Torch

by John Lutz

  The Del Moray Country Club was on the ocean, just north of the marina. It was a complex of low buildings made of pale cast concrete with lots of tinted glass and with blue-shingled roofs that were the exact color of the sea on a sunny day. The grounds were neat and green, especially around the largest building, a clubhouse containing a restaurant and lounge and windows looking out on the swimming pool and tennis courts, and beyond them the ocean. On the wide sand beach was a pavilion with a thatched roof that lent shade to a bar and a dozen round tables with high-backed wicker chairs. To the right of the pavilion, closer to the water, were white lounge chairs and wide blue umbrellas with white fringe. There was a scattering of sunbathers on the beach, men in trunks and loose-fitting shirts, women in one-piece suits, a few younger ones in bikinis. A few older ones almost in bikinis. Their actions were slow and deliberate, as if they’d become drunk from the sun.

  Carver had visited the place several times last year with a wealthy client who thought his daughter might be engaged to a fortune hunter. He’d been right, but the marriage had taken place anyway, and for now, anyway, daughter and fortune hunter were living happily in Miami, maybe even in love with each other.

  Before driving here, Carver had phoned Ellen Pfitzer, and she’d agreed to meet him in the club lounge for a drink and to discuss Donna’s death. He was fifteen minutes early, so he chose a table by the window and ordered a Dewar’s and water, then sat watching a mixed doubles match in the nearest court. The woman at the far end of the court was a leggy redhead in a white and blue tennis outfit with a skimpy skirt. The other woman was a short blond, sturdily built, in a plain white outfit, who played with single-minded ferocity but was obviously the least accomplished of the four players. Both men were much younger and much smoother on the court, and seemed to be playing with some reserve. Carver guessed they were the women’s instructors. He wondered if either of the women was Ellen Pfitzer.

  The short blond hit a forehand rocket, yelling with effort, but it was long and the redhead stood smugly, holding her racket back with both hands and watching the ball drop behind the line.

  It must have been game point. The redhead’s partner gave her a big grin and a hug, then they and the other man walked off toward the part of the clubhouse containing lockers, saunas and exercise equipment. The blond woman backhanded sweat from her forehead and trudged toward the clubhouse. Despite her stockiness she had a graceful walk, the muscles in her firm, tan legs rippling with each step. Large breasts bounced slightly beneath her white pullover shirt. She had a figure made more for pinup calendars than for tennis. Her head was bowed and she was gazing at the ground in concentration as she passed from sight.

  She must have stopped to freshen up. Ten minutes passed before she entered the lounge and stood looking around, ignoring the speculative glances of some of the men at the bar. She saw Carver, saw the cane where he’d leaned it against the table, and came toward him.

  She had an open, friendly face with blue eyes and a slightly turned-up nose, and she was even shorter than she’d appeared on the court, probably under five feet.

  “Ellen Pfitzer?” Carver asked.

  She nodded, and he introduced himself and motioned for her to sit down.

  When she was settled, the waiter appeared and she ordered a Tom Collins. Needed to cool off after the hotly contested tennis match in the sun.

  “I was watching you play,” Carver said.

  She smiled. “So what did you think?”

  “That it was too hot for that kind of thing.”

  “I only play because it’s great exercise and burns a lot of calories. I’m always fighting to keep my figure.”

  “You’re winning,” Carver said.

  She gave him another wide grin and took a long pull on the drink the waiter had placed in front of her. She lowered the glass and said, “Ah!” the way actors say it in TV commercials. Carver waited for her to sell him something.

  “Donna’s funeral was this morning,” she said.

  “I know. I didn’t go. I have a thing about funerals. They seem superfluous.”

  “They are, of course,” Ellen said. “There weren’t many people there. Donna’s mother and daughter, a few of the people from the insurance company where Donna worked. I was a pallbearer, along with your friend Beth. The mortuary supplied most of the others.”

  Carver hadn’t talked to Beth since early that morning. He wondered if there would be many mourners at Mark Winship’s funeral. “Did you know Donna’s husband?” he asked.

