Burn (18 page)

“What about the big guy who did a job on my head? Have you made any progress finding out who he is? After all, you’re a public servant and he beat up a taxpayer.”

“You
say he beat you up, just like Marla Cloy says Brant is threatening her.” McGregor laughed and slammed down the receiver.

Carver slowly hung up the phone and thought about what McGregor had said. Maybe he was right and it was all really very simple. Brant was a closet psychosexual harasser, or even killer, who’d set his sights on Marla Cloy. Misogynists who raped and murdered looked and acted like other men. They were expert at leading outwardly normal lives that concealed their compulsions; sometimes the only clue was their model citizenship.

But something in his gut told Carver that McGregor was wrong about this one being simple. Even if Brant really was stalking Marla Cloy, it was complicated. And Beth was wrong, too.

Despite her assumption that not everything in human affairs was understandable, he’d somehow work through the maze of deception and find out the truth. Discovering the truth was what he was about; he wouldn’t—he couldn’t—stop trying.

His headache was threatening to flare up. He gulped down one of Dr. Woosman’s pills without water. Then he picked up the phone again and called Joel Brant’s cellular number.

“I
WANTED TO TALK
to you,” Brant said in an angry voice. “The police were just here to see me.”

“Where’s here?” Carver asked.

“Brant Estates. The subdivision I’m building. I was turning from the subdivision main drive onto the highway, on my way to see you, when you called.”

“I heard that—”

“Wait!” Brant interrupted. “Cellular phones can be eavesdropped on by anyone with a scanner. It sounds paranoid, but the way things have been going lately ...”

“Do you want to come the rest of the way to my office and talk?”

Brant said that he did, then hung up.

Fifteen minutes later Brant entered the office looking more worried than mad. He was again handsome in his chinos and sport jacket, his white shirt and paisley tie, a boyish operator on the way up. But there were faint circles beneath his innocent blue eyes, and a weariness showed on him like a thin layer of dust.

“She accused me again, Carver,” he said, not bothering to sit down. It was “Carver” again, not “Fred.”

Carver leaned far back in his swivel chair until he was on the very edge of teetering, keeping his balance with his fingertips on the desk. “I know. I’ve talked to the police.”

“She said I threatened her in the lot of a McDonald’s restaurant, a place I’ve never even been to. That I leered at her and pretended I was shooting her with my finger.” Brant’s expression suggested a bug had just flown into his mouth. “Hell, I’m not sure I even know how to leer. The police came to Brant Estates and talked to me where my employees and the subcontractors could see what was happening. Some of the buyers, too.” He brushed back his wavy dark hair with his hand in a quick, nervous gesture. “This is no damned good for my reputation, Carver, or for business. In my case, they’re one and the same.”

“How did the police treat you?”

“Like a criminal. As if I’d already killed Marla Cloy, who I admit I’m feeling more and more like killing,”

“But they didn’t take you in.”

“Only because they can’t come up with a witness at Mc­Donald’s who saw either me or Marla Cloy there. Which is easy for me to understand, having been somewhere else at the time of the supposed attack.”

“Where were you?” Carver asked.

“Eating lunch at Belle’s Cafeteria in downtown Del Moray.”

Carver knew the place, a large and impersonal restaurant without any sort of table service. It did a booming lunch business; it was doubtful anyone would recall Brant as one of hundreds in a cafeteria line. “Were you alone?” he asked.

“Of course,” Brant said. “If I hadn’t been alone, she wouldn’t have accused me. She knows nobody there will remember me. And she knows nobody at McDonald’s will be able to swear that neither of us
wasn’t
there! She must be watching me, following me, making sure I can’t supply an alibi for the times she accuses me. And I tell you, it’s convincing the police I’m really stalking her.” He dragged a pack of Camels from his pocket. “I gotta light up. You mind?”

“Go ahead.” Carver watched him go through the ritual of flame to tobacco to smoke to a measure of calm that was bought with addiction.

Brant held the smoldering cigarette up and stared at it as if it had saved his life.

“Do you own a gun?” Carver asked, taking his hands away from the desk and dropping forward in his chair.

“The police asked me that. The answer is no. But I’m considering getting one.”

