John Lutz - Spark

“Then you’re seeing it as it is, amigo. It shouldn’t get in the way of your job. Am I right?”

“Sure,” Carver said.

But he wasn’t sure.

He drove from the Municipal Justice Building on Hughey back to Solartown and rang Hattie’s doorbell.

She’d been cleaning. As she ushered him into her cool and orderly living room, he saw a canister vacuum cleaner with a pythonlike hose and attachments resting in the doorway between dining room and kitchen. Hattie was wearing an old gray blouse and a calf-length blue skirt. Carver wondered if she ever wore slacks. Ever cursed like a sailor. Masturbated.

“Getting things straightened up,” she explained, as she sat down on the sofa opposite Carver, who’d set his cane and lowered himself into a chair. He wondered if she meant her house or her life. He was aware of the acrid scent of just-vacuumed carpet, and there were parallel tracks in the plush pile of the living room. The dishwasher was running, and the soapy fragrance of perfumed detergent drifted from the kitchen. Underlying it all was the subtle scent of roses.

“I talked to Dr. Billingsly,” he said, “and he assured me there was nothing unusual about Jerome’s coronary, either statistically or from what he observed in the operating room.”

Hattie nodded distractedly. It was unlike her not to focus in. “Yes, Dr. Billingsly mentioned to me he was present when Jerome’s official death occurred.” She brushed back a wisp of thinning gray hair and suddenly stared directly at Carver. Her seamed, chiseled features would have been a credit to Mount Rushmore. “I heard on the news about Maude Crane’s suicide.”

Carver didn’t know quite what to say, so he merely nodded.

She said, “Suicide, my eye, young man!”

“Why do you say that?” Treading carefully.

“I know about her affair with my husband, Mr. Carver. Known about it for years.”

Carver decided that sounded right. Not much got past Hattie. “Was Jerome aware that you knew?”

She gave him an incredulous look. “Of course not.”

“I’ve talked to the police, and to Billingsly, about Maude Crane’s death. They’re calling it suicide.”

“ They can be wrong. They’re not infallible.”

“Are you?”

“I come closer.”

Carver leaned forward in his chair, both hands folded over the crook of his cane. “Hattie, if you did manage to convince the police the Crane woman’s death wasn’t suicide, you’d be the prime suspect.”

“Well, maybe I killed her.”

“Not likely.”

“You don’t think I’m capable of such a thing?”

“I think you’re too logical.”

She smiled in a way he liked. “I’ve always taken pride in my ability to do whatever’s necessary in any situation.”

“Me, too,” Carver said.

“I sensed that in you. That’s why I hired you. I also assume you’re smart enough to see that my killing Maude Crane would have been in no way necessary. Before Jerome died, maybe. Certainly not now.”

“She killed herself,” Carver said, not sure if he believed it. “I saw the suicide note.”

“Did it tell about her and Jerome?”

“Yeah, so the police know about the affair, and your possible motive.”

“I don’t blame Jerome for the affair,” Hattie said. “Did the note say something about his cold and unresponsive wife?”

“Words to that effect,” Carver admitted.

“Hmph! Well, Jerome had his reasons to stray, and perhaps sex was one of them. But we were married forty-three years, Mr. Carver. That creates bonds that couldn’t be broken by Jerome occasionally having his way with some lonely widow in the dark. Maude Crane was a fool if she believed otherwise, like foolish other women down through time.”

“People not married forty-three years might not understand that,” Carver said.

“Do you?”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“I’m in some ways responsible for the furtive and disgusting extramarital affair, and if I thought Maude Crane actually killed herself, I’d feel partly responsible for her death.”

Carver didn’t want to hurt her even more deeply, but he decided he’d better lay out the cards faceup for her. “You’re telling me you think Jerome’s and Maude Crane’s deaths were murder, which would mean there’s some kind of conspiracy. But what evidence there is points in the opposite direction. You’ve got to realize the police will write your ideas off as the suspicious nature that often accompanies advanced age.”

“You mean they’ll figure me for an addle-brained, paranoid old woman.”

“Well, yes.”

“I hired you to think otherwise. Do you?”

He grinned. Hattie wasn’t one to hesitate laying down her own cards faceup. “Yeah, I think otherwise, or I wouldn’t be letting you spend your money on my services. But I have to tell you, I’m not as sure as you are that there’s something irregular going on.”

“Was the Crane woman’s suicide note handwritten?”

“No, it was typed and signed in pen.”

“Hmph!”

Carver sighed.

Hattie said, “Keep digging, Mr. Carver. You’re an honorable man and you’ll earn your money. That’s all I ask.”

“I’ll pick up the threads and follow them,” Carver told her, “but I can’t guarantee you’ll like where they lead.”

“If they lead to the truth, Mr. Carver, I’ll be satisfied. Now, would you like a glass of lemonade?”

Carver told her yes, that would be fine, and they sat in her screened-in “Florida room” attached to the back of the house and sipped lemonade from tall frosted glasses.

“Freshly squeezed fruit from my own trees,” Hattie told him with satisfaction.

He wasn’t surprised to find it unsweetened.

The Warm Sands Motel, where Carver had made reservations, was just off the Orange Blossom Trail, miles from the nearest ocean. But it had an artificial white sand beach surrounding a small lake, and it was built of artificial driftwood so it looked as if someone shipwrecked and with carpenter skills had built it. Someone high on fermented mangoes.

Despite the rustic exterior, Carver’s room was what might be called castaway luxurious, with crude-looking but expensive driftwood-gray dresser, desk, and headboard, and Winslow Homer seascape prints on the walls. The room had plush gray carpet and heavy, sea-blue drapes that matched the bedspread. From his window he could see the small kidney-shape swimming pool with several tanned and weary-looking adults lounging about on webbed chairs as if the sun had drugged them. He could hear but not see children playing in the lake and in the sand that had been trucked in.

He pulled the drapes closed, then undressed and took a long, lukewarm shower. After toweling off with rough terry cloth, he got his cane from where it was leaning against the toilet tank and limped back into the cool room. He put on Levi’s, gray sweat socks, and soft brown moccasins, a gray pullover shirt with a pocket for his sunglasses. Then he limped back into the bathroom and brushed his hair, studied himself in the mirror and decided he looked like the same guy only a shade older. That was okay; he had no illusions about time. His bald pate was deeply tanned and a little tender, but it didn’t seem as if it would peel. Reasonably satisfied with his mirror image, he left the room and limped outside and down past the office to the Warm Sands Seagrill Cafe for an early supper. Compensation for having skipped lunch.

After the swordfish steak dinner and two cups of coffee, he went outside and wrestled an Orlando Sentinel from a vending machine. He sat on a bench in the shade, listening to the kids screech and splash down on the artificial beach by the artificial lake while he read about real violence all over the world. Seen as part of the big picture, Jerome Evans’s death seemed relatively unimportant. Which Carver supposed it was-except to Hattie Evans.