For a few minutes he sat with the car’s engine idling, thinking about Beth’s pregnancy. He couldn’t deny he didn’t want to be a father again. It didn’t make sense at his age, in his circumstances. It would cause problems, turn his life upside down and sideways.
But at the same time, he couldn’t deny he was tickled by the prospect.
Nothing’s simple, he thought, and he yanked the transmission lever to drive.
The apartment Marla had moved to after Graystone was a notch down the economic scale. Bailock Avenue was in a rough part of town known for its drug-culture inhabitants and the accompanying crimes of burglary and assault. Kids growing up on Bailock were introduced to guns before getting acquainted with Dr. Seuss, and probably didn’t understand why Sam I Am didn’t simply pack a semiautomatic and force green eggs and ham on anyone he chose.
Driving along the avenue of tired brick-and-frame houses and ruined lives, Carver wondered if Marla Cloy was involved with drugs as user or dealer. It was a possibility everywhere these days, but especially in Florida, home of sun, fun, and gun, and drug smugglers’ port of call.
Her temporary apartment after leaving Graystone wasn’t really an apartment, but half of a small frame duplex. The building needed painting so badly it had been weathered to a dull gray with only traces of its once-white color showing in grainy streaks, as if an incompetent artist had attempted light breaking through an overcast sky.
Carver parked at the curb in front of the duplex, behind a ten-year-old rusty Plymouth that had once been a taxi. Then he climbed out of the Olds and made his way along a cracked and uneven sidewalk to the sagging porch.
The wooden porch floor was so spongy, he was careful not to lean with much weight on his cane; he feared its tip might penetrate a termite-infested plank.
Only half of the duplex was occupied. A middle-aged, dispirited-looking woman responded to his knock and opened the door to the occupied part, the half with curtains. She identified herself as Fern Neptune, the duplex’s owner and manager. Her body odor was horrific and almost overmatched the bourbon fumes she breathed. She had poorly hennaed hair, mottled skin, and a bulbous and veiny nose that fairly or unfairly screamed of alcoholism.
She somehow managed to look haughty and told Carver up front she didn’t have much time for him. She remembered Marla Cloy, of course, but had only rented the other half of the duplex to her for a week or so until she could move out of town. “Cheaper than a motel,” Fern said smugly, and just as anonymously. Not getting to know the tenants was the best way for a landlord, she said. It prevented pain and problems in the long run.
No, Marla hadn’t associated with the neighbors, Fern told him, but that wasn’t unusual in this part of town. No, there were never any late-night goings-on or unusual sounds coming from the other side of the duplex. And no, Marla Cloy didn’t entertain men or throw wild parties or play her stereo too loud-if she even owned a stereo.
“An unusually quiet and well-behaved woman,” Carver commented.
“I don’t know about all her behavior,” Fern said. She smiled and exposed incredibly crooked and yellowed teeth. “What they say’s true, you know, about still water running deep.”
“It can be a breeding farm for mosquitoes, too,” Carver said.
She glanced pointedly at her wristwatch, then faded back into the dimness of her duplex’s interior and closed the door halfway, letting Carver know she was finished talking to him. He was afraid she was going to inform him that time had flown.
“Let me give you my card,” he said. “Will you call me if you learn or think of anything else about Marla Cloy?”
“No,” she said flatly, ignoring the card he’d extended to her. “I don’t gossip about my tenants, past or present. Wouldn’t be in the landlord business long if I did that.”
“I guess you’re right,” he said, thinking it might be to his advantage in the future to stay on Fern’s good side-insofar as she had one.
He could feel her staring at him as he carefully negotiated the tilted, uneven sidewalk to return to his car.
After starting the Olds, he jockeyed around the old Plymouth parked in front of it, then accelerated along Bailock. The stale odor Fern Neptune had exuded seemed to cling to his clothes.
He cranked down the driver’s-side window and let warm but fresh air swirl into the car, barely noticing the black minivan that fell in behind him almost a block back, riding low and listing to the left to accommodate the great weight of the massive man behind the steering wheel.
14
Sleepy Hollow, the trailer court where Wallace and Sybil Cloy, Marla’s parents, lived, was almost twenty miles outside Orlando. Carver saw a sign featuring the cartoonlike silhouette of a headless horseman, slowed the car, and turned right onto Crane Drive.
Trailer courts in Florida were unlike those in other parts of the country. One difference was that their residents usually insisted on the term “mobile home” rather than “trailer.” Carver, who had once lived in one himself and rather liked it, still thought of them as trailers even as he called them mobile homes.
Sleepy Hollow’s streets were alphabetized and apparently all intersected Crane Drive. The lots were landscaped and relatively large, with established trees and shrubs. The trailers themselves were mostly double-wides, with artfully concealed wheels and an air of permanence about them.
The Cloy trailer was a block off Crane on L Street. It was a white double-wide with wooden latticework around the undercarriage, a porch with a blue-and-white striped metal awning over it, and a small backyard enclosed by a four-foot-high chain-link fence. Though there was no carport, there was a concrete driveway that ended abruptly near the north side of the trailer. A late-model blue Oldsmobile was parked in the driveway up close to the trailer. Beyond it Carver could see a black kettle-style barbecue smoker and two blue-webbed aluminum lawn chairs on the grass that began at the driveway’s end. Next to one of the chairs was a Coors beer can in a coiled metal holder at the top of a rod stuck in the ground.
He parked the Olds behind its newer, smaller cousin, then got out and limped over the hard ground toward the porch with the awning roof. Tiny insects swarmed into the air each time the tip of his cane entered the grass.
The Cloys had heard him arrive. He was about to knock on the white metal door with his cane when the knob rotated and the door opened. A tall, thin woman in a salmon-colored, loose-fitting dress looked at him in a way that asked what he wanted. She was in her late fifties, with gray-streaked black hair and deeply etched lines around blue eyes that seemed to strain for focus. Her face conveyed a kind of amiable strength lent by classic bone structure. “You can tell she was once a beautiful woman,” they would say about her someday when she was laid out for view in her casket. The beauty of her youth lay immortal just beneath the surface of time.
“Mrs. Sybil Cloy?” Carver asked.
She nodded, smiling, obviously wondering who he was.
“Detective Fred Carver,” he said. “I’m here to ask a few questions in regard to your daughter Marla’s complaints about Joel Brant.” Let her assume he was with the police. Let them all assume it, as long as he didn’t actually say it.
Sybil chewed on her lower lip and looked confused. “What kind of complaints?”
Carver was surprised Marla hadn’t confided her fears to her family. But maybe they weren’t close. “She says Brant is threatening her.”
“About what?” Sybil asked.
“She doesn’t know. He seems to be stalking her.”
Sybil turned her head toward someone behind her. “It’s a detective,” she said, “saying some man is threatening Marla.”