Spark (12 page)

“A hundred in it for you, if it’s good,” Carver said. The sun, the smell, were beginning to get to him. He wanted to get this over with and go where it was fresh and cool. “I’m looking for a man named Adam Beed.”

“No, don’t do that,” Brethwaite said. He frowned and spat off to the side. There was blood in his spittle. Some of it dribbled down onto his chin. “He’s a fella best not found.”

“Nevertheless,” Carver said.

“Yeah. Well, I won’t pretend I ain’t scared to tell you, but it don’t matter how I feel, ’cause I don’t know where you might latch onto Beed.”

Carver drew two fifty-dollar bills from his pocket and held them creased over his forefinger.

Brethwaite glanced at the bills and gave his yellow smile. “Keep your hundred, stay alive, I’ll stay alive, that’s the best way this conversation can go. Beed’s a genuine through-an’-through bad-ass, Carver, Last I heard he was outa prison and on booze so as to stay legal and not violate parole.”

“He’s broken parole. Otherwise I’d be able to find him.”

“Well, running out on your parole officer’s not the best play, but that’s not the same as chancing going back behind the walls on a drug charge. Beed got clean enough in prison that he’s an alky now.” Again the ruined smile. “It’s a more socially acceptable substance, not to mention legal, but despite the fact he’s a physical fitness freak, he’s just as addicted as ever and eventually it’ll take him down. An addict’s an addict, legal drug or not. I don’t shit myself or anybody else about that. Thing is, Beed don’t run in any of his old circles these days. That’s why I can’t tell you where you might find him, or even who else might know.”

Carver slipped the hundred into his pocket, watching Brethwaite stare at it until it disappeared. He was wasted and dying and needed the money; he was telling the truth.

“You ever consider going into a rehab program, Lou?” Carver asked. Had Oprah Winfrey ever considered a diet?

“I’m on a waiting list. Been on it for eight months.” Staring down at his dirty bare feet, Brethwaite sniffled again and said, “I do have something for you might be worth one of them fifties.”

Carver pulled out one of the bills and held it between thumb and forefinger. He knew Brethwaite, knew he was about to part with fifty dollars’ worth of truth. In a perverted way, his honesty kept him alive day to day, the currency he exchanged for dollars.

“I heard a guy crossed Beed a few months back down in Miami—don’t ask me how or why, ’cause I don’t know. I only tell you what I
do
know. Anyway, you ever see that movie where the dude who crossed the Mafia wakes up one fine morning and finds a horse’s head next to him in bed?”

Carver nodded.

“Well, this guy in Miami found his wife’s head resting on her pillow like usual, but nothing else under the covers. Still ain’t found the rest of her.” Brethwaite’s lips danced as he stared hard at Carver. “That give you an idea what kinda geek you’re looking for?”

Carver handed him the fifty, then turned around and limped back to the car. His stomach didn’t feel so good, and he hated the fear that hindered his limbs like arthritis.

“Helluva movie, anyway,” Brethwaite said behind him, an instant before the trailer’s flimsy door slammed shut and rattled.

Carver was in more of a mood for a musical.

A
FTER LEAVING
L
OU
B
RETHWAITE,
Carver phoned Lloyd Van Meter from a booth on Silver Star Road. Van Meter was one of the more successful private investigators in Florida, with offices in Miami, Tampa, and Orlando. He agreed to meet Carver that evening at Bixby’s Lounge on Magnolia Avenue.

The night was hot and thick as gauze when Carver parked in Bixby’s lot, then limped into the lounge through the wide entrance flanked by flickering neon palm trees.

It was almost cold in Bixby’s; it felt like ice being applied where Carver’s shirt was plastered to his flesh with perspiration. The spacious main room was starting to fill with the late-night crowd. Most of the round tables were occupied, the five-piece band had started playing, and half a dozen couples were dancing slowly on the small square floor in back. It wouldn’t be long before the music and the dancing would accelerate in noise and motion. Right now, Carver thought, Bixby’s seemed comparatively peaceful. Stillness before storm.

It was easy to spot Van Meter’s 300-plus pounds perched on a stool near the end of the long mahogany and glass-brick bar. He was wearing a green suit with a muted gray chalk stripe, green leather loafers with silver-tipped toes, a yellow shirt with what looked in the back bar mirror to be a red and green tie. He noticed Carver in the mirror and turned and smiled. He had a broad face and flowing white beard that with his bulk lent him an authoritative, biblical air, like one of those color illustrations in a dime-store religious tract. His commanding presence, his vivid awning-size clothes, as usual took Carver aback for a moment. There sat Moses sipping a beer after a spree through the K-mart men’s department.

