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“You haven’t even asked about my rates.”

“I asked Desoto. Figured I better know that before I drove over here. Don’t you worry, I got money saved. I can pay.”

“When you driving back to Key Montaigne?” Carver asked.

“Soon’s I walk out your door.”

“Leave me your phone number and I’ll give you a call. I’d like to talk to Desoto before I tell you yes or no.”

Tiller looked suspicious. “Why would you wanna do that?”

“I don’t want to steal your money, Henry.”

“Fuck you, Carver. You figure I’m some old fool thinking with my prostate gland?”

“No, no, I don’t. That’s nearer the center of judgment for young fools.”

“Fuck you,” Henry Tiller said again. “I spent a lotta years on the force in Milwaukee, and a few more in Lauderdale. I know what’s going on around me. You’ll take the job or you won’t.”

A little puzzled, Carver said, “Yeah, that’s where it stands.”

Tiller yanked a plastic ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket and scrawled a phone number on an envelope on Carver’s desk, then stomped from the office. A minute later Carver saw him drive from the parking lot in a ten-year-old Buick, the cigarette he’d been denying himself jutting from his lips. When the car turned onto Magellan, Carver noticed a “Support Your Local Police” sticker on the rear bumper.

He sat looking out at the glaring heat for a while. A gull circled on rigid wings and swooped low over the courthouse’s red tile roof, then flapped away toward the open, glittering sea. No more beautiful women walked past in the ocean breeze.

Carver had the feeling he was on the edge of something better left unexplored. It was a sensation seldom in error, a sixth sense that increased the odds on survival, and that he too often ignored. Was he dumb enough to ignore it again?

Finally he sighed, dragged the phone across the desk, and called Desoto.

A
FTER A FIVE
-minute wait Desoto came to the phone.
“Amigo,
what can I do for you?” Soft Latin music played in the background. Carver knew it was from Desoto’s portable Sony perched on the windowsill behind his desk. He could picture Desoto in his office on Hughey in Orlando, spiffily dressed as always, probably in shades of cream, plenty of gold jewelry, black hair flawlessly combed, handsome as the movies’ idea of a romantic bullfighter. Looking more like a dance instructor than a tough cop, but a tough cop nonetheless.

“It’s what you already did for me,” Carver said. “You sent me Henry Tiller.”

“Ah, Henry. Yeah, I talked to him yesterday, thought you were the man he should see. He tell you what was troubling him?”

“He told me,” Carver said. He found himself staring at the chair where Tiller had recently sat. “I’m not so sure about it, though. He seems vague.”

“You do police work in Florida, my friend, you deal with a lotta old people. You know that. The human mind changes with the years. Sometimes following Henry’s logic is like following a bus in traffic, start, stop, detour, but you stay with it and eventually it reaches a destination.”

“Then you agree with him? There’s something going on down on Key Montaigne needs looking into?”

“It’s possible,
amigo.”
Desoto was quiet for a moment. Then: “Let me tell you about Henry Tiller. He was cop in Milwaukee for a long time, then came down here and was on the force in Lauderdale.”

Carver looked out in the distance.

“Made sergeant and worked plainclothes,” Desoto said. “His wife left him a long time ago, but they had a son, Jerry. Jerry got married and had a son name of Jim, but everybody called him Bump. Three years ago, when Bump was fifteen, he became a runaway and died of a drug overdose up in Panama City. Turns out he’d been hooked on cocaine since he was twelve. That was bad enough, but Henry’s son, Jerry, couldn’t take what had happened to
his
son and hanged himself. It all got to Henry, and that’s when he took his retirement over in Lauderdale. He aged ten years in six months, they tell me.”

Carver thought about the dead boy found on the beach in Key Montaigne. About his own son, much younger, who’d been a murder victim three years ago. It was something he tried not to think about often, but he could imagine how Henry Tiller must have felt. Must still feel. First his grandson, then his son. Jesus!

“Casualties in the war on drugs,
amigo,”
Desoto said sadly.

“You got anything on Tiller’s neighbor, Walter Rainer?”

