by John Lutz
The red LeBaron led him west of town to Brant Estates. He parked on the highway shoulder and watched the sleek red car glide along recently poured concrete streets to where three display houses were lined facing north. They were ranch houses with pale gray or blue siding, powder blue roofs, and two-car garages. The house in the middle had a low white picket fence around the front yard, and its garage had been converted into a sales office. Carver watched as Brant parked in front of that house, climbed out of the red convertible, and walked into the office with his coat slung over his shoulder.
He didn’t emerge from the office for almost an hour. Carver sat watching cement trucks rumble one by one to where slab foundations were being poured at the far end of the subdivision. Several workmen were standing around, leaning on shovel handles and staring as if hypnotized by the mixers. Each time one of the mixers released its gravelly soup to pour down its steel funnel, they would get to work frenziedly shoveling, evenly distributing the wet concrete. A bulldozer was grading not far from where the concrete work was being done, raising copious clouds of dust that hung almost motionless to blemish the china blue sky. Beyond where the bulldozer was relentlessly moving earth, about a dozen houses seemed to have been completed. There were a dozen more in various stages of construction, spaced out around the new streets. Carver remembered Charley Spotto referring to them as cookie-cutter houses. Spotto was right. Though they were attractively designed, there was a numbing sameness about them.
A man in jeans, a blue pullover shirt, and a red hard hat came out of the office and strode toward where the foundations were being poured. He was tan and muscular and walked with a swagger, and he appeared to be wearing cowboy boots. He only went a short distance before climbing into a brown pickup truck with a tall antenna mounted on its rear bumper. A rubber ball had been run through with the antenna and rode halfway up it to keep it from whipping around with too much range and bashing into the truck roof.
As the man sat in the pickup, a large red truck pulling a flatbed trailer stacked with lumber snaked its way along the flat, curved street. It headed toward another far section of the subdivision, and the brown pickup followed, its antenna with the rubber ball doing a mad dance behind it as if trying to keep up.
Brant emerged from the office. He was wearing a red hard hat like the other man’s. He got in the LeBaron and drove toward where the lumber truck had stopped. The trailer bed tilted back on hydraulic lifts, and most of the lumber, bound in a mass with steel bands, slid smoothly from the flatbed onto the ground as the truck jerked and pulled away, its front wheels lifting momentarily then bouncing back down. The stack of lumber made a sharp, reverberating report like an echoing rifle shot as the boards slapped against the hard ground and one another. Another cloud of dust rose and hung in the air.
Brant parked behind the brown pickup and got out, and he and the other man in a hard hat stood talking to the truck driver, who had leaped nimbly from the trailer as soon as the lumber was deposited on the ground.
Brant slapped the truck driver on the shoulder, a bill of lading was signed, and the lumber truck drove the pattern of streets to turn around. It roared and clattered past Carver again on its way out of Brant Estates.
Work continued as Brant and the other man—whom Carver assumed was the foreman—wandered around checking on the job and coordinating events. Carver was learning something about home building, but little else. Brant seemed a plain vanilla guy, all right, just as Spotto had described.
Carver was getting bored, and he could only hang around so long before drawing attention, even if he was parked off the highway, well away from construction activity. If it weren’t for the cane, he could raise the car’s hood and pretend engine trouble for a while without looking suspicious. But even from a distance, a limping bald man with a cane might catch Brant’s eye and prompt recognition and curiosity. For a moment Carver himself even questioned what he was doing here. Private investigators didn’t generally spy on their clients.
Wondering if he’d gone hormonal in some sort of symbiosis with Beth, he put the LeBaron in drive and waited for a break in traffic before pulling out onto the highway.
What would be next for him, dry crackers for breakfast? Some world. A father. Again. He still hadn’t sorted that one out.
The LeBaron’s tires sang on the warm concrete as he drove toward the Del Moray public library.
In the library’s cool green reference room, Carver sat hunched at one of half a dozen microfilm viewers and scanned back issues of the Del Moray Gazette-Dispatch.
