by John Lutz
An unmarked white Plymouth sedan rocked to a stop behind the patrol car. From the Plymouth emerged a short, paunchy man in a rumpled brown suit. Despite his lack of physical stature and his near-obesity, there was a suggestion of carefully contained power in the way he looked over the scene and walked toward Carver and the uniformed patrolman. He’d been in places like this before, his glance and his walk said; he knew the steps to this dance.
“What happened here?” he asked.
“Fire, sir,” the patrolman said, offering the short explanation.
The paunchy man glared at him.
“Don’t know yet where or how it started,” the patrolman said, trying to recover status in the eyes of a superior. The superior. No doubt about the pecking order here.
“Find out.”
When the patrolman had hurried away, the man said, “I’m Harvey Armont, police chief here in Solarville.” He shook hands with Carver. He had beefy, rounded cheeks, with an oddly sharp nose that didn’t appear to belong on such a face. His dark eyes were searching, uncompromising cop’s eyes; his permanently arched black eyebrows gave him a worldly expression. “It looks as if the fire was pretty much confined to your room,” he said.
Carver twisted his body, his palm still flat on the wall, and looked. Armont was right; Carver’s seemed to be the only room affected. There was no more smoke, only the scorched, acrid scent that hung over every water-soaked fire scene. He realized he hadn’t seen flames.
“You here on business, Mr. Carver?” Armont asked. His voice was amiable but insistent, demanding a reply. That voice would probe, soothe, cajole, trick, seep like water through any cracks in the truth.
Carver knew he might as well give Armont what he was going to get anyway. “Yes, I’m a private detective.” He dug his wallet out of his wrinkled pants and showed the chief his license and some identification.
Armont looked over at the open door and soaked carpet of Carver’s room. “That’s interesting, considering the nature of the fire.”
“What nature?” Carver asked. “It might have been spontaneous combustion, or faulty wiring in a light switch.”
“There’s really no such thing as spontaneous combustion,” the chief said.
Another police car pulled into the lot and parked near the driveway, a gray Ford, from a nearby town, its driver drawn by radio traffic to the fire. The driver nodded to Chief Armont, one curious professional to another, but didn’t get out of the car.
The uniformed cop had returned, eager to make amends and get back on the road to promotion. “The conflagration started in a trash can behind the building,” he said. “The wooden eaves over the can caught fire, and part of the second-floor railing. The air-conditioner to this one room sucked in most of the smoke. It looks like somebody might have tossed a lighted cigarette into the can. Or maybe, hot night like this, it was spontaneous combustion.”
Armont looked at Carver without changing expression. The tone of his voice was the same, too. “In this kind of situation, the motel will fix you up with another room, Mr. Carver. Come morning, you drop by my office and we’ll talk.”
Carver nodded, catching sight of Armont’s wristwatch. Eleven-thirty. He realized that most of the illumination there was from the lightbars of emergency vehicles, fooling him into thinking it was early morning. He’d only been asleep for two hours when the phone had rung. Desoto, almost certainly, waking him and saving his life.
“One thing,” Carver said. “My cane is in there.” He nodded toward the disaster of a motel room.
The chief looked down at Carver’s legs, realizing perhaps for the first time that Carver was lame. Then he shot a commander’s sharp glance at the patrolman, and said, “Rogers.”
Rogers bustled into the room, lifting his black regulation shoes high on the spongy carpet. Carver could hear the slosh of the officer’s footfalls.
A minute later he returned, handed Carver the cane, and smiled. He waited around for a moment expectantly, like a dog that had recovered a stick for its owner and anticipated a biscuit in reward.
Carver thanked him; it was the best he could do. He got the impression that with a little incentive, maybe two biscuits, Rogers would charge alone into a Mafia stronghold.
“You lock your door now, Mr. Carver,” Armont said, as Carver turned and limped toward redheaded Daninger, who was standing before an open door to a room at the other end of the motel and maintaining his sickly, don’t-sue-me grin.
