Torch

by John Lutz

  “I feel I owe her something.”

  “Because you do feel remotely responsible for her death?”

  “Maybe. And because she was Beth’s friend. And because when I went to Riley’s Clam Shop to get a look at Enrico Thomas just to satisfy my curiosity and to try to get some hint as to why Donna wanted herself followed, Thomas turned out to be worth learning more about.”

  “And what will you do with the information?”

  “Nothing, probably. He’s a dangerous sleazeball, but that isn’t illegal. I’m driving over to return Donna’s retainer to her husband this morning, then I should be out of whatever it is I’m in.”

  “So this is merely more of your curiosity satisfying, hey?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, I think it’s your dog-with-a-rag obsession. Once you get a lock on something that seems to tug back, you can’t turn loose.”

  Carver felt a twinge of anger. “You’re constantly calling me obsessive.”

  “Only an observation, my friend.”

  “Well, you’re obsessive about it.”

  “Only because you are constant in your obsessiveness and your impatience to get to whatever it is you’re seeking. It’s a problem for you, but it makes you good at what you do.”

  “Are you going to run the Corvette’s license number?”

  “Of course. I’ll phone you back as soon as I have any information.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “See, amigo: impatience. I’ll probably get back to you within the hour.”

  Carver thanked him and hung up.

  Obsessive. Desoto called him that, Beth called him that—only she didn’t seem to mind.

  Carver wondered why they couldn’t simply think of him as determined.

  He knew he was determined.

  Only half an hour had passed before Desoto called.

  “Red ninety-two Corvette belongs to one Carl Gretch,” he said, and gave Carver the address of the apartment on Belt Street in Orlando.

  “Anything on Gretch?”

  “No outstandings. But I checked further. He did a stretch in Raiford five years ago for burglary.”

  “That it?”

  “It is for the wages of sin; he’s no longer on parole. He’s a thirty-two-year-old male Caucasian, blue and black, five-foot-five and a hundred thirty-five pounds. Not a good size for penitentiary life.”

  “The right size for Enrico Thomas, though. Know anything about the burglary?”

  “No. Might have been youthful indiscretion, boys being boys.”

  “I doubt it,” Carver said, ignoring Desoto’s sarcasm. “If it was a one-time thing, the judge probably would have allowed probation.”

  “All it means, though, is that your late client was seeing a guy with a record. It happens.”

  “Guy with a record with a knife.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I’m still curious,” Carver said.

  “Still obsessed. Are you going to keep poking around?”

  “No,” Carver said. “Whatever Donna Winship was mixed up in, it’s over. For her, anyway. For me, too.”

  “Yes. Concentrate on living clients,” Desoto said. “They’re far more profitable.”

  Carver thanked him for the help and advice, then broke the connection but didn’t hang up. He dialed the home number Donna Winship had given him. He wanted to make sure Mark Winship was there before driving to see him to return Donna’s check, tell his benign lies, then walk away from the Winship tragedy and let it play out on its own.

  No answer.

  Carver hung up the phone, then looked in the directory for Mark Winship’s address. Found it within seconds: 333 Blue Heron Road. On the moneyed side of town, farther from Carver’s cottage in decimal points than in miles. He decided to drive into Del Moray and drop by the Winship home even though he’d gotten no answer to his call, in the hope that the grieving widower would be there but didn’t want to speak on the phone. If Winship wasn’t home, Carver would drive to the office, do paperwork, and try to contact him later, maybe catch him this evening on the way back to the cottage.

  There was, after all, no rush about returning Donna’s check.

  The Winship house was one of the smaller ones on Blue Heron, but still expensive. The Del Moray paper’s account of Donna’s death had mentioned that her husband was a financial consultant; apparently he’d done well with his own investments.

  The house was a low, contemporary structure of white bricks. The roof was all planes and angles, and the corner of the house nearest the driveway was floor-to-ceiling glass behind which drapes were closed to keep the sun out. There was no car in the driveway, but the garage door was closed. A tall sugar oak grew near the garage, and a walk led around through a colorful garden that looked as if it followed the property line into the backyard.

