Burn (21 page)

“Or Atlantis,” Carver said.

“Your friend in Miami, Lloyd Van Meter, is plenty pissed about Spotto being killed. He’s leaning on us for action.”

“He’s probably frustrated. He has contacts outside the regular lanes of law enforcement, and apparently he’s had the same luck as you when it comes to finding anything on the goon who worked me over.” Carver thought about mentioning to Desoto that he’d glimpsed a huge motorcycle rider in his rearview mirror, but decided against it. There was probably nothing to it other than imagination and the fear that had been instilled in him when he was beaten. It would pass with time, like the pain in his ribs and his occasional headaches. “Are there any lesbian hangouts around Marla Cloy’s old apartment on Graystone?” he asked.

“Sure. The corner of Graystone and Zella. Place called Lari’s. Gays hang out there, too. Rough trade. It’s kind of a dive. We get peace disturbance calls there every month or so. Nothing serious, just misunderstandings that turn into assaults.” Desoto unclasped his hands and rested his elbows on the desk, releasing more shimmers of light. “Have you told Mc­Gregor about any of this?”

“Not yet. Maybe not ever.”

Desoto rubbed his chin, thinking it over. “Wise choice,” he said. “What’s his take on the assault in your office? He come up with any information?”

“He’d probably thank the guy who beat me, if he could find him. Which he can’t, because he’s not looking very hard if at all. His latest slant is to view me as a possible accomplice if Brant actually kills Marla Cloy.”

Carver was hoping Desoto would scoff at the idea, but he merely rubbed his chin again. Not very reassuring.

Someone knocked, then a sergeant Carver didn’t recognize entered Desoto’s office carrying a file folder beneath his arm and holding a plastic bag containing a knife. His uniform was impeccable and he wore an expression that suggested his stomach was upset and he was irritated.

“Crime marches on,” Desoto said with a smile.

Carver stood up and thanked him for his help, then left him to busy himself with his paperwork and whatever grief the sergeant had brought.

Before returning to Del Moray, he decided to drive over to Lari’s and see if Marla or Willa had been there. Their meeting that Carver had observed in the Holiday Inn lounge in Del Moray had carried no hint of romantic entanglement, and Willa had certainly been hesitant about any further public physical contact by the fountain outside her apartment building. It was possible that Willa, a religious woman whose sexual nature would almost certainly cause conflict and secrecy, would meet with Marla more openly here in a different city, where it was unlikely anyone would see them together and guess their relationship.

Lari’s was a dive that worked hard to look like one and capitalize on an outcast atmosphere. The tables were wooden and scarred, as was the long bar with its thick brass foot rail. The bar stools were red vinyl, some of them patched with black tape. An all-female band was milling about on a small stage toward the back, setting up sound equipment and tuning their instruments. There were half a dozen women at tables, singly and in pairs. Some of them cultivated the dyke look and wore items of male clothing or black shirts and studded jeans with black leather accoutrements. No one paid any attention to Carver except for one of three men seated at the bar. They all wore black T-shirts and boots and sported tattoos on their arms. The shirts were lettered
WANDERBEASTS
across the back. The man on the end glanced over at Carver with naked speculation in his eyes.

Carver fixed him with a firm, unreceptive look and clomped with his cane across the plank floor to where a male bartender with spiked brown hair and a painted-on black handlebar mustache was working a pencil on a clipboard.

Carver sat on a stool near him and waited. He noticed that the rest-room doors in Lari’s had unmistakable male and female symbols on them. Beneath the symbol with the skirt, “Womyn” was scrawled in what looked like lipstick. There was a flurry of amplified sound from the stage, a drum roll and a shrieking guitar slide, then silence.

“Be with you in a minute,” the bartender said in what might have been a feminine voice. Carver looked more carefully and decided he couldn’t be sure of the bartender’s gender. “We’re gonna be mighty busy in about an hour, and I gotta make sure we can handle the crowd.”

“Do you usually get busy around seven o’clock in here?” Carver asked.

“Yeah, but it’s gonna be super crowded tonight. It’s that band,” He motioned toward the women setting up to play. “The Wolverines. They’re great and they’re on the way up and they draw big.”

