Scorcher

by John Lutz

  “Awhile.”

  “Looking for a white-over-blue Lincoln?”

  “Yeah. I haven’t seen it.”

  “You won’t. We impounded it last night.”

  Carver’s stomach knotted and he hit the steering wheel hard with his fist. Pain jolted up his arm and left the heel of his hand tingling. The blow made a dull, reverberating sound. “God damn it, why didn’t somebody tell me?”

  “Say again?”

  “I’m a victim’s father! I should have been told!”

  “We don’t generally run out and notify vigilantes whenever there’s a development. That’s what you are, Carver, fuckin’ John Wayne movie walkin’. You’re on a lone-avenger trip, and that’s not good. I won’t allow it.”

  “Desoto told me you were an asshole.”

  “Naw. Not my old buddy. You’re making that up.” McGregor cranked down the window all the way and flicked the cigarette away. The rain had stopped. The palm trees that had been whipping around were still now. He left the window down. Warm, fresh air pushed into the car.

  “I need to know who owns the Lincoln,” Carver said.

  McGregor shook his head slowly, patiently. “What you need to know, Carver, what is essential, is that I am an asshole. I’m not your usual cop—not by half. Like you, I want to catch the garbage that burned your son. I want him to pay. Not as much as you do, I grant you.” The wide jaw set and muscles played in front of McGregor’s oversized, protruding ears. “But I want the bastard. Oh, I do!”

  “Let me guess,” Carver said. “There’s a promotion in it if you make the collar on this one? Maybe catapult you all the way to captain?”

  “Could be that’s part of it. Could be I don’t think an animal like that has a right to walk around and breathe in and out like decent citizens. It bothers me, I guess more than it should. I’m just like you, only it doesn’t have to be my son. I’m stuck with a strong moral sense; that’s why I’m a cop. But it doesn’t mean diddly shit to me whether you believe me. The proposition is the same.”

  “Proposition?”

  “The owner of the blue Lincoln is a guy named Paul Kave,” McGregor said. “His address is on Route A1A in Hillsboro Beach.”

  “Millionaire’s Mile,” Carver said. That was what Floridians called the area.

  And suddenly Carver was afraid and angry. The stretch of beach property in Hillsboro was among the most expensive in Florida. Luxury estates and condominiums with water views front and back—the Atlantic to the east, the Intracoastal Waterway to the west. Money was involved here, all right. Major money. The man who’d killed Chipper was rich. Carver knew what that meant. He told himself grimly that no battery of high-priced lawyers was going to save this killer.

  “Paul Kave is the son of Adam Kave,” McGregor said, as if that meant a great deal and Carver should know it and be impressed.

  “Is he one of our U.S. senators?” Carver asked. “Or a Disney World founding father? I don’t keep up on things like that.”

  “You ever hear of Adam’s Inns, one of those rare times something outside your own experience touches you?”

  “Sure.” The fast-food restaurants, featuring hot dogs served in various fashion, were in practically every shopping mall in the South.

  “Adam Kave owns them,” McGregor said. “All of them except a few sold off for franchises. Paul Kave is his only son. There was a scuba air tank in the trunk of the Lincoln; it contained traces of naphtha. Paul Kave is an amateur chemist with a lab in his parents’ home. And he’s a skin-diving enthusiast. The kid has an I.Q. over a hundred and forty, but he’s got a history of schizophrenia with paranoid delusions. His mother says he’s been under treatment off and on since he was fifteen. He’s twenty now. He’s also disappeared. Hasn’t been home for two days. He fits like a Florsheim shoe, Carver. He killed your son and he’s running.”

  “Is this proposition going to involve me backing off while Kave gives himself up and gets a wrist-slap sentence from a bought judge?”

  “No, it involves finding him. Desoto says I can’t talk you out of your vendetta, and I believe him. So I’m gonna channel all that hate, Carver. I want you to go to the Kave family, tell them what kind of work you do, and give them some bullshit story about wanting the killing to end, since you lost your own son in a holdup shooting. They won’t connect you with your real son’s murder because his name appeared in the papers and on television as Montaigne. Tell the family you know how they feel and you sympathize with them, and you want to help find Paul before the police get to him and harm him. You know he’s ill. Tell them the odds are good that the police will kill Paul rather than arrest him. They’ll buy it and hire you; I sort of laid the groundwork.”

