Scorcher (6 page)

A new gray Pontiac swung in ahead of Carver’s Oldsmobile and parked on the highway shoulder. A very tall, stooped man got out and trudged back toward the Olds. He wasn’t wearing a coat, and his wrinkled tan suit was getting water-spotted from the rain off the ocean. He walked slowly to the driver’s side of the Olds, as if it weren’t raining on him. He seemed too preoccupied to care about mere moisture.

Carver cranked the window all the way down and felt cool drops on his face.

He wasn’t surprised when the man fished a Fort Lauderdale police lieutenant’s shield from a pocket and said, “Mind if I come in?”

Carver rolled up the window and leaned over to unlock the passenger-side door. He watched the tall man walk around the front of the car, estimating his height at maybe six-foot-six. Though he was thin, almost skinny, there was an unmistakable strength in the coiled, controlled way he moved. Pro basketball centers moved like that.

“I’m McGregor,” the man said, as he lowered himself next to Carver in the Olds and slammed the door closed. He gave off a mingled, musty scent of wet clothing and cheap, perfumy cologne. “You’re Fred Carver.” He said this as if there might be some doubt in Carver’s mind as to his own identity. “Gray day, huh?”

“It just got grayer.”

“Still damned hot, though. But I guess that’s what you can expect this time of year. And the sun’ll be banging down on us again within an hour, I’d bet. Fuckin’ steambath!”

Carver wasn’t in the mood for diversion. He stared out at the dull gray ocean churned into whitecaps by the wind, then he looked directly over at McGregor. McGregor’s name suggested Scottish ancestry, but he looked Swedish. Ruddy, rawboned, lantern-jawed. Straight, lank hair so blond it was almost white. Pale blue eyes, set too close together. He had to bow his head slightly to keep it from bumping the canvas roof. There was something about him that suggested he could be mean. “How did you figure out I was here?” Carver asked.

“Didn’t figure. Desoto told me.” McGregor felt like getting to the point now himself. “That envelope and matchbook told us nothing except that whoever handled them last wore gloves. Cheap envelope that can’t be traced, and addressed with an IBM Selectric typewriter. They’re selling a couple of million of those even while we sit here and chat.”

“And maybe right now the guy who killed my son is killing somebody else’s.”

“Maybe. But we on the Lauderdale force haven’t exactly been standing around with our thumbs up our respective asses.”

“What
have
you been doing?”

“You know the answer to that; you used to be a cop. And a good one, according to Desoto, and he oughta know. He’s an old friend of mine. Solid guy.”

“He never mentioned you.”

“I hardly ever mention him.” McGregor lit a cigarette without asking if Carver minded. The car hazed up with smoke; the windshield fogged near the top. “How long you been sitting here?” he asked.

“Awhile.”

“Looking for a white-over-blue Lincoln?”

“Yeah. I haven’t seen it.”

“You won’t. We impounded it last night.”

Carver’s stomach knotted and he hit the steering wheel hard with his fist. Pain jolted up his arm and left the heel of his hand tingling. The blow made a dull, reverberating sound. “God damn it, why didn’t somebody tell me?”

“Say again?”

“I’m a victim’s father! I should have been told!”

“We don’t generally run out and notify vigilantes whenever there’s a development. That’s what you are, Carver, fuckin’ John Wayne movie walkin’. You’re on a lone-avenger trip, and that’s not good. I won’t allow it.”

“Desoto told me you were an asshole.”

“Naw. Not my old buddy. You’re making that up.” Mc­Gregor cranked down the window all the way and flicked the cigarette away. The rain had stopped. The palm trees that had been whipping around were still now. He left the window down. Warm, fresh air pushed into the car.

“I need to know who owns the Lincoln,” Carver said.

McGregor shook his head slowly, patiently. “What you need to know, Carver, what is essential, is that I
am
an asshole. I’m not your usual cop—not by half. Like you, I want to catch the garbage that burned your son. I want him to pay. Not as much as you do, I grant you.” The wide jaw set and muscles played in front of McGregor’s oversized, protruding ears. “But I want the bastard. Oh, I do!”

“Let me guess,” Carver said. “There’s a promotion in it if you make the collar on this one? Maybe catapult you all the way to captain?”