  Carver got out of the Olds and walked onto the porch. Standing in the shade of the roof’s overhang, he pressed the door button and heard bells chime faintly inside. They played four notes of a song he didn’t recognize.

  No one came to the door.

  He pushed the button and heard the abbreviated tune again, waited a few minutes, then hobbled down off the porch and walked to the garage door. It was one of those overhead doors with a small window at eye level in each section. The windows were dirty, but Carver leaned close to one, rubbed it in a circular motion with the heel of his hand, then peered inside.

  Two cars were parked in the dim garage, Donna’s gray convertible and a green Jaguar sedan. The Jag was doubtless Mark’s, so unless the family had a third car he might very well be home. Possibly he was outside and hadn’t heard the door chimes. It was worth checking on, anyway.

  Carver followed the stepping-stone walk that led through the garden. Azaleas bordered the walk on the garage side. Beyond them long-stalked dahlias swayed in the faint warm breeze. Low ground cover bearing tiny white blooms spread to the garage’s back corner and around, where a small white iron bench posed pristinely beneath an oleander tree bearing clusters of pink flowers.

  When Carver walked beyond the bench, he saw Mark Winship immediately. He was seated in a large wooden glider in the shade of an arched trellis bursting with red roses, an open book in his lap, his head bowed in concentration.

  Carver set the tip of his cane on sunbaked lawn and limped toward him. Clouds of tiny insects rose around his feet and the cane with each step. Some of them found their way inside his pants cuffs, tickling his ankles.

  When he got closer, he saw that Mark Winship was wearing glasses with tortoiseshell frames, resting somewhat crookedly halfway down his nose, and that the book in his lap was a Bible.

  When he got closer still, he noticed the small silver revolver in Winship’s right hand.

  Then the blue-black hole in his temple.

  6

  CARVER SETTLED INTO the chair facing Lieutenant William McGregor’s desk at Del Moray police headquarters. The office was sparse, with a curling tile floor that was supposed to look like wood parquet, dented black file cabinets, and, on a table alongside the desk, what looked like a combination fax, answering machine, phone, clock, police band radio, and coffee maker. The walls were a shade darker than institutional green only because they hadn’t been painted in decades. But the office did have a window, looking out on the parking lot; McGregor was moving up in the department. His problem was that he tended to move down as often as up. It had to do with his character.

  “So, look who found a dead body,” he said, grinning and lowering his six-foot-six frame into the chair behind the desk. He was a thin man but coiled and powerful, with a face to match his character. Long features, prognathous jaw, squinty little mean blue eyes, lank blond hair that hung Hitler-style over his forehead. Between his yellowed front teeth there was a wide space that he constantly probed with his tongue, as if trying to imitate a lizard. Come to think of it, Carver mused, it wasn’t an imitation at all.

  “Was there a suicide note?” Carver asked.


  “You know there was a note, asshole, because you read it before calling the police.” The tongue probed and flicked. “Know why I think that?”

  “Sure. Because you would have read it.”

  “You betcha! It’s good we understand each other.”

  Carver understood McGregor, all right. He was unprincipled, uncouth, untrustworthy, and a number of other un’s. And ambitious and self-serving. Most of all ambitious and self-serving. He’d even considered taking a run at getting elected mayor of Del Moray at one time; for the graft and free pussy, he’d told Carver. But Carver had known too much about him and put a stop to that. McGregor had never forgiven him. Never would.

  “The note I didn’t read didn’t say much,” Carver said. He’d found it stuck between the pages of the Bible in Mark Winship’s lap, and had indeed read it before phoning the Del Moray police. In what was presumably Mark Winship’s handwriting it said simply, I die by my own hand, with grief and regret, and was signed, Mark Winship. “Was it written with the pen in his shirt pocket?”

  “You mean you didn’t match ink colors?” McGregor asked.

