Scorcher

Chapter 10

A steep exterior flight of white steel stairs rose like a prehistoric, fleshless spinal column in a museum, to a landing and the top floor of the gray stucco carriage house. Carver could think of the carriage house only as a garage with a room over it. His plebeian background showing. The stucco was cracked and sloppily patched here and there, and grasping green vines had made it halfway up the wall beneath the stairs. He supposed whoever tended the grounds regarded the vines as ornamental; long nails had been driven into the stucco to aid the green tendrils on their upward quest. The nails were rusty, the higher ones waiting patiently for the vines to reach them before metal crumbled in the salt sea air.

Adam Kave stood aside and let Carver take the steps first with the cane. Carver could feel the presence of Kave close behind him as he climbed, as if Adam were telling him he wished they could go faster. The hard walnut cane made hollow clanking sounds on the steel.

On the landing, Adam edged around Carver, unlocked a heavy wooden door, and pushed it open. Heat and silence rolled out. Carver limped inside the lab.

It was dim; only minimal light filtered in through curtains pulled closed over narrow windows. Dust swirled in diffused sunbeams. A fly droned through the dappled light. Carver expected the acrid scent of chemicals, but the air was stale and musty and smelled like attics everywhere. He remembered the heat and buzzing beneath the eaves of his father’s house, decades ago.

He heard the click of a wall switch, and an overhead fluorescent fixture sent out intermittent signals of pale, flickering light, then fought its way to steadiness.

Adam examined his hand as if the switch might have soiled his forefinger. “Paul wasn’t one to keep this place clean,” he said, “and he’d never let the maid from town come in here. It was his refuge from his problems, I suppose.”

Partitioning walls had been removed so that the area above the garage was one large room. The floor was unfinished plank. The plumbing that had served bath and kitchenette was extended in copper pipe to the dry-walled ceiling and run to the east wall, then down to a long sink and workbench. Brown-tinted vials lined a shelf above the workbench. A crudely drawn skull-and-crossbones poison warning on lined notepaper was taped to the edge of the shelf. On the bench sat a Bunsen burner, an expensive and elaborate microscope, a series of glass beakers and slides, and an opened and apparently empty Pepsi can. There was a cot against the opposite wall, and near it a bentwood chair on which was piled diving equipment: swim fins, a snorkel, and what looked like the wadded top of a black rubber wetsuit. The only other evidence of Paul’s interest in the ocean was a large aquarium tank, empty, with colored pebbles and a miniature chambered castle on the bottom. There seemed to be dust over everything, as if no one had been in the place for a while, but that could be deceptive. An ancient air-conditioner was mounted in one of the windows. The sloping ceiling was insulated, but it was getting uncomfortable in the crude lab, and Carver felt like limping over and switching on the unit.

“The police spent considerable time up here,” Adam said. “They removed a few items. I’m not sure what.”

Carver nodded. He thumped across the floor with his cane and examined the chemical vials on the long shelf. He discerned nothing from the polysyllabic Latin labels. A brilliant teen-age boy might have learned to concoct anything from explosives to aphrodisiacs with the stuff. “Did Paul spend a lot of time here?”

“I don’t think he did in the past year or so,” Adam said, “though I couldn’t swear to it. He was increasingly fond of swimming, of the ocean and the creatures in it, and that took up most of his time. Now and then he’d come up here to closely examine something he’d found in the sea, but he wouldn’t spend days at a stretch here alone as he did when he was a boy.”

“He ever share the things he found? I mean, talk about them with friends or family?”

“No.”

“Not even Nadine?”

“Possibly Nadine.”

Carver looked at the cot, with its light blanket and sheet folded at its foot. “Looks as if he slept up here sometimes.”

“Maybe he did. I never kept that close a watch on his activities. Though Adam’s Inns has a national vice-president as well as district managers, I oversee my business from here, from an office in the house, Mr. Carver. I spend a great deal of time on the phone. If you accused me of neglecting Paul, I wouldn’t deny it. At the same time, the boy’s gone out of his way to cause quite a bit of trouble.”

