Spark (21 page)

“Yeah. Fella out in California named Davis painted it, Guy with a lot of talent.” Desoto’s smile was one of pleasure and possessive pride now. “You really like it?”

“Sure. It’s not the usual sort of thing I see around here.” From where he sat, Carver could glimpse just a corner of the painting of a reclining nude woman in Desoto’s bedroom. About half the prints or paintings Desoto had collected were nude studies. He had a weakness for women in the flesh and on canvas.

“You talk to Beth?” Desoto asked. How the man’s mind worked.

“Just left her,” Carver said. “Metzger and a uniform visited her at the motel, took her statement. She walked the line perfectly. Charmed Metzger, in fact.”

“Nobody charms Metzger.”

“Beth gave away nothing,” Carver said, maybe too defensively. He knew Desoto had never become totally sold on Beth. Desoto couldn’t completely overlook her background, her marriage to Roberto Gomez. The Chicago slums, then the cruel, posh life bought with Roberto’s big-money drug dealing. Excitement and casual death in a sea of green. Not many escaped that world.

Desoto sat down on the sofa. He tugged upward on the crease of his pants so it wouldn’t lose its sharpness, then crossed his legs. “This dead man in your car changes things,
amigo
.”

“Certainly for him,” Carver said.

Desoto didn’t smile. “It’s got to come out that I’ve known for some time where Adam Beed might be found, hey?”

“Maybe eventually,” Carver said.

“Beed should be the prime suspect in Roger Karl’s murder. I know that, but the rest of the department doesn’t.” Gold rings and a gold wristwatch glinted as he spread his hands palms up in a helpless gesture. “I’m a cop,
amigo.
This is a situation I can’t let continue to exist. I mean, I realize I sent Hattie Evans to you, and nobody held a knife to my throat to get me to agree to the rest of it, but—”

“I understand,” Carver interrupted. “I won’t like seeing you getting mauled by Metzger for withholding evidence.”

“And I won’t like seeing you having to go into some other kind of work,
amigo.
I mean, we’re both too good at what we do for that to be a positive thing.”

Carver tapped the carpet soundlessly with the tip of his cane.

“You at all close to having the Jerome Evans death figured out?” Desoto asked.

“Can’t be sure,” Carver said honestly.

Desoto flicked real or imagined lint off his thigh, leaving his hand suspended in the air as if the lint might try to return. “Then it’s a rough thing I have to do.”

“Better tell Metzger tomorrow,” Carver said, taking the load off Desoto. “You get clean soon as possible and you’ll be in deep shit for a while, but your career will recover. You sit much longer on homicide evidence, you’ll wind up suspended or worse.”

“These are things I know,” Desoto said.

Carver stood up, feeling the tip of the cane sink deep into plush carpet as he settled his weight over it. “Well, here we find ourselves.”

“Two days from now, I’ll tell Metzger everything I know,” Desoto said in a level voice.

Carver let the idea bounce around his mind for a few seconds. “A two-day delay could finish you with the department,” he said. “You don’t have to do that for me.”

“I’m doing it for myself. Hoping for the best. Putting my faith in you as if you were the pope.”

“It was your faith in me that got your soft parts caught in a vise,” Carver pointed out.

Desoto gave his wide, white, movie-star smile, but his eyes were hard. Cop’s eyes. “My, my. You afraid of such pressure,
amigo
?”

Carver limped across the soft carpet toward the door. “If they throw you off the force, don’t ever consider being a psychologist.”

“Two days, my friend. I’m afraid that’s all I can give.”

Carver said, “That’s more than I asked for,” and went out.

He didn’t feel like the pope.

“J
EROME WAS DECLARED
perfectly healthy at the medical center two months before his death,” Hattie Evans said the next morning, seated across from Carver in her cool, neat living room. “Don’t you remember, that’s one of the reasons I hired you.” The colorful oil painting on the wall behind the sofa where she sat was of a weeping clown against a black velvet background. Nothing like the art on Desoto’s walls.

“Your neighbor Val once mentioned that Jerome didn’t sleep well, roamed the house at night.”

“That’s true, but it’s hardly a forewarning of a heart attack.”

“Was he given any explanation or medication for his insomnia?”

