“That’s your address,” Belquest said.
“I told you she was a good friend.”
Belquest thanked him for his statement but didn’t seem quite satisfied. He switched the tape to rewind, and Carver thought he was about to ask him some questions off the record.
Instead he said, “Jesus! Damned things are killing me by inches, but I gotta have a smoke!” He flung open the car door and climbed out into the greater heat, his hand already fumbling at his pocket that held the cigarettes.
Carver thought about the gulls again, like fragments of a soul taking to heaven.
3
Riley’s clam shop was as much a bar as a restaurant, so it was doing a boisterous and profitable business at ten that night. Carver parked his ancient Olds convertible at the far end of the lot, near a row of gracefully bent palm trees. He had the car’s top down, and the deep bass beat of the music wafting from Riley’s was loud enough for him to feel it in the pit of his stomach.
The restaurant was on Vista Road, about five blocks from the ocean. On the coast, Vista ended at Magellan, about half a mile north of where Carver’s office was located, on the same street. Riley’s looked as if it were built out of odd pieces of driftwood that had washed up on the beach; there was a time not so long ago when that kind of cutesy architecture was popular in coastal Florida, especially in tourist areas. Keeping to the nautical theme, a pierlike plank walkway led to the entrance, flanked by subdued lights concealed in dense and flowery shrubbery. On the gray-weathered wood above the door was mounted what looked like a real anchor.
Several men and two women were lounging outside the entrance, near what appeared to be a ship’s watch bell and a large, spoked wooden wheel that might have been used to steer a Spanish galleon. The women wore tight jeans and loose blouses. Some of the men wore casual slacks and sport shirts, some had on jackets and ties. One of the men, wearing a jacket and brightly flowered tie, was doing an animated dance in time to the music, trying to impress the women, who looked bored. The taller of the two women, a slender brunette, crossed her arms and turned away as if trying to put the whole thing out of her mind.
Carver climbed out of the car and crossed the moonlit lot, the shadows of the breeze-tossed palm trees dancing at his feet. The brunette with her arms crossed glanced at him, then leaned with her shoulder against the thick post supporting the ship’s bell. She smiled, uncrossed her arms, and gave the spoked wooden wheel a turn, as if it were a wheel on a TV game show allowing her to choose a vowel. Carver doubted if she’d ever been to sea.
Inside the restaurant the music was deafening, provided by a five-piece all-female band featuring a shiny and complicated electric keyboard. Carver sat at the bar and lip-synched to the bartender that he wanted a draft beer.
He sat sipping his beer from its frosted mug and trying not to listen to the music for a few minutes, looking over the crowded restaurant. All the tables were occupied by at least two people. There were half a dozen or so men seated or standing at the long bar who might be by themselves. A sign over the door advertised that there would be a bikini contest next Friday, Jello wrestling the Friday after that. Carver saw no reason why the two events shouldn’t be combined.
Carrying his beer, he went outside and across wooden planks to a public phone he’d noticed mounted on a corner of the building. The brunette near the ship’s bell smiled at him again. He was about to phone Beth, so he didn’t smile back, but he raised his stein in a kind of salute to her and all womanhood.
Beth wasn’t in her apartment, so he called his beach cottage five miles up the coast highway. She had a key and came and went pretty much as she pleased. Which was most of the time. He’d given Belquest the cottage as her address because she’d be easier to reach there, and he’d know about it sooner rather than later. It was only when she had a work overload, as she had now, and had to hole up to meet a deadline, that she spent nights in her closetlike efficiency miles from the beach.
She answered on the second ring and said, “Where you been, lover?”
“How’d you know it was me?”
“I been waiting long enough for you, Fred, it doesn’t matter much anymore if it’s you.”
“I thought you’d be at your apartment tonight.”
“No, I finished the polluted fish story. You talk to Donna?”
So Beth didn’t know, hadn’t caught the information on the news.
“Fred?”
He set the beer mug on the shelf above the tattered phone directory. “I’ve got some bad news about Donna,” he said. And he told her what had happened.
She was quiet for a long time. Then, “Christ, Fred! You think she really killed herself by stepping in front of a speeding semi?”
“It looks that way. She might have been in that kind of mood, the way she was acting in the restaurant.”
“What about Megan? Her little girl.” Beth sounded as if she might be about to cry. Not like her at all; she treated tears as if they were acid that might sear her cheeks to the bone.
“She’s with Donna’s mother. The mother, the husband, they probably know by now.”
“Lord! What do you suppose they’ll tell Megan?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure what I’d tell a four-year-old kid in this situation. Or how soon.”
“Fred, before Donna left the restaurant, did she tell you what was bothering her? Why she wanted to talk to you?”
“Yes and no.” He told Beth about Donna paying him to follow her.
“And she wouldn’t tell you why?”
“No.”
“It’s not Donna at all, this stepping-out-on-her-husband business. She’s not the type, though we both know almost everybody can be.”
“Almost everybody,” Carver said. “My impression was the husband pushed her into it. Did you ever meet him?”
“Couple of times. He seemed nice enough. Donna said he had a temper, though never with her. They seemed happy together. That was a few years ago, though. Things can change.”
“Can and do,” Carver said, thinking of his own life.
“What are you gonna do now, Fred?”
“Follow somebody else. That’s part of why I called you.”
He gave Beth the phone number of Riley’s Clam Shop and asked her to wait a few minutes, then call and ask for Enrico Thomas.
When he went back inside, he saw that his place at the bar had been taken. He stood near the door, beneath the bikini and Jello sign, idly sipping his beer and studying the men at the bar who didn’t appear to be with someone or were in a waiting attitude. There was a big man in a plaid sport jacket, looked like a high-pressure salesman. An athletic type in a pullover shirt-Carver could picture him as Donna’s secret lover. A man about Carver’s age, bald on top like Carver, was seated near the far end of the bar, staring morosely into his beer as if he might have been stood up. Could be the guy who’d swept Donna off her feet and into infidelity, Carver thought. Or maybe he was flattering himself because of his resemblance to the man.
The phone rang, and the bartender, a wiry little gray-haired man in a white shirt and checked vest, hurried over to answer it.
He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece and shouted, “Enrico Thomas?” Looking up and down the bar. “Enrico Thomas here?”
A few of the men glanced at him, but no one wanted the call.
“Go see if there’s an Enrico Thomas out at one of the tables,” the bartender shouted to a blond waitress, and set the phone next to the beer taps. Carver could hear the waitress’s high, cutting voice calling Thomas’s name.
From nearby a voice shouted, “Hey! Over here! I’m Enrico Thomas.”
The bartender pointed to the phone, and the man who’d spoken moved toward it.
He’d just come out of the restroom, a slight man with dark hair and eyebrows and mustache. He was wearing gray pleated slacks and a black sport coat, white shirt, no tie. He was very well groomed, wore his clothes well, and he crossed the room toward the phone with the fluid economy of a nifty lightweight boxer or dancer.