Flame

by John Lutz

  “And you remember cooperation works both ways. Get with Records and see what you can find out about Ralph Palmer, then pass it on to me.”

  McGregor stood up straight. Stretched his arms so his fingertips almost touched the ceiling. Then he exhaled loudly, hitched up his pants, and tucked in his shirt. Said, “Why is it I gotta get mixed up with shitbums like you?”

  “What do you expect? You got no friends.”

  “You don’t either, Carver, you only think so. If they see they can use you, comes time to shit or get off the pot, they’ll shit—and all over you.”

  “You the exception?” Carver asked.

  “There are no exceptions.” McGregor smiled lewdly and sort of swung his weight across the small office to the door. Long legs covering the distance in two steps. Maybe flaunting his mobility in front of Carver. “Could be I’ll get back to you, Carver.”

  He went out, still smiling, leaving a wake of cheap perfumy cologne polluting the thick air.

  Carver sat for a minute thinking about how things were breaking. Realizing McGregor was right, it was hot in the office. Maybe the explosion had somehow screwed up the air-conditioning unit on the roof.

  The lieutenant wasn’t somebody to underestimate, Carver reminded himself. Nobody was, if they possessed the ambition of Napoleon and the scruples of Attila the Hun.

  He stared at the rough blank surface of the plywood covering the window, remembering the noise and shock of the explosion. The spray of broken glass. The contorted black thing behind the burning Cadillac’s steering wheel.

  He sat forward in his chair and dragged the phone across the desk. Lifted a pencil and pecked out a number with the eraser.

  It was time to confide in someone about his arrangement with McGregor.

  Chapter 10

  EDWINA SAID, “I HEARD on the news it was actually Frank Wesley who got killed outside your office.”

  They were seated at the white metal table on the brick veranda. Carver was facing the ocean, looking beyond her at a cluster of colorful triangular sails out near the horizon. They were all banked at precisely the same angle into the wind and seemed to move only gradually. Big boats, maybe competing in some sort of regatta. He expected they were making their way across the wavering blue carpet of sea toward the Del Moray port, on the final leg of their course. North of them, closer to shore, a large trawler plowed its way out to sea. Commerce and play. A cloud of gulls circled gnatlike behind the trawler, no doubt feeding on jettisoned garbage.

  “Fred, you hear me?”

  “Yeah,” Carver said. “Sorry.”

  “So it was really Wesley who hired you? Gave you a phony story?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Know why he did it?”

  “Not yet.”

  He looked at her obliquely as he spoke, as if not wanting to acknowledge her presence. She’d come home for the afternoon but was going back out soon to meet a client. Something about helping to arrange a mortgage loan. Relaxing now, she sipped a gin-and-lemonade from a tall glass, the breeze toying with her long auburn hair. The same breeze that was propelling the sailboats, larger now, toward shore. One with a tall yellow sail had broken from the pack and was well in the lead. There was some sort of design on the sail, but he couldn’t make it out. A skull and crossbones?

  Edwina said, “I sense in you a certain reticence.” She was smiling at him as she set down her glass in its ring of moisture on the table, causing ice cubes to clink faintly.

  Carver was drinking beer out of the can. Budweiser. He lifted the can and said, “It’s better you don’t know anything else about this. It’s more complicated than I thought.”

  “By that you mean more dangerous?”

  “That, too.” He took a swig of beer. Backhanded cold foam from his upper lip. You’d think by now they’d have come up with a better design for openings in beer cans. “Somebody oughta write a letter.”

  “About what?”

  “Openings in beer cans. How to make them so they don’t dribble beer when you tilt the can.”

  “You use a glass, that solves it.”

  “Yeah, I suppose. Or maybe the cans are okay and it’s my lip that’s the problem.”

  “Or maybe you’re being evasive because you don’t want to involve me beyond a certain point in this case.”

  “Best if you don’t get involved.”

  “I don’t mind. What you do for a living, you need somebody to talk to now and then. I want that somebody to be me.”

  He sighed. Smiled at her. Knew she was right about that part of it, but she still underestimated the danger.

  “You glad you’re working out of an office now and not the house?”

