Flame fc-4

by John Lutz

  Carver decided there was nothing here for him. He’d hoped to talk to an unsuspecting family member or be able to look the place over and possibly find something revealing. Neither of those things was going to happen. He turned away and had begun limping through the woods when he heard a splash.

  Turned back just in time to see the diving board still vibrating and the blue, blue water in the pool rippling and playing tricks with the sunlight.

  The ripples calmed, then got hectic and slapped noisily in irregular rhythm against the sides of the pool.

  Someone was swimming just out of sight.

  The dazzling, sun-reflecting water made his eyes ache. Carver crouched on his good leg behind the fence and waited, one hand on his cane, the other with fingers laced through the chain-link. He realized he was sweating heavily.

  He was patient, but the gnats swarming around him weren’t. They got in his eyes and tried to flit up his nostrils. He brushed them away now and then but it did little good. They weren’t giving up any sooner than he was.

  About five minutes passed.

  Slower than root-canal treatment.

  This was no fun. He was coated with perspiration and his leg was threatening to cramp up. The cane was slippery in his grip.

  More splashing noises came from the pool. Silence for a minute, and then music. Though not very loud, it reached Carver clearly: the old Bobbie Gentry song “Ode to Billy Joe.” Whoever was there had turned on a radio or stereo.

  Carver’s body tensed as he glimpsed a wavering shadow on the poolside concrete.

  The woman who strolled into sight was blond and slender. Though it was difficult to be sure from this distance, she looked about average height. She was wearing only the bottom of a skimpy red bikini, and her small breasts bobbed energetically as she walked. Her hair was long and soaked, plastered to her naked tan back. There was no difference in the shade of her tan around her breasts; she frequented tanning salons or she was in the habit of topless sunbathing. At first, because of her slimness, Carver thought she was very young, but even from here a more careful appraisal put her at about forty-five. Middle-aged women weren’t built like twenty-year-olds, and that was that, Cher not withstanding. Carver wondered if he was looking at Giselle Wesley.

  Whoever the woman was, detective work had suddenly become voyeurism, and that made him uneasy.

  The woman picked up the blue towel from the back of the redwood chair and dabbed at her eyes. Dropped the wadded towel into the chair, then smoothed back her wet hair with both hands. She tilted back her head and swayed gently from side to side in time with the tragic, hypnotic music, smiling slightly into the sun. The grieving widow? Maybe the maid at play.

  Carver was glad when she stepped up onto the diving board, strutted gracefully to the end, and jumped into the water feet first, folding her arms across her chest, as if she were cold, to protect her breasts. After the splash that sent thousands of glittering fragments of water flying like spraying glass, he could hear her swimming toward the other end of the pool.

  He moved away into the woods and started back the way he’d come, thinking no one had seen him but knowing he couldn’t be positive. He still didn’t feel right about spying on the solitary swimmer. Breaking and entering was one thing, but it wouldn’t do to be arrested and charged with being a Peeping Tom. The worst part was, he wouldn’t have minded watching the woman for a while, if she’d stayed in view. That was perfectly natural, he told himself. Wasn’t sure if he believed it. Finally thought, hell with it. People who analyzed themselves into paralysis got on his nerves and he didn’t want to be one of them.

  The Ford’s air conditioner felt great. As he drove back toward the main highway, he adjusted the dashboard vents so the cold rush of air was aimed directly at him. Felt perspiration evaporating where his shirt was stuck to his flesh.

  Gave only a glance at the dusty black BMW sedan that roared around him from behind and accelerated out of sight.

  Chapter 13

  Carver parked the ford in the lot of the Norrison Funeral Home on Roswell Road the next morning and sat for a moment with the motor running and the air conditioner on, watching the people who parked nearby enter the side door of the long, white clapboard building. The men wore dark, well-cut suits, the women subdued dresses. A few of the women wore hats with black veils. Carver thought veils had gone out of style, even at funeral parlors, but he wasn’t up on that kind of thing and might be wrong. Miniskirts had come back; why not veils?

  The other cars in the lot were mostly luxury models or sports cars. Expensive iron. They were all gleaming with fresh wax jobs, looked new and probably were. Money, money.

