John Lutz - Scorcher

“You’re acting stubborn.”

“As you are. But is yours an act?”

“No.”

“A little empathy then, huh?”

“I think Paul might have tried to kill you as a way of taunting me,” he said.

“Even if that’s so, he isn’t likely to try again. I’m staying.”

“Why isn’t he likely to try again?”

“I’d say he’s made his point.”

“Maybe he doesn’t think so.”

“I’m staying, Carver. Nobody like that is pulling my strings and making me walk.”

If she’d had a stick, she’d have used it to draw a line in the mud and dared him to cross it. Carver knew it was no good arguing with her when she got this way.

But Belmont didn’t know her and couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “Mr. Carver seems to make good sense, ma’am.”

She showed him what real fire was in her glance and stalked away toward the front of the house, her blue Nikes making squishing sounds with each step.

Belmont looked at Carver and shrugged. Then they followed Edwina. Carver noticed that the swimming pool was only half full; the fire-department pumpers had used it as a source of water to fight the blaze.

The chief left and a lieutenant named Braddock from the Del Moray Police Department arrived and questioned Carver briefly. He agreed with the chief and Carver that Edwina should stay somewhere else until Paul Kave was apprehended. He tried to persuade her with horror stories of fire victims, then with official bluff, now and then turning to Carver, who nodded agreement to everything the lieutenant said. Edwina finally got angry and told them both to fuck off. The lieutenant left shortly thereafter, obviously wondering why Carver wasn’t leaving with him. The man didn’t understand the territorial imperative as it related to wild animals and to Edwina.

Carver and Edwina stood near the fire-damaged Mercedes and watched the lieutenant’s car disappear down the driveway. The last of the official vehicles was gone; the ordeal was ended. The sea was pounding on the beach below, sounding like a ponderous heartbeat, and the sun was high enough now to have gained leverage and bore down with heat that weighed and withered and would dominate the day. Carver glanced toward the vast sparkling sea and his eyes ached from the glare. He limped toward the front door.

“Where are you going?” Edwina asked.

“Gonna make a call, if the phone still works.”

“It works,” she said, walking beside him. Her head was bowed and she was trying to come to terms with what had happened. This was damned personal, this setting fire to a woman’s home while she slept. “Who you going to call?” she asked, as they reached the door.

“Lloyd Van Meter at Van Meter Investigations. I’m going to get some manpower assigned to watch you in case Paul Kave tries something like this again. Here or somewhere else, like maybe a display home you’re holding open.” He paused by the phone and looked hard at her. “We going to argue about this?”

“No,” she said. She crossed the room to the sofa and plopped into it like a loose-limbed teen-ager. It was more a gesture of weariness than of defiance. “You make sense, actually. I’m being unreasonable, but then people should be unreasonable at times.” She crossed her long legs. She was wearing shorts, and there was a clump of mud smeared on her right calf. She twined her legs as if she felt cold, and some of the mud smudged her left calf. Her expression was placid and thoughtful. Carver wondered if she had ever lost her poise, even as an infant when she got ticked off over having to eat strained vegetables. “You’re right, I’m wrong,” she said, “about everything. I should leave, but I’m staying.”

“I don’t know,” Carver said. “Maybe this really is one of those times to ignore reason. You’re the only one who can judge, I guess.” He punched out the Van Meter number and waited while the phone at the other end of the connection rang. “But I still wish you’d leave.”

He noticed Edwina was right about one thing: the house did smell like burned rubber.

So much better than burned flesh.

What a piece of work was Lloyd Van Meter. Carver had met him when he was an Orlando police officer and Van Meter was searching for the wayward lover of a wealthy New York woman. Carver had arrested the man on a burglary charge, and Van Meter had appeared in a flurry of sound and confusion at police headquarters with a local, high-powered attorney and had the man sprung and back in Manhattan within hours. Red tape ensued, miles of it, and as far as Carver knew the man had never returned to Florida and been tried for breaking and entering. Carver had figured at the time that Lloyd Van Meter had unique talents as a private investigator. He’d been right. The woman in Manhattan had been a wealthy socialite who ran an expensive and exclusive call-girl operation from her mansion on Long Island. She’d rewarded Lloyd Van Meter bountifully for finding her lover and expediting his escape from legal consequences.

And now Van Meter had one of the largest investigative agencies in Florida, with offices in Miami, Orlando, and Tampa. Carver liked Van Meter, who claimed to be the illegitimate son of a notorious Prohibition-era gangster, Homer Van Meter. The present Van Meter, more or less on the right side of the law, was an obese man in his fifties, with a head of thick, flowing white hair, sharply defined features despite his weight, and a white beard that, though not all that long, lent him a distinctly biblical air. It was as if Moses had discovered pasta. He wore round glasses with gold wire frames, and he looked younger than he was until he removed the glasses and revealed the deep crow’s-feet at the corners of his shrewd blue eyes. He was always sloppily and peculiarly dressed, as if he bought his clothes at an awning company and settled for bargain fabrics that weren’t moving well. Today he had on a beige suit with darker tan vertical stripes. Van Meter’s tie was gold with brown stripes running diagonally. He was color-coordinated but the effect was dizzying.

He and his operatives had been watching over Edwina and observing members of the Kave family for three days now. Van Meter had phoned Carver and asked him to drop by Van Meter Investigations’ offices for a report.

“We came up zip,” he told Carver, leaning so far back in his creaking desk chair Carver thought the big man might wind up on the floor. But then it was Van Meter’s office, his chair; he should know how far he could stretch things. Leaning backward just far enough was his specialty.

Carver was in a comfortable walnut-and-leather chair near the desk. The office was large and furnished in Danish modern; an atmosphere of comfort and efficiency. He waited for Van Meter to continue, watching the sun’s defeat as it tried to beat its way in through the tinted triple-pane glass and heavy fishnet draperies behind Van Meter’s huge desk. Like many very fat people, Van Meter loathed heat. The office was about sixty-five degrees and might as well have been in Finland as in Florida. From an outer room came the muted chattering and intermittent screeching of a super-speed computer printer, as if a high-strung typist had gone mad.

“Paul Kave didn’t make any attempt to contact his family,” Van Meter said, his blunt fingers toying with the corner of a yellow file folder. There was a massive silver-and-turquoise pinkie ring on his left hand, the kind of jewelry Indians slapped together for twenty dollars and sold for two hundred, gaining some small revenge on white America. “Or vice versa.”

“Might he have phoned?”

Van Meter smiled. “No.”

Carver didn’t ask how he knew that. There were all sorts of wiretap gizmos and electronic listening devices, some of them legal, some of them not.