Torch (26 page)

The whole thing had taken less than a minute.

The room’s door was still open. A light came on, and for an instant a nude man appeared in the doorway, body hunched and long black hair wildly mussed. Even from this distance Carver could see the look of horror on his face as he slammed the door.

Less than fifteen minutes later the black-haired man, fully dressed now but carrying his suit coat, emerged from the room with the woman. She was dressed as before but had her hair pinned in a pile on top her head. They stood for a few minutes at the base of the stairs, talking earnestly in the faint glow of the vending machines. The man was waving his long arms, obviously upset. The woman touched his cheek gently from time to time, calming him. He slipped into his suit coat and stood still, listening to her. Then they kissed briefly and parted. Carver had a chance to get the license number of the man’s black or midnight blue Cadillac before following the Miata.

This time the redhead drove all the way back into Del Moray. She parked in the dark lot of a small, seedy motel three blocks from the ocean and went directly into one of the detached cabins, using a key she’d fished from her purse. Lights winked on inside the cabin, providing a view of a wall with an arrangement of framed prints on it, some of them hanging crookedly. Then the woman appeared at the front window and closed the drapes.

Half an hour passed. A paunchy but muscular man with tattooed arms came out of another of the run-down cabins and gave Carver a curious and hostile look as he swaggered to a dented gray pickup truck. Rap music blared from the cab as the truck kicked back gravel and roared away. Carver figured it would be wise not to be there when the man returned.

The shade was raised on the cabin window that held the air conditioner. Carver climbed from the Olds and walked along the line of cabins as if he had a firm destination. Yet he was moving slowly; a man with a cane could do that without attracting suspicion even if he were seen.

He moved even slower as he veered at an angle to where he could see inside the window, getting so close to the cabin that he could feel the hot breath of the wheezing old air conditioner.

He glanced quickly around. Took a chance.

Edging to the window, he tried not to breathe in the air conditioner’s fumes and peered inside.

The woman was wearing only black panties and bra, half reclining on a small sofa and talking on the phone. Her free hand held what looked like an ice pack on the side of one of her thighs. As Carver watched, she hung up the phone, then stood and walked into a small kitchenette, where she tossed the ice pack into the sink. The cabin was small; she was alone. She sat on the edge of the bed and unpinned her hair, let it fall and shook it out, her head hanging low. Something about the long red hair, swinging side to side and almost brushing the floor, held Carver spellbound.

A truck whined past out on the street, shifting through gears noisily and breaking the mood.

Feeling like a Peeping Tom, Carver backed away. He glanced guiltily around the shadowed parking lot. No one was on the lot or at any of the cabin windows. In fact, only two cabins’ lights were glowing other than the one near the street that served as the office.

Relieved, he went back to the Olds, got in, and started the engine. There was no more reason to be a voyeur. The redheaded woman was home—in her own motel room, anyway. He could leave and they could both go to bed and get some rest.

As he eased the big Olds as soundlessly as possible from the gravel lot and turned right onto the street, he thought of the gull he’d watched tracing patterns in the sky earlier that evening, and of the hypnotic spray and graceful arc of the woman’s long red hair swinging and almost touching the floor.

He tapped the brake and glanced back for a moment, not knowing quite what he was feeling, then drove away.

B
ETH WAS WAITING
for Carver on the beach the next morning when he came in from his swim. As he crawled up from the surf to where his cane protruded from the damp sand, he felt like some creature of early evolution, more at home in water but compelled by destiny to walk on land.

He grabbed the cane and levered himself to his feet, suddenly cool even in the morning sun, and joined Beth as she sat cross-legged on a large towel. She was wearing her red swimsuit but he doubted she would go into the water. She seldom swam or sought the sun. It amused her at times that some of the people who scorned her because she was black worked so hard to become one tenth as dark.

Beside her lay a white beach towel with a scene of a glorious setting sun and soaring gulls on it. Carver lowered himself onto the towel and leaned back toward the terrycloth sunset, supporting himself on his elbows and feeling the genuine sun and the soft sea breeze evaporating the salt water from his tanned flesh. Beth had been asleep when he’d returned last night, and still sleeping when he’d crept from the cottage half an hour ago to swim.

