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“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.

“W
E 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.
“Español,”
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.

“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.

C
ARVER 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.”