Portia Brant’s accident had been front-page news. According to witnesses, the Brant Mercedes might have been speeding when a car coming from the opposite direction crossed the dividing line and collided head-on with it. The photograph indicated that the cars had struck a glancing blow. Both drivers survived, as Spotto had said. Portia Brant, the passenger in Joel Brant’s Mercedes, hadn’t been wearing her seat belt and was decapitated.
The driver of the other car was a retired postal worker from New York named Sam Chavez. Thanks to his seat belt and air bag, he’d sustained only facial lacerations and a broken leg. His blood alcohol level was well beyond the point where he was legally drunk. Joel Brant’s alcohol level was just low enough to keep him from being legally drunk. He’d suffered only minor abrasions and contusions and hadn’t been hospitalized.
Carver concentrated on the viewer and followed the story from “Wife of Local Builder Killed in Head-on Collision” to “Portia Brant, AlA Accident Victim, Is Buried.” Portia’s photographs showed a beautiful dark-haired woman with kind eyes, a neck like a ballerina’s, and a knockout smile. There was a shot of mourners at her funeral. Joel Brant was visible standing among a knot of men wearing what looked like identical dark suits. Portia’s obituary mentioned no surviving family members other than her husband, and stated that she’d been president of the Del Moray Garden Club and had been active in local charities.
Carver stared at her photograph, at her smile and elegant neck. His mind flinched at imagining her beheaded by a slab of windshield glass or sharp-edged flying wreckage, and he wondered how much of the accident Brant remembered, how much of it troubled his dreams.
They had been driving home from an AIDS benefit ball at one of the big hotels when the accident occurred. Both had been drinking. The autopsy revealed that Portia’s blood alcohol content had been slightly higher than her husband’s.
Carver figured out how to work the viewer to make a copy of the image on the screen and fed it a quarter. Portia Brant’s photograph duplicated well. He made three more copies, then switched off the microfilm viewer and removed the reel.
Portia’s face haunted him. The death of a woman like that, the way she’d died, how might it have affected her husband beyond normal grief? If Joel Brant was psychologically askew after such an experience, who could blame him?
As long as it didn’t result in the stalking and killing of an innocent woman.
Feeling slightly queasy, Carver stood up and walked from the library, nodding to a stern-faced librarian on the way out.
Outside in the heat and sun, the nausea stayed with him. What now? Sympathetic morning sickness?
Pushing such nonsense from his mind, he decided his stomach was probably upset from the constant sideways motion of the microfilm being run through the viewer. Something like seasickness. He would skip lunch and drive directly back to the Brant Estates construction site and see if Joel Brant was still there.
The red convertible was gone from where it had been parked, and Brant was nowhere in sight. The cement mixers had gone, too. Carpenters were swarming over the studwork of a house near the recently poured foundations, and farther down the same street roofers were hard at work. Their hammering was a discordant symphony only slightly softened by distance.
Carver’s stomach was okay now, but his damaged rib was aching. He decided to drive to his office and find something to do that wasn’t strenuous or stressful. Maybe he’d even down one of th
e pills Beth had stuck in his hand as he was leaving the cottage that morning.
Half a mile down the highway he passed a low, flat-roofed structure with a sign proclaiming it to be the Egret Lounge. Despite the early hour, a row of vehicles was nosed tightly against the front of the building. They reminded Carver of suckling pigs lined against the side of their reclining mother.
One of them was the brown pickup truck driven by Brant’s foreman.
Carver braked the LeBaron and pulled onto the gravel shoulder, made a slow but tire-squealing U-turn, and parked two spaces down from the truck.
What he might learn in the Egret Lounge he wasn’t sure, but there was at least one person inside who knew Joel Brant.
23
THE EGRET LOUNGE was cool and dim inside. The mini-blinds along the front windows were sharply slanted so that bars of light traversed the low ceiling. A paddle fan, the kind that mounts flush with the ceiling to allow more headroom, was slowly revolving. It wasn’t needed to make the place cooler, but it seemed to be doing a pretty good job of keeping the tobacco smoke circulating. The Egret hadn’t yet caught up with the nonsmoking movement.
