The Coast Guard had searched for Lujan for six hours before giving up and assuming he was dead and would be easier to find in daylight. If he could be found at all. Sometimes the sea kept its dead forever; sometimes it toyed with the dead for a while before returning what was left to land.
They were out there again just after dawn. Carver stood at his window and saw two small craft silhouetted in the early sunlight, tacking in slow circles off the shore. The Coast Guard was patient, systematic. But they had read the currents wrong, and Lujan’s reappearance on land had been a surprise.
Carver drove the Olds down to Okadey that afternoon and met Desoto in the back room of the tan brick funeral parlor that served as a temporary morgue for the small community. There were yellow canvas awnings over the windows, and a bell mounted like a chimney on the low, sloping roof, doubtless to be tolled as part of the services. Carver imagined that cost extra. MAHON’S MORTUARY, the black-lettered sign peeking from among the hibiscus in front of the place had read.
Lujan wasn’t refrigerated, but the back room was cool, down in the fifties, probably, and he’d keep until the body was identified and taken to Orlando. There he’d be autopsied, methodically dissected and discussed by the big-city experts.
Somber introductions were made. Mahon himself, a short, animated man in a muted plaid sport jacket, who would have looked more at home selling aluminum siding, drew a sheet away from the body.
Carver flinched inwardly, as he always did when viewing a dead body; then he sent that part of his mind away, as he always managed to do. The emotional vulnerability had lasted only a few seconds before professional detachment took over. Mental armor. Sanity retained.
“It’s got to be him,” Carver said. The sea and its inhabitants had worked on the face, making what was left of it unrecognizable, but the pants looked the same, and the general size was the same. There were slashes near the left pants cuff, where Carver had gripped it and had barely avoided Lujan’s knife blade. And how many bodies dressed this way were bobbing around in the ocean off the resort beaches of central Florida?
Desoto nodded to the unconcerned Mahon, and the pale yellow sheet was drawn up again over Lujan’s ruined face.
“A closed-casket ceremony would be my recommendation,” Mahon said in a cigarette-throat wheeze.
Neither Carver nor Desoto offered a comment on that professional assessment. It was Mahon’s backyard they were playing in, and he was welcome to it, headstones and all.
“I’m surprised to see you here,” Carver said, as he and Desoto walked outside into the sun, Carver with his replacement cane.
The day was hot and humid, but after the chill of death in the back room, the heat felt fine to Carver. The mosquito that sampled his right forearm, the dank smell of the sea, the pelican that skimmed the blue water offshore, all represented life.
“We’ve opened the case wider,” Desoto said, “so the game has changed somewhat. It’s thought officially, and in some quarters unofficially, that Willis Eiler might have been murdered.”
“Not a Missing Persons case?”
“No, not with dead Marielitos turning up wherever you go looking for him. Death by violence is contagious.”
“He’s still alive,” Carver said.
“I think so, too.” Desoto reached into the pocket of his tailored suit, withdrew a folded white handkerchief, and used it to wipe his hands thoroughly, as if he’d touched the body inside the mortuary and encountered some kind of contamination. “But I’m not positive about what I think; that’s what’s interested me about this case from the beginning: the possibilities.”
Carver nodded, understanding. Traffic on the coast highway whizzed past them, eddying the air and spreading wind patterns over the grass. They were standing only a hundred feet or so west of the pavement. An odd location for a mortuary; too near the living.
“How do you see it now?” Desoto asked.
Carver leaned on his cane, thought for a moment. How did he see it? Really. He said, “Drugs, probably. The hundred thousand was seed money to buy a shipment of something that could be cut and resold at four or five times the price.”
“Not big money for a drug scam, Carver. My friends on the narcotics squad talk in terms of millions, not thousands. They do so with a certain arrogance.”
“Burr thinks Willis might have partners, that the deal is bigger.”
“Sam Cahill?”
“And others. Maybe two swamp turkeys called the Malone brothers.”
“What about Raymond Mackenzie?” Desoto said. “He’s still missing.”
“I can’t see him involved in a drug-running scheme,” Carver said. “But it’s possible; with so much money at stake, he might forsake the whooping crane and the snail darter. And his campsite was within the area red-penciled on the map I found in Eiler’s apartment.”
“You figure Burr is right?” Desoto asked. “About this being a major deal?”
“He might be. But even if he isn’t, there’d be enough money to provide plenty of incentive for Willis and Cahill. People have been murdered for less.”
“People have been murdered for bottlecaps,” Desoto said. “That’s irrelevant. You think Willis and Cahill hired the Marielitos to try to kill you?”
“It’s possible. Even likely.”
“What bothers me,” Desoto said, “is that the Marielitos wouldn’t be satisfied to be hired help; they’d cut themselves in on the deal. Or maybe they were in it from the beginning and it really is as big as Burr thinks.”
“The cut will be even bigger now,” Carver said, thinking about the Lujan brothers, wondering if there might be a third brother, or a homicidal cousin. Blood feuds tended to be longer-lived than their participants. “You’re right,” he said, “some of the pieces don’t quite fit.”
“Either that,” Desoto said thoughtfully, “or as we get older and more experienced we notice the irregularities around the edges.”
That could be, Carver thought.
“Have you told Edwina Talbot about what happened last night?” Desoto asked.
“Yes, I phoned her this morning.”
“And she was upset?”
“I couldn’t tell.” He wished Desoto would mind his own business.
“Ah, a lovers’ quarrel?”
“I don’t know,” Carver said. “Our last parting was ambiguous.”
“Love is ambiguous, amigo.”
“You don’t know love,” Carver said, “you only know sex.”
Desoto exposed a toothy grin to the sunlight, made a wavering gesture with a palm-down hand. “A gray area.” He looked beyond Carver, beyond the highway, out at the shimmering ocean. Carver followed his gaze. The pelican was making another determined pass at lunch, inches off the sun-shot water.
“I didn’t feel like driving out here today,” Desoto said. “I promised to take my nephews fishing, then to Disney World. They want to see EPCOT there, the society of the future.”
“Your nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie?” Carver asked.
“You’re in the wrong cartoon, my friend.”
“Yeah, that’s the feeling I’ve had lately.” Carver remembered his own trip to Disney World a few years ago with Anne and Fred Jr. He’d been more impressed than the kids by the Haunted Mansion, Tomorrow World, Space Mountain, the monorail system. Disney World was more than simply a magnificent theme park; it was a startling example of lockstep efficiency and the reach of technology. It left on its adult visitors subtle impressions not anticipated.