Burn

by John Lutz

  “More like an obsession. Do you know how they catch monkeys in Africa?”

  Carver said that he didn’t.

  “They cut round holes in sheets of plywood just large enough for the monkeys to work their hands through to grab coconuts.” Desoto accompanied this information with appropriate hand motions, scrunching his fingers together with a forward, twisting motion. “They can’t remove their hands as long as they hold the coconuts, and the monkeys are too obsessed with the coconuts to release them.”

  “Catching monkeys in Africa, huh? That sounds like something you saw in one of those late-night old movies you watch.”

  “Well, maybe it was India. The point is, obsession can be dangerous. You’re involved with people who might be out to kill each other, for all you know. Maybe you should let this one play out by itself, without your help.”

  Carver said, “What about Marla Cloy?”

  Desoto turned his hands palms up in a gesture of hopelessness and did a thing with his eyebrows to show he’d at least tried to save Carver from himself. “She lived in an apartment in the 4400 block of Graystone Avenue until about three months ago, then moved to an apartment on Bailock where she stayed briefly before moving to Del Moray. She doesn’t have a police record, and the neighbors described her as a quiet woman. Her only family’s her mother and father. They live in Sleepy Hollow, a trailer court outside of town.”

  “What do you know about them?”

  “Not much. He’s a retired railroad worker. That’s all I managed to learn. I figured it was the daughter you were interested in.”

  Carver nodded. “The name Joel Brant pop up at all?”

  “No. But then it might not, when a policeman’s asking questions.” Desoto absently polished his pinkie ring on the arm of his jacket, four quick, short swishes to buff it to a brilliant-enough shine to send a pattern of light dancing over the papers on his desk. “There is one notable thing in her background, amigo. She moved from her apartment on Graystone because it was damaged when the building burned. Three of the tenants died. Arson squad said the fire might have been set deliberately, but they could never prove it. They also said it might have been the flame from a hot water heater igniting gasoline fumes from a nearby can where paintbrushes were being soaked to clean.”

  “Who’d be dumb enough to leave a can of gasoline near a hot water heater?”

  “No one who’d admit it, apparently.”

  “Did you get the names of the tenants who died?”

  “Of course.” Desoto lifted a green file folder from his desk. “It’s all here for you, my friend. If I were you, I think I’d nose around about the fire. Three deaths such a short time ago, and the prospect of death seems to be dogging Marla Cloy again. It was probably coincidence, an accident. . . but we don’t believe in those things as much as some people, do we?”

  “I’m not sure I believe in them at all,” Carver said. He leaned on his cane and stood up.

  Desoto handed him the file folder. “How’s Beth?”

  “Why?” Carver asked without thinking, realizing too late the brusqueness of his reply. But because of her background, her previous marriage to a drug dealer, Desoto had his reservations about Beth and hardly ever inquired about her.

  Desoto appeared puzzled, then laughed. “I was only making conversation. You live with the woman, so I thought I’d ask about her. Is there a reason I shouldn’t have?”

  “No. And she’s fine. I’ll tell her you asked,”

  “Is she helping you on this Marla Cloy thing?”

  “Yeah, she sees a story in it for Burrow.”

  “How does she figure it?”

  “She thinks Marla Cloy is telling the truth about being stalked. Beth views her as another female victim of male oppression.”

  “Politically correct,” Desoto observed, “and possibly correct all the way down the line. When you eliminate the improbable, whatever’s left, however probable, must be the answer.”

  “From the same movie as the monkeys and coconuts, I’ll bet.”

  “Yes, the same Amazon adventure. What it means is that what you’re mixed up in could be precisely as it appears, a woman being stalked by a psycho with a deadly compulsion, and Beth’s sized it up accurately.”

  “Maybe she’ll change her mind,” Carver said.

  “Tell her to be careful. I mean, a fire and three dead people.” Desoto languidly waved a hand, flashing a gold cuff link. “Who knows what might happen?”

