Burn

by John Lutz

  Every window in the house was illuminated, making it look oddly like a child’s doll house lit by a single bulb. Flames were visible only on the driveway side. They licked at the overhang and roof shingles. One of the drooping canvas awnings was ablaze. Marla’s old Toyota was parked in the drive, glowing embers scattered over its roof and hood and twinkling like Christmas decorations.

  Marla must be inside, maybe still alive. Carver tried the front door and found it unlocked. Its tarnished brass doorknob was warm, but not painful to touch. He opened the door and limped inside, crouching awkwardly so he could get beneath the swirling black smoke that pressed against the ceiling and halfway down the walls. He knew the thick layer of smoke was moving lower; he didn’t have much time. Heat grabbed at his right side with a pain like the brutal pinch of flesh. His bare right arm and the right side of his neck felt as if hot coals were being pressed to them. He saw flames glaring at him through the smoke.

  Marla was easy enough to find.

  So was Joel Brant.

  They were lying side by side on the living room floor. Both looked dead, but Carver couldn’t be sure. Marla was on her back, and Brant was curled on his side as if napping, his head cradled in the crook of his arm.

  Carver got down on his hands and his good knee, his stiff leg trailing behind him, and crawled over to Marla. When he was a few feet from her, he stopped. Her eyes were open and not seeing anything. Brant’s eyes were open, too. He seemed to be staring directly at Marla, but he wasn’t.

  The black pall was swirling lower, and Carver’s breath rasped as he drew in smoke-tainted air that felt hot inside his chest. He could hear flames crackling, and the heat was searing. He reached out a hand to grab Brant’s wrist, imagining with some strange reflexive responsibility to a client that he might be able to drag the body outside and save it from the fire. But he saw the hair on his own forearm sizzle and blacken, and he withdrew his hand and began crawling toward the door.

  Something rolled painfully between his left palm and the floor, almost causing him to fold over onto his side. Then he realized it was his cane. He jammed its tip against the floor and tried to stand and make better time, but the air was much hotter even a few feet above the floor, the smoke so dense he began gagging and coughing immediately and had to drop back down. Holding the cane out in front of him, he dragged himself on his elbows and good knee toward where he thought the door must be, knowing that if he lost direction in the smoke, he was dead.

  The cane jerked around in his hand, and at first he thought someone was trying to snatch it away from him. Achilles Jones, somehow still alive! Like in one of those protracted Hollywood thriller endings when the villain is presumed dead but keeps getting back up.

  Then a voice said, “Come on! This way, goddamnit!”

  Carver laced his fingers and held tight to the crook of the cane with both hands as a powerful force drew him forward. Hands clutched his shirt, then his upper arms, and he let himself be dragged outside. One of his moccasins came off, then the other.

  He rolled onto his back, staring up at the stars and trying to suck in the sweet nectar of clear night air. But he couldn’t seem to get any. He coughed three times, then he began to choke.

  Something was placed over his mouth and nose. A figure in a yellow slicker was bending over him. “Easy now! Easy, bub! Breath in easy. ...”

  The tightness in Carver’s throat slackened, and he began drawing cool oxygen into his lungs through the mask held by the firefighter staring calmly down at him with the dark, sad eyes of a martyr. More figures in yellow slickers were milling around him, and he saw streams of water being played over the fire. Several additional pieces of firefighting equipment had arrived, along with police cars. Marla’s neighbors on Jacaranda Lane were clustered on the other side of the street, held back by a uniformed cop with his arms spread wide. The way Jones had spread his arms when he’d come at Carver for the kill.

  “He’s yours,” the firefighter who’d been holding Carver’s oxygen mask in place said. Then he stood up and passed from sight.

  White-clad paramedics were over Carver now, working him onto a gurney. He tried to sit up and tell them he could walk, but they gently eased him back down. “This yours?” one of them asked, holding the cane out where he could see it while the other fastened the oxygen mask’s strap behind his head. He nodded, and the paramedic placed the cane next to him on the gurney, beneath one of the straps that were now holding Carver fast, his arms at his sides. He felt himself levitating then, and being rolled feet first across the hard ground toward where bright lights were flashing red, blue, yellow . . .

