Nine o’clock. Carver figured Hattie would be up and about by now. Probably she’d been awake for hours, watering plants, dusting, waxing, organizing her world so it had purpose, so she could continue to cope. Carver understood. Didn’t he do the same sort of thing? Wasn’t that his work, keeping the world orderly via something called justice?
When he phoned Hattie she told him she’d been awake since seven. “I’ve been up since six,” he lied, not wanting to be topped, then told her why he’d called. She invited him to come right over to the house, if he had something he wanted to discuss in person. No sense burning up the phone line, she said, and she had things to do. And she hoped he’d be able to make sense, having been awake since six o’clock.
Carver smiled and hung up. He told Beth where he was going and asked what she had planned for the rest of the morning.
“Gonna modem those files to Jeff Mehling,” she said, “and let him come up with an analysis that might tell us something more. Then I’m gonna crawl back in that bed and doze awhile. Recover from last night.”
Six A.M. Carver couldn’t argue with that one. “Will Mehling keep all this secret?”
“You can count on it. We’ve worked together before and he’s been tight as a clam. I tell him, he’ll delete everything from his system after we exchange information and he’s had time to study it, maybe run some software on it.”
“Tell him, then,” Carver said. “And point out he’s involved in the theft of confidential medical records.”
She rose from her chair and leaned back, supporting herself with her buttocks against the desk, tall enough to be almost in a sitting position. She crossed her arms and smiled. “He’ll know that, Fred. Not to worry, we’re all thick as thieves.”
“Thieves have been known to fall out.”
“Not thieves like us, lover.” She ran a finger along the inside of one of her bra straps, causing the cup to strain away and reveal a swell of breast highlighted with perspiration in the lamplight and glow from the computer screen. “Wanna come back to bed with me for a while?”
“Wanting and doing are two different things.”
“Never noticed that about you, Fred, when you didn’t have some kinda substitution in mind.”
There was no point in trying to deal with this woman when she was in the mood to dogfight.
Carver walked to the window and parted the drapes a few inches, peered outside. Up near the other end of the parking lot a blond man and a blond woman were loading suitcases into the trunk of a car with one of those phony convertible tops that made no sense to Carver. It had a green license plate. He didn’t know which state the plate represented, but it wasn’t Florida.
He waited until the man and woman had gotten into their ersatz convertible and departed. It was wise not to let anyone see him leave Beth’s room, even an apparently vacationing couple from out of state.
The lot was deserted now in the thick morning sunlight. He nodded good-bye to Beth and slipped out the door. Heard her say, “Later, lover,” as the latch clicked solidly behind him.
He twisted the knob both directions to make sure the door was locked.
The Olds was parked on the edge of the lot, in partial shade from a grouping of date palms. The hazed plastic rear window of the canvas top, the overlaying jagged shadows of the palm fronds, kept Carver from noticing until he was almost to the car that there was a figure on the passenger side of the front seat.
He stopped and planted his cane in loose gravel, feeling his adrenaline kick in as if he’d just downed a jolt of hundred-proof liquor. The Colt was in its belt holster beneath his untucked, baggy tropical shirt, multicolored flowers and birds of paradise on a black background. He touched its comforting bulk, keeping his thumb beneath the hem of the wild shirt so he could get the gun out in a hurry if necessary.
A breeze built up with a sound like a sigh and rattled the palm fronds overhead, causing the shadows to waver and making it even more difficult to see in through the Olds’s back window. Carver moved forward, changing course slightly so he could approach the car from a different angle.
Through the clearer side window he saw that the figure in the Olds was familiar.
It took a few seconds for the penny to drop.
Roger Karl.
Carver raised his shirt enough for his hand to make contact with the checked butt of the Colt, limping closer to the car.
Karl didn’t move. If he’d heard Carver’s approach with the cane on the gravel, he gave no indication. He continued to sit slumped with his head down, as if he might be studying something in his lap.
A few feet from the Olds, Carver recognized the perfect stillness of his passenger, the subtle but chilling difference between the animate and inanimate. Roger Karl’s category in Twenty Questions had changed from animal to mineral. Carver glanced quickly about and limped to the passenger-side door and opened it.
Karl sat with his knees apart and his ankles crossed. His head was bowed as if it had become unbearably heavy, his jaw slack. His hands were folded limply in his lap. The fingers were as pale as bone. His white shirt front and the lap of his pastel yellow slacks were crusted with blood, but there was very little blood on the seat, and only half a dozen flies were feasting on what had been Roger Karl; he’d been dead when he was placed in the car. His open mouth was filled with coagulated blood and his lips and chin were caked with darker dried blood. Despite the relaxed position of his body, there was agony and horror in his wide eyes and the pitiful twist of his brow. In his mouth, on his chin, even in the blood on his shirt, was a lumpy substance he’d vomited, and throughout the crusted scarlet-brown mess tiny glass splinters glinted like shards of diamond.
Carver had seen this before in Karl’s kitchen, the dead dog by the stove. Not long ago, Roger Karl had been forced to eat hamburger laced with ground glass.
Gently closing the car door, Carver spat out the tainted, coppery taste in his mouth. He couldn’t spit out the fear. He limped toward his room.
The door looked okay but he entered with the Colt drawn, prepared to use it, his senses buzzing.
But the room was empty, cool, deceptively calm and restful, as if nothing unusual had happened and there wasn’t a dead bagman outside in Carver’s car.
He went to the phone, pecked out the number of Beth’s room, then told her what had happened and to stay where she was with her door locked.
Then he phoned Hattie Evans and told her he’d be late but didn’t tell her why.
Then he placed the Colt in the back of a dresser drawer and called Desoto.