“Wouldn’t be wise.”

“Maybe not. But who knows what Marla Cloy has in mind? She might be setting me up so she can kill me and make it look like self-defense. If one of us has to die, Carver, it’s going to be her!”

More talk of guns and killing. Only talk, Carver hoped. “You’re getting into dangerous territory, thinking like that.”

“No, no—I’m goddamned
in
dangerous territory already, because I was pushed there.” He drew on the cigarette again; a lifeline burning like a fuse.

Convincing, Carver thought. If Brant was actually stalking Marla Cloy, he was doing a great job of enlisting Carver as a witness to his innocence and persecution. A victim of an evil woman’s wiles, unable to stem the tide of political correctness and approaching catastrophe. Usually it was the woman pinned helpless by official apathy while the crushing sphere of unfair destiny rolled toward her. But it was possible to put a reverse spin on the thing:
What do you mean, no one would help her? No one would help me!

“The police gave me a stern warning. They’re within an inch of arresting me. Charging me with violating the restraining order. What do you think I should do, Carver?”

Carver smiled. “Hire a private investigator.”

Brant stared at him for a long time, then released a long breath and slumped down in the chair by the desk. He killed his half-smoked cigarette in the sea-shell ashtray on the desk corner.

“Yeah, I’m sorry,” he said resignedly, staring at the floor. “I guess there are limits to what can be done when a crazy woman is out to get somebody.”

“There are limits to what the crazy woman can do, too,” Carver said. “She can’t manufacture witnesses any easier than you can.”

“But she can establish a record of circumstantial evidence. There’s no way for me to establish a record of
not
harassing her.”

Carver said, “Gloria Bream.”

Brant looked at him, frowning. “What? How do you know about Gloria?”

“The information turned up when I was asking questions. You and this Gloria Bream are supposed to be close. I suggest you make it a point to spend a lot of time with her. When you’re with someone else and can prove it, you can’t be harassing Marla Cloy.”

Brant stared at the floor again. He had his hands cupped over his knees and was squeezing hard. “My wife hasn’t been dead long enough, Carver.”

“I understand, but maybe you shouldn’t be alone at night.”

A helpless, shadowy smile crossed Brant’s face. “I’m not alone, in a way. It’s true I’m involved with Gloria, but I can’t get Portia out of my thoughts. I wake up sometimes at night thinking she’s lying beside me.
Knowing
it.” He stared at Carver in a kind of beseeching agony. “I mean, I can hear her breathing there in the dark.”

“Ghosts,” Carver said. “We all have ghosts. Sometimes in a crowd I think I hear my son calling me. For an instant the fact of his death isn’t real, and I turn around and expect to see him. Then I remember, and it falls on me like a wall.”

“I’m sorry,” Brant said. “How long has he been dead?”

“Almost five years.”

Brant shook his head slowly from side to side. “And it hasn’t stopped for you yet.”

“Maybe it never will,” Carver said. “I’ve learned to accommodate it.”

Brant released his grip on his kneecaps and stood up. “I suppose that’s the best we can hope for.”

“Think about Gloria Bream. About my advice.”

“Sure.” Brant moved toward the door. “Incidentally,” he said, “I checked and I’m sure Marla Cloy never wrote anything about Brant Development.”

“I’ve checked way beyond that,” Carver said, “and I haven’t found any connection at all between you and Marla.”

“Because there isn’t any.”

“I’ll keep searching.”

“Sure,” Brant said again. “I can tell that about you, but I’m getting more and more afraid it isn’t going to help.” He bowed his head and closed his eyes for a few seconds, almost as if offering up a silent prayer, appealing to a power infinitely higher than Carver. Then he went out, leaving behind him a haze of smoke in the sunlight near the ceiling, and the acrid smell of the snuffed-out cigarette.

Carver stared for a long time at the closed door. Right now Brant seemed innocent. And even if he was the real stalker, he’d stay away from Marla for a while after the McDonald’s incident,

Carver decided to take up the watch on Marla again, beginning that evening. In the meantime, he wanted to see Beth. Wanted very much to see her. He understood why at times they lay desperately locked together so far into the night.

It wasn’t always love and lust.

