Burn

15

When Carver entered the cottage, he saw the note tucked beneath the salt shaker on the breakfast bar, where he and Beth customarily left messages for each other.

She was staking out Marla Cloy’s house and would return late that night.

The note also told him there was pressed turkey in the refrigerator. He found it, along with mayonnaise and lettuce, then built himself a sandwich on rye bread and ate it with a cold Budweiser. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was. He made himself another sandwich, and while he ate it he finished a small bag of barbecue potato chips Beth had eaten most of, then sealed with a wooden clothespin. He wondered where she’d obtained such a domestic item. She looked like a beautiful tribal queen. He couldn’t imagine her hanging wash.

After returning the turkey and mayonnaise to the refrigerator, he propped his sandwich plate in the dishwasher, then opened another beer. He carried the beer can and the cordless phone out onto the porch, sat down in a webbed lounge chair, and leaned his cane against the cottage wall.

He sat sipping beer and looking out at the ocean for a long time, watching a high bank of clouds move out to sea as gulls cried and wheeled in the dying light. Then he smoked a Swisher Sweet cigar, picked up the cordless phone, and called Vic Morgan.

“It’s Carver,” he said, when Morgan had answered the phone.

“You sure, Fred? You sound like you’re talking from the bottom of a barrel.”

“It’s this cordless phone.” Carver was often frustrated by technology that kept getting newer as he grew older. “I’m on a weak channel or something.”

“Then change the channel.”

“It does that automatically. I paid extra for that feature.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Can you hear me well enough?”

“Sure. As long as I just take your word for it that it’s you.”

“Given that it’s me,” Carver said, “I’d like to ask what you know about Joel Brant.”

“The guy who’s got the nutcase woman after him?”

Carver could tell where Morgan’s sympathies lay. Like a lot of cops, he’d developed a negative view of women from his years on Vice. “Same Brant. He’s my client now.”

“I don’t know anything about him personally,” Morgan said. “But I had the strong sensation he was telling me the truth. And you know how it goes when a woman’s accusing a man of anything these days. He’s got a hell of a problem even if he’s innocent. I thought you’d be the guy to get to the bottom of why this Cloy woman is out to get him.”

“Assuming he’s telling the truth.”

“You think he’s lying, Fred?” Morgan sounded surprised.

“I didn’t at first, but now I’m not so sure.”

“Hmm. That’s odd. I’ve developed a feel for these things over the years, and I’d bet the ranch and all the livestock he’s telling it straight. For some reason the Cloy broad is out to get him.”

“What if she’s the one telling the truth?”

“Then he kills her. That’s the way the law works, Fred. Can’t arrest a man for thinking about a crime-he’s got to commit it.”

“Kind of tough on the potential victim,” Carver said.

“I’m not saying it isn’t. I’m saying it’s impossible to arrest somebody who hasn’t done anything. And that’s the way it has to be. Listen, Fred, I’ve seen plenty of stalkers, and this Brant isn’t one of them. I’m convinced of it.”

“You must be, or you wouldn’t have sent him to me.”

“That’s something to remember,” Morgan said. He sounded miffed that Carver would doubt his cop’s instincts. “I might be retired, but some things don’t change. When I hear a man’s story, it counts for something if I feel in my gut he’s telling the truth.”

“It counts for plenty,” Carver assured him. “Or I wouldn’t have taken on Brant as a client.”

After breaking the connection, he laid the phone on the floor beside his chair and lit another cigar, watching the smoke he exhaled roll under and off to the side. The breeze had shifted and was blowing in off the ocean, cooling the hot sand and rattling palm fronds to make them sound as if they were tapping out a complex code. The surf whispered like a conspirator on the beach, but neither it nor the palms had the answers Carver needed.

He sat there, smoking and thinking, until dark.

When Beth arrived he was in bed asleep with the light on and the front page of the Gazette-Dispatch spread out over his chest. He awoke when he heard the crunch of her car’s tires on the sandy soil and gravel as she parked outside the cottage.

He lay half in the world of sleep and listened to the door open and close, the thunking of her footsteps in the nighttime silence as she crossed the plank floor. Water ran in the kitchen, then in the bathroom. When her footfalls got closer, he opened his eyes halfway and watched her undress. She made graceful motions out of the simple act of peeling off her clothes, almost like choreographed dance. Did she know he was watching?

Wearing only blue bikini panties, she approached him and gently removed the newspaper from his chest, then switched off the reading lamp. The room became dim in the moonlight that softened all objects. The window was open and the ocean breeze pushed in and played over Carver’s bare chest and arms, suddenly and comfortably cool now that the newspaper had been removed. He could hear the night surf, and somehow it seemed like the sound of the gentle breeze.

The bed creaked and he felt the mattress shift as she lowered her long body down to lie beside him.