  After about ten minutes, he turned off the engine and climbed out of the Ford. Heat from the sun-softened blacktop penetrated the thin soles of his shoes. Radiated up his pants legs and warmed his ankles. He used a forefinger to pry the knot in his tie a little looser, then limped across the lot into the funeral home, thinking Atlanta summers could be just as punishing as Florida’s.

  He was in a small foyer, painted white over swirly plaster and with deep brown carpeting. There was a dainty gold sofa against one wall, obviously more for decoration than for comfort. A table with a floral arrangement. Mounted on the wall above the sofa were three large wooden keys painted gold. Carver wondered what, if anything, they were supposed to signify. On what looked like a painter’s easel was a directory. It said that Francis Allan Wesley was in Suite E. A suite, no less, as if he might still be alive and seeing callers.

  Carver made his way down the hall to partly opened beige doors, the nearest of which displayed a gold E inside a circular floral design. Frank Wesley’s suite, all right. The murmur of voices drifted out between the doors. Frank throwing a party?

  He found the right angle for leverage and pulled the lettered door open wider with his cane. Stepped into the suite.

  It was a large, paneled room lined with glossy dark furniture. About fifty small, padded chairs had been arranged in rows facing what looked like a genuine marble pedestal. On top of the pedestal rested the gleaming bronze urn that contained all that was left of Frank Wesley. The entire front of the room beyond the pedestal was heaped with funeral sprays and elaborate floral wreaths. A silent explosion of color. There was no photograph of the deceased. Thirty or forty people, most of them prosperous-looking middle-aged men, stood talking in low tones. A knot of men and two women stood or sat around a grouping of furniture near the pedestal and urn. Probably Wesley’s daughter and widow. Maybe one of the men was the son-in-law, Michelle’s husband. One of the women turned her head, and Carver saw that it was the swimmer from the previous afternoon. Her blond hair was combed back and piled up on her head now. A couple of stray curls had fallen onto her forehead, which gleamed with perspiration. Her eyes were red, and she dabbed delicately at one of them with a corner of a folded white handkerchief, as if trying to remove a cinder. Pluck it out and no more of death; her problems would be over.

  No one paid much attention to Carver. He wandered over to the guest register book and signed it as Boyd Emerson. Across the room he glimpsed the woman he’d talked to earlier at the Wesley offices and nodded to her. She peered at him oddly for a second through her thick, dark-rimmed glasses, like a curious trout-know you from somewhere-then smiled and nodded back.

  Carver milled around for a while, wearing an appropriately glum expression and eavesdropping, but he heard nothing of interest. Talk seemed to be focused more on the economy than on the deceased. But then, something could still be done about the economy.

  When a severe-looking man in a black suit took up position near the urn, and people began sitting down in the rows of chairs and waiting for the service to begin, Carver decided to slip away. That was okay, he was sure. Boyd Emerson and Longbranch Feeder Pigs had paid their respects. And while Carver had overheard nothing of apparent use, he’d made mental note of the people at the funeral home and would recognize them if he saw them again. He’d also noticed how the widow’
s attitude contrasted sharply with what he’d seen when she was at home swimming.

  The parking lot seemed even hotter, and there was a stickiness to the air that made it feel almost like a warm liquid that lent resistance to movement. He was glad to lower himself into the Ford and get the air conditioner cranked up.

  They were waiting for him in his room at the Holiday Inn. A large man. A larger man. A woman. The merely large man was expensively and conservatively dressed in a gray business suit, white shirt, and paisley tie. Wore almost as much gold jewelry as Desoto. You had to look past the suit and glitter to notice what he looked like. Average. Smooth, symmetrical features. Sandy, thinning hair. He was about sixty but his eyes were ageless. They were the impersonal, avid eyes of millions of years of predators. When you looked into them it was like gazing into a deepening blue void, and then he didn’t seem average at all.

  The huge man, not much over six feet tall but probably two hundred and fifty solid pounds, had a round face, leering fat lips, tiny and tortured brown eyes set deep in tanned flesh, and a haircut that might have been administered with pruning shears. Mouse-brown hair stood up in short tufts all over his round head and well down on his neck. He was wearing white slacks and a loose-fitting, untucked white shirt. He looked as if he might be in his late thirties and had gotten there the hard way. What appeared to be knife or razor scars marked his meaty forearms and the backs of his hands.

