Carver told Wicke he’d like to talk to him, and Wicke glared at the cop and said, “Don’t give up till you find it, Dewey!” He motioned with a jerk of his head for Carver to come into his office.
Wicke listened silently as Carver told him about the encounter with the black van. He rocked far back in his padded chair and stared up at the ceiling, as if maybe pictures accompanying Carver’s words were up there.
“Davy Mathis has such a van,” he said, when Carver was finished. He let the chair fall forward. The breeze from his sudden descent stirred papers on his cluttered desk. “Was it a Dodge?”
“I don’t know,” Carver said. “Production model full-size vans look pretty much alike, and I was busy trying to stay alive. Except for the black-tinted windows and missing license plates, it was just a van.”
“Well, it mighta been Davy’s, all right, but I gotta tell you there are a lotta vans like that running around the Keys.” Wicke stood up out of his chair and paced around the massive desk, dragging his fingertips on its surface as if testing for dust. “I think I better drive out and talk with Davy nonetheless. If it was him driving the van, he’ll have a solid alibi. Probably playing cards with ten people a hundred miles away, or doing charity work for the world’s unfortunates.” Wicke grinned. “I’d say the better the alibi, the more likely it is he was the one in the van.”
Carver said, “I like your approach.”
“What’s your plan now?”
“I’ll try talking to Millicent Bing later today. Other than that, I’m not sure.”
“Millicent was probably home,” Wicke said. “I wouldn’t call her a recluse, but she’s shy.”
“Too shy to answer the door?”
“Sure. It’d be just like her.” Chief Wicke chewed on the inside of his cheek, staring at Carver. “The business with the van don’t scare you, huh?”
“It scares me,” Carver said. “A nautical nasty like Davy’s a scary guy.”
“If it was Davy.”
Carver said nothing.
Wicke played with a massive turquoise ring on the middle finger of his right hand. It looked like cheap souvenir-shop jewelry, but it would be as formidable as brass knuckles if Wicke punched someone. “I talked to a few people I know up north, Carver. Inquired about you.”
“What’d these people say?”
“Not to be fooled by the fact you walk with a cane. That you was one tough sonuvabitch. They right?”
Carver said, ‘”Tough’s relative.”
“Uh-huh.”
Wicke tucked his shirt in beneath his meal-sack stomach paunch and ambled toward the door, a signal that he had matters to attend to and Carver had taken up enough of his time. Fair enough, Carver thought, and braced with his cane and stood up.
Wicke said, “I’ll give you a call after I talk with Davy, let you know what he said.”
“If it was Davy,” Carver told him, “it means there might well be something to Henry Tiller’s suspicions.”
“Could be. Davy’s a real piss-cutter, though. Running interlopers off the road might be his idea of sport.”
“Interlopers?”
“That could be how he sees you. You can bet he knows about your staying up at Henry’s place, getting around the island and asking your questions.”
“It’s the hit and run I’ve been asking about,” Carver pointed out.
“But Davy sees the connection between you and Henry, and he might know about Henry’s suspicion that Walter Rainer’s up to no good. Davy might add that together and figure his employment’s in jeopardy. Or maybe he’d do something crazy like trying to throw a scare into you just because of loyalty to Rainer. After all, Rainer was the one gave him a chance in this world when nobody else’d give him spit.”
“You make it sound like him killing me on the highway would’ve been an admirable act of servitude.”
“Now, now, it ain’t that bad, Carver. But keep in mind we’re standing here just assuming it was Davy in that van to begin with.”
“Davy or the Easter Bunny,” Carver said, remembering what Henry Tiller had said about the likelihood of coincidence.
Wicke knew what he meant. “That bunny don’t have a valid Florida driver’s license, far as I know. In my capacity, I can’t afford to lean on the wrong man.”
Carver wondered if he meant Walter Rainer had too much money and local clout to risk going up against. It was people like Rainer who kept an appointed chief of police like Lloyd Wicke in office, and people like Rainer who could start a political ball rolling that might knock a cop all the way back to civilian. But Carver didn’t know for sure that Wicke was intimidated by Rainer, so he said nothing.
“I’ll just clean up some paperwork here,” Wicke said, “then I’ll go talk to Davy. Maybe we can throw light on this thing.”
Carver thanked him and limped from the office. There was no point getting on the wrong side of Chief Wicke, but he didn’t think he could count on him for a lot of help. The incident had convinced Carver that Henry was on to something. Carver, younger and taken more seriously than Henry, would pose a genuine threat, so Davy, on his own or on Walter Rainer’s orders, had attempted to scare him off the case.
He slid in behind the Olds’s steering wheel and sat with the windows up and the engine and air conditioner off, thinking and perspiring. It would be necessary to move in on the Rainer estate and watch it carefully, and for that he’d need help. It was time to ask Beth to drive down and join him.
Carver was aware he tended to be too independent, to become obsessive and develop tunnel vision to go along with what Desoto often referred to as his dog-with-a-rag neuroses. Once committed to anything, he found it very difficult to give up, even when logically he should. Obsession could be his weakness as well as his strength; a dog tugging on a rag sometimes lost a tooth and the rag.
He was sure he wanted Beth on Key Montaigne because he needed somebody reliable to spell him staking out the Rainer estate. It couldn’t be because he missed her and needed her in ways other than professional. Sitting there on the sweat-moistened upholstery and suffering in the heat, that kind of need must be the farthest thing from his mind.
Right.
That settled, he started the engine and got what he could from the laboring air conditioner.
10
It was late the next morning before Carver was able to contact Beth. She’d been at the library working on a paper for a postgraduate communications class at the University of Florida, but she told him it would be no problem to set it aside and help him in Key Montaigne. She’d leave soon as possible, she said, and should be able to drive south and join him by that evening. “You and I got a dinner date,” she told him.
He said he’d make reservations at the Key Lime Pie.
“I gotta dress up for that place?” Beth asked.
“Casual clothes are de rigueur there,” he assured her, wondering what Fern the waitress would think if Beth strolled into the Key Lime Pie on Carver’s arm, looking like a high-fashion model for Ebony.
“Bring the infrared binoculars,” he added. “Some of what we’ll be doing’s at night.”
“I’ll just bet.” He liked her tone of voice.
“Incidentally,” he added, “bring my gun, too.”
“‘Incidentally,’ huh? You step in something nasty down there, Fred?”
“I’m not sure yet. The gun’s in a brown envelope taped to the back of my top dresser drawer.”
“I know where it is, and I’ll bring it with me. You just try’n stay alive till I get there to take care of you.”
Carver said, “Bring along some extra ammunition.”
“Never leave home without it.”
After hanging up on Beth, Carver rummaged through Henry’s refrigerator and came up with the ingredients of lunch: some oat bran health bread Henry kept in there so it would stay fresh longer, extra-lean sliced turkey that smelled edible enough, some Heartline low-cholesterol cheese, a half-used jar of vitamin-enriched diet mayonnaise. Henry apparently feared slipping physically as well as mentally in his old age.