Torch

by John Lutz

  “Where have you been?”

  “Staying with a friend in Miami. But it wasn’t working out. I mean, his wife started bitching about me being there. Then she went the other way when her husband was right in the next room, and I had to fight her off to keep her from unzipping my pants. She held it against me. You know the way some women do. I knew it was time to come back here anyway, try to pick up my life again.” He looked up at Carver, started to take another drink of beer, then remembered the bottle was empty. Looked up at Carver again, hope in his eyes. “That what you wanted to hear?”

  “It’s what you wanted me to hear.”

  Gretch shook his head, slowly at first, then violently, in a display of agonizing dismay. When he stopped, he said, “You don’t believe a guy like me could love somebody like Donna, but it’s true. I loved her with all my heart.” He touched the side of his neck gingerly; he might have hurt himself, shaking his head that way.

  “How’d you two meet?” Carver asked. He hadn’t expected this soap opera story line from Gretch, didn’t know quite how to take it.

  “I was with another woman at a convention, a female insurance executive from out of town, when I met Donna and fell for her right there. She was with some other people from the insurance company where she worked. I saw right away there was something between us, so I phoned her the next day at work, kept phoning her until she agreed to meet me someplace for coffee. That’s how it started.” He sniffed and wiped away tears with dirty knuckles, making it look as if he had two black eyes. “You know how it ended.”

  “Did you know she was married?”

  “Not at first. She told me the second time we went out. We were both too far gone on each other for it to make any difference then. She said for me not to think I was breaking up her marriage, she was unhappy anyway.”

  “The female insurance executive. How’d you meet her?”

  Gretch clenched his hands in his lap and stared at them. “This some kinda test?”

  Carver said, “Yes.”

  “I’m a model, but I work sometimes as a paid escort. She called and I went with her to the convention. There’s nothing wrong with that. Men and women, they come into town for those kinda things, they sometimes like to be seen with somebody at important functions, you know? They got their own reasons. Like, the insurance woman prefers girls but knew that wouldn’t go well with the company brass. She wanted me to help establish the impression she liked men.”

  “You do anything other than escort these women?”

  “I don’t see as that’s any of your business. What it’s got to do with anything, anyway?”

  Gretch was starting to build up some indignation, the mood that helped carry a guy like him through life. Carver said, “What about Donna Winship’s husband?”

  “What about him?” Gretch shrugged. “He ain’t the first guy whose wife stepped out on him. From what Donna said, the marriage going sour was his fault. He’ll survive.”

  “He didn’t,” Carver said. “He’s dead.”

  Gretch stood up, wearing an astounded expression. He sat back down immediately, as if too affected by the news to remain upright. Carver couldn’t tell if the display of surprise was genuine or if modeling skills extended to acting.

  “Mark Winship shot himself when he learned about Donna’s death,” Carver said.

  For a long time Gretch said nothing, staring at the opposite wall, or maybe the blank TV screen where the man and woman had recently enjoyed sex and cigarettes.

  Then he said, “You can’t lay any guilt on me for that one. I didn’t plan for things to work out this way.” He slumped forward, elbows on knees, and stared at the floor. Carver was surprised to find himself feeling slightly sorry for Gretch.

  He said, “The police are calling his death a suicide. Right now, anyway.”

  Gretch glanced sharply over at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Means some people think Mark Winship might have been murdered.”

  Gretch rubbed both hands over his thighs with a lot of pressure, as if trying to scrape something unpleasant off his palms. “I wouldn’t know anything about that, and I don’t wanna know.”

  “No idea who’d want to kill Mark?”

  “No. And I figure if the cops say it’s suicide, it probably is. They know about those kinda things.”

  Carver said, “What about Maggie Rourke?”

  Looking at the floor again, Gretch shook his head. The back of his neck was dirty where he’d rubbed his hand over it while lugging stuff up the hot stairs. “I don’t know any Maggie Rourke.”

  “The Walton Agency.”

