John Lutz - Hot

She looked astounded. “And you assume it has something to do with Walter Rainer?”

“I don’t assume anything, Mrs. Bing, I’m only asking.”

“Well, the answer’s no, I’ve never observed anything unusual there, and my husband’s never mentioned to me that he has, either.”

“Are you also a research scientist?”

She seemed amused by the question. “Not I, Mr. Carver. I played the faithful faculty wife for years, until Dr. Sam got the funding to start the research center and aquarium.” She sounded oddly bitter. Must have realized it, and smiled. She had an overbite but an unexpectedly nice smile. “It’s Dr. Sam who’s the biologist, and that’s fine with me. Early in my academic endeavors, I found that science bored me.” She stood up and smoothed her skirt over her thighs. Carver was boring her, too, the gesture suggested; why didn’t he leave?

He couldn’t think of a good reason not to, and the base of his spine was beginning to ache, so he set the tip of the cane in the Berber weave carpet and stood up from the uncomfortable chair. “I’d like to ask Dr. Sam some of the same questions,” he said. “When will he be back?”

“When he gets back,” Millicent said. Her Adam’s apple bobbed in her long throat. “I mean, he doesn’t keep to a regular schedule when he goes on buying trips.” She moved toward the door. He noticed that she had almost no breasts, but an elegant lower body. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Carver, I’ve got a great deal of work to do.”

“I didn’t think you worked.”

“I do the bookkeeping for the center.”

“I see.” He limped toward the door. She was alongside him, then ahead of him, holding it open. Warm air rolled in from outside. “When your husband returns,” he said, “would you or he phone me at Henry Tiller’s cottage?”

“Certainly, but I don’t know when that’ll be.”

Carver smiled and said, “Whenever. Thanks for seeing me, Mrs. Bing.”

She didn’t answer. Her mind seemed to be far away as he stepped out onto the porch and she closed the door behind him.

A bee followed him as he limped back to the Olds. He used his cane to bat it like a baseball, and didn’t see where it went, so he hurriedly got into the car.

He was sure Millicent Bing was watching him from the window behind the bougainvillea-strewn trellis as he backed out of the driveway onto Shoreline.

She was obviously nervous about something, maybe even afraid, but it wasn’t necessarily connected with Henry Tiller or Walter Rainer. Carver cautioned himself not to see something sinister where there was no proof. Fear could become habit, then personality. As with a lot of people, Millicent Bing’s unease might be about something relatively innocent that had ingrained itself as dread, maybe even something that could be traced back to her childhood.

The Easter Bunny?

Carver drove back to the cottage and called Henry Tiller at Faith United in Miami. Henry answered the phone on the third ring. He sounded weak.

“How’re you making it, Henry?” Carver asked.

“They got inside me with their knives, took out some of this, some of that, sewed me up where I was tore. What there’s left of me’s gonna be okay, I think. They gave me a CAT scan yesterday and now they say I got a head injury. Hell, that’s just what I need, the way people think of me already.”

“They’re gonna have to start taking you more seriously, Henry.”

“Ah! You’re on to the bastards?”

Carver filled Henry in on what had occurred since his arrival on Key Montaigne. He tried not to make it sound as if they had enough to send Walter Rainer to the gas chamber.

When he was finished, Henry sounded stronger, exhilarated. He said, “Gotta be that shit-bum Davy tried to run you off the road, Carver.”

“Wicke thinks so, too, I’m sure, only he won’t admit it.”

“Wicke’d be a good cop if he wasn’t running so scared of his job. But the fact is, his position’s a political appointment, so he kisses ass to keep it. And Walter Rainer’s ass is one of the kissed. I up and told Wicke that one time. Got him irritated, I think.”

Carver smiled. He could imagine.

“I figure it was Davy in a rented car tried to do me in, too,” Henry said.

“Wouldn’t doubt it,” Carver told him. “Proving it’s the hard part. You know police work.”

“Sure as hell do. From years in the department in Milwaukee, then later in Lauderdale. You give me a call when you learn anything else, you hear?”

“I hear,” Carver said.

“I think you oughta find out about that dead boy, too. The one washed up on the beach. Did I tell you there was traces of cocaine found in his blood?”

“You told me.”

“Something like that happens, and that ass-kisser Wicke’s got the nerve to tell me there ain’t no drug trafficking to speak of on Key Montaigne.”

“Effie seems to agree with him,” Carver said. “She told me there’s a fair amount of drug use, but nothing big-time happening.”

“Hell, Effie’s just a kid. She don’t run in the kinda major money circles that’d deal hard stuff.”

“The boy found washed up on the beach was just a kid, too. Younger than Effie, in fact.”

“Younger in years, maybe,” Henry said, “but he was a runaway. Two months on the street and Effie’d be ten years older, God willing it never happens.”

“You’re right about that,” Carver said. He’d met too many kids not old enough to shave or have regular periods, whose lives were set on unalterable courses to hell. Drugs were always involved. Always.

“There was cocaine in that dead boy’s blood, Carver. I figure we oughta find out what that means.”

“We will. You get some rest, though, Henry. Best thing you can do is get well enough for them to release you so you can come down here and help with the investigation.”

“You’re right, damnit! You keep in touch with me, you hear, Carver.”

“I hear,” Carver said again.

“This phone call was better painkiller than them little white pills the nurses give me. I might disconnect these tubes they got plugged into me and check myself out.”

Carver didn’t know if he was serious. “Listen, Henry, just rest. Recuperate.”

“Aw, that’s what I’ll do,” Henry said. “You stay in touch, Carver, you hear?”

Carver said he heard. Hung up. Drank the last beer in Henry’s refrigerator.

He’d go nuts waiting in the little cottage for Beth to arrive, so he decided to drive into Fishback and pick up the beer and groceries, then go by police headquarters and see if Chief Wicke was around. Carver was working for Henry, and Henry was right again: It was time to find out more about the boy who’d mixed cocaine and seawater.

The Food Emporium was hot, humid, and crowded. Every resident and tourist in the area must have decided to go shopping today. Carver limped along with his cane, bumping with his grocery cart and getting bumped in return. The cart’s left front wheel squealed and hopped with regularity, exactly the way they manufactured them. Every other passing cart was equipped with a squawling, grasping infant in the wire basket-seat where produce normally went. A fat woman in a frilly white sundress nudged Carver aside with her hip and snatched the last jar of dill pickles from a top shelf. “I got a coupon,” she explained.

Finally, after checking out behind a man with twenty items in the ten-items-or-less express lane, he limped behind the squeaking cart to his car and slung the plastic bags into the trunk. Shoved the cart out of the way and drove from the lot feeling like a commando who’d just raided an enemy storehouse.

Deciding that fifteen or twenty minutes in the Olds’s trunk wouldn’t spoil anything that needed refrigeration, he drove to police headquarters, where the mayhem was less frequent and more controlled than at the Food Emporium. He parked in the side lot, in the shade of the building, and struggled out of the car to lean on his cane.