Torch (2 page)

“Marriage vows don’t give a husband the right to mistreat or neglect a wife, Donna. And believe me, you’re being too rough on yourself. You’re not the first woman to have an extramarital affair. And you wouldn’t be the first to have a good reason for one.” He gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “My former wife had good reason.”

She looked at him curiously. “Did you mistreat her?”

“Not intentionally, but I backed her to the wall all the same, and the strain on our marriage made her look to another man for what she needed. After a while, I quit blaming her.” He wasn’t being completely honest, but he figured now was the time for a benign lie.

Calmer now, the moistness in her eyes almost back to normal, Donna got off a shaky smile and said, “Maybe you’re right.”

“I know I’m right.”

She clutched her straw purse and stood up again. She seemed calmer. “Do you know where Riley’s Clam Shop is?”

“Uh-huh. Driven past it. It’s that place on Vista that looks like it’s built out of driftwood.”

She nodded. “Enrico and I meet there often.”

“Meet him there tonight as planned, then,” Carver said. “Don’t look around for me. Don’t even think about me.”

She gave him a glance from beneath the bangs, a shy smile. “What Beth said about you is right.”

“Oh? What would that be?”

“That you’re a good man but it doesn’t stick out all over you.”

Carver said, “Until recently, Beth led the kind of life that didn’t put her in contact with many good men.”

Still smiling, Donna chewed her lower lip for a few seconds, then said, “Thanks, Mr. Carver,” and turned and strode from the restaurant. The same men who’d stared at her when she entered watched her leave. A few women watched her, too, with what looked like curiosity. Maybe she was clouding up to cry again. Or barely suppressing a scream. She was a woman very near to an emotional explosion, Carver thought, and at times it showed.

After she’d gone, the waiter arrived with fresh drinks. Carver sat sipping his and watching the ice melt in hers.

About ten minutes had passed when he heard the shriek of rubber on concrete and a crash that shook the building.

I
N THE CORNER
of his vision Carver saw several gulls, wings flashing white against the darkening sky, take flight toward the open ocean. There was a hush, then a burst of activity and voices from the lounge, near the restaurant’s entrance. The diners at the tables near the windows looking out on the highway had parted curtains and were straining to see something to the north. Carver got his cane from where it was propped on the chair next to his and levered himself to his feet. He could see people from the lounge streaming out the door now, and he followed after them.

There was still plenty of light left in the evening. And heat. He felt the hot gravel of the parking lot sear into the thin soles of his moccasins as he made his way toward the highway along with most of the people who’d been in the restaurant. Two men nearby were wearing white uniforms and tall white chef’s caps. Someone tripped over Carver’s cane, sending its tip dragging through the gravel, mumbled an apology and then hurried on ahead.

On the broad highway, near the mouth of the lot’s driveway, dual strips of burned rubber blackened the concrete. Carver saw that they ran about a hundred yards along the highway, then, beyond the restaurant, veered across the yellow line and the adjacent lane.

In the tall grass beyond the shoulder, several hundred feet past the restaurant, a tractor-trailer lay on its side like a wounded dinosaur. It was obvious that the driver had slammed on the brakes and then skidded until the truck had hit the soft gravel shoulder. Probably it had jackknifed before overturning. The out-of-square trailer’s doors had sprung open, spilling wooden crates of oranges onto the highway. Oranges dotted the foliage near the truck, and hundreds of them had rolled onto the highway.

Distant sirens were warbling in the humid air, and miles down the straight, flat highway vehicles were pulled to the side and red and blue lights flashed. Carver moved to the front of the gaping crowd from the restaurant. He could see the tractor now, a shiny blue Kenworth, lying on its side at a sharp angle to the trailer, its wheels and underside exposed in a way oddly obscene. A husky man in Levi’s and a faded red tee shirt was seated nearby in the grass, a stunned expression on his bearded face. Half dozen people were clustered around him. He didn’t seem to be aware of them, or to be seriously hurt.

There was another knot of people just to the right of the driveway, none of them speaking. Carver set the tip of his cane on firm concrete and limped over to see what they were staring at.

