Scorcher (9 page)

“I do too, Mr. Kave. I’m sorry about your wife.”

Adam squared his shoulders in a manner that somehow made him appear helpless. He was facing a tragedy his money couldn’t buy him or Elana out of, and his iron will might as well be cardboard; it was frustrating. Carver did pity him, as well as the fragile, reclusive woman upstairs. “Do Paul and Nadine know?”

“No. Only I and Elana and the doctors.”

“Maybe it would be best if you took your wife somewhere she’s always wanted to go,” Carver said, “until this is over.”

“I suggested that,” Adam said. “She told me she wanted our lives to continue as they normally would for as long as possible. At her request, we don’t even talk about her illness.”

There was a lot this family didn’t talk about, Carver thought. He looked around again at the sterile, expensively furnished room, half expecting to see a complimentary mint on the pillow, hotel stationery on the bare desk. He glanced once more at the batlike manta ray hovering menacingly among the underwater plant life and unsuspecting fish. Management would take down the print and put up one of flowers in a vase, or of colorful food to stimulate guests’ appetites and requests for room service.

“Not much to see,” Adam said. “Just an ordinary room.”

But not that of an ordinary man, Carver thought. The Kave family itself hardly seemed ordinary. Or was there such a thing as an ordinary family?

“Do you have a good photo of Paul I can have?”

Adam nodded. He pulled a snapshot from his shirt pocket and handed it to Carver. “I anticipated your request.”

Carver studied the likeness of a young blond man who had oddly dreamy eyes and a trace of the strong Kave jaw, wearing jeans and a light jacket and standing hands-on-hips near a large, round boulder. He tried to fathom the meaning in those eyes and the set of the features, as if he might sense the mechanism of thought from nothing but a photograph. Then he gave up. He thanked Adam and slipped the snapshot into his own pocket.

“He’s a good-looking boy,” Adam said. “Better-looking than in those fuzzy old newspaper photos.”

The
Del Moray Gazette-Dispatch
had run a copy of Paul’s high-school yearbook photograph. It had indeed been so fuzzy that Carver had stared at it and decided it might be of any high-school student. It hadn’t looked much like the face in the current snapshot. “I can see family resemblance,” Carver said, thinking he should comment. Polite thing to do.

As they were leaving Paul’s room, Carver said, “Why does your wife object so strongly to Nadine’s marriage to this Joel Dewitt?”

“She seems unwilling to pinpoint her reasons,” Adam answered. “My guess is she thinks Joel’s dishonest.”

“Why would she? There are honest car dealers.”

“Oh, I don’t think it’s his profession she objects to. She gets feelings about people. Has instincts.”

“Accurate instincts?”

“Usually.”

“Maybe you should ask her about the barbecue-sauerkraut hot dog,” Carver said. “That sounds awful.”

Adam smiled. “You’d be surprised.”

Carver decided not to dispute the point. Adam Kave was the last man on earth to argue with about wieners. Like taking on the Colonel or his heirs about chickens.

He saw Carver out. They didn’t shake hands when they parted.

Waiting for the zebra-striped barrier to lift and release the rumbling Olds back onto the highway, Carver wondered what Elana Kave’s instincts had told her about him.

A
FTER LEAVING THE
K
AVES,
Carver stopped at a pay phone just outside Pompano Beach and called Fort Lauderdale police headquarters. He gave his name. McGregor was in but was busy, he was told. Did he care to wait? He cared to.

He tried not to touch any part of the sunbaked metal booth as he marked time till McGregor came to the phone. Cars hissed past twenty feet away on A1A, most of them with their windows cranked up and the people inside coolly ensconced in air-conditioning. Carver watched station wagons, vans, big luxury cars, miniature foreign cars—all to be found here on the edge of the sea in summer. A busy combination of fun and commerce. A gigantic, dusty tractor-trailer roared past, its tires singing. Its exhaust fumes drifted over to Carver in its hot wake of low, rolling air. Commerce.

“Carver,” McGregor’s voice finally said over the line, “I’m up to my ass in work here. You got something important to say?” Polite bastard.

“Better put what you’re doing aside for a minute,” Carver said, “pay attention to your big career gamble.”

“Hell, that’s why I’m taking time out and talking to you. But I’d rather be doing some listening.”

“The Kave family hired me.”