“I did check, here in Florida and with VICAP. Rainer’s clean. The employees, Hector and Davy, are a bit smudged. Hector came with his parents from Cuba and grew up in the Miami slums an orphan after they deserted him. Did two years in Raiford for assault, but that was five years ago and he seems to have been a good boy ever since. Davy’s got a long sheet, from joyriding cars in Cleveland as a kid to getting court-martialed out of the Navy for stealing. He worked for a while as a seaman on cargo ships outa New Orleans and got in some kinda trouble there, too. Word is he’s don’t-give-a-damn tough and not to be messed with. Supposed to have killed two men in a brawl in some South American port, but nobody knows for sure. Carries one of those pointed steel cargo hooks the way other thugs carry a knife or gun. Thinks he’s Long John Silver or somebody, and it’s unwise to argue with him. Of course, you’re unwise in that respect, aren’t you, my friend?”

“Sometimes, in some ways,” Carver admitted. Desoto knew him too well. But then, he knew Desoto.

“That was my one reservation about sending Henry Tiller to see you,” Desoto said. “Davy Mathis.”

“I’ll try to avoid him,” Carver said, realizing he’d made up his mind. He was going to call Henry Tiller and tell him he’d investigate whatever might be happening on Key Montaigne.

“You’ll avoid him like a mongoose avoids a snake,” Desoto said. “Still, Henry needs help. After what happened to his son and grandson, he deserves help. If he had anything concrete, the Key Montaigne police, or even the DEA, could jump into the game. But he’s only got his intuition, what he calls his cop’s instincts. That’s enough for me, ’cause I got my own instincts about Henry. But instincts don’t count in court.”

Carver said, “If Rainer’s got two bona fide hard-asses like Hector and Davy working for him, maybe he really is into something illegal.”

“Could be. But there are no outstanding warrants for those two now, so they’re solid citizens in the eyes of the law. In fact, they’ve been clean as soap itself the last three years.”

“Or they haven’t been caught during those years.”

“You’re going to work for Henry, right?” Desoto said.

“Yeah, I suppose I am.”

“Keep me posted and I’ll help when and how I can. Even here in Orlando, I might be able to do something. According to Henry, the Key Montaigne police might not be the most reliable. The chief there, Lloyd Wicke, thinks what he’s got is a case of senility on his hands.”

“Henry acts in a way that makes it seem a reasonable conclusion,” Carver said, watching a tractor-trailer rumble past out on Magellan. The trailer had on its side a vast print from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, the one of God and Adam with their hands almost touching. In this version, God was handing Adam an orange. In Florida that kind of advertising might be meant seriously. How out of touch could Henry Tiller be? “Know anything about Wicke?”

“I checked around. Didn’t find out much, but he’s supposed to be a good cop. I’m not saying he’s wrong about all of this being in Henry’s mind, but after talking to Henry, I’m not so sure. Anyway, like I said, Henry’s got a favor or two coming from the system. In this case, you and I are the system.”

“I’m the one going to Key Montaigne,” Carver pointed out.

“But I’d go if I could,” Desoto said. Carver believed him. “You work on your own, so you got certain advantages.”

“You mean like irregular income?”

“Anyway,
amigo,
you’re supposed to be a detective, so detect, eh? Worry this till you know everything and too much about it. Isn’t that what you do in life? Your calling?”

“It’s what I do,” Carver said, thinking maybe “calling” wasn’t too strong a word. The music coming over the phone had changed. A woman was singing now; Carver couldn’t make out the words, but it was a sad song with slow, syncopated rhythm.

“Go extra cautious with this one, all right?” Desoto said. There was concern in his voice. Instinct again.

“Sure, always.”

“How’s the lovely Beth?” Ever the gentleman, Desoto was considerate of women, especially beautiful ones. Even though he still wasn’t entirely approving of Beth, her gender alone was enough to earn his gallantry.

“Soon as I get off the phone,” Carver said, “I’m gonna drive up the coast and find out.”

“You’re a lucky man,
amigo.
But remember, you be careful.”

“I’ll buckle up.”

“I didn’t mean on the highway, my friend.”

Carver was about to ask him what he did mean, but Desoto had hung up.

Carver let the receiver clatter back into its cradle. There was no point in trying to call Henry Tiller until he’d had time to drive back to Key Montaigne.

He removed the life insurance pitch from the envelope Tiller had scribbled his phone number on, stuffed the envelope in his shirt pocket, and used his cane to lever himself to his feet. Then he limped from the office, wincing when he met the June Florida heat, and made his way across the parking lot to his car.

