“Well, the law’s gonna want to talk with you about this anyway, the way it was so damned obviously arson. Young lady here’s lucky to be still amongst the living.”
“How was it done?” Carver asked.
“Show you,” Belmont said, and waved an arm a few inches in a signal to follow. He was a man comfortable in his authority and took for granted compliance with his orders.
The three of them walked around to the back of the garage. The ground was soggy there; Carver had to prod gingerly with the cane. Belmont pointed to a buckled and charred area of wall near where the garage joined the rear of the house. There were blackened chunks of debris scattered around, and pieces of roof tile. It looked like the scene of a pyromaniac’s wild party.
“That wall’s stucco,” Carver said. “Stucco doesn’t burn.”
“Does if you pour a flammable substance on it. Which was done here, I’m sure. Burned long enough to catch the wooden eaves, then the flames walked across the roof timbers of the garage. Good thing we got here before it got a hold on the house. We’d have had to create some real water and smoke damage inside to put this thing out. Sometimes we gotta make a helluva mess dousing a fire, but there’s no other way.”
“The house is all right,” Edwina said. “It smells like burned rubber but it’s relatively undamaged. I can live in it. I will live in it.”
“You don’t have to,” Carver said.
“Sure I do.” Her voice was low and unyielding, the mind behind it made up. Carver remembered her telling him she would never again run from trouble and create a past that haunted. She’d meant it. “I’m not letting Paul Kave influence my life,” she said, “any more than you would. You should understand that.”
“You’re acting stubborn.”
“As you are. But is yours an act?”
“No.”
“A little empathy then, huh?”
“I think Paul might have tried to kill you as a way of taunting me,” he said.
“Even if that’s so, he isn’t likely to try again. I’m staying.”
“Why isn’t he likely to try again?”
“I’d say he’s made his point.”
“Maybe he doesn’t think so.”
“I’m staying, Carver. Nobody like that is pulling my strings and making me walk.”
If she’d had a stick, she’d have used it to draw a line in the mud and dared him to cross it. Carver knew it was no good arguing with her when she got this way.
But Belmont didn’t know her and couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “Mr. Carver seems to make good sense, ma’am.”
She showed him what real fire was in her glance and stalked away toward the front of the house, her blue Nikes making squishing sounds with each step.
Belmont looked at Carver and shrugged. Then they followed Edwina. Carver noticed that the swimming pool was only half full; the fire-department pumpers had used it as a source of water to fight the blaze.
The chief left and a lieutenant named Braddock from the Del Moray Police Department arrived and questioned Carver briefly. He agreed with the chief and Carver that Edwina should stay somewhere else until Paul Kave was apprehended. He tried to persuade her with horror stories of fire victims, then with official bluff, now and then turning to Carver, who nodded agreement to everything the lieutenant said. Edwina finally got angry and told them both to fuck off. The lieutenant left shortly thereafter, obviously wondering why Carver wasn’t leaving with him. The man didn’t understand the territorial imperative as it related to wild animals and to Edwina.
Carver and Edwina stood near the fire-damaged Mercedes and watched the lieutenant’s car disappear down the driveway. The last of the official vehicles was gone; the ordeal was ended. The sea was pounding on the beach below, sounding like a ponderous heartbeat, and the sun was high enough now to have gained leverage and bore down with heat that weighed and withered and would dominate the day. Carver glanced toward the vast sparkling sea and his eyes ached from the glare. He limped toward the front door.
“Where are you going?” Edwina asked.
“Gonna make a call, if the phone still works.”
“It works,” she said, walking beside him. Her head was bowed and she was trying to come to terms with what had happened. This was damned personal, this setting fire to a woman’s home while she slept. “Who you going to call?” she asked, as they reached the door.
“Lloyd Van Meter at Van Meter Investigations. I’m going to get some manpower assigned to watch you in case Paul Kave tries something like this again. Here or somewhere else, like maybe a display home you’re holding open.” He paused by the phone and looked hard at her. “We going to argue about this?”
“No,” she said. She crossed the room to the sofa and plopped into it like a loose-limbed teen-ager. It was more a gesture of weariness than of defiance. “You make sense, actually. I’m being unreasonable, but then people should be unreasonable at times.” She crossed her long legs. She was wearing shorts, and there was a clump of mud smeared on her right calf. She twined her legs as if she felt cold, and some of the mud smudged her left calf. Her expression was placid and thoughtful. Carver wondered if she had ever lost her poise, even as an infant when she got ticked off over having to eat strained vegetables. “You’re right, I’m wrong,” she said, “about everything. I should leave, but I’m staying.”
“I don’t know,” Carver said. “Maybe this really is one of those times to ignore reason. You’re the only one who can judge, I guess.” He punched out the Van Meter number and waited while the phone at the other end of the connection rang. “But I still wish you’d leave.”
He noticed Edwina was right about one thing: the house did smell like burned rubber.
So much better than burned flesh.
Chapter 24
What a piece of work was Lloyd Van Meter. Carver had met him when he was an Orlando police officer and Van Meter was searching for the wayward lover of a wealthy New York woman. Carver had arrested the man on a burglary charge, and Van Meter had appeared in a flurry of sound and confusion at police headquarters with a local, high-powered attorney and had the man sprung and back in Manhattan within hours. Red tape ensued, miles of it, and as far as Carver knew the man had never returned to Florida and been tried for breaking and entering. Carver had figured at the time that Lloyd Van Meter had unique talents as a private investigator. He’d been right. The woman in Manhattan had been a wealthy socialite who ran an expensive and exclusive call-girl operation from her mansion on Long Island. She’d rewarded Lloyd Van Meter bountifully for finding her lover and expediting his escape from legal consequences.
And now Van Meter had one of the largest investigative agencies in Florida, with offices in Miami, Orlando, and Tampa. Carver liked Van Meter, who claimed to be the illegitimate son of a notorious Prohibition-era gangster, Homer Van Meter. The present Van Meter, more or less on the right side of the law, was an obese man in his fifties, with a head of thick, flowing white hair, sharply defined features despite his weight, and a white beard that, though not all that long, lent him a distinctly biblical air. It was as if Moses had discovered pasta. He wore round glasses with gold wire frames, and he looked younger than he was until he removed the glasses and revealed the deep crow’s-feet at the corners of his shrewd blue eyes. He was always sloppily and peculiarly dressed, as if he bought his clothes at an awning company and settled for bargain fabrics that weren’t moving well. Today he had on a beige suit with darker tan vertical stripes. Van Meter’s tie was gold with brown stripes running diagonally. He was color-coordinated but the effect was dizzying.
He and his operatives had been watching over Edwina and observing members of the Kave family for three days now. Van Meter had phoned Carver and asked him to drop by Van Meter Investigations’ offices for a report.
“We came up zip,” he told Carver, leaning so far back in his creaking desk chair Carver thought the big man might wind up on the floor. But then it was Van Meter’s office, his chair; he should know how far he could stretch things. Leaning backward just far enough was his specialty.