Torch (23 page)

All of this could be had for only 2.3 million dollars, described in the brochure as a bargain reduced price. Since it was a reduced price offer, Carver considered it for a few seconds before pushing it out of his mind.

Ushering Beth before him, he handed his two invitations to an attractive and smiling blond woman in a blue yachting outfit, then limped up the canopy-covered gangplank to where a dozen or so people were wandering about the deck holding drinks and helping themselves to hors d’oeuvres offered by white-coated waiters balancing silver trays. It was, as Carver had suspected, a well-turned-out crowd devoid of polyester. Most of the men and not a few women turned to appraise Beth as she and Carver boarded. She was wearing a simple black dress with laced sleeves, a jade necklace and pin, black high heels. She looked like a princess. Carver looked like a gangster in his black slacks, pearl shirt with black and gray tie, and gray silk double-breasted sport coat, but he figured that was okay; it was something these people understood.

A waiter with a tray of champagne in tall continental glasses approached them. The glasses looked like expensive crystal, Carver noted, as he and Beth helped themselves. The champagne had the taste of fizzy old bank notes. Carver liked it.

He and Beth nodded to a few people who glanced at them as if they might know them, then they made their way toward the stern where more guests were lounging about and chatting. Carver noticed one of the women he’d seen that morning in the Post Yacht Sales office, but she was busy smiling and talking to a fat man in a gray suit and didn’t have eyes for anyone else. Carver didn’t try to avoid her. Even if she did recognize him, she’d probably figure he’d made contact with May Post and been invited.

Beth nodded and smiled at an elderly man who nodded and smiled at her. There was a lot of nodding and smiling all around. A lot of quiet calculation.

Beth sipped champagne and said, “This is a great vessel, Fred. You think we should make an offer?”

“What we should do,” he said, “is find May Post.”

“What does she look like?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen her.”

“No matter,” Beth said. “She’s the hostess and should be easy to spot. She’ll be smiling too much and moving too fast.” She swirled her remaining champagne around in her glass. “Isn’t that a certain U.S. Senator?” she said, nodding toward a handsome gray-haired man talking to a man and woman near the rail.

“Probably.”

Beth said, “Excuse me, Fred,” and started toward the man.

“Where are you going?” Carver asked, knowing where and not liking it. She acted as if she hadn’t heard.

The party had been going for a while. Music suddenly came over the yacht’s sound system. Laughter and conversation became louder. Carver watched Beth talking earnestly to the Senator, who seemed to be listening just as earnestly. Over near the opposite rail, he saw an elderly woman standing with her arm around a handsome young man in his twenties, not in a motherly way. Carver thought he’d seen the man at Nightlinks the day he’d photographed people entering and leaving. It would be interesting to look at the prints when they came back from the lab. Conversation continued buzzing around him. Two men waving drinks at each other were talking about bow thrusters. Carver didn’t know what a bow thruster was, but this boat probably had one. Or was it a ship? Someone had once told him that a ship was any vessel large enough to carry a boat. The
Stedda Work
qualified. “Talk to May,” a woman’s voice said somewhere near him. “She’s in the Blue Salon.”

Carver decided to follow that advice, even though it had been meant for someone else.

With a final glance at Beth and the Senator, who were both laughing now like old chums discussing schoolday pranks, Carver made his way below deck.

Outside sounds were nonexistent there, but the music and conversation were louder. Shuffling along a narrow companion-way, he squeezed past a heavyset woman in a sequined blue dress, traded his empty champagne glass for a full one as a white-coated waiter with a tray squeezed past him, and found the salon. It was crowded with people watching a card game, and it was red.

A man with a dead cigar in his mouth looked over at Carver and grinned. “You a gambler, sport?”

“No, just looking for the Blue Salon,” Carver explained.

“Above deck,” the man said around the cigar, then returned to watching the game, which was seven-card stud. “I raise you back,” a woman said firmly, as Carver edged away.

The Blue Salon was above deck and lined with windows that looked out over the party on deck and the lights of the marina. It wasn’t as crowded as the Red Salon. Most of the guests there were clustered around a small bar where the woman who’d collected invitations was now dispensing drinks. The sound system had been turned off and the music seeped in softly from the rest of the yacht, heavy with violins, pleasant at lower volume.

