Burn

by John Lutz

  Carver fixed him with a firm, unreceptive look and clomped with his cane across the plank floor to where a male bartender with spiked brown hair and a painted-on black handlebar mustache was working a pencil on a clipboard.

  Carver sat on a stool near him and waited. He noticed that the rest-room doors in Lari’s had unmistakable male and female symbols on them. Beneath the symbol with the skirt, “Womyn” was scrawled in what looked like lipstick. There was a flurry of amplified sound from the stage, a drum roll and a shrieking guitar slide, then silence.

  “Be with you in a minute,” the bartender said in what might have been a feminine voice. Carver looked more carefully and decided he couldn’t be sure of the bartender’s gender. “We’re gonna be mighty busy in about an hour, and I gotta make sure we can handle the crowd.”

  “Do you usually get busy around seven o’clock in here?” Carver asked.

  “Yeah, but it’s gonna be super crowded tonight. It’s that band,” He motioned toward the women setting up to play. “The Wolverines. They’re great and they’re on the way up and they draw big.”

  The electric guitar ploiiinged as one of the Wolverines fine-tuned her instrument. They favored the grunge look and were all tall, gaunt, and attractive, with straight, long blond hair. They might have been sisters from Sweden with the same consumptive disease.

  Carver waited until the bartender was finished tallying figures on the paper clipped to his board, then laid the photos of Marla, Portia, and Willa on the bar. “I’m looking for my sister Marla,” he said. “She been in lately?”

  The bartender glanced at the photos, then looked at him with savvy gray eyes, a young man or woman who recognized lies by instinct as well as by experience.

  On the other hand, considering Lari’s reputation, and the fact that the bartender didn’t know who Carver was or what he represented, cooperation might be the wisest course. At least, cooperation within a certain range.

  “She’s not my sister, actually,” Carver admitted. “But she’s a friend and I mean her no harm, and I’d like to find out if she came in here with either of these other women.”

  “Marla’s moved out of town,” the bartender said. “To Miami, I think.”

  Uh-huh. “What about the other women?”

  “Don’t know them,” the bartender said. “And I haven’t seen Marla for a long time. Every now and then she and Gail used to come in here and drink and dance.”

  Carver was silent for a few seconds while he put it together. “Gail Rogers?”

  “Sure. If you knew Marla, I figured you had to know Gail.”

  “Yeah. It was rough, Gail dying in the fire.”

  The bartender was studying the clipboard again. “It was a sad thing. Marla seemed to go a little crazy after Gail died.”

  Ploiiing! went the guitar again, this time accompanied by a light tap on the drums. “Marla ever spend time in here with anyone other than Gail?” Carver asked.

  “A few times. There was a guy she used to come in with now and then. After Gail’s death.”

  “Then Marla goes both ways?”

  “Both ways?”

  “Is she bisexual?”

  Wrong question, coming from a guy who was supposed to know Marla. The bartender was staring at him again with those savvy gray eyes. The outrageous mustache made him or her look like a riverboat gambler.

  “You said she spent time in here with a man,” Carver explained.

  “We all spend time in here together, you might say. There’s lots of music, laughter. You should drop by some night.” There was amusement in the gray gaze now. The game had ended and mental doors had closed.

  Carver smiled. “I might if I feel like dancing,” he said, setting the tip of his cane on the floor and swiveling down off the stool.

  As he made his way to the door, the Wolverine with the guitar played a short, experimental riff that trailed away to a feedback whine. The end Wanderbeast at the bar caught his eye in the mirror behind the shelved liquor bottles but this time didn’t change expression.

  That made Carver feel better, but he wasn’t sure why.

  29

  “HOW’S YOUR APPETITE?” he asked.

  Carver and Beth were having dinner at the Happy Lobster, sitting next to the long, curved window and looking out at the failing light that merged the Atlantic with the sky at the horizon.

  “Voracious,” she said. She was wearing a yellow dress cut low enough to display generous cleavage and had her hair styled something like Tina Turner’s in a sultry MTV video. The effect wasn’t lost on Carver. “I’m sick sometimes in the mornings,” she said, “but by the time noon rolls around, I’m OK. In fact, physically I’ve never felt healthier.”

  “Nature’s way of preparing you and your offspring for the ordeal of pregnancy and birth,” Carver said.

  She smiled. “You been watching Wild Kingdom, Fred?”

  He supposed he had sounded as if he were talking about her and their child being ready as soon as possible to move on with the herd. There were predators out there. “Have you given it more thought?” he asked.

  “I guess by ‘it’ you mean the baby.”

  He sipped his martini and waited.

  “I’ve thought a lot about our predicament,” she said. He didn’t like her describing it as a predicament. “I still haven’t made up my mind. It isn’t easy.” She’d ordered a martini, too, then remembered her condition and changed it to iced tea. She added sugar to the tea and stirred, gazing at the miniature whirlpool she was creating as she said, “Either way I come down on this, Fred, are we gonna be OK? The two of us?”

