because you have a job now. A challenge.”
“I’m not a victim of the work ethic,” Carver told her, knowing better. He was like Edwina; he needed an obsession, maybe even one that carried moral obligation, so he could push himself until he was satisfied that he’d done the job: an illusion of forward motion in life. But he had his doubts about whether Willis Davis was worth all of that. “When I find out anything important, I’ll let you know,” he said. He got a firm grip on his cane and started back around the pool to go to his car.
Edwina walked next to him, her sandals making soft slapping sounds against the bottoms of her feet. Her slow pace was Carver’s normal one, with the cane. She didn’t open the gate for him, or the car door.
Carver settled in behind the steering wheel, twisted the ignition key, and the Oldsmobile’s big V-8 engine growled and rumbled like the dinosaur it was. He felt its powerful vibration in his thighs and buttocks, throughout his body.
“We haven’t discussed your fee,” Edwina said, standing alongside the car.
“We’ll discuss it when I find Willis. If I don’t find him, you can cover my expenses and that’s all.”
“That’s fair to the point of being dumb.”
“That’s me for you,” Carver said. He drove away.
CHAPTER 4
Carver took interstate 95 south, then drove west on the Bee Line Expressway into Orlando. As soon as he got off the highway, he pulled to the curb and raised the Oldsmobile’s canvas top; the June Florida sun was high now, beating down on vinyl, flesh, and metal. There would be no sixty-mile-per-hour breeze to cool him now that he had to drive at a slower speed in the city. He switched on the air-conditioner before accelerating back out into traffic.
A van with more windows than a house, and half a dozen Disney World stickers pasted on its rear doors and bumper, honked at Carver for pulling in ahead of it, then whizzed on past the Olds about twenty miles per hour over the speed limit. It seemed that half the cars that passed Carver going north had Disney stickers on their bumpers or trunks. People not letting go of their vacation in Disney-dominated, enchanted central Florida, carrying the good times home with them. Someday it might be comforting to scrape the snow off that bumper and see the sticker.
A small blond kid who might have been male or female stared for a moment out a sticker-papered rear window, just before the van cut across the bow of a truck and took a turnoff toward downtown. Carver followed the van, watching it pull away at high speed. He was on his way downtown, too. He hoped he wouldn’t see the van wrapped around a tree on the way.
Carver found Lieutenant Alfonso Desoto in his office on the second floor of police headquarters. The lieutenant didn’t get up from behind his cluttered gray metal desk when Carver entered, but he smiled and waved a hand in invitation for Carver to sit down in one of the wooden chairs in front of the desk. A portable radio on the window sill behind Desoto was playing “Guantanamera.” In the other window a refrigeration unit purred away, causing a couple of yellow ribbons tied to its grill work to flutter merrily. The office looked cool but felt too warm.
Carver hooked his cane around the back of one of the chairs and pulled it to him, then sat down. He looked at Desoto without speaking. The lieutenant was as handsome as ever, and would have looked more at home in a bullfighter’s suit of lights than in his gray business suit. Desoto was over six feet tall, broad of shoulder and waspish of waist, with flashing white teeth, liquid brown eyes, and a noble Aztec profile. He was only half Mexican, Carver knew, on his father’s side. His mother was Italian. Desoto had inherited the best of the gene pool.
He was the first to speak. “You look good, amigo. The rich and idle life of the private cop apparently agrees with you.”
“Only apparently,” Carver said. “I’d rather be back on the job.”
Desoto nodded somberly. “I know. But life is change, and we all have to adapt. Sad, but that’s the way of things.”
“Don’t give me that crap.”
“Okay.”
The music on the radio stopped, and a commercial blared from the tinny speaker, a rehearsed conversation among a group of kids praising the qualities of a popular brand of pudding. Somewhere big business had gotten the idea that cuteness translated into profit. Carver wished they’d hurry up and get some other idea.
“You mind turning that off?” he asked Desoto.
Desoto raised an eyebrow in matinee-idol fashion. He didn’t look like the tough cop he was. “You don’t like pudding, amigo?”
“I don’t like cute. It makes me want to spit.”
“Ah, you’ve gotten cynical, bitter.” But Desoto’s hand reached out and switched off the radio. The room abruptly seemed unnaturally quiet, with only the purring of the air-conditioner and the distant, unintelligible crackle of a dispatcher’s voice on the police radio somewhere outside the office, droning relentlessly: Orlando keeping up in crime. “But what about Miss Edwina Talbot?” Desoto asked. “That one is beyond mere cute, wouldn’t you say?”
“Is that why you sent her to me, Desoto? To cheer me up?”
“I thought you might need something to make your pecker as stiff as your leg.”
“I only need one crutch,” Carver said. “You sent me Edwina because the Willis Davis suicide doesn’t smell right.”
“I didn’t tell her that.”
“You wouldn’t. And you wouldn’t tell her that you can’t waste money and manpower on a case that probably would end up a fat zero. That the higher-ups on the force wouldn’t let you, even if you wanted to take a run at finding Willis Davis or what’s left of him. You wouldn’t tell her, but she knows.”
“Sure, the woman’s no fool. I realized that as soon as I stopped looking at her and started listening. And there’s something else about her. She isn’t nearly as tough as she acts.”
“Oh?” It interested Carver that Desoto had come to the same conclusion he had. “Then why does she act tough?”
“You don’t understand the female of our species, amigo. This one has been hurt, badly.”
“Sure. Willis left her.” Carver was prodding. He wanted to hear what Desoto had to say about this, his area of expertise.
“No, no, I mean before that. Beyond that. She must have been. That’s why she pretends to be so cold.”
“So you decided she should be my client,” Carver said. “Good psychotherapy for both of us.”
“You were going to rust and ruin out there by the ocean, hadn’t worked in a month; I heard it from a lot of people. And what other kind of work do you know, huh, viejo? You’ve been a policeman almost all your so-called adult life.”
“Even before that,” Carver said. “I was a hall monitor in school.” He gave a Cagney-like sneer and pretended he was holding a machine gun. He knew Desoto was a late-night TV buff and a Cagney fan.
“You think when things get mean, you can get meaner,” Desoto said. “But that doesn’t always work in the real world. You can be a cruel man, Carver. Hard. But like Edwina Talbot, you aren’t as hard as you think.”
“Oh? I know I’m not so hard. Cruel, either. I get mad when I see people jerked around. I’ve been jerked around too much myself; that’s why I use a cane and list like a sinking ship when I walk. When I get mad, I try to do something about what makes me mad. There’s nothing very complicated, or wrong, with that kind of behavior.”
Desoto leaned back and crossed his arms. “So you get mad when you see people used, and you try to do something about it. You pick and choose. Who the fuck you think you are, amigo? Maybe Dirty Harry?”
“No, I’m just a guy who gets mad.”
“This is noble?”
“Nope. But if I’m too hard and cynical for some people, that’s too bad. I don’t apologize.”
Desoto leaned further back in his desk chair and looked satisfied. He’d probably meant to get Carver riled; it
