“You’re probably right,” Carver said, “but I owe it to Henry to ask around. Maybe, if nothing else, I can put his mind at ease.”
“I sure hope so,” the chief said. “I wouldn’t want his fixation about Rainer to run outa control, maybe prompt him to do something really foolish. Henry still got his service revolver?”
“He probably does,” Carver said.
“Great.” Wicke waved a hand. “But then, what the hell, every nut case in Florida’s got a gun, so why not Henry?”
Carver couldn’t answer that one. He thanked Chief Wicke for taking time to talk to him, then limped from the office. The curly-haired cop at the Selectric stared at him on the way out. The woman behind the desk smiled at him like a grandmother who’d just fed him cookies. Smalltown life.
It was much hotter outside. The sky was cloudless and the sun was having its way. There was a slight breeze off the ocean, but it was warm and created the effect of a convection oven. As he set the cane on the loose chat and limped back to the Olds, Carver could feel the sun’s heat on his bald pate. Probably he should buy a hat.
When he got back to Henry’s cottage, he punched out Efhe’s number on the cheap digital phone. A woman answered. Effie’s mother? Carver asked if he could talk to Effie, for a moment feeling like a nervous tenth grader working up the nerve to ask for a date. “Just a minute,” the woman said suspiciously. It was more like three minutes before Effie came to the phone.
In the interest of propriety, Carver kept the conversation short. He asked Effie for the names of people on Key Montaigne who were particularly friendly with or had dealings with Henry. Sounding as enthusiastic as if he’d provided a last-chance date for the prom, she said she’d make up a list and bicycle over and give it to him.
After thanking her and hanging up on her boundless energy, he called Faith United Hospital in Miami and asked about Henry Tiller’s condition.
Satisfactory, he was told. Mr. Tiller had been on the operating table three hours while surgeons explored and treated his internal injuries. Soon he’d be able to accept brief phone calls and have visitors, but not today or tonight.
After replacing the receiver, Carver found a can of Budweiser in the back of Henry’s refrigerator and sat on the front porch, sipping beer and looking out at the sea. At the sleek white form of the docked Miss Behavin’. He thought about his conversation with Chief Wicke, who seemed a competent and sensible man with no ax to grind, though maybe something of a toady for the island’s rich residents who no doubt kept him in office, politics being politics.
Maybe the chief was right, and Henry was in the gray area between reality and the tricks advanced age played on body and mind. The place where past and present mixed with never.
The beer can was empty, and Carver was still considering Henry’s questionable instincts, when he heard bike tires crunching in the driveway and Effie pedaled into view on her weatherworn Schwinn.
8
One of the names on Effie’s list was Katia Marsh, an employee of the Oceanography Research Center. After lunch, Carver found the handful of tourist brochures he’d picked up before crossing the narrow bridge to the island. The research center had its own brochure, a slick foldout that showed a low, buff-colored building perched on the edge of the sea. There were several fenced-in areas near it that reminded Carver of enclosed tennis courts, but he saw that inside the cages of chain-link fencing were rectangular pools that must contain sea life. There was a shot of a room where various tidal-pool creatures could be observed and handled by visitors. The back wall of the room was a glass window looking in on a tank wherein a large shark swam. A dark-haired man in a white smock and a stoop-shouldered woman with a pinched nose and pointed chin were smiling and observing the observers. Carver wondered if the woman was Katia Marsh.
It took only about ten minutes to drive the Olds down Shoreline and then follow the signs to the research center. It looked exactly like its photo in the brochure, but there was also a businesslike, functional feel to the place that gave the impression it existed primarily for research, and the tourist angle was merely a side endeavor to provide financing.
Carver noticed immediately that the research center provided an almost clear view of the Rainer estate, certainly a better view than from Henry’s cottage. It was no mystery to Carver why Henry had spent time at the center and gotten to know one of its employees.
He left the Olds parked in the shade of a grouping of gigantic palm trees with their lower trunks painted white. Beyond the palms was a low buffer of what looked like old telephone poles laid out horizontally and fixed in place with heavy stakes, then a stretch of rocky soil and a wooden pier jutting out to deep green water. A dock was built perpendicular to the pier, but no boat was there. Old truck tires were lashed to the weathered wood of both pier and dock to prevent damage when hulls bumped against them.
Carver turned his back on the sea and limped through the sun’s glare to the research center. He pushed open a door that led to a cool, gray-carpeted room whose walls were lined with information charts and underwater photographs. A thirtyish couple dressed like tourists was staring at some of the photos, moving in the trancelike shuffle of people combining vacation and edification. The man was holding an infant who gazed at Carver with incredibly round, curious eyes. In the back wall was a door lettered tide pool room, please touch.
A small stuffed hammerhead shark was mounted in a glass case in the center of the room, swimming perpetually toward the door. The guy carrying the infant glanced at it, then left the woman and ambled over to stand and stare. Other than that, not much seemed to be happening here among the posters and enlarged photos of sea horses and sharks. Carver limped over and opened the door to the Tide Pool Room.
He was on a square steel landing from which half a dozen black-enameled metal steps descended to a concrete floor. The Tide Pool Room was blue-painted cinder block, the bottom half of which was below ground level. Not the usual sort of construction in southern Florida, but Carver figured it was to lend strength to the sides of the tank where the big shark swam in endless circles, eyeing the outside world with the unconcerned expression of an expert poker player with aces in the hole. What, me wanna get out and devour a couple of tourists? Naw!
The seaward wall was thick glass from top to bottom to provide a view of the shark. Lined along the other three walls were what looked like large trays on wooden legs. There were a few inches of seawater in the trays, and coral and plant life. And an assortment of creatures that might be found in the shallow reaches of the sea and in tide pools left by receding waves. Two elderly women were standing near one of the trays. They wore baggy knee-length shorts and identical blue T-shirts lettered last heterosexual virgin on key west. The larger of the two was poking an exploratory finger at the top of a starfish. The other woman was glaring with distaste at a large crablike creature that was furiously waving its antennae as if warning her to keep hands off, it had had enough of people like this for one day.
Watching this all with an expression as unreadable as the shark’s was a blond woman in her twenties, wearing a white smock like the ones in the brochure photos. But she wasn’t at all like the woman in the brochure. She was enticingly on the plump side and almost beautiful, with a squarish face, large blue eyes, and a ski-jump nose. Her blond hair was cut short and hung straight at the sides and in bangs over her wide forehead. It was a simple, convenient hairdo, just right for jumping in the water and frolicking with the dolphins, then shaking dry, but on her it seemed stylish.