Flame (10 page)

But they were.

After fifteen minutes of limping through low underbrush that grabbed at his ankles and cane and tried to trip him, Carver found himself face-to-face with more chain-link fence and spiraling concertina wire. Wesley had been nothing if not security-conscious. Lot of good it had done him.

From where he stood, Carver could see the side of the house. It was only one story, but it sprawled wide; a main entry with tall Greek columns and a circular drive, then vast, low wings built on each side of the soaring portico. It was constructed of beige brick and had dark brown trim and gold accents. Thick ivy twined with green lustiness up the side nearest Carver, almost reaching the roof. He wasn’t sure what kind of architecture the house represented; would have guessed neo-Grecian Ranch Glitz.

The place looked quiet. Empty. Carver wished he had the means to get on the other side of the fence and go exploring. A little B and E never hurt anyone, as long as nothing was stolen and no one was caught. He toyed with the idea of driving back into Atlanta, buying a bolt-cutter to cope with the fence, and returning. But that would be time-consuming and risky. When he got back, the house might be teeming with mourning family and friends.

Shielded by trees on either side of the fence, he made his way along the chain-link until the rear of the Wesley house came into view.

There was a beautifully landscaped rock garden back there, and he could see one end of a swimming pool. A diving board told him it was the deep end. On the other side of the pool was a redwood table with an umbrella over it. Redwood chairs with bright yellow cushions. One of the chairs had a blue towel draped over its back, moving slightly in the breeze.

Carver decided there was nothing here for him. He’d hoped to talk to an unsuspecting family member or be able to look the place over and possibly find something revealing. Neither of those things was going to happen. He turned away and had begun limping through the woods when he heard a splash.

Turned back just in time to see the diving board still vibrating and the blue, blue water in the pool rippling and playing tricks with the sunlight.

The ripples calmed, then got hectic and slapped noisily in irregular rhythm against the sides of the pool.

Someone was swimming just out of sight.

The dazzling, sun-reflecting water made his eyes ache. Carver crouched on his good leg behind the fence and waited, one hand on his cane, the other with fingers laced through the chain-link. He realized he was sweating heavily.

He was patient, but the gnats swarming around him weren’t. They got in his eyes and tried to flit up his nostrils. He brushed them away now and then but it did little good. They weren’t giving up any sooner than he was.

About five minutes passed.

Slower than root-canal treatment.

This was no fun. He was coated with perspiration and his leg was threatening to cramp up. The cane was slippery in his grip.

More splashing noises came from the pool. Silence for a minute, and then music. Though not very loud, it reached Carver clearly: the old Bobbie Gentry song “Ode to Billy Joe.” Whoever was there had turned on a radio or stereo.

Carver’s body tensed as he glimpsed a wavering shadow on the poolside concrete.

The woman who strolled into sight was blond and slender. Though it was difficult to be sure from this distance, she looked about average height. She was wearing only the bottom of a skimpy red bikini, and her small breasts bobbed energetically as she walked. Her hair was long and soaked, plastered to her naked tan back. There was no difference in the shade of her tan around her breasts; she frequented tanning salons or she was in the habit of topless sunbathing. At first, because of her slimness, Carver thought she was very young, but even from here a more careful appraisal put her at about forty-five. Middle-aged women weren’t built like twenty-year-olds, and that was that, Cher not withstanding. Carver wondered if he was looking at Giselle Wesley.

Whoever the woman was, detective work had suddenly become voyeurism, and that made him uneasy.

The woman picked up the blue towel from the back of the redwood chair and dabbed at her eyes. Dropped the wadded towel into the chair, then smoothed back her wet hair with both hands. She tilted back her head and swayed gently from side to side in time with the tragic, hypnotic music, smiling slightly into the sun. The grieving widow? Maybe the maid at play.

Carver was glad when she stepped up onto the diving board, strutted gracefully to the end, and jumped into the water feet first, folding her arms across her chest, as if she were cold, to protect her breasts. After the splash that sent thousands of glittering fragments of water flying like spraying glass, he could hear her swimming toward the other end of the pool.