  “We met a few times, but I wouldn’t say I knew him. Donna talked about him a lot, though. They were unhappy lately, but I guess that’s no secret.”

  “She say why they were unhappy?”

  Ellen took another sip of her drink, just nibbling at the ice this time, while her blue eyes sized up Carver as if he were a tennis opponent. She placed the glass back on its coaster. “I talked about you with Beth after the funeral. In a sense, I guess you’re still working for Donna.”

  “In a sense. I want to know the reason for what happened.”

  “You’re the kind of guy who can’t let go. That’s what Beth said.”

  Great, Carver thought. More of that obsessive talk.

  “Donna confided in me several months ago that she and Mark were having problems,” Ellen said. “Then, about a month ago, she told me she was having an affair.”

  “Did she say who she was involved with?”

  “She said it was nobody I knew, and she just referred to him as ‘Enrico’ every now and then. I think she wanted me to know it wasn’t anyone at the club, any of the tennis pros. That kind of thing happens a lot around here, you know, but Donna wasn’t the type.”

  “What type was she?”

  Ellen ran a blunt, unpainted fingernail up and down her tall glass and thought for a few seconds before answering. “She was a nice woman. I know ‘nice’ is a word used too frequently, but in Donna’s case it applies. She was friendly toward everyone, but also a little shy. This is a fairly exclusive club—I’d even say snotty. Donna and Mark were members only because of Mark’s affiliation with people through his investment counseling. He seldom came here at all. Donna was aware she didn’t travel in the same circles as a lot of the members and didn’t seek out people. She didn’t mind not associating with some of the snobs around here. She was actually the homebody type and was content until her marriage started to go bad.” A serious light entered Ellen’s blue eyes and she leaned toward Carver earnestly. “I’ll tell you what type she wasn’t. She wasn’t the type to have an extramarital affair. I don’t know exactly what Mark Winship did, but the marriage must have been hopeless for Donna to get mixed up with another man.”

  “Do you remember what she said about Enrico?”

  “She said she was happy only when she was with him, and it was positively eerie how compatible they were, how they loved and hated the same things. You know the phase, when endorphins take the place of reason. She said it almost made her believe in fate or astrology. If it helps you any, I’m sure she was totally hooked on this guy. I wish I’d met him.”

  “Be glad you didn’t.”

  Her eyes widened over the rim of her glass. “Have you met him?”

  “Briefly,” Carver said. “We didn’t get along.”

  “Maybe you caught him at a bad time.”

  “If I did, he reacted badly. He threatened me with a knife.”

  Ellen shook her head. “Well, Donna wouldn’t be the first woman to gravitate toward the wrong man when her marriage was breaking up. Her husband was right for her at one time, when she was thinking straight, but under the strain, with things coming unglued, she might have been temporarily attracted to someone who was more or less his opposite.”

  That sounded pretty good to Carver. He was becoming impressed by Ellen Pfitzer.

  “But suicide,” Ellen said. She shook her head no as if she’d been asked to throw a tennis match. “That wasn’t like Donna, either.”

  “Had
she acted strange lately?”

  “She was nervous and depressed, but I wouldn’t describe her as suicidal.”

  “It was an impulsive thing,” Carver said.

  Ellen scowled. “Probably thanks to Enrico.”

  “Do you remember anything in particular Donna said about her husband?”

  “She mentioned that he’d withdrawn from her, that he’d become cold. She said he acted as if the marriage was already ended and he was just marking time until the divorce. Exactly what you’d expect to hear about a marriage on the rocks, when one of the partners has given up completely.”

  “Did he turn cool toward her for a reason?”

  “None that she knew. She told me she asked him what was wrong. Begged him to tell her. All he’d say was that he was unhappy. He’d refuse to be specific. They hadn’t really talked about a divorce yet. When she asked him if he wanted one, he wouldn’t give her an honest answer. She thought he was stalling, even though he seemed to have made up his mind she was no longer going to be a part of his life. He’d dismissed her from his existence. She told me she felt like a ghost when she was in the house with him.”