“Could be that’s part of it. Could be I don’t think an animal like that has a right to walk around and breathe in and out like decent citizens. It bothers me, I guess more than it should. I’m just like you, only it doesn’t have to be my son. I’m stuck with a strong moral sense; that’s why I’m a cop. But it doesn’t mean diddly shit to me whether you believe me. The proposition is the same.”

“Proposition?”

“The owner of the blue Lincoln is a guy named Paul Kave,” McGregor said. “His address is on Route A1A in Hillsboro Beach.”

“Millionaire’s Mile,” Carver said. That was what Floridians called the area.

And suddenly Carver was afraid and angry. The stretch of beach property in Hillsboro was among the most expensive in Florida. Luxury estates and condominiums with water views front and back—the Atlantic to the east, the Intracoastal Waterway to the west. Money was involved here, all right. Major money. The man who’d killed Chipper was rich. Carver knew what that meant. He told himself grimly that no battery of high-priced lawyers was going to save this killer.

“Paul Kave is the son of Adam Kave,” McGregor said, as if that meant a great deal and Carver should know it and be impressed.

“Is he one of our U.S. senators?” Carver asked. “Or a Disney World founding father? I don’t keep up on things like that.”

“You ever hear of Adam’s Inns, one of those rare times something outside your own experience touches you?”

“Sure.” The fast-food restaurants, featuring hot dogs served in various fashion, were in practically every shopping mall in the South.

“Adam Kave owns them,” McGregor said. “All of them except a few sold off for franchises. Paul Kave is his only son. There was a scuba air tank in the trunk of the Lincoln; it contained traces of naphtha. Paul Kave is an amateur chemist with a lab in his parents’ home. And he’s a skin-diving enthusiast. The kid has an I.Q. over a hundred and forty, but he’s got a history of schizophrenia with paranoid delusions. His mother says he’s been under treatment off and on since he was fifteen. He’s twenty now. He’s also disappeared. Hasn’t been home for two days. He fits like a Florsheim shoe, Carver. He killed your son and he’s running.”

“Is this proposition going to involve me backing off while Kave gives himself up and gets a wrist-slap sentence from a bought judge?”

“No, it involves finding him. Desoto says I can’t talk you out of your vendetta, and I believe him. So I’m gonna channel all that hate, Carver. I want you to go to the Kave family, tell them what kind of work you do, and give them some bullshit story about wanting the killing to end, since you lost your own son in a holdup shooting. They won’t connect you with your real son’s murder because his name appeared in the papers and on television as Montaigne. Tell the family you know how they feel and you sympathize with them, and you want to help find Paul before the police get to him and harm him. You know he’s ill. Tell them the odds are good that the police will kill Paul rather than arrest him. They’ll buy it and hire you; I sort of laid the groundwork.”

Carver sat silently for a while, watching the waves, calmer now, roll in and break in layers of surging foam beyond the palm trees. He could hear the surf pulling on the beach. What McGregor was suggesting, cultivating and then betraying a killer’s family, turned the pure white heat of Carver’s obsession for revenge into something tainted.

“I don’t like it,” he said finally. “It doesn’t set level. It makes me feel dirty.”

“So feel dirty. You want your son’s killer, don’t you? Any way you can nail him?”

Carver squeezed the steering wheel and stared straight ahead.

“I got my neck stuck out a mile and a half on this,” Mc­Gregor said. “Taking what you’d call a career gamble.”

“Desoto must have told you how good I am,” Carver said. “The odds are in your favor.”

“You aren’t so good I’m gonna let you go mucking around in an active homicide case on your terms. That’s impeding justice. I’ll fall on you like something very heavy from very high up.”

“I know how to stay legal.”

“Oh, really? I’m kinda like the Supreme Court, Carver. Sometimes I interpret the law any which way.”

“Maybe you oughta just enforce the law instead of trying to turn the screws on me.”

“This is the way to get Paul Kave,” McGregor said. “Listen, I saw your son at the morgue. Holy Christ, I don’t see how you can even sleep nights much less be thinking twice about what I’m proposing. I mean, I’m handing you what you claim you want. I’m fuckin’ turning you loose, tough guy.”

“I like to work in my own way.”

“I thought this
was
your way. Doing what you had to so you could wring out some justice for a change. Not enough goddamned justice in this society and you know it.”

“I know it,” Carver said.