He moved away into the woods and started back the way he’d come, thinking no one had seen him but knowing he couldn’t be positive. He still didn’t feel right about spying on the solitary swimmer. Breaking and entering was one thing, but it wouldn’t do to be arrested and charged with being a Peeping Tom. The worst part was, he wouldn’t have minded watching the woman for a while, if she’d stayed in view. That was perfectly natural, he told himself. Wasn’t sure if he believed it. Finally thought, hell with it. People who analyzed themselves into paralysis got on his nerves and he didn’t want to be one of them.

The Ford’s air conditioner felt great. As he drove back toward the main highway, he adjusted the dashboard vents so the cold rush of air was aimed directly at him. Felt perspiration evaporating where his shirt was stuck to his flesh.

Gave only a glance at the dusty black BMW sedan that roared around him from behind and accelerated out of sight.

C
ARVER PARKED THE FORD
in the lot of the Norrison Funeral Home on Roswell Road the next morning and sat for a moment with the motor running and the air conditioner on, watching the people who parked nearby enter the side door of the long, white clapboard building. The men wore dark, well-cut suits, the women subdued dresses. A few of the women wore hats with black veils. Carver thought veils had gone out of style, even at funeral parlors, but he wasn’t up on that kind of thing and might be wrong. Miniskirts had come back; why not veils?

The other cars in the lot were mostly luxury models or sports cars. Expensive iron. They were all gleaming with fresh wax jobs, looked new and probably were. Money, money.

After about ten minutes, he turned off the engine and climbed out of the Ford. Heat from the sun-softened blacktop penetrated the thin soles of his shoes. Radiated up his pants legs and warmed his ankles. He used a forefinger to pry the knot in his tie a little looser, then limped across the lot into the funeral home, thinking Atlanta summers could be just as punishing as Florida’s.

He was in a small foyer, painted white over swirly plaster and with deep brown carpeting. There was a dainty gold sofa against one wall, obviously more for decoration than for comfort. A table with a floral arrangement. Mounted on the wall above the sofa were three large wooden keys painted gold. Carver wondered what, if anything, they were supposed to signify. On what looked like a painter’s easel was a directory. It said that Francis Allan Wesley was in Suite E. A suite, no less, as if he might still be alive and seeing callers.

Carver made his way down the hall to partly opened beige doors, the nearest of which displayed a gold
E
inside a circular floral design. Frank Wesley’s suite, all right. The murmur of voices drifted out between the doors. Frank throwing a party?

He found the right angle for leverage and pulled the lettered door open wider with his cane. Stepped into the suite.

It was a large, paneled room lined with glossy dark furniture. About fifty small, padded chairs had been arranged in rows facing what looked like a genuine marble pedestal. On top of the pedestal rested the gleaming bronze urn that contained all that was left of Frank Wesley. The entire front of the room beyond the pedestal was heaped with funeral sprays and elaborate floral wreaths. A silent explosion of color. There was no photograph of the deceased. Thirty or forty people, most of them prosperous-looking middle-aged men, stood talking in low tones. A knot of men and two women stood or sat around a grouping of furniture near the pedestal and urn. Probably Wesley’s daughter and widow. Maybe one of the men was the son-in-law, Michelle’s husband. One of the women turned her head, and Carver saw that it was the swimmer from the previous afternoon. Her blond hair was combed back and piled up on her head now. A couple of stray curls had fallen onto her forehead, which gleamed with perspiration. Her eyes were red, and she dabbed delicately at one of them with a corner of a folded white handkerchief, as if trying to remove a cinder. Pluck it out and no more of death; her problems would be over.

No one paid much attention to Carver. He wandered over to the guest register book and signed it as Boyd Emerson. Across the room he glimpsed the woman he’d talked to earlier at the Wesley offices and nodded to her. She peered at him oddly for a second through her thick, dark-rimmed glasses, like a curious trout—
know you from somewhere
—then smiled and nodded back.

Carver milled around for a while, wearing an appropriately glum expression and eavesdropping, but he heard nothing of interest. Talk seemed to be focused more on the economy than on the deceased. But then, something could still be done about the economy.

