John Lutz - Burn

“Well, maybe it was India. The point is, obsession can be dangerous. You’re involved with people who might be out to kill each other, for all you know. Maybe you should let this one play out by itself, without your help.”

Carver said, “What about Marla Cloy?”

Desoto turned his hands palms up in a gesture of hopelessness and did a thing with his eyebrows to show he’d at least tried to save Carver from himself. “She lived in an apartment in the 4400 block of Graystone Avenue until about three months ago, then moved to an apartment on Bailock where she stayed briefly before moving to Del Moray. She doesn’t have a police record, and the neighbors described her as a quiet woman. Her only family’s her mother and father. They live in Sleepy Hollow, a trailer court outside of town.”

“What do you know about them?”

“Not much. He’s a retired railroad worker. That’s all I managed to learn. I figured it was the daughter you were interested in.”

Carver nodded. “The name Joel Brant pop up at all?”

“No. But then it might not, when a policeman’s asking questions.” Desoto absently polished his pinkie ring on the arm of his jacket, four quick, short swishes to buff it to a brilliant-enough shine to send a pattern of light dancing over the papers on his desk. “There is one notable thing in her background, amigo. She moved from her apartment on Graystone because it was damaged when the building burned. Three of the tenants died. Arson squad said the fire might have been set deliberately, but they could never prove it. They also said it might have been the flame from a hot water heater igniting gasoline fumes from a nearby can where paintbrushes were being soaked to clean.”

“Who’d be dumb enough to leave a can of gasoline near a hot water heater?”

“No one who’d admit it, apparently.”

“Did you get the names of the tenants who died?”

“Of course.” Desoto lifted a green file folder from his desk. “It’s all here for you, my friend. If I were you, I think I’d nose around about the fire. Three deaths such a short time ago, and the prospect of death seems to be dogging Marla Cloy again. It was probably coincidence, an accident. . but we don’t believe in those things as much as some people, do we?”

“I’m not sure I believe in them at all,” Carver said. He leaned on his cane and stood up.

Desoto handed him the file folder. “How’s Beth?”

“Why?” Carver asked without thinking, realizing too late the brusqueness of his reply. But because of her background, her previous marriage to a drug dealer, Desoto had his reservations about Beth and hardly ever inquired about her.

Desoto appeared puzzled, then laughed. “I was only making conversation. You live with the woman, so I thought I’d ask about her. Is there a reason I shouldn’t have?”

“No. And she’s fine. I’ll tell her you asked,”

“Is she helping you on this Marla Cloy thing?”

“Yeah, she sees a story in it for Burrow.”

“How does she figure it?”

“She thinks Marla Cloy is telling the truth about being stalked. Beth views her as another female victim of male oppression.”

“Politically correct,” Desoto observed, “and possibly correct all the way down the line. When you eliminate the improbable, whatever’s left, however probable, must be the answer.”

“From the same movie as the monkeys and coconuts, I’ll bet.”

“Yes, the same Amazon adventure. What it means is that what you’re mixed up in could be precisely as it appears, a woman being stalked by a psycho with a deadly compulsion, and Beth’s sized it up accurately.”

“Maybe she’ll change her mind,” Carver said.

“Tell her to be careful. I mean, a fire and three dead people.” Desoto languidly waved a hand, flashing a gold cuff link. “Who knows what might happen?”

Desoto had never before asked him to urge Beth to be careful. It struck Carver as odd that he’d worry so about Beth, a woman he accepted only grudgingly because she was Carver’s lover. It was eerie. Desoto had instincts like sensitive radar, especially when women were involved. He seemed somehow to know something, to sense that Beth needed particular protection and care.

Strangely enough, that even more than the doctor’s diagnosis brought home to Carver the unalterable and monumental fact of Beth’s pregnancy.

“You all right, amigo ?”

“Sure. Heat’s been getting to me, is all.”

Carver held up the file folder and thanked Desoto, then made for the door.

“You take care,” Desoto said behind him in a concerned voice. “This kind of heat, you’ve got to baby yourself.”

Carver ordered a hamburger and a draft Budweiser for lunch in a restaurant on Robinson Street and sat in a booth by the window, examining the contents of the file Desoto had given him. It was cool in the restaurant, in pleasant contrast to the sunbaked street and sweltering traffic on the other side of the window. The exhaust fumes of passing cars rose in shimmers of refracted light, beautiful even as they slowly poisoned the air. A heavyset man in a sweat-stained blue T-shirt, wearing a bandana around his neck, trudged past outside and glanced in at Carver’s beer mug with an expression of pure longing. Carver finished his hamburger, drained the contents of the mug, and ordered another beer.

When the second full and frosty mug was placed before him, he took a sip, then bent over the opened file with increased concentration.

Marla Cloy’s present address was there, as well as her previous addresses in Orlando. The license number of her 1987 Toyota Corolla was listed. The extent of her criminality was that she’d pled guilty and paid a fine for a speeding ticket last year. Bonnie Parker she wasn’t.

Her parents’ address was in the file. Carver planned on talking to them. But first he’d check out Marla’s address on Graystone, the apartment building that, according to the file, had suffered a serious fire several months ago that resulted in the deaths of three tenants. He lifted a page and found the names of the victims: Rita and David Kern, a married couple, and a woman named Gail Rogers.

The later address on Bailock might provide some information, though Marla had stayed there only a week before relocating to Del Moray. It was the Graystone address, and the fire, that Carver’s gut told him might yield the most insight.

He closed the file folder, finished his beer, then left a ten- and a five-dollar bill on the table to cover lunch.

As he pushed open the restaurant’s thick oak door, humid heat closed in and enveloped him like warm water. Remembering the way the guy in the blue shirt and bandana had gazed longingly at his cold beer, he limped reluctantly outside. All the way to where the Olds was parked, he could feel heat from the sidewalk radiating through the thin soles of his moccasins, softening the leather so that he was aware of even small objects and imperfections in the concrete.

The Graystone Avenue apartment building showed no sign of having been burned. It was a three-story, beige brick structure with three small, obviously nonfunctional, decorative dormers spaced evenly on its roof. The dormers’ windows were mere framed wooden panels painted sky blue with white horizontal streaks, as if they were reflecting light. The building’s real windows were flanked by narrow black shutters that were no more functional than the dormers. The door to the vestibule was tinted glass and topped by a fan-shaped transom with black spokes. A thick, jagged crack that obviously had been recently tuck-pointed ran like a lightning streak from just beneath one of the building’s front windows down the foundation to disappear behind low-lying thick shrubbery. Carver thought it might be evidence of the fire; he’d seen brick walls wave, crack, and crumble in the intense heat of a major fire. It was an old building, but well kept, in a block of similar buildings not so well maintained. Most of the small front lawns needed mowing and were browned by the sun. Though the lawn in front of Marla’s previous address had brown patches, it was mowed and trimmed, and there was an oleander tree in the front yard that had been neatly pruned.