Torch

by John Lutz

  He tapped the brake and glanced back for a moment, not knowing quite what he was feeling, then drove away.

  35

  BETH WAS WAITING for Carver on the beach the next morning when he came in from his swim. As he crawled up from the surf to where his cane protruded from the damp sand, he felt like some creature of early evolution, more at home in water but compelled by destiny to walk on land.

  He grabbed the cane and levered himself to his feet, suddenly cool even in the morning sun, and joined Beth as she sat cross-legged on a large towel. She was wearing her red swimsuit but he doubted she would go into the water. She seldom swam or sought the sun. It amused her at times that some of the people who scorned her because she was black worked so hard to become one tenth as dark.

  Beside her lay a white beach towel with a scene of a glorious setting sun and soaring gulls on it. Carver lowered himself onto the towel and leaned back toward the terrycloth sunset, supporting himself on his elbows and feeling the genuine sun and the soft sea breeze evaporating the salt water from his tanned flesh. Beth had been asleep when he’d returned last night, and still sleeping when he’d crept from the cottage half an hour ago to swim.

  “How did you do last night?” he asked.

  She remained sitting Indian fashion with her legs crossed, watching the sea. The sun was sparkling on the water like strewn diamonds. “I followed that good-looking dude to a hotel outside town where he met a woman about three times his age. They went to an expensive restaurant, then shopping. She tried on clothes for him and he made over her like she was young Liz Taylor, then they had a few drinks at a seaside lounge and he drove her back to the hotel.”

  “He go upstairs with her?”

  “Nope. He went home, to an apartment over on West Tenth. He did what an escort’s supposed to do, it seemed to me.” Squinting against the morning sun, she looked over and down at Carver. “What about that redhead you followed?”

  Carver told her about the two men the woman had met, and the apparent photographing in the motel room of the woman and the second man having sex.

  “Sounds like prostitution,” Beth said, “not to mention blackmail shaping up.”

  “It might be a variation of the badger game,” Carver said, watching a pelican splash into the sea in an awkward dive for a fish, then come up empty. “The woman lures the man to a motel room, her confederate breaks in and photographs them, then says the woman’s husband hired him. The guy in the photos with the woman buys prints and negatives from the photographer and bribes him not to tell the woman’s husband. He can feel good about that. Not only won’t his wife find out he’s been a bad boy, he’s also nobly protecting his lover.”

  “Why not simply the badger game?” Beth asked. “The man with the camera pretends to be the husband, and after threatening and arguing with the John, he calms down and generously agrees to accept a bribe not to tell the John’s wife.”

  “The photographer wasn’t in the room long enough,” Carver said. “He got in and took his shots within seconds, then ran from the scene. There was no time for conversation.”

  Beth brushed sand from her ankles, then flicked it off her towel. “That guy in Miami, Charlie Post, told you his wife had photographs of him and Maggie Rourke together.”

  “I haven’t forgotten.”

  “Seems too much of a coincidence.”

  “Maybe. People have extramarital sex, other people photograph them to nail them with proof of infidelity. Happens all the time.”

  “I figure there’s probably a common thread there,” she said.

  “Maggie isn’t connected to Nightlinks.”

  “You sure?”

  “She says no.”

  “Nixon said no about Watergate. Bush said no about Iran-gate.”

  Carver grinned. “Maggie might not even be a Republican.”

  Beth looked at him with disgust. “Woman probably don’t even vote. That’s not the point. She says no, and you believe her because she speaks through kissable lips. Jesus, Fred!”

  He sat up straight so he was at eye level with her. “There isn’t anything suggesting Maggie even knows Nightlinks exists.”

  Her expression of disdain lingered on her dark features, perspiring now in the glare of the sun. “That might be an acorn you haven’t stumbled across yet. But it might exist. Might even grow into an oak, you give it half a chance, a little of that fertilizer you spread around so well.”

  “McGregor said something about me being blind and stumbling onto acorns.”

