Burn

by John Lutz

  He moved away from her, out in front of her, where if she opened her eyes and peeked between her fingers she could see him. But she didn’t peek, didn’t change position.

  “You going to be OK?” he asked when her sobbing had subsided to the point where she might be able to answer.

  “I think so,” she said, her voice muted, her face still buried in her hands. She expelled air between her hands in a long hiss. “It’s just that I’m worried about Marla. And I told you, I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

  He laid his card on the sofa arm. “If you hear from her, will you call me?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “It’s the best thing for Marla,” Carver said.

  She began to cry again, her head bowed and her shoulders heaving with increasing violence, her gaunt body riding her out-of-control sobs. Carver glanced at the Russian handgun mounted in its case on the wall and wondered if he should leave her alone.

  Then he decided he was being alarmist. The woman lived with the pain and sorrow of being a rape victim and she hadn’t shot herself. It was unlikely she was in any danger now. He knew he could do nothing for her except perhaps leave. And there was the crucifix, mounted on the wall next to the gun. Her religion would sustain her.

  “Call me if Marla contacts you,” Carver said. “Please,” he added, and went to the door.

  He thought Willa nodded assent, but he couldn’t be sure. She began sobbing louder, still completely out of control, as he stepped into the hall and closed the door behind him.

  Willa had been one possible lead in discovering Marla’s whereabouts. Marla’s parents were another.

  It was 11:00 when Carver turned the Olds into Sleepy Hollow Mobile Home Park and drove down Crane to L Street.

  The Cloys’ car was parked in the driveway beside their clean white mobile home. The black kettle-style barbecue smoker and webbed aluminum chairs on the lawn at the end of the driveway hadn’t moved. Even the beer can still rested in the coiled metal holder stuck in the hard ground next to one of the chairs. Sleepy Hollow was the kind of place where a barbecue might break out at any moment.

  Sybil Cloy answered Carver’s knock and smiled out at him. “Do come in out of the heat, Mr. Carver.”

  Her gray-streaked black hair was combed back off her forehead today, emphasizing her strong bone structure. She was wearing dark slacks and a red stretch shirt, black sandals something like Beth’s white ones, with the soles treaded like tires. She had a trim, surprisingly good figure for a woman approaching sixty.

  Carver climbed the steel steps and moved past her into the trailer’s oak-paneled interior. It was cool inside. The scent of fresh-perked coffee was sharp and strong. From the kitchen came the relentless watery chugging of a dishwasher on wash or rinse. Now and then glass and utensils dinged together in the churning water with a high, bell-like tone.

  Wallace Cloy walked in from the kitchen, holding a mug of coffee in his right hand.

  “Mr. Carver again,” Sybil said, as if Wallace might have difficulty identifying Carver.

  “Finish your puzzle?” Carver asked. The kitchen table, which Wallace had littered with jigsaw puzzle pieces the last time Carver was there, was visible from where he stood and was bare.

  “I never complete those puzzles,” Wallace said. “I work on them until I get fed up, then say the hell with it and put everything back in the box. You can’t do that with most things in life, but you sure as shit can with a jigsaw puzzle.”

  Carver felt a twinge of envy. “That’s a healthy attitude.”

  The Cloys were both standing watching him, waiting patiently for him to get to the point.

  “Your daughter reported that Joel Brant—the man I told you about last time I was here—tried to run her down with his car.”

  “She OK?” Wallace asked.

  “Yes, she wasn’t injured. She reported the incident to the police, then she went into hiding.”

  “Into hiding where?” Sybil asked. Wallace glared at her for asking what he obviously considered to be a stupid question.

  “That’s what I came here to ask you,” Carver said. “Marla left a note saying she was leaving town. Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”

  “If she’s hiding,” Wallace said, “why should we tell you where she might be?”

  “For her own good. Brant’s on the run from the police, maybe searching for Marla. She might need protection.”

  “Orlando,” Sybil blurted out. “She used to live in Orlando, you know. She has friends there.”