  “I think so,” he said, but he wasn’t so sure. It was something he hadn’t allowed himself to consider, and something he didn’t want to talk about. The conversation was making him uncomfortable; he felt the tug of strong currents and he feared the rocks. He told Beth about showing the photographs at lesbian bars.

  “It appears now that Marla may have had an affair with her neighbor, Gail Rogers,” he concluded.

  Beth stared out the window at the blue-gray vastness. “Do you suspect Marla had something to do with the fire in the apartment building that killed Gail?”

  “I don’t know what to suspect. Marla’s still an enigma. That’s the problem. The way I saw her behave with Willa, then the bartender at Lari’s saying she’d frequented the place with Gail Rogers, pretty well substantiates that she’s a lesbian, or possibly bisexual. But I don’t know what it means; or if it’s relevant to her charges of harassment. I don’t even know if her sexual orientation makes it less or more likely that she’d concoct a story or have delusions about a man she doesn’t even know stalking her.”

  “You can’t be sure she and Joel Brant don’t know each other in some way you haven’t discovered.”

  “True. But I keep uncovering information, and none of it suggests any previous connection between the two. I can’t piece together the facts in any meaningful way.”

  She tested her tea, then added more sugar. “Maybe there is no meaningful way to piece them together,” she said.

  “No, I don’t accept that.”

  “Oh, I know. You can’t accept it. Because you can’t accept that it’s a random world out there. And you won’t change, Fred. In twenty or thirty years you’ll be the old guy sitting in a corner of the retirement home trying to figure out Rubik’s Cube.”

  He thought he knew where she was going. “If you’re suggesting I’m not good parent material and time’s running short, maybe you’re right.”

  “No, I didn’t mean that at all.”

  He didn’t believe her. Her pregnancy, in the first trimester, was tearing at their relationship already, and he felt helpless to do anything about it.

  “While you were cruising alternative-lifestyle bars,” she said, “I busied myself researching Portia Brant.”

  Carver used his red plastic sword to spear the olive in his martini.

  “I talked to a lot of people about her,” Beth went on, �
�from sorority sisters to charity contacts. Almost everyone remarked on how beautiful she was.”

  “No surprise there.” He popped the olive into his mouth and chewed.

  “Portia had plenty of male friends and admirers, and a college love affair with a star basketball player who died in his senior year of heart failure stemming from heroin use. There were other problems no one seemed willing to talk about. Two of her college friends said it was impossible for Portia to have children because of what might have been a botched abortion.”

  “The basketball player’s child?”

  “No one could say for sure. Portia went on to earn her degree in economics, then wandered through Europe for a while. When she returned to the States, she went to work at Eaton and Booth in Atlanta. They’re a financial consulting and money management firm. Five years ago, Eaton and Booth were defendants in an account-churning lawsuit. They won, but legal fees and unfavorable publicity put them out of business, leaving Portia unemployed. About that time she met and married Joel Brant, and they moved to Florida. Joel somewhat regretted that they could never have children, but acquaintances say they seemed happy together. They were considering adopting and had visited an agency just before the accident. Joel stayed busy building a successful business while she became involved in fund-raising for charities.”

  “That was mentioned in her obituary, but not what kind of charities.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be a pattern there. I’m not questioning her motives, but it seemed to be mostly a social thing for her. She worked for everything from AIDS research to saving the manatee.”

  “Balm for a guilty conscience, maybe.”

  “Could be. Whatever her motives, we oughta be grateful for people like her. There was some hint that she might have been a heavy drinker. Not in public, though. A secret alcoholic, like more than a few beautiful women who only seem to have the world by the ass.”

  Carver smiled at her, reaching across the table to touch the back of her hand. “You’re my uncontested authority on beautiful women.”

  “Martini’s getting to you, Fred. Next you’ll be wanting to skip dinner.”

  “A possibility.”

  “Fraid not tonight. Food’s about the extent of my physical craving lately. I’ve been famished all day.”

  The waiter arrived with steaming plates. Trout amandine for Carver, and a heaping and jumbled platter of boiled crab legs for Beth. The waiter asked Carver if he wanted another martini. Carver observed Beth already busy devouring her food and said that no, iced tea would be better.

  When the waiter had gone, Carver said, “I’ve been replaced by crab legs.”

  “It would be going too far to say that,” she assured him as she chewed.

  When the waiter returned with the tea, Beth reminded him that he owed her a baked potato.

  After dinner and coffee, they drove back to the cottage and found a message from Joel Brant on the answering machine. He wanted Carver to call him as soon as possible, and he sounded upset.

  “I’ve gotten a couple of phone calls,” he said when Carver contacted him. “I say hello and nobody answers. I can hear somebody breathing on the line, then they hang up.”

  “How many calls?” Carver asked, trying to digest this new piece of information. “And when did you receive them?”

  “One this afternoon on my car phone. Two early this evening in my condo, only about an hour apart.”

  “Doesn’t seem like Marla’s style,” Carver said. “She’d be more likely to claim you’ve been calling her.”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling myself. And wondering who else it could be. Do the police ever do something like that? Phone a suspect?”

  Carver was surprised. “Why do you ask that?”

