John Lutz - Flame

“Who’d notice?”

McGregor loomed closer and sat on the edge of the desk, still with his arms crossed. Something about his posture reminded Carver of a perched and waiting vulture. The rancid stench of the man was almost overwhelming. He said, “Sooner we get to the point, sooner I’ll be outa your office. Unless you’d rather keep trying to convince yourself you’re somehow better’n me.”

McGregor was right about getting the conversation over as quickly as possible, Carver thought. He tried not to think about what else McGregor had said, afraid he might be right about that, too.

Carver told him what had happened in Fort Lauderdale at Frank Wesley’s condo. Gave him a description of the two men with guns who’d been waiting in the dark when the door opened.

When he was finished, McGregor bowed his head. Rubbed his long chin with his thumb and said, “You mean you got no idea who those two guys were?”

“The Latin one might be Ralph Palmer, the man who hired Bert Renway. Why don’t you check out the name, see if there’s a sheet on him?”

“Don’t tell me how to do my job, Carver. But do tell me why you said the body in the Caddie was Renway’s. Way it looks here, everything you said the day of the bombing was bullshit. It was Frank Wesley came to hire you and then got himself killed in his car despite his seat belt being buckled.”

“I thought you could tell me something about that,” Carver said. “What happened in here just before the bombing went exactly the way I said. The man who hired me told me his name was Bert Renway.”

“And gave you cash, but you weren’t suspicious.”

“You get cash often in this business,” Carver said.

“I just bet.”

“And I went by Renway’s mobile home out west of town. Place called Beach Cove Court. Nobody was home. The grass needed cutting. His neighbor hasn’t seen him in weeks and says his car hasn’t moved.”

“I went by there, too,” McGregor said. “You see a beach or a cove out there?”

Carver said he hadn’t.

The tall man thoughtfully picked at his nose for a moment. Examined his fingernail and decided there was nothing stuck under it. “Renway ain’t been around, like you say. But then, apparently neither has Wesley.”

“You see the autopsy report on Wesley?”

“No,” McGregor said. “They carted what was left of the corpse down to Miami, where they got the lab facilities to make sense outa that kinda mess. But it was dental records proved the body was Wesley. Dental records don’t lie. So Wesley must have lied to you.”

“It looks that way,” Carver admitted. “He came here and gave me a story about Renway impersonating him. But why? And where’s Renway?”

“Maybe you forgot, those are the kinda things you’re supposed to find out. You was even paid to find out. It’d look sorta funny if I went pokin’ around in it, at least in areas where you can snoop. You and me are the only ones that know about the Renway story. That’s not the kinda thing I’m expected to keep to myself. On the other hand, you got the permission of the law to investigate.”

“Want to put that permission in writing?” Carver asked.

“No need,” McGregor said, waving a long-fingered hand in a languid gesture of dismissal. “Old buddies like us, we trust each other, hey?”

“I don’t have to trust you,” Carver said. He absently laid a hand on his recently repaired answering machine-tape recorder. Patted cool plastic.

McGregor looked at the hand. Said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Carver didn’t answer. Let the bastard think about it. Let him wonder if Carver had recorded their initial conversation about the car bombing.

“Both our asses will be in a sling if you got anything on tape,” McGregor said. “If I threatened you and tried to influence you, you shoulda reported it, not cooperated. Just remember that.”

“And you remember cooperation works both ways. Get with Records and see what you can find out about Ralph Palmer, then pass it on to me.”

McGregor stood up straight. Stretched his arms so his fingertips almost touched the ceiling. Then he exhaled loudly, hitched up his pants, and tucked in his shirt. Said, “Why is it I gotta get mixed up with shitbums like you?”

“What do you expect? You got no friends.”

“You don’t either, Carver, you only think so. If they see they can use you, comes time to shit or get off the pot, they’ll shit-and all over you.”

“You the exception?” Carver asked.

“There are no exceptions.” McGregor smiled lewdly and sort of swung his weight across the small office to the door. Long legs covering the distance in two steps. Maybe flaunting his mobility in front of Carver. “Could be I’ll get back to you, Carver.”

He went out, still smiling, leaving a wake of cheap perfumy cologne polluting the thick air.

Carver sat for a minute thinking about how things were breaking. Realizing McGregor was right, it was hot in the office. Maybe the explosion had somehow screwed up the air-conditioning unit on the roof.

The lieutenant wasn’t somebody to underestimate, Carver reminded himself. Nobody was, if they possessed the ambition of Napoleon and the scruples of Attila the Hun.

He stared at the rough blank surface of the plywood covering the window, remembering the noise and shock of the explosion. The spray of broken glass. The contorted black thing behind the burning Cadillac’s steering wheel.

He sat forward in his chair and dragged the phone across the desk. Lifted a pencil and pecked out a number with the eraser.

It was time to confide in someone about his arrangement with McGregor.

Edwina said, “I heard on the news it was actually Frank Wesley who got killed outside your office.”

They were seated at the white metal table on the brick veranda. Carver was facing the ocean, looking beyond her at a cluster of colorful triangular sails out near the horizon. They were all banked at precisely the same angle into the wind and seemed to move only gradually. Big boats, maybe competing in some sort of regatta. He expected they were making their way across the wavering blue carpet of sea toward the Del Moray port, on the final leg of their course. North of them, closer to shore, a large trawler plowed its way out to sea. Commerce and play. A cloud of gulls circled gnatlike behind the trawler, no doubt feeding on jettisoned garbage.

“Fred, you hear me?”

“Yeah,” Carver said. “Sorry.”

“So it was really Wesley who hired you? Gave you a phony story?”

“Looks that way.”

“Know why he did it?”

“Not yet.”

He looked at her obliquely as he spoke, as if not wanting to acknowledge her presence. She’d come home for the afternoon but was going back out soon to meet a client. Something about helping to arrange a mortgage loan. Relaxing now, she sipped a gin-and-lemonade from a tall glass, the breeze toying with her long auburn hair. The same breeze that was propelling the sailboats, larger now, toward shore. One with a tall yellow sail had broken from the pack and was well in the lead. There was some sort of design on the sail, but he couldn’t make it out. A skull and crossbones?

Edwina said, “I sense in you a certain reticence.” She was smiling at him as she set down her glass in its ring of moisture on the table, causing ice cubes to clink faintly.

Carver was drinking beer out of the can. Budweiser. He lifted the can and said, “It’s better you don’t know anything else about this. It’s more complicated than I thought.”

“By that you mean more dangerous?”

“That, too.” He took a swig of beer. Backhanded cold foam from his upper lip. You’d think by now they’d have come up with a better design for openings in beer cans. “Somebody oughta write a letter.”