Torch (31 page)

One of the print journalists was trying to get Geary aside for a brief interview as Carver moved away.

“Do you know the man who was arrested?” the woman from Channel 6 News asked, when Carver had reached the fringe of onlookers.

“Nobody really knows anybody else,” Carver said, and on through the heat to where his car was parked. Let her ponder
that
one and try to fit her conclusions into a seven-second sound-bite.

He drove to his office and settled in behind his desk, deciding to make himself wait until eight o’clock before calling McGregor.

“So what do you have from tonight’s raid?” he asked, when McGregor had come to the phone.

“One thing I have is you sticking your face in where it don’t belong. Don’t think I didn’t notice you at Nightlinks, piss-head.”

“I didn’t upstage you. Did you get what you need on Sincliff?”

“It looks good, especially if you and your dark meat come through like you promised. Warrants are being issued for the Johns you named. Miami’s already arrested Reverend Devine. He’s denying everything, calling it a plot against him perpetrated by his enemies in the liberal Hollywood cabal that wants to keep getting rich foisting off its values on the public.”

“Sad day for the family. What about Maggie Rourke?”

“She’s in custody here now, talking and talking. You were right about her and the way the operation worked, Carver. Some of the escorts would lie down for cash at night. Next day the little gook would make the rounds and collect Nightlinks’ percentage of the take and turn it over to Rourke. She’d bank it, then invest it under a phony account at Burnair and Crosley, using the name and social security number of a man who’s been dead for twenty years. She keeps saying the dead guy paid all his taxes so she’s clean with the IRS.”

“Kind of person you’d want to handle your money,” Carver said.

“Only thing I’d want her to handle’s my dick. I don’t trust anyone with what I stuck my neck out for and stole fair and square.”

Carver decided not to comment on that. “So the only link between Sincliff and the prostitution money was when Beni Ho collected it and turned it over to Maggie Rourke. Without that, the most you could prove was that Nightlinks escorts might be engaged in prostitution on their own.”

“But we’ve got that and more. We’ve got these shit-asses set up for penitentiary time, Carver, so you and Beth better hold up your end of the bargain and help make it stick in court.”

“It’ll stick,” Carver assured him. “You’ll be Florida’s Eliot Ness.”

“I’m that already,” McGregor said with apparent seriousness. “I’m figuring to be another Hoover.”

“You’ve got a real chance,” Carver told him. “What about Beni Ho?”

“Don’t have him yet, but we will. The high-price lawyers are already here quoting the Constitution, so all these people will be out on bail soon, money not being scarce with them.”

“What else do you have?” Carver asked.

“Whaddya mean?” McGregor sounded confused. “What else
is
there? You think Nightlinks was into white slavery or treason?”

Carver wasn’t sure if McGregor was being devious or if he was actually puzzled. The towering degenerate could play any role the situation required.

“What else did you find when you searched through the Nightlinks files?” Carver asked.

“You mean the names? There were some names that’ll surprise people, maybe even more than Reverend Devine’s. Believe me, Carver, some of Del Moray’s chamber-of-commerce types are gonna be shit-faced when the news breaks. I’m gonna enjoy hell out of that.”

“What about state politicians?” Carver asked, laying out an obvious side road for McGregor to start down. If he didn’t humor Carver and take it, his confusion was probably real.

McGregor didn’t answer for a long time. His nasal breathing came over the line as a series of muted rasps. Then he said, “You’re not asking about any state politicians, dick-face. What do you know that you didn’t tell me?”

Carver barely heard him. He was sitting back, his mind searching for where he might have gone wrong. It was still possible McGregor knew everything and was playing it close, but he doubted that. McGregor’s voice was full of genuine puzzlement and rage.

“Carver! Carver!”

Then Carver realized that if he was wrong about Nightlinks . . .

“Carver! You asshole! Carv—”

Carver hung up.

The phone rang as soon as he’d replaced the receiver. He snatched it up, knowing it was too soon for McGregor to be calling back.

Beth.

“I saw it on the news,” she said. “It looks like Sincliff is going to fall all the way this time. And Reverend Devine can’t be happy.”

Carver said, “The only one happy is McGregor. Though not without some minor irritation.”