  “Do you know anyone she might have gone to for help? Someone who’d give her a place to stay for a while?”

  “No. We never talked much about her life in Orlando. Never talked much about anything the last few years.” Now it was Sybil’s turn to glare at her husband.

  Carver decided to take a chance. “Mrs. Cloy, are you, uh, aware of your daughter’s alternative lifestyle?”

  Several seconds passed.

  “Alternative lifestyle?” she echoed.

  “Get out!” Wallace growled the words.

  “It’s a question that might be important,” Carver said.

  “Get out before I throw this hot coffee on you.” Wallace took a threatening step toward Carver.

  “Stop it!” Sybil yelled.

  “Stop it hell!” Wallace took another step and drew back his arm, holding the mug level. Carver could see steam rising from it.

  Carver set his cane on the plush blue carpet and backed away. Wallace stood motionless, glowering at him from beneath his hedgelike eyebrows. A vein on the side of his neck was protruding and pulsing out his rage like a primitive dark code.

  As Carver made his way outside, Wallace advanced on him, the coffee mug held at his side now. “There was nothing wrong with the way Marla was raised! You understand that?”

  Carver said nothing as he worked his way down the steel steps, then limped out into the front yard.

  Wallace stopped and stood in the doorway, leaning from the waist so only his stocky upper body was outside. “It don’t matter about Sybil’s sister anyway! We raised Marla right!” He tossed the hot coffee in Carver’s direction but down into the ground, where it sloshed onto the grass and steamed even in the heat. Sybil’s arm snaked around Wallace’s waist and gently pulled him back, easing him all the way inside the trailer. The white aluminum door slammed shut.

  Carver walked down the driveway to where his car was parked at the curb.

  He was about to open the door and get in when he looked up and saw Sybil coming toward him. She strode swiftly but gracefully, her handsome face creased with concern. “Mr. Carver!”

  He braced with his forearm on the car’s top and stood waiting. She came to the passenger’s side of the car and stood staring across the expanse of the canvas top at him, as if it were a negotiating table that would give ideas and insults time to cool as they crossed.

  “Please don’t think too harshly of Wallace,” she said. “He’s sensitive about that subject. Just its mention makes him angry. A man his age, and he’s from a small town in the Midwest. I guess you’d have to say he has a simplistic and bigoted view of people with different sex preferences. Alternative lifestyles, as you called them.”

  “I understand,” Carver told her.

  “My sister Grace lives in New York and is active in the gay and lesbian rights movement. That never has set well with Wallace.”

  “So that’s what he meant when he said your sister didn’t matter. Does he think she might have somehow influenced Marla?”

  “Oh, no. Grace and Marla hardly know one another. What Wallace meant was that even if those scientific studies suggesting sexual orientation might be inherited are correct, it doesn’t reflect on us—on him, really—because Marla was adopted. I told you, he’s touchy on the subject.”

  “Does Marla know she was adopted?”

  “Yes. We told her before she graduated high school. She was surprised, but she seemed to get over it. The truth
is, she never had what you’d call a happy childhood. She was so unsettled all the time. And there was always trouble with Wallace, something between them.”

  Sybil paused, catching herself. Whatever had been between Wallace and Marla, she didn’t want to discuss it.

  Carver said, “Mrs. Cloy, are you afraid of Wallace?”

  “No,” she said defensively. “Not as long as we live life his way. If we do that, everything is all right.”

  “Is that why you have little contact with Marla, because Wallace doesn’t want you to see her?”

  She held her hands out and examined the backs of them, as if looking for new liver spots or wrinkles. “Wallace can be a violent man, Mr. Carver.”

  “Was he violent with Marla?”

  “Marla had boyfriends in high school,” Sybil said, as if Carver hadn’t asked the question. “Dates with boys, anyway. Then the business with other girls started, and we—Marla and Wallace, actually—had a terrible falling out.” Sybil looked back at the pristine white trailer like an infidel trying to recall paradise, then at Carver. “I’d like to think someday Wallace will come to his senses and love her like a daughter.”

