Torch

by John Lutz

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.

  3

  RILEY’S CLAM SHOP 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, ab
out 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.

  Carver climbed out of the car and crossed the moonlit lot, the shadows of the breeze-tossed palm trees dancing at his feet. The brunette with her arms crossed glanced at him, then leaned with her shoulder against the thick post supporting the ship’s bell. She smiled, uncrossed her arms, and gave the spoked wooden wheel a turn, as if it were a wheel on a TV game show allowing her to choose a vowel. Carver doubted if she’d ever been to sea.

  Inside the restaurant the music was deafening, provided by a five-piece all-female band featuring a shiny and complicated electric keyboard. Carver sat at the bar and lip-synched to the bartender that he wanted a draft beer.

  He sat sipping his beer from its frosted mug and trying not to listen to the music for a few minutes, looking over the crowded restaurant. All the tables were occupied by at least two people. There were half a dozen or so men seated or standing at the long bar who might be by themselves. A sign over the door advertised that there would be a bikini contest next Friday, Jello wrestling the Friday after that. Carver saw no reason why the two events shouldn’t be combined.

  Carrying his beer, he went outside and across wooden planks to a public phone he’d noticed mounted on a corner of the building. The brunette near the ship’s bell smiled at him again. He was about to phone Beth, so he didn’t smile back, but he raised his stein in a kind of salute to her and all womanhood.

  Beth wasn’t in her apartment, so he called his beach cottage five miles up the coast highway. She had a key and came and went pretty much as she pleased. Which was most of the time. He’d given Belquest the cottage as her address because she’d be easier to reach there, and he’d know about it sooner rather than later. It was only when she had a work overload, as she had now, and had to hole up to meet a deadline, that she spent nights in her closetlike efficiency miles from the beach.

  She answered on the second ring and said, “Where you been, lover?”

  “How’d you know it was me?”

  “I been waiting long enough for you, Fred, it doesn’t matter much anymore if it’s you.”

  “I thought you’d be at your apartment tonight.”

  “No, I finished the polluted fish story. You talk to Donna?”

  So Beth didn’t know, hadn’t caught the information on the news.

  “Fred?”

  He set the beer mug on the shelf above the tattered phone directory. “I’ve got some bad news about Donna,” he said. And he told her what had happened.

  She was quiet for a long time. Then, “Christ, Fred! You think she really killed herself by stepping in front of a speeding semi?”

  “It looks that way. She might have been in that kind of mood, the way she was acting in the restaurant.”

  “What about Megan? Her little girl.” Beth sounded as if she might be about to cry. Not like her at all; she treated tears as if they were acid that might sear her cheeks to the bone.

  “She’s with Donna’s mother. The mother, the husband, they probably know by now.”

  “Lord! What do you suppose they’ll tell Megan?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure what I’d tell a four-year-old kid in this situation. Or how soon.”

  “Fred, before Donna left the restaurant, did she tell you what was bothering her? Why she wanted to talk to you?”

  “Yes and no.” He told Beth about Donna paying him to follow her.

  “And she wouldn’t tell you why?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not Donna at all, this stepping-out-on-her-husband business. She’s not the type, though we both know almost everybody can be.”

  “Almost everybody,” Carver said. “My impression was the husband pushed her into it. Did you ever meet him?”

  “Couple of times. He seemed nice enough. Donna said he had a temper, though never with her. They seemed happy together. That was a few years ago, though. Things can change.”

  “Can and do,” Carver said, thinking of his own life.

  “What are you gonna do now, Fred?”

  “Follow somebody else. That’s part of why I called you.”

  He gave Beth the phone number of Riley’s Clam Shop and asked her to wait a few minutes, then call and ask for Enrico Thomas.

  When he went back inside, he saw that his place at the bar had been taken. He stood near the door, beneath the bikini and Jello sign, idly sipping his beer and studying the men at the bar who didn’t appear to be with someone or were in a waiting attitude. There was a big man in a plaid sport jacket, looked like a high-pressure salesman. An athletic type in a pullover shirt—Carver could picture him as Donna’s secret lover. A man about Carver’s age, bald on top like Carver, was seated near the far end of the bar, staring morosely into his beer as if he might have been stood up. Could be the guy who’d swept Donna off her feet and into infidelity, Carver thought. Or maybe he was flattering himself because of his resemblance to the man.

