Because the foliage was so thick, Carver wasn’t very noticeable from the street. That was fine with him. He left the porch, found some firm ground with the tip of his cane, and limped to the attached one-car garage. It had a wooden overhead door with a line of small windows in it. He moved close, raised himself up slightly with a push on the cane, and peered inside.
Sunlight slanted into the garage at a sharp angle, swirling with dust and fractioning the dimness. He saw a power lawnmower with a drooping grass bag attached, metal shelves against the back wall that seemed to contain assorted junk and lawn-care tools. A few loose, unfinished boards and what looked like a length of pipe were laid crookedly overhead on the rafters. A paint-spattered aluminum extension ladder rested horizontally on hooks along the side wall away from the house. No car.
Maybe Dr. Pauly, realizing he’d overslept, had left the house in such a hurry he’d neglected to close the front door all the way. Hustling healer, late for his rounds. Could have happened.
Carver made his way back onto the porch, pushed the door all the way open, and walked inside. Called, “Dr. Pauly? Man losing blood here!”
Silence and heat.
He shut the door behind him and noticed that a mahogany plant stand near the door had been knocked over. An orange ceramic pot lay shattered and dirt had been scattered to expose the roots of a green viny plant. Someone, in their haste to get out of the house, might have struck the plant stand and kept on going.
Carver moved farther inside. He looked around the living room but saw no disorder. As he went down the short hall, he glanced into the kitchen. There was a plastic milk jug and a half-full glass of milk on the sink counter. Next to them, on a white paper towel, lay a wheat-bread sandwich with only a couple of bites out of it. Someone had been interrupted during their snack, or had simply lost all appetite. Shaken by startling news? A phone call? A visitor?
The bedroom was still a mess. Clothes and shoes were scattered on the floor and the bed was unmade, the sheets twisted. The room smelled of stale sweat and desperate emotion. As if it were the scene of recent sexual coupling.
Carver moved carefully, noting the areas of the room blocked from his sight by furniture. Slowly he shifted position until he could see the floor on the other side of the disheveled bed, the space in the corner beside the tall chest of drawers. Everywhere that might shield a body from view.
Satisfied that he’d covered the bedroom itself, he limped to the closet and slid open its tall doors on their growling rollers.
There were gaps where Dr. Pauly’s clothes were draped on wire hangers from the smooth metal closet rod. Half a dozen hangers lay tangled on the floor.
Among the boxes and folded clothes stacked on the closet’s crowded shelf was a space large enough to have accommodated a suitcase.
Carver ran his hand over the shelf there and examined his fingertips. No dust.
He went into the bathroom. A half-used, dry bar of soap lay on the tile floor. None of the towels on the racks was damp. No toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving lotion, or deodorant. No razor, either blade or electric. Not even a comb.
Dr. Pauly had packed and left home in a hurry, not worrying about leaving a mess behind.
Again Carver realized how warm the little house was. Pauly had either gone this morning before the sun had gotten brutal, or been out of the house at least long enough for the air-conditioned atmosphere to have been displaced by heat.
Carver limped into the kitchen and touched the backs of his knuckles to the half-full glass of milk. It was room-temperature. So was the milk in the plastic jug. A tiny brown roach scurried out of sight beneath the lunchmeat-on-wheat sandwich on the paper towel.
There was a wall phone in the kitchen, a beige push-button job with a long, coiled cord that touched the floor. Carver used it to call McGregor.
“Time to share,” he said when McGregor had come to the phone. “I’ve got some information for you.”
McGregor said, “My ear’s all tuned.”
“Dr. Dan Pauly’s disappeared. Didn’t show up at Sunhaven to make his rounds this morning. I went by his house to talk to him; front door was open and it looks like he packed and left in a hurry.”
“Packed, did you say?”
“I said. I’d also say he’s been gone for a while. Several hours at least.”
“I’ll be damned. Your detective training tell you that, or what?”
“My police training. Same training you got, only I didn’t forget mine.”
“That where you’re calling from, Pauly’s house over on Verde?”
“I’m standing in his kitchen.”
“Some more breaking and entering, huh?”
“I told you the front door was open.”
“Got any idea where the good doctor ran off to, Carver? Could it have been some humanitarian mission came up suddenly? Maybe a guy having a heart attack? Or some fruit just realized he got AIDS?”
“No idea,” Carver said.
“Well, I think I might know something about it. ’Cause Raffy Ortiz has disappeared, too.”
Uh-oh! “Disappeared how?”
“I had a man watching him, and it seems Raffy knew about it but didn’t let on till he was ready. Early this morning he did some fancy maneuvering and breaking of the speed limit in that white caddie of his and shook my guy. Raffy’s on the loose now and unsupervised. Running away, it looks like. Same as Dr. Pauly.”
“You saying Raffy and Dr. Pauly were partners and decided it was time to leave the scene?”
“Looks that way. They been partners before. Hey, you know how I found that out? I know about that plea- bargain deal in Miami. We weren’t gonna talk about that one, though, were we, fuckhead?”
“Sure we were. You didn’t give me a chance,”
“Yeah, I shouldn’t butt in the way I do. With you just bubbling over to spill everything to me. My bad manners cause me to miss a lot in life. Tell you, Carver, you keep your ass right where it is, and I’m coming over to look at whatever it is you seen at Pauly’s. Don’t dick around with the evidence or you got trouble.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Why’s a loose cannon like you do anything? You’re just a bit smarter than a parking meter, I guess.”
“I’ll be here,” Carver said. “Help myself to a beer from the fridge while I wait.”
“Only one,” McGregor said. “You ain’t gonna make sense when I get there, I’m sure, but I’d like it to be in your usual way.”
He plonked down the receiver. Unnecessarily hard, Carver thought.
Ah, the doctor drank Budweiser.
McGregor was accompanied by the uniform who’d been at Edwina’s, but he left him sitting in the patrol car parked out on Verde and entered Dr. Pauly’s house alone. He made the place seem even smaller.
He nodded to Carver, who was sitting on the sofa holding a beer can. Then he glanced around. “High-rent neighborhood, but not such a hot-shit house for a medical doctor, hey?”
“He probably still has an expensive habit. Even doctors have to pay something for drugs. Pauly’s not exactly at the apex of the medical profession, and who knows how much he’s been paying Raffy Ortiz, if Raffy’s been bleeding him for the past couple years?”
“That’s a point. Guy with three nuts, he’d probably be worse’n the IRS. But maybe not.”
McGregor took his time. He walked around, looked things over, touched things, came to the same conclusions Carver had reached.
“He’s been gone for a while,” McGregor said. “No telling for sure how long.”
“He’s with Raffy, like you said.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he ran off on a Caribbean cruise with some hot nurse he knows. Doctors do that kinda thing, just like anybody else.”
“He left in a hurry,” Carver reminded McGregor.
“Coulda been one fine nurse. Didn’t wanna be kept waiting to spread her legs on board ship.” He squinted from up high, down at the beer can in Carver’s fist. “There more of that stuff on ice?”
Carver said there was.