“Told you. This is all gonna go like grease through a goose, Carver. We’ll both get what we’re after, which really is the same thing even if we’re operating for slightly different reasons.”

“Why didn’t you tell me Paul Kave drew several thousand dollars from his bank account before he disappeared?”

“What? Who the fuck told you that?”

“Adam Kave.”

“Well, it’s something he forgot to tell us. I guess I’m gonna have to go out and see the old man again.” McGregor sounded miffed. Carver knew he was lying, putting on a nice act. If he could somehow collar Paul Kave before Carver caught up with Paul, so much the better. Commendations, publicity, promotion; up and up. All the way to chief someday, by God, and why stop there?

“We need to get on the same wavelength,” Carver said.
On the same planet.

“We’re on it already,” McGregor said, “homed in on Paul Kave. But I sure as hell didn’t know the son of a bitch was running with cash. That changes things.”

A listing old Ford station wagon loaded with a cargo of squirming, yelling kids shot past on the highway. A blond boy about ten staring calmly out the back window saw Carver and extended a middle finger. Carver idly wondered what would happen if the station wagon stopped and the driver backed up to use the phone. The barrier broken down by speed-going-away would be removed. He guessed that no one in the wagon would seem more innocent than the blond boy. He’d seen the same characteristic in adults. What was it about people?

“Anything you
do
know that you neglected to tell me?” Carver asked.

“Nope. Every card in this hand’s faceup, Carver. I advise you to play it that way with me, you wanna keep your ass out of a sling.”

Carver didn’t like even being in the same game with Mc­Gregor. There was no way to know where he stood. He told McGregor the story he’d fed Adam Kave, then asked if that dovetailed with what McGregor had told Adam to set up the family to hire Carver.

“It all tallies,” McGregor said. “Adam Kave’s mistaken; I did say your son had been killed in Saint Louis, not Chicago. I figure he was testing you. Old bastard didn’t sell all them wienies and become a multitrillionaire by taking things for granted.”

“How do you read his relationship with his son?”

“Easy. They didn’t get along.”

“And with his wife?”

“He loves her. A lot.”

“Nadine?”

“The young cunt? She’s around, that’s all. Guy like that, wrapped up in his business and his own high-powered life, his kids are just there, like furniture.”

That was all pretty much the way Carver had sensed the scheme of relationships in the Kave household. Yet there were undercurrents. Thinking in stereotypes and forming snap judgments could lead a few degrees off course in the beginning of a case, and miles from the right destination at the end. Like navigating at sea.

“You know anything about Nadine’s fiancé, this Joel Dewitt?” Carver asked.

“Yeah, we checked on him. Got himself a used-car and Honda motorcycle dealership here in Fort Lauderdale.”

“Elana’s against the marriage. She thinks Dewitt’s a crook.”

“I knew a car dealer once wasn’t a crook,” McGregor said. “He’s dead now; I think he’s stuffed and in a museum somewhere. Now he’s gone, there ain’t a one won’t sell you a car knowing it’ll turn wheels-up the last day of the warranty. Sure Dewitt’s a crook. All legal, though. He doesn’t have a record. Tell you something, Carver, I didn’t know the wife objected to the marriage. See, you’re paying dividends already. Fucking wealth of information. You make me feel smart I made arrangements with you. You wanna feel smart?”

“It’d be a welcome change.”

“I bet. Anyway, the lab says the accelerant used to torch your son and the restaurant guy was the same as what was in a can found in Paul Kave’s makeshift lab.”

“You’re building a heavy case,” Carver said.

“All we need is the neck to hang it on.”

“I’m working on that, McGregor.”

“I gotta go, Carver. But listen, you cover your ass. This Paul Kave is a dangerous punk, and he’s supposed to be smart as well as nuts. He knows you’re after him and might decide to do something about it, double around on you and have himself another barbecue.”

Carver saw his son’s curled and blackened body again. Clenched his eyes shut. Thought about a barbecue-sauerkraut hot dog.
Oh, Jesus!

“Carver?”

“I’m here.” Barely. He was feeling dizzy. He braced himself with the cane. The smell of exhaust from the highway came at him again. Heat seemed to crawl up his pants legs.

“You go careful, now. I wouldn’t want to lose my man on the inside.” A low chuckle. “Other hand, I wouldn’t want
you
to lose your
determination.
”

“You don’t know what determination is,” Carver said, “till you know me.”

