Torch

by John Lutz

  There was a small diamond-shaped window in the door. He peered inside. Half a dozen customers sat at the long bar, another half-dozen at small tables with hurricane lamp candle holders for centerpieces. A large-screen TV mounted high behind the bar was on, showing Rod Stewart hip-switching and spinning across a stage with a guitar, but no music seeped outside. Maggie was seated at the far end of the bar, drinking something tall and trying to ignore the portly little man on the stool next to her.

  Carver moved back from the window in the door. This wasn’t going to work. Shellie’s was smaller and less crowded than he’d anticipated. He might be able to enter unnoticed by Maggie if it were nighttime, when there would undoubtedly be more customers and probably loud music and a haze of cigarette smoke. But now, in late afternoon, he decided he’d better stay outside.

  He returned to the Olds, not liking the idea of sitting some more in the heat but knowing it was unavoidable if he wanted to do his job. And he took pride in his job. Almost everything else had been stripped from him when the holdup kid’s bullet crashed into his knee. He had his work, and he did it no matter what else happened in his life. He wondered if that was being obsessive, or simply defining. Occupations did define people. He knew who and what he was, and what he had to do. At least most of the time. His was an occupation that hinged on certain constant aspects of human nature, not all of them admirable. That was oddly comforting in a high-tech age when job experience sometimes became obsolete even before it was completed.

  He started the Olds, slipped the transmission lever to reverse, and backed down the street until he was almost a block away from Shellie’s and from Maggie’s parked car.

  Trying to ignore the heat, he half listened to a call-in radio show about abortion and waited and watched and speculated.

  Her co-workers and clients at Burnair and Crosley would be surprised to know this was where Maggie was spending her late lunch hour. If that indeed was what she was doing in a down-scale dump like Shellie’s, drinking her lunch. There was nothing about the place that suggested it served food, even if a customer might have the courage to eat there.

  It was almost four o’clock when Maggie emerged from Shellie’s and walked, head down, toward the parked Stanza. Carver couldn’t be sure, but he thought she was moving unsteadily and might be slightly drunk.

  When she drove away, he followed.

  The Stanza stayed in its proper lane, but it did weave once toward the curb. And it halted completely at the first stop sign on Gull, then accelerated slowly across the empty intersection. Maggie was driving very carefully, the way people did when they were drunk and trying to convince themselves and everyone else they were sober. He wondered if she was a secret alcoholic, and went to a place like Shellie’s to drink so she wouldn’t run into any of her straitlaced investment-world friends from Burnair and Crosley. If she was simply drinking to assuage her grief over Mark Winship’s death, she probably would have done so somewhere else, or at home, not at Shellie’s. Maggie seemed to be an experienced drinker.

  She drove east toward the ocean until she connected with Magellan, then took it south to the coast highway. Obviously, she was finished working for the day.

  Carver stayed well back from the black Stanza and listened to a clergyman and a female state representative argue about the French abortion pill. He knew where the car and the argument were going.

  He continued past the driveway of Maggie’s cottage after the Stanza had turned into it. Then he made a U-turn and parked on the shoulder behind some palms and decorative shrubbery dotted with tiny multicolored blossoms, where Beni Ho had been parked to watch the cottage when Carver had visited it the first time. He twisted the ignition key and switched off the engine and the radio.

  The parking place didn’t provide much of a view, actually. Carver could see the front of the cottage through the bushes, but not the door or the stepping-stone path to the rear of the place and the beach.

  He decided to knock on the cottage door and try getting Maggie to talk with him while she was loosened with alcohol. She should be more cooperative and revealing thanks to her time spent in Shellie’s. Besides, Carver had done enough sitting in the heat for one day.

  Leaving the Olds parked where it was, he got out and walked along the road shoulder, then down the driveway to the cottage.

  He rapped on the door with his cane and waited. There must have been a beehive somewhere close by; several honeybees droned past in the same general direction and made wide circles to disappear around the corner of the cottage. Worker bees knocking off for the day. A few of them buzzed close but didn’t seem to pay much attention to Carver. They had more important business. It was time to check in with the queen.

