Scorcher (8 page)

“Are there any other family members I haven’t met?” he asked.

“Joel,” Nadine told him.

“Not yet,” Elana said tightly. She was wiping her hands on the robe again, extending her wrinkled, lean fingers rigidly. Her brown-spotted arms and backs of her hands were the clues to her age. Still, she was innately lovely, as if it were her birthright. There were women like that, though Carver had only known a few. What had she been thirty years ago?

“I’m not feeling quite right,” she said.

Adam Kave was on his feet instantly. Time to tend to his treasure. “Why don’t you go to your room and lie down, Elana?”

She nodded. Her face was suddenly very pale. Her pained, parting glance took in Carver. Without speaking, she turned and hurried out the door.

“My wife’s ill,” Adam said. He said it in a way that discouraged any further inquiry by Carver. “In the past year she’s become more and more reclusive. And now Paul . . .”

Nadine
slip-slapped
to the window in her sandals, turned and padded close to Carver. Challenge time again. “And as you can gather,” she said, “my mother’s less than enthusiastic about me marrying Joel. Not that it will stop us.”

Carver decided not to try to stop them either.

“Joel Dewitt,” Adam explained. “He’s a car dealer in Fort Lauderdale who’s just asked Nadine to marry him.” Kave didn’t seem to have any strong pro or con opinion about the upcoming nuptials. Maybe he was one of those wise ones who didn’t worry about what they couldn’t change.

“Why doesn’t your mother like Dewitt?” Carver asked Nadine.

“You’d have to ask her, but it wouldn’t do you any good. Elana has never come out with a direct answer to that question. Because she doesn’t have one.”

“So there’s Dewitt,” Carver said, as if making mental notes. “Not yet a family member, but almost.”

“And there’s Emmett,” Nadine said.

“We don’t usually talk of Emmett in this house, Mr. Carver. He’s my older brother. I wish he weren’t. We haven’t gotten along for years.”

“But Paul and Emmett got along,” Nadine said, “when Paul was younger. I don’t think they’ve seen each other for a while. Emmett lives in Kissimmee.” Kissimmee was a small town in central Florida, less than two hundred miles from the Fort Lauderdale area, but only a matter of a few hours or so on Florida’s Turnpike, where it seemed everyone drove over seventy.

“Paul have any close friends he might contact?” Carver asked.

“None, I’m afraid,” Adam said glumly. “The boy’s always played the loner.”

“I’d like to see Paul’s lab,” Carver said, standing up out of the soft leather sofa and leaning on his cane.

“I’ll go out to the lab with you,” Adam said, standing also. “There are some things I’d like to tell you privately.”

He started for a door at the far end of the room, walking fast. Was he doing that deliberately?

Carver limped after him, twisting his body to glance back and catch Nadine’s reaction to being shut out of the conversation.

But Nadine was already striding from the room, her thighs and buttocks working powerfully beneath the silky white slacks.

Carver followed Adam Kave out past a veranda and a large, screened swimming pool, along a path lined with junglelike foliage and the perfumed scent of blossoms, toward a garage the size of an average house.

The rolling surf sighed louder as they made their way in the direction of the sea. A gull screamed and a private helicopter thrashed its way across the blue sky above the sun-touched ocean. In the shade of the palm fronds, Carver felt sheltered and temporarily at peace.

He wondered what it would be like to grow up in a place like this. His own childhood had been lower middle class, with a father probably not much more sensitive to his youth and yearnings than Adam seemed to have been toward Paul’s. What had it been like here for Paul? It would help Carver to get a feel for that, to learn how to think like Paul—if such a thing was possible.

“This is a rough time for us,” Adam Kave said in his gravelly voice. “I can’t tell you how much we appreciate your kindness and help, Mr. Carver. Are you a religious man?”

“No, there’s too much of that in Florida.”

“Well, I go to church regularly, and somehow God seems to supply what’s needed in crises like this.”

Carver didn’t answer as he followed Kave along the winding stone path toward bright sunlight and blue sky and ocean.

For an uneasy moment he felt like the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Putting another one over on Adam.

