Torch

by John Lutz

  “I figured Del Moray was small and out of the way enough that she wouldn’t be bothered. She still there, Carver?”

  “Sure. Even if she won’t accept your calls.”

  Charlie Post shrugged and smiled, a high roller accepting his losses gracefully. “I guess she knows when things are ended, too. I’ve got no hard feeling or second thoughts. I had my time in heaven and I’m just passing through on my way to nothingness, like you and everybody else.”

  Carver leaned his weight on his cane and stood up out of the overstuffed chair. His back ached from sitting in the thing, even though it had seemed comfortable. “Thanks for your time,” he told Post.

  The handsome old man pursed his lips and studied him. “You going to talk with May?”

  “If I can.”

  “Don’t believe anything she tells you, Carver. May’s a liar.” He said that with a face that could bluff at poker.

  “If she contradicts anything you told me,” Carver said, “I’ll know she’s fibbing.”

  As he moved toward the door, Post said, “Don’t let her sell you a boat.”

  30

  CARVER PARKED BESIDE Beth’s car outside his cottage.

  As he walked toward the plank front porch, he wiped perspiration from his face with the tail of his pullover shirt and was glad to hear the air conditioner droning away. Beth wasn’t bothered much by heat and often only opened the windows on some of the hottest, most humid days of summer.

  It was cool inside. She was sitting at the breakfast counter, eating a sandwich and using her laptop Toshiba. A Budweiser can and a glass half full of beer sat beside the computer.

  Carver peeled off his perspiration-soaked shirt and went into the bathroom.

  “Hot, lover?” she asked, not looking up from her computer.

  He didn’t answer. Instead he splashed cold water over his face. He felt water drip and run down his forearms and bare chest. Some of it made it down his ridged stomach and felt cool beneath his waistband. He ran more cold water over his wrists, holding them beneath the tap for several minutes. Then he toweled his face and chest dry and returned to the cottage’s main area. Though the air conditioner was on, a window was open and the sound of the surf dashing itself on the beach infiltrated the cottage.

  “I figured you’d turn up soon,” Beth said, “so I switched on the air conditioner just for you.”

  “Thoughtful,” he said, and got another Budweiser out from behind some very old barbecued chicken in the refrigerator. He carried the beer to the sofa, sat down and rolled the cold curvature of the can back and forth on his forehead, then gazed out at the ocean. A few white triangles of sails were banked at identical angles. Beyond them, far in the sun-hazed distance, was what appeared to be a cruise ship. Nothing out there seemed to be moving; maybe it was too hot. Behind him, Carver could hear Beth’s fingers clicking and clacking the computer’s keyboard with amazing speed. It sounded like a maniac abusing a typewriter inside a padded room.

  He said, “I thought you were finished with your mail-order-scam story.”

  “I am. This is a telephone boiler room piece,” she said, continuing to play the computer’s keys. “It’ll expose some of those jerks who are talking the old folks out of their ready cash. Some of the people involved in the phony mail-order business are mixed up in this. That’s how I got onto it. It’s like a web full of spiders.”

  “Gonna send any of them to jail?”

  “Hope so.”

  “That’ll just leave more helpless flies for the televangelists,” he told her.

  “You’re too cynical, Fred.”

  “I’ve been told.”

  After she relayed her story via modem to the Burrow offices, she sat down next to Carver on the sofa, leaned back, and extended her legs, as if her muscles were stiff from sitting a long time at her computer. She was wearing black shorts and a red halter that didn’t do much of a job restraining her breasts. Carver didn’t mind. Her feet were bare. The black leather sandals she’d been wearing were lying upside down on the floor next to her crossed ankles. They were the kind with soles made from tire treads and were probably good for another thirty thousand miles.

  “I still haven’t heard anything on Dredge Industries,” she said. “I’ve got Jeff Mehling working on it.”

  Mehling was Burrow’s resident computer genius. He’d helped Carver before, but they’d never met. Beth had told him Mehling mainly communicated with friends via electronic mail. Carver hadn’t wanted to hear any more about that.

