John Lutz: Burn

Ignoring a NO TRESPASSING sign, Carver made his way along the walk to the front porch. The door was hanging open, black and alligatored from the fire. He stepped into what had been the living room. It was quite bright because that part of the roof had been burned away or removed by firefighters. Carver glanced up at a sky perfectly blue except for a very high, white vapor trail. The airliner that had left it was still visible as a slowly moving silver splinter, tracing a northerly course in a cold, pure world not at all like the one from which it had risen.

He picked his way through the blackened debris of furniture and the collapsed roof to stand near where he estimated Marla’s and Brant’s bodies had lain, then he began probing the ashes with his cane. It had rained late last night, leaving the wreckage a sodden black mess that soon saturated and darkened his socks and the cuffs of his khaki pants. The dampness kept the soot down, but it helped to create an acrid stench of ruin that stung the nostrils and back of the throat.

Half an hour of searching, widening the area to cover most of the living room, yielded nothing. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to find. The police had done their work.

But he told himself the police had been under McGregor’s command, so they were hardly pressed to be thorough. He continued searching through the charred remains of the house.

After an hour, he gave up. He was satisfied that whatever clues might have been at the death site had been destroyed by flames, or by the turmoil and ruin created during the fighting of the fire.

Remembering what Beth had told him yesterday about being like a wasp at a window that kept flinging itself at the light with futile determination, he took a last look around, a part of him still unwilling to leave. Then he limped toward the door.

It was when he was out on the tiny porch that he noticed something: A faint gleam of brass among the earth and wet blackness of one of the pots containing the dead plants. The rain must have washed away enough of the ashes and soot to reveal it, as it had washed away most of the ash on the porch itself, now that the small wooden overhang was burned to nothing more than a few charred stubs.

Supporting himself carefully with his cane, Carver leaned down and picked up the object.

It was a brass casing from a fired bullet. McGregor had mentioned that the gun recovered from the scene was a revolver. They didn’t eject shells after firing rounds of ammunition; the casings remained in the cylinder. So the police probably weren’t searching very thoroughly for brass casings. And who could tell how such a tiny object had been moved around during the fire, blasted by powerful streams of water, stepped on and lacked by firefighters, swept aside with piles of debris?

There was also the possibility it had been in the terra-cotta pot for months or years and had nothing to do with the deaths of Marla and Brant. No way to prove otherwise now. Its discovery actually meant little in a case that was closed.

Carver wiped dampness and soot from the shell and held it up to the light in the manner of a man examining a rare gem. He couldn’t place the caliber until he turned the brass casing at a certain angle to the slanted rays of the morning sun. Faintly lettered on the outer rim of its base was “7.62 mm.” An uncommon-size shell ejected by an uncommon gun.

He’d dropped the casing in his pocket and was stepping down off the porch when he remembered.

He stood still for almost a full minute, frozen by realization, squeezing the brass shell through the material of his pants so hard that his fingers ached.

Then he got in the Olds and drove to see Willa Krull.

The roses on the iron trellis that was the entrance arch to the old apartment building on Fourteenth Street looked vividly red and fresh after last night’s rain. Carver noticed there was even a shallow, greenish layer of water on the bottom of the tile pond, as if the maimed and perpetually leaping concrete swordfish had at last found its element.

Willa Krull answered his knock in her usual fashion, by staring out through the crack available when she opened her door on the chain lock. Even through the narrow opening, Carver could smell the scent of gin. It wasn’t yet noon and she’d obviously been drinking heavily. She’d apparently been crying, too. The single red-rimmed eye that peered out at him was open barely wide enough to see.

“Sorry, don’ wanna talk to anyone today,” she said.

He unobtrusively moved the tip of his cane forward so she wouldn’t be able to close the door. She was going to hear what he had to say, even if he had to tell her standing there in the hall. “I just came from Marla Cloy’s house.”

“What’s left of it, you mean.”

“I know most of what happened,” he said.

“’Course. It was in the papers, on the TV news. And you were there, right?”

“You were there, too.”

She didn’t say anything. The eye didn’t change.

“Am I coming in?” Carver asked.

She nodded. He moved the cane out of the way quickly as she closed the door to remove the chain, then opened it just wide enough for him to enter.

She looked even worse than she had the last time he’d seen her, like someone who’d gotten dressed in a hurry at gunpoint. She was wearing wrinkled jeans that made her bony figure appear even more angular, and a stained white blouse that was buttoned crookedly. Her mousy hair was in disarray as usual. She was barefoot and holding a cracked water tumbler with ice and gin in it.

Carver moved past her into the apartment. The place was a mess. Unfolded and creased newspapers were scattered on the floor, as if she’d been reading the news so frenetically she hadn’t had time to refold the pages. Her gun magazines were littered over the coffee table, next to an almost empty gin bottle. Carver saw that the display case with the Russian handgun was gone from the wall. Only the plastic crucifix remained.

Willa closed the door and reattached the chain lock. Then she walked unsteadily to the center of the room, not seeming to notice that one foot was on the front page of the Gazette-Dispatch, and stood staring at him. She unconsciously waved the glass around as she talked, almost spilling out gin. “You said I was someplace you were last night.” A note of fear rang in her voice; the booze couldn’t insulate her from reality completely.

“Where’s the Russian handgun?” he asked, motioning with his head toward the faint, clean rectangle on the wall where the gun’s case had been.

“What’s the difference?”

He drew the 7.62-millimeter shell casing from his pocket and held it up for her to see. “I found this on Marla’s front porch this morning.”

She stared at it, her pinched features screwing up in fear, then in desperate defiance. “It doesn’t mean anything. Not without the gun.”

“That’s true,” Carver agreed. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

“Why should I do that?”

“Three reasons. You’re safe from the law. I need to know. And most of all, you need to tell somebody.”

She stared at the floor, then tugged at a strand of her lank hair and laughed sadly. “She liked me, too, you know. No, it was much more than that. We were fond of each other as more than friends.”

“I know.”

“She told me she was going to leave me. For a man. She didn’t tell me his name.”

“You had to know it wasn’t Brant.”

“Of course.”

“Then how did it happen?”

“The evening of-the evening after she told me she was going to Orlando so she’d be safe, Brant came here. I’d never seen him, didn’t know who he was. But he was sneaky. He used a different name, acted as if he and Marla were close. He told me he was searching for her, had to find her. What was I supposed to think? I figured he was the one Marla was leaving me for. He wouldn’t have known about us, wouldn’t have dreamed he wasn’t the only one with a relationship with Marla.”