had a rapid tenant turnover rate. Not unusual in this kind of neighborhood.
When he knocked on the door to 3-B, Marla’s old apartment, he heard movement inside almost immediately.
He’d expected D. Thatcher to be a woman, using her initial to disguise her gender for safety’s sake. But the door was opened by a tall, blond man wearing pleated gray slacks and a tight blue pullover shirt that showed off his weightlifter’s build.
He stood with his feet spread wide and his arms at his sides, hands turned palms backward, elbows crooked so they rode far out from his waist. It was the way people stood underwater.