  Carver smiled. “I’d like to think that, too.” But he didn’t believe it would ever happen.

  Sybil returned his smile and straightened up to stand away from the car.

  She remained standing motionless as he slid behind the steering wheel and drove away.

  Near the main entrance to Sleepy Hollow he pulled the Olds to the curb and sat in the heat with the engine idling. He went over in his mind the newspaper accounts of Portia’s fatal accident. Then he got out Marla’s photograph and stared at it, along with the copy of Portia’s newspaper photo.

  What he suspected was possible, he decided, as he slipped the gearshift lever into drive and accelerated out onto the highway.

  He wasn’t sure what it might mean, but it was possible.

  37

  A FEW MILES OUTSIDE Orlando, at a combination souvenir shop, produce stand, and country and western restaurant called Citrustown, Carver stopped for lunch and to phone Beth.

  While he was waiting for his order of chicken salad sandwich, french fries, and Gallopin’ Grapefruit Freezy, he made his way to the public phone mounted on the wall over by an alcove crammed with a display of souvenirs.

  He punched out the cottage’s number and waited while the phone rang on the other end of the line, eyeing the miniature covered-wagon lamps, realistic plastic fruit, animals constructed of tiny sea shells, and waxed and polished slabs of genuine cypress with electric clocks (quartz movement) inlaid in their centers,

  When Beth answered the phone, he knew better than to ask how she felt.

  Instead he said, “Can you get your friend the Burrow computer hacker to try tracing the origins of Portia Brant and Marla Cloy?”

  “Origins? You mean their childhoods?”

  “Yes. As far back as possible.”

  “All I have to do is ask,” Beth said. “Jeff already has a lot of information on them, from social security numbers to their credit ratings. Backtracking into their childhoods should be relatively easy. But why do you want to do it?”

  “I just came from seeing Marla’s parents. Turns out Marla was adopted.”

  “I don’t see the significance,” Beth said.

  “I’m not sure I do, either, but it’s worth exploring.”

  A young family came in from outside, Mom and Dad and three little preschool-age blond girls. Mom and Dad were sweaty and looked to be in mild shock. The girls looked irritable. One of them grabbed at the hair of another. They all screamed. Mom and Dad seemed not to have heard. Carver hoped they wouldn’t sit near his table.

  Beth must have heard the screaming over the phone. “Where are you, Fred?”

  “Just outside Orlando, about to dine on Florida tourist cuisine.”

  He observed the waitress setting his food on his table, looking around for him. When her gaze slid his way, he waved to her. She smiled and nodded, finished laying out his lunch, then moved away toward the kitchen.

  “I was hard on you this morning,” Beth said. “I’m sorry.”

  “No need.”

  He watched the couple with the loud kids go to a table all the way in the back of the restaurant. No, wait. Only two kids. The third blond girl was sitting at the table behind Carver’s, demanding that the family sit there. Mom and Dad looked at each other, shrugged, rose slowly from their chairs, and the girl at the table behind Carver’s was joined by the rest of the family.

  “Yes, there is a need,” Beth said. “I apologize. I can be a bitch sometimes.”

  “You’ve been consistently swell before today.”

  “Don’t be ironic, Fred. I appreciate what you told me this morning, that no matter what I decide you’ll stand by me, and we’ll be all right together.”

  “I meant it,” Carver said. “Sometimes it takes me a while to get where I need to go. I have a hard time empathizing, putting myself in other people’s skins unless I’m trying to figure them out in relation to my work.”

  “You got there, though,” Beth said. “Most men don’t.”

  One of the blond girls was turned around in her chair and had developed an interest in Carver’s food.

  “Speaking of going places,” he said, “after lunch I’m driving over to talk with Gloria Bream. It’s possible she knows where Brant is.”

  “Maybe he’ll call and tell you himself,” Beth said. “He’s your client. Have you checked your answering machine at the office?”

  “No. I’m going to as soon as I hang up.”