“You asleep, Fred?”

“No. I was watching you undress. You don’t look pregnant.”

“I don’t feel it, either, right now. Makes it easier to be in denial.” She extended a hand and stared at it. “I just quit shaking. As I turned onto the road to the cottage, a van came roaring out of nowhere and almost forced me into the ditch.”

“The driver probably thought you were the police and panicked. Teenagers have been parking there to make out, since it’s dark and secluded.”

“ ‘Make out,’ huh? You’re dating yourself, Fred.”

“Well, it’s the age of safe sex.”

“Couldn’t prove it by me,” she said, and leaned over and kissed his forehead, then dropped back onto her pillow. “I’m as pregnant as if it were nineteen-forty.”

“Hubba, hubba,” he said. “What kind of day did Marla Cloy have?”

“Normal, I’d say. She worked until late afternoon, then ran some errands in that little car of hers. In the evening she ate supper alone at a steakhouse-no steak, though, just a baked potato with a godawful assortment of goodies heaped over it till it had more calories than steak. After that she went home, came out half an hour later with a basket of clothes, and drove to a coin laundry. It was about nine o’clock when she went home and stayed there. I could see her through the window, folding and putting away clothes. Then she watched TV for a while and went to bed. Lights went out about ten-thirty. I hung around another half hour to make sure she was down for the night, then I left. Stopped for some doughnuts and slaw and drove back here.”

“Doughnuts and slaw?”

“Sounded good. Was good.”

“Marla still reading her Rendell novel?” he asked.

“Nope. She was absorbed in a different novel in the Laundromat. Something by Robert Parker.” The mattress shifted again and she lay on her side in the shadows, facing him, propped on her elbow, her chin cupped in her hand. “The whole thing was too damned normal. Fred, I got a sort of sense about the woman.”

“A sense?”

“There’s something not genuine there.”

“Maybe not. But I’m getting a different sense of Joel Brant, too. I thought Marla might be setting him up so she could kill him and plead self-defense. Now I’m not so sure. What if he’s using me to help him set up an alibi for himself? Maybe he is the one doing the persecuting, just as Marla claims, and he’s building a record of her having harassed him, so he can murder her and successfully plead self-defense.”

Beth was quiet for a moment, then she said, “Damn it, Fred, you almost sold me on the notion that Brant might be an innocent victim. After watching Marla Cloy, I think you were right-he could be the one being harassed. Now that I’ve moved to the position Marla might be playing a double game, you’ve moved to thinking Brant might be lying to you, using you to help set up his alibi.”

“It’s a possibility,” Carver said, “and I don’t like being used. One way or the other, I’m going to lay this thing bare and find out the truth.”

Beth laughed, still grimly amused by their switched positions on Marla and Brant. “You’ve got too simplified and moralistic a view of the world, Fred. The real truth’s sometimes too ambiguous for human understanding, and maybe that’s the way it is here. If these two people don’t want to level with each other or anyone else, it could be we’ll simply never know the truth, despite your compulsion to dig and dig until everything’s revealed. Who’s doing what to whom, why they’re doing it. . there’s more than one reason for most things. Brant and Marla might have lost sight of the truth themselves.”

He didn’t see how, but then there might be a lot he didn’t know.

“Sometimes,” Carver said, “the truth is gigantic and simple and so obvious we don’t recognize it at first. Or there can be some of that denial you mentioned, if the truth’s too terrible to bear. We all prefer to think we’re on the side of the angels.”

“Hmm. You been reading the Old Testament, Fred?”

“I talked to Vic Morgan on the phone today. He thinks Brant’s on the level, but it’s possible Morgan’s judgment is skewed against Marla because she’s a woman.”

“Oh, you’ve been reading Naomi Wolf.”

“Maybe Marla’s toying with us,” Carver said. “Poking her nose in a detective novel while you were tailing her.”

“The irony wasn’t lost on me. That’s one reason I think she might be taking everybody for a ride on her delusion. Or maybe she’s got a solid, old-fashioned motive for setting up Brant. Revenge, money, publicity. There could be a lucrative book contract in this for her if she claims she had to kill him in self-defense because the system failed her.”

Carver hadn’t considered that one. Another layer of possible meaning.

“She might not care if Brant’s hired you,” Beth said. “It could be presented as another example of male harassment. If Brant were dead, it would be your word against hers as to why you were hired. She might be using you, Fred, if Brant isn’t.”

Carver lay for a while with his hands behind his head, staring up at the dark ceiling, listening to the gentle rush of the surf.

“I don’t like being used,” he said again.

Beth moved close to him. He could feel the heat of her body as she leaned in and kissed his cheek. Her breath was warm. Her fingers brushed his chest, then trailed lower.

“That right?” she said.

“Wait a minute, I’ll get a condom.”

“Fred.”