  The door opened and Maggie stood staring out at him. She was still wearing the blue skirt but not the blazer and was in stockinged feet. Carver’s gaze started at her nylon-clad painted toenails and rose to her face. Her eyes were heavy-lidded and she looked mildly annoyed at being ogled. Used to it, though. A woman like her knew that some men’s eyes traveled on their own.

  Carver said, “You told me you might want to talk some more, said to come calling later.”

  She smiled at his pathetic attempt at subterfuge. “We both know I said ‘call later,’ not ‘come calling.’ ”

  He said, “Well, to tell you the truth, I phoned you again at work about an hour ago and they said you’d left for the day.”

  “So you thought you’d drive here and pester me in person?”

  “I thought it might help both of us if we talked some more about Mark Winship.”

  “Not about Donna?”

  “Donna, too.”

  Maggie ran her palms down her cheeks, dragging at the corners of her bleary eyes and distorting her features, the way kids do when they want to make a face. It amazed Carver that she was sexy even when she did that. What a temptation she must have been for Mark Winship. For any man who’d ever met her. She said, “I took a sleeping pill about an hour ago and it’s kicking in, I’m afraid. We’ll have to talk some other time, if at all.”

  Carver said, “Has anyone ever told you how beautiful you are when you’re tired?”

  “Countless times.”

  “Add my observation.”

  In a bored voice, she said, “Are you coming on to me, Mr. Carver?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Anyway, I suppose you’d say I’m spoken for.” He smiled at her, making it reassuring, letting her know that sure, he found her attractive, but he wasn’t going to be pushy about it, wasn’t in the market.

  She stared at him, gnawing hard on her lower lip. He wondered if alcohol had numbed the lip so she couldn’t feel what she was doing.

  Sensing she was weakening, he said, “Let’s drive to a restaurant and get some coffee, put off that nap for a while. If you go to sleep now, you’ll wake up at four A.M. and be tired all day tomorrow.”

  Wheels seemed to be turning inside her lovely head. Persuasive Carver. She was considering, all right. He was sure of it.

  She said, “Fuck off, Mr. Carver,” and slammed the door.

  Carver stared at the blank surface of the door for a long moment, then placed the tip of his cane to the side and turned around. More bees droned past him, low to the ground, as if humiliated by the prospect of having to take crap from the queen.

  He said, “I know how you feel,” and followed the sun-washed driveway to where the Olds was parked on the gravel shoulder.

  He wondered if Maggie had been in her bedroom before answering his knock. She’d given no sign of having found the dismembered doll on her bed.

  As he drove away, he decided it might be a good idea to find out who owned the cottage.

  18

  A STOP AT THE county courthouse told Carver the cottage where Maggie was staying was deeded to Dredge Industries, Inc. He’d had a go at finding the company’s address, but without luck. Dredge Industries had owned the property for three years.

  It was a few minutes past seven when he
pulled the Olds into the gravel lot of the Happy Lobster and turned his car over to the same young parking valet who’d been on duty the day of Donna Winship’s death. If he recognized Carver, he showed no sign. He parked a lot of cars for a lot of people. Carver watched him leave the Olds in a space at the edge of the lot, near where Donna had died, then went inside to meet Beth for dinner.

  She was seated at a table near the window, two tables down from where Carver had listened to and failed to help Donna. Her hair was tamed by a headband and her strong profile was silhouetted against the wide window and glimmering sea. He stood in the archway leading from bar to restaurant and admired her for a few seconds, then she saw him and smiled.

  The restaurant was crowded, and several men stared at him with veiled surprise and envy as he made his way among the tables, kissed her, and sat down. Central Florida wasn’t the easiest place for a white man and a black woman to be in love. It was an area where God and citrus and Mickey Mouse were sometimes worshiped to extremes. Maybe it had to do with the heat.

