John Lutz - Hot

A peal of childish laughter found its way through the thick door.

“If you don’t mind, Mr. Carver, I’d like to finish my notes in here before the summer school tour comes down those stairs.”

Carver said sure, he understood, and thanked Dr. Sam for his time.

Unfortunately he seemed to have taken up too much of it. As he limped toward the exit, the door burst open and kids streamed clomping down the steel steps, trailed by their teenage escort and Katia Marsh. Katia glanced at Dr. Sam and made a helpless motion with her head. He nodded to her, then stared strangely -perhaps with genuine hatred-at a slight blond boy about eight years old. He seemed unable to avert his gaze until the boy looked back at him, puzzled and without recognition. Then Dr. Sam smiled thinly, jotted down a few more notes on his clipboard, and seemed to escape into himself and not notice the shrill young voices and unchecked energy around him.

Carver waited until the steps were clear, then he hobbled up them with his cane and shoved open the door. “Children, this is Victor,” he heard Katia loudly proclaim as the door swung closed behind him. He limped toward the sun held at bay by the tinted glass doors leading outside.

The breeze off the sea had picked up. The Fair Wind was bobbing at the research center dock. Beyond it the smooth white hull of the larger and luxurious Miss Behavin’ appeared motionless at its mooring across the sun-shot water. A pelican went into a wobbly, awkward glide to settle on the guardrail of the parking lot and stare with mild interest at Carver.

Limping across the lot, Carver tried to fit his conversation with Dr. Sam together with that of his reclusive wife Millicent. The wife seemed to be hiding something, while Dr. Sam came across as candid and cooperative. It didn’t figure. After all, they lived together, slept together, should know all about each other and share the same secrets.

Unless Millicent Bing was keeping something from her husband as well as from the outside world.

That wouldn’t be all that unusual in a wife. And it was no business of Carver’s.

Unless the something concerned drugs and Walter Rainer.

“You figure the good doctor’s being less than candid?” Beth asked, when Carver had returned to the cottage and told her about his talk with Dr. Sam. She was wearing shorts now, and a white T-shirt with just do it lettered on it. Sitting relaxed yet with an odd regality in the porch glider, she was reading by the sunlight filtering in through the trees and the screen. She’d finished Kafka and had tied into something now by Robert Parker. Hmm.

“I’m not sure,” Carver said. “It’s hard for me to know what academic types are thinking. Dr. Sam might be lying like a politician, bending over backward to make me think there’s no connection between him and Rainer.”

“Like the hot-to-trot damsel who doth protest too vigorously?”

“Something on that order. And Katia acts as if everything at the research center’s up-front and honest scientific toil, tainted only by the evils of tourism to help turn a dollar. A dewy-eyed idealist.”

“Still,” Beth mused, laying aside Parker, “she’s interested in sharks.”

“Even obsessed by them,” Carver said.

Beth stretched languidly, long arms, hands, fingers, fingernails, attaining incredible and graceful reach. “If anything is going on at the Rainer place,” she said, “it’s hard to believe somebody at the research center didn’t at least get a whiff of it. Everything can’t be occurring at night, and the view’s too good not to notice what’s happening over there.”

Carver hobbled across the porch with his cane and lowered himself into the nylon-webbed lawn chair. Flicking a tiny spider off his forearm, he remembered the sun-hazed view across the water from the research center, the clean white hull and gleaming brightwork of the Miss Behavin’ lying beyond the gray and functional Fair Wind. Wealth and leisure contrasting with selflessness and labor. Would workaholics like the Bings and Katia Marsh notice anything outside their immediate range of vision and interest? Did they really care about anything other than their work?

“What about this Katia and Dr. Sam?” Beth asked.

Carver knew what she meant. “Neither of them’s the type.”

“Hah!”

Well, maybe she was right; she’d been reading Kafka and Parker.

“Live with a woman who’s the way you describe Millicent Bing,” Beth said, “and a young beauty interested in sharks might seem mighty appealing.”

Carver said, “She wouldn’t have to be interested in sharks.”

Beth glared at him and raised an eyebrow. Jokingly, though. He thought. She crossed her bare and beautiful brown legs and leaned back in the glider, not only unconcerned with romantic rivals, but arrogantly confident. He figured she might gibe him with a mock warning not to stray, but she said, “That the phone ringing?”

He tilted his head to the side and listened, heard faint electronic chirping from inside the cottage. “Phone,” he said, reaching for his cane.

She knew she could make it inside faster than Carver, so she jumped up and breezed into the cottage. The swinging empty glider lapsed into a paroxysm of descending squeaks behind her, as if objecting that she’d risen.

He was standing, poised over his cane, when she returned seconds later and told him it was Desoto on the line. Not much small talk between Desoto and Beth.

“Amigo,” Desoto said, when Carver had come to the phone, “I got some information for you, compliments of contacts in Miami.”

It was hotter inside the cottage. Carver started to sweat. “Something about the Evermans?”

“And more. We’ll start with the Blue Flamingo Hotel. It might be a breeding farm for fleas now, but it’s considered to be valuable property because of its potential. That part of South Miami Beach figures to be a major tourist spot when it develops over the next ten years or so.”

They say it’ll be like the French Riviera,” Carver said. “Croissants and everything.”

“Mustn’t be so cynical, amigo.”

“I’ve heard that before.” And noted the cynicism in Dr. Sam. Maybe it was a communicable disease.

“I had a title search done in Miami,” Desoto said, “and it seems the ownership of the Blue Flamingo’s a hazy maze of paperwork. Owner of record’s something called B.F. Holding and Investment Company, but try to find out who owns that. Thing is, there’s a possibility the hotel’s actually owned by organized crime, but not necessarily the good old-fashioned mafia. More likely one of the South American drug cartels.”

“And you told me not to be cynical. Is there any way to be positive about ownership?”

“Oh, sure. Enough lawyers, enough time, we could follow the paper trail and find out. I don’t know what it’d exactly mean one way or the other, though. All that drug money’s gonna be invested somewhere. It buys hotels, food franchises, politicians, stock in major corporations. The money gets cleaner the farther away it gets from the source. Lots of drug money gets dropped into collection plates at church. Ask your friend Beth.”

Carver let the remark about Beth pass without comment. “I don’t have lawyers and time,” he said.

“The Blue Flamingo’s a low-cost hotel that’s used now and then to temporarily house welfare recipients,” Desoto told him. “Which brings us to the Evermans, amigo. State welfare’s got no record of them on their rolls. Course, it’s not unusual for some of the poor or homeless to become confused or to lie about their status after they’ve been dropped from the system. And it’s also possible the Evermans are running a scam and collecting welfare checks under other identities. The kinda entrepreneur couple Republicans love.”