They shook hands and Carver took the stool next to him, hooking the crook of his cane over the bar’s leather elbow rest. The bartender came and took his order for a Budweiser.

“You seem agitated,” Van Meter said. “Your same feisty self only more so.”

“I’ve got a problem,” Carver said.

“Guys like you have always got those.”

“His name’s Adam Beed.”

Van Meter stroked his beard, sipped his beer. “That’s a problem, all right.”

“You’ve heard of him?”

“Sure. In a darkly legendary way. Like Vlad the Impaler. Never met the legend and I got no desire to.” He grinned at Carver. “But I guess I’m gonna, right?”

“Not exactly,” Carver said. “I only need you to locate him.” The bartender brought his Bud, poured exactly half of it into a glass as carefully as if it were an explosive, and walked away. Carver lifted the glass, said “Cheers,” and downed most of the beer.

“Why would you want to find Adam Beed?” Van Meter asked.

“Because he found me,” Carver said.

Van Meter stared at him but didn’t push it.

“Has to do with a job I’m on out in Solartown,” Carver said. He gave Van Meter a brief summary of the case.

“The old folks at play,” Van Meter said. Then he glanced at his hulking gray reflection in the mirror and sighed. “Well, I’m getting there myself. Just like you, Fred. Like us all.”

Carver didn’t want to wax melancholy over advancing age. He said, “My drug contacts aren’t going to do me any good. Beed’s a physical health nut, a weight lifter and martial arts expert in a major way. He’s also off illegal narcotics, making his drug of choice alcohol these days. Fanatically disciplined as he is, and worshiping his own muscles, he must have a helluva battle with booze. Control freaks always do. And there seems no doubt he’s an alcoholic.”

“A killing machine that drinks,” Van Meter reflected. “Now there’s a dangerous combination.”

“I’m not asking you to take away his car keys,” Carver said. “I got pressures that keep me from spending time tracking him down. You’ve got more contacts, people working for you. You can check with AA chapters, gyms, martial arts studios, much easier than I can.”

“It’ll take time,” Van Meter said. “This one’ll have to cost you, Fred. Gotta cover my expenses.”

“I didn’t expect it for free,” Carver told him.

“You mentioned Beth was working with you on this.”

Carver nodded.

“I’ll help you on it, just so she don’t get mixed up in looking for Beed. I heard about something he’s supposed to have done a few months ago down in Miami.”

“Me, too.”

“Scary, huh?”

Carver shrugged. “People like Beed are part of the work we do.”

“The work I do, in this instance.”

“You afraid to take the job?” Carver asked.

Van Meter leaned back on his stool, looking astonished and slightly angry, as if he might pull the Ten Commandments out of a pocket and set Carver straight on a few things. “Fred, Fred, you insult me. I’ll assign someone else to it.”

Carver smiled. “You’re getting smarter as the years pass.”

“Not you, Fred. That’s how come I worry about you. Why I worry about Beth, who seems to suffer from some of the same rash impulses. We need to concern ourselves with Beth, since Adam Beed’s involved in what you’re mucking around in. From what I’ve heard, he’s a kinky kinda homicidal maniac who’s got no love for women. His mother must have drop-kicked him or something. The shrinks might say he looks at a woman, even a woman like Beth, and sees his mother. Sets him off, maybe.”

“I’m not interested in his tortured childhood,” Carver said, “even if he had one and it had anything to do with what he did to that guy’s wife down in Miami.”

“Guess it ain’t really relevant now,” Van Meter admitted. He picked up Carver’s Budweiser bottle and poured beer into the glass in Carver’s hand. “Here, pal, let me put a head on that for you.”

Beth was in his bed when he got back to the motel. Carver wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He remembered what Van Meter had said about rash impulses.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” she said.

He shut the door and limped farther into the room. “Not much surprises me anymore, even on my birthday. How’d you get in?”

“Locks don’t concern me much, Fred.”

