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Carver washed the breakfast dishes and left them on the sink to dry, then switched off the radio, even though he liked Cats. Slow as things were on Key Montaigne, it would be a good time to extend the professional courtesy of dropping by to meet Chief Lloyd Wicke.

Key Montaigne police headquarters was a squat clapboard structure near the marina on Main. There was a steeplelike antenna next to a satellite dish on the roof. At the front curb was a dust-coated blue Ford Taurus with red and blue roofbar lights and an official-looking gold badge decal on its door. Through the windshield Carver could see a twelve-gauge riot gun mounted to the dash. Once, that had seemed a formidable weapon, in the time before drug dealers had taken up AK47 and Uzi automatic weapons. Beyond the police cruiser a dented tow truck and a maroon Toyota station wagon were parked at an angle in the small lot alongside the building. The lot was layered with chat, small white stones the size of gravel, which was used often in Florida. It was the reason for the pale coating of dust on the vehicles, like talcum powder.

Carver parked the Olds next to the Toyota, then narrowed his eyes against the sun and limped around to the front of the building. Down the block, at the marina, the commercial fishing boats had already left, but the charter crews and tourists were preparing to set to sea. A large sailboat, canvas lowered, putted on diesel engine power across Carver’s field of vision, trailing wisps of black exhaust in the clear morning air.

It was cool inside headquarters. The building had once been a house, but most of the interior walls had been removed to form a rectangular area sectioned off by low wooden railings. An elderly woman with a blue hairdo sat behind a big walnut desk near the door. There were four gray metal desks beyond her. At one of them a man with sun-bleached curly blond hair, wearing a yellow Bart Simpson T-shirt, was studiously working at an old gray IBM Selectric. He was a nifty typist; the venerable Selectric
tupita-tupita-tupita
—
dinged!
its contentment to be in such capable hands. Three identical closed doors, in a neat row beyond the desk, probably led to back offices, and maybe the holdover cells. There was a control panel and microphone near the blue-haired woman’s desk. Aside from her other office duties, she was apparently the dispatcher.

“Help you?” she asked, smiling at Carver. She had a round face and soft, pliable skin much younger than her eyes.

Carver told her who he was and that he’d like to see Chief Wicke.

“You the one staying at the Tiller place?” she asked, still smiling warmly.

“The same.”

She nodded. He thought she’d press a button on the control board and announce him on the intercom, but instead she excused herself and left her desk. She was overweight and wide-hipped and moved with effort, her labored breathing audible. Without pausing, she knocked perfunctorily and entered the middle door behind the desks. The guy at the Selectric had stopped typing and was staring at Carver. Carver nodded to him. He nodded back solemnly. Kept staring with his cop’s flat blue eyes. Maybe he remembered Carver from the last time the Fish-back bank was robbed.

“Chief’ll see you,” the blue-haired woman said, bearing down on
Chief
and making it sound like a gentle-but-firm command. She left the office door open and trod heavily back to her desk.

Carver used his cane to push open a gate in the low rail, then limped toward Chief Wicke’s office. He thought the cop at the gray metal desk would still be staring, but behind him he heard the Selectric start clattering again.

Chief Wicke was standing up behind a wide oak desk that took up most of the office. It was a messy desk. File folders were in a jumble on one corner, a dirty ashtray was poised to fall off another. A four-line phone sat on top of another stack of folders. Papers and two thick ring-binders lay near the chief, and he had one of those green felt desk pads with brown leather borders. Small slips of paper, business cards, and opened envelopes were tucked beneath the overlapping leather on each side. Chief Wicke was either a very busy or a very lazy public servant.

The chief himself was average height but wide all over, as if he’d been compressed by a great force. He might have been a long-ago high school football player too small and slow for college. His blue uniform shirt was bulging over his belt. His gold badge hung down above his shirt pocket like a flower wilted by the heat. He had a fleshy face but narrow, sharp features, as if nature had been guilty of a genetic mix-up and combined fox with fat cells. Salt and pepper hair had receded and was cut short and combed straight back. Wicke’s gray eyes were neutral yet appraising, like the eyes of the cop out at the typewriter. Like Henry Tiller’s eyes, and Carver’s, and the eyes of every cop everywhere who ever lived. Central Casting might have done worse suggesting him as the frustrated southern sheriff in one of those yokel chase comedies.

