Scorcher (11 page)

Carver declined the offer of breakfast, but he sat down at the table, where Paul might have sat had he been there. The proximity of his quarry in space if not time felt eerie. “I’ve been to see Emmett,” he said.

Elana dabbed nervously at her lips with her pink cloth napkin. She had on the same delicately laced robe she’d worn yesterday. Adam sipped his coffee from a dainty cup that looked lost and imperiled in his big hand, and peered at Carver over the rim. There was a pink flowery design on the cup, traversed by a hairline crack. Carver for some reason remembered vaguely a line from an Auden poem memorized in school, something about a crack in the side of a teacup being a lane to the land of the dead.

“Guess you had to go there,” Adam said. “I don’t like Emmett involved in family matters, though.”

“Sometimes it can’t be helped,” Nadine said. “There’s no changing the fact he’s your brother.”

“Stay out of this,” Adam said casually but with unmistakable authority.

Carver thought Nadine might snap an answer at her father, but three beautifully pitched, melancholy chimes sounded from nearby. The doorbell. End of this round.

Nadine glared at Adam, then rose and left the veranda. She was wearing a white tennis outfit with shorts, and her tanned legs were thick but surprisingly shapely. Calf muscles rippled above her soft-soled court shoes, and the firm flesh of her thighs danced with each step. She would probably be strong at sports, Carver thought. Strong at a number of things.

Adam said, “I suppose Emmett asked you not to tell me Paul’s been in the habit of driving over to Kissimmee and seeing him.”

Carver was surprised. His face must have shown it.

Adam smiled and took another nibble of coffee from the dainty cup. “I won’t put you on the spot and ask if you promised him you wouldn’t mention it. Maybe you traded that promise for some useful information.”

“I traded it for Emmett’s further cooperation,” Carver said. “If what he says is true—and you seem to confirm it—Paul might well contact him for help. Emmett promised to call me if that happened.”

“Emmett’s promises are about as solid as that sand,” Adam said, sweeping a backhand motion toward the ocean breaking on the beach below. A large, errant night moth, lost and dazzled by the light, pinged off the screen twice, then flitted away across the bright green lawn toward an uncertain future.

Elana stood up and smiled at Carver. The smile was out of context, as if she hadn’t been present during Carver and her husband’s conversation. Maybe people looking squarely at death did so from their own intensely personal and narrowed worlds.

“I’m feeling the heat somewhat, Mr. Carver,” she said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me while I take myself upstairs.”

Adam stood up hastily, causing his pink napkin to slide from his lap onto the floor. Carver stood with him and they watched Elana walk into the house. She moved with her apparently customary slowness, but so gracefully Carver thought there was a dreamlike quality to her. A breeze rose and the canvas cracked overhead, a reminder of reality.

“It isn’t the heat,” Adam said. “She gets tired faster now.” There was the slightest catch in his gravelly voice.

Carver wondered if Adam realized Emmett knew about Elana’s illness. Or did it matter? “How did you find out about Paul going to see Emmett?” he asked.

“Played detective,” Adam said in a self-congratulatory tone, sitting back down. He poured some more coffee for himself and then held out the elegant silver-and-glass carafe toward Carver, who had also sat down again. “Sure you don’t want some?”

“I’m sure,” Carver said.

Adam placed the carafe back in its stand, above a wavering candle flame. “Last year, somebody I know in Kissimmee mentioned seeing Paul’s car in Emmett’s neighborhood. That old Lincoln’s pretty distinctive, so I thought there might be something to it, even though Paul lied and told me he was someplace else when I asked him about driving to Kissimmee. So what I did was drive to Emmett’s house and back, keeping track of the mileage. And now and then I’d check the odometer in Paul’s Lincoln after he’d been gone awhile. Several times the mileage on his odometer matched exactly the mileage to Emmett’s house and back here, sometimes down to the tenth of a mile.”

No wonder Paul felt constricted, Carver thought. It wouldn’t be difficult to become paranoid with a father like Adam Kave.

Nadine came back onto the veranda, flanked by two men. The one on her right had his arm lightly around her waist. He was about six feet tall and built lean, with straight brown razor-styled hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, and bright blue eyes full of chips of light; the sort of guy who’d look great in any kind of uniform.

