Scorcher

by John Lutz

  “Mr. Carver?”

  Carver leaned on the cane and stood up.

  “Come in, please.” No flicker of eye movement to the cane. Elsing opened the door wider to make room for Carver to pass.

  The soft green decor was carried into the office. There were tall, glass-lined bookcases along one green wall, with books and papers stuffed into the shelves in a jumble. The doctor’s desk was dark mahogany. The thick brown drapes behind it were closed. A pale ceramic bust of someone who looked like Beethoven sat on top of one of the bookcases, gazing down on the scene with blank eyes. There was a tiny beige sofa in the room, a love seat. Also a comfortable-looking chocolate brown easy chair. Though it was afternoon, a brass gooseneck lamp with a green-tinted shade glowed on Elsing’s desk. It was a restful room, unnaturally quiet. Almost made you wish you had mental anguish so you could come here now and then and pass the time. It was impossible to hear the street sounds down on Commercial.

  Elsing smelled like tobacco. He motioned for Carver to sit in the comfortable chocolate brown chair, then sat down behind his desk heavily, as if his feet had been hurting. That might explain the sloppy, comfortable shoes. The pipe rack holding half a dozen well-used wood pipes explained the tobacco smell. The doctor bowed his head, then looked up and smiled expectantly. Carver figured in another couple of years the crown of Elsing’s head would be as bald as his own. Tough shit.

  “You wanted to talk about Paul Kave?” Elsing said. Right to business; time was something not to be wasted, and the way not to waste it was to take control of the conversation immediately.

  “That Beethoven?” Carver asked, pointing to the ceramic bust.

  “Uh, yes it is.”

  “I wondered.”

  “Mr. Carver—”

  “Paul’s family’s hired me to try to find him before the police do,” Carver said.

  “Paul’s my patient, Mr. Carver. Naturally I respect the confidential nature of that relationship. There isn’t much I can, or will, tell you about him.”

  “Have the police talked to you?”

  “Yes. I told them no more than was necessary.”

  Carver felt himself getting irritated despite all the greenness. “Doesn’t the Hippocratic oath take a backseat to murder?”

  “Of course. And I cooperated with the police. But I don’t think Paul killed anyone. This entire affair is some sort of tragic confluence of circumstance, and I don’t want to add to the misdirection.”

  Carver felt like giving the good doctor a lesson in admissible evidence, but he didn’t want to lose him. “Then we’ll speak only in generalities, Dr. Elsing. Tell me about schizophrenia. The kind Paul Kave suffers from.”

  Elsing’s lips curved into a momentary smile. The lines swooping from the sides of his nose deepened. “You make it seem so easily categorized,” he said in his soft, soft voice. “There’s a lot not known about schizophrenia, Mr. Carver. It usually strikes its victims when they’re young, between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, and it lasts for decades. It gets progressively worse if not controlled. Seldom better. It’s still one of medicine’s most elusive mysteries. And an illness that’s prompted a great many public misconceptions. Read the papers about the search for Paul Kave and you’ll see what I mean. Schizophrenia isn’t at all as most of the media assume.”

  “What causes it?”

  “That we don’t understand precisely. One theory is that it has to do with dopamine, a chemical that passes between nerve endings in the brain. In a so-called normal person, stress causes the dopamine levels to drop. This lessens the intensity of the signals that pass between nerves. Not so with schizophrenics. Their brain activity is heightened tremendously by stress. The chemical imbalance causes various symptoms, among them imaginary voices, irrational thoughts. The world can seem like an ominous madhouse to an advanced schizophrenic.”

  “So it’s really a physical illness that causes mental problems.”

  Elsing shook his head slowly, as if to say it was impossible to give Carver a course in psychiatric medicine in five minutes. “The chemical imbalance triggers certain reactions, Mr. Carver. And as I said, this is one of several theories. We do know that three million people, more than one percent of the population, will at some time suffer from the disease during their lives. It would behoove us to learn much, much more about it.”

  “What sort of treatment was Paul’s?”

  “Analysis and, when he was entering a bad period, medication.”