  The woman, sitting on the edge of the bed with her legs crossed, was wearing a gray blouse, black skirt, black high heels. She had a gold chain around her neck, another around her left ankle. She might have been Hispanic, but Carver couldn’t be sure. She wasn’t beautiful, but somewhere she’d learned how to dress and apply makeup. Her appeal was mostly the result of presentation. Take away the dark mascara and lipstick, the high heels and tight skirt, and she would have been an ordinary woman in her late twenties. Include them and she was something bright and shiny that grabbed attention. The sort of object that attracted predators. She was smoking a cigarette in a long black holder. Her large dark eyes gazed with something like amusement at Carver as she exhaled a thin vapor of smoke from deep in her lungs. She made smoking seem erotic.

  Carver leaned motionless on his cane just inside the door. The other three didn’t move, either. Didn’t speak. A still-life study that took on weight and urgency.

  Finally Carver said, “Got the wrong room?”

  Gray suit said, “Wrong for you or for us?”

  “Word games?” Carver asked. Trying to figure this. Thinking he could make it out the door and back into the hall. Wondering whether they’d come after him. Maybe not. He could raise hell out in the hall, possibly draw some help. Possibly. But he didn’t move, only stood there listening to his heart. He was apprehensive about this, but his curiosity kept him glued where he was.

  “No kinda game,” said the wide man in white. His deep, phlegmy voice rolled like gravel through his leering lips. Carver looked into his tiny, pained eyes and wondered if there might be something seriously wrong with the mind behind them.

  Gray suit said, “Come on in, Mr. Carver,” as if it were his room. “Sit yourself down and we’ll talk.” He had a rich Southern accent and made “Carver” three sliding syllables.

  Carver limped a few steps farther into the room. Stayed standing.

  The man in the suit said, “I’m Walter Ogden.” He motioned with an elegant gold-ringed hand toward the other man. “This is Butcher. Young lady here’s Courtney Romano.”

  “Holiday Inn send you to check on towels?” Carver asked.

  Butcher giggled. It sounded like a cat screeching beneath the phlegmy gravel. “Got him a sense of humor,” he said. More Deep South accent. “Betcha he could lose it in about ten seconds, I decided to cut it outa him. Where’s your sense of humor, Carver? Some people’s is around their heart, others just ’neath their liver. Simple thing to pluck it right out no matter where ’tis, even if you gotta look a while.” He used his leer again. Resembled an oversized gargoyle.

  Ogden said, “Calm down now, Butcher. Maybe I’ll throw you some meat.”

  “I’m countin’ on it.”

  Courtney crossed her legs the other way with a loud swish of nylon and kept staring at Carver. Smoke from the cigarette holder trailed across her face but she didn’t blink. Telling him she was a hard number and not to look in her direction for sympathy.

  Butcher drew a bone-handled knife with a long, thin cutting blade from beneath his shirt. The kind used in slaughterhouses to strip meat from bone. Said, “Ever seen how livestock starts out on its trip to the dinner table, Carver?”

  Carver knew this was all being done for effect. These three, laying it on thick. An act designed to intimidate, with Ogden, who seemed to have an agile mind behind his good-ol’-boy-sophisticate pose, the director. Still, it was working. Butcher’s words, Butcher’s baleful steady gaze, sent a tiny cold centipede scurrying up the nape of Carver’s neck. He said to Ogden, “Spare me the scary part and get to the point. Then get outa my room.”

  Courtney said in a calm, Deep South voice that held a hint of Spanish, “He talks like a real rough man, don’t he, though?”

  “Not actually,” Ogden said. “But I hope he’s a sensible one. What I’d sure like to know, Mr. Carver, is why you went to Wesley Slaughter and Rendering and represented yourself as someone else. And why you just attended the memorial service for a man you never met.”

  “Didn’t stay for the service, actually.”

  “Smart fucker,” Butcher said. Then to Ogden: “Sometimes them kind’s the most fun. Don’t take ’em long to realize they ain’t so smart, though, then they’re like all the rest. People an’ hogs; ain’t none of ’em more’n just blood, guts, an’ bone.”