As Carver’s eyes adjusted to the dimness, he saw a long bar fronting about a dozen round tables with blue-and-white checked tablecloths on them. Each table had a napkin holder and a cluster of condiment bottles in its center, along with a large glass ashtray. Except for the bar itself, the Egret looked more like a restaurant than a lounge, though a lunch menu mounted behind the bar featured nothing other than hamburgers, cheeseburgers, and fried potatoes and onions.
The place smelled like fried beef and onions as well as cigarette smoke. Carver’s stomach, which had calmed down, gave a slight twitch. Country and western was also in the air, a Randy Travis soundalike singing in a deep, deep voice about God and the flag and an old hound and the wife and kids and something about a ’75 Ford. Carver couldn’t make sense of it, but it was sad.
About a dozen customers were scattered about the Egret, four of them slouched on stools in the habitual drinker’s posture of relaxed despondency at the bar. Brant’s foreman was sitting alone at a table, staring at a full mug of beer in front of him. It must have just been drawn, because it had a thick, foamy head. The foreman looked as pensive as the melancholy lost souls at the bar. Maybe because of the music.
Carver approached the table, and the foreman looked up at him. Without his hard hat he had a head of bushy red hair that curled wherever it wanted. Unruly red eyebrows, too. His face was sunburned so that his nose was peeling; he had the kind of skin that would never tan. He squinted blue eyes at Carver, as if trying to recognize him.
“Howdy,” Carver said, also maybe because of the music. “You’re the foreman over at Brant Estates, aren’t you?”
The man nodded.
Carver used the crook of his cane to pull back a chair. “Fred Carver,” he said, extending his hand. “I noticed you over where they were building this morning.”
“Wade Schultz.” Schultz’s grip was strong, dry, and callused.
“I’d offer to buy you a drink,” Carver said, “only that one looks fresh.”
“It is,” Schultz said. He seemed neither friendly nor unfriendly, and not particularly curious.
“I was thinking about buying at Brant Estates, and when I saw your truck parked outside, I thought it might be wise to drop in and talk with you. My theory is, talk to the foreman if you really want to find out how sturdy a house is built. What do you say?”
“About what?”
“Those houses good and sound?”
“I’d say so. We’re a company that doesn’t scrimp on materials, and I can guarantee you the building codes are followed right to the letter.”
“The houses are only half of it,” Carver said. “The company itself, Brant Development, is it as sound as the houses? A guarantee’s no good if the company goes out of business.”
“Company’s sound. Brant’s been building houses in Florida for a while now, and we don’t get many complaints.”
“What about those you do get?”
“We jump on them and fix what’s broke,” Schultz said promptly.
“How about the guy that owns the company? Joe Brant, is it?”
“It’s Joel. Joel Brant.” Schultz toyed with the handle of his beer mug. Muscles and tendons danced in his bulging forearm.
Carver leaned in closer to Schultz, speaking confidentially. “This won’t get back to your boss, but. . . well, is he a reasonably honest man?”
Schultz smiled. “He’s my boss. What am I gonna do, tell you the truth if he’s a crook?”
“I don’t know. Are you?”
“He’s honest enough,” Schultz said.
“Just enough?”
Schultz took a pull of his beer and wiped a foam mustache away with the back of his hand. “You buy in Brant Estates, Mr. Carver, and you won’t be sorry. Those houses are a solid product and they’re priced right. And the honest to God truth is, Joel Brant’s as straight as any builder you can buy from.”
Carver smiled. “Sounds good to me. So he’s an honest businessman. And you tell me he’s solvent, or at least his company is. But what about his personal life? I mean, I knew a fella bought into a subdivision and the builder ran away with one of the saleswomen. Place went all to hell in no time while they were winning limbo contests in Hawaii. This Brant married?”