Carver introduced himself, and Wicke pumped his hand, saying, “Lloyd Wicke. I understand you’re staying up at Henry Tiller’s place.” Wicke’s eyes hadn’t so much as flicked toward Carver’s cane; he already knew things about Carver, so maybe he was more on top of his job than those yokel sheriffs in the movies. And there was no trace of a southern accent.

Carver leaned on the cane. “I’ll be there for a while,” he said.

“So how’s old Henry doing?”

“Not bad, considering. He’ll be laid up for some time, though. I’m here to look into the hit and run.” Among other things.

Chief Wicke frowned and nodded. “Hell of a turn for Henry, but I guess that’s what happens when you get old, your hearing and eyesight go bad, and you can’t see or hear a car coming at you.” He ran beefy fingers lightly across his chin, as if checking to make sure he’d shaved that morning. “Kinda problems we’re all gonna run into sooner or later.”

“That how you see it? Henry got nailed by some drunk driver who kept on going?”

“Sure. Or some variation of that. What other way is there to see it?”

“Henry thinks maybe it wasn’t an accident. Maybe it had to do with some suspicions he has about a neighbor of his, Walter Rainer.”

Chief Wicke chuckled and shook his head. “Now why ain’t I surprised?”

“Henry said he’d been to see you,” Carver said.

“He sure has. ’Bout a week ago. I told him he better not go around spreading such theories unless he expects to be sued. There’s no evidence Walter Rainer’s anything but just another middle-aged man with money living his Florida dream. Got himself a younger, good-looking wife, a couple of steady employees to take the load off his shoulders. So what if he does go out in his boat at night—
if
he does, which I doubt. Hell, he’s one of the least eccentric rich folks we got living on the island. You wouldn’t believe some of the oddball shit goes on here. Or maybe you would.” The chief squinted at Carver and leaned forward over his cluttered desk. “What exactly’d Henry tell you, Mr. Carver?”

“He wasn’t very specific. He seems to have added up everything he’s observed, and doesn’t like the total, even if he doesn’t know exactly what it is. Mainly, he figures a longtime cop can sense when something’s not what it oughta be.”

“I guess he’s right on that one, but there comes a time when that cop gets too old and too far away from the work. Listen, last thing I wanna do is bad-mouth old Henry, but my actual belief is that he’s rounded that bend, like a lotta old folks, and his imagination’s doing a job on him. It ain’t unnatural, either, for a man his age to get kinda paranoid.”

“You’d have a tough time convincing him of that.”

“Don’t I know it? What I tried was to convince him to quit spying on Walter Rainer, and to try and forget his crazy suspicions. Take up goddamn basket weaving or some such.”

“I bet he took to that suggestion with a smile.”

Chief Wicke grinned. “Well, you probably ain’t noticed any baskets around his place. He cussed a lot and then tromped outa here. Tell the truth, I don’t guess I blame him. It can’t be easy admitting the string’s about played out. Maybe working up suspicion about Walter Rainer is Henry’s way of trying to make himself meaningful.”

“Exactly who is Rainer?”

“Man about fifty, said to have made his fortune in the car business up north. Lives out on Shoreline and manages his investments. Now and again him and his wife, Lilly, come into town for dinner or what have you, though usually they pretty much keep to themselves. Rainer’s well-enough liked, or at least not disliked, and no trouble to anybody far as I can see.”

“His man Davy Mathis looks like a rough character.”

Wicke spread his hands on his desk and nodded. “Yeah, I know about Davy. Even mentioned his background to Walter Rainer, case he didn’t know. But he did know. He said he’d gotten to like and trust Davy when Davy worked for him up north, and felt he deserved a chance despite his background.”

“So he’s a humanitarian.”

Wicke’s broad but foxlike face creased in a smile. “Now you sound like Henry.”

“Yeah, I guess I do. Sorry. I’m working on not being so cynical.”

“Well, in our line of work, that ain’t easy. Which is maybe why an old cop like Henry needs a crime to look into, and the truth is, other’n tourist con games and an occasional fight, there ain’t much crime here on Key Montaigne. Maybe Henry shoulda gone back to Milwaukee or retired to the South Bronx.”

“So you didn’t do anything to investigate his suspicions?”