  Carver smiled. The ink color of note and pen had matched.

  “If it wasn’t that this guy committed suicide,” McGregor said, “I’d find a way to hang a murder charge on you.”

  Which meant the gun in Winship’s hand had fired the death bullet, and paraffin tests indicated the dead man had squeezed the trigger.

  The pink tip of McGregor’s tongue peeked out between his widely spaced front teeth like an evil little internal serpent. “The interesting thing is what probably drove him to kill himself. His wife got herself run over by a truck yesterday. Stupid cunt stepped right out in front of it, and splat! Or so the story goes.”

  “So he was grieving over his dead wife,” Carver said, “and the strain got to him.” He never shared knowledge with McGregor unless it was absolutely necessary. McGregor saw knowledge as power and seldom failed to use it in the most heinous way. It was too late for power to corrupt McGregor, but he could certainly corrupt power.

  “The thing is”—the tongue probed obscenely—“the wife was having a drink with you just before she ran out on the highway and tried to hug a speeding semi. That makes me curious.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re involved, fuck-face. And because the double suicide of a Del Moray couple with an address in my jurisdiction suggests that there’s more to the story than an unhappy marriage gone wild. The department makes assessments for promotion in two months, and I’m being considered. Next step is captain, then chief, and don’t think it isn’t a possibility. I don’t want anything making waves in my jurisdiction, messing up my chances. For now, it’d be best for me, and for you, if there was nothing evil going down.”

  “So something evil might move up,” Carver said.

  “You betcha.”

  “At least you’re honest about it.”

  “I’m not honest about anything!” McGregor sounded genuinely offended. “All I am is legal.”

  “And not even all the time.”

  McGregor aimed his jut-jawed, lewd grin at Carver. “If I gotta swim in this ocean, I’m gonna be a shark. That bother you, guppy?”

  “Only when you enjoy it.”

  “Well, then be bothered, cause I always fucking enjoy it. I’ve adapted, just like Darwin said always happens with the strong, and you haven’t. We both know the world is shit—difference is, you kid yourself there’s something better than shit, while I don’t. In fact, I gotta admit I love to roll in it.”

  “It’s rubbed off,” Carver observed.

  Still grinning, McGregor picked up a sharp pencil and made a little jabbing motion in the direction of Carver’s heart. Kidding, but there was malice in his eyes. “What’d you and the late Donna Winship talk about yesterday?”

  “Nothing important. Weather, sports . . .”

  “Tell me straight, Carver, or I’m gonna make sport of you.”

  “You sound as if you’re investigating a double murder. Is there some doubt that either of the Winships was a suicide?”

  “Sorry, that’s police business.”

  “Is this conversation police business?”

  “It ain’t social. Not with a pus-bag like you.”

  “Then there must be something big happening under your nose, and you don’t understand it so you’re upset and taking it out on me. I guess I should call my lawyer.”

  McGregor stared at him with a look that could melt titanium.

  “Do I get my phone call?” Carver asked.

  Slowly McGregor unfolded his long body until he was standing at full height behind the desk, looming over Carver. “What you get, fuck-face, is outa this office. Now.”

  Carver waited a few deliberate seconds. Saving face, as it were. Then he leaned on his cane and stood up.

  “That’s better,” McGregor said with satisfaction. “It’d be wise of you to be on your best behavior for a while. And don’t think I won’t be watching you and your dark-meat cunt.”

  Carver didn’t answer. He knew McGregor was trying to provoke a show of rage. McGregor fed on that kind of thing. He lived to jerk people’s strings, to make any kind of unpleasant impact in their lives. It was his charming way of communicating.

  At the door, Carver paused and turned around, his blood racing but his expression calm.

  “You finally got yourself a window,” he said, looking around the drab green room, “but this sure isn’t the office of a guy who’ll ever be chief.”

  McGregor said something to him as he left and closed the door behind him, but it made little sense to Carver even if it was intensely personal. It was language you seldom heard even at the movies.