  Gretch raised his head and stared at Carver. “Yeah, yeah. Now I know who you mean. Real pretty brunette. I don’t really know her, though. She’s another Walton model, and we worked on the same shoot last year. It was a lung shot.”

  “Lung shot?”

  “Group photo for a cigarette ad. You know, the tobacco companies like to show good-looking people having fun on a picnic or skiing or whatever. Healthy people with healthy lungs. We were all smoking and playing volleyball on the beach.”

  “You ever meet any of Donna’s friends?”

  “Are you kidding? She wasn’t the type to share that kinda secret. She wanted to keep our affair quiet. So did I. Nobody wanted anybody else to get hurt. Then it all turned to shit, like a lotta other things have happened to me in my life.”

  “You know a man named Beni Ho? Little Oriental guy.”

  “No, I don’t think so. Should I know him?”

  “Nobody should.”

  Gretch stared at him earnestly. “I gotta say I’m not completely sorry to hear about Mark Winship, not after some of the stuff Donna told me about him. It’s just a goddamn shame”—his voice broke and his eyes misted over again—“just a goddamn shame she was married at all, that any of this ever happened. Especially to somebody as good as her. I never woulda gone near her if I knew how it’d turn out. Life’s fucking funny sometimes, isn’t it? I don’t mean like ‘ha-ha’ funny, but, you know . . .”

  “I know,” Carver said. He planted his cane and moved back a few steps, toward the door. “You plan on being at this address for a while?”

  Gretch looked surprised. “Of course. I gotta be. I’m on a lease.”

  Carver left the apartment, closing the door behind him.

  He stood in the stifling hall for a few minutes, listening. There was only silence.

  Then faint music and voices from the TV.

  The sound of a shower running.

  24

  BETH FOLLOWED CARVER back to Del Moray, then to the taco stand on Magellan, where they sat in the shade of an umbrella over one of the tiny round tables and ate a late lunch-early supper. A warm salt breeze was wafting in, carrying the scent of the ocean. The sun was still bearing down hard, and Carver’s knee and forearm that were outside the circle of the umbrella’s shade were hot.

  Beth bit into her brittle taco, chewed, swallowed with apparent difficulty, and said, “I don’t understand why you like this place, Fred. Stuff tastes like a cardboard meat-pie.”

  “Try more sauce.”

  She tore the corner off one of the little plastic containers of hot sauce and squeezed some onto her taco. She took another cautious bite, chewed, said nothing, and sipped Pepsi-Cola through a straw.

  As they ate, Carver told her about his conversation with Carl Gretch. As he ate, actually. Beth only sipped soda and watched the sunlit pleasure boats bobbing in unison at their moorings as he talked.

  When he was finished talking, she continued staring at the boats. “Not much of what Gretch told you rings true, Fred.”

  “Of course not. Not even his story about how he met Donna Winship. Question is, why would he tell me how much he loved her? Why would he care what I thought?”

  “I think we should find out. I keep trying to imagine Donna and Mark both dying as suicides, and I can’t. The more we learn, the more questions present themselves.”

>   “Starting again tomorrow,” Carver said, “you keep a loose watch on Gretch’s apartment and see where he goes if he leaves. Or who visits him if he stays put. When we’re finished here, I’ll drive over and try to talk to Harvey Sincliff at Nightlinks.”

  She discovered taco sauce on her index finger and licked it off. “Gonna phone first?”

  “No. I’d rather catch him unprepared.”

  “I’ve gotta do some work on an article for Burrow,” Beth said, “then I’ll drive back to Orlando tonight and stay in a motel so I can be outside Gretch’s apartment early in the morning.”

  “He strikes me as the type who’d sleep late.”

  Beth winked. “You’d just rather have me with you than in a motel.”

  “Can’t deny it.”

  She glanced at her watch. “I’d better get going now and warm up my computer.” She slid the uneaten half of her taco over to Carver. “You consume this instrument of culinary masochism.”