Adam was talking as if burning people were merely another of his son’s boyhood peccadilloes. And maybe he figured to use his influence so the resultant punishment turned out to be on a par with the consequences of wrecking one of the family Porsches. It was easy to forget, standing here in the stifling garage laboratory, the extent of Kave’s wealth and power. What was a little thing like homicide between friends with money and clout? Carver had seen it before; it made him nauseated. He felt that way now, standing there in the heat.

“I’d like to see Paul’s room,” he said.

“Sure.” Adam stepped aside again so Carver could cross to the door and negotiate the steel landing and stairs first.

The outside air felt cool to Carver, though the temperature was pushing ninety. He heard the light switch click off as he balanced himself between cane and handrail and started down the steep steps.

At the bottom of the stairs, he glanced in a window as he waited for Adam to finish locking up and join him. No Porsches. The garage had several windows, so there was enough light to see a late-model gray Cadillac, a low-slung red Datsun sports car, and a white Chevrolet sedan. There was plenty of room for more cars. Or a tea or a coming-out party.

“The police impounded Paul’s Lincoln,” Adam said, clanging down the stairs on his two good legs and noticing Carver’s interest in the garage’s interior.

“Yeah, I was told.” Carver probed with the tip of his cane until he found a hard spot in the sandy earth and moved away from the window.

“Do you know Lieutenant McGregor well?”

“We’re old friends,” Carver said, and walked ahead of Adam back along the winding stone path to the house. The sweet scent of the flowers was cloying and added to his nausea.

Paul might not be the model of neatness in his lab, but his room looked like the executive suite of a plush hotel just before check-in time. The king-size bed was made up with the spread tucked in at the corners. Other than some oceanography magazines neatly fanned on a low table, there were no incidental objects on the dresser or writing desk. On the wall by the desk hung a large, framed, underwater color photo of what looked like a manta ray lurking among gracefully swaying, colorful undersea foliage while a school of small, bright fish swam past. There was something distinctly ominous about the enlarged print.

“Did Paul do underwater photography?” Carver asked.

Adam shrugged his blocky shoulders in an I-don’t-know gesture. Paul hadn’t been of much concern to him until lately. He didn’t know much about his son the murderer.

Carver snooped around but found no camera. He limped over to the closet, lifting the cane high between steps in the deep-pile blue carpet. He slid open one of the heavy mirrored doors. It glided smoothly and made a politely soft rumble on its rollers.

There were more clothes in there than Carver had owned in the past ten years. Most of them were casual: blue jeans and pullover shirts. Dozens of shoes of all kinds. The jackets, slacks, and suits were light-colored and conservative. Paul’s taste ran to blues and grays. On the closet’s top shelf were two stacks of more oceanography magazines, bound tightly with thick dark twine.

“He take any clothes with him when he disappeared?” Carver asked.

“We’re not sure. If he did take time to pack, he left much of his wardrobe behind.”

“What about money?”

“Paul had his own bank account. As you no doubt know from the police, he withdrew several thousand dollars from his savings the day of his disappearance.”

Carver hadn’t known; he’d have to check with McGregor about things like that, remind the lieutenant that knowledge about Paul Kave was supposed to flow both ways.

“Paul left in his own Lincoln,” Carver said, and paused for confirmation or denial.

“Yes. Paul was in love with that car. It’s a beauty. The police found it abandoned in Fort Lauderdale. I don’t imagine we’ll see it for a while, the police being what they are. I suppose Paul had no choice but to leave it somewhere, under the circumstances.” Adam seemed almost more upset over the temporary loss of the Lincoln than the likely permanent loss of Paul. Priorities. It was Paul who concerned Carver, though not in the way Adam Kave had been led to believe.

“Anyone see him leave?”

