Burn (6 page)

She emerged from the drugstore within fifteen minutes carrying a paper bag. As she was juggling the bag and her purse and trying to open her car door, the bag dropped to the pavement and split open. A large plastic bottle of Pepsi-Cola rolled beneath the car.

Marla stood with her hands on her hips for a moment, then she stooped and picked up the other items that had been in the bag: A package of notebook or typing paper, a bag of potato chips, a box of tampons, and a new paperback book. She placed them inside the Toyota behind the seat, then bent low and groped beneath the car with her hand. It took her a while to find and get a grip on the errant bottle. When she had it, she stood up and held it out at arm’s length to examine it, as if it were a fish she’d just caught. It wasn’t a keeper. After locking her car, she carried the apparently leaking bottle back inside the drugstore.

A few minutes later she came back outside with another bottle wedged beneath her arm, got into her car, and drove away. Carver followed, thinking the protective way she carried her purse and was always locking and unlocking doors suggested that maybe she really was fearful of attack. Beth would no doubt interpret it that way.

After she’d driven home and gone inside, Carver parked on Jacaranda Lane, figuring he’d be there for a while.

But half an hour later Marla was back in her car and on the move again. She’d changed to a red blouse, black slacks, and high heels, and she had her hair pulled back and fixed with a bright red ribbon or barrette. She was carrying her purse and a small blue canvas carry-on or attaché case.

Carver followed her to the Holiday Inn on Magellan, about half a mile from his office. It was a newer luxury hotel that backed onto the sea. Marla parked near the entrance to the cocktail lounge and strode inside, still carrying the blue canvas case. Judging by the slow, abbreviated arc of her arm swing as she walked, it was fairly heavy.

With the Olds’s windows cranked down, Carver could hear the surf rushing and slapping at the beach. A man and woman and three small children were strolling along the plank walkway toward the sand. The man and all three children were wearing swimming trunks. Only the woman wasn’t dressed to go in the water. She was wearing shorts and carrying a blue-and-white plastic cooler and a wad of folded beach towels. She and the man had on dark sunglasses, and all three of the kids had globs of white sunblock on their foreheads and the tips of their noses so they looked like miniature clowns only partly made up. Family life. Carver had experienced it once, but it had come unraveled. Now his son was dead and his wife and daughter lived in St. Louis, half a continent away. Laura had remarried and now had another family, one that didn’t include Carver. He’d once heard his daughter call Laura’s new husband “Daddy.” When moved by self-pity or masochism, he still probed that wound.

When the man and woman and kids had disappeared in the direction of the beach, he got out of the Olds and headed toward the lobby.

There were several people coming and going, or waiting for elevators. A black-and-gold metal sign on a stand was shaped like an arrow and pointed toward registration, out of sight around a corner. To the left were a tourism and ticket desk, car rental agency, and gift shop with a display of nondescript neckties in its window. The lobby was carpeted in green and had lots of artificial potted ferns and comfortable-looking beige chairs scattered about. Carver sank the tip of his cane in the soft carpet and walked around the corner, where he knew the cocktail lounge had an entrance off the lobby.

He didn’t have to go inside. He found a thickly upholstered beige chair from which he could see into the lounge and sat down, leaning forward to pick up a golf magazine from a bulky dark-wood table with a glass top.

From where he sat he could see Marla Cloy seated alone in a small booth along the wall. She was staring straight ahead and holding a stemmed glass with both hands. White wine again. He was watching her almost in profile. Her face was one that became more attractive the longer he looked at it. The angle of her nose and the line of her jaw suggested a simple and pleasant serenity that had to be deceptive. He knew it concealed either willful duplicity or genuine fear.

He looked away from Marla when he noticed a small, skinny, slightly hunched woman in a brown skirt and blazer walk past him into the lounge. She left in her wake the faint scent of mothballs. He saw Marla look at her and smile. The woman picked up speed and scurried rather than walked directly to the booth and sat down opposite Marla, then placed her hands out of sight beneath the table as if she were ashamed of them.

A barmaid appeared and took the woman’s order, then brought her a drink that looked exactly like Marla’s. Both women sipped their wine simultaneously, pausing as they lifted their glasses to their lips, almost in a toast.