  “If I’d still been using this place as my office,” he told her, “Wesley would have been blown up over there in the driveway. Blast mighta taken down part of the house.”

  Her face got tight and pale. She hadn’t thought of that. A trickle of perspiration ran down her cheek right in front of her ear, then down her neck, leaving a shimmering track. Beautiful women didn’t sweat, they glistened.

  “So, yeah,” he said, “I’m glad I’m working out of the office. It’s a shitty business sometimes. That’s why the less you’re connected with what I’m doing, the better off we both are.”

  She looked at him, her gray eyes serious and her smooth fighting chin jutting out at an almost jaunty angle. Sometimes she could look as strong-willed as she was. She’d exorcised some formidable internal demons, and not much that came at her from the outside scared her anymore. Tough lady. “When you feel like talking to me about it,” she told him stubbornly, “you can.”

  “I know that. I appreciate it. I don’t tell you enough how much I appreciate it.”

  Ice clinked again, musically this time, as she tossed back her head and finished her drink. Grinned with the wetness still on her lips. “Maybe you can show me instead of telling me.”

  He felt a tightening in the core of him, but he ignored it. Said, “Desoto’s due to show up here any minute.”

  She said, “Good. I feel better if he’s involved in whatever it is you’re planning.”

  “I’m not planning anything,” Carver said. “Just trying to puzzle out and muddle through. Keep McGregor off my ass and hang on to my investigator’s license.”

  “Would McGregor really make that kind of trouble for you?”

  “Sure. The way he gets his jollies.”

  “But you and he are in this together; it takes two to have an agreement.”

  “I can’t prove he’s involved. His word against mine.”

  “But if it really was Wesley in his car, and he lied to you about his identity, how can McGregor harm you? What’s he got for leverage?”

  “The fact that the man who was murdered right outside my office was my client, and I neglected to mention it to the police. Any way you turn it, it’s still withholding evidence in a homicide investigation.”

  “Can he prove that?”

  “Somebody can. Somebody else knows about it. Whoever saw Wesley enter and leave my office. That means McGregor might be able to prove it. So I’ve gotta keep going on this and get it puzzled out.”

  She ran her fingertips lightly down the side of her empty glass and said, “You couldn’t stop picking at the case anyway, could you?”

  “No,” he admitted. She knew him too well. The way Laura had. Yet in ways Laura had never dreamed existed.

  Tires crunched on gravel, faded to silence. A car door slammed.

  “Desoto,” Edwina said. She stood up, carrying her empty glass, and ambled over to the wooden gate. Arrived there the same time as Desoto and held the gate open for him. He gave her a peck on the cheek and they talked for a minute or two without looking over at Carver, then Edwina walked toward the house. Desoto watched the elegant sway of her hips with an appreciation so blatant there was an innocence about it. He simply loved women, did Desoto. They loved him back.

  Orlando Police Lieutenant Alfonso Desoto s
trolled through sunlight and shadow toward where Carver was seated at the round white table. He was impeccably dressed as always. Maybe even slept that way. Tailored cream-colored suit, lavender shirt, mauve tie, black shoes that looked made for dancing. Carver couldn’t remember ever seeing him sweat. Gold glittered on his wrists, his fingers, his tie clasp. He was a tall, slim-waisted man with broad shoulders and a large, noble head. Half Mexican and half Italian, he was handsome in the classic Latin manner, with a sharp profile, gentle dark eyes, and sleek black hair the wind never dared to muss. Watching him approach, Carver wondered when he’d stop walking and break into a tango.

  He smiled at Carver; perfect white teeth in a gold complexion. “Have I told you that yours is a beautiful woman, amigo?”

  “Yeah, but you probably told her more often.”

  Desoto unbuttoned his suitcoat and sat down in the white metal chair opposite Carver’s. As he adjusted the chair’s position, steel legs scraped noisily over the bricks. He said, “I want to make sure you know you’re lucky. That you appreciate her.”

  “We were just talking about that,” Carver said. The scraping of the metal chair legs had started the steady ringing in his ears again. Like a distant tuning fork vibrating. He tried to ignore it, regard it as background noise, like the sound of the sea. “She’s aware I appreciate her.”