A subtle light entered Hattie’s eyes, and her back became even more rigid. Her posture gave the impression her spine might snap at any moment. Carver knew he’d struck a chord—just the sort of thing he was hired to do. It gave him satisfaction to see the light in Hattie’s gaze become a gleam of respect, as if he’d finally earned his due from his tough fourth-grade teacher.

“It was a prescription drug to help him sleep,” she said. “I remember now he came home after his physical examination carrying it in a little white paper sack.”

“Do you know where he had the prescription filled?”

“Right at the medical center pharmacy,” Hattie said.

“Because it was more convenient?”

“I suppose. Though usually we got our prescription medicine at Philip’s Pharmacy in Orlando. They beat everyone’s price on drugs. But their bags aren’t white, like the one Jerome had that day. And he’d hardly have driven into Orlando after his physical examination.”

“Remember the name of the medicine?”

“No. But I might recognize it if I heard it. It was liquid, in a little brown bottle I saw in the medicine chest or on Jerome’s dresser where he kept it sometimes to take in the middle of the night without going in the bathroom and switching on lights.”

Carver got the sheet of paper with the drugs the medical center had purchased direct from Mercury Laboratories listed on it and showed it to Hattie, leaning low over the sofa arm to see past her shoulder as she ran a finger down the list of Latin words and abbreviations.

“I can’t be sure,” she said, after several minutes. “Sorry, I simply can’t.”

Carver straightened up, folded the paper, and slipped it back into his shirt pocket.

“What we
could
do,” she said, “is look at the bottle.”

Carver let out a long breath and smiled. She’d beaten him to his next question. “You been toying with me, Hattie?”

“I wouldn’t consider it, Mr. Carver. The dosage was small and Jerome didn’t finish the bottle, and I don’t recall throwing it away. It should still be somewhere around the house.”

“I thought it might be something you’d hold on to,” Carver told her, remembering what Beth had said about widows’ sentimentalism.

She stared at him. “Why on earth would I do that? Do you think I’d get all misty-eyed over a bottle of medicine just because I’d associate it with Jerome?”

“No, I guess you wouldn’t at that.”

“I live for the present and future, Mr. Carver. One exists and the other will. The past no longer exists and never will again except in memory, and your profession must have taught you the reliability of that particular faculty.”

“Let’s test memory again,” he suggested, “and see if you can find that prescription bottle.”

She gazed sternly at him. “Wait here,” she commanded brusquely, letting “young man” hang in the air. He watched her rise and stride erectly from the room. She’d easily be able to balance a book on her head as she walked. She was still constantly setting an example as she had for years in the classroom. Posture and penmanship had been important in her life and always would be.

He heard her rattling around the contents of the medicine chest. Then she left the bathroom and went into another room. The master bedroom, Carver assumed.

Silence for a long time.

She came back into the living room empty-handed.

“Memory fails again,” she said in a distressed voice. She was frowning now, worried.

Carver laid his cane across his knees and smiled up at her. “The only thing in this world I never misplace is my cane.”

She stood studying him. She didn’t smile, but the etched worry lines in her face softened. “I understand that,” she said. He thought she probably did.

He leaned forward in his chair, set the cane, and stood up.

“I’ll keep searching,” she told him. “I do think I’d remember if I threw away the bottle. And I’m sure it was more than half full. I can see it in my mind’s eye, about five inches high with a black cap the medicine had left a crust around.”

“Call me right away if you find it,” he said. Then he scrawled Beth’s room number on the back of one of his business cards. “If I’m not there to answer the phone, hang up and then call the motel again and ask for this extension. If you get Beth Jackson, tell her you’ve found the bottle.”

Hattie nodded, took the card, and glanced at it before inserting it in a wide pocket of her paisley skirt.

“Don’t forget to keep your doors and windows locked,” Carver said as he was leaving.

She said, “I never really needed that advice. I’ve been locking the house securely since Jerome died.”

As he was limping to his rented Ford, Carver glanced back and saw Val Green standing at his window. Standing guard over his ladylove, Carver figured. Val saw him and lifted a hand in greeting.

Carver waved back, climbed into the car, and drove away. Feeling better knowing Val was losing sleep over Hattie.

