John Lutz - Hot

“I’d like to know when the Evermans checked out of five-oh-five,” Carver said.

Still without talking, the man took a huge bite of doughnut, getting jelly on his fingers, and walked down to where Carver was standing on the other side of the desk. He reached low and carefully fished up a blue clothbound book and leafed through it, getting sugar and jelly on the pages even while handling it with a gentle reverence; the record of his days and nights as well as the names of guests and the dates and times of their arrivals and departures. The Book of His World.

Carver waited while he finished chewing and swallowing the bite of doughnut. It took a while, but then what was time at the Blue Flamingo? Not money, that was for sure.

“Early this morning,” the man finally said. He ran his tongue quickly over his molars; it moved beneath his cheek like a mouse under a carpet. He stared at the book again. “Was five after eight, to be precisely exact.”

“Welfare pay for the room?” Carver asked.

The desk clerk looked at him oddly. “Uh-uh, not that one.”

“Who paid?”

“The . . .” He consulted The Book yet again; it held all the answers he’d need in life. “. . . Evermans themselves.”

“Check or credit card?”

The desk clerk laughed. There was doughnut stuck between his yellowed front teeth. “You kidding? We don’t get a lotta American Express types here. And I don’t see many checks other’n Social Security. People was in five-oh-five paid cash. They took the room on June seventh.”

“How’d they act? I mean, did they spend a lotta time here in the hotel? Did they disappear for weeks at a time? Did they have a pet lion?”

“Listen, mister, I don’t pay attention to what any of the guests here does.” He squared his shoulders and tried for an imperious attitude but didn’t come close. “The place ain’t the Holiday Inn, but one thing the money buys is privacy.”

“What if I told you I was police?” Carver said.

“You’re not.”

“How do you know?”

“You’da already told me. Wouldn’t make any difference anyway. I got no reason to lie. I’m telling you how it is, and if you don’t like it, tough shit.”

Carver didn’t like it. The Evermans had come and gone like ghosts, and no one knew why or even who they were, and he’d been standing in the same room with them and now they were lost to him. Maybe they’d sensed trouble after his visit and simply disappeared, as they’d often done in life. Or maybe there was something they weren’t telling him about their son’s death.

As he planted the tip of his cane and turned to leave, the desk clerk ambled back to where his coffee and the rest of his jelly doughnut were and took another greedy bite of doughnut. This time jelly squirted down his tie and the front of his white shirt. He seemed unaware of it and Carver didn’t tell him.

It felt good to leave the Blue Flamingo, as if the bright heat outside could purge whatever poverty and despair might have clung to him. Carver registered up the street at a Howard Johnson’s, then spent most of that evening wandering up and down Collins like a tourist and watching for Frank and Selma Everman.

He never saw them, but he saw plenty of people like them. Middle-aged or older, and poor, in a neighborhood that was moving upscale and gradually cutting them adrift.

After nursing a beer for a while in the Howard Johnson’s lounge and watching a Yankees game on television, he went upstairs and slept straight through until nine in the morning.

It was past one o’clock when he got back to Henry’s cottage. Beth was still asleep after being up all night watching the Rainer estate. The air conditioner had been on a long time and the bedroom was cool as well as dim. Carver looked at the contours of her body beneath the light sheet. One of her legs had worked its way out and appeared remarkably lithe and tan against the white linen.

He felt like holding her to him, kissing her, but he decided to let her rest. He’d stretch out quietly beside her and catch some sleep himself.

Then he noticed the bruise on her cheek and the deep cut on the side of her forehead.

He nudged her awake, scaring her until she recognized him, angering her in her grogginess. Her lean body had jerked spasmodically. Now it relaxed somewhat, but she still looked startled and angry.

“What the hell’s the deal, Fred?”

He told her that’s what he wanted to know.

Carver switched on the lamp by the bed, and Beth frowned and sat up. She leaned her back against the headboard and raised both hands to cover her eyes and face. The perfumed, perspiration scent of her body rose to him; he liked its familiarity, its intimacy, what it triggered in his memory.

He gently pulled her hands away from her face. The bruise beneath her eye was an ugly purple stain, but the cut on her forehead, though deep, was only about an inch long. It would leave a light scar.

“You need stitches,” he said.

“I don’t want them. If I mark up, I know a plastic surgeon who can fix it.” The wife of Roberto Gomez speaking; money could fix anything.

His gaze took in the rest of her that was visible above the wrinkled sheet. No apparent bruises or other injuries on her body.

“You hurt anyplace else?”

“Not so’s you’d notice.”

Her guarded independence, keeping him fenced out, was beginning to annoy him. “That mean no?”

“Means no, Fred.”

“What happened to you?” he asked.

“You barged your ass in here, woke me up, and turned on the light.”

“What about your face?”

She sighed and seemed to relax, maybe with the realization she wasn’t being entirely reasonable about his concern. Settling down in the bed with her head propped on her pillow, she patted the mattress beside her. Carver supported himself with the cane, leaned over, then lay down next to her on his back. He was on top of the sheet, her lower body was beneath it, but he could feel the radiating warmth of her hip and thigh. His sun.

“Late yesterday afternoon I happened to look over and saw smoke floating above the Rainer place,” she said. “I got the binoculars and went to the blind, thinking maybe the house was on fire. It wasn’t, though. The only fire was in a big stone barbecue pit. The Spanish guy, Hector, was standing in front of it with a long fork or something, every once in a while prodding or turning whatever was on the grill. Then Rainer waddled outside, along with a blond woman in a swimming suit and sandals.”

“Young, well-built woman? Attractive?”

“In an aerobics class kinda way.”

“His wife Lilly.”

“I figured. She and Rainer stood around talking to Hector, then after a while Hector took whatever he was cooking off the grill and put it on a big platter. Then they went into the house or around by the pool out of sight. After about an hour Hector came back into view carrying something in a bag and walked down to the dock. He took the bag onto the boat, then came back and burned some more meat on the barbecue pit. When that was done grilling, he put it in a big plastic container and carried it on board, too.”

A bird began a desperate, high-pitched chattering outside. It was joined by another, maybe its mate in a domestic tiff, then they were both silent. “So maybe they were laying in some food because the boat was due to put to sea last night,” Carver said.

“That’s what I figured. But it didn’t leave the dock. I stayed there till sunset, and I noticed exhaust fumes around the boat.”

“Generators running.”

“Uh-huh. Keeping air-conditioning and appliances and what have you going.”

“Keeping the barbecued meat refrigerated for a certain fat man.”