This time Carver didn’t phone upstairs first. He limped across the Blue Flamingo’s lobby and stepped into an elevator waiting with open doors. The lobby had been deserted except for an ancient black man napping or dead in one of the armchairs. The desk clerk was facing the other way, apparently checking cubbyholes for room keys or messages while he talked on the phone.
Carver’s luck was beginning to change. On the fourth floor the elevator stopped and a skinny little man with haunted dark eyes and thin black hair pasted severely sideways over a bald spot got in. Entering the elevator with him was the smell of perfumy cologne or deodorant and stale sweat, nauseating in such close quarters. The man was holding a gray plastic ice container with a blue flamingo decal on it. It was full of ice, which apparently was available on the hotel’s even-numbered floors. The man glanced at the control panel, saw that the only glowing button said 5, and simply stood with his head tilted back, staring solemnly at a point above where the elevator doors met. He’d never acknowledged Carver’s presence and might as well have been alone. Elevator etiquette.
On the fifth floor Carver hung back and let the man with the ice leave the elevator first. When the man turned left, Carver held the Open button in so the elevator would stay as it was, and waited a few seconds before stepping out into the hall. He stood leaning on his cane and bowed his head, as if trying to remember something, playing it casual.
The man with the ice bucket had paused and knocked on a door. Now he was shifting his weight from side to side, like a worn-down nervous boxer who has no punch left and is afraid of getting hurt. As the door opened and he edged inside, he looked back at Carver with the hostile’ hope of the poor and dispossessed.
Only when Carver approached the door and saw the room number was he sure it was 505; the man with the ice must be Frank Everman, and probably his wife, Selma, had let him into the room. There was music playing in 505.
Carver rapped firmly three times on the door with his cane. Everman had seen him and knew he’d been seen, so Carver wasn’t going to go away. No use pretending the room was unoccupied; there was little choice for Everman but to open the door to nasty and persistent reality.
Which he did.
Everman was no longer holding the ice bucket, and was wiping his damp hands on his blue polyester pants. He was about fifty, but the deeply etched map of pain that was his face said it had been a tough half-century. The top two buttons of his white shirt were unfastened to reveal what appeared to be a rawhide necklace disappearing among his gray chest hairs. He was short as well as skinny, and he looked up at Carver as if he’d just done something wrong and been struck a blow in anger. There was little hope in his eyes now, and only a glimmer of hostility. He wasn’t sure about Carver, despite the cane. He’d been around enough to recognize a certain dangerous kind of man.
Behind him, standing in the middle of the room and peering over his shoulder, was a tall but stooped woman with gray hair, badly fitted dentures, and a bewildered expression. She was wearing baggy green slacks and a yellow blouse with a stain on it that looked like coffee. There was a robust polka playing in the room, a slightly cracked record, heavy on the tuba and accordion.
Carver said, “Mr. and Mrs. Everman?”
“Yeah?” said the man, making it a question.
“I’m from Key Montaigne,” Carver said, raising his voice so he’d be understood over the music. “I’m here to talk about your son.” Oompah! said the tuba, vibrating the floor.
A blank look came over the face of the man. Fear crept into the woman’s woeful blue eyes.
“Our son’s dead,” Frank Everman said.
“I know. That’s why I’m here. To ask you a few questions. I don’t like it, but that’s my job. Can I come in?” Oompah! Oompah!
Everman didn’t know how to say no. Carver inserted his cane into the room first, as if it were part of him that was already inside, then limped through the door and past Everman, who made a sort of acquiescent grunt as he shuffled aside. The hall had been hotter than the lobby, and the room was hotter than the hall. It was actually a small suite. Carver could see beyond the overstuffed old sofa that matched the lobby furniture and into a room where the corner of an unmade bed was visible. Alongside the sofa was a fancy brass floor lamp with a bent yellow shade. A cheap reproduction of a Frederic Remington painting, a weary Indian on a wearier horse, hung on one wall. There was a bookshelf on another wall, but it held stacks of 33 rpm records instead of books, and a brown stereo turntable with lots of controls but only one knob, and that one cracked in half. The woman walked over and used the cracked knob to switch off the turntable, then lifted the stylus and carefully set it aside in its bracket. The room was astoundingly quiet in the absence of polka. It smelled of stale tobacco smoke and strong insecticide, now that Frank Everman was out of range with his cologne.
The woman must have seen Carver’s nose twitch. “I just killed the biggest roach you ever seen,” she said, and crooked her forefinger over her cupped hand as if depressing the button on an aerosol can.
“I’m glad you nailed him before I got here,” Carver said, smiling. Selma might be easier to deal with than the whipped loser Frank.
Frank tried to take charge, backpedaling quickly to the center of the room so he was standing next to his wife and facing Carver. “So whad’ya need to know about Lenny? I thought we told you guys everything possible.”
“Probably you did,” Carver said sympathetically, “but we need to hear it again to verify it.” He looked over at Selma. “Losing your son as you have, you must understand we have to learn everything possible so we can try to prevent other kids from leaving home and ending up the same way. The streets are the worst kind of life for a minor.”
“For anybody,” Selma said.
“It was the drugs,” Frank said. “Goddamn drugs and the scum that sells ’em is what killed our boy.” He clenched his fists and looked fierce enough to tackle any drug dealer smaller than five feet tall.
Selma bowed her head. “Time to time, the way God works His will is hard to bear up under.” She’d produced a wadded white Kleenex from somewhere and used it to dab at her eyes. Tiny pills of tissue appeared on her blouse to join the coffee stain.
“Did Leonard have a history of drug use?” Carver asked.
