Torch (13 page)

He edged closer and extended his free hand to move aside the diaphanous white curtain.

It took a few seconds for him to realize what he was looking at. Pillows and the white sheet had been arranged to make it appear there was someone lying on the bed. There was a hank of auburn hair visible on the one pillow that was resting crosswise on the bed, but there was simply no room for a head beneath the sheet that had been pulled halfway up the pillow.

Holding his breath, Carver clutched the sheet and slowly peeled it down toward the foot of the bed.

A rubber, flesh-colored doll about ten inches long was resting on the pillow. A child’s doll. It had auburn hair like Maggie’s, even had wide gray eyes like Maggie’s. It looked as Maggie might have looked as a child. At a glance the doll seemed to be in one piece, but a closer look revealed that its limbs and head had been neatly severed and carefully placed within a quarter inch of the torso. Carver nudged it with a finger and it cried once, mechanically and pitifully.

There was something else about it. It was one of those anatomically correct dolls, and a long nail had been inserted in its vagina.

Carver backed away, leaving the doll as he’d found it, and moved to examine the rest of the cottage, bracing himself for what he might encounter.

He didn’t find the doll’s human counterpart, as he’d feared. He was the only human alive or otherwise in the place.

Now that his fear had left him, he realized it was hot in the cottage; none of the window units was running. He went back into the bedroom and examined the closet. Half a dozen simple but expensive dresses were draped on hangers. The dresser drawers contained panties, bras, folded blouses. There was a pair of well-worn Reebok jogging shoes in a corner near the dresser, white sweat socks balled nearby on the carpet.

He checked the bathroom next. The tub and walls of the shower stall were damp, and there was a mushy bar of soap near the drain. A turquoise towel on a brass rack was damp. A one-piece black swimming suit tied by its straps to another towel rack was dry. On the tub’s edge was a green plastic bottle of shampoo without a cap.

When Carver opened the vanity drawers, he found an electric hair drier and bottles of makeup and nail polish, an emery board, a large red comb, and an unopened box of tampons. On the washbasin was a clear glass tumbler containing a red toothbrush and a tube of Colgate toothpaste. He ran a finger across the toothbrush’s bristles and found they were soft and damp. He sniffed them and smelled toothpaste.

He went to the phone he’d noticed in the cottage’s main room. It was a gimmick one that looked like a tennis shoe, complete with untied laces. He picked it up and pressed the heel to his ear. After Information gave him the number of Burnair and Crosley, he called it and asked to speak with Maggie Rourke.

He hadn’t really expected her to be there and was slightly surprised when he was put on hold. The Muzak was Mozart. Class. How could anyone lose money at a place that played Mozart?

“I thought you were taking time off work,” he said, when Maggie had come to the phone and abruptly stopped Mozart so commerce might commence.

She thought he might be a client. Carver told her he wasn’t interested in commerce.

“Who is this?” Her voice had an edge to it. Fear?

“Fred Carver. Remember? We talked yesterday about Donna and Mark Winship. That’s when you told me you were taking your vacation time.”

“I remember. I changed my mind about using my vacation days. The solitude at the cottage was getting on my nerves, making me feel things more deeply. Things I didn’t want to feel.”

“What about the shooting?”

“Shooting?”

“Beni Ho, the Oriental man I asked you about yesterday, needed to be shot.”

After a static-filled pause, she said, “That’s a curious way to phrase it.”

“He’s a curious kind of guy.”

“So are you. Who shot him?”

“I did,” Carver said. “Outside your cottage. But only in the leg.”

“I think I should call the police.”

“I’ve already been to see them.”

“What was this Ho person doing at the cottage? Did he follow you there?”

“Seems so.”

“Why did you call me, Mr. Carver?”

That was a tough one. He wasn’t exactly sure of the answer. “I wondered if anyone had told you about the shooting. You were sunbathing down on the beach and didn’t hear it over the sound of the surf, and Ho and I both drove away afterward.”

“If he could drive, you must not have hurt him very bad.”

“Bad enough, only he was even badder. Didn’t you notice the blood on the ground near where you park your car?”