“You’re wrong there, old buddy,” McGregor said. He hung up the phone.

Carver stood for a moment watching the highway waver like an undulating ribbon in the bright sun. He considered Mc­Gregor’s warning about Paul Kave doubling around on him. Tigers did that, he’d read somewhere, circled around behind whoever was stalking them. Stalked the hunter. As if they were pissed off anyone would dare try to track them, and they wanted to teach whoever was after them a deadly lesson. Tigers were supposed to be a bitch to hunt.

The heat from the concrete was seeping up through the soles of Carver’s shoes. He limped back to the Olds, lowered himself behind the steering wheel, and drove north and then west toward Kissimmee.

The car’s top was up but all the windows were down. Carver took the outside lane and passed slower vehicles as if they were crippled stragglers. The wind blasting through the windows and ballooning the canvas top smelled fresh and cleared his head.

He hadn’t mentioned Emmett Kave to McGregor. If Mc­Gregor didn’t know about Adam’s brother, let him find out some other way.

C
ARVER WAS SURPRISED
when he saw Emmett Kave’s house on Jupiter Avenue in Kissimmee. Obviously it was Adam who had all the family money, and he didn’t share it with Emmett. As he parked at the curb in the dappled shade of an insect-riddled sugar oak, Carver remembered Adam saying he wished Emmett weren’t his brother. There had been a great deal of force behind the words despite their offhand delivery.

As he straightened up out of the Olds, his view unobstructed by the tree’s lower limbs, Carver took a closer look at the house. It was narrow and long and in serious disrepair. The frame siding had been white but was now a mottled gray, showing large areas of bare, rotted wood. The sloping roof wasn’t shingled but was covered with green sheet-roofing that was patched near the peak with tar that glistened black and soft in the fierce sun. One of the wooden shutters was dangling crazily from a front window, and the gutter above the small porch sagged as if the sad weight of years bore down on it.

Behind the house and off to the side, at the end of a dirt-and-gravel driveway, sat a garage in equally bad condition. It had wooden doors that needed paint, and the roof was sway-backed. Not sagging in the manner of the porch roof, but as if it had been struck a sharp and powerful karate chop with the edge of a giant hand. Carver noticed a nearby tree and guessed that a falling limb had snapped the roof’s center beam.

He looked around at the street of similar houses. This was a rough section of Kissimmee, but only a few houses were as run-down as Emmett Kave’s. All of them were set on stone foundations and seemed to have basements, which were relatively rare even here in central Florida, far from the ocean. The homes must have been constructed by the same builder within a short time of each other, and years ago probably made a modest but pleasant neighborhood. Economics and urban evolution had changed all that.

Emmett’s yard, which was mostly sandy earth, was by far the barest one on this side of Jupiter Avenue. A goat couldn’t have found a blade of grass inside the rusty wire fence that bordered most of the property. Emmett wouldn’t hurt himself cutting the lawn.

The walk leading from the street to the front porch was tilted and cracked. Carver found it easiest to make his way to the door by keeping to the side of the ruined concrete and setting the tip of his cane against sun-hardened earth. His stark shadow angled into puzzle pieces, parting and rejoining, as it passed over the jagged sections of walk.

He made it to the porch and stood still for a moment in the shade. Somebody was home. An old blue box fan vibrated and growled in one of the front windows, causing a few high, scraggly weeds to bend and sway in the sunlight in silent protest. There was a wasps’ nest tucked neatly in a corner of the porch ceiling, and one of the warlike insects was droning around Carver as if warning him not to try anything funny. Carver leaned on a supporting post and used the tip of his cane to press an almost invisible, painted-over button.

A buzzer rasped to urgent life inside the house, as if there were a huge version of the pesky wasp in there, communicating with the lookout on the porch. The inane thought made Carver uneasy.

After about half a minute, the door opened and a strong smell of frying bacon drifted outside. Carver squinted through the dark screen door into the house.

A man moved closer to the screen and changed from hazy outline to individual. He was almost exactly the size and build of Adam Kave, but his nose was larger, his gray eyebrows much bushier. He had the square, powerful Kave jaw, and that and the eyebrows lent his face a cragginess that looked good on a man well into his late sixties. There was about him the same energy that seemed to emanate from brother Adam, but tinged with the desperation of near-poverty. Like the last-chance, wild hope that flares just before total resignation.