The electric guitar
ploiiinged
as one of the Wolverines fine-tuned her instrument. They favored the grunge look and were all tall, gaunt, and attractive, with straight, long blond hair. They might have been sisters from Sweden with the same consumptive disease.

Carver waited until the bartender was finished tallying figures on the paper clipped to his board, then laid the photos of Marla, Portia, and Willa on the bar. “I’m looking for my sister Marla,” he said. “She been in lately?”

The bartender glanced at the photos, then looked at him with savvy gray eyes, a young man or woman who recognized lies by instinct as well as by experience.

On the other hand, considering Lari’s reputation, and the fact that the bartender didn’t know who Carver was or what he represented, cooperation might be the wisest course. At least, cooperation within a certain range.

“She’s not my sister, actually,” Carver admitted. “But she’s a friend and I mean her no harm, and I’d like to find out if she came in here with either of these other women.”

“Marla’s moved out of town,” the bartender said. “To Miami, I think.”

Uh-huh. “What about the other women?”

“Don’t know them,” the bartender said. “And I haven’t seen Marla for a long time. Every now and then she and Gail used to come in here and drink and dance.”

Carver was silent for a few seconds while he put it together. “Gail Rogers?”

“Sure. If you knew Marla, I figured you had to know Gail.”

“Yeah. It was rough, Gail dying in the fire.”

The bartender was studying the clipboard again. “It was a sad thing. Marla seemed to go a little crazy after Gail died.”

Ploiiing!
went the guitar again, this time accompanied by a light tap on the drums. “Marla ever spend time in here with anyone other than Gail?” Carver asked.

“A few times. There was a guy she used to come in with now and then. After Gail’s death.”

“Then Marla goes both ways?”

“Both ways?”

“Is she bisexual?”

Wrong question, coming from a guy who was supposed to know Marla. The bartender was staring at him again with those savvy gray eyes. The outrageous mustache made him or her look like a riverboat gambler.

“You said she spent time in here with a man,” Carver explained.

“We all spend time in here together, you might say. There’s lots of music, laughter. You should drop by some night.” There was amusement in the gray gaze now. The game had ended and mental doors had closed.

Carver smiled. “I might if I feel like dancing,” he said, setting the tip of his cane on the floor and swiveling down off the stool.

As he made his way to the door, the Wolverine with the guitar played a short, experimental riff that trailed away to a feedback whine. The end Wanderbeast at the bar caught his eye in the mirror behind the shelved liquor bottles but this time didn’t change expression.

That made Carver feel better, but he wasn’t sure why.

“H
OW’S YOUR APPETITE?”
he asked.

Carver and Beth were having dinner at the Happy Lobster, sitting next to the long, curved window and looking out at the failing light that merged the Atlantic with the sky at the horizon.

“Voracious,” she said. She was wearing a yellow dress cut low enough to display generous cleavage and had her hair styled something like Tina Turner’s in a sultry MTV video. The effect wasn’t lost on Carver. “I’m sick sometimes in the mornings,” she said, “but by the time noon rolls around, I’m OK. In fact, physically I’ve never felt healthier.”

“Nature’s way of preparing you and your offspring for the ordeal of pregnancy and birth,” Carver said.

She smiled. “You been watching
Wild Kingdom,
Fred?”

He supposed he had sounded as if he were talking about her and their child being ready as soon as possible to move on with the herd. There were predators out there. “Have you given it more thought?” he asked.

“I guess by ‘it’ you mean the baby.”

He sipped his martini and waited.

“I’ve thought a lot about our predicament,” she said. He didn’t like her describing it as a predicament. “I still haven’t made up my mind. It isn’t easy.” She’d ordered a martini, too, then remembered her condition and changed it to iced tea. She added sugar to the tea and stirred, gazing at the miniature whirlpool she was creating as she said, “Either way I come down on this, Fred, are we gonna be OK? The two of us?”

“I think so,” he said, but he wasn’t so sure. It was something he hadn’t allowed himself to consider, and something he didn’t want to talk about. The conversation was making him uncomfortable; he felt the tug of strong currents and he feared the rocks. He told Beth about showing the photographs at lesbian bars.