“No. Nadine must have been out with Joel Dewitt. I was engrossed in business most of that evening-our new barbecue-sauerkraut hot dog.”

Yee-uk! Carver thought.

“And Elana was in her room as usual,” Adam went on. He set his jaw muscles quivering and stared hard at Carver with his intense magnified dark eyes. “There’s, uh, something you should know about Elana, Carver. It will make you realize why I’m hiring you, and why she shouldn’t be burdened with any. . negative information you uncover.”

Carver leaned with both hands on his cane and waited.

“My wife is terminally ill with cancer of the spleen. She won’t live more than another year. The strain of what’s happened might cut short even that small amount of time she has left. That’s why I want this situation resolved and left behind us as quickly as possible. I want every precious, irreplaceable moment of life for her-for us. I want Paul found.”

“I do too, Mr. Kave. I’m sorry about your wife.”

Adam squared his shoulders in a manner that somehow made him appear helpless. He was facing a tragedy his money couldn’t buy him or Elana out of, and his iron will might as well be cardboard; it was frustrating. Carver did pity him, as well as the fragile, reclusive woman upstairs. “Do Paul and Nadine know?”

“No. Only I and Elana and the doctors.”

“Maybe it would be best if you took your wife somewhere she’s always wanted to go,” Carver said, “until this is over.”

“I suggested that,” Adam said. “She told me she wanted our lives to continue as they normally would for as long as possible. At her request, we don’t even talk about her illness.”

There was a lot this family didn’t talk about, Carver thought. He looked around again at the sterile, expensively furnished room, half expecting to see a complimentary mint on the pillow, hotel stationery on the bare desk. He glanced once more at the batlike manta ray hovering menacingly among the underwater plant life and unsuspecting fish. Management would take down the print and put up one of flowers in a vase, or of colorful food to stimulate guests’ appetites and requests for room service.

“Not much to see,” Adam said. “Just an ordinary room.”

But not that of an ordinary man, Carver thought. The Kave family itself hardly seemed ordinary. Or was there such a thing as an ordinary family?

“Do you have a good photo of Paul I can have?”

Adam nodded. He pulled a snapshot from his shirt pocket and handed it to Carver. “I anticipated your request.”

Carver studied the likeness of a young blond man who had oddly dreamy eyes and a trace of the strong Kave jaw, wearing jeans and a light jacket and standing hands-on-hips near a large, round boulder. He tried to fathom the meaning in those eyes and the set of the features, as if he might sense the mechanism of thought from nothing but a photograph. Then he gave up. He thanked Adam and slipped the snapshot into his own pocket.

“He’s a good-looking boy,” Adam said. “Better-looking than in those fuzzy old newspaper photos.”

The Del Moray Gazette-Dispatch had run a copy of Paul’s high-school yearbook photograph. It had indeed been so fuzzy that Carver had stared at it and decided it might be of any high-school student. It hadn’t looked much like the face in the current snapshot. “I can see family resemblance,” Carver said, thinking he should comment. Polite thing to do.

As they were leaving Paul’s room, Carver said, “Why does your wife object so strongly to Nadine’s marriage to this Joel Dewitt?”

“She seems unwilling to pinpoint her reasons,” Adam answered. “My guess is she thinks Joel’s dishonest.”

“Why would she? There are honest car dealers.”

“Oh, I don’t think it’s his profession she objects to. She gets feelings about people. Has instincts.”

“Accurate instincts?”

“Usually.”

“Maybe you should ask her about the barbecue-sauerkraut hot dog,” Carver said. “That sounds awful.”

Adam smiled. “You’d be surprised.”

Carver decided not to dispute the point. Adam Kave was the last man on earth to argue with about wieners. Like taking on the Colonel or his heirs about chickens.

He saw Carver out. They didn’t shake hands when they parted.

Waiting for the zebra-striped barrier to lift and release the rumbling Olds back onto the highway, Carver wondered what Elana Kave’s instincts had told her about him.