  Desoto had never before asked him to urge Beth to be careful. It struck Carver as odd that he’d worry so about Beth, a woman he accepted only grudgingly because she was Carver’s lover. It was eerie. Desoto had instincts like sensitive radar, especially when women were involved. He seemed somehow to know something, to sense that Beth needed particular protection and care.

  Strangely enough, that even more than the doctor’s diagnosis brought home to Carver the unalterable and monumental fact of Beth’s pregnancy.

  “You all right, amigo?”

  “Sure. Heat’s been getting to me, is all.”

  Carver held up the file folder and thanked Desoto, then made for the door.

  “You take care,” Desoto said behind him in a concerned voice. “This kind of heat, you’ve got to baby yourself.”

  12

  CARVER ORDERED A HAMBURGER and a draft Budweiser for lunch in a restaurant on Robinson Street and sat in a booth by the window, examining the contents of the file Desoto had given him. It was cool in the restaurant, in pleasant contrast to the sunbaked street and sweltering traffic on the other side of the window. The exhaust fumes of passing cars rose in shimmers of refracted light, beautiful even as they slowly poisoned the air. A heavyset man in a sweat-stained blue T-shirt, wearing a bandana around his neck, trudged past outside and glanced in at Carver’s beer mug with an expression of pure longing. Carver finished his hamburger, drained the contents of the mug, and ordered another beer.

  When the second full and frosty mug was placed before him, he took a sip, then bent over the opened file with increased concentration.

  Marla Cloy’s present address was there, as well as her previous addresses in Orlando. The license number of her 1987 Toyota Corolla was listed. The extent of her criminality was that she’d pled guilty and paid a fine for a speeding ticket last year. Bonnie Parker she wasn’t.

  Her parents’ address was in the file. Carver planned on talking to them. But first he’d check out Marla’s address on Graystone, the apartment building that, according to the file, had suffered a serious fire several months ago that resulted in the deaths of three tenants. He lifted a page and found the names of the victims: Rita and David Kern, a married couple, and a woman named Gail Rogers.

  The later address on Bailock might provide some information, though Marla had stayed there only a week before relocating to Del Moray. It was the Graystone address, and the fire, that Carver’s gut told him might yield the most insight.

  He closed the file folder, finished his beer, then left a ten- and a five-dollar bill on the table to cover lunch.

  As he pushed open the restaurant’s thick oak door, humid heat closed in and enveloped him like warm water. Remembering the way the guy in the blue shirt and bandana had gazed longingly at his cold beer, he limped reluctantly outside. All the way to where the Olds was parked, he could feel heat from the sidewalk radiating through the thin soles of his moccasins, softening the leather so that he was aware of even small objects and imperfections in the concrete.

  The Graystone Avenue apartment building showed no sign of having been burned. It was a three-story, beige brick structure with three small, obviously nonfunctional, decorative dormers spaced evenly on its roof. The dormers’ windows were mere framed wooden panels painted sky blue with white horizontal streaks, as if they were reflecting light. The building’s real windows were flanked by narrow black shutters that were no more functional than the dormers. The door to the vestibule was tinted glass and topped by a fan-shaped transom with b
lack spokes. A thick, jagged crack that obviously had been recently tuck-pointed ran like a lightning streak from just beneath one of the building’s front windows down the foundation to disappear behind low-lying thick shrubbery. Carver thought it might be evidence of the fire; he’d seen brick walls wave, crack, and crumble in the intense heat of a major fire. It was an old building, but well kept, in a block of similar buildings not so well maintained. Most of the small front lawns needed mowing and were browned by the sun. Though the lawn in front of Marla’s previous address had brown patches, it was mowed and trimmed, and there was an oleander tree in the front yard that had been neatly pruned.

  Carver left the Olds unlocked, as he always did in questionable neighborhoods, so car thieves wouldn’t slash the canvas top to gain access, which guaranteed a major expense if the vehicle was later recovered. He waited for a dusty black pickup truck to rattle and rumble its way down Graystone, then he crossed the street and passed through the dappled light beneath the oleander tree and approached the door with the fan-shaped transom.

