John Lutz - Spark

“Resist as strongly as Hattie Evans?”

Billingsly smiled again. “Ah! Mrs. Evans is a strong woman.” He took a long pull of coffee and glanced at his watch. “I like her, which is why I was glad to agree to talk with you. To reassure her that, like so many other women in this land of dietary idiocy, she lost her husband to a heart attack. It’s cruel, but it’s simple reality. She’ll simply have to adapt, and I’m sure she will.” He stood up and drained his foam cup, then tossed it into a plastic-lined wastebasket near the coffee machine. Another discard whose time had run out.

Carver planted his cane and stood, also. He thanked Billingsly for his time.

“Tell Mrs. Evans I said hello,” the doctor told Carver, as he bustled out of the waiting room. Carver watched him hurry down the hall and disappear beyond the busy, circular counter that was the nurses’ station. One of the nurses glanced after Billingsly, then at another nurse, and both women smiled.

Carver poured himself a cup of coffee and sat back down, watching a gray and withered man in an oversized blue robe shuffle along the hall while pushing a portable steel stand with a transparent envelope dangling from it. The sack of clear liquid was joined to the back of his hand by a coiled plastic tube and an IV needle.

The old get despondent, the wise young Dr. Billingsly had said.

Maybe Hattie Evans clung to her craving for justice rather than sink into that despondency after her husband’s sudden and unexpected death. She was a willful woman who would cling fiercely and not be easily dislodged. Definitely the last-leaf-upon-the-tree type.

Obsession was preferable to suicide. Carver knew that.

Maybe that explained it all, he thought, watching the old man with the portable IV disappear into one of the rooms.

Or maybe it explained nothing.

“Explain,” Desoto said.

Carver was sitting in front of Lieutenant Alfonso Desoto’s desk in his office on Hughey in Orlando. Desoto was elegantly dressed as usual. Pale-gray suit, mauve shirt with maroon tie, gold watch, two gold rings, gold cufflinks. On him it somehow didn’t look flashy. He had the dark and classic looks of a matinee idol in one of the old movies he loved, the one where the handsome bullfighter gets the girl. Those who didn’t know him sometimes guessed he was a gigolo rather than a tough cop. That could be a serious mistake.

Carver explained the connection between Hattie Evans and the late Maude Crane. To wit: the late Jerome Evans.

Desoto leaned back in his chair and flashed his cuff links. Behind him, a Sony portable on the windowsill was playing sad Latin guitar music very softly. “What you’re saying, amigo , is that someone might have murdered Maude Crane?”

“Not exactly,” Carver said. “I guess what I’m doing is asking.”

“If what you say is true about Crane’s affair with Jerome Evans, and Crane was murdered, the prime suspect would be Hattie Evans, your client.”

“Even with Jerome dead?”

“The need for vengeance doesn’t die with the prize,” Desoto said. The breeze from the air conditioner barely ruffled his sleek black hair, Carver couldn’t remember ever seeing Desoto’s hair seriously mussed.

“I don’t even know if Hattie was aware of her husband’s affair, having only heard about it secondhand myself.”

“Secondhand from whom?”

“Her next-door neighbor, Val Green.”

“How would he know?”

“He gets around. He’s a member of the Solartown Posse.”

Desoto absently buffed the ring on his right hand on the left sleeve of his suit coat. The guitar on the Sony was strummed suddenly in swift, dramatic tempo. “That’s the civilian volunteer group that patrols the place, hey?”

“That’s it,” Carver said. He thought Desoto might scoff at the Posse, but he didn’t. Volunteer groups-some might call them vigilante groups-were becoming more and more prevalent as the war on drugs drained law enforcement of resources. The police were beginning to see the good ones as an asset. The bad ones could be the worst kind of liability. “I’m not sure about Val Green, so I’m not sure Jerome and Maude were actually seeing each other behind Hattie’s back.”

“Be sure,” Desoto said. “It was in the suicide note.”

He opened a file folder on his desk and handed Carver a sheet of white paper. Carver rested his cane on his thigh and read. Typed on the cheap white bond paper was a long, pathetic account of how lonely Maude Crane’s life had become, and how she’d prefer death over living without Jerome. Above her typed name was an indecipherable ink scrawl.

Carver laid the note faceup on the desk. His hip was getting numb; he had to shift his weight, move his bad leg. “Anyone might have typed this.”

“But they didn’t.”

“And the signature could have been made by somebody flinging ink from across the room.”

“But it wasn’t. The paper was still in Maude Crane’s Smith-Corona manual typewriter, and her prints and hers alone were on the keys. The signature, vague as it is, matches samples we found among her personal papers. This one is suicide plain and simple, amigo. And the second one this year in Solartown. Sometimes the very old, the very sick and sad, choose it as their way out, hey? You should understand that.”

Carver knew what he meant. It was Desoto who’d helped to prevent him from one day swimming out to sea too far to return, when he was depressed after taking disability retirement from the department with his maimed leg. The reference to past agony irritated Carver. He said, “Why did you send Hattie Evans to me?”

Desoto smiled. He loved women as much as they loved him. Any age, race, nationality. The faded but defiant spirit of Hattie Evans might have gotten to him, caused him to regard her as something more than just another suspicious and fearful old woman. “I liked her, amigo. But more than that, I didn’t think she was the type to become paranoid in her old age. Maybe the facts didn’t warrant me sending her to you; they certainly didn’t warrant a police investigation. Still, I felt there might be something real in what she was saying. Call it more of a character judgment than anything else.”

Carver tapped the rubber tip of his cane soundlessly on the floor, staring at it and nodding. Cops’ instincts. They should be given more official standing. “I picked up the same quality in her,” he said.

“You going to tell her about Maude Crane’s affair with her husband?”

“I don’t want to,” Carver said. “That’s why I came here, to reassure myself there’s no connection between Jerome Evans’s death and Maude Crane’s, other than the emotional linkage.”

“There’s no other connection,” Desoto assured Carver. “This part of the game is exactly as it seems. An old woman lost her husband, another her lover and companion and then her will to live. A world of fighters and quitters. Don’t put the widow, the one survivor of the triangle, through unnecessary pain.” His dark eyes were somber, full of genuine sympathy for Hattie Evans. So unlike a cop sometimes.

Carver stared at the suicide note on Desoto’s desk, listening to the sounds of the policeman’s world wafting into the office between the notes of the sad Spanish guitar. Gruff voices, sometimes joking; the faint chatter of a police radio; the shrill protests of a suspect being booked. There seemed no need for Hattie to know anything other than what she might read in the newspaper or catch on TV news. Another soul, old and alone in Solartown, had chosen the time and means of deliverance.

“No reason to tell Hattie about the affair,” Carver said. “I’ll see it as a suicide for now.”