Kiss (2 page)

“Gotta go,” she said. “Beachfront property to show.”

“I’ll make it more worth your while to stay,” he told her, waking up further. The temperature outside was still bearable; the bedroom window was open and he could hear the ocean sighing beyond the swaying sheer curtains and the screen.

Edwina stood up and smoothed her skirt over her thighs. Commerce today, not sex. “I’m sure you would,” she said.

Carver had an erection. “You wouldn’t be sorry.”

“But I might be sorry later, when another agent sells the property.”

“You could afford to lose a commission.”

“It’s not the commission.”

Carver ran his palm over his bald pate, as if arranging nonexistent hair. “Yeah, I know.” There was a distant click and a low whirring sound. The central air-conditioning unit kicking in to begin its day’s valiant effort of holding the heat at bay. It was a long war that one summer would end with a burned-out fan motor or broken-down compressor; the heat would prevail. Cool air from the vent wafted over Carver’s legs.

“I just remembered, I passed Desoto’s car yesterday on the coast highway,” Edwina said. “At least I think it was his. Was he coming here?”

“Uh-huh. He wants to hire me.”

Edwina cocked her head to the side. This interested her.

“Wants me to look into Sunhaven Retirement Home,” Carver said.

“That place about ten miles outside of town? Looks like some building blocks dropped out of the sky?”

“That’s the one. Desoto’s uncle was in there for a while. He died three days ago.”

Edwina ran the tips of neatly manicured fingers along her smooth jaw line. She did that when her mind was turning over. “Does Desoto think there’s something wrong with how he died?”

Carver sat up, his stiff left leg extended straight out in front of him. He scooted forward and swiveled until he was sitting on the edge of the mattress. He reached for his cane and leaned on it. “It’s not that, exactly,” he said. “The uncle, Sam Cusanelli, told Desoto several times there was something not right about Sunhaven. But apparently he couldn’t define exactly what was wrong. Desoto didn’t take it seriously enough to look into it, even though he and the uncle were close when Desoto was a kid. Cusanelli was seventy-six and his mind played tricks on him sometimes.”

“But Desoto takes it seriously now,” Edwina said. “Why?”

Carver shook his head. “I dunno. Guilt, maybe, over something he doesn’t even remember. Grief, I’m sure. Way people’s minds work.”

“You going to look into it for him?”

“Starting today,” Carver said. “Soon as I get myself up and around.”

“You said the uncle died three days ago,” Edwina said. “We should send flowers.”

That was something that hadn’t occurred to Carver. He wasn’t good at the amenities. “I’ll find out where they should go,” he said.

“Never mind,” Edwina told him, “I’ll check the
Gazette-Dispatch
obituary page. You said, ‘Cusanelli’?” She didn’t ask it as if she were surprised. She knew Desoto was half Italian. She’d asked Carver about him. Women were always curious about Desoto.

“Cusanelli,” Carver confirmed.

She reversed her wrist and shot a cool gray glance at her watch. “Damn! Gotta go.”

“Good luck,” Carver said.

She was already out the door and in the hall when she called back to him, “You, too.”

Carver sat still and listened to the outside door open and shut, then the vibrant hum of the automatic garage-door opener. It sounded like a tenor with a sore throat.

The overhead door hummed closed, and briefly he heard the precision growl of Edwina’s Mercedes as she low-geared it down the curving driveway. She’d be heavy on the accelerator when she reached the highway. She was on intimate terms with speed.

After a few minutes Carver got up and limped with his cane into the bathroom, where he splashed cold water on his face to come fully alert. He slept nude, so he had only to sit on the bed again and work into his swimming trunks, and he was ready for his morning therapeutic swim.

After making his way down the rough wooden steps to the beach, he walked with difficulty over the soft sand to where the surf was fanning white, grasping hands of foam on the shore. The sea had always wanted the land.

He moved closer to the ocean and stuck his cane like a spear in the damp sand. Then he lay down on his stomach and, using his arms and good leg to propel himself, inched backward into the cool water. When a particularly large wave roared in, he scooted into it and let its ponderous reverse momentum lift and carry him seaward until he was floating free.

Carver felt exuberant in the water. His upper body had become amazingly strong since he’d been supporting his weight with the cane and had come to rely on his arms and torso. Nature’s way of compensating. And here in the ocean, kicking from the hip, he was as mobile as anyone and more powerful than most.