  “As it should be,” Desoto said. “Women are too often taken for granted. Even women like Edwina. The best things in life we take for granted, you notice?”

  “That’s because they’re the steadiest.”

  The breeze got under the table’s umbrella. Lifted it slightly and snapped the material taut. The umbrella shaft moved with the wind.

  “Thanks for coming here,” Carver said, changing the subject. “I’d have been glad to drive over to Orlando.”

  Desoto shrugged. “No trouble. I had police business in Vero Beach, so I was gonna be in the area. Planned on dropping in on you anyway.”

  Carver nudged his beer can with a knuckle. “Want one of these? Or anything else to drink?”

  Desoto shook his head. “Edwina already asked and I told her no thanks.” He rested his elbows on the table and folded his hands. Gold cuff links peeked out from beneath his suitcoat sleeves. “I didn’t like the way you sounded on the phone. You in some kinda trouble, amigo?”

  Carver said, “I stepped—or I guess I was pushed—into something nastier and deeper than I suspected.” He told Desoto about Wesley-Renway coming to his office, the car bombing, the pressure-forged arrangement with McGregor, the two hard cases in Wesley’s condo in Fort Lauderdale.

  When he was finished he felt better. Noticed the ringing in his ears had stopped.

  Desoto had listened quietly, with a calm, almost melancholy expression on his dark and dramatic features. Then he said, “That McGregor, he’s some asshole, eh?”

  “He hasn’t changed,” Carver said. “Still giving ambition a bad name.”

  “This Renway is still missing?”

  “Far as I know. Though nobody’s reported him as such. Nobody around who cares, really.”

  “That’s kinda curious, eh? That Wesley would say he’s this average-joe kinda guy Renway, living in a trailer here in Del Moray.”

  “There’s a lot I’m curious about,” Carver said. “Can you contact somebody in Miami without making ripples?”

  “You know I can.”

  “Find out what there is to know about Wesley. And about a guy named Ralph Palmer. Hispanic, probably Cuban. About six feet tall, speaks with a slight accent. Handles guns as casually as if they were cooking utensils. I asked McGregor to check, but you know how that’ll go. If he does come up with something it won’t reach me, especially if it’s valuable information.”

  “True,” Desoto said. “He sees information as currency. He isn’t wrong about that, but he wants to hoard it and get rich, spend it only when he can get the most in return. Works for him, up to a point.”

  Carver grunted agreement. Watched a large egret over the water, sun winking off white wings. You didn’t often see egrets around this part of the coast. They were usually farther south toward Lauderdale.

  “I’ll make the moves,” Desoto said. “Call you later this afternoon, probably. Where you gonna be?”

  “Most likely my office. I oughta be there when they put in the new window.”

  “You should ask for Plexiglas instead of regular glass,” Desoto said. “It’s stronger and doesn’t shatter. They use it in the cockpits of military planes. Even machine-gun bullets bounce off the stuff.”

  “If I thought that was gonna be a factor,” Carver said, “I’d order a sheet of steel.”

  Desoto grinned and leaned back, clasping his hands behind his head and gazing out to sea. The sailboats were nearer to shore and farther south now. Only a few of them were visible around the blue-misted curve of the coast. The trawler was a distant gray form in the haze. A couple of gulls soared and screeched, not flapping their wings at all. Desoto said, “A beautiful spot, here, amigo. Beautiful place, beautiful woman. Garden of Eden stuff, eh? You’re lucky. You maybe don’t wanna fuck around and get the serpent upset.”

  “McGregor doesn’t leave me much choice.”

  “And you,” Desoto said, no longer grinning, “you can’t leave it alone anyway. I know you, Carver; you get your teeth sunk in and can’t turn loose. You don’t mind my saying so, you’re kinda screwy that way.”

  “Edwina agrees with you.”

  “Sure she does.” Desoto leaned forward again, swinging his hands around from the back of his head. He said, “She’s your lover. I’m your friend. We understand you.”

  There was more truth to that than Carver liked to admit. He glared at Desoto.

  Unperturbed, Desoto stared again out at the sea with rapt brown eyes. Said, “You know, I think I’ll take that drink now, amigo. Anything that’s wet and isn’t poison.”