  Carver thought he saw Courtney shiver. Genuine revulsion? Or more playing for effect?

  Ogden, using a more reasonable tone of voice, said, “It’s this way, Mr. Carver. Wesley Slaughter and Rendering’s in a very competitive business, and there’s some delicate negotiations going on that will continue despite Mr. Wesley’s death. We don’t want anything happening that might upset those negotiations.” He smiled. “This all clear to you?”

  “Sure. You think I’m an industrial spy.”

  “I think it’d be smart of you not to show your face around Wesley Slaughter and Rendering again. Not to ask any more questions about poor Mr. Wesley. Not to trespass on private property. Spy on grieving widows. That kinda thing.”

  “Or?”

  Butcher smiled. Carver like him better leering.

  Carver said, “Your buddies tried to scare me off this case down in Florida. They the ones aimed you at me?”

  Butcher stiffened. Drew invisible little circles in the air with the point of the knife. Ogden seemed genuinely puzzled. “What buddies in Florida?”

  “You know the two. Down in Fort Lauderdale. Black guy and a Hispanic.”

  Courtney drew in her breath sharply.

  “Their act wasn’t nearly as frightening as yours, though,” Carver said. “Guns and tough talk was all. Gun can do more damage in a second, but there’s something unsettling about a knife.”

  Butcher said, “Ain’t there, though?”

  Ogden said, “Well, you shoulda listened to those fellas, Mr. Carver. Been best all around.” He reached into his suitcoat and drew a fat white business envelope from an inside pocket. “Here’s the way we can do it,” he said. “There’s a lotta money in this envelope, and I’m gonna leave it down at the desk for you. Come morning, you and that envelope be gone. You understand?”

  Carver said, “People don’t run other people out of town anymore. Not even very often in the movies.”

  “Ain’t no movie,” Butcher said.

  “If I reclaim that envelope tomorrow, you’ll wish you’d beat me to it,” Ogden said. “We clear on that?”

  Still looking at Ogden, Carver pointed with his cane at Butcher. “Didn’t you just hear Butcher say this wasn’t a movie?”


  “Think on it,” Ogden said. “Whatever it is, it’s up to you whether it has a happy ending.”

  Courtney stood up from the bed. She was shorter than Carver had imagined. Nicely built but thick through the waist. She drawled, “You better listen and do, Mr. Carver.”

  “He’s been given time to consider,” Ogden said. He started toward the door. Butcher followed. Then Courtney. Like ducks in a row.

  As he passed Carver, Butcher reached into his pants pocket and held up what looked like a rawhide necklace strung with about half a dozen tiny misshapen beads of leather. Said, “I carry this here for luck, Carver.”

  “They’re earlobes,” Ogden explained. “Real ones, you can be sure. He’s got him a little eccentricity and sorta collects them.”

  Courtney looked bored but slightly ill.

  Carver said, “They bring you luck, Butcher?”

  “More luck than the folks I cut ’em from,” Butcher said logically, grinning and slipping the leather loop back into his pocket, He smoothly inserted the long-bladed knife into its sheath beneath his shirt.

  Ogden smiled and said, “Don’t trust too much in your luck, Mr. Carver.” He held the door open as Courtney and Butcher slid past him into the hall. Shook his head and said in an amused, boys-will-be-boys tone, “Earlobes. Ain’t that something?”

  “Something,” Carver agreed.

  But the door had already closed.

  Chapter 14

  The next morning, as he limped through the Holiday Inn lobby, Carver tried not to look at the envelope stuffed in the box beneath his room number. A lot of money, Ogden had said. And, to Ogden, a lot would indeed be a lot. There was no telling how much was in the bulging white envelope. Maybe even six figures. Possibilities endless and shining.

  Better not think about that.

  But his mind kept returning to the knowledge of the envelope the way the tip of a tongue keeps returning to an aching tooth. And finding decay.

  He got the Ford from the hotel garage and drove through iridescent streets damp from a dawn rain to the Atlanta Public Library, only about six blocks away on the corner of Carnegie Way and Forsyth.