Torch

by John Lutz

  But when Carver turned around he saw a man standing just inside the bedroom door. He was Oriental and diminutive, maybe not even five feet tall, wiry beneath his loose-fitting gray slacks and long-sleeved white shirt. His hair was black and combed severely to the side, and his features were smooth and dainty, with the kind of toothy, cheery grin that had made stereotypes of a generation of Oriental actors. He was wearing light and supple tan leather shoes that might have passed for house slippers. He made absolutely no sound as he strode a few smooth steps toward Carver. It occurred to Carver that the man might have followed him up the stairs one step behind and he wouldn’t have known it.

  Something about the tight, controlled way the small man moved alerted Carver, but too late. The man’s almost dainty right hand made a quick, elegant gesture, drawing Carver’s gaze as one of the small slippered feet flicked out and kicked the cane from his hand. The man’s other hand was against Carver’s chest, then he was three feet away and grinning down at Carver, who was lying on his back where he’d fallen on the floor. Carver had never seen anyone move so smoothly so fast.

  “Maybe we should talk,” Carver said, raising himself on one elbow and noticing that his cane was too far away to grab.

  The man kicked him in the ribs, almost casually, but so quickly that Carver couldn’t block the flashing foot or clutch it so he could pull the man down on his level. The smile stayed firm as a mask on the man’s face.

  “Easy!” Carver groaned through his pain. “We’re both Bruce Lee fans.”

  “Amateur shit,” the tiny man said. He did a complete turn so quickly it appeared that film had jumped frames. Carver felt but didn’t see the kick to his shoulder. His arm went numb as if it had been shocked with high voltage.

  “I could splatter your brains on the wall just like a bullet had hit you,” the man said. He had only a faint Oriental accent that Carver couldn’t place. Everything he said sounded condescending. “I might mess up my shoes, though.”

  “Don’t do that,” Carver said. “They look expensive.”

  “They are made from the flesh of my enemies.”

  Carver didn’t think the man was kidding. He lay still, figuring that was about the only defense he had. He didn’t want to be kicked in his good leg; that might immobilize him to the point of panic.

  The little man kicked his good leg. Carver tried with his uninjured arm to grab the blur that was a foot but failed.

  “Have we met someplace before?” he grunted, forcing himself with great effort to lie still now, not thrash around and go into a blind rage of pain.

  “You’re Mr. Carver.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m tonight’s bad dream.”

  “Today’s,” Carver said, taking another kick to the arm. There wasn’t much pain because the arm was already numb. The guy wasn’t perfect.

  “You’re here to visit Mr. Gretch,” the man said, “but he doesn’t live here anymore. You and he aren’t friends anyway, so you shouldn’t try to locate him. There is no point.”

  “I only want to talk to him,” Carver said.

  “He doesn’t want to listen. He’s not a good listener. Are you a good listener?”

  “I try.

  “Mind your own business, or that of someone other than Mr. Gretch. Do you hear and comprehend?”

  “Both those things.”

  The tiny man floated across the carpet and picked up Carver’s cane. He twirled it as if he were a majorette leading a parade, then gripped it with both hands as if it were a sword and lashed the air with it in neat, symmetrical patterns. The last slash of the cane brought it straight down to rest lightly on Carver’s Adam’s apple.

  Carver didn’t move. He felt sweat break out on his face and turn cold. His stomach was jumping around with fear in a way he wouldn’t have thought possible.

  “You could be dead at this moment, Mr. Carver.”

  Carver didn’t speak, only nodded.

  The cane flashed up and away from his throat, and he closed his eyes, thinking it was about to descend with the same velocity and crush his larynx.

  When he opened his eyes, the cane was lying near him and the tiny man was standing near the door. Still smiling like a character in an old Charlie Chan movie, the man nodded, almost a bow, then was gone.

  Carver rolled onto his side and waited for the pain to subside and at least some feeling to return to his arm and good leg. The fear he’d felt when he thought he might be killed with his cane was still in his stomach, making him nauseated.