  “I don’t think Gretch will suspect he’s being watched now, but be careful anyway,” he said, as she stood up to leave.

  Tall, tall woman, she leaned far down to peer beneath the edge of the umbrella at him. “You figure Gretch thinks you actually believed his story?”

  “No, but he knows I can’t do anything about it one way or the other.”

  She straightened up and he could no longer see her face. “I might stop for a hamburger on the way home, Fred. Viva la Mexico, but screw their food.”

  He watched her walk away. Then he slid his chair over so he was completely out of the sun and ate the rest of her taco.

  The Nightlinks office address was on the end of a strip shopping center in an otherwise desolate stretch of Telegraph Road. The office’s glass door and show window were tinted midnight blue and had gold scrollwork on them but no lettering.

  The shopping center was one long, continuous building with a brick facade and a flat roof with air-conditioning units mounted on it. The units were partly shielded from view by low, wooden privacy fences that looked more as if they belonged in someone’s backyard than on a roof. Power and phone lines ran from a pole with a large transformer on it to a corner of the building. A row of birds sat on the top cable, looking out over the parking lot. The shop next to Nightlinks was closed and its windows were soaped solid. Next to it was a dry cleaner, then a used-book store, a pharmacy, an Everything-Is-A-Dollar store, then a tavern called the Aero Lounge that had a sign with a three-bladed yellow propeller that slowly rotated. On the other side of Nightlinks was a driveway that led around the cinder block wall to the rear of the building for deliveries, then a vacant lot high with weeds.

  Carver parked in the nearest space, about halfway down the row of shops, and was about to climb from the car when he saw an attractive redheaded woman come out of Nightlinks. He watched her lower herself with a great show of legs into a black sports car and drive away.

  She hadn’t been gone more than a few seconds when a well-dressed man of about thirty entered Nightlinks.

  Carver thought he’d sit where he was and watch for a while.

  Ten minutes later, the man came out accompanied by a blond woman in a red dress and very high heels. Just behind them walked a small, lean man dressed as a cowboy. The cowboy drove away alone in a battered pickup truck with a gun rack in the rear window. The other man and the blond woman left together in a yellow Lincoln Town Car.

  Except for a Federal Express delivery, there was no activity during the next twenty minutes. The Olds was heating up and some men in work clothes who’d entered the Aero Lounge had given him a curious glance. Suspicious character in an old convertible, he knew he couldn’t stay where he was much longer without answering some questions. He decided it was time to see if Harvey Sincliff was in.

  It felt good to get out of the hot car and straighten up. As he got closer to the building, he noticed small gold lettering near the bottom of the blue-tinted window, spelling out the name of the company. Very discreet. When he opened the door, a bell chimed and a thin woman of about forty seated behind a low gray reception desk smiled at him. The office was surprisingly plush, done in grays and blues. The reception area was small, though. There was a door behind the woman’s desk that no doubt led to bigger and better things.

  The woman, who was attractive despite protruding teeth, asked if she could help Carver.

  He said that maybe she could.

  Her eyes took him in, assessing and categorizing. Part of her job. “We have several escorts available,” she told him, “though not for tonight.”

  “I only want to talk with someone,” Carver said.

  “That’s fine. Our people are all very good listeners.” She reached into a desk drawer and got out a pink and white form. “We take all major credit cards but no personal checks. We’ll need to know a few things about you.”

  “My name is Fred Carver,” he said. “It’s Mr. Sincliff I need to see.”

  Her smile stuck but her teeth retracted half an inch. “Are you in sales?”

  “No. It concerns one of his employees. Carl Gretch.”

  Now she stopped smiling altogether. It made her look years older, emaciated rather than fashionably thin. It was as if the smile, the thinness, were all an act, as McGregor had said. McGregor would assess her as single and on the hunt, searching for a man and a cake.

  “Are you with the police?” she asked.

  “No.”

  She looked uncertain for a moment, then said, “It’s almost five o’clock; I’m not sure Mr. Sincliff is still here.”

  “Could you please check?”

