“Still?”
“Why did you call, Fred?” She obviously wasn’t amused by his pass at humor.
“I’ve just come from Marla Cloy’s old apartment building in Orlando.” He told her what he’d found out.
“She sounds like a more or less normal woman,” Beth said.
“You wanted to be a part of the investigation. Can you keep an eye on her while I check out things here in Orlando? I’m pushing my luck tailing her close every day; she’s bound to notice I’m in the background too often for coincidence.”
“Okay, I’ll carry the ball for a while. It’ll give her another car and another face to look at if she’s peeking from the corner of her eye. Think she’s home now?”
“Probably. She’s like you: work, work, work.”
“ ’Cause of the bills, bills, bills.”
“You sure you feel well enough to do this?”
“Of course I do. I’m okay. A little queasy in the morning, but after that I’m my usual self.”
“Selves, now.”
“Shut up, Fred.”
He thought she was going to hang up, but she stayed on the line. He could hear her breathing as he stared out over the Olds’s long hood at a row of greasy five-gallon oil drums. A brown and black dog, very fat, waddled out from behind the drums. Carver wondered if it was pregnant.
“Have you thought any more about the baby?” he asked.
“It’s what I think about even when I’m thinking about something else,” she said, evading what he was really asking.
“Are you positive you’re focused enough to follow Marla Cloy without being noticed?”
“I’m positive, Fred.” She sounded irritated now, almost to the point of attacking him. “It’s not at all the way you think, when a woman’s pregnant.”
There was no way he could dispute that. Better stick to business. “Marla carries a paperback novel around with her and reads it from time to time. I don’t think she’s as involved in it as she’d like anyone watching to believe. And she’s cautious by nature. Make sure you keep your distance from her in public places. And when you follow her in your car-”
Beth hung up.
Carver was left with the receiver pressed to his ear, listening to the distant sigh and static of the broken connection.
He had a few further instructions for her, but he decided against calling her back. Instead, he stretched out his arm and replaced the receiver in its cradle, then cranked up the car window and switched the air conditioner to its highest setting.
For a few minutes he sat with the car’s engine idling, thinking about Beth’s pregnancy. He couldn’t deny he didn’t want to be a father again. It didn’t make sense at his age, in his circumstances. It would cause problems, turn his life upside down and sideways.
But at the same time, he couldn’t deny he was tickled by the prospect.
Nothing’s simple, he thought, and he yanked the transmission lever to drive.
The apartment Marla had moved to after Graystone was a notch down the economic scale. Bailock Avenue was in a rough part of town known for its drug-culture inhabitants and the accompanying crimes of burglary and assault. Kids growing up on Bailock were introduced to guns before getting acquainted with Dr. Seuss, and probably didn’t understand why Sam I Am didn’t simply pack a semiautomatic and force green eggs and ham on anyone he chose.
Driving along the avenue of tired brick-and-frame houses and ruined lives, Carver wondered if Marla Cloy was involved with drugs as user or dealer. It was a possibility everywhere these days, but especially in Florida, home of sun, fun, and gun, and drug smugglers’ port of call.
Her temporary apartment after leaving Graystone wasn’t really an apartment, but half of a small frame duplex. The building needed painting so badly it had been weathered to a dull gray with only traces of its once- white color showing in grainy streaks, as if an incompetent artist had attempted light breaking through an overcast sky.
Carver parked at the curb in front of the duplex, behind a ten-year-old rusty Plymouth that had once been a taxi. Then he climbed out of the Olds and made his way along a cracked and uneven sidewalk to the sagging porch.
The wooden porch floor was so spongy, he was careful not to lean with much weight on his cane; he feared its tip might penetrate a termite-infested plank.
Only half of the duplex was occupied. A middle-aged, dispirited-looking woman responded to his knock and opened the door to the occupied part, the half with curtains. She identified herself as Fern Neptune, the duplex’s owner and manager. Her body odor was horrific and almost overmatched the bourbon fumes she breathed. She had poorly hennaed hair, mottled skin, and a bulbous and veiny nose that fairly or unfairly screamed of alcoholism.
She somehow managed to look haughty and told Carver up front she didn’t have much time for him. She remembered Marla Cloy, of course, but had only rented the other half of the duplex to her for a week or so until she could move out of town. “Cheaper than a motel,” Fern said smugly, and just as anonymously. Not getting to know the tenants was the best way for a landlord, she said. It prevented pain and problems in the long run.
No, Marla hadn’t associated with the neighbors, Fern told him, but that wasn’t unusual in this part of town. No, there were never any late-night goings-on or unusual sounds coming from the other side of the duplex. And no, Marla Cloy didn’t entertain men or throw wild parties or play her stereo too loud-if she even owned a stereo.
“An unusually quiet and well-behaved woman,” Carver commented.
“I don’t know about
“It can be a breeding farm for mosquitoes, too,” Carver said.
She glanced pointedly at her wristwatch, then faded back into the dimness of her duplex’s interior and closed the door halfway, letting Carver know she was finished talking to him. He was afraid she was going to inform him that time had flown.
“Let me give you my card,” he said. “Will you call me if you learn or think of anything else about Marla Cloy?”
“No,” she said flatly, ignoring the card he’d extended to her. “I don’t gossip about my tenants, past or present. Wouldn’t be in the landlord business long if I did that.”
“I guess you’re right,” he said, thinking it might be to his advantage in the future to stay on Fern’s good side- insofar as she had one.
He could feel her staring at him as he carefully negotiated the tilted, uneven sidewalk to return to his car.
After starting the Olds, he jockeyed around the old Plymouth parked in front of it, then accelerated along Bailock. The stale odor Fern Neptune had exuded seemed to cling to his clothes.
He cranked down the driver’s-side window and let warm but fresh air swirl into the car, barely noticing the black minivan that fell in behind him almost a block back, riding low and listing to the left to accommodate the great weight of the massive man behind the steering wheel.
14
Sleepy Hollow, the trailer court where Wallace and Sybil Cloy, Marla’s parents, lived, was almost twenty miles outside Orlando. Carver saw a sign featuring the cartoonlike silhouette of a headless horseman, slowed the car, and turned right onto Crane Drive.
Trailer courts in Florida were unlike those in other parts of the country. One difference was that their residents usually insisted on the term “mobile home” rather than “trailer.” Carver, who had once lived in one himself and rather liked it, still thought of them as trailers even as he called them mobile homes.
Sleepy Hollow’s streets were alphabetized and apparently all intersected Crane Drive. The lots were
