John Lutz - Spark

“I’m not interested in his tortured childhood,” Carver said, “even if he had one and it had anything to do with what he did to that guy’s wife down in Miami.”

“Guess it ain’t really relevant now,” Van Meter admitted. He picked up Carver’s Budweiser bottle and poured beer into the glass in Carver’s hand. “Here, pal, let me put a head on that for you.”

Beth was in his bed when he got back to the motel. Carver wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He remembered what Van Meter had said about rash impulses.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” she said.

He shut the door and limped farther into the room. “Not much surprises me anymore, even on my birthday. How’d you get in?”

“Locks don’t concern me much, Fred.”

He leaned on his cane and looked at her in the light of the bedside reading lamp. The air conditioner was humming away on high, and she was lying on her back and covered almost to the neck with the sheet. Her lithe body seemed incredibly long. Her shoulders were bare and he was sure she was nude beneath the white cotton. She’d been reading before he’d arrived; a thick paperback book was propped open on the table that held the lamp. Something by Joseph Conrad.

After his conversation with Van Meter, it bothered him that she’d chanced being seen so they could be together for the night. Besides that, he’d stayed too long at Bixby’s, drunk several more beers and talked too much with Van Meter. He was feeling less than amorous. “It was a risk, you coming here.”

“Everything’s a risk, from birth to death, even if you’re a suburban WASP and you’ve got your life arranged so you don’t know it.”

“You sure nobody saw you?”

“Positive. I float like a shadow through the heart of darkness.”

“Some shadow.”

“It’s almost eleven o’clock, Fred, and I smell beer on you all the way over here. Where you been?”

“Drinking with Lloyd Van Meter.”

“Ah! You hiring him to help locate Adam Beed?”

“Uh-huh. You have any luck finding out about Solartown, Inc.’s major shareholders?”

“I don’t rely on luck, Fred.” She ran a long-nailed finger slowly across her lower lip. “C’mon to bed, lover. Business later.”

He wondered, what could there be about Joseph Conrad? Then he got undressed and joined her, becoming unexpectedly aroused when he felt the heat of her beneath the thin sheet. His knuckles brushed the smooth, warm expanse of her thigh.

Her hand found him and did its magic. “Knew you’d see it my way,” she said, and slid on top of him.

It was morning before he thought again about Jerome Evans or his widow Hattie or Adam Beed or Joseph Conrad. Or anything other than Beth.

She was good at that.

While Beth was showering the next morning, Carver drove down the highway to a doughnut shop and bought half a dozen glazed and a large cup of coffee to go.

When he returned, she was wearing panties and bra and drying her hair with a big white towel from the still-steamy bathroom. She sniffed the air and eyed the doughnut bag. “Smells yummy.”

He put the grease-spotted bag and the cup on the desk.

“Only one cup?” she said.

“Only one occupant in this room,” he reminded her. He limped into the bathroom, ripped the plastic sanitary wrap from one of the glasses, and carried the glass back out to the desk. He poured about half of the large cup of coffee into it, leaving it black. “I brought you some powdered cream,” he said, “only the label calls it ‘Mock Milk.’ ”

“Sounds heavenly, if only you remembered a plastic spoon.”

He found himself wondering if she was recalling her luxurious existence with Roberto Gomez, when coffee was no doubt brought to her and the spoons were silver, from the largest serving size down to the tiniest coke spoons worn on delicate neck chains.

When she was finished with her hair, she slipped into a pair of shorts and a clean orange blouse, then dragged over a chair to sit across from him at the desk. She sprinkled cream in her coffee, stirred it gingerly with her finger, and they went to work on breakfast.

“Fresh,” she commented, through a mouthful of glazed doughnut.

“I’m working on that,” he said.

“If I wanted bad comedy,” she told him, “I’d tune in to local news.”

After finishing his second doughnut, he wiped sugar glaze from his hands with a napkin and settled back with his coffee. He said, “Tell me about Solartown.”

She swallowed a last bite of doughnut, then licked a long finger. “The five principal shareholders are all players in the financial major leagues. We’re talking a prestigious investment company, a bank with international holdings, a lumber firm that’s one of the largest in the world, a retail chain with stores in half the states, and an insurance company that has more money than most small countries. All of them, with the possible exception of the bank, are on solid financial footing. Solartown’s a minor part of their overall picture.”

“How’d you learn all this?”

“It’s mostly public information, available at the touch of a few computer keys.”

“Your friend Jeff’s computer?”

“His and mine. The laptop I use to compose when I travel has a modem. I also called some contacts I have in various high positions. People I knew from when I was with Roberto.”

“Users?”

She nodded. “But dependable.”

“Not to their employers.”

“None of them runs a train, Fred. Don’t be so damned judgmental.”

“I wasn’t passing judgment, only wondering how good your information is.”

“It’s good as it gets. And what it means is that, unless there’s some small fish with ideas of his or her own, Solartown, Inc. is too friggin’ big to be operating some scam to do old folks outa their houses so they can resell them. That’d be like you and me hanging around schoolyards to swipe lunch money,”

“Lunch money’s stolen every day,” Carver said. “What about Brad Faravelli? He’s in a perfect position to steal from the other kids.”

“He seems okay, but who knows? Forty-two years old, married, three kids, Harvard Business School grad, been with Solartown since it began seven years ago. Before that he was a vice prez at a Wall Street investment company that went belly-up over some questionable bond trading. He wasn’t directly involved in it, by the way.”

Carver said, “Harvard. Wall Street. Jesus!”

“Don’t be a reverse snob, Fred. Anyway, I can get a better feel for it all after I interview Faravelli this afternoon. I told him I’m doing a feature story for Burrow, but it might be published in some other Florida papers, as well.”

“He believed that?” Carver asked.

“It might be the truth, Fred.” She finished her coffee, then wadded her napkin and stuffed it into the empty foam cup. There was a crescent of red from her lipstick on the cup’s rim. “What about you?” she asked. “You were your usual unbleeding, unconcussed self last night, and you’d talked with Van Meter about him locating Adam Beed. So I’m assuming you didn’t run into Beed yourself, or find out much about him.”

He realized for the first time she’d risked coming to his room because she was concerned about him. Not one of her rash impulses at all.

“Beed seems to have really gotten off drugs while he was in Raiford,” he said. “He’s strictly a boozer now.”

“Same thing, different terminology. He’s an addict, if the booze is running him. He’s as outa control as if he were on coke or heroin.”

“It doesn’t seem to have that kind of hold on him.”

“Not yet. But if he’s drinking regularly, it’ll get him.”