“Not anymore. His wife died a while back in a car accident.” Another pull of beer. “He isn’t going to run away with anyone, Mr. Carver. He’s not the irresponsible type.”
“Wife died? That’s a shame. He a young man?”
“Fortyish.” Schultz tilted back his head and drank his mug of beer down past the halfway point.
“I’d like to think that’s young,” Carver said. “It can hit a man hard, losing his wife so suddenly. Make him somebody other than himself for a while, if you know what I mean.”
“Some men.”
“Is Brant one of them?”
“Listen, I been on an extended lunch hour, waiting on some lumber deliveries.” Schultz glanced at his watch. “They oughta be there by now.” He stood up. “Been nice meeting you, Mr. Carver. I hope to be building your house one of these days.”
“It’s possible,” Carver said.
He watched as Schultz swaggered from the Egret, opening the door and disappearing from dimness in a blast of sunlight that made it appear he was walking into a stoked furnace. The door swung back quickly, cutting short the rude interruption of the outside world.
When Carver turned back around in his chair, a woman was sitting at the table.
She was in her early forties, with gray hair cut short as if for summer and surf, even though it wasn’t flattering. Her face, pretty with a kind of cheerful eagerness about it, was browned and seamed, as if she’d spent a lifetime in the Florida sun. She was wearing a light gray blazer with shoulder pads, but it was obvious that her shoulders were plenty broad without help from the pads. The neckline of her blouse beneath the blazer was low enough to reveal a lot of freckles and the very beginning of cleavage. Her hands were feminine but strong-looking. In the dimness and haze of tobacco smoke, she was strikingly tan and healthy looking, like an Olympic swimmer in the autumn of life.
She raised a cigarette from beneath the level of the table and took a long drag, shattering her Olympian image. Turning her head slightly to the side and exhaling, she smiled and said, “I overheard you talking to Wade about Brant Estates.”
“I’m thinking of buying there,” Carver explained. Lie, lie, lie.
“I work there. My name’s Nancy Quartermain.”
Great. Someone else who might talk with Brant and mention the man with the cane who’d inquired about a house. “Oh? Are you a salesperson?”
“No, the bookkeeper. I just wanted to make sure Wade didn’t. . . well, scare you off. He’s a good foreman, but he’s not the best at dealing with potential customers.”
“That’s OK,” Carver said, “it
’s not his job.”
A waitress came over and Carver asked Nancy Quartermain if he could buy her a drink. She asked for a diet Coke with a lemon wedge, and Carver ordered a draft beer like the one Schultz had been drinking. Two men in work clothes came in and joined the lineup at the bar. “Fish sandwich, Lorraine,” Carver heard one of them say to the waitress, even though it wasn’t listed on the menu.
“From time to time,” Nancy said, “Wade and Joel Brant get into violent arguments. It happened this afternoon.”
“Really? Over what?”
“It doesn’t make any difference. All of their arguments are over work matters. You know, financing, or completion dates, that kind of thing. They always blow over fast. Like storms out of the Gulf. But I wanted to make sure Wade didn’t say anything derogatory about Joel Brant. He’s a fine builder, a fine man.”
“You know him well?”
She took a final drag on her cigarette, then snuffed it out in the glass ashtray as she exhaled a faint trace of smoke. “Just as a boss who’s only in the office occasionally.” She stared at Carver. “No romantic interest whatsoever, if that’s what your question meant.”
It hadn’t meant that, and he was surprised she would think it had. Was she protesting too vigorously?
“Schultz told me Brant was involved with a woman named Gloria Bream,” Carver lied again. It had been Charley Spotto who’d ferreted out that piece of information.
“That’s none of my business. Or Wade’s.” The waitress came with their drinks, and Nancy was silent until she’d gone. “I can tell you this, though. Mr. Brant’s wife was killed in an auto accident about six months ago. Mr. Brant was driving when their car was hit by a drunk driver. He sort of blames himself, though he shouldn’t. The other driver was soused to the gills. Say, did Wade tell you about this?”