A
STEEP EXTERIOR FLIGHT
of white steel stairs rose like a prehistoric, fleshless spinal column in a museum, to a landing and the top floor of the gray stucco carriage house. Carver could think of the carriage house only as a garage with a room over it. His plebeian background showing. The stucco was cracked and sloppily patched here and there, and grasping green vines had made it halfway up the wall beneath the stairs. He supposed whoever tended the grounds regarded the vines as ornamental; long nails had been driven into the stucco to aid the green tendrils on their upward quest. The nails were rusty, the higher ones waiting patiently for the vines to reach them before metal crumbled in the salt sea air.

Adam Kave stood aside and let Carver take the steps first with the cane. Carver could feel the presence of Kave close behind him as he climbed, as if Adam were telling him he wished they could go faster. The hard walnut cane made hollow clanking sounds on the steel.

On the landing, Adam edged around Carver, unlocked a heavy wooden door, and pushed it open. Heat and silence rolled out. Carver limped inside the lab.

It was dim; only minimal light filtered in through curtains pulled closed over narrow windows. Dust swirled in diffused sunbeams. A fly droned through the dappled light. Carver expected the acrid scent of chemicals, but the air was stale and musty and smelled like attics everywhere. He remembered the heat and buzzing beneath the eaves of his father’s house, decades ago.

He heard the click of a wall switch, and an overhead fluorescent fixture sent out intermittent signals of pale, flickering light, then fought its way to steadiness.

Adam examined his hand as if the switch might have soiled his forefinger. “Paul wasn’t one to keep this place clean,” he said, “and he’d never let the maid from town come in here. It was his refuge from his problems, I suppose.”

Partitioning walls had been removed so that the area above the garage was one large room. The floor was unfinished plank. The plumbing that had served bath and kitchenette was extended in copper pipe to the dry-walled ceiling and run to the east wall, then down to a long sink and workbench. Brown-tinted vials lined a shelf above the workbench. A crudely drawn skull-and-crossbones poison warning on lined notepaper was taped to the edge of the shelf. On the bench sat a Bunsen burner, an expensive and elaborate microscope, a series of glass beakers and slides, and an opened and apparently empty Pepsi can. There was a cot against the opposite wall, and near it a bentwood chair on which was piled diving equipment: swim fins, a snorkel, and what looked like the wadded top of a black rubber wetsuit. The only other evidence of Paul’s interest in the ocean was a large aquarium tank, empty, with colored pebbles and a miniature chambered castle on the bottom. There seemed to be dust over everything, as if no one had been in the place for a while, but that could be deceptive. An ancient air-conditioner was mounted in one of the windows. The sloping ceiling was insulated, but it was getting uncomfortable in the crude lab, and Carver felt like limping over and switching on the unit.

“The police spent considerable time up here,” Adam said. “They removed a few items. I’m not sure what.”

Carver nodded. He thumped across the floor with his cane and examined the chemical vials on the long shelf. He discerned nothing from the polysyllabic Latin labels. A brilliant teen-age boy might have learned to concoct anything from explosives to aphrodisiacs with the stuff. “Did Paul spend a lot of time here?”

“I don’t think he did in the past year or so,” Adam said, “though I couldn’t swear to it. He was increasingly fond of swimming, of the ocean and the creatures in it, and that took up most of his time. Now and then he’d come up here to closely examine something he’d found in the sea, but he wouldn’t spend days at a stretch here alone as he did when he was a boy.”

“He ever share the things he found? I mean, talk about them with friends or family?”

“No.”

“Not even Nadine?”

“Possibly Nadine.”

Carver looked at the cot, with its light blanket and sheet folded at its foot. “Looks as if he slept up here sometimes.”

“Maybe he did. I never kept that close a watch on his activities. Though Adam’s Inns has a national vice-president as well as district managers, I oversee my business from here, from an office in the house, Mr. Carver. I spend a great deal of time on the phone. If you accused me of neglecting Paul, I wouldn’t deny it. At the same time, the boy’s gone out of his way to cause quite a bit of trouble.”

Adam was talking as if burning people were merely another of his son’s boyhood peccadilloes. And maybe he figured to use his influence so the resultant punishment turned out to be on a par with the consequences of wrecking one of the family Porsches. It was easy to forget, standing here in the stifling garage laboratory, the extent of Kave’s wealth and power. What was a little thing like homicide between friends with money and clout? Carver had seen it before; it made him nauseated. He felt that way now, standing there in the heat.