  Ambulance doors swung open wide, as if waiting to embrace him. The gurney jerked and tilted a few degrees as its wheels were folded up so it could become a simple stretcher again and be slid inside. Weakness rushed over Carver like a dark wave, and the ambulance seemed to swoop and whirl crazily, making him dizzy.

  The hell with it, he thought. He closed his eyes and concentrated on drawing in sweet, sweet oxygen. He was addicted. It was impossible to get enough of it. Fire, earth, water . . . Didn’t precious air have to be in there somewhere?

  The hell with it, he thought again, hearing the ambulance doors slam shut somewhere off in the distance. He’d puzzle it all out later.

  Breathing in.

  Breathing out.

  That was all that mattered now.

  40

  CARVER SAT IN THE hard oak chair in McGregor’s office. It had been two days since the fire. His injured ribs were wrapped again, though this time not in a support but with a thousand yards of flesh-colored Ace elastic bandage fastened to itself with metal clips.

  A multiline phone chirped and flashed yellow lights on McGregor’s desk, but he ignored it and the calls were answered elsewhere.

  Two detectives Carver had noticed when he’d walked past the booking area were joking and laughing loudly out in the hall. McGregor unwound from his desk chair, strode to the door, slammed it hard, then stalked back behind his desk and sat down.

  The laughing and joking got softer then ceased altogether.

  McGregor absently inserted a forefinger in his ear, rotated it for what seemed a full minute, then wiped the finger on his shirtsleeve. In the hot, confining office, his body odor was probably enough by itself to make a suspect confess.

  “The deal was that we share information,” Carver reminded him.

  McGregor grinned and probed the gap between his teeth with his tongue. “Deal? Deals with shitheads like you don’t count. They’re like putting poison out for roaches. On the other hand, if I wasn’t to tell you how this mess of yours wound up, you’d be sniffing around like a cur smells a bitch in heat, being a pest all the longer.”

  “You have a poetic way of putting things.”

  “Well, it ain’t gonna rhyme, but here it is: Marla was shacked up in Orlando with a guy named Dan, fella who customizes vans so the suckers think they got a rolling Taj Mahal. She’d known him for a while and they had an on-again, off-again thing going. He knows nothing about her being stalked or anything else. Only knew she was a lively piece of tail. He says she left his apartment the evening of the fire but didn’t say where she was going.”

  “What about the fire?”

  “Arson squad says it was set with an accelerant, probably gasoline, since there was a metal gas can in the debris. There wasn’t much left of the bodies. The autopsy report says each was shot, probably fatally, before the fire got to them. No way to know which of them started the fire, or who shot who first. My bet would be on Brant. Though the place was rented, so Marla might have torched it.”

  “What about the guns?” Carver asked, marveling at the idea of a penny-wise murderer-arsonist.

  “We found only one gun, or what was left of it. A thirty-two revolver.”

  “Two corpses,” Carver said, “only one gun.”

  “That’s right. You pass the fucking math test.”

  “So where’s the other gun?”

&nbs
p; “Who knows and who gives a shit?”

  “I don’t and I do,” Carver said. “Were all the bullets thirty-twos?”

  “No way to say for sure. The heat of the fire melted them down. Messed up the gun, too. There was no way to run ballistics tests. Way I see it, there might have been only one gun to begin with, and Marla and Brant got shot when they were struggling over it. Or their deaths might have been the result of a murder-suicide pact. Anything’s possible. After all, you never found out what the fuck was going on between them. If there ever was another gun, it must have got lost in the confusion of the fire. Or maybe it got stolen later. Lots of people at the scene, poking around.”

  Carver folded his hands over the crook of his cane and leaned forward in his chair, saying nothing.

