John Lutz: Spark

“What are you, in your mid-forties?”

“That’s what I am,” Carver said, staring at Hattie Evans, wondering if “Hattie” was a nickname. She was wearing quite a hat, a prim and proper red mushroomlike thing with a truncated little stem on top. It was ninety degrees outside and she was wearing a hat. He had to admit, despite her sixty-plus years it made her look jaunty.

“Well, you listen, Mr. Carver, I don’t play games and I won’t be brushed aside.”

“Didn’t intend either of those things,” Carver said. He tried a smile. He was a fierce-looking man but he knew his smile was unexpectedly beautiful and disarming. Used it often. Hattie seemed unimpressed.

As she’d entered Carver’s office on Magellan and sat down before his desk, he’d seen her faded but quick blue eyes flit to where his cane leaned, but she didn’t ask about it. She sat poised with military rigidity in the chair and pressed her knees tightly together beneath the skirt of her navy-blue dress. It was an expensive dress but old and a little threadbare, as was her once-stylish-possibly-hat. She was a whipcord-lean woman, not tall, and she had the look about her of someone who’d endured a lot but was ready for more. Though she’d never been pretty, crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, pain and experience etched like wounds at the corners of her lips, gave her narrow, alert face a kind of character that held the eye.

“I’m sixty-seven years old,” she said, “in case you’re wondering. In case you’ve got ideas.”

“Ideas?”

“You know what I’m talking about. Those kinds of ideas. Don’t pretend you’re slow. I took the time and trouble to find out about you before I came here.”

Carver sighed. “I don’t have those kinds of ideas, Hattie. Anyway, I can see you’re not the sort to try them on.” He shot her his smile again. “Not that some men wouldn’t like to.” Such charm. Was it working?

She glared at him.

“You mentioned Lieutenant Desoto sent you,” Carver prompted, noticing for the first time that Hattie Evans smelled not unpleasantly like roses. Desoto was Carver’s longtime friend on the Orlando Police Department. The friend who’d urged him not to surrender, to go into private investigation after a holdup man-a kid, really-had shattered Carver’s kneecap with a bullet and left his leg bent at a thirty-degree angle for life.

“The lieutenant said the police couldn’t really delve into my case because I didn’t have enough evidence. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

“All the time,” Carver said. He leaned back in his chair and extended his stiff left leg out beneath the desk, digging his moccasin heel into the carpet.

“He told me he had a hunch, though, that I wasn’t just talking through my hat, so he recommended I come to you. Was he right to do that?”

“Talk and we’ll decide,” Carver told her.

“My husband, Jerome, and I live-at least I live-out in Solartown. Do you know where that is?”

Carver nodded. Solartown was a sprawling retirement community east of Orlando, hundreds of almost identical houses all built within the past ten years. It was one of those self-contained middle-class retirement communities like Sun City out in Arizona, with its own shops, medical facilities, recreation center. A retiree didn’t have to leave the place for any reason other than variety. It was all there: golf, tennis, bingo, swimming, crafts classes, everything but a mortuary.

“Two weeks ago, while we were having watercress sandwiches for lunch, Jerome keeled over dead from a heart attack.” Her facial muscles remained immobile as she said that, but glimmers of sorrow passed through her direct blue eyes like windswept clouds. Passed quickly. She wasn’t one to wallow in grief.

“I’m sorry,” Carver told her.

“Thank you. Jerome and I moved down here to Florida two years ago from St. Louis, after he retired from his job at the brewery. He had a complete medical checkup then and his heart was strong. That city’s got the best medical doctors in the world. They wouldn’t be mistaken. And his heart was sound when he had his regular checkup two months ago.”

“How old was Jerome?”

“Seventy last December third. And in fine shape but for a slightly swollen prostate. We also know his family tree, and heart attacks aren’t in his heredity.” She stared hard at Carver, as if he should have assimilated what she’d said and drawn a conclusion.

“You aren’t convinced he died of a heart attack?” he asked, remembering Desoto had referred her to him. Desoto didn’t send him prospective clients lightly.

“I suppose he did,” Hattie said, “if that’s what the Solartown Medical Center doctors say was the cause of death. But the question is, why? How?”

“As I understand it,” Carver said, “at Jerome’s age, it might simply have happened.”

“Nothing in this world simply happens, Mr. Carver, despite what the bumper stickers say. I think the note proves that.”

“Note?”

“Two days ago I found it in my mailbox, but without a stamp. It was printed in black ink and it said my husband was murdered. It was unsigned, of course. When I went to the police, they seemed to regard the letter as a sadistic practical joke. A young officer patted my shoulder as if I were his pet dog and told me I’d be shocked at what some people could do. I told him nothing shocked me, but he just patted me again. It was only your Lieutenant Desoto who took me at all seriously. He suggested I bring the note, and my story, to you.” She crossed her legs, somehow without having separated them. “And here I am.”

“Did you bring the note?”

“Of course I did.” Her tone of voice made Carver feel momentarily guilty for asking such an obvious question. She drew a white envelope from her blue straw purse and handed it to him. It smelled strongly of roses.

The envelope had her name printed on it in black felt-tip pen. The note inside read simply: “Jerome was murdered. Don’t ever think otherwise.” The simple, almost childish printing was the same as on the envelope.

He replaced the note in the envelope and laid it on the desk. He said, “The police could be right. It might well be a sadistic prank.”

“If you were me, young man, wouldn’t you feel compelled to make sure?”

He looked across the desk at her and she gazed back without blinking, a wisp of a woman, all spirit against the storm.

“I can afford to pay you,” she assured him. “Jerome was overinsured.”

“An investigation might come to nothing.”

“That’s not exactly a winning attitude, Mr. Carver, but I assure you I comprehend the odds.”

Carver had just finished tracking down the missing daughter of a jailed drug dealer. He had nothing else going at the moment. He got a contract from a desk drawer and explained the terms to Hattie. She signed it and then wrote him a retainer check that smelled like roses.

Then she stood up and smiled for the first time. It was a satisfied, inward kind of smile, but it made Carver like her. She was tough and precise and not hobbled by sentiment. If she’d bent at all in her life, it hadn’t been one time or one degree more than was necessary.

He laid the contract on top of the crude note. He’d start a file when Hattie left.

Standing very erect, she primly smoothed her skirt down over her bony hips. It had a lot of wool in it for Florida. “Good day, Mr. Carver. I’ll expect regular concise reports.”

“Were you ever a schoolteacher?”