“I’d like to see Paul’s room,” he said.

“Sure.” Adam stepped aside again so Carver could cross to the door and negotiate the steel landing and stairs first.

The outside air felt cool to Carver, though the temperature was pushing ninety. He heard the light switch click off as he balanced himself between cane and handrail and started down the steep steps.

At the bottom of the stairs, he glanced in a window as he waited for Adam to finish locking up and join him. No Porsches. The garage had several windows, so there was enough light to see a late-model gray Cadillac, a low-slung red Datsun sports car, and a white Chevrolet sedan. There was plenty of room for more cars. Or a tea or a coming-out party.

“The police impounded Paul’s Lincoln,” Adam said, clanging down the stairs on his two good legs and noticing Carver’s interest in the garage’s interior.

“Yeah, I was told.” Carver probed with the tip of his cane until he found a hard spot in the sandy earth and moved away from the window.

“Do you know Lieutenant McGregor well?”

“We’re old friends,” Carver said, and walked ahead of Adam back along the winding stone path to the house. The sweet scent of the flowers was cloying and added to his nausea.

Paul might not be the model of neatness in his lab, but his room looked like the executive suite of a plush hotel just before check-in time. The king-size bed was made up with the spread tucked in at the corners. Other than some oceanography magazines neatly fanned on a low table, there were no incidental objects on the dresser or writing desk. On the wall by the desk hung a large, framed, underwater color photo of what looked like a manta ray lurking among gracefully swaying, colorful undersea foliage while a school of small, bright fish swam past. There was something distinctly ominous about the enlarged print.

“Did Paul do underwater photography?” Carver asked.

Adam shrugged his blocky shoulders in an I-don’t-know gesture. Paul hadn’t been of much concern to him until lately. He didn’t know much about his son the murderer.

Carver snooped around but found no camera. He limped over to the closet, lifting the cane high between steps in the deep-pile blue carpet. He slid open one of the heavy mirrored doors. It glided smoothly and made a politely soft rumble on its rollers.

There were more clothes in there than Carver had owned in the past ten years. Most of them were casual: blue jeans and pullover shirts. Dozens of shoes of all kinds. The jackets, slacks, and suits were light-colored and conservative. Paul’s taste ran to blues and grays. On the closet’s top shelf were two stacks of more oceanography magazines, bound tightly with thick dark twine.

“He take any clothes with him when he disappeared?” Carver asked.

“We’re not sure. If he did take time to pack, he left much of his wardrobe behind.”

“What about money?”

“Paul had his own bank account. As you no doubt know from the police, he withdrew several thousand dollars from his savings the day of his disappearance.”

Carver hadn’t known; he’d have to check with McGregor about things like that, remind the lieutenant that knowledge about Paul Kave was supposed to flow both ways.

“Paul left in his own Lincoln,” Carver said, and paused for confirmation or denial.

“Yes. Paul was in love with that car. It’s a beauty. The police found it abandoned in Fort Lauderdale. I don’t imagine we’ll see it for a while, the police being what they are. I suppose Paul had no choice but to leave it somewhere, under the circumstances.” Adam seemed almost more upset over the temporary loss of the Lincoln than the likely permanent loss of Paul. Priorities. It was Paul who concerned Carver, though not in the way Adam Kave had been led to believe.

“Anyone see him leave?”

“No. Nadine must have been out with Joel Dewitt. I was engrossed in business most of that evening—our new barbecue-sauerkraut hot dog.”

Yee-uk! Carver thought.

“And Elana was in her room as usual,” Adam went on. He set his jaw muscles quivering and stared hard at Carver with his intense magnified dark eyes. “There’s, uh, something you should know about Elana, Carver. It will make you realize why I’m hiring you, and why she shouldn’t be burdened with any . . . negative information you uncover.”

Carver leaned with both hands on his cane and waited.

“My wife is terminally ill with cancer of the spleen. She won’t live more than another year. The strain of what’s happened might cut short even that small amount of time she has left. That’s why I want this situation resolved and left behind us as quickly as possible. I want every precious, irreplaceable moment of life for her—for us. I want Paul found.”