Torch Page 3

  Letting the Olds’s engine idle, he took his foot off the brake and the big car crept along the curb until it was almost directly opposite the apartment building. All of the building’s windows facing the street were visible from here.

  Within a minute or two after Thomas had entered the building, lights winked on in the second-floor-west corner unit.

  Carver switched off the softly rumbling engine, climbed out of the car, and crossed the street.

  The blossoms on the vines had a perfumed scent that carried on the warm night air, but the building’s vestibule smelled oddly of fresh paint and stale urine. There were crumpled, paint-spattered newspapers on the dirty tile floor. Carver saw that graffiti had been recently painted over on the wall above the bank of tarnished brass mailboxes. That “Miranda loves” someone or something was still visible through the new, thin coat of blue paint. Carver figured what Miranda would really love would be to move out of the building.

  He saw her name right away in the slot above one of the mailboxes: Miranda Perez. There were eight units in the building. Carver checked the mailbox slots for Thomas’s name but didn’t see it. The upper west corner unit appeared to be occupied by someone named Carl Gretch—at least Gretch got his mail there.

  “What the fuck you doing?”

  The voice made Carver jump.

  He gripped his cane tightly just below the crook, ready to use it as a weapon.

  “Who the fuck are you?” the voice said.

  Carver peered up the dark stairwell and saw Enrico Thomas poised halfway down the steps to the vestibule, leaning forward and glaring at him. In his right hand was a knife with a long, thin blade that reflected what little light there was in the dim building.

  “I’m looking for Miranda Perez,” Carver said.

  “Don’t play stupid; I saw you at Riley’s Clam Shop, saw you following me in that big tub of shit you drive. All the way here from Del Moray.”

  “I drove here to see Miranda,” Carver said. “She loves me.”

  “Loves everybody with a few dollars to spend, but I doubt she and you ever met. Like I asked before, what the fuck do you want?”

  There was nervousness in Thomas’s voice now. Carver wasn’t playing his part the way Thomas had imagined, didn’t seem scared enough. Well, Carver knew he was scared. On the other hand, there was something about the way the almost girlishly thin man on the stairs held the knife—too tightly, too near the glint of the blade. He obviously wasn’t an experienced knife fighter. Carver decided to run a bluff.

  “I’m leaving,” he said. “I might even call the cops.”

  “You’re not going till you say why you followed me.”

  “Sure I am. I pretty much go where I please, and a scrawny little player like you doesn’t bother me much.”

  “Fucking gimp, I got a mind to saw off your good leg if you don’t start talking.”

  Carver turned to face Thomas directly, balancing himself and lifting the cane. “Close quarters here. You really want to use that blade?”

  “Just try me.”

  “If you come down those stairs with that knife,” Carver said, “there’s no going back for you. I’m going to take it away from you and feed it to you sideways. I’m going to enjoy doing it.”

  Thomas hadn’t expected this, aggression from a cripple, a cane brandished as a weapon. Carver was in his forties with a stiff left leg, but his upper body was lean and powerful. And though he was average size, he was still larger and more muscular than Thomas.

  Sensing the balance shift, Carver moved slightly toward Thomas. The knife extended, Thomas backed several steps up the flight of stairs. He looked a bit startled, as if his legs had moved on their own.

  Carver said, “Going down or up?”

  “You say you know Miranda,” Thomas said, almost whining, “but I bet she wouldn’t have anything to do with a fucking cripple like you for any amount of money.”

  “Well, you ask her when you see her. We’re crazy in love with each other. But you’re changing the subject. You coming down here with that knife?”

  Time stopped in the bubble of events. Thomas licked his lips. Carver had assumed he was Latin, but up close, even in the dim light, he didn’t look Latin at all, despite the dark hair and mustache.

  “Please come down here,” Carver said.