  “What kind of medication?” Carver asked. He saw Elsing notice his piqued interest and wasn’t sure if the doctor would answer. The muted ringing of a phone filtered in from the outer office; Beverly caught it on the third ring.

  “Chlorpromazine. It regulates dopamine levels and lessens the patient’s delusions.”

  “Does it regulate paranoia?”

  “Yes, you might say that. And as you surmise, paranoia is one of the disease’s symptoms.” Dr. Elsing was pressing on the desk with his fingertips. “Are you assuming Paul killed those people in a fit of paranoia, Mr. Carver?” His fingertips were white, not green.

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “Not at all likely. Paul could get paranoid at times, even mildly aggressive. But I don’t believe he’s a killer.” He shook his head slowly and looked glum. “Few of the misconceptions about schizophrenia make life easier for the disease’s victims.”

  “A police psychiatrist thinks it’s possible that Paul was extremely paranoid and killed his victims to avenge some slight or imagined wrong done to him.”

  “That chain of thought is consistent with Paul’s potential behavior, except for the degree of paranoia and the killing part. Maybe he’d insult or even punch someone for this imagined wrong, but taking human life is a different matter. I doubt he’d react with anything near that intensity.”

  Carver persisted. “The police psychiatrist says it’s possible.”

  Elsing looked as if he had a bad taste in his mouth. He didn’t want to call the police psychiatrist a fool, but that was what he thought. That’s how it was with inexact sciences. “Possible? Sure, Mr. Carver. But the odds and the illness suggest it isn’t probable. I know. Paul Kave is my patient, not the patient of some . . . police employee who’s never even met him.”

  “Or grown to like him.”

  Elsing smiled again. It was a kind of male Mona Lisa smile, not giving away much. “You’re something of a psychoanalyst yourself, Mr. Carver.”

  “That’s what keeps me working. Were some of Paul’s problems caused by his relationship with his father?”

  Elsing chewed on the inside of his jaw for a moment, then said, “I don’t think I’ll answer that.”

  “How often was Paul receiving medication?”

  “Once a day. Capsules.” Elsing anticipated Carver’s next question. “He has enough medication to last another few days.”

  “And when he runs out?”

  Elsing tugged at a button on his coat sleeve. “I don’t know. Paul’s a brilliant and resourceful boy, but there’s no way for him to obtain the drug without a prescription.”

  “Would Paul recognize the effects of his illness setting in once he’s off medication?”

  “At first he would. But after a while delusion would seem consistently real to him. It’s something like being an alcoholic, Mr. Carver. After the first few drinks an alcoholic thinks he’s sober and able to thread needles or drive a car or work calculus. Everything is altered, and a private reality takes charge.”

  Carver handed out his second business card of the morning. “If Paul contacts you for more capsules, will you phone me?”

  “The police have already requested that.”

  “I’d like you to call me before the police, Dr. Elsing. For Paul. After all, we both want to help him.”

  Elsing nodded ever so slightly. He wasn’t dumb enough to agree concretely, but Carver suspected the doctor would phone. He was obviously fond of Paul Kave. He stood up. “I’m sorry, but I’ve g
ot a patient waiting, Mr. Carver.”

  “I noticed her in the outer room. Marie.”

  “I specialize in helping young people.”

  “It must be difficult to keep your objectivity,” Carver said, “and not feel for them too deeply.”

  “Every analyst has to learn to cope with that prospect, Mr. Carver. The way to relieve a patient’s anguish isn’t to become part of the problem.”

  Carver decided he liked Dr. Elsing. A practical man doing battle with shadows. Carver knew how that felt. He sank his cane into the carpet, braced on it, and levered himself up out of the deep, comfortable chair. “If Paul took this medication long enough, would it possibly cure him?”

  “I thought I’d made it clear,” Elsing said. “There is at this time no cure for schizophrenia.”

  “You also made it clear that stress intensifies the symptoms. And Paul Rave’s under plenty of stress.”

