Flame

Chapter 5

Soft. Warm.

Carver was aware of Edwina kissing him on the lips. He sat up in bed and saw she was fully dressed, even carrying her blue vinyl attache case, smiling down at him. On her way to turn real estate.

She said, “You overslept.”

“I was tired,” Carver said. “Bomb going off nearby made me exhausted.”

“Guess it would.”

He had an erection. “Sure you have to leave right away?”

Something in her gray eyes; she wanted to stay. “ ’Fraid I do. I have an appointment to show a condo.”

“Can’t you be half an hour late?”

“It’s beachfront property.”

Ah! Big commission. Not that it was the money that primarily motivated Edwina; this was her game, the symbolic and real means to her independence after her divorce and then a crushing love affair with a man now deservedly dead. She didn’t trust Carver completely. He didn’t trust her. He’d gone through a hellish marriage and divorce himself. His ex-wife Laura and their seven-year-old daughter Ann lived in St. Louis. In a way, that was worse for him than if they didn’t exist. In a way.

Edwina bent down again. Kissed him lightly on the forehead this time. She smelled like roses. Fresh shampoo and perfume. She had on her gray pin-striped blazer and matching skirt. Dark hose and black high heels. It was real-estate biz this morning, all right. She smiled again, as if kissing him brought that on automatically. Gave a kind of shrug and said, “Sorry, but I have to go. Will you be here this afternoon?”

“No. Gotta drive to Fort Lauderdale.” When she’d come home late last night, he’d told her everything about yesterday. Let it all flow from him, and then he could finally relax. “One stop I have to make first.”

“Bert Renway’s mobile home?”

She was ahead of him. “That’s right.”

“Why do you think he was hired to impersonate Wesley?”

The why of it was something they hadn’t discussed last night. Carver had been too tired to talk for very long. She’d urged him to forget the day, to sleep. To blot out everything and think about it again when he was rested. Good advice. Irresistible, coming from Edwina. Much about her was irresistible.

He fluffed his pillow against the headboard, sat up straighter, and leaned heavily back into it. The maneuver brought him eye-level with a shaft of morning light spearing through the gap in the drapes. Made his head pound. “My guess is that Renway fit Wesley’s general description close enough so that whoever was hired to watch Wesley would be lured into tailing Renway. Hell, why not? Wesley’s apartment, Wesley’s car, even some of Wesley’s clothes.”

“So the idea was that Wesley knew someone was out to kill him and arranged to have Renway murdered in his place?”

“Not necessarily,” Carver said. “It might have been nothing more than a setup that’d allow Wesley freedom to do what he wanted while his watchers were wasting their time following Renway.”

“Isn’t there some law against that?” Edwina asked.

“Not as long as everybody knew where they stood and Wesley wasn’t doing anything illegal. Renway was playing a role for pay. Like an actor.”

“His first and final role,” she said.

“Turned out that way, poor bastard. He didn’t know the script or all the players. Or the danger. Maybe, for that matter, neither did Wesley.”

Her lips parted, then she pressed them shut; her pink lipstick seemed to bond like glue. She’d been about to ask him to be careful, but had thought better of it. Their love for each other was obsessive and they both knew it. Two obsessive personalities. She about whatever real-estate deal she was working to close, he about whatever case he was on. They needed to be that way. It was their oxygen.

The air conditioner clicked on and sent a wave of cool air flowing across the room. Felt good on Carver’s bare chest.

He said, “If you need to get in touch, I’ll be at the Carib Terrace.”

She said, “I’ll need to get in touch,” and swayed from the bedroom. She had the most elegant walk Carver had ever seen; maybe he was especially awed by it because of his lameness. Even her long auburn hair, swinging gently in syncopation with her hips, was mesmerizing. When she was gone the room felt larger and emptier.

He listened to the rumbling whine of the automatic garage door opener. Heard the snarl of her Mercedes. Listened to her shift gears as the car rolled down the long, curving driveway and then accelerated up the highway. She was in a hurry. Determined. Sometime soon, papers would be signed and a condo would change hands. Another triumph.

He got up and took a lukewarm shower, staying under the needlelike drive of the water for a long time. Then he dressed in lightweight brown slacks, a black pullover shirt, and his brown moccasins that were easy to get on and off even with the stiff knee. Poked his left hand through the band of his gold Seiko watch and fastened the clasp around his wrist.