  That did it. Thomas wasn’t the type to be told what to do, even if a “please” happened to be attached. Deftly folding the knife closed, he retreated another few steps, moving backward up the stairs easily, nimbly, still facing Carver. “I know what you look like,” he said, almost spitting the angry words. “Don’t you forget that.” He backed up two more steps, into the shadows of the landing.

  “And I know what you look like,” Carver told him. “Like a million other guys who know that down deep they don’t have what they need.”

  He edged to the street door, then pushed it open and moved outside. As he limped away, he listened for the door to sweep open behind him, for Thomas’s rushing footsteps.

  But no one emerged from the building.

  Carver returned to the Olds and lowered himself into the warm vinyl upholstery.

  As he put the transmission lever in drive and pulled away from the curb, he saw Enrico Thomas in the second-floor-west apartment. He’d struck an absurdly dramatic pose, standing squarely at the window like an anorexic, miniaturized colossus with fists on hips, watching Carver as kings on balconies gaze down on subjects about to be ill-used.

  Carver thought, A dangerous man with a knife.

  He was shaking badly as he drove away.

  4

  THE LIGHTS WERE burning in his modest but private beach cottage when Carver parked the Olds next to Beth’s car. Her car was a LeBaron convertible, like Donna Winship’s, only white rather than gray, the sort used in droves by car rental companies in Florida and then sold by local dealers. The similarities in the women’s cars was enough of a reminder of life’s impermanence that Carver was eager to get inside the cottage and talk with Beth, touch her, in appreciation of her continued if fragile existence. Of his own.

  Beth, a tall black woman with the look of a tribal queen turned fashion model, was seated on the sofa by the lamp, barefoot and wearing Carver’s faded blue terrycloth robe. When he came through the door, she set aside the three or four sheets of white paper she’d been reading. She was a journalist for Burrow, a small and gutsy local weekly newspaper that sent its reporters where angels feared to tread. Beth liked that.

  “Get what you wanted?” she asked. The lamp starkly side-lighted her strong features, her prominent cheekbones and forehead. She was a woman who’d seen far too much for most people, but not for her. She’d fought her way out from under, starting with the Chicago slum of her girlhood, and would keep fighting. Everything about her told you that, from her regal, undefeated bearing to the bite of her words when she was angry and the directness of her gaze as she assessed the world. Her eyes were different tonight, though; she’d been crying.

  It was cooler inside the cottage, but still too warm. Carver crossed the plank floor to the small kitchen area, opened the refrigerator and got out a cold Budweiser. “I know where Enrico Thomas lives—if that’s his name.” He went to the couch and sat down next to Beth. She snatched away the article she’d been working on before he sat on it.

  He was going to kiss her, but her arm was around his neck and she was kissing him. She smelled of scented soap and shampoo. She leaned away, smiling, but with her eyes still sad.

  He said, “I appreciate you.”

  “Works both ways, Fred.”

  He told her about following Thomas from Riley’s Clam Shop into Orlando, the confrontation inside the building, the different name above the apartment’s mailbox.

  “Where’s that leave you?” she asked.

  “Waiting until morning. Then I’ll call Desoto and see if he’ll run the Corvette’s license plate number.” He glanced at the papers she’d placed next to the lamp on the table. They we
re marked with red felt-tip pen where she’d been revising. She was being careful with this article; often she sent in her story to the Burrow office using the modem in her computer. “I thought you were finished with the pollution story.”

  “I am. This is something else. I’ve been working on it for a while and should be able to wrap it up soon.”

  “What’s it about?” he asked, nodding toward the papers.

  “A mail-order company that sends overpriced junk merchandise to grieving widows and pretends the husband ordered it just before his death. Bastards!” She sat back and crossed her improbably long legs, parting the robe high up her bare thigh. “Fred, I’m sitting here wondering if things would have worked out the same way today if I hadn’t arranged for you and Donna to meet.”