“You oughta feel good about this, Fred. I know I do. By the way, Jeff ran down the history of Dredge Industries. It’s a shell corporation, used to be one of a number of companies set up for swamp drainage. Incorporated in Delaware in eighty-six, became a subsidiary of the Brightmore Company in eighty-nine, apparently for tax purposes. Brightmore held title to the cottage where Maggie was staying. Then Brightmore, along with Dredge Industries, was acquired in ninety-two by Modelers, Inc. President and CEO of Modelers is Vincent McLain Walton.”

It came together in his mind with a click so definite he could almost hear it. He couldn’t speak for a moment.

“Fred?”

“We can talk later,” he said. He knew Sincliff and the others would soon be back on the street. And the Nightlinks raid had been all over the local news for hours.

“What’s going on, Fred?”

“No time to explain.”

“Okay,” she said, knowing it was futile arguing with him. “But let me in on it first. For
Burrow.
And for us.”

“Us first,” he said as he replaced the receiver.

The phone was jangling again as he grabbed his cane and made for the door. He let it ring as he burst out into the heat and lowering light of the humid evening. Didn’t even pause to see if the caller would leave a message.

His course was as clear to him now as the shining, righteous way to salvation was clear to Reverend Devine.

T
HE HOT SUNLIGHT
was golden in the dusk as Carver parked the Olds in front of the Walton Agency on Sunburst Avenue. The low beige brick building looked like a military bunker that had been converted to civilian use and landscaped with lush bushes and palm trees. There was no sign of activity. The modeling agency might have been closed.

But it wasn’t. When Carver pushed on the brass plate of the tinted glass door, it swung open. He stepped inside and stood in sudden coolness on plush brown carpeting. A lamp on an end table next to a small sofa with what looked like an Aztec design on its back was glowing feebly, in anticipation of the night. Verna, the overly made-up receptionist with the candy-red lips, wasn’t behind the front desk. The room was unoccupied, and quiet except for the sound of cars swishing past out on Sunburst.

The door marked VINCENT WALTON opened noiselessly and Walton stepped out.

He looked tired and resigned, rather than surprised to see Carver. Today he was wearing designer jeans, baggy and tapered tight at the ankles, and a silky white shirt that was unbuttoned halfway down to reveal his hairy chest and a gold chain with a carved ivory charm on it. With his handsome, weary features and pencil-thin mustache, he reminded Carver of an aged Errol Flynn trying without success to play the swashbuckling leading man one last time.

He said, “I was afraid I’d see you here, Carver. You’re the kind of dog that keeps digging till it finds the bone.”

“I know why Donna Winship committed suicide, and why Mark Winship and Gretch were killed.”

“Well, that’s the bone.”

“The modeling agency is a front for a much more lucrative business. When someone wants a divorce but knows the price in money or child custody is going to be high, they come to you. You help them.”

“Only if they’ve heard of us and understand our unique service. And if they’ve been referred to us by a former client. We advertise by word of mouth only and cater to a select clientele, and our price is high because our specialty is in demand.” Walton’s tone of voice had taken on the quality of a salesman making his pitch, believing in his product.

“You provide someone to seduce the spouse who’s going to be served divorce papers but doesn’t know it yet,” Carver said. “The seduction isn’t difficult, considering that your employees are experienced, attractive, and expert seducers, and they have intimate information provided by your clients about their spouses.”

“You’d be surprised how easy it is, Carver, when you know everything about a person, from their taste in food and music to their sexual preferences and weaknesses.”

“Your employees, like Carl Gretch or Mandy Jamison, accomplish the seduction, then in the course of the affair they arrange to be photographed or videotaped with the victim in a compromising position.”

“Preferably one involving sexual deviance,” Walton said. “Even a straight arrow like Donna Winship had desires she wasn’t aware of until they were awakened in her by Carl. He was good at his work.”

Carver felt his anger rise, a pressure pumping through his veins. “The victim usually agrees to any divorce conditions, knowing that if there’s a court fight the affair and the tape or photographs will be made public and they’ll lose big anyway, as well as suffer loss of reputation. The illicit lover has disappeared by then, run out on them the way Maggie did on Charlie Post. But that only makes the affair seem more tawdry and increases the likelihood of the victim losing even more money, property, or child custody in the divorce.”

