“What else do
“Only what you read in the police report. He came to my place up the coast. Said his name was Bob Ghostly and he wanted someone to search for his missing wife. He passed himself off as a medical supply salesman.”
“He was one, for six months in New York. But that was ten years ago, when he was between scams. The company fired him for beating up one of the secretaries.”
“Charges filed?”
“No. There was no way for her to prove who’d done a job on her, but everyone knew. A few months after Gomez was gone, she was killed by a hit-and-run driver.”
“Hirsh?”
“This was before he knew Hirsh. Not Hirsh’s style, either. He looks people in the eye when he kills them. They say he even gives the religious a chance to make their peace.”
“What a guy,” Carver said.
“Well, compared to Gomez he’s a saint.” Strait stood up and gave Carver a stern look. “Sure you’re off this case, Carver?”
“As off it as I can be. I don’t work for people like Gomez.”
“That’s what Lieutenant Desoto said about you. You’ve got the reputation of a tough guy who’s as honest as possible in your line of work, otherwise this interview would have been conducted in another place and another manner. Different questions altogether.”
Carver said, “Different answers, too.” Wondering what was this hard-ass bureaucrat doing threatening him. But then, some DEA agents were like that. The last one he’d met had been a closet fanatic bent on revenge for a long-ago lynching.
Strait stared at him as if doing some reassessment. He pulled a long black wallet out of an inside pocket, withdrew a card, and laid it on Carver’s desk. “Gomez contacts you again, call that number and let me know immediately.”
Carver didn’t say he wouldn’t, didn’t say he would.
Didn’t even say good-bye when Strait walked from the office.
10
After Strait had left the office, Carver talked by phone to a Del Moray woman who wanted him to follow her husband to confirm adultery with her teenage sister. She told him she’d be in to see him and make arrangements, but he wasn’t sure if she’d show. There was no telling where an investigation might lead, and who’d be hurt by spilled acid. So that kind of thing usually stayed within a family. Sometimes everything worked out, sometimes it festered and the poison spread.
Carver spent most of the day dunning people who owed him money, the only paperwork he enjoyed.
The hours slipped past and the woman who suspected her husband and sister of having an affair didn’t come into the office. Carver skipped lunch and ate supper alone in Del Moray, and considered driving by Edwina’s to see if she was home. Then he decided against it. He lowered the Olds’s canvas top and drove north along the coast toward his beach cottage, while the sea went from blue to dark green as the sun arced like a slow-motion meteor toward land.
She was waiting inside the cottage, sitting on the small sofa with her legs crossed, wearing a flowered, silky white blouse and white shorts that showed off her tanned thighs. Seeing her there made Carver ache when he thought of losing her. The dependency he’d feared had become fact.
When he leaned on his cane and closed the door behind him, she said, “I thought we oughta talk.”
Carver limped over behind the breakfast counter and opened the refrigerator. He got out a Budweiser and popped the tab, spilling some of the cold, fizzy beer to form a small puddle on the wood floor. Bracing with the cane, he spread the dampness around with the sole of his shoe. He came out from behind the counter and said, “Well, we didn’t do much talking last night.”
She smiled, remembering. The sun was in the final, rapid stages of setting, softening the light in the cottage and taking ten years off her. Then her face set in hard lines. “I had a conversation with Lester today.”
Jack Lester was the real-estate developer who was building the huge condo project in Hawaii and wanted Edwina as marketing director. Carver could imagine what the conversation had been about. He was right.
“I have to let him know within a week whether I’ll take the job.”
“Pressure,” Carver said.
“Lester’s under pressure himself.”
Carver didn’t care about Lester. He took a pull of beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. A gull screamed outside, wheeling in the darkening sky. He said, “You want the job.” Not a question.
“Yes,” she said.
He stood for a while, leaning on his cane and listening to the ocean whisper ancient secrets. “Gonna take it?”
“I don’t know.”
He thought she did know.
“Think I should take it?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” But he did know. Jesus, how did they get into this?
He walked to the wide window and gazed out at the timeless ocean undulating with an orange tint from the sunset behind the cottage. The horizon seemed higher than where he was standing; the sea was overwhelming.
“Fred?”
He turned around to face her. She’d uncrossed her long tan legs and had her knees pressed together, her hands folded in her lap. He said, “You think love’s always a trap?”
She gave him a brief, hopeless smile. “Maybe that’s the nature of the beast; we should ride it while we can before it turns on us.”
“That seems more applicable to wild horses.” He crushed the empty beer can and tossed it at the wastebasket. Missed. The can clattered on the floor. He’d pick it up later, in the morning.
He limped over to Edwina and leaned down and kissed her lips. She was quietly crying. Not like her to cry.
She sighed and stood up. “C’mon, Fred.” She leaned on him as they made their way to the bed.
He made love to her with a passion that knew its time was limited. Used his hands, his mouth. Lost himself in her soft warm flesh while the ocean rushed and ebbed outside.
Afterward, he lay back silently while she slept. He stared out at the darkness and knew that it inevitably consumed love and life and there were no exceptions. Delusions kept people alive, and they were perishable.
But hadn’t he always known that? Carver the cynic?
The hot black night enveloped him, and he tried without luck to sleep.
The next morning he woke up alone and miserable. Edwina had left a note on her pillow saying she needed to get back to Del Moray early for a sales meeting. The sun, glaring like a malevolent orange eye, sent slanted morning light crashing through the wide window to wash the cottage in heat and brilliance.
Carver crumpled up the note and dropped it back on the pillow. Clenching his eyes shut against the aggressive sun, he ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth and grimaced at the terrible taste. He used his cane to help him stand up and hobble to the bathroom, where he immediately brushed his teeth.
He took a hot shower that he gradually adjusted to ice cold, then toweled himself dry and was feeling somewhat human again as he got dressed. Up to the Paleolithic era, anyway.
Carver limped to the breakfast counter and the Braun coffee-maker Edwina had given him as a birthday present. He rooted in a drawer and saw that there were no filters, just an empty cardboard box. Not that it mattered; there was no coffee, either. Twisting his torso, he reached for the refrigerator door and swung it open. He was looking at three cans of beer, some inedible cottage cheese, a glass decanter with a dribble of orange juice in it. There was some month-old bacon in the meat keeper, he was pretty sure. He closed the door. The refrigerator began to hum, doing what it could to keep things fresh and compensate for his irregular eating habits. GE trying to