  Fifteen minutes passed before he trusted himself to grip the cane and stand up. He didn’t move for a long time, because the room was tilting this way and that as if tossed on a wild sea. Everything hurt. He wondered if the quick little man had kicked him places he hadn’t even been aware of at the time.

  When the room was at last still, he slowly descended the stairs and returned the key to Hodgkins, who said he hadn’t heard anyone on the stairs and had never seen a tiny Oriental man around the building.

  “You mean like some kinda midget?” he asked, squinting at Carver as if suspecting some sort of joke.

  “Almost a midget, but he packs a giant’s wallop.”

  “Hmph! You find anything up there in the apartment?”

  “Just that near-midget.”

  “Well, if I see him I’ll sure phone you right away.”

  Carver got to the Olds and drove back to Del Moray, then up the coast road to his cottage. He wanted to submerge his aching body in a bathtub full of hot water before he got too stiff to move.

  All the way along the coast, with the ocean on his right and gulls keeping pace briefly with the car and wheeling and screaming over the beach, he wondered if Gretch had noticed that three of his photographs were missing.

  11

  BECAUSE OF HIS bad leg, Carver usually showered instead of bathing. The tiny bathroom in the cottage was equipped with a small white fiberglass tub and shower stall. The tub was deep enough but not very long, which meant that when he sat in it he had to extend his stiff leg out at an uncomfortable angle over the curved edge into space. That was okay this time, since that leg was one of the few parts of him his attacker had ignored, probably following the maxim that if it ain’t fixed, don’t break it.

  The hot water soothed his pain as he settled down as deep as possible in the tub. He wanted to avoid being so sore tomorrow that he’d be unable to get out of bed. He rested his head on the wall behind the tub and draped the hot, soaked washcloth over his face, thinking it had been one hellacious day.

  Lying there healing with his eyes closed, he heard Beth say, “Kinda early for a bath.”

  He removed the washcloth and looked at her standing in the doorway. She was wearing yellow shorts and a black tee shirt lettered GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE, PEOPLE WITH GUNS KILL PEOPLE. Her bare tanned legs looked impossibly long from Carver’s low vantage point, and her heavy breasts stretched the shirt’s fabric. She had on a yellow headband and bright red lipstick. It occurred to Carver that there was only one part of him that wasn’t stiff, and she was about to change that. He altered the direction of his thoughts and told her why he was in the bathtub letting hot water work its magic.

  When he was finished, she leaned her shoulder against the doorjamb and crossed her arms. She said, “I want in, Fred.”

  For a moment he thought she planned on getting into the tiny tub with him, then he realized what she meant. The Winship deaths called to her on a personal as well as journalistic basis. Donna had been her friend, and Beth had set up the meeting with Carver just before her death. That someone had tried to frighten Carver off the case in Gretch’s apartment meant that there was something to hide. Jeff Smith, her editor at Burrow, would be interested.

  “You gonna keep me involved and informed?” she asked. Her expression was grave, her strongly boned face like something cast in bronze in a lost age.

  Carver didn’t like the thought of the tiny Oriental destruction machine focusing on Beth. He k
new she wouldn’t see it that way. She was physically tough herself and proficient in martial arts and probably figured she’d be a match for the little man. People who were into martial arts thought that way. Cockiness was part of the way they psyched themselves into knowing they could break wood or bricks with flesh and bone, psyched themselves into thinking it was important in the first place. He covered his face again with the washcloth.

  “Fred?”

  “You’re in,” he said from beneath the rag, knowing he had no choice.

  He felt her kiss his forehead through the thick, soaked material.

  “You had supper?” she asked.

  “Just a couple of Tylenols.”

  “Hungry?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll cook us up some hamburgers anyway, then we’ll eat while you fill me in on everything about the Winship case.”

  Fifteen minutes later, when the water had cooled and the scent of frying beef was prodding his appetite, he decided it was time to struggle out of the bathtub.