  “Like I said,” McGregor told him, “anything’s possible. And since we got nobody to charge, the case is fucking closed.”

  “The way you like them,”

  “Nothing wrong with that. I’m a cop.”

  “What about the other dead man?”

  “The not-so-jolly green giant? He got mashed by a fire engine. We haven’t identified him yet except by that silly a.k.a., Attila Jones.”

  “Achilles,” Carver corrected.

  “Whatever. It’s all Greek to me, My guess is we never will know who he is. His prints don’t match anything on record, and it’s for sure his mommy’s not gonna turn up and claim the carcass.”

  “No ID on him?” Carver asked.

  “Weren’t you listening?”

  Carver stared at McGregor and waited.

  “OK, OK. There was nothing in his pockets except twenty bucks and the keys to a motorcycle parked on the next block.”

  “A Harley-Davidson?”

  “That’s right. Stolen plates, stolen bike. No surprise there except that sometime somewhere somebody trained the geek to ride a motorcycle.”

  Frustration tightened like a fist in Carver’s stomach. He’d never know who hired Jones, or whether it was Marla or Brant who wanted him to back away from the investigation. And if Marla knew she was Portia’s sister, so Brant might have known and had some motive to harass Marla. Carver realized that now there was no way to sort out victim or perpetrator.

  “Anything else?” he asked, but not with any real hope.

  McGregor sneered. “Only if I can figure out a way to charge you with something.”

  Carver stood up and limped toward the door.

  “And I’ll think of a way eventually,” McGregor added.

  Neither man said good morning. Neither would have been sincere.

  Without looking back, Carver went out the door. He needed fresh air almost as much as he had the night of the fire.

  “What did McGregor say?” Beth asked when Carver returned to the cottage.

  “That the case is closed.”

  He told her the details of his visit with McGregor. She listened carefully, all the while continuing making a sandwich at the breakfast bar. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was almost noon. Without asking if he was hungry, she began building another tuna salad sandwich. For him, he assumed.

  “I’m not hungry,” he said.

  “Sure you are,” she told him. “You only had coffee for breakfast. Eat this. You need it.”

  He didn’t say no. It was best not to cross her these days.

  On the cottage porch after lunch, sitting next to Beth and watching the sun spark off the sea, Carver said, “I’ll never know the truth.” He spoke more to a soaring gull than to Beth. “Who was the stalker and who was the intended victim? Who was the killer? And why?”

  Beth turned her face in his direction and raised her sunglasses so the lenses rested above her forehead like a second pair of eyes. She was sweating in the afternoon heat. A bead of perspiration zigzagged from her hairline down her temple and cheek. “But you do know the truth now, lover. Which is that human nature’s so complex the truth’s hardly ever accessible.”

  “I have a problem with that,” Carver said.

  She laughed. Then she bent effortlessly, picked up one of her sandals from the porch floor, and swatted hard at an insect near her chair. “Only problem is, Fred, you don’t accept it.”

  “Sometimes I do.”

  “No. Never. You keep flying at the light like a wasp at a window.” She examined the sandal’s rubber sole and made a face. “Why I love you, I guess.”

  He stood up and went inside for a cold beer.

  Then he sat for a while longer, staring out at the sea.

  41

  WHEN CARVER PARKED the Olds in front of 22 Jacaranda Lane the next morning, he found half of Marla’s house still standing. Her car remained where it had been parked in the driveway, tilting toward the house on two partly melted tires, its left side charred and blistered. No attempt had been made to board up any of the remaining windows; there would have been little point, with much of the house reduced to blackened, skeletal framework.

  The police were finished there, and probably the insurance investigators, too. The tattered remains of a police-scene ribbon dangled from where it was tied in a bow around a porch rail, reminding Carver of when people put up yellow ribbons in support of political hostages. Partially protected from firefighter action by the railing, the dead potted plants on the porch looked virtually unchanged. One of the terra-cotta pots had been knocked about six inches out of line, but that was all.