  “I went with my attorney this afternoon to try to convince the police that I’m the one being harassed. It didn’t help. That Lieutenant McGregor is a horrible human being.”

  “Everyone who knows him would agree. I can’t see him badgering you with anonymous phone calls, though. It takes the fun out of it for him if his victims don’t know he’s responsible for their misery,”

  “He seems capable of anything. He told my attorney we were wasting his time, that he doesn’t care who’s stalking who, and that his job begins when one of the players dies. My lawyer’s so pissed off he’s going to complain to McGregor’s superiors and write the news media.”

  “It won’t help,” Carver said. “McGregor will deny the conversation. He’s better at covering his backside than anyone you’ll ever meet. It’s his way of life. What did your lawyer tell you when he calmed down?”

  “He advised me to leave the state, or at least the city, for a while. But I can’t do that—I’ve got my business to run, and this would be a devastating time to ignore it. Anyway, that might not solve anything with Marla Cloy, only delay it. I haven’t felt so trapped since Portia died. I’ve got a psychotic killer after me, and she’s the one everybody believes.”

  “Not everybody.”

  “Listen, Carver, can you talk to McGregor?”

  “I have talked to him. He threatened to charge me as your accomplice after you kill Marla.”

  “God! I tell you, I’m getting desperate!” He sure sounded desperate. “I’m convinced that woman’s got me set up and might kill me at any time under circumstances that make it appear to be self-defense. Maybe then the police will question her more extensively and realize she’s crazy, but by then it’ll be too late.”

  “It doesn’t have to come to that. Have you ever heard of a woman named Gail Rogers?”

  “No.”

  “What about Achilles Jones?”

  “Hercules, did you say?”

  “No. Achilles. He of the vulnerable heel.”

  “Only in high school literature class. Why do you ask?”

  “It doesn’t matter. This whole business is tangled with wires that don’t connect.”

  “What doesn’t connect are the wires in Marla Cloy’s head. She’s deranged and dangerous, and I’m her target.”

  “There seems to be nothing in the past to link you and Marla,” Carver said, “but what about Marla and your late wife?”

  “Portia?” Brant was incredulous, but Carver had seen a lot of incredulous husbands. “Believe me, this can’t have anything to do with Portia.”

  “Are you sure you never heard her mention Marla’s name? Or any of the other names that have come up during the past week?”

  “I’m sure. Portia’s got nothing to do with this. If you knew her, you’d understand that. Women like Portia and Marla Cloy have absolutely nothing in common. It’s impossible.”

  Carver didn’t differ with him. He knew Brant wouldn’t be receptive to dissent. Dead wives often attained sainthood status as time wore the rough spots from memory.

  “I’ll talk to a friend with the Orlando police,” he said. “He has no jurisdiction in this instance, but he might know someone on a state level who can help.”

  “Help how?” Brant asked.

  “Maybe put some pressure on McGregor to act more like a public servant.”

  “McGregor seems too much like a public parasite for that to work.”

  Carver agreed with that assessment but didn’t say so. He assured Brant he’d keep working on Marla Cloy, and that often seemingly unrelated pieces of information fell into place to reveal pattern and motive.

  “Those kinds of neat explanations only happen in movies and mystery novels, not in real life,” Brant said dismally before hanging up.

  Carver thought he sounded remarkably like Beth, who was standing leaning on the open refrigerator door, gazing longingly at a shelf containing only beer, pickles, and yogurt.

  Carver silently bet on the pickles and won.

  30

  “YOU KNOW THE PROBLEM,” Desoto said when Carver met him for lunch the next day in Orlando. “McGregor’s right when he says there’s a limit to what he can do to prevent stalking from becoming assault or murder. It’s somethi
ng law enforcement hasn’t quite figured out how to deal with yet.” He talked as if it were an administrative problem and not life or death.

  They were in Ruggeri’s, an Italian restaurant on Washington, not far from Church Street Station. It was small and cool, with red carpeting, lots of dark wood, and more booths than tables. It lent itself to private conversations and was a place where deals were struck over the pasta. Carver and Desoto were in a booth next to a window, but it was stained glass and they could see only vague, shadowy forms of passersby. “What I had in mind,” Carver said, “was possibly familiarizing someone with the situation who might put pressure on McGregor by at least making him aware he’s being watched.”

  Desoto paused in artfully coiling spaghetti strands around his fork. “But what exactly is the situation? Is it Marla Cloy trying to set up Brant for whatever action, for whatever reason? Or is it a simple case of a closet psychopath stalking a defenseless woman?”

  “I wish I knew for sure,” Carver said. He sipped his draft Budweiser. He’d ordered only a stuffed mushroom appetizer and a side salad and was finished eating. The pungent aroma of spices and cooked garlic in Rugerri’s was almost enough by itself to satisfy his hunger. He watched Desoto fork in spaghetti and wondered how he stayed in such excellent physical condition. Desoto dined freely on sumptuous main dishes, with copious quantities of wine and rich desserts, and as far as Carver knew didn’t exercise beyond vigorously brushing lint from his elegant clothes.