She waited until he was all the way outside, then leaned forward out the door, as if she didn’t want Wallace to overhear her. “If there’s any way we can help you, help Marla, let us know.”
“I will,” Carver said. “And don’t worry too much about this. It’s not so serious that Marla even mentioned it to you.”
“I worry about Marla. A mother worries.”
“Most of them, anyway.” Carver turned toward his car, watching a swarm of insects rise around his cane. “Good luck with the puzzle.”
“Good luck with your own puzzle,” Sybil told him.
15
When Carver entered the cottage, he saw the note tucked beneath the salt shaker on the breakfast bar, where he and Beth customarily left messages for each other.
She was staking out Marla Cloy’s house and would return late that night.
The note also told him there was pressed turkey in the refrigerator. He found it, along with mayonnaise and lettuce, then built himself a sandwich on rye bread and ate it with a cold Budweiser. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was. He made himself another sandwich, and while he ate it he finished a small bag of barbecue potato chips Beth had eaten most of, then sealed with a wooden clothespin. He wondered where she’d obtained such a domestic item. She looked like a beautiful tribal queen. He couldn’t imagine her hanging wash.
After returning the turkey and mayonnaise to the refrigerator, he propped his sandwich plate in the dishwasher, then opened another beer. He carried the beer can and the cordless phone out onto the porch, sat down in a webbed lounge chair, and leaned his cane against the cottage wall.
He sat sipping beer and looking out at the ocean for a long time, watching a high bank of clouds move out to sea as gulls cried and wheeled in the dying light. Then he smoked a Swisher Sweet cigar, picked up the cordless phone, and called Vic Morgan.
“It’s Carver,” he said, when Morgan had answered the phone.
“You sure, Fred? You sound like you’re talking from the bottom of a barrel.”
“It’s this cordless phone.” Carver was often frustrated by technology that kept getting newer as he grew older. “I’m on a weak channel or something.”
“Then change the channel.”
“It does that automatically. I paid extra for that feature.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Can you hear me well enough?”
“Sure. As long as I just take your word for it that it’s you.”
“Given that it’s me,” Carver said, “I’d like to ask what you know about Joel Brant.”
“The guy who’s got the nutcase woman after him?”
Carver could tell where Morgan’s sympathies lay. Like a lot of cops, he’d developed a negative view of women from his years on Vice. “Same Brant. He’s my client now.”
“I don’t know anything about him personally,” Morgan said. “But I had the strong sensation he was telling me the truth. And you know how it goes when a woman’s accusing a man of anything these days. He’s got a hell of a problem even if he’s innocent. I thought you’d be the guy to get to the bottom of why this Cloy woman is out to get him.”
“Assuming he’s telling the truth.”
“You think he’s lying, Fred?” Morgan sounded surprised.
“I didn’t at first, but now I’m not so sure.”
“Hmm. That’s odd. I’ve developed a feel for these things over the years, and I’d bet the ranch and all the livestock he’s telling it straight. For some reason the Cloy broad is out to get him.”
“What if she’s the one telling the truth?”
“Then he kills her. That’s the way the law works, Fred. Can’t arrest a man for thinking about a crime-he’s got to commit it.”
“Kind of tough on the potential victim,” Carver said.
“I’m not saying it isn’t. I’m saying it’s impossible to arrest somebody who hasn’t done anything. And that’s the way it has to be. Listen, Fred, I’ve seen plenty of stalkers, and this Brant isn’t one of them. I’m convinced of it.”
“You must be, or you wouldn’t have sent him to me.”
“That’s something to remember,” Morgan said. He sounded miffed that Carver would doubt his cop’s instincts. “I might be retired, but some things don’t change. When I hear a man’s story, it counts for something if I feel in my gut he’s telling the truth.”
“It counts for plenty,” Carver assured him. “Or I wouldn’t have taken on Brant as a client.”
After breaking the connection, he laid the phone on the floor beside his chair and lit another cigar, watching the smoke he exhaled roll under and off to the side. The breeze had shifted and was blowing in off the ocean, cooling the hot sand and rattling palm fronds to make them sound as if they were tapping out a complex code. The surf whispered like a conspirator on the beach, but neither it nor the palms had the answers Carver needed.
He sat there, smoking and thinking, until dark.
When Beth arrived he was in bed asleep with the light on and the front page of the
He lay half in the world of sleep and listened to the door open and close, the thunking of her footsteps in the nighttime silence as she crossed the plank floor. Water ran in the kitchen, then in the bathroom. When her footfalls got closer, he opened his eyes halfway and watched her undress. She made graceful motions out of the simple act of peeling off her clothes, almost like choreographed dance. Did she know he was watching?
Wearing only blue bikini panties, she approached him and gently removed the newspaper from his chest, then switched off the reading lamp. The room became dim in the moonlight that softened all objects. The window was open and the ocean breeze pushed in and played over Carver’s bare chest and arms, suddenly and comfortably cool now that the newspaper had been removed. He could hear the night surf, and somehow it seemed like the sound of the gentle breeze.
The bed creaked and he felt the mattress shift as she lowered her long body down to lie beside him.
“You asleep, Fred?”
“No. I was watching you undress. You don’t look pregnant.”
“I don’t feel it, either, right now. Makes it easier to be in denial.” She extended a hand and stared at it. “I just quit shaking. As I turned onto the road to the cottage, a van came roaring out of nowhere and almost forced me into the ditch.”
“The driver probably thought you were the police and panicked. Teenagers have been parking there to make out, since it’s dark and secluded.”
“ ‘Make out,’ huh? You’re dating yourself, Fred.”
“Well, it’s the age of safe sex.”
“Couldn’t prove it by me,” she said, and leaned over and kissed his forehead, then dropped back onto her pillow. “I’m as pregnant as if it were nineteen-forty.”
“Hubba, hubba,” he said. “What kind of day did Marla Cloy have?”
“Normal, I’d say. She worked until late afternoon, then ran some errands in that little car of hers. In the evening she ate supper alone at a steakhouse-no steak, though, just a baked potato with a godawful assortment of goodies heaped over it till it had more calories than steak. After that she went home, came out half an hour later with a basket of clothes, and drove to a coin laundry. It was about nine o’clock when she went home and stayed there. I could see her through the window, folding and putting away clothes. Then she watched TV for a while and went to bed. Lights went out about ten-thirty. I hung around another half hour to make sure she was down for the night, then I left. Stopped for some doughnuts and slaw and drove back here.”
“Doughnuts and slaw?”