  Ignoring a NO TRESPASSING sign, Carver made his way along the walk to the front porch. The door was hanging open, black and alligatored from the fire. He stepped into what had been the living room. It was quite bright because that part of the roof had been burned away or removed by firefighters. Carver glanced up at a sky perfectly blue except for a very high, white vapor trail. The airliner that had left it was still visible as a slowly moving silver splinter, tracing a northerly course in a cold, pure world not at all like the one from which it had risen.

  He picked his way through the blackened debris of furniture and the collapsed roof to stand near where he estimated Marla’s and Brant’s bodies had lain, then he began probing the ashes with his cane. It had rained late last night, leaving the wreckage a sodden black mess that soon saturated and darkened his socks and the cuffs of his khaki pants. The dampness kept the soot down, but it helped to create an acrid stench of ruin that stung the nostrils and back of the throat.

  Half an hour of searching, widening the area to cover most of the living room, yielded nothing. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to find. The police had done their work.

  But he told himself the police had been under McGregor’s command, so they were hardly pressed to be thorough. He continued searching through the charred remains of the house.

  After an hour, he gave up. He was satisfied that whatever clues might have been at the death site had been destroyed by flames, or by the turmoil and ruin created during the fighting of the fire.

  Remembering what Beth had told him yesterday about being like a wasp at a window that kept flinging itself at the light with futile determination, he took a last look around, a part of him still unwilling to leave. Then he limped toward the door.

  It was when he was out on the tiny porch that he noticed something: A faint gleam of brass among the earth and wet blackness of one of the pots containing the dead plants. The rain must have washed away enough of the ashes and soot to reveal it, as it had washed away most of the ash on the porch itself, now that the small wooden overhang was burned to nothing more than a few charred stubs.

  Supporting himself carefully with his cane, Carver leaned down and picked up the object.

  It was a brass casing from a fired bullet. McGregor had mentioned that the gun recovered from the scene was a revolver. They didn’t eject shells after firing rounds of ammunition; the casings remained in the cylinder. So the police probably weren’t searching very thoroughly for brass casings. And who could tell how such a tiny object had been moved around during the fire, blasted by powerful streams of water, stepped on an
d lacked by firefighters, swept aside with piles of debris?

  There was also the possibility it had been in the terra-cotta pot for months or years and had nothing to do with the deaths of Marla and Brant. No way to prove otherwise now. Its discovery actually meant little in a case that was closed.

  Carver wiped dampness and soot from the shell and held it up to the light in the manner of a man examining a rare gem. He couldn’t place the caliber until he turned the brass casing at a certain angle to the slanted rays of the morning sun. Faintly lettered on the outer rim of its base was “7.62 mm.” An uncommon-size shell ejected by an uncommon gun.

  He’d dropped the casing in his pocket and was stepping down off the porch when he remembered.

  He stood still for almost a full minute, frozen by realization, squeezing the brass shell through the material of his pants so hard that his fingers ached.

  Then he got in the Olds and drove to see Willa Krull.

  42

  THE ROSES ON THE iron trellis that was the entrance arch to the old apartment building on Fourteenth Street looked vividly red and fresh after last night’s rain. Carver noticed there was even a shallow, greenish layer of water on the bottom of the tile pond, as if the maimed and perpetually leaping concrete swordfish had at last found its element.

  Willa Krull answered his knock in her usual fashion, by staring out through the crack available when she opened her door on the chain lock. Even through the narrow opening, Carver could smell the scent of gin. It wasn’t yet noon and she’d obviously been drinking heavily. She’d apparently been crying, too. The single red-rimmed eye that peered out at him was open barely wide enough to see.

  “Sorry, don’ wanna talk to anyone today,” she said.

  He unobtrusively moved the tip of his cane forward so she wouldn’t be able to close the door. She was going to hear what he had to say, even if he had to tell her standing there in the hall. “I just came from Marla Cloy’s house.”