  That afternoon Beth said, “McGregor’s the worst kind of cop there is. Corrupt and admits it, so he stays on the safe side of the line while he’s messing up other people’s lives.”

  “He doesn’t admit it to everyone,” Carver said, “only the people he’s sure already know.”

  “That has to be a growing number.”

  “But it hasn’t grown large enough yet. It probably never will. He’ll see to that. Survival of the fittest, he’d call it. Cops like McGregor retire secretly wealthy.”

  “And unbothered by conscience.”

  “But he’ll probably be haunted by the opportunities he missed,” Carver said. “That can be worse than a conscience for a guy like McGregor.”

  They were seated on stools at the breakfast counter in Carver’s beach cottage, eating tuna-salad sandwiches and drinking beer. Neither of them much liked to cook; this was a typical meal when they ate in. Carver had been home for a while, seated on the porch with his good leg propped on the rail and watching the sea, thinking. Beth had been out scrounging up facts about her wayward mail-order company, and had returned fifteen minutes ago for lunch and to use her word processor.

  “So don’t get involved with McGregor,” she said. “I don’t want him messing around in our lives.”

  Carver removed the top slice of rye from his sandwich and added mayonnaise. Better. He chewed tuna salad, swallowed and took a sip of Budweiser. Then he swiveled slightly on his stool so he could look past the silhouetted planters with their dangling vines, hanging by chains in the wide window. The ocean was choppy today and seemed to rise toward the horizon so that it was higher than the roof of the cottage. It appeared vast and ominous. Far out near the horizon, a large ship sat seemingly motionless in the haze. An oil tanker, Carver thought.

  “Fred?”

  “McGregor and I agree on a few things,” he said.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “The Winship suicides don’t feel right.”

  “Hell, no, they don’t! Does a pair of suicides ever feel right?”

  “I mean, there’s a lot more to them than what’s on the surface.”

  “Why should you care?”

  “I don’t know, but I do care.”

  “That’s just one of the ways you�
�re not like McGregor,” she said around a bite of sandwich. “But there’s nothing in it for you if you keep poking around, using up your time.”

  “You know better.”

  “Sure. I meant monetarily. Course, that thousand-dollar check might still cash without any trouble, especially if you get to the bank on time. And you’ve done some investigating and put your ass on the line, kind of earned it.” She licked mayonnaise from a long, red-nailed finger and smiled. “Think of that, lover.”

  He had his pension and had made a few sound investments, had most of what he wanted. The essentials, anyway. He didn’t need the thousand dollars. And it was Megan Winship’s money now. He downed the last of his beer and said, “Fuck the money.”

  Beth laughed from somewhere down deep. “That’s my Fred! Dumb but I love him.”

  Carver figured “dumb” was better than “obsessive.” Maybe.

  He got down off the stool, leaving his cane and using the counter and stove for support while he got another beer from the refrigerator.

  Working the pull-tab, feeling cold foam run between his thumb and forefinger, he said, “Talk to me about Donna Winship.”

  7

  THE APARTMENT BUILDING Carl Gretch lived in looked even more depressing in the harsh morning light. Like the man himself, probably.

  Carver had driven into Orlando to be parked on Belt Street across from the building by eight o’clock, on the off chance Gretch-Thomas was an early riser. He didn’t want to miss connections with the knife-wielding Romeo.

  He sat behind the Olds’s steering wheel for a moment with the engine idling, gazing at the dirty beige stucco building with its rust-pitted iron balconies. Pigeon droppings, invisible under the streetlight two nights ago, looked like candle drippings on the surface of the wall not covered by vines. The vines, with their brilliant red tubular blossoms, were the only good thing about the place, possibly the only good thing in the neighborhood.

  The old car might overheat if he sat there much longer with the engine running and the air conditioner plugging away, so Carver switched off the ignition. Even at eight o’clock, oppressive heat began to push into the car almost immediately. The sun was determined to punish Florida again today.