Kiss (22 page)

“Bet you did.”

“He might be even more screwed up in the head than you are.”

“Oh, doubtless he is. What’d he have to say?”

“Told me to drop the Sunhaven case. But I don’t think he really believes I will.”

“I don’t think he wants you to,” McGregor said. “I know how shitheads like him see shitheads like you. He’s taking his time, is all, getting his kicks playing with you before he decides to do whatever it is he’s leading up to. Foreplay, you might call it. To say Raffy Ortiz is a sadist is to say flies like sugar.”

“That’s more or less how Desoto reads it.”

“Hey, I ain’t surprised. Desoto’s a bright guy. How he got mixed up with a downhill roller like you is beyond me.”

“What
shouldn’t
be beyond you is that something more than watered-down Geritol is happening at Sunhaven. Otherwise Raffy Ortiz wouldn’t be commuting between here and New Orleans around the time of Kearny Williams’s death and funeral.”

“His second trip might have been just to see why you went there.”

Carver had to admit that was possible. But in the room at the Belle Grande, Raffy didn’t ask him what he was doing in New Orleans. Which suggested he already knew. He’d been watching Carver.

“Was Raffy doped up when he talked to you in New Orleans?” McGregor asked.

“I’d say so, but I couldn’t be sure.”

“I hear he’s on drugs more and more these days. And he’s losing control and falling toward bottoming out. Guy like that can be especially dangerous. As if he ain’t dangerous enough already.”

“If the law knows that much about him, why can’t he be nailed for possession?”

“That’d be kinda like nailing a great white shark for swimming in the wrong end of the pool. The guy’s not your ordinary dopehead. He’s got some heavy-duty connections, people who turn white and shit in their pants if he looks hard at them. Believe me, Raffy Ortiz wouldn’t take some short fall for carrying a little coke. He’d bounce right back onto the street meaner than ever.”

“That his drug of choice? Cocaine?”

“I couldn’t guess. Right now, I’d say you’re his drug of choice, what’s giving him his ongoing high. Sorta the way a cat gets a rush outta toying with a mouse.”

“You know him so well,” Carver said in disgust, “but you can’t get it through your dense bureaucratic head he’s into something out at Sunhaven.”

“Don’t get your blood boiling,” McGregor said. “Happens I agree with you. That’s why I lowered myself to entering into a kind of agreement with you. That’s why I got one of my men trailing around after Edwina Talbot like she was a bitch in heat and he was a hound with a hard-on.” He rested both huge palms flat on his desk, as if he were getting ready to compress the poor piece of furniture against the floor. “Edwina’s still breathing and bouncing around unbruised, Carver. That was my end of the deal. Now, what’ve you learned about Sunhaven?”

“What I’ve been trying to get across to you. I’m surer than ever something’s wrong when residents are dying out there. I talked to Dr. Macklin yesterday.”

“I talked to her, too. While you were in New Orleans. Used the subject of you as an excuse. She doesn’t like you coming around. Says everything’s hunky-dory at Sunhaven and you oughta go back to peeking through motel keyholes.”

“She said that? About motel keyholes?”

“Not exactly,” McGregor admitted, raising a pale eyebrow. “I’m paraphrasing. But the intent was there.”

“She used the same attitude on me. You meet her husband?”

“Nope, I saw her when she was alone in her office. Great legs for a doctor, hey?”

“Know anything about Brian Macklin?”

“The hubby?”

“Yeah. He’s a painter.”

“Oh? Houses or sunsets?”

“Sunsets. He’s supposed to be good. Actually sold some canvases. He’s getting ready to have a one-man show in Miami.” Miami again, Carver thought. But he didn’t mention to McGregor the frequency of the city’s name popping up. It could merely be coincidence. Miami was the large cosmopolitan area where somebody like Brian Macklin might be most likely to have his work shown.

“I’ll see what I can find out about hubby Brian,” McGregor said. “Guy must be crazy, out painting pictures instead of running up the miles on that wife of his. Being a doctor, I bet she knows some moves. Meantime, you better do what you can to stay away from Raffy Ortiz.”

Carver knew McGregor wasn’t expressing concern for him. He didn’t want Carver’s corpse to turn up somewhere and prompt a lot of questions he might have to lie about or play dumb on. Danger either way.

