“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 Mc shy;Gregor’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 Mc shy;Gregor didn’t know about Adam’s brother, let him find out some other way.
Chapter 12
Carver 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.
“Emmett Kave,” Carver said.
Emmett looked at him down the length of his body, up again to the face. “You say my name like we know each other.” The voice was deep, but not as deep as Adam’s, and it had none of the gravelly quality. “We met?”
“No. My name’s Carver. I’ve met your brother. The family resemblance is unmistakable.”
“Hm. Up to a point, I s’pose.”
“The Kaves have hired me to try to find their son Paul.”
“Police are trying to do that.”
“They’d like me to find him before the police do.”
“Yeah,” Emmett said after a pause, “I can understand why. What are you, a private detective?”
“That’s what I am.” Carver got his I.D. from his back pocket and held it up to the screen.
“Don’t mean shit to me,” Emmett said. “Got nothing to compare it with for genuineness.” He aimed a thick finger like the barrel of a weapon at Carver, as if about to warn him off his property. But instead he used the finger to unhook the screen-door latch and then melted back into shadow, like a man retreating into a protective, gloomy cave. “C’mon in, Carver.”