John Lutz - Torch

Wishing Donna had shared even more confidences with Ellen, Carver thanked her and stood up.

She glanced at his cane. “That a temporary thing?”

“As temporary as I am.”

“Well, there are worse things in life than a stiff leg. You seem to do okay for yourself.”

“I haven’t curled into a ball and cried for a long time.”

“Me, either. Not since last night.” She smiled in a way that suggested she wouldn’t mind if he sat back down.

He laid one of his business cards on the table. “If you hear anything more about Enrico Thomas,” he said, “call me and let me know.”

“So that’s his last name. Thomas.”

“No,” Carver said, “I was getting to that. His real name is Carl Gretch, and he seems to have disappeared.”

Ellen looked surprised. “Donna was going with a guy who used an alias?”

“And a knife,” Carver said. “See, she didn’t share as many confidences with you as you thought.”

“It makes me wonder,” Ellen said, sounding a little mystified, “what else she didn’t tell me.”

As Carver left the rarefied, moneyed atmosphere of the club lounge, he tried to imagine Carl Gretch there and couldn’t.

What had nice Donna Winship been thinking?

Carver sat at a table in the shade of a tilted umbrella and ate a taco. After leaving the country club, he realized he hadn’t had lunch and was hungry, so he drove to a taco stand he liked near the public marina, on Magellan about half a mile from his office. It was a pleasant place to think and get indigestion.

He leaned over the table as he bit into the brittle taco shell, careful not to drip sauce on his shirt or pants. It relaxed him to sit and watch the boats bobbing at their moorings or putting in or out of the marina. As he wiped grease from his fingers and leaned back in his plastic chair, a large sailboat with its canvas down glided on alternate motor power parallel to the shore, then altered course to head toward open water. He sipped his Busch beer and watched its sails being hoisted when it was farther from shore.

It was late enough for him to be the only customer other than two young girls perched on stools at the stand’s counter. He figured no one would be bothered by smoke, so he finished his beer, then fired up a Swisher Sweet cigar. He liked to smoke the small, slender cigars sometimes after meals. A substitute for dessert.

He watched shreds of smoke drift away on the sea breeze and thought that what he knew about the deaths of Donna and Mark Winship had about the same substance and permanence.

By the time the cigar was half gone, the sun had moved enough so that the tilt of the umbrella was wrong and allowed sunlight to lance beneath it and glint off the smooth white table. Carver’s eyes began to ache.

There was an outside public phone near the stand, so he snubbed out what was left of the cigar in a square glass ashtray on the table and got up and deposited his empty beer can, wadded napkin, and the crumpled paper that had held the taco in a trash can. Some of the hot red sauce from the wrapper got on the edge of his hand and he licked it off, then went to the phone.

The two girls at the counter glanced at him, then looked away with obvious disinterest. He was too old for them, in another universe. Or maybe it was the cane. He wasn’t sure which he hoped it was. The old guy laboriously scraping a grill stared at him from behind the counter as if he thought Carver might want another taco, then returned to his work when he saw that Carver was moving toward the phone.

The plastic and metal of the phone shelter was hot from the sun. Carver leaned on it for support, hooked his cane over a steel lip, and inserted most of the change he’d received when he’d bought lunch. He called his office, waited for the answering machine to kick in, then punched out his personal code on the phone’s keypad to signal the machine to play his messages. Four of them, according to the machine’s electronic brain:

The garage where he had the Olds serviced called to say he couldn’t bring the car in for an oil change as scheduled and should phone for another appointment. There were a couple of hang-ups. Then Hodgkins, the manager of the building where Carl Gretch had lived, was on the machine telling Carver that Gretch had returned to the apartment. The time on the message was 1:05, an hour ago.

Carver replaced the receiver and made his way through the scattering of tables and umbrellas to where the Olds was parked with its canvas top down. He lowered himself into the hot vinyl upholstery behind the steering wheel, got the engine started, and drove fast for Orlando and the apartment on Belt Street.

The door to Gretch’s apartment was closed and locked. Carver rapped on the checked enameled wood with his cane. Waited and listened. No answer and no sound from inside.

He went back down to the first floor and the apartment door lettered MANAGER and knocked.

Hodgkins opened the door almost immediately. He was wearing the same baggy jeans he’d had on when Carver had last seen him, but he’d changed from his white tee shirt into a crisp blue and gray plaid sport shirt that still had creases in it from being folded when it was bought. He smelled like stale pipe tobacco with an underlying scent of bourbon.

“Figured you’d be here in a hurry,” he said, “but it wasn’t fast enough. Gretch was only in his place about fifteen or twenty minutes. When I stopped him on his way downstairs and asked him about the rent he owed, he acted like he was in a big hurry, said I should fuck off. Them were his exact words. Then he was past me and out the door and into that fancy car of his. Left twenty bucks’ worth of tire on the street screechin’ outa here.”

“Was he carrying anything when he came downstairs?” Carver asked.

“No, not as I can recall.”

“Mind if I go up and have another look around his place?”

“Not in the slightest.”

Hodgkins shuffled out of sight for a minute with his stiff-jointed gait, then returned and handed Carver a key attached with string to a metal-rimmed cardboard tag with 2-W lettered on it in black ink. Carver thanked him and climbed back up the stairs, clumping on the wooden steps with his cane.

Gretch’s apartment looked exactly as it had this morning, but it was warmer and stuffier. Hodgkins had turned off the air-conditioning in the unit. Carver studied the mismatched furniture, but none of it seemed to have been moved. A bead of sweat ran down his ribs as he limped into the bedroom and saw that the bed was still stripped down.

Everything looked the same here, too. He opened the closet’s sliding louvered door and felt around on the top shelf. The porn magazine and the photos he’d returned there were now gone. They must be what had drawn Gretch back to the apartment. More specifically, it would be the photographs he wanted. Blackmail material, maybe.

No, Carver thought, the photos weren’t lewd or compromising enough for that, and they were of women posed by themselves. The most the subjects could be accused of was posing for what looked like amateurish attempts at the kind of mild pinup shots still seen on calendars in garages and small-town barbershops.

“Hello.”

The voice was soft and throaty and might have belonged to a woman.

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.