  “They wouldn’t have worked out exactly the same,” he told her, “but the end result probably would have been the same. Your friend wasn’t holding up well under the strain of a disintegrating marriage, and like you said, she wasn’t the type to have an affair. Despite the glowing account of her relationship with Enrico Thomas, I suspect he only made things worse for her.”

  What he didn’t say was that he’d been wondering the same thing as Beth: If he and Donna Winship hadn’t met and talked, would she still be alive? Not that he considered himself responsible for her impulse to destroy herself, but undeniably, if the kaleidoscope of fate had been turned a few degrees either way, things might be different. He told himself that life was a risk for everyone every second and he bore no blame, but how could he really know? Had he said something seemingly innocent to trigger the plunge of spirit that had prompted a desperate woman to take her last and fatal step?

  Beth gently lifted the cold beer can from his hand and took a sip, then touched the rounded damp side of the can to her forehead as if trying to relieve a headache.

  “There’s the matter of the thousand-dollar retainer she gave me,” Carver said.

  Beth lowered the can but didn’t hand it back to him. “What about it?”

  “Donna Winship hired me to follow her, and obviously that’s impossible now.”

  “You followed that Enrico Thomas character.”

  “To satisfy my own curiosity, not as part of why she hired me.”

  “So the nature of the job has changed.”

  “There is no client, Beth, so no job.”

  “Well, you can’t very well return the money if Donna’s dead.”

  “I won’t cash her check,” Carver said, “but it’ll be entered in her checkbook, so her husband will know about it. I’m going to have to talk to him, return the check to him.”

  “Don’t do that, Fred. The way Donna talked, the guy turned away from her and tuned her out completely. Believe me, she wouldn’t want you to return the retainer.”

  “If I simply hold the check, he’ll eventually contact me with his own questions.”

  She looked thoughtful, then resigned. “I suppose that’s true. And if you do cash it, he can get you for fraud. Judging from how Donna came to think of him, he probably would.”

  “So I’ll drop by and give him the check,” Carver said. “I’ll let him think she hired me to follow him, checking to see if he was having an affair.”

  “Are you doing Enrico Thomas a favor?”

  “Doing Megan Winship a favor. There’s no reason she or anybody else has to know about Thomas and her mother.”

  Beth took another sip of beer then gave him back the can. “Some world, huh? A person steps outside the lines, maybe only once, and there can be a multitude of victims.”

  “That’s why I’m returning the check to Mark Winship.”

  “Maybe I can get this company I’m writing about to send him a thousand dollars worth of crappy merchandise along with a bill addressed to Donna.”

  Carver laughed. He finished the small amount of beer left in the can, then got his cane from where it was propped against the cushions and stood up. On the way to the bathroom he tossed the empty can into the kitchen wastebasket. It made a satisfying clatter in the bottom of the metal basket, as if signaling the end of a miserable day.

  As he was rinsing out his mouth after brushing his teeth, he noticed the reflected Carver in the mirror looked exhausted, older than his forty-odd years. Certainly older than he’d looked this morning, and than he hoped he’d look tomorrow. The scar at the right corner of his mouth was dragging on his lips, giving him an especially sardonic expression. He was bald except for a fringe of thick gray curly hair that grew well down the back of his neck. His catlike blue eyes, tilted up at the corners in his tan face, were bloodshot and eerie-looking from fatigue; no wonder Thomas had been afraid of him despite the knife. When he twisted the faucet handle to stop the flow of water, muscles danced in his corded arms and across his bare, tan chest. His upper body was hard and powerful from his therapeutic morning swims in the sea and from dragging himself around with the cane. One of the few advantages of having a locked and ruined knee.

  When he returned to the cottage’s main room, he saw that Beth had gone to bed. He turned off the light and joined her in the screened-off sleeping area.

  She was awake, waiting for him in the humid darkness. Nude, as she always slept. He felt the warm length of her lean body, then the wetness of tears as she moved her head onto his pillow and her cheek brushed his. One of her firm breasts, surprisingly large for such an otherwise slender woman, pressed against his ribs. The sound of the surf playing itself out on the beach drifted in through the open window like urgent, incomprehensible whispering, as if the sea knew something profound it would share if only its ancient language could be understood. Had human beings ever understood it? Beth flung a long leg across Carver and sighed.

