Damp with perspiration, he went back inside the house and got a can of Budweiser from the refrigerator, downed it quickly, then opened another can and carried it into the spare bedroom Edwina used as an office.
The blinds were closed and it was dim in there, so he switched on the desk lamp. It was one of those banker’s lamps with a green glass shade and cast a sickly light. He rolled a sheet of blank paper into the Olympia portable Edwina used when she typed real-estate contracts. Between sips of beer, he used his forefingers to peck out a letter to her. He tucked the letter in a white business envelope, wrote her name on it in blue felt-tip pen, and returned to the living room.
After laying the letter on the table near the front door, where she couldn’t miss seeing it, he girded himself against the heat and limped back outside. He made sure he locked the door behind him.
Birdie Reeves was behind her receptionist’s desk in Sunhaven’s bright pastel lobby. She was engrossed in one of her checkout-counter tabloids and didn’t pay much attention to the tap, tap of his cane; plenty of canes and aluminum walkers at Sunhaven. When she did glance up and see him, she smiled, then the country sweetness of the smile was clouded over by worry.
“I’m s’posed to tell Nurse Rule if you show up here, Mr. Carver.”
“I didn’t show up,” Carver said. “You were busy with your work and must not have seen me pass.”
“Mr. Carver-”
“It’ll be all right, Birdie.” He patted the hand that held the headline about a New England fishing village invaded by porpoises with legs, and sidled away to head for Amos Burrel’s room.
A completely bald old man in a pink vinyl chair beamed at Carver and said, “Wha’cha know, young fella?”
Good question, Carver thought. He shrugged and said, “Not much,” and moved on.
He knocked on Amos’s door. No answer. He rotated the knob and pushed the door open. There was a minty, medicinal scent in the room.
Amos didn’t look scared. Didn’t look angry. Looked disinterested. He was wearing blue-and-gray-striped pajamas, sitting in a severe, straight-backed wooden chair that might have been made by Shakers to punish themselves for sins real or imagined. He was staring out his window at the slope of sun-browned grass that led to the parking lot. His long face seemed to sag even more, loose skin draping to the wattles beneath his jaw. It was as if the bone structure beneath the flesh were gradually disintegrating and soon there would be nothing to hold form. Amos’s face, his entire body, would melt away like tallow.
Carver said hello and sat down on the edge of the bed. The springs squeaked; the mattress was surprisingly soft.
“Hot outside?” Amos asked.
“Hot.”
“Looks hot.”
“Kearny Williams died last night,” Carver said.
Amos nodded, still staring at the bright sunlight outside the window. A jay fluttered down on the brown grass, decided it was too hot to strut around searching for nonexistent worms, and took to the air again.
“What do you think about it?” Carver asked.
“Think I ought not to talk to you,” Amos said.
“Why not? Nurse Rule?”
Amos’s scrawny chest rose and fell beneath the striped pajamas. “You gotta understand, Carver. Game I’m in here, I ain’t got a lotta cards to play.”
“Point is,” Carver said, “you’re in the game to stay. You don’t have any choice about it.”
“Yeah.” Amos drew out the word as if it tasted bad sliding over his tongue.
“You hear anything last night?” Carver asked.
Amos pursed his lips. Regular Sphinx.
“Sooner you tell me, sooner I’ll get outta here,” Carver said.
There was logic in that. Amos wrung his narrow, withered hands. They were dry and Carver could actually hear them rubbing together. He didn’t like the spot he’d put the old man in, but he was in a spot himself. The world seemed to work that way too often, robbing us of the best part of ourselves little by little.
“Heard nothing,” Amos said. “I was hung over this morning. Still hung over. I think they mighta put something in my food to make me sleep through whatever happened. I sniffed an odd smell through the vent this morning, though. Like something had been burned. Like somebody’d struck a match maybe to smoke a cigarette.”
“You mentioned a burned smell after Jim Harrison died,” Carver pointed out.
“Did I?”
“Did Kearny Williams smoke?”
“Hell, no! Damn near nobody smokes in Sunhaven, Carver. Not the staff. Not any of the residents except them so desperate for tobacco they can’t help themselves, and so rich they can’t be tossed outta here. Think I ain’t wanted to fire up a pipe now and again? Had a collection of meerschaum pipes. Gone now.”
“Is it a strict rule? No smoking at Sunhaven?”
“Strict as that kinda rule can be. Straight from the top. Dr. Macklin figures smoking’s the greatest evil in the world since sex. She don’t do neither, way I figure it.”
Carver remembered the Medallion Motel and the cigarette lighter inside Dr. Macklin’s glove compartment. He wondered about the wisdom that was supposed to come with age. “Any of the staff smoke on the sly?”
“Not as I know of. One of the things they ask here before hiring attendants or anyone else is whether they smoke. Discrimination, you ask me. People like that, they look for a wisp of smoke the way censors keep an eye skinned for a snippet of pornography so they can fly into a righteous rage. Zealots, is what they are. Zealots is what’s got the world screwed up. Radicals. Extremists. Oughta stand ’em all up against a wall and shoot ’em!”
Carver could see that Amos was torn. On the one hand he didn’t want Carver in his room, but on the other it was so nice to have an ear to bitch into.
Worry won out over loneliness. “What I told you, Carver, that’s all I know. Period. Jane was right. We had a long talk, and she convinced me that even if there is something bad going on here I oughta mind my own business unless I got facts and proof of what I think. It’s my best interest she’s got at heart. She’s an angel of mercy come late into my life, that woman.”
“What exactly did she tell you?”
“I’m sorry, but she made me agree not to say what we talked about. It’s private, between me and Jane. She don’t want to be part of spreading rumors, she said. I think she’s right about that, Carver. Right about a lotta things. Makes me wonder how my life woulda been if I’d met her years ago.”
“Everybody wonders those kinds of things,” Carver said.
“I wish you’d go now. Really do wish that,”
“Okay, Amos, I understand. Thanks.” Carver stood up and took the necessary two steps to the door. “You need anything, phone me. All right?”
Amos looked away from the window and smiled at Carver. “Okay.” The smile suggested he was grateful for the invitation but probably wouldn’t call.
On his way back through the lobby, Carver stopped at the receptionist’s desk long enough to ask Birdie if any of Sunhaven’s staff smoked.
“That’s like strictly forbidden here, Mr. Carver.” Her eyes roamed from side to side as if she and Carver were talking about political assassination.
“What about socially?” Carver asked. “Away from Sun-haven?”
“I don’t see many of the staff away from here,” Birdie said “None of them smokes, far as I know.”
“Isn’t that sort of unusual?”
“Getting less and less. And I’m sure a few of them are sneaking a puff now and then, but I don’t know which.”
Carver thanked her and moved toward the door. A bent, gray woman in a wicker rocker gave him a lustrous if broken-toothed smile and said, “Beautiful day, eh?”
Carver agreed that it was.
“Don’t rain all the time here in Florida the way it does in Seattle,” the woman observed.
“Guess not,” Carver said.
“Seattle was nice, but this here is lovely.”
Carver wished he could stay for a moment and chat with the woman, but he knew he shouldn’t. Miles to go and promises to keep.