“I noticed it. I assumed a cat or dog had caught and killed a small animal, maybe a squirrel. There are a lot of squirrels around there.”

Carver considered asking about the dismembered doll on her bed, but she wouldn’t like the idea of his nosing around inside the cottage. He said, “I think you and I should talk some more.”

“I don’t see why.”

“A lot about the Winships is still up in the air.”

“Since they’re both dead, I don’t understand why it should have to come down.”

“Maybe I could explain.”

She muffled the phone and said something indecipherable to someone in the office. Or maybe she was putting on the busy act. No more time for Carver. “Let me think about it,” she said into the phone. “Call me some other time.”

He settled for that and hung up the shoe that played Mozart.

He was parked in the Olds across the street from Burnair and Crosley at noon, near the park where he’d spoken with Beverly Denton. There was a chance Maggie would cross the street to have lunch with the squirrels and pigeons, or walk or drive to a restaurant where Carver could follow.

He raised the car’s canvas top for what shade it provided and sat in the heat and suffered, waiting and watching the building.

She didn’t emerge from the tower of reflecting planes until after two o’clock. By then the back of Carver’s shirt and the seat of his pants were molded by perspiration to the Olds’s vinyl upholstery. He wondered from time to time what it would be like to ply his trade in Minneapolis.

Maggie looked crisply businesslike and stylish in a pale blue skirt and blazer, a white blouse, and blue high heels. A black leather purse was slung by a strap across her shoulder. Gripped in her right hand and swinging at her side was a flat brown attaché case.

She strolled down to the corner, drawing men’s admiring glances, then crossed the street and walked toward where he was parked. Her skirt clung to her thighs with each step, making it difficult for Carver to avert his gaze. Never had he been more appreciative of static cling.

She showed no inclination to enter the park. He was afraid she was going to approach the Olds, but instead she stopped and appeared to get into a car that was parked out of sight in front of a van half a dozen spaces away. Carver sat up straight and started the Olds’s engine. Ahead of him, a shimmering haze of exhaust fumes drifted from in front of the van.

Seconds later, Maggie’s black Stanza with the rose on its antenna pulled away from the curb to join the bright flow of traffic on Atlantic Drive, and Carver followed.

M
AGGIE
R
OURKE DROVE
north on Atlantic, then turned west on Gull, all the time sitting stiffly behind the wheel and seemingly staring straight ahead. She drove fast but not recklessly, and with a disdain for stop signs that had to garner her several moving violations per year. Maybe she knew somebody with more clout than ethics, so she didn’t worry about traffic tickets. Maybe she knew McGregor.

She’d mentioned the cottage where she’d been staying belonged to someone else. Carver thought she might drive to her own address in Del Moray, but she was headed in another direction. Gull Avenue ran straight west away from the ocean, into the poorer part of town.

In a declining neighborhood near the Cuban section, Maggie pulled the Stanza to the curb lane and parked in the middle of the block.

It was a block lined with small shops, many of them bankrupt and boarded. Among those still in business were a tiny pharmacy whose door and windows were protected by heavy mesh curtains that could be lowered and locked at night, an occult bookstore, a barbershop that looked as if it might feature dog-eared back issues of
Hustler
, a plumbing supply shop, a tattoo parlor, and a lounge whose red neon sign, drab in daylight, proclaimed it to be S ELLIE’S.

Carver was surprised. This wasn’t what he’d expected when classy and upscale Maggie had driven away from her well-paying job at Burnair and Crosley.

He was surprised again when she climbed from the Stanza, keeping her knees modestly together as the skirt of her business suit worked itself up, and after carefully locking her car, walked into S ELLIE’S.

Carver sat in the Olds and studied the place. It looked as if it occupied the entire ground floor of an aged four-story brick building. Curtains and yellowed shades indicated that there might be seedy apartments on the top three floors. Probably the lounge drew business from the warehouses of several small trucking companies Carver had noticed three or four blocks to the east. Even as he pondered this, two men in work clothes strolled down the street from that direction, talking animatedly with each other in what seemed to be a good-natured argument. One was tall and blond and was carrying a black lunchbox. The other was shorter and muscular and appeared to be Hispanic. They also entered S ELLIE’S.

