Burn

22

Beth’s LeBaron convertible wasn’t as fast as the Olds, but it also wasn’t as noticeable; there were a zillion like it in Florida, most of them rentals driven by tourists living the fun-and-sun fantasies pictured in color travel brochures. Life was a series of illusions large and small, and some of them could be bought.

Carver had topped off the gas tank and now was parked near Brant’s condo. He had the car’s top up and the windows closed and the air conditioner humming away. It was cool in the LeBaron; it had a more efficient air conditioner than the Olds, maybe because it hadn’t labored through so many merciless summers. And the Olds was rusty enough to let some of the cold air escape.

At 7:30 Brant drove from between the white-brick mock guard kiosks marking the entrance to Warwick Village. He was behind the wheel of a LeBaron convertible, not the sleek black Stealth. His convertible was red, however, and he drove with the top down. Carver hadn’t figured him for a two-car kind of guy, but then maybe the Stealth was in the shop and he was driving a loaner. It was difficult to identify a rental car in Florida. The leasing agencies operated under new restraints, since some of the local criminals had decided to view tourists as game animals.

Carver depressed the accelerator and stayed well back of the red LeBaron. Another LeBaron convertible turned from a side street and rode between them. If they all lowered their tops and had beauty queens as passengers, they could have a parade. Brant was wearing a white shirt and had his sport jacket or suit coat folded and draped over the back of the passenger seat, so he was easy to track even in heavy traffic. Carver, wearing the horn-rimmed dark glasses that he fancied made him look a little like Jack Nicholson only with less hair, didn’t think he’d be at all conspicuous in Brant’s rearview mirror if he kept his distance.

The red LeBaron led him west of town to Brant Estates. He parked on the highway shoulder and watched the sleek red car glide along recently poured concrete streets to where three display houses were lined facing north. They were ranch houses with pale gray or blue siding, powder blue roofs, and two-car garages. The house in the middle had a low white picket fence around the front yard, and its garage had been converted into a sales office. Carver watched as Brant parked in front of that house, climbed out of the red convertible, and walked into the office with his coat slung over his shoulder.

He didn’t emerge from the office for almost an hour. Carver sat watching cement trucks rumble one by one to where slab foundations were being poured at the far end of the subdivision. Several workmen were standing around, leaning on shovel handles and staring as if hypnotized by the mixers. Each time one of the mixers released its gravelly soup to pour down its steel funnel, they would get to work frenziedly shoveling, evenly distributing the wet concrete. A bulldozer was grading not far from where the concrete work was being done, raising copious clouds of dust that hung almost motionless to blemish the china blue sky. Beyond where the bulldozer was relentlessly moving earth, about a dozen houses seemed to have been completed. There were a dozen more in various stages of construction, spaced out around the new streets. Carver remembered Charley Spotto referring to them as cookie-cutter houses. Spotto was right. Though they were attractively designed, there was a numbing sameness about them.

A man in jeans, a blue pullover shirt, and a red hard hat came out of the office and strode toward where the foundations were being poured. He was tan and muscular and walked with a swagger, and he appeared to be wearing cowboy boots. He only went a short distance before climbing into a brown pickup truck with a tall antenna mounted on its rear bumper. A rubber ball had been run through with the antenna and rode halfway up it to keep it from whipping around with too much range and bashing into the truck roof.

As the man sat in the pickup, a large red truck pulling a flatbed trailer stacked with lumber snaked its way along the flat, curved street. It headed toward another far section of the subdivision, and the brown pickup followed, its antenna with the rubber ball doing a mad dance behind it as if trying to keep up.

Brant emerged from the office. He was wearing a red hard hat like the other man’s. He got in the LeBaron and drove toward where the lumber truck had stopped. The trailer bed tilted back on hydraulic lifts, and most of the lumber, bound in a mass with steel bands, slid smoothly from the flatbed onto the ground as the truck jerked and pulled away, its front wheels lifting momentarily then bouncing back down. The stack of lumber made a sharp, reverberating report like an echoing rifle shot as the boards slapped against the hard ground and one another. Another cloud of dust rose and hung in the air.

Brant parked behind the brown pickup and got out, and he and the other man in a hard hat stood talking to the truck driver, who had leaped nimbly from the trailer as soon as the lumber was deposited on the ground.

Brant slapped the truck driver on the shoulder, a bill of lading was signed, and the lumber truck drove the pattern of streets to turn around. It roared and clattered past Carver again on its way out of Brant Estates.

Work continued as Brant and the other man-whom Carver assumed was the foreman-wandered around checking on the job and coordinating events. Carver was learning something about home building, but little else. Brant seemed a plain vanilla guy, all right, just as Spotto had described.