They talked for about half an hour, sometimes seriously, sometimes laughing at what might have been a shared joke. Next to Marla, the thin woman looked particularly drab in her brown suit and with her lifeless brown hair. Her coloring and ferretlike features brought to mind the word “mousy.” Even from this distance Carver could see that she wore very little makeup and no fingernail polish. Her pale hands, animated when she talked, were quick and nervous.

Marla dragged the blue attaché case onto the table and unzipped it. When she opened it, Carver caught a glimpse of compartments in the lid that contained several yellow file folders. Marla drew a thick brown envelope from the case and laid it on the table in front of the mousy woman. It was a large envelope, almost square.

Marla got a pencil from the case and wrote something on the envelope, then she and Mousy put their heads close together and discussed whatever it was she’d written. Mousy borrowed Marla’s pencil and added something of her own on the front of the envelope. Then she rested her arm over the envelope in a casual but possessive manner.

When the attaché case was zipped and placed back on the floor, the two women finished their drinks somewhat hurriedly. Then Mousy stood up, carrying the brown envelope. Marla remained seated and was fishing around in her purse for money to pay the check. Carver figured he’d have to make a decision soon. He already knew what it would be.

He laid the golf magazine back on the table, then gripped his cane and stood up. By the time Mousy came out of the lobby carrying the envelope, he was already in the Olds with the engine running. She walked around the corner of the building, and he had to drive fast along the row of parked cars to keep her in sight.

She climbed into a gray Volkswagen Rabbit, and when she left the parking lot and turned left onto Magellan, he was behind her.

The mousy woman slowed her car on Fourteenth Street, in a neighborhood of small shops and old two-story apartment buildings, and parked it nose-in to a low stone wall in front of a building set well back from the street and shaded by mature sugar oaks. With the brown envelope tucked beneath her arm, she walked under a wrought-iron entrance arch that served as a trellis for bedraggled-looking roses. Carver watched her make her way around a pond with a statue of a leaping fish in its center, then enter the building through a large, heavy door with a decorative black iron ring for a knocker.

He got out of the car and saw “2-D” in faded black paint on the stone wall in front of the parked Rabbit. There were other such markings, obviously designating each of the parking slots to correspond with apartments. He stood for a moment listening to the Rabbit’s little four-banger engine ticking as it cooled, then he traced the mousy woman’s steps, passing through the rusty iron trellis of roses, noticing that the pond in the entrance courtyard was dry and contained a scattering of dirt and sun-browned dead weeds. Many of its square blue tiles were cracked or missing. The leaping fish had once been a sword-fish, he noticed, but now its sword was a mere jagged stub where it had been broken off, perhaps by vandals.

The building’s foyer was small, also done in blue tile, but in better repair than the pond and fountain outside. There was a faint medicinal smell to it, or maybe the lingering scent of mothballs from the mousy woman’s passage. Some of the tiles were cracked and some were replacements that were a brighter blue outlined in the pristine white of fresh grout. There was a bank of fancy brass mailboxes and buzzer buttons, old and slightly tarnished.

Carver saw that the building contained twelve apartments. The name above 2-D was W. Krull.

He thought about going upstairs and talking to W. Krull, trying to discover what was in the envelope Marla had given her, then decided against it. He doubted that she’d be cooperative or unsuspecting. Possibly it was his imagination, but there seemed to have been something vaguely furtive about the meeting in the Holiday Inn lounge and the exchange of the envelope. W. Krull might suspect he’d followed her from the hotel and be a good enough friend to tip off Marla.

Better to wait a while before approaching her.

Mildred Fain said he was a talented guy. He should be able to think up something more convincing than that insurance agent act.

C
ARVER HAD MET
with attorneys at four o’clock to give a deposition concerning a woman who’d hired him to find her missing teenage daughter, whom he’d found living with her forty-year-old uncle in Orlando. The girl had been fourteen, but she looked and acted like a twelve-year-old. After the daughter’s return to her parents, statutory rape charges had been filed against the uncle. Carver’s deposition would be instrumental in the ongoing plea bargaining process. Despite the prosecutor’s tough talk, Carver figured the uncle’s attorneys would whittle away the sentence so that the man would receive a short jail term and be placed on probation. Carver was thinking about the uncle’s walking when he saw Beth’s white LeBaron convertible pull into the lot and park in front of the office.