  Carver sat silently for a while, watching the waves, calmer now, roll in and break in layers of surging foam beyond the palm trees. He could hear the surf pulling on the beach. What McGregor was suggesting, cultivating and then betraying a killer’s family, turned the pure white heat of Carver’s obsession for revenge into something tainted.

  “I don’t like it,” he said finally. “It doesn’t set level. It makes me feel dirty.”

  “So feel dirty. You want your son’s killer, don’t you? Any way you can nail him?”

  Carver squeezed the steering wheel and stared straight ahead.

  “I got my neck stuck out a mile and a half on this,” McGregor said. “Taking what you’d call a career gamble.”

  “Desoto must have told you how good I am,” Carver said. “The odds are in your favor.”

  “You aren’t so good I’m gonna let you go mucking around in an active homicide case on your terms. That’s impeding justice. I’ll fall on you like something very heavy from very high up.”

  “I know how to stay legal.”

  “Oh, really? I’m kinda like the Supreme Court, Carver. Sometimes I interpret the law any which way.”

  “Maybe you oughta just enforce the law instead of trying to turn the screws on me.”

  “This is the way to get Paul Kave,” McGregor said. “Listen, I saw your son at the morgue. Holy Christ, I don’t see how you can even sleep nights much less be thinking twice about what I’m proposing. I mean, I’m handing you what you claim you want. I’m fuckin’ turning you loose, tough guy.”

  “I like to work in my own way.”

  “I thought this was your way. Doing what you had to so you could wring out some justice for a change. Not enough goddamned justice in this society and you know it.”

  “I know it,” Carver said.

  “And now you back away.” McGregor spat dryly, disdainfully, with his upper lip curled over an eyetooth. It was a dandy expression of contempt and one Carver imagined the big man had practiced to make perfect and used in tough interrogations.

  McGregor worked the chrome door handle, about to get out of the car. The musty cologne scent got stronger with his sudden movement.

  “Wait a minute,” Carver said. “There’s one thing we haven’t talked about.”

  Twisting his long body back toward Carver, McGregor arched a blond eyebrow. “What’s that?”

  “If I find him, I get him. I don’t want to see his money make things light for him. You, personally, can have credit for bagging him. But later. When I’m finished with him. I’ll fade out of the scene.”

  “Jesus, Carver, you’re asking a lot.”

  “You’ve got a lot to gain by giving it to me.”

  McGregor made a fist with one hand and massaged its massive knuckles with the other. “It’s gotta be miles, miles off the record,” he said, “like the rest of this conversation. I mean, I never told you any of this.”

  “How could you? We haven’t met.”

  McGregor smiled. It made his eyes seem tiny and cruel. There was a wide gap between his teeth and his breath smelled sour. Carver didn’t like the idea of having him as a co-conspirator, but there it was.

  “So we got an agreement,” McGregor said. “The kid’s yours.”

  He climbed out of the
car and slogged back to the Pontiac, his boat-size shoes sloshing rainwater in his wake.

  Carver sat and watched him drive away, then reached forward and twisted the ignition key.

  Chapter 9

  THE KAVE ESTATE on A1A could barely be seen from the road as a glimpse of bright red tile roof through the trees. Carver waited for a break in the passing Lincolns and Cadillacs, then turned the Olds sharply into the graveled entrance.

  McGregor had indeed laid the groundwork for Carver’s visit. When he identified himself over the intercom at the gate, a male voice immediately instructed him to drive through.

  It wasn’t a gate, really; it was a drop barrier of the type used at railroad crossings, only smaller. The black-and-white-striped, tapered length of lumber rose smoothly to allow the Olds to pass, then automatically settled back into place behind it. Made Carver feel like a locomotive engineer.

  He tapped the accelerator, and continued up the gently sloping, winding drive toward the red roof and now a section of stark-white stucco wall. The top was down on the Olds and the sun was just beginning to get serious about making misery, and over the rumble of the car’s big V-8 engine he could hear the rush and sigh of the ocean beyond the house.