  Carver looked out the window at the sunbathers on the beach. Beyond the pavilion’s thatched roof, he could see a few of the luxury cruisers docked at the club’s private marina, their white hulls bobbing in the gentle, sheltered water, their navigational antennae and painted brightwork gleaming in the sun. Everything and everyone at the club was bright and clean and rich.

  “Was Donna a good tennis player?” Carver asked.

  “Not really. She was too timid, didn’t seem to mind if she lost. Yet for some reason she’d occasionally become ferocious and go to the net more than anyone. She’d still lose, but you had to watch out or she’d take your head off with one of her forehands.”

  He showed Beth’s list to Ellen. “Who else should I talk to on here?”

  She pointed to the name beneath her own, then sat back. “To tell you the truth,” she said, “I think I knew Donna as well as anyone. We shared . . . you know, women’s confidences.”

  “What about the name below yours? Beverly Denton?”

  “Yeah, Donna mentioned her. I think she’s a friend of Mark’s, really. The three of them used to spend time together, but Donna said she and Beverly never saw each other anymore, what with the way Mark had been acting. I doubt if she’d be of much help.”

  “What about the possibility of Mark and Beverly having been romantically involved?”

  “Anything’s possible. But I think Donna told me not long ago that Beverly was engaged to some guy who refurbishes yachts.” Ellen brushed back a strand of blond hair that had fallen over one eye; it had to bother her playing tennis. “Anyway, like I said, Donna and I shared confidences. If she’d thought Mark and Beverly had a thing going, she’d have told me.”

  Wishing Donna had shared even more confidences with Ellen, Carver thanked her and stood up.

  She glanced at his cane. “That a temporary thing?”

  “As temporary as I am.”

  “Well, there are worse things in life than a stiff leg. You seem to do okay for yourself.”

  “I haven’t curled into a ball and cried for a long time.”

  “Me, either. Not since last night.” She smiled in a way that suggested she wouldn’t mind if he sat back down.

  He laid one of his business cards on the table. “If you hear anything more about Enrico Thomas,” he said, “call me and let me know.”

  “So that’s his last name. Thomas.”

  “No,” Carver said, “I was getting to that. His real name is Carl Gretch, and he seems to have disappeared.”

  Ellen looked surprised. “Donna was going with a guy who used an alias?”

  “And a knife,” Carver said. “See, she didn’t share as many confidences with you as you thought.”

  “It makes me wonder,” Ellen said, sounding a little mystified, “what else she didn’t tell me.”

  As Carver left the rarefied, moneyed atmosphere of the club lounge, he tried to imagine Carl Gretch there and couldn’t.

  What had nice Donna Winship been thinking?

  10

  CARVER SAT AT a table in the shade of a tilted umbrella and ate a taco. After leaving the country club, he realized he hadn’t had lunch and was hungry, so he drove to a taco stand he liked near the public marina, on Magellan about half a mile from his office. It was a pleasant place to think and get indigestion.

  He leaned over the table as he bit into the brittle taco shell, careful not to drip sauce on his shirt or pants. It relaxed him to sit and watch the boats bobbing at their moorings or putting in or out of the marina. As he wiped grease from his fingers and leaned back in his plastic chair, a large sailboat with its canvas down glided on alternate motor power parallel to the shore, then altered course to head toward open water. He sipped his Busch beer and watched its sails being hoisted when it was farther from shore.

  It was late enough for him to be the only customer other than two young girls perched on stools at the stand’s counter. He figured no one would be bothered by smoke, so he finished his beer, then fired up a Swisher Sweet cigar. He liked to smoke the small, slender cigars sometimes after meals. A substitute for dessert.

  He watched shreds of smoke drift away on the sea breeze and thought that what he knew about the deaths of Donna and Mark Winship had about the same substance and permanence.