She entered the office smiling, wearing a gauzy tan blouse and a flowing darker brown skirt hemmed down around her ankles. Three-piece, square onyx earrings, loose-fitting gold and black bracelets, and a necklace of large black and green stones dangled and clicked and clacked as she walked.

She sat down in front of Carver’s desk, her back rigid and not touching her chair, yet she seemed totally relaxed. Her hair was combed back to a bun and she wore a black headband. He thought she looked particularly regal today. She wore dark red lipstick and had her eyes skillfully made up so that they seemed faintly oriental. Her rigid posture caused her breasts to challenge the thin material of her blouse.

The air conditioner clicked on. Carver didn’t blame it.

“I was in town for an appointment,” she said, “so I thought I’d drop in.”

“I’m glad.”

“Give your deposition?” she asked.

He nodded. “I think the uncle’s going to walk.”

“Should he?”

“No. Where he’ll walk is straight back to that kid, if it isn’t prevented. She doesn’t look old enough to trust with the toaster.”

“Nothing you can do about it,” Beth said. “It’s up to the court. Maybe you should concentrate on what you
can
do something about.”

“Marla Cloy?”

“Uh-hm. What have you learned?”

He told her about this morning’s conversation with Mildred Fain. Then about Marla’s meeting W. Krull at the Holiday Inn and handing over the envelope.

“Doesn’t sound so suspicious to me,” Beth said. “Maybe they met on business.”

“I’m wondering what kind,” Carver said.

“You’d like to catch her in a narcotics exchange, wouldn’t you?”

“It would make things simpler. And it’s not so illogical. After all, there’s snow as well as sand in Florida.”

Beth stared at him. “Maybe the meeting
was
for a payoff—a down payment, anyway—and Marla hired the woman to kill Brant before he makes good on his threat and murders her.”

“I thought of that. This woman wouldn’t strike you as a hired killer.”

“You know better than that, Fred.”

He did.

“Are you going to talk to W. Krull?” Beth asked.

“Tomorrow.”

“What lie are you planning to tell her? That pathetic insurance agent thing?”

“No,” he said. “I’m going to tell her the truth, that I’m investigating the matter of Joel Brant threatening Marla Cloy.”

“Going to say you’re with the police?”

“Of course not,” Carver said. “I’ll let her decide that on her own.”

Beth gazed out the window for a moment, then turned to face him with a somber, oddly pained expression he was seeing for the first time. It transformed her features so that at a glance he might almost have thought he was looking at another woman. She was always doing things like that, revealing new and unexpected facets of herself. Carver had the feeling her capacity to surprise him was infinite; she was a puzzle he would never quite solve. It bothered him when he couldn’t get to the truth and meaning of things he cared about. It also kept him intrigued.

“I told you I had an appointment today,” she said. “It was with a doctor.”

There was something in her voice that scared him. He felt his heart accelerate. His mind whirled and searched for hints that she might be ill, symptoms he should have noticed. He knew he could be blind to such things.

“You’re OK, aren’t you?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. It depends.”

“On what?”

“I’m not sure of that, either.”

“You feel all right?”

“Yes and no.”

“Damn it, Beth!”

He was shocked to see the flesh beneath her eyes dance. A look of wonder and fear crossed her face before she bowed her head and began to sob almost silently.

This was not her. Not her at all.

Using the desk and chair for support, he went to her and lowered himself to kneel on one leg beside her chair, his bad leg extended in front of him. He balanced himself with one hand on the chair while he held her with his free arm.

“Whatever it is,” he said, “don’t panic. These things are hardly ever as serious as they seem at first. We’ll get second and third opinions, find a specialist.”

She stopped sobbing, then she drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, using fresh oxygen to compose herself. She dabbed daintily at her eyes with a tissue, smearing her mascara. She sniffed, and wiped her nose.