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“You didn’t answer my question, fuckface.”

“I thought you said police business.”

McGregor brushed glass fragments off the chair by the desk and sat down. Draped one long, long leg over the other. There were deep creases behind the knees of his cheap brown suit. Lint and dandruff littered the shoulders. Suit needed to go in for its yearly cleaning. He said, “Okay, you know the guy that got blown up?”

Carver trusted McGregor about as far as he’d trust Charles Manson with a badge. The lieutenant often worked outside the police department and outside the law itself in his pursuit of personal glory, wealth, and promotion. It had led to his dismissal from the Fort Lauderdale police, but he’d come north to Del Moray and quickly lied and cheated his way up the ranks in that small department.

“I knew him,” Carver said. He leaned into his cane and stood up. Limped idly around the office, extending his bad leg out in front of him now and then, with the heel on the floor, and doing a kind of cane-supported deep knee-bend to pick up things from the carpet. A file folder. The ashtray. The third thing he picked up was the Japanese-made combination phone, answering machine, recorder, and Dictaphone. As he did so, he pressed the record button. Casually placed the machine on the desk corner with the built-in mike aimed at McGregor. Lifted a nine-inch shard of window glass and tossed it over near the upended wastebasket. Just tidying up. The conversation in the office would be recorded now, without McGregor’s knowledge.

“So go on, tell me about it,” McGregor said. “Gonna make like a shy talk-show guest and force me to drag every answer outa you?”

“His name was Bert Renway. He came here to hire me.”

“That figures. Guy musta been a loser from the get-go. Everything in that car’s been burned or melted, so you’re the main source of information. Don’t lie or hold anything back, Carver. This is a murder investigation.”

“Maybe the car exploded by itself. Gas fumes.”

“Don’t give me your coy act. First thing I smelled when I drove up was cooked meat. Second thing was cordite from a blasting-powder charge. It was TNT or something sent your client on his way, not super unleaded.”

Carver knew McGregor was right—this was a murder investigation and no time to play cute. Not unless he had some other occupation in mind. Which he didn’t; he had a love-hate relationship with investigative work.

He sat back down behind the desk and told McGregor every detail of Renway’s visit.

When Carver was finished, McGregor sat rubbing his thumb along the side of his long jaw. He said, “You and I both know the likely reasons somebody’d hire some fool to take over an apartment and car.”

Carver said, “I was gonna approach it from that angle.”

McGregor’s close-set, beady eyes took on an intense look. Carver had seen that expression before. The lieutenant was thinking hard, turning it all over in his mind, figuring how to use to best advantage what he’d just heard.

Then he smiled, poking the pink tip of his tongue through the space between his front teeth. It lent him a thoroughly evil, lascivious air that perfectly matched his character. He said, “Fort Lauderdale, huh? I got no use for any of the worthless fartbrains in that department.”

“They feel the same way about you,” Carver said. “Difference is, they’re right.”

“The murder happened right here in Del Moray,” McGregor said thoughtfully. “You’ve fulfilled your professional obligation and informed the police of what you know. From now on, I think you better keep the story to yourself. So it’ll be just between the two of us.”

One part of Carver couldn’t believe it. The other wasn’t surprised. He’d seen too much of McGregor to assume limits on his deviousness or unethical behavior. Where ethics should be, McGregor had a vacuum.

Carver said loudly, so the recorder would be sure to pick it up, “You mean you’re not going to tell the Fort Lauderdale police about Renway living in Wesley’s apartment? Getting blown up in Wesley’s car?”

“This is a Del Moray matter,” McGregor said. “We’ll see what the Fort Lauderdale police find out for themselves. See how they play this thing. See if
they
share with
us
.”

“You sound like a schoolkid arguing on the playground over whose turn it is to be It.”

“
It
was Renway, and if he could, he’d tell you we ain’t playing schoolyard games.” He slumped his lanky frame to the side. His suitcoat fell open to reveal a wrinkled lining, a brown leather shoulder holster, and the checked butt of a Police Special. “Maybe now it’s your turn to be It, Carver. You say this Renway gave you two thousand dollars?”

“That’s right.”

“So you’ve been officially hired. Bought and paid for.”

“Thing is,” Carver said, “my client’s dead.”

