Tropical Heat (17 page)

They shook hands, and Burr waited while Carver sat down and rested his cane against the desk.

Then Burr sat down slowly, with an odd familiarity, in Armont’s chair and said, “Do you have any idea why Lujan would try to kill you?”

“No,” Carver said. “I was hoping you might.”

“Had you had any contact with him before yesterday?”

“Not that I know of.”

Burr began to rotate back and forth slightly in Armont’s swivel chair, as if it were something he did habitually every day. “We checked on you with the Orlando police. You come out clean, at least on the surface. Lujan doesn’t look clean by any standards. He was involved in smuggling schemes and drug dealing in the Miami area since the early eighties. The company he ran with is rough, but no rougher than Lujan. He liked to cut people. He killed before with a knife, we’re sure, though we could never nail him. The gang he was with used him to even scores. Nobody knows how many times. He wasn’t a big fish, but he was the kind that swam in a big pond and would lead you to larger fish. We’ve been keeping track of him.”

“Then maybe you know what brought him to Solarville,” Carver said.

“No, we don’t,” Burr admitted. His single blue eye blinked in annoyance. There was a sharp intensity about it from its task of doing double duty. “But if we knew what brought
you
here, maybe we could guess about Lujan.”

“Was he mixed up in something current around Miami?” Carver asked.

Burr smiled; it made him look positively dashing. “Guys like Lujan are always mixed up in something current. He was a Marielito.”

“I thought we’d sent the worst of them back to Cuba last year,” Carver said.

“Not the worst and the smartest. They slipped through the net early and set up shop. They’re organized. They’re into drugs, prostitution, gambling, extortion; the gamut of crime, anything illegal and profitable. But especially drugs. And they’re bad people, Carver. Bad beyond belief. Narcotics has always been a rough business, but now it’s rougher.”

“Do you know who Lujan worked for in south Florida?”

“He worked for whoever wanted somebody killed.”

Carver thought about that. This knife for hire. It reduced the odds on Lujan’s attack on him being a coincidence, unrelated to his mission in Solarville, almost to nil.

Burr leaned forward and rested his elbows on the desk. “Now, about what brought you to Solarville and led to a dead Marielito. . . .”

Carver told him about everything, including the missing hundred thousand dollars. He had no choice. Burr was federal and not to be crossed. Too many of these guys suffered from the Eliot Ness syndrome.

None of it quite tied in with Lujan. When he had finished talking, Carver sat and watched Burr consider it all. The blue eye caught the light from the window and looked perplexed.

“Lujan might have come here to meet the Malone brothers,” Carver suggested. “Snowbirds of a feather. . . .”

“We know about the Malones,” Burr said. “Lujan was small-time, but even he wouldn’t get involved with a couple of backwater bunglers like the Malones.”

“Big oaks from little yokels grow,” Carver said.

Burr frowned at him. Apparently he wasn’t one for puns or maxims. But that was to be expected: The DEA didn’t joke much. “It might be a good idea if you left Solarville,” he said. The line about the oaks must have done it.

“I’m planning to, as soon as we’re finished with this conversation. There isn’t much I can do here now.”

“Except maybe finally get burned or stabbed to death.”

“Had Lujan ever been a firebug?”

Burr shook his head. “Never. That bothers me.” Like Carver, he couldn’t quite see the Tumble Inn fire as an accident, even though there was nothing to rule out that possibility.

Each man knew what the other was thinking. “Not Lujan,” Burr said. “He liked knives, not flames. What fire does for a pyromaniac, knives did for Lujan.”

Carver nodded. He understood. If the motel fire had been deliberate, probably someone other than Silverio Lujan had set it. This was a world of specialists.

“Where are you going when you leave Solarville?” Burr asked.

“Del Moray.”

Burr leaned over the desk and gave Carver a white business card with several phone numbers engraved on it in official-looking small black print. “We want to know what you know, when you know it. Understand?”

“Sure,” Carver said. He knew there was no need to tell Burr how to get in touch with him. He angled the cane straight down, set the tip, and levered himself to his feet. “Anything else?”

“Not for now.”

Carver knew Burr was watching him limp from the office, wondering how a cripple like Carver could have killed a hard-ass Marielito. Wondering a lot of things. Some of them the same things Carver was wondering.