  He remembered what she’d once told him in her blunt and incisive manner: Sometimes women needed to be fucked, sometimes they needed to be held, sometimes they needed both. Though it sounded a bit like something from The Playboy Philosophy, he figured she was probably right.

  Without having to be told, he knew this was a night for holding, then for sleep and whatever absolution it might bring.

  5

  CARVER SWAM OUT to sea to the point where he could watch other early morning risers walking the curved shoreline, some of them with their heads lowered, combing the beach for shells. The sun was still low and the ocean was cool. He stroked parallel to the shore for a while, feeling that the strength of his arms, his endurance, could power him forever, even though he knew better. In the water, kicking from the hips, his powerful upper body working in rhythm with his legs, he was as physically capable as any man and more capable than most. He loved his morning swims, so much so that at times he wondered if evolution might be working on him in reverse, luring him back to the sea.

  He turned over and floated on his back for a while, gazing up at a cloudless sky going from gray to blue. The sun felt warm and heavy on his upper chest and face. The only sounds were the massive slide of the ocean and the occasional cry of a gull, like that of a woeful, desperate woman. He rode gentle swells that would become higher then flatten out before crashing onto the beach. As he rose on one of the swells to its peak, he glanced in at his cottage, a small, flat-roofed structure nestled where the beach curved to form a thin crescent of sand. The Olds sat by itself near a grouping of date palms beside the cottage; Beth had risen earlier and left to pursue her story for Burrow. He raised a wrist and glanced at his waterproof watch. Almost eight o’clock. Desoto would be at his desk in police headquarters on Hughey in Orlando.

  Carver rolled over on his stomach and began swimming at an angle toward the beach, using the momentum of the waves to hasten his crawl stroke. Within a few minutes he was near enough to feel the backwash of the surf, and to see his cane jutting like a beacon from the sand near his white towel.

  Next came the part he didn’t like. He waited for a particularly large and powerful wave, then stroked hard and rode it in as far as possible onto the beach, using the great momentum of the ocean to help him ashore. He l
ay still then, holding his ground as wet sand and shells around and beneath him moved again toward the sea in the backwash of the surf.

  No matter how well this method worked, he still had to crawl several yards to the cane and his towel on dry sand. This morning was no exception, and he was glad as he often was that the stretch of beach in front of his cottage was almost completely private because of the curve of the shoreline.

  In a sitting position, he dried off with the towel as best he could, then used the cane for support as he stood up. He draped the towel around the back of his neck, then set out for the cottage, careful where he placed the cane in the soft sand.

  After showering and dressing, he poured a cup of coffee from the pot Beth had left on the burner of the Braun brewer, leaned on the breakfast counter near the phone, and called Desoto.

  He got through to the lieutenant right away and filled him in on what had happened, and why he wanted the Corvette’s license plate number run through the Motor Vehicles Department.

  For a few minutes Desoto said nothing, and all Carver heard on the line was a soft Latin melody he was sure came from the portable Sony that sat on the windowsill behind Desoto’s desk. Guitars, he thought. Desoto loved slow guitar music.

  Then Desoto said, “A terrible way for a woman to go, amigo, stepping in front of a speeding truck.” Desoto truly loved women, the entire sex, and it pained him to see or hear about a woman in the kind of agony that had prodded Donna Winship to her death. “Are you thinking it might not have been suicide?”

  “No, I think she killed herself,” Carver said.

  “And you also think that by saying something else in the restaurant, treating her differently in perhaps some small matter, you might have prevented her death.”

  “Yes, but I know that’s a stupid way to think.”

  “It is. The world is always much simpler in retrospect. But if you’re satisfied the woman’s death was suicide, what’s your interest now?”