  He wasn’t as sore as he thought he’d be the next morning, but he didn’t so much as consider his usual therapeutic swim in the ocean. The clock by the bed read 9:05. Beth was already gone. Despite Carver’s reservations, they’d agreed last night that she would stake out Gretch’s apartment to see if he or the Oriental man showed up again. If one of them did appear, Carver had given her strict instructions not to approach him but to very discreetly follow.

  Carver sat up on the edge of the mattress and reached for his cane. With each breath, his side ached where he’d been kicked in the ribs. His good leg and his right arm were sore but functional. The involuntary groan he heard when he forced himself to stand up was his own but sounded like someone else’s. Someone who should have sense enough to stay in bed.

  He got dressed gingerly, careful not to extend his reach too far, easing into his pants and socks, then his leather moccasins. He went to the dresser and completely removed the top drawer. Taped to the back of the drawer was his .32 Colt semiautomatic. He slipped the gun’s shoulder holster over his bare torso, then checked the clip and action and slid the gun into the holster. Then he put on a loose-fitting silk shirt with a tropical bird pattern and examined himself in the mirror. The looseness and wild print of the colorful material made the bulk of the gun barely noticeable.

  When he phoned Burnair and Crosley Investments, where Mark Winship had been a financial consultant, and asked to speak with Beverly Denton he was told that Miz Denton hadn’t arrived for work. Instead of leaving a message, he drove to a restaurant down on the coast highway and had a breakfast of scrambled eggs, jellied toast, and black coffee. Then he sat at one of the unoccupied tables outside and smoked a Swisher Sweet while he read the Del Moray Gazette-Dispatch. The motels along the beach were complaining that oil drifting in from the big tankers offshore was getting to be a major problem. There were no murders or other major crimes reported, only the oil; smooth sailing for McGregor.

  By the time he’d returned to the cottage, a little past ten, Beverly Denton was at her desk at Burnair and Crosley. She agreed on the phone to talk with Carver about Donna Winship’s death but didn’t want to discuss it in the office. She suggested they meet in the small park across the street from Burnair and Crosley, where she often had lunch and relaxed. She’d be wearing a green dress with black shoes, she said. Carver told her he walked with a cane and would be the most handsome man in the park. She agreed to meet him anyway.

  The park was only about half a square block, a flat, grassy area where concrete benches were arranged in the shade of palm trees. In the center of the park was a twenty-foot-tall steel sculpture made up of a series of sleek, shiny panels rising like parallel knife blades tapered to different points. Carver wasn’t sure what it was supposed to represent, but he liked it. Maybe it had been created to complement the building across the street that housed Burnair and Crosley, which was also made up of shiny, parallel panels of steel and tinted glass, only with elevators and offices inside.

  Beverly Denton was easy enough to find. It was only 11:30 and the park was almost unoccupied except for two preteen boys climbing around on a jungle gym at the far end. She was sitting on one of the concrete benches and gazing out at the traffic passing on Atlantic Drive.

  As Carver approached her he saw curiosity become decision in her eyes, which were dark brown like her short-cropped, boyish hair. She had lean features made to look even thinner by large gold hoop earrings. When she stood up and smoothed the skirt of her green dress, he noted that she was slender but shapely, a trim, neat woman who looked worried.

  “Mr. Carver?”

  He said he was and suggested they sit down on the bench, which they did, at opposite ends and angled to face each other. Like a couple of shy teenagers who’d just been introduced by a best friend. Beverly crossed her legs so tightly they seemed welded together. Her body language suggested that even if he was the most handsome man in the park, she didn’t care; she wasn’t in the mood.

  He tried his smile on her, which he knew made his fierce features surprisingly amiable. She didn’t seem reassured. He said, “You were a friend of Donna Winship.” Telling her, not asking.

  “I was a friend to both Donna and Mark,” she said in a soft, steady voice, “but I wouldn’t say a close friend of either.” She stared for a moment at her short, red fingernails. “What’s your interest in the Winships?”