Carver was getting bored, and he could only hang around so long before drawing attention, even if he was parked off the highway, well away from construction activity. If it weren’t for the cane, he could raise the car’s hood and pretend engine trouble for a while without looking suspicious. But even from a distance, a limping bald man with a cane might catch Brant’s eye and prompt recognition and curiosity. For a moment Carver himself even questioned what he was doing here. Private investigators didn’t generally spy on their clients.

Wondering if he’d gone hormonal in some sort of symbiosis with Beth, he put the LeBaron in drive and waited for a break in traffic before pulling out onto the highway.

What would be next for him, dry crackers for breakfast? Some world. A father. Again. He still hadn’t sorted that one out.

The LeBaron’s tires sang on the warm concrete as he drove toward the Del Moray public library.

In the library’s cool green reference room, Carver sat hunched at one of half a dozen microfilm viewers and scanned back issues of the Del Moray Gazette-Dispatch.

Portia Brant’s accident had been front-page news. According to witnesses, the Brant Mercedes might have been speeding when a car coming from the opposite direction crossed the dividing line and collided head-on with it. The photograph indicated that the cars had struck a glancing blow. Both drivers survived, as Spotto had said. Portia Brant, the passenger in Joel Brant’s Mercedes, hadn’t been wearing her seat belt and was decapitated.

The driver of the other car was a retired postal worker from New York named Sam Chavez. Thanks to his seat belt and air bag, he’d sustained only facial lacerations and a broken leg. His blood alcohol level was well beyond the point where he was legally drunk. Joel Brant’s alcohol level was just low enough to keep him from being legally drunk. He’d suffered only minor abrasions and contusions and hadn’t been hospitalized.

Carver concentrated on the viewer and followed the story from “Wife of Local Builder Killed in Head-on Collision” to “Portia Brant, AlA Accident Victim, Is Buried.” Portia’s photographs showed a beautiful dark-haired woman with kind eyes, a neck like a ballerina’s, and a knockout smile. There was a shot of mourners at her funeral. Joel Brant was visible standing among a knot of men wearing what looked like identical dark suits. Portia’s obituary mentioned no surviving family members other than her husband, and stated that she’d been president of the Del Moray Garden Club and had been active in local charities.

Carver stared at her photograph, at her smile and elegant neck. His mind flinched at imagining her beheaded by a slab of windshield glass or sharp-edged flying wreckage, and he wondered how much of the accident Brant remembered, how much of it troubled his dreams.

They had been driving home from an AIDS benefit ball at one of the big hotels when the accident occurred. Both had been drinking. The autopsy revealed that Portia’s blood alcohol content had been slightly higher than her husband’s.

Carver figured out how to work the viewer to make a copy of the image on the screen and fed it a quarter. Portia Brant’s photograph duplicated well. He made three more copies, then switched off the microfilm viewer and removed the reel.

Portia’s face haunted him. The death of a woman like that, the way she’d died, how might it have affected her husband beyond normal grief? If Joel Brant was psychologically askew after such an experience, who could blame him?

As long as it didn’t result in the stalking and killing of an innocent woman.

Feeling slightly queasy, Carver stood up and walked from the library, nodding to a stern-faced librarian on the way out.

Outside in the heat and sun, the nausea stayed with him. What now? Sympathetic morning sickness?

Pushing such nonsense from his mind, he decided his stomach was probably upset from the constant sideways motion of the microfilm being run through the viewer. Something like seasickness. He would skip lunch and drive directly back to the Brant Estates construction site and see if Joel Brant was still there.

The red convertible was gone from where it had been parked, and Brant was nowhere in sight. The cement mixers had gone, too. Carpenters were swarming over the studwork of a house near the recently poured foundations, and farther down the same street roofers were hard at work. Their hammering was a discordant symphony only slightly softened by distance.

Carver’s stomach was okay now, but his damaged rib was aching. He decided to drive to his office and find something to do that wasn’t strenuous or stressful. Maybe he’d even down one of the pills Beth had stuck in his hand as he was leaving the cottage that morning.

Half a mile down the highway he passed a low, flat-roofed structure with a sign proclaiming it to be the Egret Lounge. Despite the early hour, a row of vehicles was nosed tightly against the front of the building. They reminded Carver of suckling pigs lined against the side of their reclining mother.

One of them was the brown pickup truck driven by Brant’s foreman.

Carver braked the LeBaron and pulled onto the gravel shoulder, made a slow but tire-squealing U-turn, and parked two spaces down from the truck.

What he might learn in the Egret Lounge he wasn’t sure, but there was at least one person inside who knew Joel Brant.