Moving closer to the bar, Carver braced himself with his cane and stood pretending to gaze out the window, actually studying the reflections of the guests in the salon and eavesdropping on their conversation. Within a few minutes he heard a woman seated on a plush window seat referred to as May.

He turned around and looked closely at her. Beneath a tight sequined red dress her body was thin enough to hint at anorexia. Her short hair had been dyed blond too often and was stiffly arranged so it angled sharply over one of her penciled eyebrows. She had a long, bony face that held a kind of angular attractiveness. As she crossed her legs, she noticed Carver staring at her. Quickly she drew on the cigarette she was holding and turned her attention back to the sincere-looking middle-aged man seated beside her. He puffed on a pipe and listened. Carver noticed for the first time that most of the people around him held cigarettes. Apparently Blue was the smoking salon, which accounted for the dead cigar in the mouth of the cardplayer below deck.

When the man with the pipe stood up and walked away, Carver approached May Post.

She smiled up at him with the kind of almost genuine, high-voltage smile seen on virtually everyone who sold expensive merchandise. For all she knew, Carver was a potential buyer. She couldn’t know everyone she’d invited.

“Make the deal?” he asked.

The smile didn’t quite disappear. “Hardly. That was Jason Orondo, my sales manager.” She drew on her cigarette, exhaled slowly, and studied him through the haze with a smoker’s narrowed eyes. He could tell he didn’t set quite right with her, though for the moment she couldn’t figure him out. Her eyes said she knew he wasn’t Palm Beach, though; that was for sure.

He gave her his own warmest smile. “Care to talk about something other than yachts?”

Melting but still wary, she met his eyes and said, “Okay. Unless you’re from the Internal Revenue Service.”

He laughed and sipped his champagne. Debonair Carver. “Nothing like that, I assure you.”

“They can be sneaky.”

“It’s a sneaky world,” he said sadly, “full of misdirection.”

“Then do be direct.”

“I’m a private investigator and I’d like to talk to you about Charlie Post.”

She looked thoughtful. “Charlie? Is he being investigated?”

“Not really. He’s on the periphery. I’m looking into a couple of deaths up in Del Moray.”

“Homicides?”

“Maybe.”

She grinned, liking that. “Charlie’s capacity to get into trouble knows no limits.”

“He told me you divorced him because he was unfaithful.”

“He was wrong. I divorced him because I was tired of him. He happened to be going out with some bimbo at the time, and that was convenient. I hired somebody like you to follow him. Charlie and the bimbo were photographed in a compromising position, not to mention an uncomfortable one.”

“Who was she?”

“Just the latest in a long line of women with big boobs and round heels. She ran out on Charlie the next day. It was a one-night stand that didn’t work out well. Even he didn’t know her name, and I’d never seen her before. Charlie wasn’t particular when his worm was wriggling. Probably she was some waitress he picked up. It didn’t matter that she probably couldn’t have been found even if we’d searched; we had the photographs. Most of the divorce agreement took place out of court.” She caught something in the corner of her vision, smiled and waved across the room at someone, then looked back up at Carver. “Charlie knew I didn’t love him, Mr. . . . ?”

“Carver.”

“He knew I didn’t love him and was going to leave him sooner or later. He didn’t love me, either. He did everything but ask me to leave. Finally I got sick of him and I obliged.” She smiled again, but not in the way she had at her guest across the room. “Is that direct enough?”

“Sure is. So you don’t think Charlie took the other woman seriously.”

“Of course he didn’t. Charlie never took any woman seriously except for an hour at a time. Plenty of them, though. He’s got more energy than any man his age I’ve ever met; I’ll give him that much.”

“Was it a fair divorce?”

“I think so. Doesn’t Charlie?”

“He didn’t mention.”

She sucked hard on her cigarette, using it for a prop, then turned her head to the side and exhaled a long trail of smoke as she stood up. He was surprised by how tall she was. She seemed even thinner than she’d appeared sitting down. “I think we just stopped being candid with each other,” she said, looking down at him.

He shrugged. “Sorry. It always happens.”