  “Jeff told me he’d have something soon,” Beth went on. “He’s still experimenting, finding his way into various data banks.”

  Carver wondered if the government knew about Mehling.

  Beth laced her fingers behind her head, inhaled deeply as she stretched her long body, and gave him a sloe-eyed glance. “You talk to Post?”

  Not looking at her breasts, he told her about the conversation with Charlie Post at the Hotel Miranda in Miami Beach.

  “Pussy broke,” Beth said. “That’s how some people I know used to describe Post’s condition. And some men’ll go out and find the wrong woman and do it all again. It’s a masochistic thing with them, giving up their money for love.”

  “Post didn’t strike me as masochistic.”

  “Nobody’s how they strike people, Fred. You oughta know that.”

  Then he told her about stopping briefly in Palm Beach on the drive up the coast. May Post hadn’t been in her office at Post Yacht Sales, and she hadn’t answered her home phone.

  “Why didn’t you hang around until she showed up?” Beth asked.

  “Because the office workers were frantically finalizing arrangements for a party that night on a yacht they had listed to sell, the Stedda Work. Woman in the office who was calling to check on the caterer explained to me that was how they showed some of their yachts to prospective clients. Like a floating open house with booze and hors d’oeuvres.”

  “And May Post is sure to be on board,” Beth said, her head resting back so she was staring now at the ceiling. “It’s a pretty smart tactic, getting the rich sales prospects liquored up and maybe bidding against each other.”

  “Charlie Post told me May was smart.”

  They both were quiet for a while, listening to the low hum of the air conditioner and the soft rush of the surf. Not far away outside a gull cried. Beth idly moved a bare foot over and rested painted toes on Carver’s moccasin. He could feel the pressure of each individual toe through the supple leather.

  She said, “I’m assuming you’re going to drive back to Palm Beach tonight and crash the party.”

  “No. I’ll be there as a guest. I managed to pick up a few unused invitations when no one was looking.”

  “A few?” She sounded interested.

  Carver said, “We’ll have to look as if we belong with the Palm Beach set and could afford a yacht or two. Got something suitable to wear?”

  “Don’t worry,” she told him, “I’ll be the richiest and the bitchiest. But you I’ll have to supervise, Fred. When you get dressed up you look like a gangster.”

  31

  THE STEDDA WORK was, according to a color brochure available at the foot of the gangplank, a 94-foot Broward Motoryacht built in 1985. It was a beautiful white vessel with red trim, three luxury staterooms, two salons, an on-deck galley, a 170-bottle wine cooler, a teak swimstep with stairs and transom door, and a range of 3,000 miles so you could get far away from land and enjoy it all without being disturbed.

  All of this could be had for only 2.3 million dollars, described in the brochure as a bargain reduced price. Since it was a reduced price offer, Carver considered it for a few seconds before pushing it out of his mind.

  Ushering Beth before him, he handed his two invitations to an attractive and smiling blond woman in a blue yachting outfit, then limped up the canopy-covered gangplank to where a dozen or so people were wandering about the deck holding drinks and helping themselves to hors d’oeuvres offered by
white-coated waiters balancing silver trays. It was, as Carver had suspected, a well-turned-out crowd devoid of polyester. Most of the men and not a few women turned to appraise Beth as she and Carver boarded. She was wearing a simple black dress with laced sleeves, a jade necklace and pin, black high heels. She looked like a princess. Carver looked like a gangster in his black slacks, pearl shirt with black and gray tie, and gray silk double-breasted sport coat, but he figured that was okay; it was something these people understood.

  A waiter with a tray of champagne in tall continental glasses approached them. The glasses looked like expensive crystal, Carver noted, as he and Beth helped themselves. The champagne had the taste of fizzy old bank notes. Carver liked it.