“Oh, I didn’t say that. I asked around a bit. Even drove up to the Rainer place and talked to Walter Rainer. He was surprised. He don’t even know Henry. I think his feelings were a little hurt; it ain’t pleasant to be suspected of God knows what. He even offered to let me search the house grounds.”

“But you didn’t.”

The chief lifted his broad shoulders helplessly. “I honestly had no reason, Mr. Carver.”

“Other than the Walter Rainer matter, is there anyone on Key Montaigne who might have reason to do Henry harm?”

“Hell, no. Ain’t nobody takes him all that serious.” Wicke rested his palms flat on his desk and faced Carver squarely. “Look, you’re making too much of this. What happened is some DWI or scared-shitless tourist accidentally ran over Henry in Miami, then panicked and fled the scene. I’ve asked Miami police to set up checks on the car rental agencies in the area, notify me if they report any suspicious damages. But you know how it is, a car can hit a human being and not sustain near as much damage as the person. All depends on how it happens.”

“You’re probably right,” Carver said, “but I owe it to Henry to ask around. Maybe, if nothing else, I can put his mind at ease.”

“I sure hope so,” the chief said. “I wouldn’t want his fixation about Rainer to run outa control, maybe prompt him to do something really foolish. Henry still got his service revolver?”

“He probably does,” Carver said.

“Great.” Wicke waved a hand. “But then, what the hell, every nut case in Florida’s got a gun, so why not Henry?”

Carver couldn’t answer that one. He thanked Chief Wicke for taking time to talk to him, then limped from the office. The curly-haired cop at the Selectric stared at him on the way out. The woman behind the desk smiled at him like a grandmother who’d just fed him cookies. Smalltown life.

It was much hotter outside. The sky was cloudless and the sun was having its way. There was a slight breeze off the ocean, but it was warm and created the effect of a convection oven. As he set the cane on the loose chat and limped back to the Olds, Carver could feel the sun’s heat on his bald pate. Probably he should buy a hat.

When he got back to Henry’s cottage, he punched out Efhe’s number on the cheap digital phone. A woman answered. Effie’s mother? Carver asked if he could talk to Effie, for a moment feeling like a nervous tenth grader working up the nerve to ask for a date. “Just a minute,” the woman said suspiciously. It was more like three minutes before Effie came to the phone.

In the interest of propriety, Carver kept the conversation short. He asked Effie for the names of people on Key Montaigne who were particularly friendly with or had dealings with Henry. Sounding as enthusiastic as if he’d provided a last-chance date for the prom, she said she’d make up a list and bicycle over and give it to him.

After thanking her and hanging up on her boundless energy, he called Faith United Hospital in Miami and asked about Henry Tiller’s condition.

Satisfactory, he was told. Mr. Tiller had been on the operating table three hours while surgeons explored and treated his internal injuries. Soon he’d be able to accept brief phone calls and have visitors, but not today or tonight.

After replacing the receiver, Carver found a can of Budweiser in the back of Henry’s refrigerator and sat on the front porch, sipping beer and looking out at the sea. At the sleek white form of the docked
Miss Behavin’.
He thought about his conversation with Chief Wicke, who seemed a competent and sensible man with no ax to grind, though maybe something of a toady for the island’s rich residents who no doubt kept him in office, politics being politics.

Maybe the chief was right, and Henry was in the gray area between reality and the tricks advanced age played on body and mind. The place where past and present mixed with never.

The beer can was empty, and Carver was still considering Henry’s questionable instincts, when he heard bike tires crunching in the driveway and Effie pedaled into view on her weatherworn Schwinn.

O
NE OF THE
names on Effie’s list was Katia Marsh, an employee of the Oceanography Research Center. After lunch, Carver found the handful of tourist brochures he’d picked up before crossing the narrow bridge to the island. The research center had its own brochure, a slick foldout that showed a low, buff-colored building perched on the edge of the sea. There were several fenced-in areas near it that reminded Carver of enclosed tennis courts, but he saw that inside the cages of chain-link fencing were rectangular pools that must contain sea life. There was a shot of a room where various tidal-pool creatures could be observed and handled by visitors. The back wall of the room was a glass window looking in on a tank wherein a large shark swam. A dark-haired man in a white smock and a stoop-shouldered woman with a pinched nose and pointed chin were smiling and observing the observers. Carver wondered if the woman was Katia Marsh.