  He thought she might refuse, but her smile returned. She asked Carver to excuse her and went through the door behind the desk. She was much taller than she’d appeared sitting down, and had long legs with remarkably slender ankles.

  A minute later she came back and sat down, leaving the door open. A medium-sized man with a stomach paunch appeared there. He wore a harried expression, a neat white shirt, and plaid suspenders, and looked like an accountant with books that refused to balance. His dark hair was thinning and combed sideways from a clean part, and there was an expression of abstract concern on his face that appeared permanent. His head was too small for his body, and his tiny dark eyes were set so close together that at a glance he appeared cross-eyed. It was the eyes that gave him the concerned expression.

  He smiled, somehow still looking troubled, and said, “Please come in, Mr. Carver.”

  Carver followed him through a hall to a door near the far end of the building. Then he stepped aside and let Carver pass ahead of him into a spacious, musty-smelling office with a blue area rug over a gray tile floor. There was a large desk in the office, a table with a computer, printer, and copy machine on it. There was a window with closed blinds to the left of Carver, a wooden bookshelf and a line of dark gray file cabinets to his right. A cigar-store Indian that looked genuine stood stoically in a corner. Collector plates were arranged in a diamond pattern on the wall near the desk. John Kennedy was there. Elvis was there. So was John Wayne.

  So was Beni Ho.

  But not on a plate.

  He was standing as still as the wooden Indian, leaning against the wall near the plates and smiling.

  Carver heard the door close behind him, and Harvey Sincliff moved out in front of him and sat down behind the desk. Beni Ho stepped out a few feet from the wall and lifted the cane he was using for support to show it to Carver.

  “You and I are alike now, Carver.”

  Carver said, “I’m taller.”

  “I don’t think that’s what you came here to talk about,” Sincliff said. “My receptionist said you mentioned Carl Gretch.”

  “Why is Mr. Ho here?” Carver asked.

  “He’s my employee.”

  “Does that mean bodyguard?”

  “If you like. Mr. Ho is still a capable man, even with his cane. Something you should understand, Mr. Carver.” Beni Ho continued smiling, but he lifted his arm slightly, elbow ou
t, so Carver could see the holstered handgun tucked tight against his ribs beneath his jacket.

  “Why would you think you need protection to talk to me, Mr. Sincliff?”

  “I’m not a violent man,” Sincliff said, “and you have a formidable reputation, Mr. Carver.”

  Mr. Ho, Mr. Carver, Mr. Sincliff. We sound like the New York Times, Carver thought. “While Mr. Ho is here,” he said, “we might as well talk about him. I understand he works for you as an escort as well as a bodyguard?”

  “On occasion. He’s versatile.”

  “What about Mr. Carl Gretch?”

  “Not as versatile, I’m sure. And he doesn’t work for me, whoever he is. I’ve never heard of him.”

  “Then why did you agree to see me?”

  “Politeness. And curiosity. As I said, you have a reputation.”

  “So you don’t know Carl Gretch, even by reputation. Do you know Enrico Thomas?”

  “Of course. He’s one of our escorts, but on a part-time basis. I believe he has another job.”

  “Thomas and Gretch are the same man.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “How did he get involved with Donna Winship?”

  “The woman who was struck and killed by a truck? If Enrico was dating her, it had nothing to do with Nightlinks. Though we have plenty of repeat business, usually it’s with out-of-town clients who come to Florida infrequently. Executives who need an escort for the evening to attend some official function. Whatever you might think, ours is a respectable enterprise.”

  “Then why him?” Carver nodded toward Beni Ho.

  “He works for me,” Sincliff said. “His life outside this business is no concern of mine. A lot of folks have the wrong idea about what we do here, and some of them make threats. I knew of Mr. Ho’s expertise in the martial arts, so I added protection to his duties. Other aspects of his reputation are immaterial.”

  “Is Enrico Thomas good at his work?”

  “All our escorts are ladies and gentlemen who know how to behave in public.”