Carver shook the slender cool hand gently, so as not to break fine bones, and stepped into the house. Alice’s blue eyes flicked to his cane, registered no change of expression. He knew she was thinking about all the steps leading up to the house and how she might talk him into ignoring them if he turned out to be a serious prospect. You had to be wily to survive in sales.
The house was bare and needed a lot of interior work. The walls were faded and paint was peeling from the ornate woodwork. A kidney-shaped water stain marred the high ceiling. There was a large stone fireplace in the room they were in, flanked by bookcases beneath fancy stained-glass windows that muted the sun and did wonderful Technicolor tricks with the light.
“As you can see,” Alice said, “the place needs work but has tremendous potential.” Her voice bounced around in the emptiness.
Carver tapped the hardwood floor with his cane. The clatter might have been heard for miles. “I plan on putting some heavy manufacturing equipment in this room,” he said. “We build locomotive engines. Do you think the floor will support the weight?”
For only a second she was confused. “Mr. Carver, I don’t think the zoning on this property…” She stopped talking. An expression of fear, then admirable determination and cunning subtly transformed her round, sweet features. She tried not to move her eyes toward the door; he was between her and it, and that might mean everything. Here was the real-estate lady’s nightmare. “You’re not actually interested in buying this property, are you, Mr. Carver? Or is Carver your real name?”
“Relax, Alice,” Carver said reassuringly. “I’m not interested in anything you’d object to. Anyway, you could outrun me if I tried anything.”
She exhaled slowly and seemed slightly more at ease, looking dubious, waiting.
“My time is pressing and this is the surest way I could get to talk to you,” Carver explained. “My name really is Fred Carver. I’m a detective.”
“Police?”
“No, private.” Carver got out his wallet and showed her his investigator’s license.
Still dubious. He hoped she wasn’t the type who carried Mace.
“I’m working for a friend of yours,” he said. “Edwina Talbot. I think you might be able to help me help her. You can tell her about this conversation when we’re finished.”
“We could have met in a more conventional way, Mr. Carver. I’d say that the reason we didn’t was that you didn’t want me to know beforehand that the conversation was going to be about Edwina.” Perceptive lady. “Were you afraid she and I might agree on some sort of lie?”
“No,” Carver said. “It’s true that I didn’t want you and Edwina to talk before I met you, but only because what she told you might color what you’d tell me.”
“Is it so important to you that I don’t have any preconceived notions?”
“It is. I’m probing for nuances as well as hard information.”
“I thought detectives dealt only in facts.”
“We do, but first we have to catch the slippery things. That’s why I need your help.”
Alice breathed in and out noisily, got a filter-tipped cigarette from her purse, and began to pace. Beneath one of the stained-glass windows, she turned. The softened light made her twenty again. “You’re trying to find poor Willis.” She flicked a dainty silver lighter and touched the bluish tip of its flame to her cigarette in a lingering way that suggested the cigarette might enjoy it.
“Do you think he’s findable?”
“No, I don’t.” She dropped the lighter back in her purse. “What specifically do you want to talk about?”
“I want to know more about Willis Davis.”
“Such as?”
“Such as why is he Willis? Why doesn’t anybody ever call him Willie?”
Alice smiled-not as bright as her saleswoman smile but definitely more genuine. “A Willie is more casual than a Willis. A Willie might wear a shirt even though it has a stain on it, or he might miss a belt loop. A Willis wears laundered, starched shirts and has a matching belt to go with each pair of pants and never misses a loop. Believe me, Willis was a Willis. He was a fastidious dresser, fastidious about everything he did.”
“How many times did you see him?” Carver asked, remembering the ketchup stain on the sport jacket. “And for how long?”
“Oh, a dozen times, I guess. Social get-togethers. Or he’d be there when I went to Edwina’s house to see her. Willis was an okay guy; I liked him. And you could tell he cared a lot about Edwina.”
“Did Edwina care a lot about him?”
Alice looked closely at Carver, gauging him. “Edwina cared everything about him. She’s had a tough time with the men in her life, with her former husband. She’s been knocked around some. Abused physically and emotionally. It changed her, gave her a hard veneer. You might say she never met a man before Willis who could match her strengths, or maybe understand her weaknesses.”
“Do you mean a man she could look up to?” Carver always thought of Wilt Chamberlain when he used that expression.
“No, I mean a man who wouldn’t need her to be dependent, one she could look upon as her equal. The Edwina I know doesn’t do much looking up to anyone.”
Carver thought about his broken marriage to Laura. That hadn’t been exactly a fifty-fifty proposition. He’d demanded too much of her, made some classic male mistakes. And now she was living in St. Louis with their son and daughter, and he missed them, all of them at times. He’d needed to let Laura be Laura, but he hadn’t.
“Despite his kind and quiet manner, there must have been something steely-strong in Willis Davis,” Alice was saying, “because even though they’d only known each other four months before he disappeared, Edwina loved him with complete commitment. She told me that; she used those words.”
Carver wasn’t surprised. And he remembered that Edwina had told him that she and Willis met six months before. A mistake? An approximation? A lie? “What kind of words did Willis use?” he asked. “Did he seem educated? Did he use a lot of profanity? Did he say throwed and ain’t?”
“He seemed well educated, now that you mention it. And I don’t think I ever heard him curse. He seemed basically a good man, decent. That was how he struck people, as decent.”
“What sort of things did he talk about?” Carver asked.
“He talked about everything-but somehow without really saying anything. Yet he was interesting, even fascinating. He was great at cocktail parties.”
“How did he treat Edwina?”
“He was kind to her, attentive. Always the gentleman.”
“Don’t you find it unusual that a savvy woman like Edwina would fall so hard and so thoroughly for a man after knowing him only a matter of months?”
“Not at all,” Alice said. “It’s like that sometimes with some women, no matter how knowledgeable they are in other matters.”
“Did you ever get the impression that Willis was using Edwina?”
“Not in the sense you mean, not deceptively. She helped to get him his job at Sun South. Edwina’s the one who talked Ernie Franks into hiring Willis, but I wouldn’t call that using her.”
“I guess not,” Carver said. “And I suppose he could have left her afterward.”
“Actually, not right away,” Alice said thoughtfully. “From what I know of Ernie Franks, he might have thought badly of Willis if he didn’t stay with Edwina after getting the job at Sun South. Franks has the reputation of an honest, no-nonsense developer, a nice guy but no patsy. And that’s how he impressed me when I did some of the decorating for display units at Sun South. He even made me sign some kind of oath of integrity printed on a picture of the crucifixion.”
“Did you meet Sam Cahill when you were at Sun South?”
“Briefly. The fast-shuffle type. Full of glib talk and easy promises to get a client’s name on a contract. And he had big ideas. Wanted to get financing and start some kind of development of his own in central Florida.”