  “Man must know a few things.”

  “He calls you my dark meat.”

  “Fuck McGregor!”

  He laughed.

  “You like getting me pissed, Fred?” She punched him on the upper arm. Hard. “You like it, do you?”

  He laughed harder, but his arm was aching.

  She punched him again, in precisely the same way in precisely the same spot, adding injury to injury. “You think it’s funny, do you?”

  “No, no!” he said, still laughing.

  She waited, not smiling.

  He stopped laughing.

  “You could be right,” he said.

  “So what you gonna do about it, Fred?” She jokingly drew back her fist as if about to punch his arm again where it was still throbbing, only much harder this time.

  He guessed she was joking, anyway.

  “I’m going to talk to Maggie Rourke,” he told her.

  It wasn’t exactly the answer she’d wanted, but she didn’t argue. She stood up gracefully and shook sand from her towel, snapping it like a whip. The breeze caught some of the sand and blew it on Carver. “You’re gonna have breakfast first,” she said.

  He found his cane and gained his feet, dragging his towel up with him. “We going out to eat?”

  “I got some biscuits ready to go in the oven,” she told him. “We can eat in this morning.”

  She’d surprised him again. She wasn’t one to use the kitchen for much other than rinsing her hands.

  “Biscuits?”

  “Biscuits. Like your Aunt Jemima used to bake.”

  “Why the spurt of domesticity?” he asked. “Cause I felt like some biscuits,” she said, straight-faced.

  He followed her up the beach toward the cottage. She was walking slower than usual so he could keep pace, her heels kicking up small rooster tails of sand. He loved walking behind her, watching the beautiful undulating flow of her lean body as she strode with confidence and elegance. It was difficult to imagine her in a kitchen wearing an apron, busying about and tending to biscuits.

  “Did you make those biscuits from scratch?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  He thought for a moment of twisting up his towel and flicking her in the buttocks.

  Then he decided that would be a bad idea.

  She was domestic only up to a point.

  When Carver phoned Burnair and Crosley he was told that Maggie wasn’t expected in that day. He asked to talk to Beverly Denton, who said that Maggie had called in sick that morning.

  His stomach still churning from Beth’s biscuits, he drove A1A toward Maggie’s cottage.

  He didn’t really believe there had to be a connection between the man photographing the redhead and her John, and Maggie’s being photographed with Charlie Post. Adultery, photographs, and divorce had been close partners since the invention of the camera. But he wanted to talk with Maggie about Post’s being roughed up when he’d attempted to see her.

  Or maybe he simply wanted to talk with Maggie.

  She opened the door right away when he knocked. She must have just returned from the beach; she was wearing a black one-piece swimsuit cut high on the thighs, and there was a sheen of perspiration on her tan face and the swell of her breasts. She smiled when she saw it was Carver, knocking him slightly off balance. He’d imagined she might reward his persistence by throwing something at him.

  “You are determined about that conversation we’re supposed to have,”
she said. Her eyes were a deep and nondescript color in the dim light of the cottage, pulling at him so that he had to look away for a second.

  “Obsessed, even,” he said. “Apparently you bring that out in people.”

  “Some people. The ones who need to be obsessed.”

  She stepped aside and made room for him to enter.

  The cottage was cool, not so dim now that he was inside. She didn’t ask him to sit down, but she still wore her slight smile as she stood facing him. She was obviously aware that she fascinated him; it was a familiar phenomenon for her.

  “It’s a new swimming suit,” she said, backing away a few steps and turning, modeling so he could see her from every angle. She was one of those women whose compactness lent the impression of full perfection. Her smile was wider as she stopped turning and faced him. “Well, how do I look?”

  “Like a flavor.”

  The smile burst into a short, musical laugh.

  “I called you at Burnair and Crosley,” he said. “They told me you’d called in sick.”

