by John Lutz
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.
42
The 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 pr
oblem, 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.
Then he screamed and came at Carver with what martial arts practitioners call a crescent kick, wheeling his body and leg sideways, his foot arcing with bullet speed toward Carver’s head.
But the injured leg slowed him enough for Carver to lean back and away. He felt the swoosh of air as Beni Ho’s foot flashed past his face. He lashed out with the cane but missed as the little man spun in a complete circle so fast he was a momentary blur.
The sudden action flushed fear from Carver. He thought he might die, but in the fatalistic core of him he wasn’t afraid. It had come down to mechanics.
Ho was on him again so fast he could react only by lifting his cane with both hands to try to block the downward chopping blow. The hard walnut cane split in half like balsa wood, doing little other than slowing the edge of Ho’s hand before it glanced off Carver’s shoulder, probably breaking the collarbone. Carver kicked out with his good leg and felt pain in his toe as it made contact with Ho’s shinbone. It was Ho’s injured leg, and the little killer’s smile was replaced by a look of annoyance as his backhanded elbow blow at Carver missed and he staggered toward him. The mental repose of the trained assassin had momentarily been broken by surprise and pain. Carver kicked the leg again, this time the thigh where the bullet had entered, losing his footing and falling hard onto his back. The unbalanced Ho grunted and stumbled, beginning to fall. So quick and agile was he that he managed to change the direction of his fall so he’d land on top of Carver. In midair he was already drawing back his hand to strike what would be a lethal blow to the throat.
Carver raised the splintered cane and it entered Ho’s chest below the sternum. The hand thudded into the carpet near Carver’s head. Ho’s face was inches from Carver’s, grinning with shock, the eyes just beginning to register what had happened. He grunted but couldn’t rise. Tried a straight blow with his knuckles that bounced off Carver’s forehead and didn’t hurt much. Carver twisted the cane and shoved on it at an angle to the heart, letting Ho’s weight help drive it deeper. He felt the warm blood on his fists and between their bodies spread.
The little man thrashed wildly and ineffectually, then made a deep, animal sound in his throat and went limp. He sighed, blood frothing at the corners of his grin, and lay in the stillness and silence of death.
The rhythmic hissing sound Carver heard was his own breathing as he came back from the primitive place where he’d been, where all creatures think only of survival.
Ho seemed as light and small and harmless as a child as Carver lifted and rolled him to the side. The countless eight-by-ten glossy head shots of models on the wall smiled down at the scene of mayhem and death as if it were a setting requiring them to register confidence and glee. Carver propped himself up on his elbows, then struggled to a sitting position. He was aware now of a ringing in his ears.
Then its pitch changed and he recognized the distant warbling of sirens. He realized what had happened. Beth had figured it out, too. Or McGregor. Probably Beth, who’d then called McGregor.
Walton had heard the sirens, too. The door with his name on it opened and he came out in a hurry. He said, “Beni, you hear-”
Then he saw what had happened and he stared down at Carver. His lips worked, making his thin, bristly gray mustache writhe like a caterpillar dying in the sun. “I’ve got a gun in my desk drawer,” he said. “I oughta kill you.”
Carver said, “Murder’s more serious than seduction.”
Walton stood thinking about that. The kind of legal help he could afford wouldn’t be able to let him walk, but with Ho dead and unable to testify, Walton almost certainly could avoid a homicide charge. The dead could be a convenience in court.
The sirens grew louder and were now obviously heading in the direction of the agency.
Walton stared at Carver for almost a full minute, turning it all over. There were possibilities, even with time running out fast, but none of them were good ones.
Then his broad shoulders slumped and he went to the reception desk and sat down in the chair behind it. He picked up the phone.
Carver thought he was going to call the police, maybe dream up a story about how Carver had barged into the agency and tried to kill him.
But he called his attorney instead.
43
Carver watched the ocean and let his thoughts roll with the waves. Beth was revising her final installment on the Walton Agency story for Burrow on her laptop. They were sitting on the cottage porch, side by side in the webbed aluminum chairs. It occurred to Carver that old married folks sat like that on their porches, though not usually with a computer.
A sailboat banked gracefully into the wind near shore. Beyond it the low profile of an oil tanker, its scooplike hull long and low on the horizon, its superstructure well back on the bow, moved almost imperceptibly through the morning haze like a mirage. A gull soared in close to the cottage, screamed, and glided to the beach to touch down near foam fingers of surf. The warm breeze carried the fetid and fishlike smell of the sea, a reminder of life and death and forever.
“I write this stuff,” Beth said, looking up from the computer, “and I get mad all over again at Walton.”
Carver knew what she meant. Marriages that might still be intact, people who might still be alive, had fallen victim to Walton and his experienced and skillful employees. He said, “There’s something particularly unfair about the business he was in. Husbands and wives who might never have strayed didn’t stand much chance under the pressure of expert seducers who knew the most intimate details about them.”
“I don’t exactly buy into that, Fred. The spouses have gotta share the blame.”
“Kind of an uneven match, though,” Carver said, thinking for a moment of Maggie Rourke. Beautiful, almost irresistible Maggie. “I feel sorry for them.”
“So do I. But the forbidden fruit was rolled their way, and they’re the ones who picked it up and bit into it. Their gamble, their loss, their responsibility.”
“Even Donna Winship?”
“Even Donna.”
Carver glanced over at her impassive dark features. She amazed him sometimes by being even more uncompromising than he was. But then she’d survived by not compromising about certain things, by keeping a part of herself whole at the center of the damage.
It was surprising how often uncompromising people, if they were discriminative in their choice of battle, were ultimately proved right.
It was called character.
We were here and then gone in this world, and character was the thing that made a difference, that made it all mean something.
“Anyway,” she said, “Walton’s doing time, and most of the spouses are going back to court and setting their divorces right, sometimes filing criminal charges for fraud.”
Carver watched the sailboat tack out to sea, toward silver spokes of sunlight angling down through breaks in mountainous white clouds. Sometimes Florida could be a postcard.
“Speaking of wronged spouses,” Beth said, “Charlie Post phoned here yesterday asking for you.”
“Am I supposed to call him back?”
“No, he’ll call you. He wants to sell you a yacht.”
Carver grinned. The sailboat appeared to enter the radiant columns of sunlight and shimmered in the distance as if transformed inside a brilliant cathedral of light.
He watched it until it disappeared in the bright haze.
Here and then gone.
FB2 document info
Document ID: fbd-cfdeac-fa4f-7344-579d-a601-8cff-7b9f31
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 22.12.2011
Created using: calibre 0.8.31, Fiction Book Designer, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 software
Document authors :
John Lutz
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