  The blond girl reached for Carver’s sandwich but Mom clutched her wrist, stopping her just in time. Mom looked around, saw Carver on the phone, and smiled at him. Kids, said the smile. What are you gonna do?

  “Want me to call you when Jeff gets the information on Portia and Marla?” Beth asked.

  “I’ll call you,” Carver said. “Or I’ll come by the cottage. I’ll be back sometime late afternoon.”

  “If you get a chance, stop someplace and buy some lemons.”

  He looked over at the mountains of citrus fruit displayed in bins outside the restaurant and told her lemons would be no problem.

  Then he hung up, fed more change into the phone, and called his office. When his machine answered, he punched in the code that would play his messages.

  A man wanting to sell him international mutual funds had called, and Desoto. No one else. Not Joel Brant.

  Carver decided to drop in and see Desoto instead of returning his call. He hung up the phone then limped over to his table. He didn’t give the international funds a thought; he had a difficult enough time figuring out Florida.

  Lunch looked terrible but tasted good. Especially the Gallopin’ Grapefruit Freezy. The little blond girl who wanted his sandwich swiveled around in her chair again and stared at him with eyes like laser beams.

  He ate fast and got out of there, pausing only to buy lemons.

  Desoto looked up from what he was working on and smiled at Carver. He was holding a round magnifying glass with a long handle in his left hand, the kind Sherlock Holmes used. Before him on his desk lay his gold wristwatch and an array of miniature tools. The watch’s back had been removed. In Desoto’s other hand was a tiny screwdriver with a yellow plastic handle.

  “You ever try to replace a watch battery, amigo?” Desoto asked.

  Carver leaned on his cane and shook his head no.

  “You’ve got to remove these two minuscule screws you can hardly even see. Do it with this tiny screwdriver almost too small to pick up with your bare fingers, all the time watching what you’re doing through a magnifying glass.”

  “You better take the watch to a jeweler.”

  “Yeah.” He put down the magnifying glass and carefully moved everything to the side. “I thought it would be something like changing a battery in a flashlight.” Wiping his hands with a white handkerchief he produced from a pocket, he leaned back i
n his chair. His windowsill stereo was silent today, maybe so his concentration on the watch wouldn’t be broken. “I wanted to let you know we got a print from your office that matches the ones on the wrecked Harley and on the trunk lid of Spotto’s rental car.”

  “Now all you need is Achilles Jones.”

  “That’s another reason I wanted to talk to you. A nineteen ninety-four Harley-Davidson Electra Glide Ultra was stolen from in front of a biker bar over on Vermont Avenue late last night. The owner apparently tried to stop the thief.”

  “Apparently?”

  “Nobody saw what happened. The guy who owned the bike went outside to get cigarettes from his saddlebag. When he didn’t come back, one of his friends went to see what was keeping him. Found him dead behind a line of parked motorcycles. His nose and eye area had been smashed in hard enough to drive bone splinters into his brain. The M.E. says the fatal injury required incredible force and was done with a blunt instrument, possibly a huge fist.”

  Carver told Desoto about the motorcycle tire tracks Wade Schultz had pointed out this morning at Brant Estates.

  “I’ll get somebody out there and makes casts of the tread,” Desoto said. “Something else. The dead biker—Rawley Everwatt was his name—was holding a knife with blood on the blade. Must have taken a run at the thief and got some of him. It’s the same type as a blood sample we took off the wrecked motorcycle after its run-in with your car.”

  Carver grinned appreciatively. “You really are good at your work.”

  “So Jones is wounded beyond whatever injuries he received in the accident with your car. But there’s no way to know how bad he’s hurt from either incident. He might have superficial injuries from the accident, and Everwatt might only have managed to nick him with the knife before getting punched out of the world.” Desoto’s tanned features creased to form his handsome white smile, but there was nothing of humor there. “The case builds. When we get this Jones, we’ll have him good.”

  “He’s too large to go unnoticed forever,” Carver said.