The man on Nadine’s left looked like a troll that had crawled out from under a bridge. He was not more than five and a half feet tall, and his neck swelled into shoulders bunched with muscle. His hair was a dark, Medusalike mass of ropy curls. The backs of his gnarled hands were sooted with black hair, and Carver imagined the stocky little man had hair matted over most of his body. His face was swarthy and wide, with a pushed-in nose and protruding brown eyes. He reminded Carver of a Pekingese pup; yet, strangely enough, there was a crude kind of confidence and vitality about him of the sort Carver had seen appeal to women. A beast not quite tamed.

Both men and Nadine were smiling broadly, as if they’d shared a bawdy joke on the walk through the house to the veranda.

The tall one with his arm around Nadine she introduced as her fiancé, Joel Dewitt. The troll was Nick Fanning, CEO of Adam’s Inns.

Nadine, Dewitt, and Fanning sat down at the table, and Nadine poured them coffee from the fancy carafe. Carver had to refuse another cup of the stuff.

Fanning seemed very much at home here. “These two tell me the wedding’s set for April,” he said.

Adam shrugged. “That’s what they tell me, too, Nick.”

Fanning looked around abruptly, as if a slight noise had attracted his attention. The smile was still a shadow on his broad face. As he rotated his head, the cords on his muscular neck jumped like taut cables straining to escape from beneath his flesh. “Where’s Elana?”

“Not feeling well this morning,” Adam told him.

“Sorry to hear,” Fanning said. He added cream to his coffee. He kind of jabbed the marbled liquid with his spoon and swirled it around a few times, then rested the spoon on his saucer with a single faint click. Casual.

Silence moved onto the veranda, stayed, and got heavy. Nobody wanted that.

“Some hot morning,” Joel Dewitt remarked.

“Summer,” Adam said, explaining it neatly.

“Summer in hell,” Fanning said.

“How’s the car business?” Carver asked Joel Dewitt.

Dewitt gave him a sharp glance; somebody had been talking about him to Carver. “Booming. I sell Honda cycles, too. New ones. Say, you look like the motorcycle type, Fred.”

“Not me,” Carver said.

“You driving the Olds convertible out front?”

Carver nodded. “My style. My price range.”

Dewitt smiled. “Don’t be so sure. Come on in and see me and I’ll convince you otherwise. Put you on a cycle and show you what you been missing.”

Adam stood up. Fanning took the cue and stood also.

“Well, Nick and I’ve got a ton of work to do,” Adam said. He looked at Carver. “Be in touch soon, eh?”

Carver said he would.

“Bring your coffee, Nick,” Adam said, and he and Fanning disappeared into the cool dimness of the house, Adam leading the way. They were reminiscent of Dr. Frankenstein and his assistant Igor.

“They’re going to talk for hours about goddamn wieners,” Nadine said. “One time they had a four-hour nationwide conference call about how many sesame seeds should be on the bun of something called the Ali-Baba Dog.”

“I’ve tried that one,” Dewitt said. “It’s not bad. Probably made lots of money for your dad, too.”

A large pleasure boat veered in toward shore, moving at a fast clip just outside the breakers and tooting its air horn, as if it knew the Kaves and was saying hello. Carver watched it continue close to the beach, then angle into the waves seaward, spreading a trough of white foam and unsettled water in its wake.
Fantasy
was lettered on its stern. Neighbors, maybe. The boat was similar to the one moored down at Adam Kave’s private dock. Nadine gave no indication that she’d noticed it.

“Any news on Paul?” Dewitt asked her. Carver found it odd that he’d ask Nadine that in front of him.

“Not much,” she said. “He’s still missing. Mr. Carver’s trying to locate him.”

Dewitt shot Carver an appraising, cold blue look. “Any way I can help . . .” he said. His words trailed to silence as he caught sight of the figure to his left.

Elana was standing in the doorway to the house. “Nadine, Mel Bingham is here to see you.” She didn’t acknowledge Dewitt’s presence—a queen enduring the company of a fool.

Nadine flushed slightly and squeezed Dewitt’s hand. “I won’t be long,” she said in a tight voice. She got up and followed her mother into the house. Dewitt twisted in his chair and watched them. Maybe he was looking at Nadine’s legs. Carver was.

“How well do you know Paul?” Carver asked.

Dewitt swiveled back to face the table, then idly nudged around a bowl with a squashed half-grapefruit in it. He was nervous; possibly he didn’t like Nadine talking to Mel Bingham, whoever Bingham might be.

“Paul and I got along okay,” Dewitt said. “He’s kinda odd, but not a bad kid. It’s rough seeing this happen to him.”

“Think he’s guilty?”