“I’ll try to avoid him,” Carver said. “But if I do see him, I’ll mention you know what I know.”

He was a little surprised, and unsettled, when McGregor looked genuinely frightened.

He wondered what McGregor would think if he knew Carver’s next stop was Raffy Ortiz’s condominium.

T
HE WHITE
C
ADILLAC WAS
parked in a slot in the ground-level garage beneath the building. Painted in luminescent pink on the raw concrete wall behind it was “6-D,” apparently Raffy’s condo unit number.

The harsh glass-and-stone structure was called Executive Tower and was on the ocean side of Ponce de Leon Drive. It didn’t have a doorman but it featured a wide private beach. There were Keep Out and No Trespassing signs in every direction. Very exclusive. An expensive place to hang your hat and proud of it.

Carver limped to a low wooden fence and stood beneath a blue-and-yellow umbrella to look out at the stretch of sand, some colorful striped cabanas, and the surf reaching gentle white fingers up the beach. About a dozen people lounged on the beach, some on towels, some in chairs, a few sitting where the sand was damp and dark and letting the waves lick at their bare feet. There were no children; Carver supposed Executive Tower was one of those condo developments whose bylaws prohibited residents with young offspring. Kept the place neat and quiet for solid citizens like Raffy Ortiz.

Carver didn’t see Raffy’s formidable form among the bodies on the beach, and at the moment there was no one bobbing in the swells or swimming out beyond the surf.

Across the street from Executive Tower was a strip retail center that contained the usual assortment of beachside shops and tourist traps. At the end of the low, L-shaped building’s short leg was an ice cream parlor called Frosty Frieda’s. Carver crossed the street, went inside, and sat at a table by the window.

It was appropriately cool in Frosty Frieda’s. The tables were round and cutesy, with bentwood legs. A teen-age waitress with chocolate stains down the blouse of her yellow uniform wandered over and introduced herself as if they were going out on a date.

Carver looked at the menu and ordered something called a Chunky Chill. It sounded as if it would take a long time to consume, and he could have a cup of coffee afterward and sit at the table and watch Executive Tower without arousing suspicion as other customers came and went.

The Chunky Chill turned out to be a concoction of frozen custard, chocolate syrup, whipped cream, and peanuts. It was topped with a maraschino cherry. Carver didn’t like maraschino cherries; if cherries died and were embalmed, they would come out maraschino. He plucked the garish red glob from the whipped cream with his thumb and forefinger and deposited it in the ashtray. There it would shrivel and stick like chewed gum and have to be chipped away by whoever cleaned the ashtrays. Teach Frieda to sell the nasty things here.

The rest of the Chunky Chill was delicious, and probably less than thirty thousand calories. He had to force himself to spoon it into his mouth slowly while he watched the Executive Tower garage exit.

He was on his second foam cup of coffee when Raffy’s white Caddie inched its nose out of the shadowed exit like a cautious shark, saw a break in the traffic, and glided out into a smooth left turn and drove away. Raffy was behind the steering wheel and alone in the car. His dark hair was pomaded and slicked back neatly, and he had on a cream-colored sport coat or suitcoat with a blue shirt open at the collar. He was also wearing a contented expression on his broad, tanned face, as if his life were free of worry. And maybe it was at that. Maybe he was the lion in the jungle, just as he thought.

Hoping Raffy wasn’t merely driving to the corner for a six-pack of beer, Carver paid for his coffee, left the iciness of Frosty Frieda’s for the oven outside, and crossed the street to Executive Tower.

He limped through a large, glitzy lobby and rode an elevator to the sixth floor. The hall carpeting was thick and spongy and caused his cane to sink deep and drag, so he had to walk more slowly than he wanted to the fancy white door marked “6-D” an inch below its round glass peephole.

He knocked three times, to be on the safe side in case Raffy had left a friend behind in the condo. When there was no answer he tried the brass doorknob and wasn’t surprised to find it locked. Carver had picked locks before, but it was a damned sight harder than it seemed in movies and detective novels, so he glanced around to make sure there was no one else in the hall and then rocked back on his cane and stiff leg and used his good leg to kick the door.

The lock held but the doorjamb gave, and without a great deal of noise. The door swung open. There was an ugly dark smudge from the sole of Carver’s moccasin on its white surface.

