John Lutz - Kiss

It was late afternoon but still hot. Carver had poured two glasses of lemonade from the tall pitcher Edwina kept in the refrigerator.

He watched the breeze ruffle the fringe on the umbrella sprouting from the center of the table on the brick veranda. The sun sparked silver off the ocean swells that curled in on themselves to form whitecaps as they neared the shore. Due to the lay of the land, he couldn’t see the beach from where he sat, but he could hear the slap of the waves and the rush and roar of surf. Far out at sea something dark, a boat, a bit of flotsam, something, was drifting. Whatever it was, it looked lost and lonely.

Alfonso Desoto sat across from Carver, his back to the sea, his glass of lemonade untouched before him and resting in a circle of dampness on the white-enameled table.

His handsome Latin features had an intense cast to them this afternoon, like those of a bullfighter contemplating grave danger. Desoto was dressed neatly as ever, in a well-tailored cream-colored suit, pale blue shirt, and mauve tie. His gold watch glinted on one wrist, a bulky gold bracelet on the other. He wore a gold diamond ring on each hand, pinkie ring on the right, ring finger on the left. He looked too prosperous and flashy for a cop, but he was a cop. And a good one. A lieutenant in the Orlando department.

He was here in Del Moray because Carver was his friend. Because he was worried. It wasn’t like Desoto to worry. Or seem to worry, anyway. It made Carver uneasy. He watched the sea behind Desoto, kept an eye on whatever it was out there drifting.

“Where’s Edwina?” Desoto asked casually.

“Out selling condos someplace.”

Desoto sighed and sat back. “Not a bad way to earn your bread, amigo. Doesn’t depend on crime, like our professions.”

“You haven’t seen some of the condos.”

Desoto didn’t smile. “What we do for a living, dealing with the kinds of people we see every day, it makes you cynical. Makes you get suspicious when maybe you shouldn’t.”

“Or when maybe you should,” Carver said.

He waited for Desoto to get around to whatever he’d come here to say. The breeze kicked up and snapped the umbrella against its metal frame; the table moved an inch, as if its sail had been filled with wind, scraping over the hard bricks. Carver wondered why the breeze never mussed Desoto’s glossy black hair.

Desoto picked up his glass and sipped his lemonade. Put the glass back down and rotated it smoothly in its circle of dampness. He said, “I want to talk to you about my uncle Sam Cusanelli.”

The Italian name didn’t throw Carver. He knew Desoto wasn’t Cuban, as many people assumed. His father had been Mexican, his mother Italian, even though Desoto looked like classic Latin nobility profiled on a Spanish coin. Carver tapped a finger on his own damp, cold glass of lemonade and nodded.

“I never saw much of my father when I was a kid,” Desoto went on. “He was always off somewhere doing whatever mining engineers do-if he really was a mining engineer. It was actually my mother who raised me, amigo. My mother and Uncle Sam.”

He grinned, perfect white teeth a shock in his dark features.

“When I was very young I used to think he was the real ‘Uncle Sam.’ He did nothing to set me straight.”

Carver waited. A gull flapped by overhead, screeched wildly, and then soared in a graceful arc toward the ocean to pursue another gull.

“I grew up,” Desoto said. “Learned the truth about Uncle Sam. Both of them.” He added sadly, “My own Uncle Sam got old, amigo.”

“We all get old,” Carver said. That oughta help cheer up Desoto. Carver sipped his lemonade; it was bitter but he figured he deserved it and took another sip.

Desoto smiled, his dark eyes somber. “From time to time I have doubts that you’ll grow old, my friend.”

Carver rested his hand on the crook of the hard walnut cane that was leaning against his chair. He remembered the noise and muzzle flash, and the pain of the bullet that had smashed his kneecap and ended his career as an Orlando police officer three years ago. There were times, brief, endless seconds of undeniable mortality, when he wanted nothing so much as the opportunity to become old. “So what happened to your uncle?” he asked.

Desoto shifted his weight and looked uncomfortable. “He stayed with my mother for a while, then after she died he lived alone at an old residential hotel in South Miami Beach. It was a clean place, and Sam was happy there. Then his legs got bad-a circulation problem. Wasn’t long before his mind began to slip now and then, but nothing serious. I drove down to see him one day and found out he’d been moved to a retirement home. His sister, in Saint Louis, had arranged for it and was paying the bills.”

“That’d be your aunt,” Carver said.

Desoto nodded. “My Aunt Marie. Only met her a few times, when I was a kid. She never got along with Sam or my mother.”

“Why not?”

“Who knows? One of those reasons you never tell kids, I guess. All I heard were whispers.” He curled the left half of his upper lip in a sneer. “Apparently there’d been a reconciliation.”

“Happens in families,” Carver said. “People grow up, see time dwindling away, and tend to forgive things that happened when everybody’s blood ran hotter.”

“The home Marie and her husband put Sam in was Sunhaven.”

Carver knew the place. A rambling building that looked like a series of pastel cubes or children’s blocks clustered at random near the coast highway. Pale cement with lots of tinted reflecting plastic or glass. There was a fancy wooden gate that was sometimes opened, sometimes closed when Carver drove past. Room, board, and medical attention couldn’t be cheap at Sunhaven, but it didn’t look to Carver like a good place to be while the golden years melted away in the Florida sun. On the other hand, old Sam had to be better off there than in some fleabag art-deco hotel in south Miami. What was Desoto complaining about?

“Aunt Marie must be well off,” Carver said.

“Medicare picked up much of the cost,” Desoto said, as if eager to minimize Marie’s contribution.

“But not all of it,” Carver said. Fair was fair.

“No, amigo, not all of it.”

Carver was suddenly aware that Desoto had used the past tense. “You said ‘picked’ up.”

“Yes,” Desoto said. “Two days ago Sam Cusanelli died.”

Carver wasn’t sure what to say to this. “How old was he?” he asked.

“Seventy-six.”

What now? Well, he led a long, full life? The pain on Desoto’s face concerned Carver. There was a lot more to this than an old man dying on celestial schedule in a nursing home.

“About six months ago Sam began writing me letters,” Desoto said. “He knew I was a policeman, but I’m afraid he had exaggerated ideas of my sphere of influence and authority. He wanted me to investigate what was wrong at Sunhaven.”

Carver ran his fingertips lightly over the warm, smooth table. “Wrong in what way?”

Desoto shook his head slowly. “I’m not sure. The letters were vague. He was an old man, and it’s true his mind wasn’t what it had been.” Above the pale blue collar and neatly knotted tie, Desoto’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “I’m afraid I didn’t take him as seriously as I should have, and now he’s dead.”

Carver thought he knew where Desoto was taking the conversation. “Dead how?”

“Oh, natural causes. A cerebral hemorrhage. A stroke, in other words. He’d had them before, and finally a massive one killed him. I talked to the doctor, saw the death certificate.”

“But you’re not comfortable with the situation.”