“Is there anything you want from your room before morning?” Daninger asked. “Anything at all?”
Carver told him no. His wallet, with all his money in it, and his keys, were in his pants pockets. One of the few advantages of falling asleep with your clothes on. He was missing only his shoes, and knew they’d be soaked and unwearable.
“Curt will launder all your clothes and get them to you in the morning,” Daninger said through his uncertain, pleading grin. “And of course anything you’ve lost will be replaced.”
Carver found himself feeling sorry for Daninger, small-town businessman staring into the loaded barrels of years of expensive litigation. It was enough to make any entrepreneur jittery. “You’ve done everything possible, Mr. Daninger,” he said. “Thanks.”
Daninger was at least somewhat relieved. Carver accepted the key to his new room, went inside, and locked the door carefully.
He lay awake for a long time, listening to the emergency vehicles racing their engines and departing one by one. The fire-truck drivers blasted air horns and clanged bells, as if they were merging with traffic on a crowded four-lane highway.
Finally Carver dozed off.
He slept two hours out of the next eight, popping awake now and then, imagining he smelled smoke.
CHAPTER 13
In the morning, Curt showed up as promised. The friendly, pimply teen-ager grinned at Carver and sauntered past him to the closet. Slung over his shoulder were all of Carver’s cleaned clothes draped on hangers.
“Got most of the smoke smell outa these,” he said. He ducked back outside and returned with a suitcase about the same size as the one Carver had lost to smoke and water the night before. Best of all, he was carrying a new pair of black dress shoes similar to the ones Carver had lost in the fire. The design was much the same, only these were wingtips, thin-soled and flexible; not the thick, clompy kind Willis Davis wore. The shoes were 10s, Carver’s size.
“You’re pretty lucky,” Curt said, standing by the open door.
“Yeah, I made out okay; this is a new pair of shoes.”
“I mean about still being alive,” Curt said. He wasn’t one for subtlety.
Carver tested the zipper on the suitcase, running it back and forth. Smooth.
“This town is rumored to be a haven for drug runners,” he said, glancing at Curt. “Any of that true?”
“Naw. There’s always talk about the Malone brothers. Sean and Gary. But believe me, they blow a little grass now and then and that’s it. Some drugs at the high school, too, even with a few of the teachers. Some hard stuff, but not much. Like it is everywhere. Big deal, huh? Folks just need somebody to talk about.”
“That’s the truth,” Carver agreed, thinking they wouldn’t be likely to talk to Curt if they didn’t want their words spread around like flu at an orgy.
He attempted to give Curt a tip, but Curt would have none of that. Not from a poor cripple the motel had almost smoked like a ham.
“Daninger said to tell you there’ll be no charge for the room as long as you wanna stay,” he said.
“Thank him for me,” Carver said. “Tell him I’ll send home for the family and the rest of my things.”
Curt’s acne-marred face split into a mottled grin. Nothing bled; a testimonial for Clearasil. “Really?”
“No,” Carver said. “I’ll be here a few more days at most.”
Still grinning, Curt hitched up his faded Levi’s and ambled slowly out to return to the office. Walking at normal speed seemed alien to the boy�
��s nature.
His clothes might be fresh, but Carver still smelled faintly like charred hickory. He went into the bathroom and took a long shower in lukewarm water, lathering up twice.
He stayed in the shower until he no longer smelled like a forest fire. Then he toweled dry, dressed in some of his freshly laundered clothes, and tried out his new shoes.
The shoes fit well. Someone had even pressed his clothes, and Daninger had managed to have Carver’s blue sport jacket dry-cleaned. No expense or effort had been spared in the attempt to sidestep litigation.
Carver felt okay after the night before, only a little tired. But he knew about fire; another ten minutes in that small room that was filling up with smoke and he would never have awakened, except perhaps for a few terrified, airless last seconds before eternity.
He smoothed the thick, damp gray hair above his ears, palmed water from his bald crown, and was about to leave the room when the phone rang.