  “Donna thought something might be wrong in her life and hired me to investigate. I’m still investigating.”

  “Why?”

  He decided to give her the short answer and not mention that he had been the last person to talk to Donna, that he had been her last hope and might have said something that confirmed her despair and prompted her sudden impulse to end her life, that now he wanted to make up for it to assuage a guilt that maybe he shouldn’t feel but most definitely did.

  “Because I was paid,” he said.

  That seemed to satisfy her; coin of the realm was her job. She said, “Mark and I worked together. There across the street.” She tilted her head in the direction of Burnair and Crosley. One of the hoop earrings caught the sun. “Mark was a financial consultant, as I am. When his client list became too large, he referred business to me. We became friends, and that’s how I met Donna.”

  “What was your opinion of her?”

  “She was nice.”

  The same word Ellen Pfitzer had used to describe Donna Winship. “Can you be more specific?”

  Beverly raised her hands in a faint, futile gesture. “They seemed happily married.”

  “I’m told they weren’t so happy the past several months.”

  “That could be. When I became engaged to Warren I didn’t see them much anymore. The four of us went out for dinner a few times, but Warren and Mark didn’t really hit it off, so we drifted apart.”

  “Warren’s the fella who refurbishes yachts?”

  She smiled. “You are an investigator.”

  “What about Mark? I assume you liked him.”

  “He was nice, too.”

  Carver looked out at the traffic, becoming aware that exhaust fumes were heavy in the park. “Nice, huh? Beverly, you could have told me this on the phone. Why did you agree to a face-to-face meeting?”

  “Because it doesn’t seem logical to me that the Winships killed themselves. I guess I can’t quite believe it.” She gnawed her lower lip and squirmed slightly on the hard bench.

  Carver waited, knowing there was more. A squirrel chattered nearby, then scampered up the trunk of the nearest palm tree.

  “What about you?” she asked. “Do you think they were really both suicides?”

  “There isn’t much doubt,” he said, “but there’s some.”

  “How often does that happen, a husband and wife committing suicide only a day apart?”

  “I don’t know,” Carver said. “They don’t keep statistics.”

  “There had to be a hell of a reason for it,” Beverly said. “Tha
t’s why I thought it’d be a good idea if we talked, because I feel their deaths should be investigated, and the police won’t do it since officially they were suicides.” She let out a long breath. “The last five or six months, Mark Winship was involved with another Burnair and Crosley employee, a woman named Maggie Rourke.”

  “He told you that?”

  “No. He didn’t have to. Maggie confided it to me about two months ago when she realized I’d noticed how they acted together when they thought they were alone one day in a file room. I figured it was none of my business, and Warren and I never saw the Winships again, so I didn’t mention it to Mark or anyone else.”

  “Except for me, now.”

  “Because the Winships are dead, and that should be looked into.”

  “Tell me about Maggie Rourke. Something other than that she’s nice.”

  Beverly smiled. “Okay, I’ll try to be more insightful. Maggie’s a financial consultant, too. She’s in her early thirties and divorced, a focused career woman. It kind of surprised me that she’d let herself become involved with someone at work. But once she did tell me and I knew for sure, I began watching the two of them together, how they exchanged glances, fond touches. They acted like a couple too much in love to hide it. The thing is, after Donna died, Mark surely would have talked to Maggie. That means she might know something important.”

  Carver thought she might indeed. “Is Maggie at work now?”

  “No. After Mark’s death she took her vacation time, I’m sure so she could mourn him in private. She left an address and phone number where she could be reached, though. She said it was a beach cottage south of town off the coast highway.” Beverly felt around in her large black leather purse and withdrew a folded sheet of white paper. Carver could see the sharp impressions of typing on the side folded in. “The address and number are on here,” she said, handing the paper to him. “Do me a favor and don’t mention where you got them.”

  “I don’t know where this will lead,” he said. “At some point I might have to mention it.”

  “Well, if it comes to that, so be it. I’m not doing anything wrong.” She stared at him as if for confirmation.