  “Paul’s got a pisspot full of trouble,” Elsing said, momentarily dropping his air of professionalism and surprising Carver with his profanity. “That doesn’t mean he’s a killer.”

  Carver didn’t see it that way. Not in the face of the evidence.

  “Can you tell me that, in your expert judgment, Paul couldn’t kill another human being?”

  “No,” Elsing said, with a sigh almost too soft to hear. “But that’s an unfair question. I can’t state that about anyone. Including you, Mr. Carver.”

  Carver said nothing as he limped through the reception room, past Beverly and Marie and the cool spearmint scent, out into the hall with its bulletin board advertising millionaires’ floating toys. He was sweating when he reached the elevator.

  Seated in the heat in his car, he tried to reconcile Dr. Elsing’s apparent affection and belief in Paul Kave with his own unrelenting anger. There were times when that rage for revenge slackened, when Paul Kave was humanized and seemed almost sympathetic. Almost.

  Deliberately this time, Carver called up the nightmare, blackened ruin of his son. His namesake. Flesh of his flesh. Burned flesh. Tortured flesh. Black twisted hole of a mouth, tendons drawn tight by blast-furnace heat to curl the limbs into a praying posture. Face like that of a darkened, shrunken head bobbing on a cannibal’s hip. A wizened trophy no longer a person except to those who’d loved him. In this case, Paul Kave’s grotesque trophy. What had the moment been like when Chipper saw the flames? Felt their first paralyzing licks? How long had that instant lasted in human, clockless time?

  Carver started the engine and slammed the Olds into Drive. People on the sidewalk stared as the big car roared out of its parking space.

  Paul wasn’t as Elsing or his family saw him.

  Carver felt like screaming into the hot, booming wind that Paul Kave was a killer.

  A monster.

  One that breathed fire.

  Chapter 15

  WHAT TO DO WHEN confronted with a smooth surface and no handhold? Carver wasn’t sure, but the way things were going, he might have to find out. His visit with Dr. Elsing hadn’t exactly sprung open doors to fresh vistas of knowledge.

  He didn’t know how long he’d be in the Fort Lauderdale area. That depended on Paul Kave. But it was here, near where Paul disappeared, that Carver had to seek the beginning of the trail, where he’d find something to grasp and build on and follow to ultimate revenge. Always there had to be at least some thin indication of direction. People changed the world as they moved through it, even as it changed them.

  He drove north the short distance to Pompano Beach and registered where Laura had stayed, at the Carib Terrace Motel on Ocean Boulevard. He was given a ground-floor unit, and he sat for a while on the edge of the bed and gazed through the sliding glass doors at the beach.

  It was essentially the same view as the one from the unit upstairs, where he’d visited Laura after Chipper’s murder. Probably some of the same sunbathers lounged out there on the pale sand, and some of the same children ran and kicked through the surf. Down where the beach was darkened from high washes of foam, an elderly man with his pants rolled into doughnuts just below his knees was walking slowly with his head down, squatting occasionally on spindly legs to examine seashells, none of which was apparently worthy of his collection. Not far from the glass doors, a potbellied man in violent tropical-print swimming trunks was trying earnestly to fold or unfold a bulky redwood lounge chair, wrestling with it as if it were his conscience.

  After a while the glare outside caused Carver’s eyes to ache. He got up and pulled the drapes closed. Light and sound were instantly muted, and he suddenly felt isolated and lonely. Remotely afraid of something he couldn’t identify.

  He phoned Adam Kave and told him where he could be reached if there was any news on Paul. Then he walked down the street to a Chinese restaurant and had a lunch of crab Rangoon appetizers, Hunan beef and broccoli, and two Budweisers. East meets West.

  As soon as he returned, the motel owner’s wife stopped him as he passed the office door and told him he had two messages. He was supposed to call Nick Fanning sometime that afternoon or evening. And a Lieutenant Desoto had phoned from Orlando and wanted Carver to call back as soon as possible.

  The youngish, pretty woman handed him a slip of lined paper with the phone numbers written on it. She yelled “Don’t run—walk!” at a skinny tan kid by the motel pool, then stepped back into the air-conditioned office. Sometimes good advice, Carver thought, sometimes not.