Something in him knew even before he saw the woman sprawled on the gravel shoulder. Dread jogged his memory and he glanced toward the parking lot to see again a barely noticed gray LeBaron convertible with its door hanging open, a straw purse visible on the front seat.

“. . . thought I saw her earlier in the restaurant,” a woman’s quavering voice said as Carver found an opening in the crowd and pushed his way to where he’d have a clear view.

He’d seen the woman earlier in the restaurant, too.

Donna Winship lay on her side with one arm pinned beneath her body, the other flung above her head as if she were making a dramatic gesture. Her modest blue dress was torn and bloody and worked by the rolling of her body up around her hips, revealing lacerated legs and ripped panty hose that hung like strips of flesh. Maybe some of it was strips of flesh. She was shoeless, and one of the panty hose feet was loose and yanked to form a point about six inches beyond her toes, as if she’d tugged it that way as she’d begun to undress. Her wildly tumbled hair concealed most of her face, but Carver could see that beneath the cuts and dirt her expression was peaceful.

A highway patrol car reached the jackknifed trailer first, followed within seconds by another that arrived from the opposite direction and cut across the grassy median.

One of the troopers began setting out flares along the highway while the other talked to the truck driver, who now had his legs drawn up and his face resting on his knees. Someone pointed toward the people around Donna Winship, and the trooper looked grim and began jogging toward the newly discovered accident victim.

People moved aside, but when the trooper, a young guy with a deep tan and close-cut black hair, got to within twenty feet of Donna he saw that she was obviously dead. He came the rest of the way at a walk. Behind him, more emergency vehicles were arriving, including an ambulance. Two attendants were talking to the truck driver now, bending over him with their hands on their knees.

The young trooper knelt down and looked at Donna but didn’t touch her, then he straightened up and hitched a thumb in his belt. He looked suddenly older, and sad and tired. His job was a weight.

“Anyone know who she is?” he asked.

Carver said he did. He took a few steps forward and leaned on his cane. The trooper looked him up and down, then politely asked him to accompany him to the patrol car. Carver walked alongside him, glancing out to sea, thinking of the peaceful expression on Donna’s face and for some reason remembering the gulls that had taken wing immediately after the accident. The trooper who’d laid out the flares approached, nodded with an unfathomable look at his colleague, then continued past them on his way to make sure no one disturbed the body.

A plainclothes cop from the Sheriff’s Department joined Carver and the trooper in the car, introducing himself as Sergeant Dave Belquest. He sat in the back and laid a tiny tape recorder on the top of the front seat-back, near Carver. He was a beefy man of about fifty, stuffed into a wrinkled and perspiration-stained light gray suit. He had bushy gray eyebrows, gray tufts of hair protruding from his ears and nostrils. As soon as he’d entered the car, the interior smelled strongly of stale tobacco. Carver smoked an occasional after-dinner cigar himself and hoped he never smelled like that.

Carver acknowledged that he was aware the conversation was being taped, then gave them his statement. He described everything that had occurred between himself and Donna Winship inside the Happy Lobster. Everything other than her affair with Enrico Thomas; this was, after all, Beth’s friend, and he owed her something for her thousand dollars. Ethics had gotten him into trouble before, and he knew they might this time, too. But the daughter, Megan, had lost her mother and deserved a memory unblemished by Carver.

“You say she left the restaurant about ten minutes before you heard the crash?” Belquest asked in a hoarse, death-wish smoker’s voice. The tobacco stench came at Carver even stronger, like a warning.

“That’d be my guess,” Carver said. Beside him, the trooper was jotting things on a leather-bound notepad.

“Any more guesses?” Belquest asked.

“I think she was driving the gray LeBaron convertible in the parking lot. Its door is hanging open, and what looks like the purse she had in the restaurant is on the front seat.”

Belquest’s right hand moved to the pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket and touched them. Withdrew. He wanted to light up but knew he couldn’t in the close confines of the patrol car. It was almost as warm in there as outside; the engine was idling but the trooper must not have set the air conditioner on high. “The parking valet said the victim sat in her car for a while, then got out and walked over to the highway. He thought she might be having car trouble and was going to flag down someone to give her a ride to a station. He noticed she’d left her car door open, and he was walking over to close it before seeing if he could help her, when he heard the truck’s brakes. Didn’t even see her get hit, is what he said. He was watching the truck skid down the highway, then hit the shoulder and turn over.”

