John Lutz - Tropical Heat

Desoto leaned back and crossed his arms. “So you get mad when you see people used, and you try to do something about it. You pick and choose. Who the fuck you think you are, amigo? Maybe Dirty Harry?”

“No, I’m just a guy who gets mad.”

“This is noble?”

“Nope. But if I’m too hard and cynical for some people, that’s too bad. I don’t apologize.”

Desoto leaned further back in his desk chair and looked satisfied. He’d probably meant to get Carver riled; it was sport. Sometimes, for Desoto, getting people mad was like testing their batteries.

He smiled, his dashing devil smile. “So, you’re going to help Miss Edwina Talbot?”

Carver nodded. “If Edwina can give herself blindly, so can I. Besides, you’re right: It’s something to keep me busy.”

Desoto widened his smile to wicked. He was the amiable lothario again. “Some busy.”

“The people who told you about me were right,” Carver admitted. “I was turning to rust because of infrequent activity. It’s time to oil up the old machinery and see if the gears still turn.”

“They turn,” Desoto told him. “They’ll always turn. The chase is in your blood.”

“Sure, heat-seeking missiles, beagles, and me. Tell me about Willis Davis.”

“He’s missing,” Desoto said, straight-faced. “Other than that we actually don’t know much about him. According to Edwina Talbot, he’d been acting strangely before his disappearance, murder, suicide, whatever. And his boss says Davis was a distant kind of guy, a loner.”

“Maybe all that was his way of laying the groundwork for a fake suicide.”

“Or a real one.”

Carver repeated most of what Edwina had told him, and Desoto said that was just about the way the case went.

“Why would somebody interrupt breakfast to commit suicide?” Carver asked.

Desoto waved a hand as if the question were almost irrelevant. “Suicides do these things sometimes, Carver; you know that. They like for their survivors to wonder what really happened to them. Or maybe a person or persons unknown came after Davis, happened to catch him at breakfast, and threw him off the drop. Wanted his bacon or the last danish. Or possibly Davis went insane and was scared over the drop. Maybe he saw people that weren’t there.”

“Did Davis’s jacket and shoes tell you anything?”

Desoto stood up and moved gracefully to a row of filing cabinets along the wall. He pulled open a drawer, thumbed through it, and withdrew a yellow file folder. It wasn’t very thick, Carver noticed.

Seated again at his desk, Desoto opened the folder and scanned its contents. “That information’s not here,” he said. “You’ll have to check with Marillo in the lab.”

Carver was surprised. “Not there? How could that be? The man disappeared over a week ago.”

“There couldn’t be much,” Desoto said, unconcerned, “or Marillo would have phoned me.”

“What the hell’s happened to the department since I left?” Carver asked.

“It’s gotten busier,” Desoto said. “We’ve had to prioritize. Such a nice word, eh? Crime is on the upswing, like marriage. The drug business has moved up here in a big way from south Florida. So we’ve got more men in Narcotics, fewer in Homicide. But Homicide’s busier, too. It goes with the drug scene.”

“Is that why they labeled the Willis Davis case a homicide?” Carver asked. “So it would get lost with a lot of other unsolvables?”

Desoto shrugged. “You find inconsistencies in Davis’s death. Who’s to say the man wasn’t murdered?”

Carver studied his old friend. The job would never get to Desoto; he’d be the best cop possible under any circumstances, a very good cop indeed, and probably never advance in rank.

Carver folded his hands around each other and the top of his cane, shifted his weight forward in his chair, and stood up. The muscles in his tanned forearms rippled; his arms had gotten stronger since he’d been struggling about with the cane.

“Will you keep me tapped into any developments?” he asked.

“Sure, amigo. And you keep me informed. I haven’t lost interest in this case. That’s really why I sent Edwina Talbot out to see you. We’ll help each other, Carver. You’re sort of half an answer to my manpower problem; you’re still on the job, in a way, only somebody other than the city is paying you. The arrangement could benefit all concerned.”

“If I’m the cheapest labor you’ve got,” Carver said, “maybe the department should see to it that some other cops get disabled.”

“Ah, if only we had a suggestion box.” Desoto laced his fingers on the desk and gazed up at Carver. Glinting gold cufflinks peeked out from beneath his gray jacket sleeves like the wary eyes of concealed animals. “Where are you going now?”

“To the lab,” Carver said, “to talk to Marillo.”

“Don’t tell him I suggested you see him,” Desoto said. “I don’t want him pestering me unless he finds something startling, like a notebook with Mafia hit men in a pocket.”

“What would Mafia hit men be doing in a pocket with a notebook?” Carver asked.

“Marillo is a scientist. Scientists are boring, and I don’t want to be bored by one. He’s plain vanilla in a white dish, Marillo is.”

“He’s okay,” Carver said. “He smells like formaldehyde but he means well. I like him.” He limped to the door and opened it.

“See,” Desoto said behind him, “now that you’re busy, you’ve already lost some of your cynicism. Your hard edge. I miss you. You were somebody in the department who could do what needed doing, always, no matter what it was. At the same time, you have ethics and compassion. Almost like a split personality. Officer Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It’s rare, that quality.”

“I doubt if you mean any of that,” Carver told him, stepping into the hall and slamming the door.

Thinking this was no time to lose his hard edge.

Sam Marillo was at his desk in the lab, in the frosted-glass cubicle that passed for his office. He was a fiftyish, perfectly groomed small man with long, bony features, an erect, fit body, abnormally flawless skin, and short-cropped iron-gray hair pomaded and combed straight back. He looked as if he’d been manufactured rather than born. When he heard Carver’s perfunctory, rattling knock on the side of the doorless cubicle, he adjusted his silver-rimmed spectacles and looked up, then smiled when he saw Carver limp in.

He stood up briskly behind his desk, in a way that suggested he’d incorporated exercising into his work regimen, and they shook hands. “How’s the leg, Carver?”

“Locked tight as the door to the Narcotics evidence room.”

Carver noticed that the desk, as usual, was symmetrically arranged. A marble clock and a calendar were at precise angles, a stack of file folders and the “in” and “out” baskets were situated so their edges were parallel to the edges of the desk. Several sharpened pencils and a ball-point pen had been laid next to each other so that they pointed in precisely the same direction, like compass needles.

Marillo formed a Gothic steeple with his manicured pink hands and gazed thoughtfully up at Carver.

“I need to know about Willis Davis,” Carver said. “He’s the suicide they’re keeping open as a murder case. Or vice versa.”

“I know who he was,” Marillo said. “It makes no difference to me what they’re doing at headquarters with his case. I just tell them what they want to know and don’t make waves.”

Not even ripples, Carver thought. “What are you going to tell them about Davis?”

“Not much. It’s kind of tough without a body. We just have his sport jacket and shoes.”

“Did he have athlete’s foot?”