“And now you back away.” McGregor spat dryly, disdainfully, with his upper lip curled over an eyetooth. It was a dandy expression of contempt and one Carver imagined the big man had practiced to make perfect and used in tough interrogations.

McGregor worked the chrome door handle, about to get out of the car. The musty cologne scent got stronger with his sudden movement.

“Wait a minute,” Carver said. “There’s one thing we haven’t talked about.”

Twisting his long body back toward Carver, McGregor arched a blond eyebrow. “What’s that?”

“If I find him, I get him. I don’t want to see his money make things light for him. You, personally, can have credit for bagging him. But later. When I’m finished with him. I’ll fade out of the scene.”

“Jesus, Carver, you’re asking a lot.”

“You’ve got a lot to gain by giving it to me.”

McGregor made a fist with one hand and massaged its massive knuckles with the other. “It’s gotta be miles, miles off the record,” he said, “like the rest of this conversation. I mean, I never told you any of this.”

“How could you? We haven’t met.”

McGregor smiled. It made his eyes seem tiny and cruel. There was a wide gap between his teeth and his breath smelled sour. Carver didn’t like the idea of having him as a co-conspirator, but there it was.

“So we got an agreement,” McGregor said. “The kid’s yours.”

He climbed out of the car and slogged back to the Pontiac, his boat-size shoes sloshing rainwater in his wake.

Carver sat and watched him drive away, then reached forward and twisted the ignition key.

T
HE
K
AVE ESTATE
on A1A could barely be seen from the road as a glimpse of bright red tile roof through the trees. Carver waited for a break in the passing Lincolns and Cadillacs, then turned the Olds sharply into the graveled entrance.

McGregor had indeed laid the groundwork for Carver’s visit. When he identified himself over the intercom at the gate, a male voice immediately instructed him to drive through.

It wasn’t a gate, really; it was a drop barrier of the type used at railroad crossings, only smaller. The black-and-white-striped, tapered length of lumber rose smoothly to allow the Olds to pass, then automatically settled back into place behind it. Made Carver feel like a locomotive engineer.

He tapped the accelerator, and continued up the gently sloping, winding drive toward the red roof and now a section of stark-white stucco wall. The top was down on the Olds and the sun was just beginning to get serious about making misery, and over the rumble of the car’s big V-8 engine he could hear the rush and sigh of the ocean beyond the house.

The grounds abruptly became immaculately tended: neatly trimmed hedges; colorful yet controlled explosions of lush bougainvillea; healthy-looking, precisely placed palm trees with symmetrical white stripes about their trunks; deep-green grass of uniform height and at erect attention. A lizard, green as the grass and primitive as the Mesozoic age, struck a travel-poster pose on a nearby tree trunk, as if it had been bribed by the gardener. Carver felt like the only flawed object on the grounds. He paused and let the engine idle as he took in the house. Sat feeling the vibration of the powerful car.

The house was two stories and rambling, all white stucco and black wood trim and fancy wrought iron. Spanish architecture, with rough-hewn cedar arches and decorative rails. Red shutters and red front double doors matched the vivid color of the tile roof. The driveway curved to run beneath a wide portico from the ceiling of which dangled a heavy iron-and-stained-glass Spanish-style light fixture.

To his left, Carver saw a path winding to wooden steps that led down to the beach and blue-white rolling surf and a boat-house and dock. A white-and-brown pleasure boat—a forty-foot Gulf star with a flying bridge—bobbed gently at the dock. The private beach was wide, and the sand was clean and flawless except where the sea had washed in some globs of oil from passing ships, along with dark tangles of kelp. The place made Carver wish he were rich.

He parked the Olds in the black shade of the portico and struggled out with his cane.

As soon as he slammed the car door one of the tall red front doors opened and a sturdily built man of medium height well into his sixties stepped outside. He was wearing dark slacks and a gray silk short-sleeved shirt buttoned halfway up. Casual but unmistakably expensive. His straight, black but graying hair was brushed back as if he were facing a stiff wind. Silver-rimmed squarish glasses magnified his intense dark eyes and made him look as if he’d never blink, even if you touched his pupil with a pencil point. Around the loosening flesh of his thick neck hung a glinting gold chain that lost itself in the gray mat of hair on his chest. He had prominent cheekbones and very thin lips, and a wide, square jaw that looked capable of cracking walnuts.