  He and Beth nodded to a few people who glanced at them as if they might know them, then they made their way toward the stern where more guests were lounging about and chatting. Carver noticed one of the women he’d seen that morning in the Post Yacht Sales office, but she was busy smiling and talking to a fat man in a gray suit and didn’t have eyes for anyone else. Carver didn’t try to avoid her. Even if she did recognize him, she’d probably figure he’d made contact with May Post and been invited.

  Beth nodded and smiled at an elderly man who nodded and smiled at her. There was a lot of nodding and smiling all around. A lot of quiet calculation.

  Beth sipped champagne and said, “This is a great vessel, Fred. You think we should make an offer?”

  “What we should do,” he said, “is find May Post.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen her.”

  “No matter,” Beth said. “She’s the hostess and should be easy to spot. She’ll be smiling too much and moving too fast.” She swirled her remaining champagne around in her glass. “Isn’t that a certain U.S. Senator?” she said, nodding toward a handsome gray-haired man talking to a man and woman near the rail.

  “Probably.”

  Beth said, “Excuse me, Fred,” and started toward the man.

  “Where are you going?” Carver asked, knowing where and not liking it. She acted as if she hadn’t heard.

  The party had been going for a while. Music suddenly came over the yacht’s sound system. Laughter and conversation became louder. Carver watched Beth talking earnestly to the Senator, who seemed to be listening just as earnestly. Over near the opposite rail, he saw an elderly woman standing with her arm around a handsome young man in his twenties, not in a motherly way. Carver thought he’d seen the man at Nightlinks the day he’d photographed people entering and leaving. It would be interesting to look at the prints when they came back from the lab. Conversation continued buzzing around him. Two men waving drinks at each other were talking about bow thrusters. Carver didn’t know what a bow thruster was, but this boat probably had one. Or was it a ship? Someone had once told him that a ship was any vessel large enough to carry a boat. The Stedda Work qualified. “Talk to May,” a woman’s voice said somewhere near him. “She’s in the Blue Salon.”

  Carver decided to follow that advice, even though it had been meant for someone else.

  With a final glance at Beth and the Senator, who were both laughing now like old chums discussing schoolday pranks, Carver made his way below deck.

  Outside sounds were nonexistent there, but the music and conversation were louder. Shuffling along a narrow companion-way, he squeezed past a heavyset woman in a sequined blue dress, traded his empty champagne glass for a full one as a white-coated waiter with a tray squeezed past him, and found the salon. It was crowded with people watching a card game, and it was red.

  A man with a dead cigar in his mouth looked over at Carver and grinned. “You a gambler, sport?”

  “No, just looking for the Blue Salon,” Carver explained.

  “Above deck,” the man said around the cigar, then returned to watching the game, which was seven-card stud. “I raise you back,” a woman said firmly, as Carver edged away.

  The Blue Salon was above deck and lined with windows that looked out over the party on deck and the lights of the marina. It wasn’t as crowded as the Red Salon. Most of the guests there were clustered around a small bar where the woman who’d collected invitations was now dispensing drinks. The sound system had been turned off and the music seeped in softly from the rest of the yacht, heavy with violins, pleasant at lower volume.

  Moving closer to the bar, Carver braced himself with his cane and stood pretending to gaze out the window, actually studying the reflections of the guests in the salon and eavesdropping on their conversation. Within a few minutes he heard a woman seated on a plush window seat referred to as May.

  He turned around and looked closely at her. Beneath a tight sequined red dress her body was thin enough to hint at anorexia. Her short hair had been dyed blond too often and was stiffly arranged so it angled sharply over one of her penciled eyebrows. She had a long, bony face that held a kind of angular attractiveness. As she crossed her legs, she noticed Carver staring at her. Quickly she drew on the cigarette she was holding and turned her attention back to the sincere-looking middle-aged man seated beside her. He puffed on a pipe and listened. Carver noticed for the first time that most of the people around him held cigarettes. Apparently Blue was the smoking salon, which accounted for the dead cigar in the mouth of the cardplayer below deck.

  When the man with the pipe stood up and walked away, Carver approached May Post.