“You still better do what you were hired for,” McGregor said. “Go to Fort Lauderdale and figure out what the Wesley impersonation’s all about. Let me know what’s going on, but don’t let anyone else in on it. Not even anybody in the Del Moray department. Our little secret. Ain’t it deliciously fun?”

“No.”

“But ain’t you curious?”

“Yeah,” Carver had to admit. He knew he’d have gone to Fort Lauderdale even if McGregor hadn’t suggested it. The police wouldn’t think kindly of a private investigator mucking around in an open case, but McGregor was solving that problem. The police were requesting Carver’s help, and it was all on tape. Carver decided to put up some resistance anyway, for the recorder. The reluctant virgin. “Being curious doesn’t mean I’m on my way to Lauderdale.”

McGregor began making obscure but unmistakable threats about pulling strings and having Carver’s investigator’s license revoked if he didn’t cooperate. Carver tuned him out and let him talk in the direction of the microphone. McGregor was right, this was fun.

“I dunno,” Carver said, stringing him along, “this is an open case. I can wind up in the wringer.”

“You’re in the wringer now,” McGregor said. “Balls and all.” He leaned forward and smiled with all the earnestness of a Yugo salesman. “Listen, Carver, we both know this smells like something big and important. The kinda thing where there’d be plenty of credit to spread around if we broke it. Fame and money for you, and a career maker for me. Be fucking captain someday.”

“Another way for you to make captain again might be old-fashioned good police work.”

“Screw good police work. Sticking parking tickets under windshield wipers, standing and waving traffic through on streetcorners too hot to touch, peeling dead winos off the sidewalks—
that’s
good police work. If you’d stayed with the Orlando department instead of pulling a dumb-ass stunt like getting your knee shot away doing good police work, you wouldn’t’ve gone higher than patrolman. It’s ’cause of the way you think. Way you see the world. Like you got some kinda mission and can’t bend with the wind. Kinda dumb hero who dies defending the bridge and then gets marched over and forgotten. Small-time shit, that’s you.”

“No way to talk to a man whose help you want.”

“Hey, it’s a two-way street, fuckhead.”

“Until you decide to put up a new sign.”

“I’m not asking you to cut off your dick, Carver. And this way you keep your client’s two grand instead of it gets confiscated for evidence. Use it to cover expenses in Fort Lauderdale. Figure out what’s happening down there and keep me tuned in. We’ll be the kinda goddamn heroes that collect medals, we play this right.”

“Let me think about it.”

McGregor snorted and looked disgusted. “It ain’t like you got a choice, Carver. Not a real one, anyway. I gotta know now, or I got no recourse but to put your story in my report. Haul you in as a suspect, maybe. Hey, why not? You were the last person to see the victim alive. You and him argued.”

“I don’t recall an argument.”

“Then why’d you tell me about it? I gotta put it in my report. Hell of an argument. Over some money you owed him, I think it was. Root of all evil, hey?”

“And I excused myself, ducked outside, and planted a bomb in his car?”

“Who’s to say you didn’t have help?” McGregor flashed his gap-toothed, Satanic grin. “You’re over a barrel, Carver. You don’t wanna get fucked, you best do as I tell you. Either you drive down to Fort Lauderdale, or you go for a drive to headquarters and log some jail time. Get muddied enough to lose the privilege of taking people’s money for uncovering dirt and screwing up their lives. Which direction you wanna travel?”

Carver pretended to think about it. Finally said, “South to Fort Lauderdale.”

“Very sensible,” McGregor said, unfolding up out of his chair to loom over the seated Carver. Guy probably hadn’t trimmed the hair in his nostrils for years. “Kinda rare for you, to be so reasonable.”

“As you pointed out, I don’t have much choice.”

McGregor grinned and took two long strides to the door. Paused and said, “Keep in touch, assface. Don’t forget that part of our arrangement.”

“You’ll know what I know,” Carver said, in the mood to be agreeable. He wanted McGregor to leave as soon as possible, before the combined odors of cheap cologne and scorched flesh became too much for his stomach.

“
When
you know it,” McGregor added, and ambled out the door, swinging his long arms wide.

Carver waited a few minutes, then pressed rewind on the machine to make sure the conversation was recorded. He could put the cassette in his safe-deposit box, conduct the investigation his way, and tell McGregor to go fuck himself if push came to shove. Serve the dumb yahoo right for not keeping up with Japanese technology.