He swam far out from shore. Then he turned his body and treaded water, bobbing on the gentle swells and staring in at Edwina’s house with its red tile roof, perched atop the rise where the Army Corps of Engineers had built up the beach with rocks and the developer had graded the land to afford a better view. The sun was like flame on the back of his neck.

After about five minutes he stroked toward shore with his peculiar but graceful Australian crawl.

When he dragged himself back up onto the beach, near where his cane jutted from the sand, he was breathing hard, his chest heaving and each intake of breath a rasping plea for oxygen. That was how he wanted it. Almost every morning since his retirement from the force, he’d been able to swim a bit farther out, each time with a degree of added strength. Occasionally he’d find himself wondering what it would be like to continue swimming straight out to sea, into the tilted, sliding expanses of blue-green ocean and the rushing of water that sounded like the roar of mortality in the blood.

Not today.

Carver grasped the cane and used it to lever himself to his feet. Dripping water, he limped toward firmer ground and the house.

After a shower and quick shave, he dressed in light tan slacks and a black pullover shirt. He put on brown socks and his well-worn moccasins. The crown of his bald head was tanned, but he had thick gray hair curling above his ears and well down the back of his neck. He was forty-four years old, medium-size but trim and cabled with sinew. His features were more harsh than handsome. His nose was straight, he had blue catlike eyes, and a boyhood scar lent the right corner of his mouth a sardonic twist. A strong face, maybe to the point of brutality. Was that why Edwina loved him?

He had black coffee, half a grapefruit, and a piece of dry toast for breakfast. Then he stretched out an arm for the phone and called Desoto in Orlando.

“Still feel the way you did when we talked yesterday?” he asked, when the lieutenant had come to the phone.

“Same way,
amigo.
I know what you’re thinking, that my head’s not screwed on right at this time. But believe me, I gave the matter a lot of thought before driving there to talk with you.”

“It didn’t seem spur of the moment,” Carver assured him.

Desoto said, “You find out anything?”

“Hell, no. I just got up.”

“Hmm.” Disapproval.

“Who were some of your uncle’s friends at the retirement home?”

“You don’t keep friends very long at a place like that,” Desoto said sadly, “But I do remember one old guy. Name’s Kearny. That’s his first name. I think his last name’s Williams. He and Sam seemed pretty thick. Took their meals together in the mess hall they call a dining room, played checkers. That kinda stuff. They argued a lot, but they were friends. You could tell by watching them. I was glad Sam had somebody like that out there.”

“Kearny still at the home?”

“I guess so,” Desoto said. “If he’s still alive.”

“I’ll let you know when and if I do find out anything,” Carver said,

“I know you will.” Desoto paused. “You be careful, okay?”

“Of what?”

“I’m not sure. I got a feeling about that place. All that sadness, the ends of lives, and in so much sun and brightness. Maybe when you go there you’ll know what I mean.”

“We’ll find out this morning,” Carver said.

He stretched his arm again, leaning his weight on the cane, and hung up the phone. Then he limped out to his rusty Oldsmobile convertible, put down the canvas top, and drove through the morning heat toward Sunhaven Retirement Home.

He thought about Edwina kissing him good-morning. And about Uncle Sam, dying among hired help in a place that had made him uneasy.

It felt great to be alive and too young for Medicare.

T
HERE WAS A LINE
of palm trees along the perimeter of the parking lot at Sunhaven, but they provided little shade. Carver nevertheless found a space in the dappled light beneath one of them and turned off the Olds’s ancient and powerful V-8 engine. In the sudden silence, palm fronds rattled in the warm breeze, speaking an old and indecipherable language.

He got out of the car, set the tip of his cane in the lot’s bleached gravel, and limped toward the nearest of the tinted cubes.

A transparent door was barely discernible as the entrance. Its copper tint gave back Carver’s reflection as he approached: a slightly crooked, featureless man with a cane, struggling in glaring two dimension. The heat from the gently inclined pale concrete ramp to the door radiated through the thin leather soles of his moccasins. The temperature might hit a thousand today.

But not inside Sunhaven. As Carver stepped in and the door swished closed behind him, the chill almost stopped his heart. All that tinted glass must make the air conditioning more efficient.