Each of them had ghosts to hold at bay.

“I
’VE BEEN TO
the library,” Beth said when Carver had parked the car and limped toward the cottage. She was sitting in the shade on the porch, her Toshiba computer glowing in her lap. Carver didn’t blame it.

“So have I,” he said, taking the porch steps and lowering himself into the webbed lounger next to her aluminum-framed chair. “In the middle of the afternoon.”

“I went there not long after you left here this morning,” she said. “Had to go out for crackers anyway.”

He didn’t know if she was kidding, so he kept quiet.

“We should have coordinated our efforts,” she said. “I expect you were there for the same reason I was.”

“Reference room?”

“Right. To check the
Gazette-Dispatch
back issues on the Brant accident.”

He nodded.

“Duplication of effort,” she said.

“We screwed up, all right,” Carver said, squinting out at the sun glancing off the calm sea. “One of us should have been on Marla or Brant. She claimed Brant threatened her again. This time at a McDonald’s near her house, at the same time I was looking at microfilm.”

“Any witnesses?”

“Of course not. It probably didn’t happen.”

“You’re coming around to my way of thinking, Fred. Marla Cloy might not be a typical harassed female, though I confess I can’t quite figure out her game.”

Carver didn’t remind her that that originally had been his approach to the case, the reason Joel Brant had hired him. Then he’d drifted away from that theory; maybe Brant was using him and in a clever double game really
was
a threat to Marla. It might be either way. And now ... he didn’t know.

It was complicated and confusing, just as Beth predicted it would be. He didn’t remind her of that, either. It was best not to push a pregnant woman who’d driven miles for crackers.

“The accident must have been terrible for Brant,” she said. “The decapitation, the fact that he was driving and had alcohol in his bloodstream. It might have been enough to unhinge him mentally. Make him unpredictable.”

Carver stared at her. “Good Lord, are we switching positions on this again?”

“I never had a firm position,” she said.

“Oh? I thought yours was the feminist position.”

“You don’t understand. You’re as much a feminist as I am, Fred.”

That surprised him.

“You’re a humanist,” she explained. “That’s somebody who believes in a life directed toward the well-being of other people. You might not know it, but that’s why you run around like a combination bloodhound and pit bull, searching out truths that will provide the gift of justice.”

“I thought it was my fee,” he said.

“One reason, anyway. A humanist is automatically a feminist. A feminist isn’t automatically a humanist, but should be.” She switched off her computer and closed its lid, then carefully set it down on the plank floor beside her chair. “There’s something else I don’t have a firm position on.”

He knew what she was going to say, and dreaded hearing it. Time was nudging them into a corner, forcing a decision before it was too late. You delayed in some things and you belonged to fate.

“I went into Del Moray for another reason,” she said. “I made an appointment for next week at an abortion clinic.”

A coldness moved through him. “I thought you said you were undecided.”

“I am. But you can’t just walk in and have the procedure the same day. The only other clinic in Del Moray closed last year after threats and demonstrations by pro-lifers. Somebody threw a Molotov cocktail through a window. It didn’t ignite, but it injured one of the patients. The doctors there called it quits, so there’s a long waiting list of patients.”

“Jesus!” Carver said.

“They say He has something to do with it. How do you feel about this, lover?”

He was numb. “I’m not sure. I can’t deny you’re the one carrying the baby, so it’s your decision.”

“I know that. But I don’t want to make it without you.”

He looked over at her and smiled. “Should I force you to carry a child to term? Is that really an option for me?”

“No,” she admitted. “I just want you to know I don’t take it lightly. The people demonstrating in front of the clinics ... I see their point, Fred. At least the ones who are nonviolent. Don’t agree with it, but I sure see it.”

“You’re saying this is a close call.”

“Yes. And I’m sure it is for most women. Remember my telling you about the breech birth the last time I was pregnant? About Roberto’s son strangling on the umbilical cord?”

“I remember.”

“I was secretly glad, Fred. I didn’t want to bring a child into that world of drugs and cheap money and violence. The illicit drug business itself seduces and destroys people like a narcotic. Money’s addictive. Money’s a drug. In the recovery room afterward, I told the doctor I was glad the child died.”