“How did you do last night?” he asked.

She remained sitting Indian fashion with her legs crossed, watching the sea. The sun was sparkling on the water like strewn diamonds. “I followed that good-looking dude to a hotel outside town where he met a woman about three times his age. They went to an expensive restaurant, then shopping. She tried on clothes for him and he made over her like she was young Liz Taylor, then they had a few drinks at a seaside lounge and he drove her back to the hotel.”

“He go upstairs with her?”

“Nope. He went home, to an apartment over on West Tenth. He did what an escort’s supposed to do, it seemed to me.” Squinting against the morning sun, she looked over and down at Carver. “What about that redhead you followed?”

Carver told her about the two men the woman had met, and the apparent photographing in the motel room of the woman and the second man having sex.

“Sounds like prostitution,” Beth said, “not to mention blackmail shaping up.”

“It might be a variation of the badger game,” Carver said, watching a pelican splash into the sea in an awkward dive for a fish, then come up empty. “The woman lures the man to a motel room, her confederate breaks in and photographs them, then says the woman’s husband hired him. The guy in the photos with the woman buys prints and negatives from the photographer and bribes him not to tell the woman’s husband. He can feel good about that. Not only won’t his wife find out he’s been a bad boy, he’s also nobly protecting his lover.”

“Why not simply the badger game?” Beth asked. “The man with the camera pretends to
be
the husband, and after threatening and arguing with the John, he calms down and generously agrees to accept a bribe not to tell the John’s wife.”

“The photographer wasn’t in the room long enough,” Carver said. “He got in and took his shots within seconds, then ran from the scene. There was no time for conversation.”

Beth brushed sand from her ankles, then flicked it off her towel. “That guy in Miami, Charlie Post, told you his wife had photographs of him and Maggie Rourke together.”

“I haven’t forgotten.”

“Seems too much of a coincidence.”

“Maybe. People have extramarital sex, other people photograph them to nail them with proof of infidelity. Happens all the time.”

“I figure there’s probably a common thread there,” she said.

“Maggie isn’t connected to Nightlinks.”

“You sure?”

“She says no.”

“Nixon said no about Watergate. Bush said no about Iran-gate.”

Carver grinned. “Maggie might not even be a Republican.”

Beth looked at him with disgust. “Woman probably don’t even vote. That’s not the point. She says no, and you believe her because she speaks through kissable lips. Jesus, Fred!”

He sat up straight so he was at eye level with her. “There isn’t anything suggesting Maggie even knows Nightlinks exists.”

Her expression of disdain lingered on her dark features, perspiring now in the glare of the sun. “That might be an acorn you haven’t stumbled across yet. But it might exist. Might even grow into an oak, you give it half a chance, a little of that fertilizer you spread around so well.”

“McGregor said something about me being blind and stumbling onto acorns.”

“Man must know a few things.”

“He calls you my dark meat.”

“Fuck McGregor!”

He laughed.

“You like getting me pissed, Fred?” She punched him on the upper arm. Hard. “You like it, do you?”

He laughed harder, but his arm was aching.

She punched him again, in precisely the same way in precisely the same spot, adding injury to injury. “You think it’s funny, do you?”

“No, no!” he said, still laughing.

She waited, not smiling.

He stopped laughing.

“You could be right,” he said.

“So what you gonna do about it, Fred?” She jokingly drew back her fist as if about to punch his arm again where it was still throbbing, only much harder this time.

He guessed she was joking, anyway.

“I’m going to talk to Maggie Rourke,” he told her.

It wasn’t exactly the answer she’d wanted, but she didn’t argue. She stood up gracefully and shook sand from her towel, snapping it like a whip. The breeze caught some of the sand and blew it on Carver. “You’re gonna have breakfast first,” she said.

He found his cane and gained his feet, dragging his towel up with him. “We going out to eat?”

“I got some biscuits ready to go in the oven,” she told him. “We can eat in this morning.”

She’d surprised him again. She wasn’t one to use the kitchen for much other than rinsing her hands.

“Biscuits?”