  Carver hadn’t gone back to the office. Instead he’d made love slowly and gently to Edwina. Appreciating her.

  After she’d left to meet her client, he lay perfectly still on the mussed, sex-scented bed and enjoyed the cool breeze pressing in through the window. Listened to the secretive, repetitive whispers of the ocean. Gossip human ears couldn’t sort out. What did the sea know? What had it known for ages?

  At eight o’clock that evening Carver answered the phone. Desoto’s Southern Bell-processed voice said, “Thought you were gonna be at your office, amigo. All I got was your answering machine when I called.” There was very faint static on the line, like sandpaper being scraped lightly over wood.

  “Changed my plans,” Carver said, wishing at that moment that he hadn’t gotten the answering machine repaired. “Find out anything?”

  “There’s no Ralph Palmer with any kind of record,” Desoto said. “Guy doesn’t exist. Not even as an alias.”

  “He exists,” Carver said.

  “The autopsy report on Wesley’s very hush-hush for some reason. Probably because Wesley was an important fella. My Miami contact was scared shitless, and that’s all he’d say. I found out a couple of things that didn’t make the news, though. Wesley was a big-shot businessman from Atlanta, Georgia. Founder and chairman of the board of Wesley Slaughter and Rendering, Incorporated.”

  “Slaughter and Rendering?” Carver said. “What the hell’s that mean?”

  “Means they butcher hogs. Something to do with rendering fat from them, among other things. It’s a damned big outfit. Gets pigs from all over the South, turns ’em into hams and little pork sausages, then sends ’em to various outlets.”

  Carver thought that described a slaughterhouse as well as he’d ever heard. A merging of meat and manufacturing.

  “I was told Wesley Slaughter and Rendering’s the largest and most successful company of its kind south of the Mason-Dixon line,” Desoto said. “And that’s saying something, ’cause it’s a very competitive business.”

  “Ham-to-ham combat,” Carver said.

  “Wh
azzat, amigo?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Here’s the thing, though,” Desoto said. “The condo in Fort Lauderdale’s not Wesley’s regular address. He lives in Atlanta. The condo’s owned by his company. Corporate bigwigs are sent there for vacations from time to time. Executive privilege, eh? Don’t it make you wanna run out and buy one of those leather briefcases?”

  “What about the car?” Carver asked.

  “Mine’d be a BMW.”

  “I mean Wesley’s car.”

  “The Caddie was a rental leased by the company.”

  Carver sat quietly trying to digest what he’d been told, wondering what it all meant.

  “Any of this help you, amigo?”

  Carver said, “Hogs, huh?”

  Chapter 11

  BOOKING A RESERVATION ON a flight into Atlanta on short notice was no problem. Every commercial airline flight that went anywhere in the country seemed to be routed through Hartsfield-Atlanta International Airport. It was to planes what the hive was to bees.

  Carver got up early and drove through slanted morning sunlight into Orlando. Left his car in a pay lot and rode a shuttle to the airport. Boarded his plane almost immediately. Sat on the motionless, stifling Boeing 747 for an hour reading the airline magazine over and over, until he was almost ready to send away for the wristwatch with a face for each time zone. Heard the ringing in his ears begin again as finally the engines fired up and the plane taxied out onto the runway and took off. Endured the screams of the infant in the seat in front of him, the boring conversation about industrial couplers from the salesman next to him. Ate some roasted peanuts from a cellophane wrapper. Dribbled coffee on his shirt. Stood in line at the Hertz car-rental counter in Atlanta until he thought his patience or his cane might snap. And by 11:00 A.M. he was checked into the Holiday Inn on Piedmont Road in downtown Atlanta. Simple.

  The hotel was a large, sand-colored structure with a high-rise section. Carver was given a room on the fourteenth floor, a pleasant, airy one with a dark green carpet and green flower-print drapes and bedspread. There was a green velvet chair on gold casters. A small sofa. The light wood dresser, writing desk, and nightstands were of the sort that are stamped out at some factory that furnishes all hotels everywhere. The walls were pale beige, as was the spacious, tiled bathroom.