Willis Davis’s apartment was on Escalera Street, in an Orlando neighborhood of newer brick apartment buildings interspersed with older stucco two-story structures with terra-cotta roofs, wrought-iron balconies, and unkempt gardens. Most of the stucco was cracked, missing in spots, its pastel colors faded from the sun. The brick buildings were clean-lined and functional and looked as if they might have been built two hours ago. It was a fascinating juxtaposition of old and new. Willis’s apartment was in one of the new brick buildings, on the third floor, front.
He had virtually moved out of the place, long ago. A very fine layer of dust covered everything, evenly settled, like dust on waxed fruit in a bowl. It seemed not so much to make things dirty as to remove their luster, make them something less than real.
The furniture was fairly new, traditional and nondescript. A couple of outdated magazines lay on a round coffee table; a bookshelf near the window held a stereo tape deck and two speakers, and some more magazines, Time and Real Estate Weekly, stacked in a jumble down below. The wall hangings looked like dime-store prints, and most of them listed sharply in the same direction, as if the building had been tilted slightly by a curious giant, then straightened.
Edwina switched on a lamp to make the place brighter. It didn’t help much; the fine dust seemed to absorb the illumination. She looked around, breathed in deeply, then walked toward a hall leading to the bedroom, which Carver could see from where he stood.
Carver found the thermostat and turned it to Cool, then he followed her. Air rushing from a ceiling vent in the hall brushed the back of his neck. “When’s the last time the police looked around in here?” he asked.
“Unless they used the landlord’s passkey, they were only here the day after Willis disappeared.”
Carver thought that was about right. The apartment of a probable suicide wouldn’t be subject to as much attention as that of a suspect in a crime. The Orlando police had probably given the place a quick but thorough once-over, searching for a note or anything that had suggested self-destruction.
While Edwina was rummaging through mostly empty dresser drawers, Carver walked around and did some nosing about of his own. Obviously Willis hadn’t lived in the apartment for months, and had visited it only occasionally while he was living with Edwina in Del Moray. The medicine cabinet held nothing but a rusty Gillette razor and a dehydrated stick of deodorant. The soap in the tile dish by the bathtub was also dry and cracked. One of the tub’s faucets was dripping loudly and steadily; the sort of thing that would get on Carver’s nerves if he let it. He bent down and turned the faucet handle tight, but the water still dripped at the same rate.
Carver went into the kitchen, where he could still barely hear the steady tap! tap! tap! of water hitting the tub. The refrigerator held two cans of Budweiser and what had once been a tomato. The cupboards contained a sparse assortment of half boxes of cereal and crackers, a few cans of Campbell’s soup.
In the bedroom, Edwina was still going through drawers. She’d found a necklace and a pair of black spike-heeled shoes. “We spent some time here before Willis moved in with me,” she explained. She checked a bottom drawer and pulled out a wrinkled, man’s tie. Holding it high to examine it, she quite consciously caressed it before laying it back in the drawer. Something of Willis.
“Did you expect to find some sign that he’d been here?” Carver asked.
“I don’t know. Possibly I did. It would at least tell me that he has some choice in his movements, that he’s reasonably well, and whatever danger he might be in has left him still alive.”
“If he’s in danger.”
Edwina shot him a brief glare. She began to speak and then stopped, her lips trembling. She’d been about to defend Willis but seemed to realize that her carefully managed composure might crack under the pressure of emotion.
Carver limped over to the closet and slid open the door. A gray suit with wide lapels was draped over a hanger, out of style. Willis hadn’t figured it worth taking with him to Edwina’s. The shelf above the hanger bar was empty. Carver went through the suit pockets. They were empty, too.
He walked over to the window, his cane leaving quarter-sized depressions in the plush, rose-colored carpet. For a while he stared down at Escalera Street, thinking. If Willis had anything in his possession he hadn’t wanted Edwina to find, he might have left it there in the apartment, well hidden. And if he hadn’t been able to predict the precise time when he had to fake his suicide and disappear, whatever might be hidden could still be there. It was possible he’d returned to get it-if there was an “it.” But he might not have needed to return for it. The kind of hiding place Carver had in mind was one that wouldn’t be uncovered by less than a major police search, perhaps not even by new tenants.
“I’m going to look around,” he told Edwina.
“Isn’t that what you’ve been doing?”
“I mean more thoroughly.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. Probably there isn’t anything to be found. But there are places to hide things, and I might as well check them.”
“Another one of those bases that need to be touched?” Edwina asked.
“Maybe home plate,” Carver said. “The winning run. Who can tell about Willis?”
He thought she’d reply that she could, but she knew better. She silently checked the drawer in the nightstand.
Carver started with the bedroom. He removed light bulbs to see if anything was hidden in the sockets. Using a dime for a screwdriver, he checked the cavities behind the switchplates. Then he went over the mattress and springs, tested the corners of the carpet to make sure it hadn’t been peeled back and replaced, made sure the hanger rod in the closet wasn’t hollow.
He found nothing in the bedroom and moved on to the bathroom. By this time Edwina had finished retrieving her things and was sitting patiently on the living-room sofa. All she had found were the shoes and necklace, which were beside her on the cushion. When Carver glanced in at her, she crossed her legs and looked unhappy. He wondered how she’d look in the black spiked heels and necklace, nothing else.
Back to business, he told himself.
Or maybe without the necklace.
The bathroom took only about ten minutes, and yielded nothing of interest other than an unusually large palmetto bug that scurried into the woodwork. Carver moved on to the kitchen. He would do the living room last. Room after room, by the book.
In the kitchen, he had luck. When he removed the access panel to the plumbing, at the back of the cabinet beneath the sink, he discovered a coffee can attached to the water pipes with electricians’ tape so it wouldn’t fall between the walls.
He removed the can and pried the lid from it.
Inside were a snub-nosed. 38 Colt revolver, a clear plastic packet of white powder, and several credit cards, library cards, driver’s licenses, and Social Security cards. There was also a folded piece of gray paper.
Carver set the gun aside, opened the packet, and looked closely at the fine white powder. He wet his finger, touched it to the stuff, and tasted a few particles. Cocaine. He resealed the packet and examined the cards. The Social Security cards looked forged and probably were. Maybe Willis had used them to obtain the rest of the phony identification.
When he sorted through the cards, Carver found that they were made out to two names: Arnold Givers and David Verrac. Carver guessed that Givers and Verrac were names pulled from Willis’s imagination, or from old gravestones so Willis could contact local government agencies and obtain genuine birth certificates to start the chain of false I.D. s. Building a new identity link by link was easy if you knew how.