Tropical Heat Read Online Free PDF Page A

plastic coaster. Carver guessed that the glass contained grapefruit juice. Or maybe it was a Margarita sans salt.
    “Would you like something cool to drink?” she asked. “Or coffee?”
    Carver declined. He was looking across the small round swimming pool at a brick veranda where another, larger table, with a fringed blue umbrella, was surrounded by four webbed aluminum chairs. Beyond the table was a low, curved brick wall with a long redwood planter on top. There were a lot of colorful flowers in the planter, and something green and viny draped out of one end. On the other side of the low wall the ground sloped gradually to what must have been the drop Edwina had described. They were up high, on a point of land jutting out from the coast. From where they sat, the sea and sky looked incredibly blue and vast.
    “Tell me about Willis Davis,” Carver said.
    Edwina stared at her glass, slowly lifting it just a fraction of an inch off the metal table and putting it back down in its wet ring, as if studying with a scientific eye the amazing adhesion of the water. “Willis is a considerate, gentle man.”
    “Likewise Bluebeard and Theodore Bundy. Tell me about Willis.”
    “He’s a soft touch who probably got in trouble helping someone. So soft, in fact, that, to tell you the truth, it’s difficult for me to imagine him as a salesman. But on the other hand, there’s something tremendously persuasive about him. I’ve seen him use that persuasiveness on a customer. If he believes in a product, he might be able to sell it better than a dozen high-pressure types like me.”
    “You don’t strike me as high-pressure,” Carver said. “High-voltage, maybe. It could be you’re not as hard as you think.”
    “You haven’t seen me trying to close a real-estate deal.” She looked up from her drink. Her eyes were barely visible behind the green-tinted lenses. “I don’t mean pushy; that’s not what I am. Maybe I’m not exactly high-pressure at that. But I am relentless. That’s part of what I saw in Willis—a quiet, calm relentlessness.”
    “Do you have a photograph of him?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    Edwina shrugged. “I didn’t know it was required by law. Some people are camera bugs, some aren’t. I never took his photograph; I don’t even own a camera.”
    “Don’t real-estate salespeople around here photograph the houses they list?”
    “No, a professional photographer hired by the company does that.”
    “So describe Willis.”
    Edwina drummed her fingertips on the metal table. The sound annoyed Carver. He could feel the subtle vibrations with his own hand, which was resting on his side of the table.
    “He’s difficult to describe,” Edwina said finally. “He’s about your height—maybe five-foot-ten. Where you’re lean and muscular, Willis is well built but maybe a few pounds overweight. Still, he doesn’t have a stomach paunch and isn’t soft.”
    “What color are his hair and eyes?” Carver asked.
    “His hair is medium brown. His eyes are what you might call hazel. He’s sort of average-complexioned, with handsome, regular features. He has no distinguishing marks that I can think of. Oh—he has a scar on his right shoulder, in front, from an operation he had when he got hurt playing high-school football.”
    “A shoulder separation?” That was the most common football injury that would leave the kind of scar Edwina had described.
    “I don’t know.”
    “What high school?”
    “A private school up north. He was the team’s quarterback.”
    “Where exactly is Willis from?”
    “Orlando.”
    “I mean, before that.”
    “He never said. He did mention that he’d lived a while in the Midwest.”
    “Did you get the impression he was a Florida native?”
    “Nobody is a Florida native. Willis has a kind of nonregional accent. Which is no accent at all, if you know what I mean.”
    “Sure. Like one of those talking-suit network TV anchormen: coast-to-coast bland. But what sort of