“Don’t really know.” Dewitt touched the ruined grapefruit with his forefinger, then pressed the fingertip to his tongue, as if to ascertain that the taste was sour. He grimaced slightly. Genuine grapefruit, all right. “The police seem to think Paul’s the one.”

“You know this Mel Bingham?” Carver asked.

Dewitt’s ears reddened. “He’s some asshole pesters Nadine, is all. Thinks she should go for him. Elana’s all for the idea, I can tell. What are you, a private detective or something? I mean, if the family hired you to find Paul, that’s what you must be. Right?”

“That’s it,” Carver said. “That doesn’t mean you have to answer my questions. I’m not the police, just a guy making conversation.”

“Hey, I know. Listen, I’d like to help Paul, if for no other reason than he’s Nadine’s brother. Fact is, Fred, I didn’t see him all that much when I came around. The mother, Elana, she isn’t so hot on this marriage. So it’s uncomfortable for Nadine and me here. We generally don’t hang around. Paul never did either. So, you see, our schedules didn’t overlap much.”

“Why do you think Elana’s against the marriage?”

Dewitt turned his hands palms up and raised them a few inches in a helpless gesture, or as if he might be trying to levitate the table. “She doesn’t like me. Hell, I don’t know why. Chemistry, maybe. Or maybe she’s got this idea car dealers are all swindlers. You’d be surprised the kind of prejudice there is against some occupations. Or maybe you wouldn’t, being a private detective.”

Carver hadn’t been off the force and in private practice very long, but he’d already been called a keyhole peeper, a sleaze bag, and assorted things even less nice. Joel Dewitt had a point. But Elana didn’t seem the sort to tag people that way. There was a sadness and wisdom to her that suggested understanding gained the hard way and not forgotten.

He gave Dewitt one of his cards and asked him to call if he had anything to say about Paul Kave. Dewitt handed Carver a card with a Fort Lauderdale address and told him he should come in and see if maybe he really
was
the cycle type. “Never too old,” he said. Carver didn’t care for that, but what the hell, Dewitt might still be in his twenties. Go-getter making it in his youth and about to marry into more of it. Full throttle, kid.

“Tell Nadine I said good-bye,” Carver said. He leaned on his cane and straightened up. The cane had been beneath the table, so Dewitt had to be seeing it for the first time, but there was no change of expression in his eyes. “I’ll go out this way and walk around the side of the house.” Carver limped toward a door in the aluminum screen.

“Remember what I said about that motorcycle,” Dewitt said behind him. “Cane don’t make any difference.”

“Might even be a good thing to use on sharp corners,” Carver said, and went out. The screen door clicked solidly closed behind him; it didn’t slam and reverberate like the one on Carver’s beach cottage. The fit and finish of big money.

When he’d almost reached the Olds, he heard a spat-out oath and saw a lanky young man stalking toward a mud-spattered red Jeep parked in the shade of the portico. His elongated face was creased with anger and his white jogging shoes seemed to want to pause of their own accord and kick pebbles and bits of bark, causing him to lurch. Forces he couldn’t comprehend had control of him.

He spotted Carver and glared; might have been able to burn a hole in paper with that look. “Fuckin’ Dewitt!” he said. “When you see him, you tell him I know he’s a crook!”

This must be Mel Bingham, and he must be connecting Carver and Dewitt because Carver was standing near the car parked next to the Olds, a new, deep blue Jaguar sedan with tinted windows. Bingham probably thought Carver was waiting for Dewitt.

“I might not see him again,” Carver said. “I just met him. You better tell him yourself.”

“Oh, I’ve told him before,” Bingham said. He had flame-red hair to match his temper and his splotchy, freckled complexion. He was wearing jeans and a gray T-shirt with
Have a Shitty Day
lettered in black across the front. His caved-in chest was trembling and his hands were white-knuckled fists that seemed to want to strike and burrow and pluck out vital organs. He’d followed the advice on his T-shirt and he was mad.

“I’d like to talk to you for a minute,” Carver said, wondering if Bingham could calm down enough for coherent conversation.

Carver wasn’t going to find out today.

“Later!” Bingham snarled. He swung his long body up into the Jeep, fired up the engine, and probably got a lot of satisfaction from the screeching of the knobby tires on the driveway.

Carver watched the Jeep two-wheel it around a corner and out of sight behind some palm trees. He wondered if the automatic barrier at the base of the drive would be triggered soon enough to rise before the Jeep reached it. Bingham was furious enough to drive through the barrier. Through brick walls, maybe.