John Lutz - Hot

“Can’t we find out?”

“It’d be up to Welfare to investigate, and as usual they’re underfinanced and understaffed. We got a zillion billion poor, and Welfare’s only a single point of light.”

“Any kinda arrest sheet on either of the Evermans?” Carver asked.

“Nothing kicked out by computers here or in Washington. But then, I only had their names to work with, and those’re probably false. Get me some fingerprints, and I’ll bet the computers’ll go wild printing out priors on the Evermans.”

“Maybe I’ll have to do that,” Carver said. “Or maybe I’ll talk to them again.” His palms were wet; he switched hands on the phone.

“However you play it, amigo, be extra careful. All that anonymity’s kinda scary.”

“Isn’t it, though?” Carver said.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you more, my friend. Or at least something heartening and more definite. The hotel’s possible link to big drug money can’t be good. Might even be dangerous. Anyway, I regret bearing bad news.”

“Don’t,” Carver told him. “If I know all the news possible, it’s less likely to jump up and surprise me.” He thanked Desoto and hung up.

“So what’s the deal?” Beth asked. She’d come in from the porch and was standing just inside the door, her book at her side with a finger inserted between the pages to keep her place.

Carver told her.

“Some days it doesn’t pay to pick up the phone,” Beth said, just as the phone rang again.

Carver lifted the warm plastic receiver and pressed it to his ear.

A voice from Faith United Hospital in Miami informed him that Henry Tiller was dead.

“We got murder now,” Beth said, when Carver had hung up and told her about Henry Tiller. She might have been informing him they had mice. Her deep dark eyes were fixed on him, but there was nothing in them to indicate what she was thinking. Death was something she’d seen from a lot of angles.

He told her then about the Blue Flamingo Hotel and there being no welfare records on the Evermans.

“Shouldn’t surprise you, people like that’d lie to you,” Beth told him. “The system fucks them over enough for telling the truth, lying seems the wise thing to do even if the truth’s just as harmless.”

“Question is, what else might they’ve been lying about?”

She shrugged. “That’s a question you’d have to put to them.” A smile. “Not that they mightn’t lie.” She strode over to the sofa and sat down, crossed her legs. “Going back to Miami?”

“Gonna have to, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, not much choice.” She didn’t seem pleased. “I guess that means I spend time in the brush again tonight with my thermos of coffee and my Captain Midnight binoculars.”

“’Fraid so.”

“When you leaving?”

“Now.”

She smiled very faintly. “That’s what I like about you, Fred, you’re direct.”

He remembered Roberto Gomez had been the direct type, too. In his business, that often involved someone’s untimely death. There must be a lot Beth hadn’t told him. The thought made him uncomfortable. Made him perspire even more. The cottage’s window units weren’t keeping up with the heat and humidity today.

“You don’t seem awed by the fact we’re dealing now with a homicide,” he said.

“I’m not. I always thought the object of running over Henry Tiller was to take him out of the game.”

“Still,” Carver said, “this raises the stakes, increases the danger.”

“I suppose.”

“I can’t read you sometimes,” Carver told her.

She said, “You like that about me.”

“Now and then you sound like Desoto.”

“Oh?”

“He’s always psychoanalyzing me, calling me obsessive, seeing ulterior motives and subconscious drives, making it all more complicated than it really is.”

“I like Desoto. I know he doesn’t approve of me, but I like him.”

“He’d approve of you if he knew you the way I do,” Carver said.

“I’m sure he would.” There was no mistaking the lascivious look in her eye.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Uh-huh. Maybe that subconscious thing.”

Well, maybe. If it was subconscious, how would he know? He was amusing her and didn’t care for that; he’d had enough of this game. “When you go to the blind tonight and take up surveillance,” he said firmly, the dominant male in command, “you be extra careful.”

She said, “You watch out for your balls in Miami.”

It was late afternoon when Carver entered the sweltering dimness of the Blue Flamingo’s lobby. Hell of a place to have to live, he thought. To play out the last days of a dwindling life in what advertisers called the golden years. No fun to be stuck here as a welfare transient, either.

He took the elevator to the fifth floor and knocked on the cracked enameled door of Room 505, listening for some sound from inside. He could hear something, not polka music, a soft and wavering whirring. When he knocked again, louder, the sound stopped abruptly.

The woman who opened the door wasn’t Selma Everman. She was Latin, in her forties, with an emaciated figure and flecks of gray in her long black hair. She had wide-set brown eyes that seemed immense in her creased and narrow face. Her left cheek was hollowed unnaturally, as if most of her molars were missing on that side. She slipped her hands into the back pockets of her jeans and smiled at Carver, the hollow in her cheek deepening.

He said, “I’m looking for Mr. and Mrs. Everman.”

The woman’s smile became puzzled and she shook her head, made a helpless gesture with her hands. “Espanol,” she said.

Great, she didn’t speak English. Beyond her Carver saw an old Hoover canister vacuum cleaner on wheels and remembered the whirring noise he’d heard. He stepped into the room and saw that it was orderly, not cluttered as it had been when he’d visited the Evermans. The bed was made with military fastidiousness. There were wide tracks on the worn carpet from the Hoover.

“You’re the maid?” he asked, starting with the obvious, as if he or the woman were an idiot. Language barriers caused that kind of behavior.

Her smile widened and she nodded.

“Are the Evermans gone?” He lifted his cane for a moment and used it to make a gesture that took in the room and ended in a wave at the door.

“They check out,” she said, nodding.

“When?”

She lifted her shoulders and shook her head.

“Hoy?” he asked.

“Si.”

Which could mean this morning or this afternoon, not last night. He wasn’t really getting anywhere. He limped farther into the room and looked around. The maid didn’t attempt to stop him, only stood looking at him with amiable curiosity.

If the Evermans had cut and run, they would have done everything possible to remove any sign of themselves. And what details or fingerprints they might have missed, the industrious maid would have cleaned away.

“Have you done the bathroom?” Carver asked.

She nodded. He wasn’t sure if she’d understood.

He went to the door and looked in at the sparkling white porcelain. There was a yellow rubber bucket full of cleaning supplies on the floor near the toilet bowl, which had a paper sanitary strip across its rough wooden seat.

“You do good work,” he said despondently, and limped around her and back out into the hall. She grinned at him as if unsure she’d been complimented. Leaving the door open, he started toward the elevators. Behind him the vacuum cleaner began to whine again.

The paunchy desk clerk with the dyed black hair and the ugly mole beneath his eye was on duty again today. Though he was wearing a tightly knotted wide blue tie, his white shirt was untucked, as if he’d settled on a compromise over whether to dress businesslike or casual this morning. He was standing at the end of the desk, drinking coffee and eating a jelly doughnut. When Carver had stood at the desk for several seconds, the clerk looked at him, washed down a bite of doughnut with a slug of coffee, and made a face as if he’d burned his tongue. Said nothing.