  The grounds abruptly became immaculately tended: neatly trimmed hedges; colorful yet controlled explosions of lush bougainvillea; healthy-looking, precisely placed palm trees with symmetrical white stripes about their trunks; deep-green grass of uniform height and at erect attention. A lizard, green as the grass and primitive as the Mesozoic age, struck a travel-poster pose on a nearby tree trunk, as if it had been bribed by the gardener. Carver felt like the only flawed object on the grounds. He paused and let the engine idle as he took in the house. Sat feeling the vibration of the powerful car.

  The house was two stories and rambling, all white stucco and black wood trim and fancy wrought iron. Spanish architecture, with rough-hewn cedar arches and decorative rails. Red shutters and red front double doors matched the vivid color of the tile roof. The driveway curved to run beneath a wide portico from the ceiling of which dangled a heavy iron-and-stained-glass Spanish-style light fixture.

  To his left, Carver saw a path winding to wooden steps that led down to the beach and blue-white rolling surf and a boat-house and dock. A white-and-brown pleasure boat—a forty-foot Gulf star with a flying bridge—bobbed gently at the dock. The private beach was wide, and the sand was clean and flawless except where the sea had washed in some globs of oil from passing ships, along with dark tangles of kelp. The place made Carver wish he were rich.

  He parked the Olds in the black shade of the portico and struggled out with his cane.

  As soon as he slammed the car door one of the tall red front doors opened and a sturdily built man of medium height well into his sixties stepped outside. He was wearing dark slacks and a gray silk short-sleeved shirt buttoned halfway up. Casual but unmistakably expensive. His straight, black but graying hair was brushed back as if he were facing a stiff wind. Silver-rimmed squarish glasses magnified his intense dark eyes and made him look as if he’d never blink, even if you touched his pupil with a pencil point. Around the loosening flesh of his thick neck hung a glinting gold chain that lost itself in the gray mat of hair on his chest. He had prominent cheekbones and very thin lips, and a wide, square jaw that looked capable of cracking walnuts.

  “Mr. Carver,” he said. There was something mechanical about the way his lips and lower jaw moved, as if there might be a battery pack in him somewhere. He shaped a lower-face smile as he stepped down off the concrete stoop. “I’m Adam Kave.” He extended a hand and Carver shook it. Kave squeezed hard, sensed the unexpected power in Carver’s grip, and let up quickly. Not a man to waste time on losing battles.

  He led Carver through a large foyer with a terra-cotta floor and some high-priced Spanish-style furnishings, along a hall lined with mirrors and paintings, and into a room spacious enough for indoor polo.

  The Spanish touch was here, too. Massive wood beams sectioned off the high ceiling. The walls were rough-textured white stucco, like the house’s exterior, with decorative colorful tiles set in them. Except for a massive, gold-framed oil painting of a three-masted battle galleon forging through a wild ocean storm, the ornate tiles were the only wall decorations.

  Carver negotiated the floor carefully. It was set with large hexagonal sections of tile or marble, strewn with thick throw rugs. The furniture was black leather and dark, heavy wood. All the tables and a few elaborate wooden chairs had curlicued black iron legs. The room was cool. No need to switch on either of the two large, wicker-bladed paddle fans that extended on slender brass pipes like bizarre gigantic spiders at rest and at watch from the center beam of the lofty ceiling.

  “Sit down, please, Mr. Carver,” Adam Kave said in his deep, phlegmy voice. He was one of those men who always seemed to need to clear his throat, and who had probably cultivated and disciplined the timbre of his voice to approximate a tone of command.

  Carver set the tip of his cane and lowered himself into a black leather sofa that faced a wide window overlooking the beach. The ocean seemed vast from here. A gull touched down nimbly on the pure sand, gazed about, realized it was trespassing, and uneasily took to the air again. It was no stranger to packing orders.

  “Something to drink?” Adam Kave asked.

  “Thanks, no.”

