John Lutz - Torch

“ ’Atta baby!” Kirk yelled. “Don’t hide the label with your fingers. Good.” Click, whirrr. Click, whirrr. “Good, good, good. More shock!” The blond widened her eyes over her dazzling white smile. Click, whirrr. Click, whirrr. Click, whirrr.

“Good, good. Perfect! Got it, Wilbur,” Kirk said, straightening up from peering through the camera.

Wilbur turned off the compressor and the fan, then the spigot at the sink, and the only sound was water draining from the tray where the model stood ankle deep in mock champagne.

“I’m all fucking wet!” she pointed out again.

“You did a great job, Jane,” Kirk told her.

“Right on, babe,” Wilbur concurred. “We all did a great job.”

The model stepped out of the water and wrapped herself in a white terrycloth robe, then walked toward the room Carver had assumed was a darkroom. Wilbur began disassembling the set.

Kirk grinned at Carver and said, “Sorry to make you wait, but we were in the middle of a shoot.”

“That’s okay,” Carver said, “it was interesting. I’ll change my brand of champagne.”

“The company’s gearing up for a big promotion.”

“I meant to a brand different from that one,” Carver said, tilting his head toward the bottle. “That one will always taste like water to me now.”

Kirk grinned again. He looked amazingly like a pockmarked Sinatra when he did that.

Carver told him who he was, where he’d gotten his name, what he wanted.

Kirk rubbed his chin. “If Walton sent you over here, it must be all right.”

Carver didn’t tell him that Walton hadn’t exactly sent him. He said, “Walton told me you use one of his models a lot. Enrico Thomas.”

“I did at one time. But Enrico hasn’t been around for quite a while. Last time I requested him, Walton told me he wasn’t available.”

“Enrico ever give you any problems?”

Kirk raised his eyebrows. “Me? Naw! I know what you’re talking about, though. I heard some stuff about Enrico.” He turned toward the busy Wilbur. “Hey, Wilbur, Enrico ever give you any trouble?”

“Not me,” Wilbur said, coiling a cable.

“Do you have an address or phone number on him that might be different from Walton’s?”

“I don’t have that kinda info on any of the models. We deal direct through the agency. That’s how this business works. Walton wouldn’t like it if we started cutting deals on the side with his employees. Not that we’d do such a thing.”

“Never ever,” Wilbur said.

“Enrico ever say anything that might lead you to know what he did when he wasn’t modeling, where he hung out?”

“No. Not as I can recall.”

“Nightlinks,” Wilbur said.

Kirk and Carver stared at him.

He stood there with the coiled cable and repeated, “Nightlinks. I don’t know what it is, but I remember Enrico mentioning to one of the other models about working at Nightlinks.”

“Walton told me Enrico didn’t work a second job,” Carver said.

Kirk smiled. “I suspect a lot of the models don’t tell their agencies everything about their lives away from the camera. Agents can be pushy and demanding if another job gets in the way of their commissions.”

“Is all of your work with Walton models?”

“Nope. Jane there”-he made a vague backhand motion toward where Jane had posed with the champagne bottle-“is with an agency over in Orlando. We deal with half a dozen agencies. It all depends on the types our clients want.”

Jane came out of the room wearing jeans and a sleeveless blouse and carrying a flowered duffel bag. She seemed much shorter, and Carver realized she must have been wearing high heels in the water to make her legs look longer, even though they obviously wouldn’t be visible below her ankles in the champagne photograph. All of her makeup had been removed and she looked like a teenager. She waved and said, “See you, Drew. Take care, Wilbur.”

They both waved back, and all three men watched her stride from the studio, a shapely little woman who didn’t at all resemble the sleek blond beauty who’d be uncorking champagne on the beach in the photograph. So much of life and love and advertising was illusion.

Carver left his card with Kirk, and Kirk assured him he’d phone and let him know if Enrico showed up at the studio.

“Let’s set up for the sailboat shoot,” Kirk was telling Wilbur as Carver left. “We’ll need more wind to make spray.”

Photography in Florida, Carver decided, could be a wet business.

As he crossed Sunburst toward the Olds, he looked around for Jane but she was nowhere in sight.

Carver drove to his office and looked up Nightlinks in the phone directory. It was listed as an escort service and had an address on Telegraph Road on the southern edge of Del Moray. It appeared that Carl Gretch-Enrico Thomas worked as a paid escort, perhaps a male prostitute. Something Donna Winship undoubtedly didn’t know.

Or did she at least suspect? Carver wondered if Gretch had used the Thomas name when working for Nightlinks. He sat back behind his desk and looked out the window at two skinny teenage girls waiting for a bus across Magellan. One was wearing amazingly tight red shorts, pretending to be annoyed when passing motorists stared or honked their horns.

Or was she pretending? Laura, his former wife, would call him a sexist for wondering that, and maybe she’d be right. Still, looking at the girl across the street, he was curious. Carver wished he understood women; it might make what he was working on easier. Might make his life easier.

Desoto, way over in Orlando, probably wouldn’t know anything about Nightlinks. But Carver knew someone who almost certainly would know, a retired Del Moray police sergeant named Barney Travers who was living now in a residential hotel in Miami. Travers had worked on the vice squad for fifteen years and knew more than anyone about the dark side of sunny Del Moray.

Carver flipped though his Rolodex and came up with Travers’s number, a bit surprised that it was there, then remembering he’d jotted it down and inserted it last year after Travers had sent him a Christmas card. The card had to do with elves and reindeer and was a jarring example of what fifteen years of vice squad duty could do to a cop’s sense of humor.

He was about to reach for the phone and call Travers when the door opened and McGregor strutted in.

The tall man was grinning lewdly, the pink tip of his tongue oozing out between his front teeth as if struggling to emerge completely from his mouth. He was wearing the same wrinkled, ill-fitting brown suit he’d had on the last time he’d aggravated Carver, and the smell of stale perspiration mingled with cheap perfumed cologne or deodorant was still with him. He stood with his fists on his hips, staring down at Carver, his suit coat shoved back so the butt of his gun was visible in its shoulder holster.

“Why don’t you ever knock?” Carver asked. “Why do you always burst in here like you expect to interrupt a Mafia conspiracy?”

“You never know,” McGregor said, “I might catch you masturbating. Arrest you for indecent exposure the way they did that other comedian a few years ago.”

“Since I’m not exposed or doing anything illegal,” Carver said, “what do you want this time?”

McGregor jutted out his long jaw, putting on his angry expression, and glared at the lowly Carver. “Despite what I told you,” he said, “the word I get is that you’re still running around trying to make something out of nothing.”

Carver pretended to be puzzled.

“The late happy couple,” McGregor reminded him. Flick went the tongue. “You know, Splat and Bang.”