“Biscuits. Like your Aunt Jemima used to bake.”

“Why the spurt of domesticity?” he asked. “Cause I felt like some biscuits,” she said, straight-faced.

He followed her up the beach toward the cottage. She was walking slower than usual so he could keep pace, her heels kicking up small rooster tails of sand. He loved walking behind her, watching the beautiful undulating flow of her lean body as she strode with confidence and elegance. It was difficult to imagine her in a kitchen wearing an apron, busying about and tending to biscuits.

“Did you make those biscuits from scratch?” he asked.

She didn’t answer.

He thought for a moment of twisting up his towel and flicking her in the buttocks.

Then he decided that would be a bad idea.

She was domestic only up to a point.

When Carver phoned Burnair and Crosley he was told that Maggie wasn’t expected in that day. He asked to talk to Beverly Denton, who said that Maggie had called in sick that morning.

His stomach still churning from Beth’s biscuits, he drove A1A toward Maggie’s cottage.

He didn’t really believe there had to be a connection between the man photographing the redhead and her John, and Maggie’s being photographed with Charlie Post. Adultery, photographs, and divorce had been close partners since the invention of the camera. But he wanted to talk with Maggie about Post’s being roughed up when he’d attempted to see her.

Or maybe he simply wanted to talk with Maggie.

She opened the door right away when he knocked. She must have just returned from the beach; she was wearing a black one-piece swimsuit cut high on the thighs, and there was a sheen of perspiration on her tan face and the swell of her breasts. She smiled when she saw it was Carver, knocking him slightly off balance. He’d imagined she might reward his persistence by throwing something at him.

“You
are
determined about that conversation we’re supposed to have,” she said. Her eyes were a deep and nondescript color in the dim light of the cottage, pulling at him so that he had to look away for a second.

“Obsessed, even,” he said. “Apparently you bring that out in people.”

“Some people. The ones who need to be obsessed.”

She stepped aside and made room for him to enter.

The cottage was cool, not so dim now that he was inside. She didn’t ask him to sit down, but she still wore her slight smile as she stood facing him. She was obviously aware that she fascinated him; it was a familiar phenomenon for her.

“It’s a new swimming suit,” she said, backing away a few steps and turning, modeling so he could see her from every angle. She was one of those women whose compactness lent the impression of full perfection. Her smile was wider as she stopped turning and faced him. “Well, how do I look?”

“Like a flavor.”

The smile burst into a short, musical laugh.

“I called you at Burnair and Crosley,” he said. “They told me you’d called in sick.”

“It passed,” she said. She ran a hand absently along a well-turned forearm, then was perfectly still for a second in an exquisitely graceful pose, like something Michelangelo might have created if he’d worked with warm flesh instead of stone. “The sun heals everything if only you give it time.”

“Maybe it’s the time that heals.”

“No, it takes the heat of the sun to purge body and soul.”

Carver found himself staring at her cleavage above the bra of her black suit. He quickly looked into her eyes and saw amusement there, and a kind of cruel pleasure. She was a woman who understood the power of her sex, what she possessed that she might give or withhold.

“I saw Charlie Post yesterday,” he said, trying to get to business. “He looked a bit rough after his beating.”

“Beating?” Parallel frown lines of concern appeared above the bridge of her nose, then disappeared. “Charlie was beaten?”

“Not long after trying to see you.”

Maggie hitched up the top of her swimming suit as if it might be about to fall from her breasts, but she didn’t move to tie the string designed to loop around her neck for support. “It isn’t a good idea for Charlie and me to see each other again. I think even Charlie would tell you that.”

“He’s more convinced of it now,” Carver said.

“Is he all right?”

“He’ll heal. Time and the sun and all that.”

“Who did it to him?”

“A large man driving a big black luxury car.”

She made a show of trying to think, actually looking up and off to the left, as if her memory were suspended there like a balloon. “I don’t know anybody like that. At least anybody who beats up people. Poor Charlie. He’s a prince of a guy, and he doesn’t deserve all the trouble he’s had. I mean, that wife of his. Ex-wife. My God, what a curse she turned out to be.”