O
N THE ROAD BACK
to the motel, Carver didn’t notice the flashing red and blue lights in his rearview mirror. There was too much glare from the sun.

The sudden wail of a siren, abruptly cut off as if a hand had been clamped over a screaming mouth, startled him.

He checked the Olds’s rearview mirror and saw a police car inches off his back bumper, its lightbar flashers rotating on its roof but simply not up to overpowering the intense tropical sunlight. Only when the cars passed through dappled shade were the flashing lights even noticeable.

Carver braked the Olds and swerved to the side of the road, feeling the car’s right front wheel go off the gravel and sink slightly into marshy ground beyond the shoulder.

The police car had pulled in behind the Olds, as if it had been towed there by a string between the two vehicles. Carver sat quietly and watched it in the mirror.

Chief Armont got out of the car, hitched up his belt, and walked up to lean on the passenger-side door of the Olds. The Olds’s canvas top was up; Armont crouched to peer in at Carver.

“Am I going to get a ticket,” Carver asked, “or is this just a warning?”

Armont’s beefy face was flushed, perspiring. It hadn’t taken him long after getting out of the air-conditioned cruiser to break into a sweat. “Neither,” he said. “I just want to talk to you. I knew you were leaving, so I figured I could catch you here driving back from your conversation with the DEA.”

“I could have hung around your office and waited for you,” Carver said. “If it’s still your office and not Burr’s.”

Armont chuckled. “Assertive bastard, ain’t he?” He settled down more comfortably with his elbows on the car door, where the window rolled down into it; that would leave nasty grooves in his arms, Carver thought.

“The fact is,” Armont said, “I got some information about twenty minutes ago that might interest you. That’s why I decided to try to catch up with you here, before you were on the road back north. It concerns our departed friend Silverio Lujan.”

“Why don’t you get in the car and sit down?” Carver suggested.

Armont shook his head; perspiration dripped from his chin. “Just as soon stand out here.” He folded his gnarled hands. “A few days ago the University of Florida called my office. They were worried about a naturalist from their faculty, a Professor Raymond Mackenzie. Mackenzie left last week to spend some time here in the Everglades, cataloging wildlife, or whatever naturalists do. He was supposed to phone a female student of his who he lives with, but he never called. She alerted the university, kept bugging them to inquire and stir up some kind of action. I drove out and found his campsite two days ago. His four-wheel-drive Jeep was parked next to his little camper trailer, but he wasn’t there. There were signs that he’d left suddenly some time ago. A rotting, half-eaten meal; the butane cookstove switched on, and out of fuel. Mackenzie hasn’t turned up since at his campsite, or been seen by anyone around here.”

Carver waited patiently for Armont to get to the point.

“I remembered something from Mackenzie’s campsite,” Armont said. “Footprints in the soft ground around there. So I drove out this morning and made casts of some of the prints. They match the sandals Silverio Lujan was wearing when he tried to kill you and got dead himself.”

Carver sat with his hands on the steering wheel, remembering Lujan coming at him with the knife.

Armont said, “They’re the kind of sandals whose soles are made from tire carcasses. The treadmarks are identical.”

“They sell a lot of those,” Carver said. “How do you know these were Lujan’s that made the campsite prints? Were they both B. F. Goodrich, or what?”

“Goodyear, actually. The one with the blimp. But they also have individual distinguishing marks on them. Lujan’s sandals made those prints. Whatever happened to Mackenzie, Lujan was out there at some point—during, before, or after. What I want to know from you, Carver, is had you ever had any contact with Mackenzie?”

“I never heard of him until a few minutes ago,” Carver said. “From you. Are you telling me you think Lujan killed him?”

“I’m not sure what to think right now,” Armont said. “There’s quicksand in that part of the swamp south of town. Sinkholes that go down deeper than imagination. A man could have an accident there, disappear for good. Even a trained naturalist like Mackenzie.”

“Still,” Carver said, “those sandal prints. It’s possible Lujan knifed him, maybe in a robbery, maybe for twisted sport, and there’s no connection between that and his attempt on my life.”

