“Did Hodgkins let you into the apartment?” he asked.
“I never saw any Hodgkins. I let myself in without benefit of a key. Cheap-ass apartment locks. If I was a tenant there and got robbed, I’d sue.”
Carver didn’t bother pointing out the illegality of what she’d done. Or that ends didn’t justify means, which he was sure would be the case in this instance. The catalogs were worthless, some of them dating back over a year.
“You’re right about there being nothing in these,” she said. “But what’s not in them might turn out to be interesting.”
“Nothing’s been ordered from any of them,” Carver told her. “The oldest ones were on the bottom of the stack. Gretch probably got them in the mail and put them in the closet out of the way in case he decided to order something later, then when the new catalogs came he did the same thing. Maybe he threw them away every couple of years. Lots of people treat catalogs that way. This is the age of mail-order. Send away for anything in any catalog, and a week later they all have your name and address on gummed labels.”
He noticed then that she had a sheet of paper in her lap. There were columns of numbers on it. As he watched, she added another number and tossed the catalog she’d been reading on the floor on the passenger side with half a dozen others. For After Eight was lettered on its glossy cover, which featured a foppish-looking young guy and girl in what looked like Spandex tuxedos. They were grinning at each other as if just last night they’d discovered sex. Carver ignored the girl’s figure and leaned closer and squinted at the columns of figures on the paper in Beth’s lap.
“These are page numbers,” Beth said. “Or, more precisely, the numbers of the pages that have been torn out of these catalogs. I’m going to get copies of the current catalogs and see what was on those pages.”
“Maybe Gretch has a crush on one of the models and he’s using the pages for pinups.”
“Some of the pages are missing from men’s clothing catalogs, or the menswear section of general catalogs.”
“Still possible,” Carver said. “It’s unlikely, though, considering his relationship with Donna Winship. But Gretch wouldn’t be the first bisexual gigolo.”
Beth looked directly at him. She wasn’t smiling.
“Okay,” Carver said, “I won’t deny it. You latched onto something I overlooked.”
Now she smiled.
He leaned closer and kissed her cool cheek. “Thanks for the good work.”
“You’re improving, Fred. Growing as a human being.”
He wasn’t sure if she was kidding, so he said nothing. He was at least as smart as the mosquitoes.
He took over the stakeout for the rest of the evening, settling down in the Olds’s sticky warm upholstery and watching the taillights of Beth’s car draw closer together, then disappear in the dusk as she turned a corner. Maybe he should have made more of the catalogs. He had to admit that Beth might be right about the missing pages being significant. If that turned out to be the case, he’d go wherever her research led. He wasn’t going to be recalcitrant about it.
Belt Street was quiet except for an occasional passing car. Carver could barely see the flow of heavier traffic on the major cross street three blocks down. As the evening deepened to blackness, the lights of the cross-traffic seemed to flow in steady bursts of red-tinted white streams each time the signal changed from red to green.
He and Beth were only going to keep a loose stakeout on Gretch’s apartment; it would be almost impossible, and probably unproductive, for one of them to be in position all the time. Old Hodgkins would doubtless know if Gretch returned, and he’d call Carver.
Carver turned on the radio and tuned it to a Marlins game, heard immediately that the score was nine to one in favor of the New York Mets, and sat only half listening. The play-by-play man gave the scores around the league and mentioned the St. Louis Cardinals. St. Louis, where Carver’s former wife, Laura, lived with their daughter, half a continent away from where Carver sat in the heat in an ancient convertible and watched a stucco apartment building darkening to join the shadows of the night,
At least he shouldn’t have to worry about Beni Ho. The little man would have to take things slow for a while, maybe a long time if the bullet remained in his leg and he was forced to seek medical treatment from a doctor who’d follow the law and report a gunshot wound to the police.
But Carver knew that people like Beni Ho had their own medical plans with doctors who’d been compromised. Beni Ho, bionic little bastard that he was, might be limping after a limping Carver in no time. And there was always the possibility that Desoto was wrong about Ho’s adherence to the martial arts’ manly code. Ho might be hiding in the foliage right now, drawing a bead on Carver through an infrared scope mounted on a rifle.
Carver sat back and watched the apartment building through half-closed eyes, listening to the third inning and trying not to think about Beni Ho.
He was about as successful as the Marlins.
15
A smiling Beni Ho crept toward Carver, who was teetering without his cane. When Carver turned to see if the cane was on the ground behind him, he saw that there was no ground. He was on the edge of an abyss that whistled and echoed with grief and loneliness. Ho stopped a few feet short of him, and with a wide, wide grin, extended a single, slender forefinger and nudged Carver into the abyss. As he plunged through blackness, wind or a scream whistling in his ears, he heard a voice say, “Stay away from that route if at all possible.”
He realized he was no longer hurtling through blackness but was lying on his back on perspiration-soaked sheets, listening to the clock radio blare the morning traffic report.
Beth was beside him, sleeping through the back-up on Magellan, the accident on the Camille drawbridge, the nude jogger running with a dog on the coast highway. The clock radio was on her side of the bed.
“Beth!” he called fuzzily, still staring at the ceiling.
There was only the ranting of the radio. A disc jockey had taken over from the guy in the traffic copter and was yammering almost faster than the ear could follow.
“Beth!”
“Whazzit, lover?”
“Turn that damned thing off!”
“ ’Zat?”
“The clock radio-hit the button!”
The deejay said, “Doin’ the rock an’ roll review to get you in the mood for the office zoo. We’ll play while you’re on your way for pay. We’re gonna spin till you clock in. Music back through the years just for your ears!”
Stretched out on her stomach, her cheek mushed on her extended right arm, Beth opened her eyes sleepily and smiled at Carver.
Carver said, “Clock radio. Please!”
“Idea, Fred, is the device is s’pose to wake you up, get you vertical.”
As Carver rolled onto his side and groped for his cane, he bumped it with his wrist and it clattered to the floor. Little Richard began to scream at him. He rolled onto his back again, bumping his bald pate on the wooden headboard. Ordinarily he liked Little Richard. But not at the moment. Not at the moment at all.
“Beth!”
She languidly reached out with a long arm, and silence dropped over the room like a blanket.
After a while she said, “I’ll make coffee.”
Carver said nothing. He found his cane, sat up with one leg on the floor, then swiveled around to slump on the edge of the mattress. He heard Beth, behind him, climb out of bed. The springs whined as she stood up. He sat staring at nothing, listening to her bare feet pad across the plank floor, hoping she’d get a splinter in a toe. She never had and didn’t this time. Probably the woman could walk barefoot on hot coals. Pipes bonged and banged in the wall, and tap water ran for the coffee.