Spark

18

After leaving Lou Brethwaite, Carver phoned Lloyd Van Meter from a booth on Silver Star Road. Van Meter was one of the more successful private investigators in Florida, with offices in Miami, Tampa, and Orlando. He agreed to meet Carver that evening at Bixby’s Lounge on Magnolia Avenue.

The night was hot and thick as gauze when Carver parked in Bixby’s lot, then limped into the lounge through the wide entrance flanked by flickering neon palm trees.

It was almost cold in Bixby’s; it felt like ice being applied where Carver’s shirt was plastered to his flesh with perspiration. The spacious main room was starting to fill with the late-night crowd. Most of the round tables were occupied, the five-piece band had started playing, and half a dozen couples were dancing slowly on the small square floor in back. It wouldn’t be long before the music and the dancing would accelerate in noise and motion. Right now, Carver thought, Bixby’s seemed comparatively peaceful. Stillness before storm.

It was easy to spot Van Meter’s 300-plus pounds perched on a stool near the end of the long mahogany and glass-brick bar. He was wearing a green suit with a muted gray chalk stripe, green leather loafers with silver-tipped toes, a yellow shirt with what looked in the back bar mirror to be a red and green tie. He noticed Carver in the mirror and turned and smiled. He had a broad face and flowing white beard that with his bulk lent him an authoritative, biblical air, like one of those color illustrations in a dime-store religious tract. His commanding presence, his vivid awning-size clothes, as usual took Carver aback for a moment. There sat Moses sipping a beer after a spree through the K-mart men’s department.

They shook hands and Carver took the stool next to him, hooking the crook of his cane over the bar’s leather elbow rest. The bartender came and took his order for a Budweiser.

“You seem agitated,” Van Meter said. “Your same feisty self only more so.”

“I’ve got a problem,” Carver said.

“Guys like you have always got those.”

“His name’s Adam Beed.”

Van Meter stroked his beard, sipped his beer. “That’s a problem, all right.”

“You’ve heard of him?”

“Sure. In a darkly legendary way. Like Vlad the Impaler. Never met the legend and I got no desire to.” He grinned at Carver. “But I guess I’m gonna, right?”

“Not exactly,” Carver said. “I only need you to locate him.” The bartender brought his Bud, poured exactly half of it into a glass as carefully as if it were an explosive, and walked away. Carver lifted the glass, said “Cheers,” and downed most of the beer.

“Why would you want to find Adam Beed?” Van Meter asked.

“Because he found me,” Carver said.

Van Meter stared at him but didn’t push it.

“Has to do with a job I’m on out in Solartown,” Carver said. He gave Van Meter a brief summary of the case.

“The old folks at play,” Van Meter said. Then he glanced at his hulking gray reflection in the mirror and sighed. “Well, I’m getting there myself. Just like you, Fred. Like us all.”

Carver didn’t want to wax melancholy over advancing age. He said, “My drug contacts aren’t going to do me any good. Beed’s a physical health nut, a weight lifter and martial arts expert in a major way. He’s also off illegal narcotics, making his drug of choice alcohol these days. Fanatically disciplined as he is, and worshiping his own muscles, he must have a helluva battle with booze. Control freaks always do. And there seems no doubt he’s an alcoholic.”

“A killing machine that drinks,” Van Meter reflected. “Now there’s a dangerous combination.”

“I’m not asking you to take away his car keys,” Carver said. “I got pressures that keep me from spending time tracking him down. You’ve got more contacts, people working for you. You can check with AA chapters, gyms, martial arts studios, much easier than I can.”

“It’ll take time,” Van Meter said. “This one’ll have to cost you, Fred. Gotta cover my expenses.”

“I didn’t expect it for free,” Carver told him.

“You mentioned Beth was working with you on this.”

Carver nodded.

“I’ll help you on it, just so she don’t get mixed up in looking for Beed. I heard about something he’s supposed to have done a few months ago down in Miami.”

“Me, too.”

“Scary, huh?”

Carver shrugged. “People like Beed are part of the work we do.”

“The work I do, in this instance.”

“You afraid to take the job?” Carver asked.

Van Meter leaned back on his stool, looking astonished and slightly angry, as if he might pull the Ten Commandments out of a pocket and set Carver straight on a few things. “Fred, Fred, you insult me. I’ll assign someone else to it.”

Carver smiled. “You’re getting smarter as the years pass.”

“Not you, Fred. That’s how come I worry about you. Why I worry about Beth, who seems to suffer from some of the same rash impulses. We need to concern ourselves with Beth, since Adam Beed’s involved in what you’re mucking around in. From what I’ve heard, he’s a kinky kinda homicidal maniac who’s got no love for women. His mother must have drop-kicked him or something. The shrinks might say he looks at a woman, even a woman like Beth, and sees his mother. Sets him off, maybe.”

“I’m not interested in his tortured childhood,” Carver said, “even if he had one and it had anything to do with what he did to that guy’s wife down in Miami.”

“Guess it ain’t really relevant now,” Van Meter admitted. He picked up Carver’s Budweiser bottle and poured beer into the glass in Carver’s hand. “Here, pal, let me put a head on that for you.”

Beth was in his bed when he got back to the motel. Carver wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He remembered what Van Meter had said about rash impulses.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” she said.

He shut the door and limped farther into the room. “Not much surprises me anymore, even on my birthday. How’d you get in?”

“Locks don’t concern me much, Fred.”

He leaned on his cane and looked at her in the light of the bedside reading lamp. The air conditioner was humming away on high, and she was lying on her back and covered almost to the neck with the sheet. Her lithe body seemed incredibly long. Her shoulders were bare and he was sure she was nude beneath the white cotton. She’d been reading before he’d arrived; a thick paperback book was propped open on the table that held the lamp. Something by Joseph Conrad.

After his conversation with Van Meter, it bothered him that she’d chanced being seen so they could be together for the night. Besides that, he’d stayed too long at Bixby’s, drunk several more beers and talked too much with Van Meter. He was feeling less than amorous. “It was a risk, you coming here.”

“Everything’s a risk, from birth to death, even if you’re a suburban WASP and you’ve got your life arranged so you don’t know it.”

“You sure nobody saw you?”

“Positive. I float like a shadow through the heart of darkness.”

“Some shadow.”

“It’s almost eleven o’clock, Fred, and I smell beer on you all the way over here. Where you been?”

“Drinking with Lloyd Van Meter.”

“Ah! You hiring him to help locate Adam Beed?”

“Uh-huh. You have any luck finding out about Solartown, Inc.’s major shareholders?”

“I don’t rely on luck, Fred.” She ran a long-nailed finger slowly across her lower lip. “C’mon to bed, lover. Business later.”

He wondered, what could there be about Joseph Conrad? Then he got undressed and joined her, becoming unexpectedly aroused when he felt the heat of her beneath the thin sheet. His knuckles brushed the smooth, warm expanse of her thigh.

Her hand found him and did its magic. “Knew you’d see it my way,” she said, and slid on top of him.

It was morning before he thought again about Jerome Evans or his widow Hattie or Adam Beed or Joseph Conrad. Or anything other than Beth.

She was good at that.