  “It passed,” she said. She ran a hand absently along a well-turned forearm, then was perfectly still for a second in an exquisitely graceful pose, like something Michelangelo might have created if he’d worked with warm flesh instead of stone. “The sun heals everything if only you give it time.”

  “Maybe it’s the time that heals.”

  “No, it takes the heat of the sun to purge body and soul.”

  Carver found himself staring at her cleavage above the bra of her black suit. He quickly looked into her eyes and saw amusement there, and a kind of cruel pleasure. She was a woman who understood the power of her sex, what she possessed that she might give or withhold.

  “I saw Charlie Post yesterday,” he said, trying to get to business. “He looked a bit rough after his beating.”

  “Beating?” Parallel frown lines of concern appeared above the bridge of her nose, then disappeared. “Charlie was beaten?”

  “Not long after trying to see you.”

  Maggie hitched up the top of her swimming suit as if it might be about to fall from her breasts, but she didn’t move to tie the string designed to loop around her neck for support. “It isn’t a good idea for Charlie and me to see each other again. I think even Charlie would tell you that.”

  “He’s more convinced of it now,” Carver said.

  “Is he all right?”

  “He’ll heal. Time and the sun and all that.”

  “Who did it to him?”

  “A large man driving a big black luxury car.”

  She made a show of trying to think, actually looking up and off to the left, as if her memory were suspended there like a balloon. “I don’t know anybody like that. At least anybody who beats up people. Poor Charlie. He’s a prince of a guy, and he doesn’t deserve all the trouble he’s had. I mean, that wife of his. Ex-wife. My God, what a curse she turned out to be.”

  “Charlie would agree. He doesn’t feel the same way about you, though.”

  “But I was a curse nonetheless. I mean, it was his affair with me that really sent May off the deep end so she divorced him.”

  “It would have happened sooner or later.”

  “Sure. But it doesn’t feel good to be the one who made it happen sooner.”

  “What do you know about Nightlinks?” Carver asked.

  Her expression remained one of concern for Charlie, but she glanced off and up to the left again at her hovering memory. “You asked me that before and I said I knew nothing. What is Nightlinks, anyway?”

  “An escort service.”

  “Well, I never heard—Wait a minute, you don’t think Charlie and I met through an escort service, do you?”

  “I don’t know. How did you meet?”

  “In a more conventional and respectable manner.” She walked to a small credenza, moving slowly and deliberately, knowing he was watching. That he couldn’t not watch. The confidence of beautiful women within the context of their familiar worlds always amazed him. They moved through the waters of attraction and seduction with the ease of bright tropical fish.

  Striking a too-casual pose with one hip jutting out, she poured herself a glass of white wine. Then she looked over at Carver as if just remembering he was there. “Would you like a drink?”

  “No. Too early.”

  “Well,” she said a little sadly, “it’s too late for me. Would you like anything else?” She made it sound innocent, but there was a glitter in her eyes that reflected something deep within. Eve in the apple orchard.

  “Maybe it’s too late for that, too,” he said.

  “But only maybe.” She placed her stemmed glass on the credenza and walked boldly over to him. She kissed him on the lips, leaning into him with her breasts. She smelled fresh and damp and eager. Stepping back, but with a hand on his arm where Beth had playfully punched him this morning, she said, “Am I a flavor you like?”

  “Can’t deny it,” he said, and ran the backs of his knuckles gently, weightlessly, down the line of her cheek.

  “Then don’t deny yourself anything,” she said, smiling dreamily.

  “I can’t mix pleasure with business.”

  “That’s one of those old saws that’re hardly ever true.”

  “True this time, though.”

  “Then forget about business.”

  “Is that what you’re trying to get me to do?”

  She moved away from him, not bothering to conceal her annoyance. “You’ve got me wrong, Fred. It is Fred, isn’t it?”

  “Sometimes it’s Fred. Sometimes it’s Fool. And I don’t have you at all,” he said, hearing the lament in his voice.

