John Lutz - Torch

Carver was surprised. This wasn’t what he’d expected when classy and upscale Maggie had driven away from her well-paying job at Burnair and Crosley.

He was surprised again when she climbed from the Stanza, keeping her knees modestly together as the skirt of her business suit worked itself up, and after carefully locking her car, walked into S ELLIE’S.

Carver sat in the Olds and studied the place. It looked as if it occupied the entire ground floor of an aged four-story brick building. Curtains and yellowed shades indicated that there might be seedy apartments on the top three floors. Probably the lounge drew business from the warehouses of several small trucking companies Carver had noticed three or four blocks to the east. Even as he pondered this, two men in work clothes strolled down the street from that direction, talking animatedly with each other in what seemed to be a good-natured argument. One was tall and blond and was carrying a black lunchbox. The other was shorter and muscular and appeared to be Hispanic. They also entered S ELLIE’S.

After deciding the lounge was probably fairly large inside and he might be able to enter without being noticed by Maggie, Carver got out of the Olds. He didn’t lock the door on the driver’s side. That way if the Olds was stolen the thief might not slash the canvas top to gain access. That could prove expensive, if Carver got the car back. The minimal insurance he had wouldn’t cover it. He crossed the street and saw the darkened outline of the missing letter on the neon sign, making it SHELLIE’S.

There was a small diamond-shaped window in the door. He peered inside. Half a dozen customers sat at the long bar, another half-dozen at small tables with hurricane lamp candle holders for centerpieces. A large-screen TV mounted high behind the bar was on, showing Rod Stewart hip-switching and spinning across a stage with a guitar, but no music seeped outside. Maggie was seated at the far end of the bar, drinking something tall and trying to ignore the portly little man on the stool next to her.

Carver moved back from the window in the door. This wasn’t going to work. Shellie’s was smaller and less crowded than he’d anticipated. He might be able to enter unnoticed by Maggie if it were nighttime, when there would undoubtedly be more customers and probably loud music and a haze of cigarette smoke. But now, in late afternoon, he decided he’d better stay outside.

He returned to the Olds, not liking the idea of sitting some more in the heat but knowing it was unavoidable if he wanted to do his job. And he took pride in his job. Almost everything else had been stripped from him when the holdup kid’s bullet crashed into his knee. He had his work, and he did it no matter what else happened in his life. He wondered if that was being obsessive, or simply defining. Occupations did define people. He knew who and what he was, and what he had to do. At least most of the time. His was an occupation that hinged on certain constant aspects of human nature, not all of them admirable. That was oddly comforting in a high-tech age when job experience sometimes became obsolete even before it was completed.

He started the Olds, slipped the transmission lever to reverse, and backed down the street until he was almost a block away from Shellie’s and from Maggie’s parked car.

Trying to ignore the heat, he half listened to a call-in radio show about abortion and waited and watched and speculated.

Her co-workers and clients at Burnair and Crosley would be surprised to know this was where Maggie was spending her late lunch hour. If that indeed was what she was doing in a down-scale dump like Shellie’s, drinking her lunch. There was nothing about the place that suggested it served food, even if a customer might have the courage to eat there.

It was almost four o’clock when Maggie emerged from Shellie’s and walked, head down, toward the parked Stanza. Carver couldn’t be sure, but he thought she was moving unsteadily and might be slightly drunk.

When she drove away, he followed.

The Stanza stayed in its proper lane, but it did weave once toward the curb. And it halted completely at the first stop sign on Gull, then accelerated slowly across the empty intersection. Maggie was driving very carefully, the way people did when they were drunk and trying to convince themselves and everyone else they were sober. He wondered if she was a secret alcoholic, and went to a place like Shellie’s to drink so she wouldn’t run into any of her straitlaced investment-world friends from Burnair and Crosley. If she was simply drinking to assuage her grief over Mark Winship’s death, she probably would have done so somewhere else, or at home, not at Shellie’s. Maggie seemed to be an experienced drinker.

She drove east toward the ocean until she connected with Magellan, then took it south to the coast highway. Obviously, she was finished working for the day.

Carver stayed well back from the black Stanza and listened to a clergyman and a female state representative argue about the French abortion pill. He knew where the car and the argument were going.

He continued past the driveway of Maggie’s cottage after the Stanza had turned into it. Then he made a U-turn and parked on the shoulder behind some palms and decorative shrubbery dotted with tiny multicolored blossoms, where Beni Ho had been parked to watch the cottage when Carver had visited it the first time. He twisted the ignition key and switched off the engine and the radio.

The parking place didn’t provide much of a view, actually. Carver could see the front of the cottage through the bushes, but not the door or the stepping-stone path to the rear of the place and the beach.

He decided to knock on the cottage door and try getting Maggie to talk with him while she was loosened with alcohol. She should be more cooperative and revealing thanks to her time spent in Shellie’s. Besides, Carver had done enough sitting in the heat for one day.

Leaving the Olds parked where it was, he got out and walked along the road shoulder, then down the driveway to the cottage.

He rapped on the door with his cane and waited. There must have been a beehive somewhere close by; several honeybees droned past in the same general direction and made wide circles to disappear around the corner of the cottage. Worker bees knocking off for the day. A few of them buzzed close but didn’t seem to pay much attention to Carver. They had more important business. It was time to check in with the queen.

The door opened and Maggie stood staring out at him. She was still wearing the blue skirt but not the blazer and was in stockinged feet. Carver’s gaze started at her nylon-clad painted toenails and rose to her face. Her eyes were heavy-lidded and she looked mildly annoyed at being ogled. Used to it, though. A woman like her knew that some men’s eyes traveled on their own.

Carver said, “You told me you might want to talk some more, said to come calling later.”

She smiled at his pathetic attempt at subterfuge. “We both know I said ‘call later,’ not ‘come calling.’ ”

He said, “Well, to tell you the truth, I phoned you again at work about an hour ago and they said you’d left for the day.”

“So you thought you’d drive here and pester me in person?”

“I thought it might help both of us if we talked some more about Mark Winship.”

“Not about Donna?”

“Donna, too.”

Maggie ran her palms down her cheeks, dragging at the corners of her bleary eyes and distorting her features, the way kids do when they want to make a face. It amazed Carver that she was sexy even when she did that. What a temptation she must have been for Mark Winship. For any man who’d ever met her. She said, “I took a sleeping pill about an hour ago and it’s kicking in, I’m afraid. We’ll have to talk some other time, if at all.”