  By the time the cigar was half gone, the sun had moved enough so that the tilt of the umbrella was wrong and allowed sunlight to lance beneath it and glint off the smooth white table. Carver’s eyes began to ache.

  There was an outside public phone near the stand, so he snubbed out what was left of the cigar in a square glass ashtray on the table and got up and deposited his empty beer can, wadded napkin, and the crumpled paper that had held the taco in a trash can. Some of the hot red sauce from the wrapper got on the edge of his hand and he licked it off, then went to the phone.

  The two girls at the counter glanced at him, then looked away with obvious disinterest. He was too old for them, in another universe. Or maybe it was the cane. He wasn’t sure which he hoped it was. The old guy laboriously scraping a grill stared at him from behind the counter as if he thought Carver might want another taco, then returned to his work when he saw that Carver was moving toward the phone.

  The plastic and metal of the phone shelter was hot from the sun. Carver leaned on it for support, hooked his cane over a steel lip, and inserted most of the change he’d received when he’d bought lunch. He called his office, waited for the answering machine to kick in, then punched out his personal code on the phone’s keypad to signal the machine to play his messages. Four of them, according to the machine’s electronic brain:

  The garage where he had the Olds serviced called to say he couldn’t bring the car in for an oil change as scheduled and should phone for another appointment. There were a couple of hang-ups. Then Hodgkins, the manager of the building where Carl Gretch had lived, was on the machine telling Carver that Gretch had returned to the apartment. The time on the message was 1:05, an hour ago.

  Carver replaced the receiver and made his way through the scattering of tables and umbrellas to where the Olds was parked with its canvas top down. He lowered himself into the hot vinyl upholstery behind the steering wheel, got the engine started, and drove fast for Orlando and the apartment on Belt Street.

  The door to Gretch’s apartment was closed and locked. Carver rapped on the checked enameled wood with his cane. Waited and listened. No answer and no sound from inside.

  He went back down to the first floor and the apartment door lettered MANAGER and knocked.

  Hodgkins opened the door almost immediately. He was wearing the same baggy jeans he’d had on when Carver had last seen him, but he’d changed from his white tee shirt into a crisp blue and gray plaid sport shirt that still had creases in it from being folded when it was bought. He smelled like stale pipe tobacco with an underlying sce
nt of bourbon.

  “Figured you’d be here in a hurry,” he said, “but it wasn’t fast enough. Gretch was only in his place about fifteen or twenty minutes. When I stopped him on his way downstairs and asked him about the rent he owed, he acted like he was in a big hurry, said I should fuck off. Them were his exact words. Then he was past me and out the door and into that fancy car of his. Left twenty bucks’ worth of tire on the street screechin’ outa here.”

  “Was he carrying anything when he came downstairs?” Carver asked.

  “No, not as I can recall.”

  “Mind if I go up and have another look around his place?”

  “Not in the slightest.”

  Hodgkins shuffled out of sight for a minute with his stiff-jointed gait, then returned and handed Carver a key attached with string to a metal-rimmed cardboard tag with 2-W lettered on it in black ink. Carver thanked him and climbed back up the stairs, clumping on the wooden steps with his cane.

  Gretch’s apartment looked exactly as it had this morning, but it was warmer and stuffier. Hodgkins had turned off the air-conditioning in the unit. Carver studied the mismatched furniture, but none of it seemed to have been moved. A bead of sweat ran down his ribs as he limped into the bedroom and saw that the bed was still stripped down.

  Everything looked the same here, too. He opened the closet’s sliding louvered door and felt around on the top shelf. The porn magazine and the photos he’d returned there were now gone. They must be what had drawn Gretch back to the apartment. More specifically, it would be the photographs he wanted. Blackmail material, maybe.

  No, Carver thought, the photos weren’t lewd or compromising enough for that, and they were of women posed by themselves. The most the subjects could be accused of was posing for what looked like amateurish attempts at the kind of mild pinup shots still seen on calendars in garages and small-town barbershops.

  “Hello.”

  The voice was soft and throaty and might have belonged to a woman.