  She heard it too and smiled. “It’s not really going to be Fool this time, is it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to sort it out later.”

  “Well, that ‘maybe’ is still hanging in the air, so it’s still Fred for the time being.” She strode back to the credenza and picked up her glass. “Sure you won’t have something to drink?”

  “Maybe later,” he said.

  She rolled the roundness of the cool glass across her cheek where he’d touched it, then briefly across the tan swell of her breasts. A trickle of moisture ran beneath the black material of her suit. “Maybe’s good enough for now,” she said.

  He nodded, shifted his weight over his cane, and limped to the door. He hated to leave. Hated it! He felt as if he were walking on the bottom of the sea.

  “Is Charlie still in town?” Maggie asked behind him.

  He turned around. “No, he went back to Miami.”

  “Good. I’m still fond of Charlie. That old man really is one of the best. I want to see him happy.”

  Carver couldn’t help smiling. “You saw him happy for a while.”

  “Didn’t I, though?” she said, and raised her glass and sipped.

  He went out into the heat and got in the Olds. Seated behind the steering wheel, he noticed his hand was trembling.

  Beth. He knew it was Beth who’d kept him from Maggie inside the cottage.

  Beth had become almost a physical part of him, had burned her way deep into his life so that he couldn’t be unfaithful to her without being unfaithful to himself. He despised that kind of oneness and dependency. He knew it for a weakness. He’d guarded against it, hadn’t wanted it to happen.

  But it had.

  When the trembling stopped he drove away, but he couldn’t help glancing back.

  36

  THAT NIGHT THEY SWITCHED.

  Beth followed the redhead and Carver the man who’d escorted the elderly woman the night before. That way neither escort would notice the same person in the background, a tall black woman or a bald man who walked with a cane. And this evening they picked up on them outside their homes instead of at Nightlinks.

  The man, a darkly handsome guy who looked like an Arab terrorist who’d shaved off his beard, didn’t strike Carver as being as young as Beth had described. And he didn’t go to Nightlinks tonigh
t. He was working, though, all dressed up and with someplace to go: black slacks, gray shirt open at the throat to show off a gold chain, unconstructed darker gray sport jacket. He got into his late-model maroon Buick, and Carver followed him to the Sea Lord Hotel.

  He was in the lobby about twenty minutes before emerging with a roundish, pretty brunette on his arm. She had on a silky black skirt and a sleeveless white blouse with a glittering gold design down the front. She looked about forty and was staring up at her escort as if he’d been manufactured only for her delight.

  Carver thought, Some way to make a living, as he slipped the Olds into drive and followed the maroon Buick back out onto A1A.

  Nightlinks and the woman turned left and dropped south all the way to Lauderdale-by-the-Sea. It was dark when they pulled into the parking lot of the Holiday Inn on El Mar Drive. El Mar ran east of A1A at that point, the last street before the beach and ocean.

  Carver parked nearby and watched.

  The woman waited in the Buick while the man went into the hotel lobby. He returned five minutes later, climbed back into the Buick, and the woman climbed all over him. They kissed as if interested in the Guinness record, then the man got back out of the car and walked around to the passenger side. Out of sight of the woman, he ran the back of his hand across his mouth, then worked his cheeks between thumb and forefinger. Maybe she’d loosened a tooth. It had to be an occupational hazard.

  Gallant and smiling, he opened the door for the woman. She took his offered hand and climbed out, tugging down her skirt with unnecessary modesty. She was grinning as if she’d just happened upon the potential of the opposite sex. Possibly she had.

  Holding hands, the two of them strolled along El Mar to a restaurant a few blocks away. The sign outside said the name of the place was Aruba. It was crowded, but somehow they got a table after only a short wait. Maybe love working its wonders.

  Aruba was a good restaurant from Carver’s point of view. It was located on the beach near a wooden pier that jutted far out and was softly lighted. Tourists were out enjoying the night, some of them wandering around holding ice cream cones from a shop across the street.