He leaned on his cane and looked at her in the light of the bedside reading lamp. The air conditioner was humming away on high, and she was lying on her back and covered almost to the neck with the sheet. Her lithe body seemed incredibly long. Her shoulders were bare and he was sure she was nude beneath the white cotton. She’d been reading before he’d arrived; a thick paperback book was propped open on the table that held the lamp. Something by Joseph Conrad.

After his conversation with Van Meter, it bothered him that she’d chanced being seen so they could be together for the night. Besides that, he’d stayed too long at Bixby’s, drunk several more beers and talked too much with Van Meter. He was feeling less than amorous. “It was a risk, you coming here.”

“Everything’s a risk, from birth to death, even if you’re a suburban WASP and you’ve got your life arranged so you don’t know it.”

“You sure nobody saw you?”

“Positive. I float like a shadow through the heart of darkness.”

“Some shadow.”

“It’s almost eleven o’clock, Fred, and I smell beer on you all the way over here. Where you been?”

“Drinking with Lloyd Van Meter.”

“Ah! You hiring him to help locate Adam Beed?”

“Uh-huh. You have any luck finding out about Solartown, Inc.’s major shareholders?”

“I don’t rely on luck, Fred.” She ran a long-nailed finger slowly across her lower lip. “C’mon to bed, lover. Business later.”

He wondered, what could there be about Joseph Conrad? Then he got undressed and joined her, becoming unexpectedly aroused when he felt the heat of her beneath the thin sheet. His knuckles brushed the smooth, warm expanse of her thigh.

Her hand found him and did its magic. “Knew you’d see it my way,” she said, and slid on top of him.

It was morning before he thought again about Jerome Evans or his widow Hattie or Adam Beed or Joseph Conrad. Or anything other than Beth.

She was good at that.

W
HILE
B
ETH WAS SHOWERING
the next morning, Carver drove down the highway to a doughnut shop and bought half a dozen glazed and a large cup of coffee to go.

When he returned, she was wearing panties and bra and drying her hair with a big white towel from the still-steamy bathroom. She sniffed the air and eyed the doughnut bag. “Smells yummy.”

He put the grease-spotted bag and the cup on the desk.

“Only one cup?” she said.

“Only one occupant in this room,” he reminded her. He limped into the bathroom, ripped the plastic sanitary wrap from one of the glasses, and carried the glass back out to the desk. He poured about half of the large cup of coffee into it, leaving it black. “I brought you some powdered cream,” he said, “only the label calls it ‘Mock Milk.’ ”

“Sounds heavenly, if only you remembered a plastic spoon.”

He found himself wondering if she was recalling her luxurious existence with Roberto Gomez, when coffee was no doubt brought to her and the spoons were silver, from the largest serving size down to the tiniest coke spoons worn on delicate neck chains.

When she was finished with her hair, she slipped into a pair of shorts and a clean orange blouse, then dragged over a chair to sit across from him at the desk. She sprinkled cream in her coffee, stirred it gingerly with her finger, and they went to work on breakfast.

“Fresh,” she commented, through a mouthful of glazed doughnut.

“I’m working on that,” he said.

“If I wanted bad comedy,” she told him, “I’d tune in to local news.”

After finishing his second doughnut, he wiped sugar glaze from his hands with a napkin and settled back with his coffee. He said, “Tell me about Solartown.”

She swallowed a last bite of doughnut, then licked a long finger. “The five principal shareholders are all players in the financial major leagues. We’re talking a prestigious investment company, a bank with international holdings, a lumber firm that’s one of the largest in the world, a retail chain with stores in half the states, and an insurance company that has more money than most small countries. All of them, with the possible exception of the bank, are on solid financial footing. Solartown’s a minor part of their overall picture.”

“How’d you learn all this?”

“It’s mostly public information, available at the touch of a few computer keys.”

“Your friend Jeff’s computer?”

“His and mine. The laptop I use to compose when I travel has a modem. I also called some contacts I have in various high positions. People I knew from when I was with Roberto.”

“Users?”

She nodded. “But dependable.”

“Not to their employers.”

“None of them runs a train, Fred. Don’t be so damned judgmental.”

“I wasn’t passing judgment, only wondering how good your information is.”

“It’s good as it gets. And what it means is that, unless there’s some small fish with ideas of his or her own, Solartown, Inc. is too friggin’ big to be operating some scam to do old folks outa their houses so they can resell them. That’d be like you and me hanging around schoolyards to swipe lunch money,”