Carver unfolded the gray paper. It was a detailed map of Solarville, with an area of swamp south of town neatly circled in red pencil. He refolded the map and put it with the gun.
“What’s all that stuff?” Edwina asked. She had approached quietly behind Carver and was staring over his shoulder where he sat on the floor in front of the sink.
“That’s a gun,” he said, pointing to the revolver.
“I mean the rest of it.”
“Ever hear of Arnold Givers or David Verrac?” he asked.
“No.”
He gathered everything in his right hand, beneath his right arm, and stood up with difficulty using the cane. Edwina didn’t move to help him. He spread out the gun, the cocaine, the map, and the phony identification on the butcher-block counter and watched her step close and peer at the revealing display.
“What does it all mean?” she asked finally.
“It suggests that Willis was up to something you didn’t know about. That Solarville was in his thoughts. That he tooted or dealt in coke. And that he used several identities for whatever he did in life. He might be living somewhere now under an assumed name, if he isn’t dead. When you get involved with dope, guns, and false identities, usually you’re also involved with people whose flip sides are dangerous.”
Edwina walked back to the sofa and sat down; Carver watched her through the kitchen doorway.
He returned the can with its contents to where he’d found it, screwed the painted plywood access panel back on, and went into the living room to join her. His good leg was aching from all the straightening and stooping, and the awkward position he’d had to hold under the sink. He was perspiring; the air-conditioning he’d switched on when they’d entered the apartment hadn’t caught up with the heat.
“Willis didn’t do dope,” Edwina said, staring up at him.
“Not in front of you, maybe,” Carver said. “Or maybe he didn’t do drugs at all but had something in common with people who did.” He wondered if the packet in the coffee can might be a sample in a major narcotics deal. A hundred thousand dollars would buy a lot of cocaine or pure heroin near the source. It was all beginning to point that way. Willis Davis dealing in all kinds of dreams, romantic and otherwise.
“Maybe the coke belongs to somebody else,” Edwina said.
“Maybe,” Carver said, rolling with her optimism.
She stood up, started to pace, then turned to him and said, “God damn it, Carver.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But you should have thought about where whatever I learned might take you. Take us.”
Edwina looked away from him. He suspected she was crying. The Willis Davis she knew was dissolving in front of her. Fading like someone who’d never quite existed for her from the beginning. He was too good, and then too bad, to be true. But she couldn’t turn loose her idea of him. Drugs? Guns? Fake I.D.? Hidden in his apartment? Not her Willis. Like hell not!
“There has to be a logical explanation,” she said, turning again to face him, trying not to think about the actual logical explanation. Her eyes were moist, her mouth soft and unsteady. She bit her lower lip and swallowed. Pressure, pressure. Carver could almost see her shell cracking.
“It might be an explanation you won’t like,” he said, pushing it. He felt mean now. Let her get a clear look at reality. Shake her past, shake Willis, forever.
Then she was pressed against him, sobbing. He hadn’t expected that. He could feel the wet heat of her tears through his shirt.
He stood still and held her close for a long time. Her back and shoulders eventually stopped quaking, then began moving steadily with her regular breathing. She was in control again, but barely, hanging on in a tumult of emotion that might snatch her away again any second.
Carver ran his hand down her back, aware of the firmness of one of her breasts pressing against his side. Firm yet soft. She raised her reddened face, said, “Carver-”
He kissed her. She hesitated, then leaned hard into him. Maybe he was Willis just then, maybe not. He moved his mouth, his tongue, over her tear-streaked face. She clung to him, staring up blankly at him, something deep turning in her eyes.
Carver moved as gracefully as he could with the cane, leading her toward the bedroom. He was breathing rapidly, faintly grinning. Willis’s bedroom, Willis’s bed, Willis’s woman. Carver anticipated the next half hour with perverse pleasure. This is what happens when you play dead, Willis. You wrongheaded asshole. You lose. Big. At least for a while.
But he knew that really he was about to lie down with Edwina and Willis. A threesome. Carver knew that should matter to him more than it did. The hell with it. He didn’t care. And right now Edwina didn’t seem to care. Maybe this would help to ease the bastard from their lives.
The cane was a hindrance. By the time they reached the bedroom door, she was ahead of him.
CHAPTER 21
It rained hard at three o’clock, but not for long. The sun was out again immediately afterward, making up for lost time, reheating the concrete so that shimmering waves of vapor rose and formed a low, multicolored haze, like a rainbow that had fallen and lost form but hadn’t dissolved.
It was much hotter outside than in Desoto’s office; the window had fogged up like a medicine-cabinet mirror after somebody’s steaming bath. It made Carver feel confined, as if there were no outside world. Nothing except the low and crackling metallic voice of the dispatcher on the radio in the squad room, the clacking of a teletype or printer, the inexorable official stirrings of the law. This was Police World, with nothing beyond.
Desoto leaned back behind his desk, held up a paper clip he’d bent, and stared at it with a kind of wonder, as if it were a piece of surrealistic sculpture. “Have you gotten on better than friendly terms with Miss Edwina Talbot?” he asked.
“You have a dirty mind,” Carver told him, shifting in his chair.
“You bet. It’s fun. I think of myself as an erotic romantic.”
“You think of yourself,” Carver said.
Desoto seemed glad that he’d irritated Carver. He smiled. He speculated. “Do you sleep with that cane?” he asked.
Carver glared at him, told himself to calm down. This was Desoto, who had always been like this and wouldn’t change until his glands did. If they ever did. Carver suspected he was looking at a dirty old man in the making. Desoto would serve out his time on the force, retire, get collared for lascivious conduct in the park.
“Why do you think this Silverio Lujan tried to knife you?” Desoto asked. No more men-of-the-world talk; time for business. The DEA had been in touch with Desoto.
“Who knows?” Carver said. “He was a Marielito, and a tough one. A guy like that, maybe he just felt mean. Maybe he hadn’t stabbed anybody for a while.” He told Desoto about the missing naturalist and the matching sandal prints.
“It’s possible that Lujan knifed Mackenzie and hid the body in the swamp,” Desoto said.
“Some insight,” Carver told him. “Have you got anything more on Lujan?”
Desoto shrugged and shook his head. “He only goes back to 1980, after the boat lift. There’s no way to get a line on him for when he was in Cuba. He and his two brothers came over here together on the same boat.”
“Brothers?”
“Jorge and Alejandro,” Desoto said. He pronounced the names with a Spanish flare, made them sound beautiful, not the names of thugs. “Alejandro was killed in gang warfare in Miami.”
“What about Jorge?”
“Who can say?” Desoto adjusted his white cuffs. “Marielitos don’t notify the post office when they change address. The last anyone seems to have heard of Jorge was when he was arrested for torching a tavern in Daytona. Doused the place with gasoline and set fire to it, customers and all. He’d been in a scrap, got outfought because he was outnumbered, then left and came back fifteen minutes later with a can of gas and a match, mad at everybody. What a sore loser. Fortunately there was a back door to the place, so everyone got out. A few people were burned, one of them seriously. Jorge was tried for the crime, but witnesses declined to testify and there wasn’t enough evidence to convict.”