Frank looked puzzled, then said, “We told you fellas he did. His fuckin’ peers got him using the stuff when he was no more’n eleven years old. Hell, we was surprised to find out. Exactly the kinda unsuspecting parents you read about. Lenny was hard to roust outa bed some mornings, but other’n that we seen no sign whatsoever he had a problem.”
“What kinda drugs he use?” Carver asked.
“You name it and Lenny probably tried it in his young life. Toward the last he was smoking crack cocaine, is what I gather. But we don’t know for sure except for what they found in his blood test after he . . . was gone. Once he got past twelve years old, Lenny never let us in on what was happening in his life. Lousy peers took over.”
“That’s not exactly true,” Selma interjected, defending her dead son and her competence as a mother. “It was just the drug part of his life he kept secret.”
Frank snorted. “My feeling is drugs were his whole life. Him and the other poor fucked-up kids that caught a habit. Not to mention the bastards that deal the stuff. You lie down with them dogs, you’re gonna get up with plenty of fleas. Then one day you don’t get up at all.”
“That’s what usually happens,” Carver agreed. “And Leonard had run away before, right?”
“Just temporarily,” Selma said.
“Till the police brung him back,” Frank told Carver, ignoring Selma. “Once when he was ten, and another time when he was eleven.”
“How long was he gone those times?”
“When he was ten he was away less’n a week. Cops found him way the fuck up in Haines City. Time he was eleven, he was gone two months and some social worker found him right here in Miami, selling artificial flowers at a busy intersection.”
Two months, Carver thought. That was a long time for an eleven-year-old boy to be on the streets and not fall prey to the perverts or the dope dealers. Time enough to become savvy and cynical and lost to yourself as well as the people who might be searching for you. It would be so easy for us to alleviate our social problems by making sure every kid in the country had education, medication, and some sort of basic physical and emotional nourishment. But Carver knew it wasn’t going to happen. Fifteen or twenty years would have to pass in order to see the results, and political horizons extended only to the next election.
Selma said, “Looka here, Mister . . . ?”
“Carver.”
“Mr. Carver. We’re living in this hotel on welfare ‘cause of Frank’s disability.”
“Got injured in an industrial accident,” Frank said, with what sounded like pride.
“What I’m saying,” Selma went on, “is that we don’t wanna make no waves and bring the case worker down on us for neglecting Leonard-which we definitely did not do. But folks on the dole don’t wanna call attention to themselves, you know?”
Carver said he understood. He looked hard at her. “You really think it’s plausible your runaway son went swimming in the ocean and drowned under the influence of cocaine?”
“Ain’t that what happened?” Frank asked.
Selma said, “Leonard was a good swimmer.”
“Not juiced up on coke, he wasn’t,” Frank said bitterly. He screwed up his face and trained his injured eyes on Carver. “To answer your question, yeah, it fits the way Lenny was, the way he was living at the time, that he mighta done something like that. Anyway, I guess the proof’s in the pudding, ain’t it?”
“Afraid it is,” Carver said.
Selma moved her pale and flabby arm in a tired gesture toward the ice bucket. A bottle of bourbon and a plastic liter bottle of Coca-Cola Classic sat beside it on an old elliptical mahogany coffee table that looked like a surfboard on legs. “You wanna drink, Mr. Carver?”
“No thanks,” Carver said, “I’ve taken up about enough of your time. One last thing, though, are you satisfied with the way the investigation into your son’s death was handled?”
“Oh, hell, yeah!” Frank blurted out. “Them people down on Key Montaigne couldn’t have been nicer, don’t you think, Selma?”
“They was as comforting as anybody could be under the circumstances,” Selma said.
“You acquainted with a man down there named Walter Rainer?”
“No,” Frank said.
“Yes,” Selma said. “He was the nice fella give you a lift when the rental car got a flat.”
“Yeah, mighta been his name at that. Big fucker in a long gray car. Name Rainer sounds right.”
“So you don’t have any doubts about the way Leonard died?”
“Doubts?” Frank Everman stared at Carver. “What kinda doubts?”
“Nothing, really,” Carver said. “I just wanna make sure you’re satisfied with the way everything was done. It’s important we make it easy as possible for people who’ re gonna have similar experiences, because the sad thing is, there are plenty more kids out there living the way your Leonard did.”
Selma said, “Often times-and I know it’s a sin to think it-I do believe Lenny’s better off now. I mean, the kinda discontent and mental suffering he was in. Whatever it was made him take to the streets. And the drugs and stuff. The horrible people he took up with. He was living a life of agony and might eventually have come to an even worse end. It’s like the bible says about the wages of sin, and Lenny was led astray and into the wilderness early in life.”
Carver wondered if she imagined her dead son in hell. How couldn’t she, if she believed in an afterlife of reward and punishment?
Frank shook his head sadly. “Damned peers!”
Carver left the Evermans to their bourbon and their beer-hall music and rode the elevator down to the lobby. Their grief for their son didn’t ring quite true, didn’t seem to stab deep enough. On the other hand, it was possible they were so beaten down by poverty they’d become numbed to tragedy.
The explanation of the flat tire and the ride from Walter Rainer might well be fact, the one genuine coincidence that had tilted Henry’s suspicion to conviction.
Carver had left the Olds parked in the lot alongside the Blue Flamingo, in the shade of the adjacent hotel that was deserted and under renovation. He limped over to it and was about to unlock the door when his cane was suddenly jerked from his grasp. He heard it clatter to the pavement as he twisted, stumbled, and fell back against the warm hood of the car, supporting himself with his elbows and with his stiff leg angled out in front of him like a brace.
He was looking at Davy Mathis, who was standing on the cane, smiling and holding a wood-handled steel cargo hook that had been honed to a gleaming point.