As he turned the corner off of Pelican Lane, a large gray Cadillac flashed past going the opposite direction on Golden Drive. He caught a glimpse of the driver. It might have been the infamous Nurse Gorham, but he couldn’t be positive. He’d only seen her once before, that time he’d talked to Dr. Wynn at the medical center, and he couldn’t trust his memory.

C
ARVER FOUND
P
HILIP’S
Pharmacy easily enough on Washington in downtown Orlando. It was a small shop, unusual in that it specialized in prescription and over-the-counter drugs rather than the general run of merchandise most drugstores now carried. No shoes or motor oil here. There was a kid behind the register up front, and a middle-age man in a white smock was working behind the counter in the back, near a display of vitamins and drugstore eyeglasses.

The cashier, a dumpy little girl about sixteen, looked at Carver as expectantly as a puppy when he entered the pharmacy. He smiled at her and limped back toward the prescription counter. She returned to pricing cartons of cigarettes, maintaining a profitable symbiotic relationship.

The guy behind the high, polished wood prescription counter was gray but fit looking, as if he exercised religiously and consumed scads of vitamins from the nearby display. He was wearing those half-glasses for reading and glancing knowledgeably at people over the frames, and, amazingly, they made him appear younger from a distance. Up close now, Carver saw that he was probably in his sixties. The plastic tag on his pristine white smock was curved up at the corners like a smile and said his name was Mark and he was a registered pharmacist. Carver wondered if that was how he was registered, simply “Mark.”

“Help you?” he asked.

Carver figured most people could say yes. He saw that the front of the counter contained shelves of condoms and spermicides. “Hope so,” he said. “I’m investigating something that involves prescription drugs. I need answers, so who better to ask than a pharmacist?”

“You’re the police?” Mark asked, regarding Carver’s question as rhetorical.

Carver told him he was private, which impressed Mark to the point where he didn’t bother asking for any identification beyond Carver’s plain white business card. Carver thought maybe he should get a wide-open eye, or maybe a figure in a trench coat engraved on his cards. He could go anywhere then.

He drew the list of Mercury Laboratory drugs from his pocket and laid it on the counter. “Which of these might be prescribed for insomnia?” he asked.

Mark studied the creased sheet of paper for a minute or so, while Carver listened to the distinctive double-clicking of the mechanical pricer on the cigarettes up by the register. Then Mark gazed wisely at Carver over the dark frames of his half-glasses. “Nothing on this list of drugs matches any prescription I’ve filled for insomnia.”

Disappointment was heavy in Carver. “What might a doctor usually prescribe to help someone sleep?”

“Oh, a number of things. Seconal’s a favorite.”

Carver nudged the list with a finger. “You know what these all are for sure?”

“No, several of them I don’t recognize.” Mark adjusted the glasses on his narrow nose. “But if I had to guess which was a soporific, I’d choose this one.” He pointed with a slender, manicured finger. “Luridus-X.”

“Why’s that?”

“I remember my Latin, ‘Luridus’ roughly translated could mean ‘a deathlike state.’ Possibly a description of sleep.”

“What about the
X?
” Carver asked.
C-click! C-click!
went the pricer at the front of the pharmacy. The cashier still at it, getting to the cartons she’d missed.

Mark shrugged and adjusted his glasses again. “I couldn’t say.”

A tall woman basted to a glowing red approached the counter and asked, too late, which was the most effective sunscreen she could buy.

Carver thanked Mark and left him to his work.

After a stop at a McDonald’s for scrambled eggs, sausage, and a biscuit, he drove the rented Ford back to the Warm Sands Motel.

Beth’s car was missing from the parking lot. Carver figured she must be out being a journalist. There was a battered black pickup truck parked in the only shade, so he parked the Ford in a slot near his room and climbed out. The sun had risen high enough to hit with brutality, and he felt perspiration break out on his back and seep into his shirt even as he limped the short distance to his door.

The first thing Carver saw when he entered the dim room was the message light on the phone blinking out a frenetic red signal. Maybe Hattie calling to say she’d located her husband’s leftover medication.

It was cool in the room, but not cool enough. After turning the air-conditioner thermostat as far as it would go to the Cool side, Carver sat on the edge of the bed and punched out the number for the motel office.