The upper drawers were reserved for papers. Raffy usually waited until he’d received a warning notice before paying his electric bill, but he was too smart to leave anything more incriminating than that lying around. There was a small Rolodex but it contained only the phone numbers of local merchants, so if there was an address book that meant something it probably stayed with Raffy.
In the desk’s wide, shallow top drawer was a typed note from Raffy to Raffy, reminding him to pick up cleaning on Wednesday. There were similar typed reminders crumpled and discarded in the wastebasket. Raffy was one of those organized and orderly people who were in the habit of typing themselves messages. A man of compulsions.
Carver felt toward the back of one of the drawers where he’d seen a stack of small boxes. As he’d hoped: spare typewriter ribbon.
The typewriter was the kind that used one-time ribbon on a cartridge. Carver removed the cartridge and slipped in a fresh one. He typed some dots and random letters so the exposed part of the ribbon was used, slipped the old cartridge into his pocket, and was about to leave the room when he heard a soft sound in the front of the apartment.
Fear leaped to his throat and formed a lump there.
Moving silently with the cane, he crept to the office door and peered down the hall into the living room. Blood beat like a drum in his ears.
He saw no one, but again he heard the sound. A soft scuffing noise with something tentative about it. There was no denying what it was-someone walking around in the living room.
Carver was about to turn and look for a place to hide, when a tall blond woman in nothing but a red bikini strutted into view, stood with her hands on her hips near the broken door to the hall, and said in a loud voice, “Jesus H. Christ!” She moved her head from side to side to stare around her, as if in disbelief that someone had entered the condo in such a blatant manner.
Carver stayed perfectly still and she didn’t seem to notice him. But if she moved farther into the apartment there was no way he could avoid being seen by her.
He saw fear cross her beauty-pageant features as she realized whoever had broken in might still be there.
She did a quick deep-knee bend and snatched up a red beach towel from the floor where she’d dropped it. Then she wrapped the towel tightly around herself, as if for the magical protection of terrycloth, and backed out into the hall.
Carver suddenly realized who she was: the blond woman in the Polaroid photos.
She must have been down on the beach.
Now she was probably bustling toward the nearest phone to call the police. Or, more likely, to call Raffy.
Past time for Carver to leave.
He made his way quickly through the living room, poked his head out to make sure the hall was empty, and limped with exaggerated casualness to the elevators. Just a visitor, or maybe one of the new tenants. He longed to toss his cane aside and run. Bolt to safety like a twenty-year-old. He had to remind himself that was impossible.
It seemed an hour before an elevator reached the sixth floor. It start-and-stop rumbled in its shaft as it sought floor level, then was silent. Carver swallowed hard and heard his throat crack.
When the doors hissed open he half expected to see the blond woman in the bikini, perhaps with a security guard at her side.
But she hadn’t had that much time to organize her thoughts and efforts. The elevator was empty.
Carver rode the plush little cubicle down to the lobby. Dropping from danger, or into it.
No one seemed to pay much attention to him as he limped outside onto the sun-washed sidewalk.
28
Beneath the bright glare of the lamp he’d set up, Carver sat at the breakfast counter in his cottage, carefully unwinding and studying the ribbon from the cartridge he’d removed from Raffy Ortiz’s typewriter. He played the ribbon gingerly through his smudged fingers and tried to imagine spaces between words so he could decipher the steady stream of typing. It was more difficult than he’d imagined to make sense of the impressions on the flimsy ribbon.
After a while it became grinding work that made Carver’s back ache and his vision swim. Raffy used his typewriter to send routine household correspondence and countless of his terse reminders to himself. There were dozens of addresses with zip codes. Also a few phone numbers, but a check of Carver’s Del Moray cross-directory showed them to be numbers of merchants in the vicinity of Executive Tower.
His own phone rang, causing his body to jerk and his mind to bob up from the depths of concentration. He pinched a slight kink in the ribbon to indicate where he left off, then grabbed his cane and crossed the cottage to snatch up the phone on the fifth ring. He said hello and stared through the wide front window at the glimmering Atlantic and at distant sails leaning against the wall of a stiff easterly breeze. A few high, white clouds were racing each other out to sea.
“McGregor here, Carver,” came the assertive voice over the line. “Thought you oughta know we got a call about a break-in over in Executive Tower on Ponce de Leon.”
“That the tall, ritzy condo looks like an office building?”
“Looks like all the other beachside condos in Florida,” McGregor said.
“Right across the street from a shopping center?”
“Now you got it. Somebody was in there prowling around Raffy Ortiz’s unit.”
“No kidding?”
“Uh-hm. His girlfriend phoned us. Blond cunt name of Melanie Star. Real name, too, though she said it used to have two r’s in it.”
“So Raffy’s place was burglarized. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving victim.”
“When I heard the squeal,” McGregor said, “I got myself over there like a good public servant while the uniforms were still making the prelim and taking information. Raffy was there, all angry and ugly with his muscles bunched up and fire in his eye.”
“Well, can’t blame him. Somebody break in and steal your whips and chains, you’d feel the same way.”
“Oh, nothing was taken. I could tell that what Raffy was actually sore about was two things. First, that somebody’d been nervy-and stupid-enough to B and E his condo. Second, that the Star bitch was dumb enough to phone the police.”
“He’s got an aversion to the law, that guy.”
“Like so many. Hey, Carver, what were you doing late this morning, say about eleven or quarter after?”
“Vacuuming dust balls behind my sofa. You sure nothing was taken from Raffy’s?”
“I’m sure ’cause he’s sure. He looked around very, very carefully. Whoever broke in there didn’t try to disguise the fact. Smashed the shit outta the door. Then left things in mild but unmistakable disarray, you might say. I mean, didn’t really tear up the place, but left it just messy enough so Raffy’d know somebody’d been there rooting around. Almost like the guy that busted in didn’t mind if Raffy got pissed off. Mighta even wanted it. Got some kinda death wish, I guess, not to leave poison like Raffy alone. Our housebreaker oughta know better, huh? Always a chance the victim’ll come up with a name and inflict great bodily harm on whoever it was broke in the place. Wouldn’t be surprised what Raffy’d do. For that matter, I wouldn’t wanna be in that Melanie Star’s shoes.”
“I doubt they’d fit,” Carver said. He noticed, far out at sea, a huge oil tanker. It was fixed on the horizon like a motionless gray island, but he knew it was making its way south along the coast. It was like a different world passing by, without the problems of this one. He wondered if the residents at Sunhaven could see it.
“Real reason I phoned,” McGregor said, “was to tell you I saw a few people, made a few phone calls about Brian Macklin. He’s a painter, all right. Supposed to be real talented and gets his stuff displayed all over the state. He’s sixty-four and got an arrest record from back in the sixties and seventies when he was mixed up in the peace movement.”