  The phone rang, and the bartender, a wiry little gray-haired man in a white shirt and checked vest, hurried over to answer it.

  He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece and shouted, “Enrico Thomas?” Looking up and down the bar. “Enrico Thomas here?”

  A few of the men glanced at him, but no one wanted the call.

  “Go see if there’s an Enrico Thomas out at one of the tables,” the bartender shouted to a blond waitress, and set the phone next to the beer taps. Carver could hear the waitress’s high, cutting voice calling Thomas’s name.

  From nearby a voice shouted, “Hey! Over here! I’m Enrico Thomas.”

  The bartender pointed to the phone, and the man who’d spoken moved toward it.

  He’d just come out of the restroom, a slight man with dark hair and eyebrows and mustache. He was wearing gray pleated slacks and a black sport coat, white shirt, no tie. He was very well groomed, wore his clothes well, and he crossed the room toward the phone with the fluid economy of a nifty lightweight boxer or dancer.

  Carver saw rather than heard him say hello, then yes, then look puzzled and place the receiver back down on the bar. Beth had gotten him to confirm he was Enrico Thomas, then hung up as instructed.

  Thomas looked all around the bar, then walked to the wide arch separating it from the main restaurant and gazed around, standing for a moment up on his toes for a better view. Gleaming Italian loafers flat on the floor again, he glanced at his watch. Carver shot a look at the beer-ad clock behind the bar—illuminated, flat-bellied surfers sitting around a campfire and boozing it up with beautiful girls who looked about sixteen. Ten-twenty. He took a sip of beer, watching the small, neat man rub his chin over and over and rock slightly on the balls of his feet. He acted as if he was waiting for someone, all right, getting impatient. Someone who was fifteen minutes late and would never be on time again.

  Thomas found a spot to stand near the end of the bar and ordered a drink that looked like bourbon and water. He stood there sipping it slowly, talking to no one, switching his gaze back and forth from th
e ball game on the TV above the bar to the door. Somebody on TV hit a home run, but Thomas seemed disinterested.

  At exactly 10:35, looking slightly agitated, he dropped a couple of bills on the bar and walked past Carver, out the door.

  Carver waited a few seconds, then followed. As he made his way to the Olds, he saw Thomas getting into a red Corvette convertible. Carver lowered himself into the Olds and got it started just in time to follow the Corvette from the lot.

  He made a note of the license plate on Thomas’s car, then stayed well back from it. Within minutes they were outside the Del Moray city limits, traveling south along the coast highway. Then Thomas cut west to 95, drove south to the Bee Line Expressway and headed west again, toward Orlando.

  The Olds’s huge prehistoric engine was made for gas guzzling and highway speed. Carver had no trouble keeping the Corvette in sight. He sat in the rush of warm wind and noise, feeling the vibration of road and engine running through the car, along the backs of his thighs, knowing it would be late tonight before he’d see Beth.

  Enrico Thomas slowed the Corvette on Belt Street in Orlando and cruised along at about thirty. Then the low-slung car’s brakelights flared as it made a sharp right turn into a low garage alongside a two-story beige apartment building with cracked stucco, ornate rusty iron balconies, and thick vines crawling wild up its north side. The garage door had either been open, or Thomas had signaled an automatic opener as he approached. The glow from the sodium streetlight on the corner tinted everything, including the blooms on the vines, a sickly orange color.

  Carver pulled the Olds to the curb on the opposite side of the street and watched Thomas emerge from the shadows of the garage. He appeared to point inside the garage’s dark interior, and the garage’s overhead door slowly lowered until it met the ground. Thomas then locked the door with a key before walking toward the apartment entrance. A car like the Corvette would be stolen every other day in this neighborhood unless its owner took precautions.

  Carver could call his friend, Orlando police lieutenant Alfonso Desoto, and probably get Thomas’s precise address from the Corvette’s license number, but he was here and wanted to make the trip bear fruit as soon as possible.