“You’d think if she had car trouble, she would have come back in the restaurant and phoned. Or maybe asked me for a lift.”

“I’d think that,” Belquest said. “But the valet didn’t. He’s a sixteen-year-old kid and was probably thinking of girls or surfing or the new Paula Abdul record.” He sounded irritated.

“What’s the truck driver say?” Carver asked.

“That she stepped out in front of the truck. Looked to him like it was on purpose.” Belquest’s right hand feinted toward his cigarettes again, then rested on the back of the front seat near the recorder. Nicotine had him in too tight a grip to let go easily. “You think she was in that kind of a mood when she left the restaurant?”

Carver thought about that. What kind of a mood was it that prompted someone to step deliberately in front of twenty tons of truck?

“You said she was tense,” Belquest pointed out. “Was she that tense, do you think?”

“There’s no way to be sure,” Carver said, “but she might have been. She had plenty of reason.”

Belquest looked out the car window at Donna’s body being loaded into a second ambulance that had arrived after the first had carted away the driver for examination and possible treatment. Two tow trucks were parked near the overturned truck now, their drivers standing and apparently discussing how to right the behemoth. Traffic was moving again, crushing oranges, waved on by the first trooper on the scene.

“People do things on impulse,” Belquest said. “Suicides don’t always seem in the mood when they commit the act. I knew a cop once, just got married, got a promotion, then ate his gun. Seemed happy only an hour before, on his way to living out the American dream.”

Carver said, “Something must have changed for him. He found himself in some other country and some other dream.”

“Odd she’d hire you to follow her,” Belquest said. “Didn’t that make you curious?”

“Sure. I tried to get her to tell me her reason, but she refused.”

“How come you’d accept a case like that?”

“Donna Winship was a friend of a friend who was worried about her.”

“Good friend?”

“To both of us.”

“What’s this good friend’s name?”

Carver gave him Beth Jackson’s name, then the address he wanted to give him.

“That’s your address,” Belquest said.

“I told you she was a good friend.”

Belquest thanked him for his statement but didn’t seem quite satisfied. He switched the tape to rewind, and Carver thought he was about to ask him some questions off the record.

Instead he said, “Jesus! Damned things are killing me by inches, but I gotta have a smoke!” He flung open the car door and climbed out into the greater heat, his hand already fumbling at his pocket that held the cigarettes.

Carver thought about the gulls again, like fragments of a soul taking to heaven.

R
ILEY’S
C
LAM
S
HOP
was as much a bar as a restaurant, so it was doing a boisterous and profitable business at ten that night. Carver parked his ancient Olds convertible at the far end of the lot, near a row of gracefully bent palm trees. He had the car’s top down, and the deep bass beat of the music wafting from Riley’s was loud enough for him to feel it in the pit of his stomach.

The restaurant was on Vista Road, about five blocks from the ocean. On the coast, Vista ended at Magellan, about half a mile north of where Carver’s office was located, on the same street. Riley’s looked as if it were built out of odd pieces of driftwood that had washed up on the beach; there was a time not so long ago when that kind of cutesy architecture was popular in coastal Florida, especially in tourist areas. Keeping to the nautical theme, a pierlike plank walkway led to the entrance, flanked by subdued lights concealed in dense and flowery shrubbery. On the gray-weathered wood above the door was mounted what looked like a real anchor.

Several men and two women were lounging outside the entrance, near what appeared to be a ship’s watch bell and a large, spoked wooden wheel that might have been used to steer a Spanish galleon. The women wore tight jeans and loose blouses. Some of the men wore casual slacks and sport shirts, some had on jackets and ties. One of the men, wearing a jacket and brightly flowered tie, was doing an animated dance in time to the music, trying to impress the women, who looked bored. The taller of the two women, a slender brunette, crossed her arms and turned away as if trying to put the whole thing out of her mind.