Desoto shrugged inside his elegant suitcoat. “Who knows for sure about this kind of crash? One car involved, nobody around to see it happen. Someone could have driven them to the edge of the embankment, then sent the car over. Or possibly it was a suicide pact, or suicide and murder. Death by misadventure, amigo. There were no skid marks.”
“Or whoever was driving could have fallen asleep at the wheel and the car went off the road.”
“That’s the hypothesis,” Desoto said. “Whatever’s simplest is most likely. But why would the Kern woman have your name written on a scrap of paper? Nothing else, just your name?”
Carver didn’t answer. He didn’t know. Maybe it all meant nothing. It could be that Desoto was making too much of this. Possibly he’d seen the old movie Out of the Past the night before, the ending where Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer careened to their deaths in a ’46 Chevy.
But he knew Desoto had something else in mind. “You think they were in on the drug deal?” Carver asked.
“It’s not impossible. Burr’s almost convinced of it. He’s looking into their lives right now. Panacho’s wife told him her husband had phoned and had hinted he’d unexpectedly discovered something important. He wouldn’t say what it was about. She said he sounded scared, but that might only be the hindsight of grief. Burr’s on his way to talk to the Disney people: Fearless Fosdick in the Magic Kingdom.”
Desoto nodded to the gum-chomping attendant, who ushered them into the warmer area of the morgue. Carver followed the lieutenant out of the building, onto the hot sidewalk. Deja vu. Carver had had enough of looking at corpses and then going out to stand in the heat. He felt nauseated, chilled despite the sun.
“You okay, amigo?” Desoto asked, staring at him.
Carver nodded. “Yeah, relatively.”
“Not an easy world sometimes.”
“Not easy ever, it seems for some people.”
“Maybe it’s meant to be that way. A test for us.”
“That is a lot of crap perpetuated by the folks who like to wear hair shirts.”
“Oh, probably. You told Edwina Talbot about her Willis, eh?”
“This morning. Just before I drove here.”
Desoto’s features sharpened in concern. “How did the news set with her?”
“I’m not sure yet. It was rough on her at first. She tried not to accept it.”
“But you wouldn’t let her lie to herself. Not anymore. Not you.”
Carver squinted against the lowering sun and stared at Desoto. Sometimes the handsome lieutenant’s perceptiveness surprised him. “That’s how it was,” he said, “and I think she has stopped lying to herself, stopped idolizing Willis. But I’m not sure.”
“You’re going back to her now?”
“Yes,” Carver said. “Then we’re driving to Solarville.”
“Under it all,” Desoto said, “she’s strong. I found that out during her visits about Willis. Someday you’ll be surprised by how strong she is.”
“I hope so,” Carver told him, and left him standing there in the slanted, burning sunlight.
Carver limped across the street and got in the Olds. As he started the engine and pulled away from the curb, he saw Desoto still standing on the sidewalk, thinking. Adding, subtracting, not getting answers, wandering through the obscure and trying to bring it into focus, make sense of it, not having any luck.
Carver knew how he felt. Every turn seemed to lead to more turns; every frustration seemed to beget more of the same. The search for Willis Davis had about it a dreamlike quality of quiet madness. Carver felt at times as if he were trying to feel his way through the miasma of nightmares. Then there were times when he seemed to see clearly, but objects on his mind’s horizon simply receded further out of reach as he advanced, eluding him. He wondered how it would be to forget all of this and get a job selling insurance. Or maybe even real estate.
But he only wondered for a moment; he’d never make a salesman. “What other kind of work do you know?” Desoto had asked. Carver knew the answer to that one and had to live with it.
After wending his way out of Orlando and onto the highway, he drove fast back to Del Moray.
CHAPTER 28
Edwina looked put together, in control. She’d brushed her dark hair, put on a blue cotton blouse and a crisp tan skirt. She was wearing blue socks, and the kind of jogging shoes they sew a lightning streak on so they can jack the price up to forty dollars. The outfit made her appear young, interested and interesting. There was an awareness in her calm gray eyes that offset the sadness.
She was holding a drink in her right hand, a whiskey sour in a stemmed glass. As she let him into the house, Carver looked closely at her. She didn’t appear at all sloshed.
“Want one?” she asked.
He said that he did and sat down in the cool living room. Beyond the sheer curtains over the wide window, the still-bright evening continued to simmer. The only intrusion from outside was the whisper of the sea. Everything was neat and in place, clean, as if she’d dusted and straightened the room, the house, while he was gone. A life in order, at least on the surface.
He wondered how she was now, how what had happened played on her mind while he was away. Sometimes there was a delayed reaction to the kind of information he’d thrown at her. Carver felt miserable about what he’d done. Doing the tough but essential tasks in this world exacted a price. Someone once said that sooner or later every man had to shoot his own dog. Carver felt as if he’d been shooting his own dog all his life.
Edwina returned with another whiskey sour, handed it to him, then sat down across from him in a low chair. She said, “Who’s dead?”
“Two people,” Carver said. “Man and a woman. A car accident on Highway 75.”
“How does that concern you?”
“I saw them when I was in Solarville. They were staying at the Tumble Inn.”
“Do they have anything to do with Willis?”
“I’m not sure. My name was written on a slip of paper in the woman’s briefcase. They were both Disney executives. Her name was Mildred Kern; the man was David Panacho.” He watched Edwina’s face as he spoke; she gave no sign that she recognized the names.
“Maybe the Kern woman saw you in Solarville,” Edwina suggested, “found out you were a private detective, and wrote down your name with the intention of hiring you someday. Were the two lovers?”
“Possibly. They appeared as if they might be, but I can’t be sure. And Solarville is the kind of out-of-the-way place two employees of the same company would go for a romantic tryst if they didn’t want corporate gossip to affect their careers.”
“It could be that one or both of them are married,” Edwina said. “You might eventually have been contacted by the woman and asked to follow a spouse, to learn about another affair in order to temper a divorce settlement.”
“Or follow a child or a business associate or a mother or father or find something that was stolen… maybe a black bird. I’ve thought about the possibilities. It’s a futile exercise. The woman is dead, so we’ll probably never know what she was doing with my name written down, what she intended.”
Edwina sipped her drink deliberately, then slowly lowered her glass. He watched her, concerned, wondering. She looked as if she felt fine, as if crush had led to bounce, but you never could tell about people. And he needed to be sure about her. He parted his lips to speak.
“I’m all right,” she said, before he could ask.
He smiled and tapped the cane on the blue carpet. It made no sound.
“Really,” she said, smiling back. “I have wounds, but they’re healing. This is the other world with different, sweeter songs, isn’t it?”
“It can be if that’s what you want.”
“I do want it that way,” she said.
He believed her, but he wasn’t so sure she could bring it off. Not by herself, anyway. He hoped Desoto was
