John Lutz - Spark

“These are things I know,” Desoto said.

Carver stood up, feeling the tip of the cane sink deep into plush carpet as he settled his weight over it. “Well, here we find ourselves.”

“Two days from now, I’ll tell Metzger everything I know,” Desoto said in a level voice.

Carver let the idea bounce around his mind for a few seconds. “A two-day delay could finish you with the department,” he said. “You don’t have to do that for me.”

“I’m doing it for myself. Hoping for the best. Putting my faith in you as if you were the pope.”

“It was your faith in me that got your soft parts caught in a vise,” Carver pointed out.

Desoto gave his wide, white, movie-star smile, but his eyes were hard. Cop’s eyes. “My, my. You afraid of such pressure, amigo ?”

Carver limped across the soft carpet toward the door. “If they throw you off the force, don’t ever consider being a psychologist.”

“Two days, my friend. I’m afraid that’s all I can give.”

Carver said, “That’s more than I asked for,” and went out.

He didn’t feel like the pope.

“Jerome was declared perfectly healthy at the medical center two months before his death,” Hattie Evans said the next morning, seated across from Carver in her cool, neat living room. “Don’t you remember, that’s one of the reasons I hired you.” The colorful oil painting on the wall behind the sofa where she sat was of a weeping clown against a black velvet background. Nothing like the art on Desoto’s walls.

“Your neighbor Val once mentioned that Jerome didn’t sleep well, roamed the house at night.”

“That’s true, but it’s hardly a forewarning of a heart attack.”

“Was he given any explanation or medication for his insomnia?”

A subtle light entered Hattie’s eyes, and her back became even more rigid. Her posture gave the impression her spine might snap at any moment. Carver knew he’d struck a chord-just the sort of thing he was hired to do. It gave him satisfaction to see the light in Hattie’s gaze become a gleam of respect, as if he’d finally earned his due from his tough fourth-grade teacher.

“It was a prescription drug to help him sleep,” she said. “I remember now he came home after his physical examination carrying it in a little white paper sack.”

“Do you know where he had the prescription filled?”

“Right at the medical center pharmacy,” Hattie said.

“Because it was more convenient?”

“I suppose. Though usually we got our prescription medicine at Philip’s Pharmacy in Orlando. They beat everyone’s price on drugs. But their bags aren’t white, like the one Jerome had that day. And he’d hardly have driven into Orlando after his physical examination.”

“Remember the name of the medicine?”

“No. But I might recognize it if I heard it. It was liquid, in a little brown bottle I saw in the medicine chest or on Jerome’s dresser where he kept it sometimes to take in the middle of the night without going in the bathroom and switching on lights.”

Carver got the sheet of paper with the drugs the medical center had purchased direct from Mercury Laboratories listed on it and showed it to Hattie, leaning low over the sofa arm to see past her shoulder as she ran a finger down the list of Latin words and abbreviations.

“I can’t be sure,” she said, after several minutes. “Sorry, I simply can’t.”

Carver straightened up, folded the paper, and slipped it back into his shirt pocket.

“What we could do,” she said, “is look at the bottle.”

Carver let out a long breath and smiled. She’d beaten him to his next question. “You been toying with me, Hattie?”

“I wouldn’t consider it, Mr. Carver. The dosage was small and Jerome didn’t finish the bottle, and I don’t recall throwing it away. It should still be somewhere around the house.”

“I thought it might be something you’d hold on to,” Carver told her, remembering what Beth had said about widows’ sentimentalism.

She stared at him. “Why on earth would I do that? Do you think I’d get all misty-eyed over a bottle of medicine just because I’d associate it with Jerome?”

“No, I guess you wouldn’t at that.”

“I live for the present and future, Mr. Carver. One exists and the other will. The past no longer exists and never will again except in memory, and your profession must have taught you the reliability of that particular faculty.”

“Let’s test memory again,” he suggested, “and see if you can find that prescription bottle.”

She gazed sternly at him. “Wait here,” she commanded brusquely, letting “young man” hang in the air. He watched her rise and stride erectly from the room. She’d easily be able to balance a book on her head as she walked. She was still constantly setting an example as she had for years in the classroom. Posture and penmanship had been important in her life and always would be.

He heard her rattling around the contents of the medicine chest. Then she left the bathroom and went into another room. The master bedroom, Carver assumed.

Silence for a long time.

She came back into the living room empty-handed.

“Memory fails again,” she said in a distressed voice. She was frowning now, worried.

Carver laid his cane across his knees and smiled up at her. “The only thing in this world I never misplace is my cane.”

She stood studying him. She didn’t smile, but the etched worry lines in her face softened. “I understand that,” she said. He thought she probably did.

He leaned forward in his chair, set the cane, and stood up.

“I’ll keep searching,” she told him. “I do think I’d remember if I threw away the bottle. And I’m sure it was more than half full. I can see it in my mind’s eye, about five inches high with a black cap the medicine had left a crust around.”

“Call me right away if you find it,” he said. Then he scrawled Beth’s room number on the back of one of his business cards. “If I’m not there to answer the phone, hang up and then call the motel again and ask for this extension. If you get Beth Jackson, tell her you’ve found the bottle.”

Hattie nodded, took the card, and glanced at it before inserting it in a wide pocket of her paisley skirt.

“Don’t forget to keep your doors and windows locked,” Carver said as he was leaving.

She said, “I never really needed that advice. I’ve been locking the house securely since Jerome died.”

As he was limping to his rented Ford, Carver glanced back and saw Val Green standing at his window. Standing guard over his ladylove, Carver figured. Val saw him and lifted a hand in greeting.

Carver waved back, climbed into the car, and drove away. Feeling better knowing Val was losing sleep over Hattie.

As he turned the corner off of Pelican Lane, a large gray Cadillac flashed past going the opposite direction on Golden Drive. He caught a glimpse of the driver. It might have been the infamous Nurse Gorham, but he couldn’t be positive. He’d only seen her once before, that time he’d talked to Dr. Wynn at the medical center, and he couldn’t trust his memory.

Carver found Philip’s Pharmacy easily enough on Washington in downtown Orlando. It was a small shop, unusual in that it specialized in prescription and over-the-counter drugs rather than the general run of merchandise most drugstores now carried. No shoes or motor oil here. There was a kid behind the register up front, and a middle-age man in a white smock was working behind the counter in the back, near a display of vitamins and drugstore eyeglasses.

The cashier, a dumpy little girl about sixteen, looked at Carver as expectantly as a puppy when he entered the pharmacy. He smiled at her and limped back toward the prescription counter. She returned to pricing cartons of cigarettes, maintaining a profitable symbiotic relationship.