“The right size for Enrico Thomas, though. Know anything about the burglary?”
“No. Might have been youthful indiscretion, boys being boys.”
“I doubt it,” Carver said, ignoring Desoto’s sarcasm. “If it was a one-time thing, the judge probably would have allowed probation.”
“All it means, though, is that your late client was seeing a guy with a record. It happens.”
“Guy with a record with a knife.”
“Hmm.”
“I’m still curious,” Carver said.
“Still obsessed. Are you going to keep poking around?”
“No,” Carver said. “Whatever Donna Winship was mixed up in, it’s over. For her, anyway. For me, too.”
“Yes. Concentrate on living clients,” Desoto said. “They’re far more profitable.”
Carver thanked him for the help and advice, then broke the connection but didn’t hang up. He dialed the home number Donna Winship had given him. He wanted to make sure Mark Winship was there before driving to see him to return Donna’s check, tell his benign lies, then walk away from the Winship tragedy and let it play out on its own.
No answer.
Carver hung up the phone, then looked in the directory for Mark Winship’s address. Found it within seconds: 333 Blue Heron Road. On the moneyed side of town, farther from Carver’s cottage in decimal points than in miles. He decided to drive into Del Moray and drop by the Winship home even though he’d gotten no answer to his call, in the hope that the grieving widower would be there but didn’t want to speak on the phone. If Winship wasn’t home, Carver would drive to the office, do paperwork, and try to contact him later, maybe catch him this evening on the way back to the cottage.
There was, after all, no rush about returning Donna’s check.
The Winship house was one of the smaller ones on Blue Heron, but still expensive. The Del Moray paper’s account of Donna’s death had mentioned that her husband was a financial consultant; apparently he’d done well with his own investments.
The house was a low, contemporary structure of white bricks. The roof was all planes and angles, and the corner of the house nearest the driveway was floor-to-ceiling glass behind which drapes were closed to keep the sun out. There was no car in the driveway, but the garage door was closed. A tall sugar oak grew near the garage, and a walk led around through a colorful garden that looked as if it followed the property line into the backyard.
Carver got out of the Olds and walked onto the porch. Standing in the shade of the roof’s overhang, he pressed the door button and heard bells chime faintly inside. They played four notes of a song he didn’t recognize.
No one came to the door.
He pushed the button and heard the abbreviated tune again, waited a few minutes, then hobbled down off the porch and walked to the garage door. It was one of those overhead doors with a small window at eye level in each section. The windows were dirty, but Carver leaned close to one, rubbed it in a circular motion with the heel of his hand, then peered inside.
Two cars were parked in the dim garage, Donna’s gray convertible and a green Jaguar sedan. The Jag was doubtless Mark’s, so unless the family had a third car he might very well be home. Possibly he was outside and hadn’t heard the door chimes. It was worth checking on, anyway.
Carver followed the stepping-stone walk that led through the garden. Azaleas bordered the walk on the garage side. Beyond them long-stalked dahlias swayed in the faint warm breeze. Low ground cover bearing tiny white blooms spread to the garage’s back corner and around, where a small white iron bench posed pristinely beneath an oleander tree bearing clusters of pink flowers.
When Carver walked beyond the bench, he saw Mark Winship immediately. He was seated in a large wooden glider in the shade of an arched trellis bursting with red roses, an open book in his lap, his head bowed in concentration.
Carver set the tip of his cane on sunbaked lawn and limped toward him. Clouds of tiny insects rose around his feet and the cane with each step. Some of them found their way inside his pants cuffs, tickling his ankles.
When he got closer, he saw that Mark Winship was wearing glasses with tortoiseshell frames, resting somewhat crookedly halfway down his nose, and that the book in his lap was a Bible.
When he got closer still, he noticed the small silver revolver in Winship’s right hand.
Then the blue-black hole in his temple.
6
Carver settled into the chair facing Lieutenant William McGregor’s desk at Del Moray police headquarters. The office was sparse, with a curling tile floor that was supposed to look like wood parquet, dented black file cabinets, and, on a table alongside the desk, what looked like a combination fax, answering machine, phone, clock, police band radio, and coffee maker. The walls were a shade darker than institutional green only because they hadn’t been painted in decades. But the office did have a window, looking out on the parking lot; McGregor was moving up in the department. His problem was that he tended to move down as often as up. It had to do with his character.
“So, look who found a dead body,” he said, grinning and lowering his six-foot-six frame into the chair behind the desk. He was a thin man but coiled and powerful, with a face to match his character. Long features, prognathous jaw, squinty little mean blue eyes, lank blond hair that hung Hitler-style over his forehead. Between his yellowed front teeth there was a wide space that he constantly probed with his tongue, as if trying to imitate a lizard. Come to think of it, Carver mused, it wasn’t an imitation at all.
“Was there a suicide note?” Carver asked.
“You know there was a note, asshole, because you read it before calling the police.” The tongue probed and flicked. “Know why I think that?”
“Sure. Because you would have read it.”
“You betcha! It’s good we understand each other.”
Carver understood McGregor, all right. He was unprincipled, uncouth, untrustworthy, and a number of other un’s. And ambitious and self-serving. Most of all ambitious and self-serving. He’d even considered taking a run at getting elected mayor of Del Moray at one time; for the graft and free pussy, he’d told Carver. But Carver had known too much about him and put a stop to that. McGregor had never forgiven him. Never would.
“The note I didn’t read didn’t say much,” Carver said. He’d found it stuck between the pages of the Bible in Mark Winship’s lap, and had indeed read it before phoning the Del Moray police. In what was presumably Mark Winship’s handwriting it said simply, I die by my own hand, with grief and regret, and was signed, Mark Winship. “Was it written with the pen in his shirt pocket?”
“You mean you didn’t match ink colors?” McGregor asked.
Carver smiled. The ink color of note and pen had matched.
“If it wasn’t that this guy committed suicide,” McGregor said, “I’d find a way to hang a murder charge on you.”
Which meant the gun in Winship’s hand had fired the death bullet, and paraffin tests indicated the dead man had squeezed the trigger.
The pink tip of McGregor’s tongue peeked out between his widely spaced front teeth like an evil little internal serpent. “The interesting thing is what probably drove him to kill himself. His wife got herself run over by a truck yesterday. Stupid cunt stepped right out in front of it, and splat! Or so the story goes.”
“So he was grieving over his dead wife,” Carver said, “and the strain got to him.” He never shared knowledge with McGregor unless it was absolutely necessary. McGregor saw knowledge as power and seldom failed to use it in the most heinous way. It was too late for power to corrupt McGregor, but he could certainly corrupt power.
“The thing is”-the tongue probed obscenely-“the wife was having a drink with you just before she ran out on the highway and tried to hug a speeding semi. That makes me curious.”