Leaving the canvas top up on the ancient Oldsmobile convertible, he coaxed what he could from the balky air conditioner as he drove north on the coast highway toward his beach cottage and Beth Jackson.

C
ARVER MADE LOVE
to Beth before telling her about Henry Tiller’s visit. He knew if he’d told her first, she’d have been distracted. Was that male chauvinism? Maybe. His former wife, Laura, had pointed to that kind of attitude as part of the reason for the dissolution of their marriage. Carver figured she might be right and had tried to modify his thinking. He was still trying.

Beth lay beside him now on her back, her hands clasped behind her head, considering what he’d said. The window was open and the breathing, sighing sound of the surf was in the room, punctuated by the lazy metallic ticking of the slowly revolving paddle fan on the ceiling above the bed. A breeze was playing over their nakedness, evaporating perspiration and purging the room of the musky afterscent of sex. Carver looked over at Beth’s smooth, dusky body, long and lean as a high-fashion model’s but with an obvious wiry strength. There was firm definition to her stomach muscles, and her long thighs curved with the musculature of the distance runner. She’d been running when Carver first met her, from her drug-czar husband who’d been bent on killing her.

Staring at the ceiling, she said, “Tell you about the war on drugs, Fred, it obscures other things. People in power use it to advance their own agendas. The news media give the public wrong images, wrong impressions.”

“What’s obscured, for instance?” Carver asked. He was aware Beth knew plenty about drugs, having been married to the infamous late Roberto Gomez. She’d grown up in a Chicago slum and gotten out the only way she’d known how—with her sex and beauty. Then slowly she’d turned her life around, even while living with Gomez and regrets, got an education, escaped from Gomez and his world bought by drug money, and fell in love with Carver. Called herself Jackson again, her maiden name. It bothered Carver sometimes that what she’d seen in Gomez, she might see in him.

“Main thing that’s obscured,” she said, “is the fact there is no drug problem.”

Carver wasn’t surprised; she was always saying things like that, setting little conversational traps, and he’d learned not to jump in and argue. He said, “Explain.”

“The powers that be act like there’s some substance, some
stuff,
causing all our problems, and if we just stop most of it at the border, things’ll get better. They say guns don’t kill people, people do, then they think it’s the junk itself that’s causing drug addicts. Get rid of the white powder and the weed that can be smoked, and the problem’ll be solved.”

“Hasn’t worked so far,” Carver said.

“’Cause it’s bullshit. You stop most of the drugs, and their street price’ll go up and so will the crime the addicts commit to pay for their habits. Stop every bit of drugs and people’ll grow their own, or develop new designer drugs. Hell, a good chemist could walk around this place and figure out some way to cook up something gets folks high. And there’s always somebody who’ll buy it and sell it. Problem’s not drugs, problem’s that people wanna do whatever to escape the reality of their lives.”

Carver thought her reasoning was sound. He propped himself up on his elbow and stared at her dark, highlighted features. There was a softness to them, a gentleness, that belied how tough she was. Toughness from deep down wasn’t always obvious.

She stopped looking at the ceiling and glanced over at him. “So the government declares war on drugs by saying, ‘We’re gonna come down hard on you people if you don’t stop using that stuff we’ve made illegal ‘cause you can’t stop using it.’ Makes no sense. An addict’ll check in for a cure only after hitting absolute bottom, Carver, and then they put him on a waiting list so he has months before he can get treatment. So he goes back to drugs and thinks everything’s fine again, and he’s no longer interested in treatment. Big surprise. Thing they do then is arrest and convict him and toss him in jail with some real hard cases that’ll teach him tricks and stay in touch with him the rest of his life. Turn him into one of them. Sometimes I wonder who those government assholes talk to when they get their ideas about drugs.”

Carver said, “They talk to each other.”

“What I’m trying to tell you,” Beth said, “is whenever drugs might be involved, don’t take for granted things are what they seem. Or even that they’re about drugs at all. What they’re about is somebody getting money or getting elected or both. That’s the way it is. I goddamn know.”

“I love you,” Carver said, “because you’re so ambivalent.”

“It’s just that I happen to know about drugs and what goes on around them.”