“Yeah,” Armont said, “it’s possible.” He didn’t seem to believe it. “Could be we’ll never know, with Lujan dead.” More perspiration dripped from his chin.

“Thanks for the information,” Carver said. He reached over and shook Armont’s hand.

Armont stood up straight, so that only his ample stomach was visible out the window. He slapped the canvas top of the car to get Carver’s attention. “You take care now,” he said, loud enough for Carver to hear.

Carver watched him walk back to the cruiser and get in.

Armont started the car immediately. Its tires kicked up mud and rock as it swerved back onto the road and accelerated past the parked Olds.

The chief tapped the horn and waved to Carver, an oddly wistful good-bye.

Carver sat for a while longer, thinking about what Armont had told him. Something had happened to the naturalist Mackenzie out there in the swamp. Considering Lujan’s history with knives, it wasn’t at all unlikely that Mackenzie and Carver were simply meant to be fellow victims, by chance and nothing more. Or Lujan might have visited the campsite but had nothing to do with Mackenzie’s disappearance.

Coincidence again? Hah!

Carver started the Olds and gunned the engine to free the right front wheel from the pull of the swamp.

It was almost noon when Carver and Edwina drove out of Solarville in the Olds and headed toward the main highway, then north. Not toward Del Moray but toward Orlando. Edwina wanted to get some of her things from Willis’s apartment, she’d said. Carver thought she probably wanted to visit the apartment to get a renewed sense of Willis, to make the ghost more real.

They stopped for a light lunch at a truck stop that served free orange and grapefruit juice in paper cups, then continued through the grove country with the Olds’s top raised to block the brooding tropical sun. Carver sat disconsolately behind the steering wheel, thinking about the night before and listening to flying insects smack against the windshield and meet sudden, unexpected oblivion.

In the rented Pontiac that followed the Olds were three men, well dressed in expensive if slightly flamboyant fashion, seated calmly in the air-conditioned oasis of the car’s spacious blue interior. They were large men, and each had about him the perfect stillness of the truly dangerous, the calmness of the carnivore conserving energy for the kill. Two of the men had been on the boat off the shore near Sun South when Carver was talking to Franks.

The three had spent most of their lives in Cuba. Hard lives, not without violence. They were Marielitos.

The driver, a bulky man with a receding hairline above a peasant’s sunbrowned face of blunt angles and planes, was Jorge Lujan. Silverio’s brother.

He liked knives
and
fire.

A
BOUT AN HOUR AFTER
lunch they were close to Orlando. The smiling, sunny presence of Disney World began to make itself felt, radiating far beyond the Magic Kingdom. Signs began to give mileage and directions to the land of Mickey and Pluto and the Monorail. Carver stopped and filled the Olds’s tank at Gas World. A roadside shop with a display of clocks made from waxed slabs of cypress billed itself as Souvenir World. A produce stand not much larger than a phone booth was Citrus World. In the station wagon in front of the Olds, anywhere from four to six children (they were moving around inside the car too fast to count) all wore oversized mouse ears that kept getting knocked crooked on their small heads. The man and woman in the front seat took turns twisting awkwardly and shouting at the kids. Frantic World.

Willis Davis’s apartment was on Escalera Street, in an Orlando neighborhood of newer brick apartment buildings interspersed with older stucco two-story structures with terra-cotta roofs, wrought-iron balconies, and unkempt gardens. Most of the stucco was cracked, missing in spots, its pastel colors faded from the sun. The brick buildings were clean-lined and functional and looked as if they might have been built two hours ago. It was a fascinating juxtaposition of old and new. Willis’s apartment was in one of the new brick buildings, on the third floor, front.

He had virtually moved out of the place, long ago. A very fine layer of dust covered everything, evenly settled, like dust on waxed fruit in a bowl. It seemed not so much to make things dirty as to remove their luster, make them something less than real.

The furniture was fairly new, traditional and nondescript. A couple of outdated magazines lay on a round coffee table; a bookshelf near the window held a stereo tape deck and two speakers, and some more magazines,
Time
and
Real Estate Weekly
, stacked in a jumble down below. The wall hangings looked like dime-store prints, and most of them listed sharply in the same direction, as if the building had been tilted slightly by a curious giant, then straightened.