John Lutz - Tropical Heat

Carver parked the Olds next to a dusty Winnebago motor home on the lot that had a visitors sign hung on chains at its entrance. He got out and made his way along a sidewalk toward the tinted-glass panels of the nearest building. The concrete walk gave way to different-colored stepping-stones and strategically led prospective buyers through a small tropical garden. For several steps nothing was visible beyond the low palms except for beach and rolling blue sea. Carver slowed his pace and breathed in deeply, giving himself to the scent and salty weight of the sea air, a heavier scent that overpowered the sweet fragrance of the garden’s wildly colored blossoms. The surf pounded regularly like a great immortal heartbeat. The suggestion of eternity was there on the edge of the vast ocean, if not eternity itself.

The sales office was in one of the towers. It was a spacious, circular room carpeted in pale green. There were color photographs and artists’ renderings of Sun South units on the even paler green walls, and in the center of the room was a scale model of the time-share project, displayed under glass and complete with plastic model cars, trees, and pedestrians. Carver studied the models, noticed that the pedestrians were all smiling, the cars were all Porsches and Cadillacs.

“Can I help?” a slim, attractive redheaded woman in a brown business suit asked. She was smiling like one of the miniature Sun South residents under the glass, the kind of smile they taught in sales seminars, glossy and bright, with a painted-on kind of sincerity that would dissolve only upon a direct insult or a slap.

Carver looked beyond her to the row of multicolored cubical offices from which she’d emerged, work space created by arranging pastel panels of some kind of rough-textured plastic. “I’d like to see Mr. Franks,” he said. “My name is Carver.”

Her smile stuck, didn’t waver. It was a good one. Her facial muscles had to be tiring. “I’m Chris,” the woman said. “I can assist you if you’re interested in one of our units. Our one-bedroom Poseidon model is on sale this month, with special financing. There are plenty of prime weeks left.”

“I’m not interested in buying a time share,” Carver said.

Even that didn’t sweep the smile from Chris’s freckled friendliness, but it did make her smile a bit crooked. What was this guy with the limp and cane doing here if he wasn’t a customer?

Carver gave her back her smile, watched her soften, but just a little. “Tell Mr. Franks I need to talk to him about one of his former employees.”

“Which employee is that?” Chris asked, teeth still going at it but eyes not smiling now; but interested eyes nonetheless.

What the hell, Carver thought, and decided to see what reaction he might get from Chris. “Willis Davis.”

She didn’t seem surprised. She’d expected to hear Davis’s name.

“I’ll tell Mr. Franks’s secretary you’re here,” she said.

Carver watched her sashay across the pale green carpet, around a bespectacled salesman showing a politely interested white-haired couple some brochures, and through a narrow hall between the pastel, partitioned offices where promises and sales were made, more of the former than the latter. Life was such a game of percentages.

While he waited, Carver walked over to gaze out the wide, curved window that overlooked the sea. To his right was a low, grayish-black building that was supposed to appear as if it had been crudely built of driftwood. But its windows were framed in aluminum, and an air-conditioning unit squatted on its flat roof, SUN SOUTH CAFETERIA, a sign on a landlocked weathered dinghy near its entrance read. Behind and to the left of the cafeteria some of the tennis courts were visible. Carver watched a leggy woman in a pink tennis outfit slap neat base-line returns. Her opponent was out of Carver’s sight, beyond the corner of the cafeteria, but whoever was on the other end of the court returned the woman’s shots crisply to almost precisely the same location. It occurred to him that she might be playing a machine that launched tennis balls for practice. To Carver’s right, two men in a yellow golf cart bounced softly to or from the course. Life at Sun South looked posh and easy for those who could afford to buy a time share or two.

“Mr. Carver?”

He turned from the view outside to see a tall blonde in a navy blue dress smiling at him. Standing well behind her, still smiling but looking a bit uncertain, was Chris. Everyone seemed to smile a lot at Sun South, as if the air were tinged with cheer.

“Mr. Franks will see you,” the blonde said.

Carver nodded and followed her toward the hall between the partitions. She walked slowly so he could keep up, which in this case was fortunate, because the spongy green carpeting made walking with a cane a chore.

Franks’s office was large and plush, furnished in pale wood and fabric, and decorated in shades of gray. Franks was large and done in shades of gray himself. He was six feet tall, prosperous-looking and fiftyish, and his expensive gray suit couldn’t quite hide his stomach paunch. He had flawlessly groomed wavy grayish hair, gray eyes, and a rather unhealthy-looking grayish complexion. This was an aging, handsome man who spurned the sun. He was the only person Carver had seen at Sun South who wasn’t smiling.

Franks waited for his secretary to leave before he spoke.

“Sit down, please, Mr. Carver.” He did manage a good old Sun South smile as he motioned toward a chair near his desk, then sat down in his gray, executive’s chair behind the desk. Behind the chair was a window that bathed the visitor in light but silhouetted and to some degree concealed the features of Franks where he sat facing Carver. A cheap and obvious trick to gain advantage in interviews. Carver resented it; too many of these half-ass, big-money entrepreneurs had their offices arranged this way.

Easy, he cautioned himself, don’t be cynical.

But he was cynical. He knew it. Couldn’t help himself.

The office was soundproofed, private to the point of defensive isolation; only the soft sigh of cooled air rolling through the ceiling vents, and the ocean view out the window, gave evidence of an outside world.

“You wanted to talk about Willis Davis?” Franks asked. His voice seemed muffled by the silence, yet still managed to convey an amiable but unmistakable authority.

“Actually, I wanted you to talk about him,” Carver said. “I’m a private investigator, hired to look into his suicide.” He leaned forward and showed Franks his P.I. license.

A flicker of alarm seemed to dance for just an instant over Franks’s distinguished gray features. “Hired by whom?”

“I’d have to get my client’s permission to reveal that,” Carver said. “Professional ethics.”

“Oh? You have those?”

Carver nodded.

“One doesn’t associate the profession of private detective with ethics,” Franks said.

“One is wrong.”

Franks raised a manicured hand that looked as if it had never known manual labor. “I didn’t mean offense.”

“Tell me about Davis,” Carver said.

“Willis was quiet for a salesman, but he knew how to close a deal. He could smell blood, sense vulnerability. I liked him.”

“Would you peg him as the type to commit suicide?”

Franks looked thoughtful. “No, but I’m not sure there is a specific suicidal type.” He leaned back, gazed for a moment at his fingertips resting lightly on the desk. Outside the double-pane window, the ocean rolled soundlessly, as if its power had been tamed. “Are you working with the police?”

“Yes. With Lieutenant Desoto of Orlando.”

Franks touched his fingers together, then pressed them with springy persistence back and forth against each other, and digested that semi-accurate information silently.