Ready to joust with windmills, he told himself, checking his image in Edwina’s dresser mirror. Guy too harsh-looking to be called handsome. Bald on top, with thick curly gray hair in a fringe over his ears and at the back of his head well down on his neck. Catlike blue eyes in a tanned face. Scar that gave a permanent sardonic twist to the right corner of his lips. Made him look like a cynic, which wasn’t far from the truth. But a cynic with hope. Carver was forty-four now, and he knew he’d look much the same at fifty-four. His arms and torso were lean and muscular from dragging his lower body around with the cane and from his morning swims in the ocean. When Carver swam, strokes long and powerful, legs kicking freely from the hips, he was as whole as anyone. He relished that feeling

Edwina must have gone out and bought a newspaper. The morning Del Moray Gazette-Dispatch lay folded on the sofa in the living room. Carver limped over and reached out with the tip of his cane to flip the paper so he could see the front page. There was the story about the car bombing, featuring a color photograph of the burned-out Caddie being hoisted by a police tow truck. What was left of Bert Renway had already been removed from the front seat and transported to the morgue.

Carver moved closer, picked up the paper, and read. The Cadillac’s license plates had been legible, even though burned black, because of the raised numerals, and the car had been quickly traced to Frank Wesley of Fort Lauderdale. McGregor was letting the press and the Del Moray police think the charred body behind the steering wheel was Wesley. Carver remembered the force of the explosion and the intensity of the fire. Possibly even dental records wouldn’t work to identify the victim. But eventually, Carver knew, the medical examiner’s office would glean from forensic evidence that the corpse wasn’t Wesley’s. Give them time and an infinitesimal sample of bone or tissue and they could tell you about the victim’s family tree. Science. And surely Bert Renway would sooner or later be reported missing. Two and two would equal the inevitable four, and some cop with a mathematical mind would stumble upon the equation. McGregor was buying time and nothing more with his silence.

Carver read the entire news item quickly but thoroughly. His name wasn’t mentioned. Good.

In the kitchen, he rooted around and found a day-old cinnamon Danish. Brought a cup of water to a boil in the microwave, then spooned in some instant coffee. He tested the brew’s temperature with his little finger and figured it would have burned the tip off his tongue if he’d been foolish enough to take a sip.

He carried the Danish and steaming coffee out onto the veranda and sat at the white metal table in the shade of the umbrella that sprouted from its center. The breeze off the sea made the umbrella’s long fringe sway and tangle. It would cool his coffee nicely.

The Atlantic was sending in large breakers this morning. He could hear the surf crashing on the beach, but he couldn’t see it because the house and brick veranda were built on a rise the developer had calculated would expand the ocean view. That meant Carver had to negotiate steep wooden steps down to the beach almost every morning for his swim, something that had given him difficulty at first. Now he took the steps easily, knowing exactly where and when to plant the tip of his cane.

On the narrow strip of beach, he’d thrust the cane into the sand like a spear. Then he’d scoot backward into the rushing waves until they lifted him and carried him seaward and the water was deep enough for him to swim. The jutting cane was his marker when he was tired and stroking for shore.

After about ten minutes, he ate most of the Danish and drank all the coffee. Glanced at the Seiko. It was only nine forty-five, and he wasn’t on a schedule, so he fired up a Swisher Sweet cigar and sat watching a determined sailboat tack into the wind and zigzag its way out to sea. Far beyond it, near the horizon, a grayish, hulking oil tanker, ghostly in the morning haze, moved almost imperceptibly northward.

The breeze picked up, carrying landward the fish smell of the sea and the real or imagined scent of crude oil. Just off the shore, a pelican, flying low and straight and with almost mechanical wingbeats, flapped across Carver’s line of vision and headed south. The bird was fishing, he knew, watching for movement in the dark, dancing waves. There was a world beneath the surface out there. In here, too.

He heard a low, sonorous humming, different from the rest of the faint traffic sounds from the highway. Familiar.

Edwina’s Mercedes.

The tone changed as she downshifted to turn into the driveway, another shift as she took the curving grade. Tires crunched on gravel as the car rolled to a halt near the garage, out of sight from Carver. The deep rumbling of the engine stopped and silence sang between the drawn-out sighs of the surf.

Thunk! The car door slamming.

Edwina walked out onto the veranda. The stiff breeze off the ocean riffled her hair and folded back her unbuttoned blazer to reveal one of her breasts jutting beneath her silky white blouse. She didn’t seem to mind being mussed. Tilted back her head and squinted into the wind as if luxuriating in it.

Carver propped his cigar in the ceramic ashtray. The breeze snatched the tenuous spiral of smoke and carried it away like a restless spirit.

“I decided to come back,” she said.

He said, “I thought you had a condo to sell.”

She dropped her attache case in a webbed lounge chair. Swayed across the uneven bricks toward him on her dark high heels. Said, “Screw the condo.”

He thought, Well, sure.