  The vestibule was mostly pink marble with a gray vein, crisscrossed with fine cracks that suggested antiquity. According to Desoto, Marla Cloy had lived in apartment 3-B. Carver checked the names above the mailboxes and saw that a D. Thatcher lived there now.

  The building didn’t have an elevator. Steel stairs, painted beige, that probably had replaced the original wood stairs, angled upward toward brilliant light streaming through a window on an upper-floor landing.

  As he set his cane’s tip and began climbing, Carver decided to leave D. Thatcher for last. It was the neighboring apartments that interested him most.

  He was in excellent physical condition except for his permanently locked left knee. But the higher he climbed, the more stifling the building became. Ascending toward the pure, blinding light made going up the stairs seem like a near-death experience. He hoped it wasn’t.

  By the time he reached the third floor, he was slightly short of breath and perspiring.

  After waiting a minute until he’d cooled down, he made his way to apartment 3-C, directly across the hall from Marla Cloy’s old apartment.

  He knocked, got no answer, and moved across the hall to 3-A. He could hear a radio or TV playing inside, so he rapped loudly with the crook of his cane.

  The muffled music and voices inside were suddenly quiet, as if Carver had surprised transgressors at play.

  The door opened, the smell of onions cooking emerged, and a stooped, gray-haired woman in her sixties cocked her head and stared inquisitively at Carver.

  “I’m looking for Marla Cloy,” he said. “I was told she lived at this address, but I’m not sure which apartment’s hers.”

  “Her name downstairs on the mailboxes?” the woman asked.

  “Couldn’t find it.”

  “Then you probably got the wrong address. I couldn’t help you much, anyways. Only lived here two months. But I never heard of any Norma Cloy.”

  “Marla,” Carver corrected, and apologized for disturbing her.

  He got similar results from the occupants of 3-D and 3-G. Apparently the building had a rapid tenant turnover rate. Not unusual in this kind of neighborhood.

  When he knocked on the door to 3-B, Marla’s old apartment, he heard movement inside almost immediately.

  He’d expected D. Thatcher to be a woman, using her initial to disguise her gender for safety’s sake. But the door was opened by a tall, blond man wearing pleated gray slacks and a tight blue pullover shirt that showed off his weightlifter’s build.

  He stood with his feet spread wide and his arms at his sides, hands turned palms backward, elbows crooked so they rode far out from his waist. It was the way people stood underwater.

  When Carver asked him about Marla Cloy, he nodded. “Sure, I remember Marla. I used to talk to her now and then down in the laundry room. I wash stuff pretty often because I work out regularly. She was always down there doing a load, too. Must be one clean woman.”

  “She lived in this apartment, didn’t she?”

  “Right. There was a fire about three months ago. Burned hell outa this end of the building. She moved out, and when the place got fixed up, I gave up my old apartment on the second floor and moved in here. Another thirty a month in rent, but it’s worth it. Everything’s practically brand-new.”

  It occurred to Carver why the other third-floor tenants he’d talked to hadn’t lived at the address very long. They’d all moved into newly renovated apartments after the fire. “Was anybody hurt?”

  “Yeah. Three people died. It was a big fire, in the papers, on TV news. The apartments on this floor all had smoke damage, and a couple of ’em were totaled.”

  “What about this one?”

  “Mostly smoke damage, but the kitchen was wiped out. The fire started in the basement and raced up the ductwork to the apartment right beneath this one. Then it spread through the rest of the place. Not much damage on the second floor other than to that apartment, but the flames came right up the ducts and between the walls and did a job on this floor. Firemen said that’s not unusual.”

  “Who lived in the first-floor apartment directly above where the fire started?”

  “Guy named Bill Swarthmore. People right across the hall, the Kerns, died in their sleep from smoke inhalation. Woman next to them, Gail Rogers, was found dead right inside her door. They say she suffocated, too.”

  “That’s a shame. But Swarthmore survived?”

  “Yeah. He was in Colorado skiing, or he probably would have died just like the others.”

