“’Cause it’s bullshit. You stop most of the drugs, and their street price’ll go up and so will the crime the addicts commit to pay for their habits. Stop every bit of drugs and people’ll grow their own, or develop new designer drugs. Hell, a good chemist could walk around this place and figure out some way to cook up something gets folks high. And there’s always somebody who’ll buy it and sell it. Problem’s not drugs, problem’s that people wanna do whatever to escape the reality of their lives.”
Carver thought her reasoning was sound. He propped himself up on his elbow and stared at her dark, highlighted features. There was a softness to them, a gentleness, that belied how tough she was. Toughness from deep down wasn’t always obvious.
She stopped looking at the ceiling and glanced over at him. “So the government declares war on drugs by saying, ‘We’re gonna come down hard on you people if you don’t stop using that stuff we’ve made illegal ‘cause you can’t stop using it.’ Makes no sense. An addict’ll check in for a cure only after hitting absolute bottom, Carver, and then they put him on a waiting list so he has months before he can get treatment. So he goes back to drugs and thinks everything’s fine again, and he’s no longer interested in treatment. Big surprise. Thing they do then is arrest and convict him and toss him in jail with some real hard cases that’ll teach him tricks and stay in touch with him the rest of his life. Turn him into one of them. Sometimes I wonder who those government assholes talk to when they get their ideas about drugs.”
Carver said, “They talk to each other.”
“What I’m trying to tell you,” Beth said, “is whenever drugs might be involved, don’t take for granted things are what they seem. Or even that they’re about drugs at all. What they’re about is somebody getting money or getting elected or both. That’s the way it is. I goddamn know.”
“I love you,” Carver said, “because you’re so ambivalent.”
“It’s just that I happen to know about drugs and what goes on around them.”
“I guess you do.”
“So what you’re getting into here might be more dangerous than you think. You best be careful.”
“That’s what Desoto kept telling me.”
“He’s your friend, and I’m more’n that to you. So listen to us. We care about your hide more’n you do. You’re like a combination bloodhound and pit bull, and that’s unhealthy.”
Carver said, “Grrrr,” and pretended he was trying to bite her right nipple. Well, not entirely pretending.
She laughed and shoved him away, and they both lay still for a moment. Then she moved languidly in the bed, rustling the cool sheets, and kissed him, using her tongue. One of her long dark legs curled over him, warmer than the breeze. Her foot hung off his side of the bed.
She rested her head on his chest and said, “You gonna need me?”
He knew she wasn’t talking about, more sex.
Beth sometimes acted as Carver’s business partner as well as lover. She’d gotten tough during her hard years, knew martial arts, could handle firearms. He didn’t need to worry much about her. But he remembered what Desoto had said about Davy Mathis.
“I’m not sure,” he told her. “Let me sniff around down on Key Montaigne for a while, get some sense of things.”
“If that’s what you want. But when you’re ready to tilt at the windmill, let me know.” She unwound herself from him and stood up. Stretched, arching her back. “I’m gonna take a shower.” She padded barefoot across the plank floor, her slender body undulating like dark flame. Carver enjoyed watching her walk. He wondered how she’d look in a light summer dress, luxuriating in the wind. Again he wished he could paint. Maybe he’d take it up. She stopped and turned, smiling at him. “You coming?” she asked.
After showering together, they drove in the Olds to the Happy Lobster, a restaurant on the coast highway. It was a place where Carver and Edwina Talbot, the previous woman in his life, had often spent time, but that didn’t bother Carver or Beth. Neither was the type to wallow in sentiment.
Carver ordered the swordfish steak, and Beth devoured a lobster with mannered and precise enthusiasm.
Over coffee and cheesecake she said, “From what you’ve told me, it seems possible this Henry Tiller’s mind has been affected by age.”
“Desoto doesn’t think so, and he’s seen more of Tiller than I have.”
“What do you think?”
“I’m not so sure, but I trust Desoto enough that I need to go to Key Montaigne and find out.”
“I’m not as devout a believer as you are in those cop’s instincts you talk about. I’ve seen them wrong plenty of times.” Her dark, dark eyes became serious. “I’ve seen them get cops killed.”
Carver stared out the wide, curved window at the darkening Atlantic. The horizon was almost indistinguishable from the gray-green sea. So much distance out there, so much emptiness. Anything might be lost in it. Anything.
Beth took another bite of cheesecake. Chewed, swallowed, then sipped her coffee. She extended her little finger when she sipped from a cup. Where had she learned that? Not in the slums of Chicago, or from Roberto Gomez.
She placed her cup in its saucer with a faint and delicate clink, then reached across the table and rested her long, graceful fingers on Carver’s bare forearm. She dug in slightly with her painted nails, demanding his full attention. “You need me, you’ll call me. Promise?”
“I promise,” he said. “But first I better call Henry Tiller and tell him I’m driving down to see him in the morning.”
But back at the cottage, when Carver punched out the number scrawled on the envelope from his office, it wasn’t Tiller who answered the phone. It was a woman’s voice that uttered a tentative hello.
“Can I talk to Henry?” Carver asked. Beth was leaning on the breakfast counter, pouring a couple of after-dinner brandies and staring at him.
“No way. I mean, I’m afraid you can’t do that,” the woman on the phone said. She sounded young now, maybe a teenager.
“Why not?”
“He ain’t home. He’s in the hospital.”
“What hospital?”
“Faith United, in Miami.”
“Who is this?” Carver asked.
“My name’s Effie. Sometimes I come in and clean for Mr. Tiller. You Fred Carver?”
“I am.”
“Mr. Tiller said you might call. I was to tell you he’s in Faith United. A car hit him. I think he’s in serious condition.”
“Car hit him how?” Carver asked.
“I ain’t sure. All I know is he said he stopped and ate supper in Miami, and he was crossing the street to go back to his car and got run down.”
“Who was the driver?”
“I dunno. You could talk to the Miami police, I guess. Or the hospital.”
“Did Mr. Tiller himself phone you?”
“Yeah. We’re friends. He trusts me, and he knew I’d be here cleaning up.”
“I’ll call him at the hospital,” Carver said.
“I don’t think you can. He told me he was about to be operated on, that’s why he wanted me to let you know where he was and why. He left a message on your office answering machine, he said, but he was afraid you wouldn’t get it. Mr. Tiller don’t trust anything with a microchip in it.”
“Me, either,” Carver said.
He thanked Effie the cleaning girl and hung up. Told Beth what had happened.
“Still driving to Key Montaigne?” she asked, crossing the room and handing him a brandy snifter.
“First thing tomorrow,” Carver told her, passing the glass beneath his nose and breathing in the sharp alcohol scent, like a head-clearing warning. “With a stopover in Miami.”
4
Faith United Hospital was on Hoppington Avenue in west Miami. Its main building was a five-story arrangement of pale concrete and arched windows, but onto this had been added long, three-story wings of pink brick and darkly tinted glass. The architecture clashed, making it look as if an old building had dropped from the past and landed in the center of a modern one.