The lobby was done in pastels, mostly the pale blues and pinks seen in nurseries, as if to suggest the full circle of nothing to life to nothing. There were several residents seated in wicker chairs. The nearest, an old woman secured with a knotted yellow sheet so she wouldn’t topple from her rocking chair, lolled her head toward Carver and smiled as if she recognized him as a long-lost family member. It was quiet in the lobby and the runners on her rocker made soft, rhythmic creaking sounds. Hypnotic sounds. Two old men, one of them with a missing right arm, halted their game of checkers and glanced over at Carver. The nearer of them, hatchet-faced and obviously without his dentures, smiled in the same way as the woman in the rocker. The one-armed man, unnoticed for a moment, darted out his hand and furtively scooted a red checker forward on the board. Carver wondered if it had been his move.

In the center of the blue and pink and mauve lobby was a long, curved reception desk, the lower half of which was covered with what looked like pink industrial velvet. Beyond it were half a dozen tall, pastel dividers, partitioning off what probably were private areas where residents and visitors could talk uninterrupted.

Carver nodded to the checker players and limped toward the tiny, redheaded girl behind the reception desk.

She got younger as he got closer. He figured her for about fifteen, but she had the kind of looks that could confound the guy who guessed ages at carnivals. Her hair was carrot-colored and she had a sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of a miniature, perfect nose. Her eyes were blue and widely spaced, with a dreamy quality and with that pink-rimmed look so often seen on redheads. She had a trim figure beneath her white-and-gray uniform: lean waist and high, small, protruding breasts—a teenage figure. Her hair was medium-length and combed back, arranged in a sort of bun on top of her head and held there with a blue ribbon tied in a large bow. The flared bow resembled an exotic butterfly that had found a suitable flower. There were errant, fiery wisps of hair curling in front of her ears. She looked to Carver as if she ought to be wearing pigtails and orthodontic braces and marching in the junior high school band. The plastic name plaque on the desk read “Birdie Reeves.”

She glanced up from the magazine she’d been reading and noticed Carver. She blinked once, slowly, as if there were sand beneath her eyelids and they hurt. Then she smiled. Her teeth were even but protruded; that only added to her Becky Thatcher look. She was so much the opposite of classic beauty that she made you see her own brand of beauty in her blazing youth.

She stood up behind the counter, though it was hardly noticeable, and said, “Can I help you?” There was a lilt to her voice, maybe a midwestern drawl.

“I’m looking for Kearny Williams,” Carver said.

Birdie’s smile kept splitting her features, causing the flesh at the corners of her eyes to crinkle in a parody of crow’s feet. People like her never really appeared old; they simply faded and reminded other people that time was passing. “Uh-hm, we got a Mr. Williams here. You a relative?”

“Friend of a friend. My name’s Fred Carver. Tell Mr. Williams I knew Sam Cusanelli.”

Birdie’s blue eyes widened and her sadness absorbed her smile. “Shame about Mr. Cusanelli,” she said. “He was a nice man. I’d say that about most any of the residents, I guess, but it really was true of Mr. Cusanelli. How well did you know him?”

“Very well, when he was younger.”

She was smiling again, waiting for Carver to say more. He didn’t.

“I see,” she said. A man and a woman wearing white uniforms bustled past, discussing something earnestly, oblivious of where they were. The man mumbled, “. . . a drop in the white cell count,” and the woman nodded thoughtfully. The old woman in the chair lolled her head and tried to lift a hand to wave but was ignored.

Birdie said, “Well, I s’pose it’s okay.” She pointed; her thin arm was freckled and dusted with reddish down. “Go on through that door and down the hall, then turn left and you’ll come to Mr. Williams’s room. I’m sure he’s there; he’s most always there.” She consulted a chart on a clipboard. “Room number’s one.”

“Easy to remember,” Carver said.

“Not for Mr. Williams sometimes.”

Carver said thanks and left her to return to her magazine. It had to do with heavy-metal rock stars. There was a glossy cover illustration of an insanely grinning thirtyish man dressed as an English schoolboy and aiming his elaborate guitar like a rifle. Birdie seemed enthralled by the magazine’s contents. Her lips moved soundlessly as she read.