  Three sun-browned, fortyish guys in shorts and identical gray tee shirts with alligators on their chests were still staring at Carver and Beth. They had a pitcher of beer at the table, and two of them were wearing caps lettered GATOR BAITER above the bills. There was hostility in their gazes, and the thin edge of envy Carver had seen in some of the other eyes that had followed him to the table.

  Beth said, “Wonder what those swamp turkeys are thinking.”

  Carver thought about his bad leg, then Beth’s two beautiful good ones showing beneath her light tan skirt, and said, “Probably they figure I must know some tricks.”

  Beth smiled. “You do, Fred, you do.” She turned slightly and aimed her smile at the swamp turkeys, and they looked uncomfortable and concentrated on their drinking. Beth could be intimidating.

  Then one of the men grinned and said something to a man at the next table, all the while looking at Beth. Carver knew what he was doing. He’d made a remark to the other man to fish for agreement on whatever he’d said about Beth. Bigots always sought, even sometimes demanded, confirmation of their beliefs. They needed that reassurance. But the man at the adjoining table simply turned away, as if he hadn’t heard.

  A pert blond waitress arrived and announced she was their server and rattled off a litany of specials, then asked if she could get them something to drink while they were making up their minds. Beth ordered a martini, Carver a scotch, rocks.

  Carver made up his mind right away and set his lobster-shaped menu aside. Beth chewed the inside of her cheek and contemplated.

  When she’d finally closed her menu, he told her about his afternoon following Maggie, and what little he’d discovered about ownership of the cottage.

  Beth said, “Sounds like Maggie might have a drug problem.”

  “I only saw her drinking booze.”

  “Same thing, if you can’t control it. Doesn’t matter if it’s booze, tobacco, or cornflakes—if it’s got you instead of the other way around.”

  Carver didn’t debate the point. Beth was sensitive on the subject. She saw no real difference between users of illicit recreational drugs and people who drank and smoked uncontrollably; she thought alcohol and tobacco were the latter’s drugs of choice merely because they were legal and readily available. It was, to her way of thinking, an area where only the law defined morality, and with no real concern for the destruction of the addicts.

  “A woman grieving the death of a lover might drink only to ease the pain, but she wouldn’t do it in a dump like you described unless she was used to being there.”

  “That doesn’t mean she’s got a drinking problem,” Carver said. “Maybe she likes unwashed guys with tattoos.”

  “That could be,” Beth said.

  He saw she was serious and didn’t answer. The part of her past he didn’t know about bothered him sometimes. It took effort to set it aside and leave it hers alone.

  “This Dredge Industries might not be incorporated in Florida,” she said. “If you want, I can find out more about it through Burrow.”

  “It might help,” Carver said.

  The waitress returned with their drinks and a broad smile. Beth ordered salad and lobster tail, Carver asked for the salmon steak special. The waitress seemed pleased, as if she’d sold him on the special, then sashayed away toward the kitchen.

  Carver said, “Cheers,” and sipped his drink and looked out the long curved window at the ocean, still rolling blue-green and vast, unchanged from when he’d sat looking at it and talking with Donna Winship, unchanged by thousands of years. Ships seemed to sit motionless in the haze of heat and distance out near the horizon, as if time were a slower process far out from land.

  “You don’t look cheerful,” Beth said. “Did you and Donna sit at this table when you met here?”

  “No. Two tables away.”

  Beth said, “Won’t do you any good to dwell on it and muck around in a lot of sentimental bullshit, Fred. The past is the past. We live in the present and can try to do something about the future. That’s all there is for any of us.”

  “You’re cold.”

  “You know better.”

  He sighed and smiled at her. “Yeah, I do. What you are is realistic. And probably tougher than I am.”

  She raised her glass, not smiling. “I wouldn’t argue either point.”

  Carver knew she was right about how futile and destructive it was to dwell on the irrevocable past, but she hadn’t seen Donna Winship walk from the restaurant alive, then seen her minutes later mangled and dead on the pavement. That sort of thing made a vivid and lasting impression, and one that visited in dreams.

