The cane flashed up and away from his throat, and he closed his eyes, thinking it was about to descend with the same velocity and crush his larynx.
When he opened his eyes, the cane was lying near him and the tiny man was standing near the door. Still smiling like a character in an old Charlie Chan movie, the man nodded, almost a bow, then was gone.
Carver rolled onto his side and waited for the pain to subside and at least some feeling to return to his arm and good leg. The fear he’d felt when he thought he might be killed with his cane was still in his stomach, making him nauseated.
Fifteen minutes passed before he trusted himself to grip the cane and stand up. He didn’t move for a long time, because the room was tilting this way and that as if tossed on a wild sea. Everything hurt. He wondered if the quick little man had kicked him places he hadn’t even been aware of at the time.
When the room was at last still, he slowly descended the stairs and returned the key to Hodgkins, who said he hadn’t heard anyone on the stairs and had never seen a tiny Oriental man around the building.
“You mean like some kinda midget?” he asked, squinting at Carver as if suspecting some sort of joke.
“Almost a midget, but he packs a giant’s wallop.”
“Hmph! You find anything up there in the apartment?”
“Just that near-midget.”
“Well, if I see him I’ll sure phone you right away.”
Carver got to the Olds and drove back to Del Moray, then up the coast road to his cottage. He wanted to submerge his aching body in a bathtub full of hot water before he got too stiff to move.
All the way along the coast, with the ocean on his right and gulls keeping pace briefly with the car and wheeling and screaming over the beach, he wondered if Gretch had noticed that three of his photographs were missing.
11
Because of his bad leg, Carver usually showered instead of bathing. The tiny bathroom in the cottage was equipped with a small white fiberglass tub and shower stall. The tub was deep enough but not very long, which meant that when he sat in it he had to extend his stiff leg out at an uncomfortable angle over the curved edge into space. That was okay this time, since that leg was one of the few parts of him his attacker had ignored, probably following the maxim that if it ain’t fixed, don’t break it.
The hot water soothed his pain as he settled down as deep as possible in the tub. He wanted to avoid being so sore tomorrow that he’d be unable to get out of bed. He rested his head on the wall behind the tub and draped the hot, soaked washcloth over his face, thinking it had been one hellacious day.
Lying there healing with his eyes closed, he heard Beth say, “Kinda early for a bath.”
He removed the washcloth and looked at her standing in the doorway. She was wearing yellow shorts and a black tee shirt lettered GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE, PEOPLE WITH GUNS KILL PEOPLE. Her bare tanned legs looked impossibly long from Carver’s low vantage point, and her heavy breasts stretched the shirt’s fabric. She had on a yellow headband and bright red lipstick. It occurred to Carver that there was only one part of him that wasn’t stiff, and she was about to change that. He altered the direction of his thoughts and told her why he was in the bathtub letting hot water work its magic.
When he was finished, she leaned her shoulder against the doorjamb and crossed her arms. She said, “I want in, Fred.”
For a moment he thought she planned on getting into the tiny tub with him, then he realized what she meant. The Winship deaths called to her on a personal as well as journalistic basis. Donna had been her friend, and Beth had set up the meeting with Carver just before her death. That someone had tried to frighten Carver off the case in Gretch’s apartment meant that there was something to hide. Jeff Smith, her editor at Burrow, would be interested.
“You gonna keep me involved and informed?” she asked. Her expression was grave, her strongly boned face like something cast in bronze in a lost age.
Carver didn’t like the thought of the tiny Oriental destruction machine focusing on Beth. He knew she wouldn’t see it that way. She was physically tough herself and proficient in martial arts and probably figured she’d be a match for the little man. People who were into martial arts thought that way. Cockiness was part of the way they psyched themselves into knowing they could break wood or bricks with flesh and bone, psyched themselves into thinking it was important in the first place. He covered his face again with the washcloth.
“Fred?”
“You’re in,” he said from beneath the rag, knowing he had no choice.
He felt her kiss his forehead through the thick, soaked material.
“You had supper?” she asked.
“Just a couple of Tylenols.”
“Hungry?”
“No.”
“I’ll cook us up some hamburgers anyway, then we’ll eat while you fill me in on everything about the Winship case.”
Fifteen minutes later, when the water had cooled and the scent of frying beef was prodding his appetite, he decided it was time to struggle out of the bathtub.
He wasn’t as sore as he thought he’d be the next morning, but he didn’t so much as consider his usual therapeutic swim in the ocean. The clock by the bed read 9:05. Beth was already gone. Despite Carver’s reservations, they’d agreed last night that she would stake out Gretch’s apartment to see if he or the Oriental man showed up again. If one of them did appear, Carver had given her strict instructions not to approach him but to very discreetly follow.
Carver sat up on the edge of the mattress and reached for his cane. With each breath, his side ached where he’d been kicked in the ribs. His good leg and his right arm were sore but functional. The involuntary groan he heard when he forced himself to stand up was his own but sounded like someone else’s. Someone who should have sense enough to stay in bed.
He got dressed gingerly, careful not to extend his reach too far, easing into his pants and socks, then his leather moccasins. He went to the dresser and completely removed the top drawer. Taped to the back of the drawer was his .32 Colt semiautomatic. He slipped the gun’s shoulder holster over his bare torso, then checked the clip and action and slid the gun into the holster. Then he put on a loose-fitting silk shirt with a tropical bird pattern and examined himself in the mirror. The looseness and wild print of the colorful material made the bulk of the gun barely noticeable.
When he phoned Burnair and Crosley Investments, where Mark Winship had been a financial consultant, and asked to speak with Beverly Denton he was told that Miz Denton hadn’t arrived for work. Instead of leaving a message, he drove to a restaurant down on the coast highway and had a breakfast of scrambled eggs, jellied toast, and black coffee. Then he sat at one of the unoccupied tables outside and smoked a Swisher Sweet while he read the Del Moray Gazette-Dispatch. The motels along the beach were complaining that oil drifting in from the big tankers offshore was getting to be a major problem. There were no murders or other major crimes reported, only the oil; smooth sailing for McGregor.
By the time he’d returned to the cottage, a little past ten, Beverly Denton was at her desk at Burnair and Crosley. She agreed on the phone to talk with Carver about Donna Winship’s death but didn’t want to discuss it in the office. She suggested they meet in the small park across the street from Burnair and Crosley, where she often had lunch and relaxed. She’d be wearing a green dress with black shoes, she said. Carver told her he walked with a cane and would be the most handsome man in the park. She agreed to meet him anyway.
The park was only about half a square block, a flat, grassy area where concrete benches were arranged in the shade of palm trees. In the center of the park was a twenty-foot-tall steel sculpture made up of a series of sleek, shiny panels rising like parallel knife blades tapered to different points. Carver wasn’t sure what it was supposed to represent, but he liked it. Maybe it had been created to complement the building across the street that housed Burnair and Crosley, which was also made up of shiny, parallel panels of steel and tinted glass, only with elevators and offices inside.