Tiller’s shaggy gray eyebrows knitted in a fierce frown. “Don’t patronize me, goddamnit!”
Carver shrugged and said, “Okay, I won’t. I was, I guess, and I’m sorry.”
“Those people are into some bad shit, Carver. I heard Rainer talking a few times after I knew for sure he’d been gone to sea, and he lied when he was asked where he’d been. I heard him tell somebody that boat hadn’t been away from the dock for a couple of months, but I knew better. He’s lying to cover up something illegal. Every atom in my brain tells me that.”
Carver absently drummed his fingertips in sequence on the desk. Thrrrrump! Thrrrrump! He said, “Well, I see what you mean there.” But he wasn’t sure if he did. If lying was against the law, who’d be left to run the country? So far Henry Tiller hadn’t given him much in the way of hard facts.
“Then there’s the dead boy,” Tiller said.
Carver looked at him. “Huh?”
“Dead kid. Thirteen years old. Washed up on the beach.”
“Rainer’s beach?”
“No, no, farther down the island.” Impatiently. Carver just couldn’t catch on.
“How’d the boy die?”
“Drowned, they say. I say cocaine killed him. There were traces of it in his blood.”
“Maybe he was tripping,” Carver said, “and went for a swim, got too far out.”
“That’s what Wicke says.”
“Wicke?”
“Key Montaigne police chief, Lloyd Wicke. The kid was just another runaway got hisself fucked up on drugs, the way he sees it. The boy’s parents came from somewhere up north and claimed the body, and that was the end of it.”
“You don’t think it should be accidental death?”
“Hell, I dunno! But pieces don’t dovetail, you know what I mean?”
“No,” Carver said, getting exasperated. Henry Tiller had plenty to tell, but he had an oldster’s difficulty in getting it out in logical and comprehensible order.
“Evening after they came to Key Montaigne to claim the kid’s remains, I seen the boy’s father talking to Rainer in Rainer’s big gray Lincoln parked outside Fishback.”
Carver stopped drumming his fingers. The sound was getting on his nerves. “Could be coincidence. Or maybe they even knew each other from some time back, and Rainer was driving along and saw the guy. Or maybe the father’s rental ran out of gas and he was hitchhiking.”
“Coincidence and the Easter Bunny,” Tiller said angrily, fumbling again with his pack of cigarettes, this time so violently Carver could hear the cellophane wrapper crinkling.
“Okay, okay. You tell any of this to the Key Montaigne law?”
“Sure, to Chief Wicke hisself. Bastard didn’t take it too serious. Told me what I wanted to hear, then sent me on my way. I tell you, I got old and learned what it is to be a member of an oppressed minority.”
Carver said, “You think Rainer’s mixed up in drugs?”
“It’s sure as hell possible.”
“More possible than the Easter Bunny,” Carver admitted. “So what do you want me to do, Henry?”
“Go down there and investigate on the sly, find out what’s going on. I know something is.”
Carver leaned far back in his chair, extending his bad leg beneath the desk. “Why are you so interested, Henry?”
Tiller looked mystified for a moment, in that panicky manner of only the very young or very old, the momentarily or forever lost. “Why, I told you, I used to be a cop. Up in Milwaukee, then for a while in Lauderdale. I was plainclothes for a-”
“I see,” Carver interrupted.
Tiller stood up; he must have been an intimidating and powerful man when he was young. “You gonna give it a go, Carver?”
“You haven’t even asked about my rates.”
“I asked Desoto. Figured I better know that before I drove over here. Don’t you worry, I got money saved. I can pay.”
“When you driving back to Key Montaigne?” Carver asked.
“Soon’s I walk out your door.”
“Leave me your phone number and I’ll give you a call. I’d like to talk to Desoto before I tell you yes or no.”
Tiller looked suspicious. “Why would you wanna do that?”
“I don’t want to steal your money, Henry.”
“Fuck you, Carver. You figure I’m some old fool thinking with my prostate gland?”
“No, no, I don’t. That’s nearer the center of judgment for young fools.”
“Fuck you,” Henry Tiller said again. “I spent a lotta years on the force in Milwaukee, and a few more in Lauderdale. I know what’s going on around me. You’ll take the job or you won’t.”
A little puzzled, Carver said, “Yeah, that’s where it stands.”
Tiller yanked a plastic ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket and scrawled a phone number on an envelope on Carver’s desk, then stomped from the office. A minute later Carver saw him drive from the parking lot in a ten-year-old Buick, the cigarette he’d been denying himself jutting from his lips. When the car turned onto Magellan, Carver noticed a “Support Your Local Police” sticker on the rear bumper.
He sat looking out at the glaring heat for a while. A gull circled on rigid wings and swooped low over the courthouse’s red tile roof, then flapped away toward the open, glittering sea. No more beautiful women walked past in the ocean breeze.
Carver had the feeling he was on the edge of something better left unexplored. It was a sensation seldom in error, a sixth sense that increased the odds on survival, and that he too often ignored. Was he dumb enough to ignore it again?
Finally he sighed, dragged the phone across the desk, and called Desoto.
2
After a five-minute wait Desoto came to the phone. “Amigo, what can I do for you?” Soft Latin music played in the background. Carver knew it was from Desoto’s portable Sony perched on the windowsill behind his desk. He could picture Desoto in his office on Hughey in Orlando, spiffily dressed as always, probably in shades of cream, plenty of gold jewelry, black hair flawlessly combed, handsome as the movies’ idea of a romantic bullfighter. Looking more like a dance instructor than a tough cop, but a tough cop nonetheless.
“It’s what you already did for me,” Carver said. “You sent me Henry Tiller.”
“Ah, Henry. Yeah, I talked to him yesterday, thought you were the man he should see. He tell you what was troubling him?”
“He told me,” Carver said. He found himself staring at the chair where Tiller had recently sat. “I’m not so sure about it, though. He seems vague.”
“You do police work in Florida, my friend, you deal with a lotta old people. You know that. The human mind changes with the years. Sometimes following Henry’s logic is like following a bus in traffic, start, stop, detour, but you stay with it and eventually it reaches a destination.”
“Then you agree with him? There’s something going on down on Key Montaigne needs looking into?”
“It’s possible, amigo.” Desoto was quiet for a moment. Then: “Let me tell you about Henry Tiller. He was cop in Milwaukee for a long time, then came down here and was on the force in Lauderdale.”
Carver looked out in the distance.
“Made sergeant and worked plainclothes,” Desoto said. “His wife left him a long time ago, but they had a son, Jerry. Jerry got married and had a son name of Jim, but everybody called him Bump. Three years ago, when Bump was fifteen, he became a runaway and died of a drug overdose up in Panama City. Turns out he’d been hooked on cocaine since he was twelve. That was bad enough, but Henry’s son, Jerry, couldn’t take what had happened to his son and hanged himself. It all got to Henry, and that’s when he took his retirement over in Lauderdale. He aged ten years in six months, they tell me.”
Carver thought about the dead boy found on the beach in Key Montaigne. About his own son, much younger, who’d been a murder victim three years ago. It was something he tried not to think about often, but he could imagine how Henry Tiller must have felt. Must still feel. First his grandson, then his son. Jesus!