Noting with satisfaction that the damage wouldn’t be noticeable at a glance from the hall, he went in and closed the door behind him.

He saw that there were two locks on it beside the cheap mechanism in the knob. One was a thick chain lock that hadn’t been engaged. The other was a Schlage dead bolt, half of which still clung by its screws above the section of wood frame that had been split away and now lay on the floor with shiny brass hardware attached.

Raffy would be pissed off mightily when he saw the damage. Know who’d been here. Carver smiled and went on about his business. The best defense was a good you-know-what.

The condo was furnished even more garishly than Desoto’s. Deep red-orange carpet. Dramatic furniture with lots of glass and metal and pale green leather. On the wall over the marble mantel there was actually a large framed painting of a clown on black velvet. Didn’t look like a Renoir. The scent of recently fried onion permeated the place; Raffy must have eaten a snack or an early lunch.

Carver made his way across the living room to the hall. He almost gagged. Arranged on the hall walls was a series of graphic color photographs apparently taken at a slaughterhouse. Close-ups of the panic in the eyes of the doomed cattle, huge carcasses dangling from steel hooks while workers in bloodstained aprons dispassionately hacked away with long knives. The last shot was a tight one of a cow’s head, with most of the flesh stripped away and the eye sockets empty but for clotted blood. Raffy’s idea of humor, maybe. Or, worse still, something he enjoyed without humor. Carver thought he wouldn’t eat steak for a while.

The centerpiece of the bedroom was a large round water bed with a mirrored canopy. On the walls were framed prints of virginal-looking blond women in flowing white dresses, some of them romping through idyllic fields of wild flowers.

Carver rooted through dresser drawers and found only the expected assortment of socks, underwear, and shirts. Quality material. Expensive labels.

There were more good labels on the coats and slacks in the closet. On the closet shelf was a stack of bondage magazines with photos of women in various stages of agony or ecstasy while constricted by ropes or leather bindings. Some of them looked underage. Next to the magazines were some Polaroid photographs of a slender blond woman, nude except for high heels and held fast to a chair with adhesive tape and suffering various indignities at the hands of a man. Only the man’s arms and hands were visible in the photos. He had his sleeves rolled up a few turns and was wearing a wristwatch with an expansion band. The woman had a rubber ball stuck halfway in her mouth and held by tape, and her eyes had a dazed quality as if she might be on drugs.

The condo’s second bedroom was Raffy’s office. It had the same red carpeting and rough white plaster walls. Also a white leather couch and chair, and a massive cherrywood desk with curved legs. The top of the desk was bare except for a ceramic lamp in the shape of a nude woman with her hands joined above her head, as if she were diving straight up. On a table sat a black push-button phone and a small gray portable electric typewriter. The walls were lined with wooden bookshelves, but instead of books contained a complex stereo system, a portable TV with a video recorder, and stacks of cassettes. Carver looked over the cassettes. Raffy’s taste ran to X-rated movies and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Propped at one end of a shelf was even a signed eight-by-ten publicity photo of Schwarzenegger stripped to the waist and wielding a machine gun. He was wearing a stoic expression and perspiring heavily after a hard day on the set.

Carver returned to the desk and searched through the drawers one by one, not bothering to put things back the way he found them. The two bottom drawers were stuffed with martial arts magazines, and in the back of one drawer was a jumble of Oriental weaponry: the obligatory chain with a wooden handle at each end, some star-shaped steel throwing disks for death from a distance, a lead-weighted leather sap that resembled an ordinary blackjack.

The upper drawers were reserved for papers. Raffy usually waited until he’d received a warning notice before paying his electric bill, but he was too smart to leave anything more incriminating than that lying around. There was a small Rolodex but it contained only the phone numbers of local merchants, so if there was an address book that meant something it probably stayed with Raffy.

In the desk’s wide, shallow top drawer was a typed note from Raffy to Raffy, reminding him to pick up cleaning on Wednesday. There were similar typed reminders crumpled and discarded in the wastebasket. Raffy was one of those organized and orderly people who were in the habit of typing themselves messages. A man of compulsions.

Carver felt toward the back of one of the drawers where he’d seen a stack of small boxes. As he’d hoped: spare typewriter ribbon.