After deciding the lounge was probably fairly large inside and he might be able to enter without being noticed by Maggie, Carver got out of the Olds. He didn’t lock the door on the driver’s side. That way if the Olds was stolen the thief might not slash the canvas top to gain access. That could prove expensive, if Carver got the car back. The minimal insurance he had wouldn’t cover it. He crossed the street and saw the darkened outline of the missing letter on the neon sign, making it SHELLIE’S.

There was a small diamond-shaped window in the door. He peered inside. Half a dozen customers sat at the long bar, another half-dozen at small tables with hurricane lamp candle holders for centerpieces. A large-screen TV mounted high behind the bar was on, showing Rod Stewart hip-switching and spinning across a stage with a guitar, but no music seeped outside. Maggie was seated at the far end of the bar, drinking something tall and trying to ignore the portly little man on the stool next to her.

Carver moved back from the window in the door. This wasn’t going to work. Shellie’s was smaller and less crowded than he’d anticipated. He might be able to enter unnoticed by Maggie if it were nighttime, when there would undoubtedly be more customers and probably loud music and a haze of cigarette smoke. But now, in late afternoon, he decided he’d better stay outside.

He returned to the Olds, not liking the idea of sitting some more in the heat but knowing it was unavoidable if he wanted to do his job. And he took pride in his job. Almost everything else had been stripped from him when the holdup kid’s bullet crashed into his knee. He had his work, and he did it no matter what else happened in his life. He wondered if that was being obsessive, or simply defining. Occupations did define people. He knew who and what he was, and what he had to do. At least most of the time. His was an occupation that hinged on certain constant aspects of human nature, not all of them admirable. That was oddly comforting in a high-tech age when job experience sometimes became obsolete even before it was completed.

He started the Olds, slipped the transmission lever to reverse, and backed down the street until he was almost a block away from Shellie’s and from Maggie’s parked car.

Trying to ignore the heat, he half listened to a call-in radio show about abortion and waited and watched and speculated.

Her co-workers and clients at Burnair and Crosley would be surprised to know this was where Maggie was spending her late lunch hour. If that indeed was what she was doing in a down-scale dump like Shellie’s, drinking her lunch. There was nothing about the place that suggested it served food, even if a customer might have the courage to eat there.

It was almost four o’clock when Maggie emerged from Shellie’s and walked, head down, toward the parked Stanza. Carver couldn’t be sure, but he thought she was moving unsteadily and might be slightly drunk.

When she drove away, he followed.

The Stanza stayed in its proper lane, but it did weave once toward the curb. And it halted completely at the first stop sign on Gull, then accelerated slowly across the empty intersection. Maggie was driving very carefully, the way people did when they were drunk and trying to convince themselves and everyone else they were sober. He wondered if she was a secret alcoholic, and went to a place like Shellie’s to drink so she wouldn’t run into any of her straitlaced investment-world friends from Burnair and Crosley. If she was simply drinking to assuage her grief over Mark Winship’s death, she probably would have done so somewhere else, or at home, not at Shellie’s. Maggie seemed to be an experienced drinker.

She drove east toward the ocean until she connected with Magellan, then took it south to the coast highway. Obviously, she was finished working for the day.

Carver stayed well back from the black Stanza and listened to a clergyman and a female state representative argue about the French abortion pill. He knew where the car and the argument were going.

He continued past the driveway of Maggie’s cottage after the Stanza had turned into it. Then he made a U-turn and parked on the shoulder behind some palms and decorative shrubbery dotted with tiny multicolored blossoms, where Beni Ho had been parked to watch the cottage when Carver had visited it the first time. He twisted the ignition key and switched off the engine and the radio.

The parking place didn’t provide much of a view, actually. Carver could see the front of the cottage through the bushes, but not the door or the stepping-stone path to the rear of the place and the beach.

He decided to knock on the cottage door and try getting Maggie to talk with him while she was loosened with alcohol. She should be more cooperative and revealing thanks to her time spent in Shellie’s. Besides, Carver had done enough sitting in the heat for one day.