Torch

30

Carver parked beside Beth’s car outside his cottage.

As he walked toward the plank front porch, he wiped perspiration from his face with the tail of his pullover shirt and was glad to hear the air conditioner droning away. Beth wasn’t bothered much by heat and often only opened the windows on some of the hottest, most humid days of summer.

It was cool inside. She was sitting at the breakfast counter, eating a sandwich and using her laptop Toshiba. A Budweiser can and a glass half full of beer sat beside the computer.

Carver peeled off his perspiration-soaked shirt and went into the bathroom.

“Hot, lover?” she asked, not looking up from her computer.

He didn’t answer. Instead he splashed cold water over his face. He felt water drip and run down his forearms and bare chest. Some of it made it down his ridged stomach and felt cool beneath his waistband. He ran more cold water over his wrists, holding them beneath the tap for several minutes. Then he toweled his face and chest dry and returned to the cottage’s main area. Though the air conditioner was on, a window was open and the sound of the surf dashing itself on the beach infiltrated the cottage.

“I figured you’d turn up soon,” Beth said, “so I switched on the air conditioner just for you.”

“Thoughtful,” he said, and got another Budweiser out from behind some very old barbecued chicken in the refrigerator. He carried the beer to the sofa, sat down and rolled the cold curvature of the can back and forth on his forehead, then gazed out at the ocean. A few white triangles of sails were banked at identical angles. Beyond them, far in the sun-hazed distance, was what appeared to be a cruise ship. Nothing out there seemed to be moving; maybe it was too hot. Behind him, Carver could hear Beth’s fingers clicking and clacking the computer’s keyboard with amazing speed. It sounded like a maniac abusing a typewriter inside a padded room.

He said, “I thought you were finished with your mail-order-scam story.”

“I am. This is a telephone boiler room piece,” she said, continuing to play the computer’s keys. “It’ll expose some of those jerks who are talking the old folks out of their ready cash. Some of the people involved in the phony mail-order business are mixed up in this. That’s how I got onto it. It’s like a web full of spiders.”

“Gonna send any of them to jail?”

“Hope so.”

“That’ll just leave more helpless flies for the televangelists,” he told her.

“You’re too cynical, Fred.”

“I’ve been told.”

After she relayed her story via modem to the Burrow offices, she sat down next to Carver on the sofa, leaned back, and extended her legs, as if her muscles were stiff from sitting a long time at her computer. She was wearing black shorts and a red halter that didn’t do much of a job restraining her breasts. Carver didn’t mind. Her feet were bare. The black leather sandals she’d been wearing were lying upside down on the floor next to her crossed ankles. They were the kind with soles made from tire treads and were probably good for another thirty thousand miles.

“I still haven’t heard anything on Dredge Industries,” she said. “I’ve got Jeff Mehling working on it.”

Mehling was Burrow’s resident computer genius. He’d helped Carver before, but they’d never met. Beth had told him Mehling mainly communicated with friends via electronic mail. Carver hadn’t wanted to hear any more about that.

“Jeff told me he’d have something soon,” Beth went on. “He’s still experimenting, finding his way into various data banks.”

Carver wondered if the government knew about Mehling.

Beth laced her fingers behind her head, inhaled deeply as she stretched her long body, and gave him a sloe-eyed glance. “You talk to Post?”

Not looking at her breasts, he told her about the conversation with Charlie Post at the Hotel Miranda in Miami Beach.

“Pussy broke,” Beth said. “That’s how some people I know used to describe Post’s condition. And some men’ll go out and find the wrong woman and do it all again. It’s a masochistic thing with them, giving up their money for love.”

“Post didn’t strike me as masochistic.”

“Nobody’s how they strike people, Fred. You oughta know that.”

Then he told her about stopping briefly in Palm Beach on the drive up the coast. May Post hadn’t been in her office at Post Yacht Sales, and she hadn’t answered her home phone.

“Why didn’t you hang around until she showed up?” Beth asked.

“Because the office workers were frantically finalizing arrangements for a party that night on a yacht they had listed to sell, the Stedda Work. Woman in the office who was calling to check on the caterer explained to me that was how they showed some of their yachts to prospective clients. Like a floating open house with booze and hors d’oeuvres.”

“And May Post is sure to be on board,” Beth said, her head resting back so she was staring now at the ceiling. “It’s a pretty smart tactic, getting the rich sales prospects liquored up and maybe bidding against each other.”

“Charlie Post told me May was smart.”

They both were quiet for a while, listening to the low hum of the air conditioner and the soft rush of the surf. Not far away outside a gull cried. Beth idly moved a bare foot over and rested painted toes on Carver’s moccasin. He could feel the pressure of each individual toe through the supple leather.

She said, “I’m assuming you’re going to drive back to Palm Beach tonight and crash the party.”

“No. I’ll be there as a guest. I managed to pick up a few unused invitations when no one was looking.”

“A few?” She sounded interested.

Carver said, “We’ll have to look as if we belong with the Palm Beach set and could afford a yacht or two. Got something suitable to wear?”

“Don’t worry,” she told him, “I’ll be the richiest and the bitchiest. But you I’ll have to supervise, Fred. When you get dressed up you look like a gangster.”