Torch

38

Carver paused just inside the door. It was dim and cool as a cave inside Shellie’s, and the low-volume sound system was playing something forlorn and slow by Eric Clapton. There were about a dozen customers scattered around, four or five of them at the bar. The TV above the bar was tuned soundlessly to a cable channel showing jai alai from Miami, but nobody was paying attention except for the bartender, not the stocky woman today but a fat man with sandy hair and a white shirt.

Maggie was seated on a stool at the end of the bar, a drink in front of her and the briefcase lying at her feet like a weary pet she’d been walking. Her clothes were casual-baggy red tee shirt and skin-tight black shorts that came down almost to her knees. She was wearing black sandals, letting the left one dangle so loosely from her toes that it seemed an instant away from dropping to the floor and subtly changing everything in her world.

When Carver approached, she looked over at him with a flash of surprise and then careful disinterest.

“Still sick?” he asked, sliding onto the stool next to her, not glancing down at the briefcase.

“Why should you care?”

“Is this the woman-scorned act?”

“Don’t overestimate yourself.”

She was working hard to get him to leave. He didn’t blame her. The bartender sauntered over to them, never taking his eyes off the TV. Carver asked for a Budweiser. It was set before him, half of it poured into a glass, all without a word from the bartender. Carver wondered if he had a bet down on the jai alai match.

“Listen,” Maggie said, turning toward him, “excuse my bad manners. I’m a little drunk, early as it is.” Since he wasn’t leaving, she’d apparently changed her tactics.

“Going into work when you leave here?”

“Huh?” She smiled. “Not a chance. Why would you ask that?”

“Your briefcase. I thought maybe you stopped here on your way to work.”

“Actually I was in early this morning and picked up some papers to take home and study.”

“What kind of papers?”

“Information on an initial public offering. Savings and loan going public. You interested?”

He smiled. “Nothing to invest.”

“Damn, damn, damn!” the bartender said, reacting to something on television. Clapton began crooning achingly about love lost forever.

Maggie took a sip of her drink, then rested her hand on the back of Carver’s. Her fingers were cool from being curled around her glass. “Last time we were here you offered to drive me home.”

“I thought you were drunk then. You’re not drunk now.”

“Nice of you to think not. You’re a gentleman, Ferd.”

“That’s Fred. I’ll be glad to carry your briefcase out to your car for you, gentleman that I am.”

Her eyes picked up the light from the TV and glowed with alarm and lucidity. “No, thanks. I’m not leaving yet. Not for a while.”

“Me either, I guess.”

She was quiet for a moment, staring into her drink. Then she said, “You still think Mark’s death was murder?”

“Yes.”

“Any proof?”

“Not yet.”

“If it was murder, Fred, I’d like to see you catch the bastard who did it.”

“You’re not convinced anymore it was suicide?”

“I’ve found it hard to stay convinced of anything since Mark died. The world keeps shifting on me, meaning one thing then another. I turn around and everything’s changed.” Her sandal dropped to the floor, and she absently lowered her foot and snagged it with her toes without looking. “It scares the shit out of me.”

She didn’t sound scared, even though she should have been. Carver remembered the mutilated doll in her bed. He thought maybe she really was feeling the effects of the liquor.

“Everybody’s scared from time to time,” he said.

“Even big bad Fred?”

He said, “You scare me, Maggie.”

“I scare a lot of men. Then they try to prove to themselves they’re not scared. It’s a pattern.”

“Life’s full of patterns, only sometimes they’re hard to see. Like those optical illusions that are one thing then another, depending on how you look at them.”

“That’s your job, I guess. Seeing the patterns, the real shapes of things in the fog.” She sounded sad.

Maybe she sensed what he was thinking, what had emerged from the fog. Maggie, Beni Ho, Carl Gretch-they formed a tighter and tighter pattern. He knew now they were all connected in some meaningful way with Nightlinks. Mark’s lover, Donna’s lover, and a killer. And Donna and Mark and Gretch were dead. Maggie should be more frightened than she was. She should be scared sick.

He could think of only one reason why she wasn’t. He swiveled on his stool and stood up. Laid some ones on the bar to pay for the beer he’d only sampled.

“Thought you were gonna hang around,” she said.

“Changed my mind. Work to do.”

“Don’t mention to anyone at Burnair and Crosley you saw me here, okay?”

“Sure. There’s not much chance I’d run into someone from there anyway.”

“Well, you never know.”

“I’m trying to change that.”

“Fred!” she called, as he was leaving. When he turned around she was smiling at him.

“You scare me, too,” she said.

He returned to the shoe store doorway across Gull and waited less then five minutes before Maggie came out of Shellie’s, blinked at the sunshine, then strode to her car.

She was walking a straight line and didn’t seem the least bit drunk. Maybe she’d been scared sober.

She was carrying the briefcase.

He hurried to the Olds and climbed in and followed her, first to the Florida Federal Bank of Del Moray on Blue Heron Drive, then to Burnair and Crosley.