  Beth put down her glass and bent sideways to reach something on the floor, causing one of her breasts to strain against her blouse. The move drew men’s eyes like laser beams. She said, “Got something for you, lover.”

  He waited while she laid a yellow file folder on the table and opened it.

  Inside were copies of catalog pages. They were fastened together with a paper clip and there was a yellow Post-it stuck to the top one with the date and name of the catalog scrawled on it. He assumed they were copies of the pages missing from the catalogs in Gretch’s apartment.

  “I found eight of the catalogs so I could see what was on the torn-out pages,” she said. She turned the folder around so Carver could examine the pages right-side up.

  He removed the paperclip and leafed through them. They were sharp copies, though not in color like the pages themselves. They all showed a series of male models wearing foppish clothes, from evening wear to bikini swim trunks.

  “So whaddya think?” Beth asked from across the table. She placed the olive from her martini between her lips, sucked on it to enjoy the gin flavor, then deftly let it roll back on her tongue. Probably giving the Gator Baiters fits.

  Carver said, “I think I wouldn’t wear much of this stuff. Well, maybe the black leather jacket with the steel spikes running up the arms.”

  “You could bring it off,” Beth said.

  They were both aware that he sometimes dressed in a way not all that different from the catalog models. Wore dark pullover shirts, dark slacks, and Italian loafers he didn’t have to lace. No steel spikes, though.

  He started to close the folder.

  Beth said, “Look again.”

  He did.

  This time he saw it immediately.

  He examined each of the copies carefully. One of the models on every page was Carl Gretch. There he was in a European-cut sport coat, there in a striped silk shirt with a wild tie, there in an elaborate and probably wildly colorful kimono. In one shot he was seated at an outdoor table dining with a smiling blond woman with a spiked hairdo and a see-through top.

  Carver straightened the copies and closed the folder, grinning. “Great work, Beth. I can check with the catalog publishers, get the photographers’ names, then the name and address of the modeling agency that represents Gretch.”

  Beth tos
sed down the rest of her drink. “I already did that, Fred. It’s the Walton Agency on Sunburst Avenue in west Del Moray.”

  Carver touched the back of her hand. “I’m proud of you.”

  She said, “Sometimes I’m proud of you, too, Fred.”

  19

  THE WALTON AGENCY was a small, modern brick building angled on a narrow lot on a pretty good block of Sunburst. The bricks had been painted the dull brown color of an apple that surprises when you bite into it and find it rotten.

  Carver entered the lobby through a tinted glass door, and found himself on plush beige carpeting. A middle-aged woman with unnaturally dark hair and troweled-on makeup sat at a marble-topped desk that had nothing on its surface but a complicated, many-lined white phone and an acrylic plaque that said Verna in graceful green script. On the wall behind her were dramatic color and black-and-white photographs of beautiful people. Years ago she might have been one of them. She was still hanging on by her long, painted nails. She smiled at Carver with lips the color of fresh blood. It was a wicked, guilty smile, as if she were a vegetarian caught being a carnivore.

  He said, “You’re one of the models, right?”

  Verna’s smile didn’t seem to change physically, yet somehow it became more genuine. She had great-looking capped teeth. “Once upon a time,” she said in a husky voice that probably sounded sexy on the phone. He saw that behind the makeup she was pushing sixty, but you had to look closely to know it.

  “Is Mr. Walton in?” Carver asked.

  The smile stayed on the red lips but faded from her mascara’ed eyes. She dragged a large appointment book up from a shelf behind the desk and started to open it slowly, as if its leather cover were almost unbearably heavy.

  “I don’t have an appointment,” Carver said, “but Mr. Walton will see me. It’s about one of his clients.”

  “Are you looking for a model?” Verna asked.

  “Yes. A man named Enrico Thomas.”

  She studied him for several seconds, as if trying to determine if he was one of the good guys. “Just a minute, please, Mr. . . . ?”