Carver thought it would be Daninger, checking on his well-being, wondering if the clothes were to his satisfaction. But it was Desoto. The Cahill report.
“I phoned you last night,” Desoto said. “You didn’t answer.”
“You saved my life last night,” Carver said.
“Hey, don’t blame me. I wasn’t near you.”
Carver explained what happened.
“This fire I saved you from,” Desoto said, “was it an accident?”
“Maybe. It could have been spontaneous combustion. What about Sam Cahill?”
“He was in trouble over in Fort Lauderdale nine years ago. Assault with a deadly weapon, suspended sentence. A domestic quarrel over a woman when her husband showed up unexpectedly. The treacherous paths of love. Cahill tried to bean the guy with a lamp. Relatively minor stuff. There’s nothing else on him in Florida.”
“Nothing? No drugs?”
“Not on the record.” Desoto paused. “You know what the Chinese say, amigo?” he asked, mixing cultures without a qualm. “When someone saves your life, you’re responsible for them, share the blame or credit in whatever they do from then on.”
“You’ve got it backward,” Carver said. “ You share the blame for whatever I do.”
“If that’s the way it is,” Desoto said, “I’m going to hang up and stay away from the phone, in case there’s another fire there.”
“Thanks for the call last night,” Carver said, “and for the rundown on Cahill.”
“Part of what makes my job a joy,” Desoto said. “It’s possible that you might be onto something too big for you to handle, amigo. Something nobody else has noticed.”
“I don’t know yet what I’ve got hold of,” Carver said honestly.
“You’re out there alone, Carver. The first to suspect something. Not healthy, my friend. The early worm gets devoured by the bird. Maybe you should get out of there, count your bullets, and look forward to another day, eh?”
“Not yet. The fire might really have been an accident.”
“You seen the local law yet?”
“No, I’ll get around to that this morning.”
“You worry me.”
“That Chinese thing.”
Desoto snorted. “I got to go, Carver. Crime calls. A busy day shaping up. Folks killing each other at a brisk pace.” Latin music came faintly over the phone; Desoto had turned on his radio, building rhythm and momentum to carry him through the day.
“Thanks again,” Carver said. “Really.”
Desoto hung up without answering. No sentimentalist he.
Carver left to talk to Chief Armont, as promised, locking the door carefully behind him, catching a whiff of charred wood from the direction of his old room.
The morning was hot. And the air was filled with clouds of some kind of tiny insect that had ventured out of the swamp to mate or die or act out some other mysterious rite of nature. The bugs were good at being pests. They flitted abruptly this way and that and had no respect for humans. Carver brushed the irritating insects away as he limped toward his car.
The man watching him from behind the trees at the end of the parking lot didn’t seem to mind the insects at all. Until he was sixteen, he’d endured worse inconveniences every day of his life, indoors and out. Inconveniences that to others had seemed an inexorable grinding that had finally worn them down, destroyed them.
That kind of background gave a man certain hard-won advantages, if he followed the right course and played his own game. A man like that could do things some people would faint just thinking about, because they’d always had a choice; it had never been necessary for them to learn what they could really do on sheer nerve, what they might even come to enjoy. He grinned, tasted and then spat out one of the unpredictable tiny bugs, and started walking through the moss-draped woods toward town.
CHAPTER 14
Solarville’s Police Headquarters had once been somebody’s home. The ordinary problems of life had been shared there, solved or not solved, and probably children had romped and brooded to maturity within its shelter. Now the inside of the low white house had been purged of hominess and rearranged into a booking area and offices. Carver figured Chief Armont’s office was in what had once been the master bedroom. There was what appeared to be a closet door on one wall, on another a window that looked out on a sloping stretch of ground ending at a tall chain-link fence bordering the backyard of the house in the next block.
Behind the fence a large black and tan Doberman pinscher paced like a caged dark spirit, as if contemplating escape for malicious purposes, or daring anyone to come into the yard. Carver wondered why someone whose house backed up to police headquarters thought they needed a watchdog.