  “Lucky break. Do they know how the fire started?”

  “Not exactly. Last word I heard on it was somebody left some paintbrushes soaking in a can of thinner or gasoline, and it caught fire somehow.”

  “Do you know where I can find Marla Cloy now?” Carver asked, fishing.

  “Nope. She kept pretty much to herself. Some kinda writer, is what she said she was. You know how they are. Good-looking gal, though, especially when she dressed up. I tried to date her a few times, but she always spun me right around. She was the smile-and-hello type, but didn’t have any close friends I know of in the building. Well, wait a minute. She was friendly with Gail Rogers, I think, what with Gail living right across the hall. But that’s not much help to you, I guess, Gail being dead.”

  “Did you know her at all?”

  “Gail? Not really. Just to say hello to. I saw her and Marla walking together downtown once, so I’m sure they were friends.”

  “What kind of reputation did Gail Rogers have?”

  “Reputation? Heck, I don’t know. Never heard anything bad about her.” Thatcher absently adjusted a shirtsleeve, creating ripples in the tight musculature of his arm. Carver figured he worked out a lot, and probably with a fanatic’s dedication.

  “Did you ever try to date her?”

  Thatcher looked at him curiously, letting him know he was getting too personal. “Gail wasn’t my type. Kinda plain. Seemed nice enough, though. Why do you ask?”

  “If I can’t find Marla Cloy any other way, I thought maybe Gail Rogers’s friends or family might know where she is.”

  “Could be, but I don’t know how you’d get in touch with them.”

  “During the brief contact you had with Marla, did you notice anything unusual in the way she behaved?”

  “Can’t say I did. She was standoffish, but not like she was a snob or anything like that. Distant, is all. She acted like a lady who’d maybe been hurt and was healing inside, in her mind.”

  “Hurt how?”

  “That I couldn’t tell you. I might even be wrong about it.”

  A woman’s impatient voice called, “Don? Honey?” from somewhere inside the apartment. Thatcher scratched his flat stomach beneath his taut shirt and smiled at Carver. A conspiratorial, us-men-of-the-world kind of smile.

  “I’m interrupting you,” Carver said.

  “Sorta.”

  He thanked Thatcher for talking with him, then
gave him his card and asked him to call if he thought of anything else.

  “Hey, you’re a confidential investigator,” Thatcher said, squinting at the card. “That’s neat. A private eye.”

  “Shamus,” Carver said with a smile. “But Marla’s not in any kind of trouble.”

  “She inherit money or something?”

  Why did they always ask that? “No,” Carver said, “people who inherit money are usually easy to find.”

  “Don!” The voice was almost desperate.

  Thatcher shrugged his massive shoulders and shook his head in apology for having to end the conversation.

  Carver nodded wisely, letting him know he understood how women were with a handsome guy like Thatcher, and Thatcher closed the door—leaving Carver leaning on his cane and wondering about the woman who did her wash often and acted as if she’d been hurt.

  13

  TWO BLOCKS AWAY from the Graystone apartment building, Carver found a drive-up public phone on the corner of a service station lot. He managed to maneuver the Olds close enough to reach the key pad through the open window without getting out of the car, then punched out the number of the beach cottage.

  Beth was there, as he’d hoped, probably working on a Burrow assignment.

  “How do you feel?” he asked, when she’d answered the phone.

  “Pregnant.”

  “Still?”

  “Why did you call, Fred?” She obviously wasn’t amused by his pass at humor.

  “I’ve just come from Marla Cloy’s old apartment building in Orlando.” He told her what he’d found out.

  “She sounds like a more or less normal woman,” Beth said.

  “You wanted to be a part of the investigation. Can you keep an eye on her while I check out things here in Orlando? I’m pushing my luck tailing her close every day; she’s bound to notice I’m in the background too often for coincidence.”

  “Okay, I’ll carry the ball for a while. It’ll give her another car and another face to look at if she’s peeking from the corner of her eye. Think she’s home now?”