When a severe-looking man in a black suit took up position near the urn, and people began sitting down in the rows of chairs and waiting for the service to begin, Carver decided to slip away. That was okay, he was sure. Boyd Emerson and Longbranch Feeder Pigs had paid their respects. And while Carver had overheard nothing of apparent use, he’d made mental note of the people at the funeral home and would recognize them if he saw them again. He’d also noticed how the widow’s attitude contrasted sharply with what he’d seen when she was at home swimming.

The parking lot seemed even hotter, and there was a stickiness to the air that made it feel almost like a warm liquid that lent resistance to movement. He was glad to lower himself into the Ford and get the air conditioner cranked up.

They were waiting for him in his room at the Holiday Inn. A large man. A larger man. A woman. The merely large man was expensively and conservatively dressed in a gray business suit, white shirt, and paisley tie. Wore almost as much gold jewelry as Desoto. You had to look past the suit and glitter to notice what
he
looked like. Average. Smooth, symmetrical features. Sandy, thinning hair. He was about sixty but his eyes were ageless. They were the impersonal, avid eyes of millions of years of predators. When you looked into them it was like gazing into a deepening blue void, and then he didn’t seem average at all.

The huge man, not much over six feet tall but probably two hundred and fifty solid pounds, had a round face, leering fat lips, tiny and tortured brown eyes set deep in tanned flesh, and a haircut that might have been administered with pruning shears. Mouse-brown hair stood up in short tufts all over his round head and well down on his neck. He was wearing white slacks and a loose-fitting, untucked white shirt. He looked as if he might be in his late thirties and had gotten there the hard way. What appeared to be knife or razor scars marked his meaty forearms and the backs of his hands.

The woman, sitting on the edge of the bed with her legs crossed, was wearing a gray blouse, black skirt, black high heels. She had a gold chain around her neck, another around her left ankle. She might have been Hispanic, but Carver couldn’t be sure. She wasn’t beautiful, but somewhere she’d learned how to dress and apply makeup. Her appeal was mostly the result of presentation. Take away the dark mascara and lipstick, the high heels and tight skirt, and she would have been an ordinary woman in her late twenties. Include them and she was something bright and shiny that grabbed attention. The sort of object that attracted predators. She was smoking a cigarette in a long black holder. Her large dark eyes gazed with something like amusement at Carver as she exhaled a thin vapor of smoke from deep in her lungs. She made smoking seem erotic.

Carver leaned motionless on his cane just inside the door. The other three didn’t move, either. Didn’t speak. A still-life study that took on weight and urgency.

Finally Carver said, “Got the wrong room?”

Gray suit said, “Wrong for you or for us?”

“Word games?” Carver asked. Trying to figure this. Thinking he could make it out the door and back into the hall. Wondering whether they’d come after him. Maybe not. He could raise hell out in the hall, possibly draw some help. Possibly. But he didn’t move, only stood there listening to his heart. He was apprehensive about this, but his curiosity kept him glued where he was.

“No kinda game,” said the wide man in white. His deep, phlegmy voice rolled like gravel through his leering lips. Carver looked into his tiny, pained eyes and wondered if there might be something seriously wrong with the mind behind them.

Gray suit said, “Come on in, Mr. Carver,” as if it were his room. “Sit yourself down and we’ll talk.” He had a rich Southern accent and made “Carver” three sliding syllables.

Carver limped a few steps farther into the room. Stayed standing.

The man in the suit said, “I’m Walter Ogden.” He motioned with an elegant gold-ringed hand toward the other man. “This is Butcher. Young lady here’s Courtney Romano.”

“Holiday Inn send you to check on towels?” Carver asked.

Butcher giggled. It sounded like a cat screeching beneath the phlegmy gravel. “Got him a sense of humor,” he said. More Deep South accent. “Betcha he could lose it in about ten seconds, I decided to cut it outa him. Where’s your sense of humor, Carver? Some people’s is around their heart, others just ’neath their liver. Simple thing to pluck it right out no matter where ’tis, even if you gotta look a while.” He used his leer again. Resembled an oversized gargoyle.

Ogden said, “Calm down now, Butcher. Maybe I’ll throw you some meat.”