“That’s King,” Armont said, noticing Carver looking out the window at the dog. “He looks tough but he’s a marshmallow.” He stared speculatively at Carver. “How about you? Are you really a marshmallow?”
“Do I look tough?”
“Yeah. Even with the cane.”
“You look tough, too. Even without the cane.”
The chief paced around the room for a while, not so unlike a chunky counterpart of the unimaginatively named King. His tie was loosened, and his short-sleeved white shirt had crescents of dampness beneath the arms. He wasn’t compatible with the climate of his town. His thick arms were layered with muscle. As he paced, his stomach paunch preceded him aggressively like the confident prow of a ship. He looked like a square-fisted, solid cop, all right, and Carver suspected that his center was as hard as his exterior.
“That fire last night,” Armont said, “it wasn’t necessarily accidental. You said you were here on business. Anybody in town have a motive to try to barbecue you?”
“I doubt it. I just arrived yesterday.”
Armont stopped his restless roaming, then sat on the edge of his desk and crossed his arms, propping them on the shelf of his stomach. “Why are you here, Mr. Carver?”
Carver told him, mentioning the possible connection between Sam Cahill and Willis Davis, but not between Cahill and drugs. Maybe Cahill wasn’t involved in drug trafficking. Or maybe he was and Chief Armont knew it. Right now, it was a box better left unopened.
“No sign of this Davis around here,” Armont said. “Any stranger draws at least some attention in a town like Solarville. Nobody fitting Davis’s description, vague and average as it is, has set down around here.” He spoke as if he knew everything that went on in and around Solarville. He probably did.
“What can you tell me about Sam Cahill?” Carver asked.
Armont shrugged; the powerful muscles in his arms danced. Carver thought it was a shame he didn’t have one of those tattoos of a hula girl on his forearm, so the girl could wriggle when the muscle did. “He’s been here about six months. Deals in real estate out of a home and office he rents out on Pond Road. Drives a fancy red car. Got himself some money.”
“It there enough real estate dealt around here to make it worth his while?” Carver asked.
“There might be. And he t
alks now and again about building a subdivision outside the north edge of town. He could be serious; ground’s flat out there, and fairly dry.” The arms resting on the stomach paunch unfolded. Armont gripped the desk edge with thick, gnarled fingers. Carver had seen fingers like that on an old major-league catcher. “You musta checked on Cahill,” the chief said. “He got any priors?”
Carver knew Armont could easily run his own check on Cahill; this was a test of cooperation. Carver cooperated. “A nine-year-old assault conviction,” he said. “Never served time. It was a domestic fracas; a husband came home at the wrong time and caused a problem. Cahill tried to solve the problem with a lamp. Used it as a club. The traditional blunt instrument.”
“Humph. He’s been quiet enough here. Maybe he’s grown out of his temper.” Armont’s flat yet curious eyes flicked up and down Carver, considering him. “You can find Cahill most mornings about this time at The Flame restaurant down on South Loop. He’s probably having breakfast there as usual, trying to suck up again to Verna Blaney, one of the waitresses.”
“Was Cahill involved with this waitress?”
“For a while he seemed to be; then whatever was going on cooled off, at least with Verna. It’s the sort of thing folks around here would notice and probably make too much of. Myself, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was nothing between Verna and Cahill but acquaintanceship. Verna’s dad, Ned Blaney, ran airboat rides for tourists through the swamp south of town before he died of a heart attack nine months ago. People wondered what would happen to Verna. She got the job at The Flame, and she’s still living out on her hundred or so godforsaken acres in the ramshackle swamp cabin she and her dad shared before he died. She’s a good woman, maybe went a little touchy and withdrawn after Ned died, then she seemed to right herself.” Armont recrossed his arms; he was done talking, finished with his own gesture of cooperation.
Carver thanked him for the information and started toward the door.