  She smiled up at him with the kind of almost genuine, high-voltage smile seen on virtually everyone who sold expensive merchandise. For all she knew, Carver was a potential buyer. She couldn’t know everyone she’d invited.

  “Make the deal?” he asked.

  The smile didn’t quite disappear. “Hardly. That was Jason Orondo, my sales manager.” She drew on her cigarette, exhaled slowly, and studied him through the haze with a smoker’s narrowed eyes. He could tell he didn’t set quite right with her, though for the moment she couldn’t figure him out. Her eyes said she knew he wasn’t Palm Beach, though; that was for sure.

  He gave her his own warmest smile. “Care to talk about something other than yachts?”

  Melting but still wary, she met his eyes and said, “Okay. Unless you’re from the Internal Revenue Service.”

  He laughed and sipped his champagne. Debonair Carver. “Nothing like that, I assure you.”

  “They can be sneaky.”

  “It’s a sneaky world,” he said sadly, “full of misdirection.”

  “Then do be direct.”

  “I’m a private investigator and I’d like to talk to you about Charlie Post.”

  She looked thoughtful. “Charlie? Is he being investigated?”

  “Not really. He’s on the periphery. I’m looking into a couple of deaths up in Del Moray.”

  “Homicides?”

  “Maybe.”

  She grinned, liking that. “Charlie’s capacity to get into trouble knows no limits.”

  “He told me you divorced him because he was unfaithful.”

  “He was wrong. I divorced him because I was tired of him. He happened to be going out with some bimbo at the time, and that was convenient. I hired somebody like you to follow him. Charlie and the bimbo were photographed in a compromising position, not to mention an uncomfortable one.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Just the latest in a long line of women with big boobs and round heels. She ran out on Charlie the next day. It was a one-night stand that didn’t work out well. Even he didn’t know her name, and I’d never seen her before. Charlie wasn’t particular when his worm was wriggling. Probably she was some waitress he picked up. It didn’t matter that she probably couldn’t have been found even if we’d searched; we had the photographs. Most of the divorce agreement took place out of court.” She caught something in the corner of her vision, smiled and waved across the room at someone, then looked back up at Carver. “Charlie knew I didn’t love him, Mr. . . . ?”

  “Carver.”

  “He kn
ew I didn’t love him and was going to leave him sooner or later. He didn’t love me, either. He did everything but ask me to leave. Finally I got sick of him and I obliged.” She smiled again, but not in the way she had at her guest across the room. “Is that direct enough?”

  “Sure is. So you don’t think Charlie took the other woman seriously.”

  “Of course he didn’t. Charlie never took any woman seriously except for an hour at a time. Plenty of them, though. He’s got more energy than any man his age I’ve ever met; I’ll give him that much.”

  “Was it a fair divorce?”

  “I think so. Doesn’t Charlie?”

  “He didn’t mention.”

  She sucked hard on her cigarette, using it for a prop, then turned her head to the side and exhaled a long trail of smoke as she stood up. He was surprised by how tall she was. She seemed even thinner than she’d appeared sitting down. “I think we just stopped being candid with each other,” she said, looking down at him.

  He shrugged. “Sorry. It always happens.”

  “It’s been a pleasure talking to you, Mr. Carver. Explore the yacht. Enjoy the rest of the evening.” She turned and began walking from the salon.

  He said, “Would you consider a million and a half?”

  She didn’t look back.

  “What did you say to the Senator?” Carver asked Beth as they sped north on the Florida Turnpike toward Del Moray. He was driving but they were in her car. It put in a better appearance than the Olds.

  “I thanked him. He gets little enough of that. What did May Post say to you?”

  “Pretty much the same thing Charlie Post told me.”

  “So now you know Post isn’t a complete liar.”

  “The best liars are never complete. That’s why what they say smacks of the truth.”

  “True enough.”

  They drove for a while in silence, listening to the tires tick over seams in the pavement. Then Carver glanced over at Beth and said, “You were the most stunningly attractive woman on the boat.”

  She moved close to him, kissed his ear, and said, “What were you doing looking at every other woman on board?”