Something was wrong. The tape wasn’t rewinding.

Carver flipped open the machine’s plastic lid and saw that there was nothing to rewind; the tape hadn’t moved. The green “Power On” light wasn’t glowing. He lifted the receiver and heard no dial tone. Jiggled the cradle button up and down. Nothing.

He punched every button on the complex control panel. No result. The circuitry was dead.

The machine’s contact with the floor had broken something in its delicate, microchip-stuffed interior. Damn the Japanese.

S
OFT. WARM
.

Carver was aware of Edwina kissing him on the lips. He sat up in bed and saw she was fully dressed, even carrying her blue vinyl attaché case, smiling down at him. On her way to turn real estate.

She said, “You overslept.”

“I was tired,” Carver said. “Bomb going off nearby made me exhausted.”

“Guess it would.”

He had an erection. “Sure you have to leave right away?”

Something in her gray eyes; she wanted to stay. “ ’Fraid I do. I have an appointment to show a condo.”

“Can’t you be half an hour late?”

“It’s beachfront property.”

Ah! Big commission. Not that it was the money that primarily motivated Edwina; this was her game, the symbolic and real means to her independence after her divorce and then a crushing love affair with a man now deservedly dead. She didn’t trust Carver completely. He didn’t trust her. He’d gone through a hellish marriage and divorce himself. His ex-wife Laura and their seven-year-old daughter Ann lived in St. Louis. In a way, that was worse for him than if they didn’t exist. In a way.

Edwina bent down again. Kissed him lightly on the forehead this time. She smelled like roses. Fresh shampoo and perfume. She had on her gray pin-striped blazer and matching skirt. Dark hose and black high heels. It was real-estate biz this morning, all right. She smiled again, as if kissing him brought that on automatically. Gave a kind of shrug and said, “Sorry, but I have to go. Will you be here this afternoon?”

“No. Gotta drive to Fort Lauderdale.” When she’d come home late last night, he’d told her everything about yesterday. Let it all flow from him, and then he could finally relax. “One stop I have to make first.”

“Bert Renway’s mobile home?”

She was ahead of him. “That’s right.”

“Why do you think he was hired to impersonate Wesley?”

The why of it was something they hadn’t discussed last night. Carver had been too tired to talk for very long. She’d urged him to forget the day, to sleep. To blot out everything and think about it again when he was rested. Good advice. Irresistible, coming from Edwina. Much about her was irresistible.

He fluffed his pillow against the headboard, sat up straighter, and leaned heavily back into it. The maneuver brought him eye-level with a shaft of morning light spearing through the gap in the drapes. Made his head pound. “My guess is that Renway fit Wesley’s general description close enough so that whoever was hired to watch Wesley would be lured into tailing Renway. Hell, why not? Wesley’s apartment, Wesley’s car, even some of Wesley’s clothes.”

“So the idea was that Wesley knew someone was out to kill him and arranged to have Renway murdered in his place?”

“Not necessarily,” Carver said. “It might have been nothing more than a setup that’d allow Wesley freedom to do what he wanted while his watchers were wasting their time following Renway.”

“Isn’t there some law against that?” Edwina asked.

“Not as long as everybody knew where they stood and Wesley wasn’t doing anything illegal. Renway was playing a role for pay. Like an actor.”

“His first and final role,” she said.

“Turned out that way, poor bastard. He didn’t know the script or all the players. Or the danger. Maybe, for that matter, neither did Wesley.”

Her lips parted, then she pressed them shut; her pink lipstick seemed to bond like glue. She’d been about to ask him to be careful, but had thought better of it. Their love for each other was obsessive and they both knew it. Two obsessive personalities. She about whatever real-estate deal she was working to close, he about whatever case he was on. They needed to be that way. It was their oxygen.

The air conditioner clicked on and sent a wave of cool air flowing across the room. Felt good on Carver’s bare chest.

He said, “If you need to get in touch, I’ll be at the Carib Terrace.”

She said, “I’ll need to get in touch,” and swayed from the bedroom. She had the most elegant walk Carver had ever seen; maybe he was especially awed by it because of his lameness. Even her long auburn hair, swinging gently in syncopation with her hips, was mesmerizing. When she was gone the room felt larger and emptier.