Carver waited patiently for Armont to get to the point.
“I remembered something from Mackenzie’s campsite,” Armont said. “Footprints in the soft ground around there. So I drove out this morning and made casts of some of the prints. They match the sandals Silverio Lujan was wearing when he tried to kill you and got dead himself.”
Carver sat with his hands on the steering wheel, remembering Lujan coming at him with the knife.
Armont said, “They’re the kind of sandals whose soles are made from tire carcasses. The treadmarks are identical.”
“They sell a lot of those,” Carver said. “How do you know these were Lujan’s that made the campsite prints? Were they both B. F. Goodrich, or what?”
“Goodyear, actually. The one with the blimp. But they also have individual distinguishing marks on them. Lujan’s sandals made those prints. Whatever happened to Mackenzie, Lujan was out there at some point-during, before, or after. What I want to know from you, Carver, is had you ever had any contact with Mackenzie?”
“I never heard of him until a few minutes ago,” Carver said. “From you. Are you telling me you think Lujan killed him?”
“I’m not sure what to think right now,” Armont said. “There’s quicksand in that part of the swamp south of town. Sinkholes that go down deeper than imagination. A man could have an accident there, disappear for good. Even a trained naturalist like Mackenzie.”
“Still,” Carver said, “those sandal prints. It’s possible Lujan knifed him, maybe in a robbery, maybe for twisted sport, and there’s no connection between that and his attempt on my life.”
“Yeah,” Armont said, “it’s possible.” He didn’t seem to believe it. “Could be we’ll never know, with Lujan dead.” More perspiration dripped from his chin.
“Thanks for the information,” Carver said. He reached over and shook Armont’s hand.
Armont stood up straight, so that only his ample stomach was visible out the window. He slapped the canvas top of the car to get Carver’s attention. “You take care now,” he said, loud enough for Carver to hear.
Carver watched him walk back to the cruiser and get in.
Armont started the car immediately. Its tires kicked up mud and rock as it swerved back onto the road and accelerated past the parked Olds.
The chief tapped the horn and waved to Carver, an oddly wistful good-bye.
Carver sat for a while longer, thinking about what Armont had told him. Something had happened to the naturalist Mackenzie out there in the swamp. Considering Lujan’s history with knives, it wasn’t at all unlikely that Mackenzie and Carver were simply meant to be fellow victims, by chance and nothing more. Or Lujan might have visited the campsite but had nothing to do with Mackenzie’s disappearance.
Coincidence again? Hah!
Carver started the Olds and gunned the engine to free the right front wheel from the pull of the swamp.
It was almost noon when Carver and Edwina drove out of Solarville in the Olds and headed toward the main highway, then north. Not toward Del Moray but toward Orlando. Edwina wanted to get some of her things from Willis’s apartment, she’d said. Carver thought she probably wanted to visit the apartment to get a renewed sense of Willis, to make the ghost more real.
They stopped for a light lunch at a truck stop that served free orange and grapefruit juice in paper cups, then continued through the grove country with the Olds’s top raised to block the brooding tropical sun. Carver sat disconsolately behind the steering wheel, thinking about the night before and listening to flying insects smack against the windshield and meet sudden, unexpected oblivion.
In the rented Pontiac that followed the Olds were three men, well dressed in expensive if slightly flamboyant fashion, seated calmly in the air-conditioned oasis of the car’s spacious blue interior. They were large men, and each had about him the perfect stillness of the truly dangerous, the calmness of the carnivore conserving energy for the kill. Two of the men had been on the boat off the shore near Sun South when Carver was talking to Franks.
The three had spent most of their lives in Cuba. Hard lives, not without violence. They were Marielitos.
The driver, a bulky man with a receding hairline above a peasant’s sunbrowned face of blunt angles and planes, was Jorge Lujan. Silverio’s brother.
He liked knives and fire.
CHAPTER 20
About an hour after lunch they were close to Orlando. The smiling, sunny presence of Disney World began to make itself felt, radiating far beyond the Magic Kingdom. Signs began to give mileage and directions to the land of Mickey and Pluto and the Monorail. Carver stopped and filled the Olds’s tank at Gas World. A roadside shop with a display of clocks made from waxed slabs of cypress billed itself as Souvenir World. A produce stand not much larger than a phone booth was Citrus World. In the station wagon in front of the Olds, anywhere from four to six children (they were moving around inside the car too fast to count) all wore oversized mouse ears that kept getting knocked crooked on their small heads. The man and woman in the front seat took turns twisting awkwardly and shouting at the kids. Frantic World.
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.