“You’ve got it,” Walton said, as if Carver were a struggling student who’d finally grasped the lesson.

“But Donna Winship figured something was wrong and hired me to follow her—because she thought someone else might be following her.”

“Our private detective and photographer. But he wasn’t following her constantly. He’s a busy man and spread too thin. You can understand why there’s such a need for our services. The world’s full of people—male and female—who need the best possible terms of divorce when they want to terminate a bad marriage. I mean, to me, marriage is a valuable institution. Reverend Devine and I agree on that one. He was easy, by the way. Cindy Sue Devine knew about his addiction to sex, so Mandy Jamison became a devout churchgoer and volunteer. It only took a month. She had to wait in line. So now he knows how it feels, huh?” He raised his arms and tilted his head to one side in a parody of the Crucifixion. “It looks now like Cindy Sue is going to control the good reverend’s church and the flock that gets shorn regularly.”

“In a way, she and you are in the same business,” Carver said. “You both prey on people’s misery, offer them paradise, then make your killing.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Walton said, “but praise the Lord, you’re right.”

“Speaking of killing,” said a voice Carver knew. The other door behind the reception desk had opened and Beni Ho stepped out and leaned on his cane.

“You’ve placed us in a compromising position of our own, Carver,” Walton said. “We’re going to have to close shop here, it appears. Make ourselves impossible to find. It’s a real shame.”

“You’d still be in business if you hadn’t gotten greedy,” Carver said. “Which of the Winships approached you first?”

“Mark. He wanted the divorce and he wanted the child. So I assigned Enrico Thomas—Carl Gretch—to Donna. Gretch knew she was weak and he could get her to do almost anything with enough time, so he stretched things out. She got kinkier and kinkier, loving every second of it and loving him. Couldn’t help herself any more than a woman drowning in the middle of the ocean. One night she told Gretch she’d decided she was going to divorce Mark, and she was worried someone might know about their affair and she might lose child custody.” Walton grinned. “Gretch got my okay, then he told her how to avoid that.”

“So you accepted both spouses as clients.”

“It was the first time we’d done that,” Walton said. “It opened a whole new world of opportunity.”

“But Donna wasn’t as blinded by love and lust as you and Gretch thought. She suspected what was going on and suffered so much guilt that she killed herself, and Beni Ho murdered a remorseful Mark to keep him quiet and made it look like suicide. Then he killed Gretch, after you’d talked him into moving back into his apartment to deflect suspicion after he’d panicked and run. Maggie would have been next. She started out by faking alcoholism, then found it wasn’t all an act. Her drinking, and what she knew, posed a problem, even after you left her that dismembered doll as a warning.”

“Donna’s death was something Mark hadn’t figured on,” Walton said. “It hit him hard, made him feel responsible. Maggie had managed through Charlie Post to get a position at Burnair and Crosley so she could get next to him after Donna hired us, so she was in a good position to keep an eye on him almost on an hourly basis. And she knew how to get him to talk in bed. She told us he was considering committing suicide and leaving a note explaining why. So we had to prevent that. We simply moved his schedule up and persuaded him to write a note that met with our approval. That zipped everything up neatly. Then you came along,” Walton said bitterly, “and it was a matter of time before Gretch would break and talk. So I gave him to Beni.”

“And now,” Beni Ho said through his ever-present smile, “I get you.” He stood up straighter and tossed away his cane. It clattered off the far wall and dropped onto the carpet. “We’re not alike anymore, Carver, except on the inside, where it counts most. You understand why I need to kill you.”

“And you understand it works in both directions.”

“We’re more alike than different.”

Walton said, “I’ll finish packing what we need from here,” and went into his office, closing the door with his name on it. In his mind, Carver was finished business.

Beni Ho moved toward Carver in a slight crouch, still favoring the leg Carver had shot. There was intense and glossy concentration in his eyes and anticipation in his smile. Carver could see his tiny, lithe body readying itself, like a cat gathering energy for its spring. The cold fear in Carver’s gut was like novocaine, partially paralyzing him, slowing reaction and movement. Ho knew about that and winked at him.