“It appears now that Marla may have had an affair with her neighbor, Gail Rogers,” he concluded.

Beth stared out the window at the blue-gray vastness. “Do you suspect Marla had something to do with the fire in the apartment building that killed Gail?”

“I don’t know what to suspect. Marla’s still an enigma. That’s the problem. The way I saw her behave with Willa, then the bartender at Lari’s saying she’d frequented the place with Gail Rogers, pretty well substantiates that she’s a lesbian, or possibly bisexual. But I don’t know what it means; or if it’s relevant to her charges of harassment. I don’t even know if her sexual orientation makes it less or more likely that she’d concoct a story or have delusions about a man she doesn’t even know stalking her.”

“You can’t be sure she and Joel Brant don’t know each other in some way you haven’t discovered.”

“True. But I keep uncovering information, and none of it suggests any previous connection between the two. I can’t piece together the facts in any meaningful way.”

She tested her tea, then added more sugar. “Maybe there is no meaningful way to piece them together,” she said.

“No, I don’t accept that.”

“Oh, I know. You
can’t
accept it. Because you can’t accept that it’s a random world out there. And you won’t change, Fred. In twenty or thirty years you’ll be the old guy sitting in a corner of the retirement home trying to figure out Rubik’s Cube.”

He thought he knew where she was going. “If you’re suggesting I’m not good parent material and time’s running short, maybe you’re right.”

“No, I didn’t mean that at all.”

He didn’t believe her. Her pregnancy, in the first trimester, was tearing at their relationship already, and he felt helpless to do anything about it.

“While you were cruising alternative-lifestyle bars,” she said, “I busied myself researching Portia Brant.”

Carver used his red plastic sword to spear the olive in his martini.

“I talked to a lot of people about her,” Beth went on, “from sorority sisters to charity contacts. Almost everyone remarked on how beautiful she was.”

“No surprise there.” He popped the olive into his mouth and chewed.

“Portia had plenty of male friends and admirers, and a college love affair with a star basketball player who died in his senior year of heart failure stemming from heroin use. There were other problems no one seemed willing to talk about. Two of her college friends said it was impossible for Portia to have children because of what might have been a botched abortion.”

“The basketball player’s child?”

“No one could say for sure. Portia went on to earn her degree in economics, then wandered through Europe for a while. When she returned to the States, she went to work at Eaton and Booth in Atlanta. They’re a financial consulting and money management firm. Five years ago, Eaton and Booth were defendants in an account-churning lawsuit. They won, but legal fees and unfavorable publicity put them out of business, leaving Portia unemployed. About that time she met and married Joel Brant, and they moved to Florida. Joel somewhat regretted that they could never have children, but acquaintances say they seemed happy together. They were considering adopting and had visited an agency just before the accident. Joel stayed busy building a successful business while she became involved in fund-raising for charities.”

“That was mentioned in her obituary, but not what kind of charities.”

“There doesn’t seem to be a pattern there. I’m not questioning her motives, but it seemed to be mostly a social thing for her. She worked for everything from AIDS research to saving the manatee.”

“Balm for a guilty conscience, maybe.”

“Could be. Whatever her motives, we oughta be grateful for people like her. There was some hint that she might have been a heavy drinker. Not in public, though. A secret alcoholic, like more than a few beautiful women who only
seem
to have the world by the ass.”

Carver smiled at her, reaching across the table to touch the back of her hand. “You’re my uncontested authority on beautiful women.”

“Martini’s getting to you, Fred. Next you’ll be wanting to skip dinner.”

“A possibility.”

“Fraid not tonight. Food’s about the extent of my physical craving lately. I’ve been famished all day.”

The waiter arrived with steaming plates. Trout amandine for Carver, and a heaping and jumbled platter of boiled crab legs for Beth. The waiter asked Carver if he wanted another martini. Carver observed Beth already busy devouring her food and said that no, iced tea would be better.

When the waiter had gone, Carver said, “I’ve been replaced by crab legs.”

“It would be going too far to say that,” she assured him as she chewed.

When the waiter returned with the tea, Beth reminded him that he owed her a baked potato.