  “I’ll have a Scotch,” he said, as if it were Carver who’d offered. He moved to a dark-stained wood credenza and opened its doors. There was a kind of compact power in the way he swung his arms and carried his shoulders as he walked; he’d probably been physically tough when he was younger, and might have a few good minutes in him even now. Carver caught a glimpse of glittering crystal, a miniature refrigerator, a bright row of bottles.

  Kave plunked ice cubes into a glass, doused them with Cutty Sark, then closed the credenza doors and turned again toward Carver. The force of his attention came in waves.

  Carver said, “I’m sorry about your son’s trouble.”

  Kave stared into his glass, swishing the Scotch and ice around. The ice made a tiny tinkling sound. Musical. “Not sorry for the victims?”

  “Them, too,” Carver said. He took a deep breath, plunged. “My own son was killed a few years back in Saint Louis, Mr. Kave. A boy about Paul’s age was holding up a convenience store. My son walked in at the wrong time; he wanted a can of root beer and instead he got a bullet through the brain.”

  Kave was watching him, still swirling the liquid in his glass. More slowly now. Carver couldn’t hear the ice.

  “At first I wanted the boy who did the shooting tried and executed. Could have easily killed him myself. Without conscience, I thought. Then his sister came to me, told me about him, and eventually, despite myself, I began to feel sorry for my son’s murderer. He had a history of mental illness and was married and had a son of his own. He was actually robbing the store for food to feed his wife and child, and he saw my son as a threat and panicked. The clerk testified that he hadn’t demanded money; he’d asked for a bag filled with canned goods and ice cream.” Carver shifted on the sofa, almost knocking over his cane leaning on the arm. “I know it doesn’t make sense, that kind of risk for ice cream and canned vegetables. But the sister convinced me it made sense to her brother. Or it did at the time he walked into that store with a gun.”

  Kave was staring hard at Carver through the thick-rimmed squarish glasses. His wide jaw was set like a curbstone.

  This guy isn’t buying it, Carver thought, with a falling sensation. Not believing me for a second. McGregor’s idea was loonier than the story Carver was concocting. He began to sweat; he could feel it in his palms and beneath his arms.

  “Go on,” Kave urged. Carver wondered why.

  “The boy was declared legally insane and is confined for life in a mental institution in Missouri,” Carver said. “When I heard the verdict, I was glad. Glad he wasn’t executed. And when I read about your son Paul being on the run, and having had
his own share of mental problems . . .” He paused, picked up his cane, and ran its tip lightly over the tile floor in a circle, as if trying to describe boundaries for his emotion. “Well, it struck a responsive chord and made me want to help you. Help your son. Empathy, I suppose they call it.”

  “I’d assumed it was counter to professional ethics for a private investigator to solicit business,” Kave said calmly.

  “I’m glad you feel that way,” Carver said. “Most people don’t credit the profession with any ethics at all.”

  The iron-vise jaws were clenched, but again the thin lips snaked into a slight smile. “I thought Detective McGregor said Chicago.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Chicago. I thought, when he recommended I employ you, he told me your son was killed in Chicago.”

  “Saint Louis,” Carver said. Christ! he thought; what had McGregor told Kave? This whole thing should have been worked out more carefully.

  Yet Kave seemed to believe. For now.

  “Shall we talk about fee, Mr. Carver?”

  “Not unless I show you some results.” Something to prove this one is from the heart.

  “That’s generous of you,” Kave said, “and I’ll be generous back if in time you do obtain results.”

  He walked to the wide window and looked out at his grounds and his beach and his ocean. At his boat berthed at his dock. His, his, his. His business had bought it all, made for him a well-managed world under control. Except for his son. Paul wasn’t under control. He was wandering around burning people to death. Carver wondered, was it parental love prompting Adam Kave to try to retrieve his murderous son from pursuit and retribution, or was it something else?

  Whatever Kave’s motives, Carver had his own. Apparently McGregor had set the stage well enough and Kave was going to hire him. For an instant Carver regretted that. But for no more than an instant. Then his mind flicked up the image of Chipper’s blackened body in the morgue. He experienced a deep, dark satisfaction as he smiled and said, “I’m glad you’re allowing me to help Paul, Mr. Kave.”