“It’s been a pleasure talking to you, Mr. Carver. Explore the yacht. Enjoy the rest of the evening.” She turned and began walking from the salon.

He said, “Would you consider a million and a half?”

She didn’t look back.

“What did you say to the Senator?” Carver asked Beth as they sped north on the Florida Turnpike toward Del Moray. He was driving but they were in her car. It put in a better appearance than the Olds.

“I thanked him. He gets little enough of that. What did May Post say to you?”

“Pretty much the same thing Charlie Post told me.”

“So now you know Post isn’t a complete liar.”

“The best liars are never complete. That’s why what they say smacks of the truth.”

“True enough.”

They drove for a while in silence, listening to the tires tick over seams in the pavement. Then Carver glanced over at Beth and said, “You were the most stunningly attractive woman on the boat.”

She moved close to him, kissed his ear, and said, “What were you doing looking at every other woman on board?”

“Part of my work.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Not completely,”

“You don’t have to sweet-talk me, Fred.”

That was true.

Partly.

W
HILE
C
ARVER SWAM
the next morning, Beth drove into Del Moray to pick up the photographs of Nightlinks clientele. She’d left before he’d gone into the sea, and she’d already returned by the time he’d showered away salt water along with oil from the offshore freighters and dressed.

She was seated on a stool at the breakfast bar. Before her were two coffee cups, a box of doughnuts, and the fat white envelope containing the photographs.

Carver saw that her cup was full. He went to the Braun brewer and poured coffee into the cup she’d set out for him. Then he sat down on the stool diagonally across the counter from her.

“Bought glazed,” she said.

“Good.” He opened the box and withdrew one of half a dozen glazed doughnuts. Took a generous bite out of it, then set it down on a piece of the opaque paper that doughnut shops used because for some reason iced and sugar-coated doughnuts didn’t stick to the stuff. The doughnut was fresh and still warm.

Beth took a bite out of another doughnut, brushed sugar and icing from her hands, then very deftly opened the envelope in a way that wouldn’t get it sticky. Carver sipped coffee and watched her thumb through the stack of photographs with equal dexterity. When she was halfway through, she gave him the ones she had seen.

The camera and lens had worked well. Though blurred foliage in the foreground spoiled some of the shots, in most of them the unknowing subjects were framed as tightly as if the camera had been only a few feet from them.

“Nice-looking folks,” Beth said, still studying the photos. “I guess you gotta be a looker to work as a paid escort.”

“It can’t hurt,” Carver said.

Beth examined some more photos, then said, “Hey! This guy.”

Carver looked up at her.

“This guy right here.” She laid a photograph on the counter.

It was a shot of Harvey Sincliff and another man walking toward the Aero Lounge.

“I saw him enter and leave Gretch’s apartment building more than once,” Beth said. Her long red fingernail tapped the image of Sincliff rather than his companion. A flake of glazed icing dropped from her finger onto the photo.

“You sure?”

“He was there at least twice,” Beth said. “I didn’t actually see him with Gretch, but Gretch was home each time he was in the building. I made a note of that, but didn’t think it was important. For all I knew he was there to see somebody else. Maybe even lived there.” She leaned forward and blew the flake of icing from the photo. “Who is he?”

“Harvey Sincliff. He owns Nightlinks.”

“Oh. Well, Gretch worked for him as an escort. Maybe that’s why he was there to see him.”

“Sincliff told me he knew Gretch as Enrico Thomas, and then only slightly. Didn’t even recall who he was until I prodded his memory. He also told me he hadn’t seen Gretch in months.”

“I guess he lied, then,” Beth said around a bite of doughnut. “No surprise. Question is why.”

Carver finished his doughnut, then ate another one, pondering that question.

“Maybe there’s more to Nightlinks than just an escort service,” Beth said.

“There is. Sincliff is into prostitution, but it’s difficult to prove.”

“I took that for granted. Most escort services are fronts for prostitution. I mean, maybe there’s even more to it than that.”

“Any ideas?”

“No. But people have died, Fred. It might be worth finding out Sincliff s real connection with Gretch, and what, if anything, Nightlinks has to do with it.”