  He glanced at Fanning’s number but didn’t recognize it. He did recognize the other number: Desoto’s extension at police headquarters in Orlando. The times of the calls to Carver were scrawled next to the numbers. Fanning had called half an hour before Desoto. Carver bore down on his cane and walked, didn’t run, away from the lapping blue pool and the acrid scent of chlorine and went into his room.

  The phone was ringing. He lifted the receiver and said hello, expecting to hear Fanning or Desoto.

  A man’s unfamiliar voice said, “Her tits swelled up and sort of split open when they burned, then they shriveled up. Hey, it was something to see. And hear. I’ll always think of her as my old flame.”

  Carver sat on the edge of the bed, dragged the phone to him, and rested the base unit in his lap. His good leg was trembling. “Who is this?”

  “You know who I am, Carver. And I know who you are. Yeah, I know.”

  “Paul? . . .”

  Click. Buzz.

  The connection had been gently but abruptly broken. Carver sat listening to the hum of the dial tone for a long time. It seemed as if the buzzing might be in his head, the sound of fury and futility. It was a frantic, wavering drone that made his pulse race and his hands clench. Don’t run, walk!

  He made himself calm down and tried to memorize every nuance of the young male voice that had casually projected such horror in him. There was nothing distinctive about the voice. A nice normal voice; that was what had been so chilling about the words it had spoken.

  He slowly pressed down on the cradle button, let it up, and pecked out Nick Fanning’s number. How had Fanning known where to phone him and leave a message? But Carver realized anyone might have followed him from the Kave estate and found out where he was staying, and then told anyone else.

  “I was with Adam Kave when you called to let him know where to reach you,” Fanning said, after answering on the second ring and exchanging hellos. “I noticed the name of your motel when he jotted it down on his desk pad.” Very pat.

  But it didn’t explain why Fanning had called. “Do you know something about Paul, Mr. Fanning?”

  “More to the point,” Fanning said, “I think there’s something you oughta know. Whatever Paul’s problems, they aren’t entirely Adam Kave’s fault.”

  “I didn’t suppose so.”

  “You’re going to talk to people,” Fanning said, “and they’re going to give Adam a bad rap. Or is that the case already?”

  “Adam Kave hasn’t rated glowing reports as a father,” Carver admitted.

  “And
it’s true he hasn’t been a good father to Paul, but probably not so true as some of the people you’ve talked to would have you believe. I’m in a position to know. I’ve watched their relationship, and even tried to intercede a few times. While Adam certainly is too critical of Paul, it’s also true that he loves Paul very much.”

  “So why are you telling me this, Mr. Fanning?”

  “Call me Nick. And I’m butting in because I owe a lot to Adam Kave, at least enough to set the record straight about him and Paul. Adam’s an exceptional man, Carver, a man who was driven by something in his youth that demanded unequivocal success, and still drives and demands. He’s not like the rest of us. He created a multi-million-dollar empire from nothing but an idea.” Fanning’s voice had taken on a lilt that was almost evangelical. He’s not like the rest of us.

  “And now it’s the seventh day and he’s resting?”

  “No, now he rules his kingdom. That’s the real stuff of his life. Exercising the unbendable will that enabled him to succeed spectacularly in business in the first place.”

  “The Kave stubborn streak.”

  “Sure. You can call it that if you want to simplify it. While Adam’s equipped to found and control business empires, he isn’t well equipped to be a father. He doesn’t know how and he never took the time to learn. But I’ve seen him try. It’s the only thing I’ve seen him try at and fail. And he fails as big as he succeeds. It’s painful to observe. He doesn’t know how to talk to Paul, even how to take a pass at it.”

  “He still try?”

  “The last few years he’s tried. But maybe it’s too late. There are emotions there he doesn’t seem able to handle; he grapples with them and loses and can’t figure out why. The thing for you to remember, Carver, is that at the base of all their troubles, Adam loves Paul even if Paul doesn’t know it.”