“No. And I figure if the cops say it’s suicide, it probably is. They know about those kinda things.”
Carver said, “What about Maggie Rourke?”
Looking at the floor again, Gretch shook his head. The back of his neck was dirty where he’d rubbed his hand over it while lugging stuff up the hot stairs. “I don’t know any Maggie Rourke.”
“The Walton Agency.”
Gretch raised his head and stared at Carver. “Yeah, yeah. Now I know who you mean. Real pretty brunette. I don’t really know her, though. She’s another Walton model, and we worked on the same shoot last year. It was a lung shot.”
“Lung shot?”
“Group photo for a cigarette ad. You know, the tobacco companies like to show good-looking people having fun on a picnic or skiing or whatever. Healthy people with healthy lungs. We were all smoking and playing volleyball on the beach.”
“You ever meet any of Donna’s friends?”
“Are you kidding? She wasn’t the type to share that kinda secret. She wanted to keep our affair quiet. So did I. Nobody wanted anybody else to get hurt. Then it all turned to shit, like a lotta other things have happened to me in my life.”
“You know a man named Beni Ho? Little Oriental guy.”
“No, I don’t think so. Should I know him?”
“Nobody should.”
Gretch stared at him earnestly. “I gotta say I’m not completely sorry to hear about Mark Winship, not after some of the stuff Donna told me about him. It’s just a goddamn shame”-his voice broke and his eyes misted over again-“just a goddamn shame she was married at all, that any of this ever happened. Especially to somebody as good as her. I never woulda gone near her if I knew how it’d turn out. Life’s fucking funny sometimes, isn’t it? I don’t mean like ‘ha-ha’ funny, but, you know . . .”
“I know,” Carver said. He planted his cane and moved back a few steps, toward the door. “You plan on being at this address for a while?”
Gretch looked surprised. “Of course. I gotta be. I’m on a lease.”
Carver left the apartment, closing the door behind him.
He stood in the stifling hall for a few minutes, listening. There was only silence.
Then faint music and voices from the TV.
The sound of a shower running.
24
Beth followed Carver back to Del Moray, then to the taco stand on Magellan, where they sat in the shade of an umbrella over one of the tiny round tables and ate a late lunch-early supper. A warm salt breeze was wafting in, carrying the scent of the ocean. The sun was still bearing down hard, and Carver’s knee and forearm that were outside the circle of the umbrella’s shade were hot.
Beth bit into her brittle taco, chewed, swallowed with apparent difficulty, and said, “I don’t understand why you like this place, Fred. Stuff tastes like a cardboard meat-pie.”
“Try more sauce.”
She tore the corner off one of the little plastic containers of hot sauce and squeezed some onto her taco. She took another cautious bite, chewed, said nothing, and sipped Pepsi-Cola through a straw.
As they ate, Carver told her about his conversation with Carl Gretch. As he ate, actually. Beth only sipped soda and watched the sunlit pleasure boats bobbing in unison at their moorings as he talked.
When he was finished talking, she continued staring at the boats. “Not much of what Gretch told you rings true, Fred.”
“Of course not. Not even his story about how he met Donna Winship. Question is, why would he tell me how much he loved her? Why would he care what I thought?”
“I think we should find out. I keep trying to imagine Donna and Mark both dying as suicides, and I can’t. The more we learn, the more questions present themselves.”
“Starting again tomorrow,” Carver said, “you keep a loose watch on Gretch’s apartment and see where he goes if he leaves. Or who visits him if he stays put. When we’re finished here, I’ll drive over and try to talk to Harvey Sincliff at Nightlinks.”
She discovered taco sauce on her index finger and licked it off. “Gonna phone first?”
“No. I’d rather catch him unprepared.”
“I’ve gotta do some work on an article for Burrow,” Beth said, “then I’ll drive back to Orlando tonight and stay in a motel so I can be outside Gretch’s apartment early in the morning.”
“He strikes me as the type who’d sleep late.”
Beth winked. “You’d just rather have me with you than in a motel.”
“Can’t deny it.”
She glanced at her watch. “I’d better get going now and warm up my computer.” She slid the uneaten half of her taco over to Carver. “You consume this instrument of culinary masochism.”
“I don’t think Gretch will suspect he’s being watched now, but be careful anyway,” he said, as she stood up to leave.
Tall, tall woman, she leaned far down to peer beneath the edge of the umbrella at him. “You figure Gretch thinks you actually believed his story?”
“No, but he knows I can’t do anything about it one way or the other.”
She straightened up and he could no longer see her face. “I might stop for a hamburger on the way home, Fred. Viva la Mexico, but screw their food.”
He watched her walk away. Then he slid his chair over so he was completely out of the sun and ate the rest of her taco.
The Nightlinks office address was on the end of a strip shopping center in an otherwise desolate stretch of Telegraph Road. The office’s glass door and show window were tinted midnight blue and had gold scrollwork on them but no lettering.
The shopping center was one long, continuous building with a brick facade and a flat roof with air-conditioning units mounted on it. The units were partly shielded from view by low, wooden privacy fences that looked more as if they belonged in someone’s backyard than on a roof. Power and phone lines ran from a pole with a large transformer on it to a corner of the building. A row of birds sat on the top cable, looking out over the parking lot. The shop next to Nightlinks was closed and its windows were soaped solid. Next to it was a dry cleaner, then a used-book store, a pharmacy, an Everything-Is-A-Dollar store, then a tavern called the Aero Lounge that had a sign with a three-bladed yellow propeller that slowly rotated. On the other side of Nightlinks was a driveway that led around the cinder block wall to the rear of the building for deliveries, then a vacant lot high with weeds.
Carver parked in the nearest space, about halfway down the row of shops, and was about to climb from the car when he saw an attractive redheaded woman come out of Nightlinks. He watched her lower herself with a great show of legs into a black sports car and drive away.
She hadn’t been gone more than a few seconds when a well-dressed man of about thirty entered Nightlinks.
Carver thought he’d sit where he was and watch for a while.
Ten minutes later, the man came out accompanied by a blond woman in a red dress and very high heels. Just behind them walked a small, lean man dressed as a cowboy. The cowboy drove away alone in a battered pickup truck with a gun rack in the rear window. The other man and the blond woman left together in a yellow Lincoln Town Car.
Except for a Federal Express delivery, there was no activity during the next twenty minutes. The Olds was heating up and some men in work clothes who’d entered the Aero Lounge had given him a curious glance. Suspicious character in an old convertible, he knew he couldn’t stay where he was much longer without answering some questions. He decided it was time to see if Harvey Sincliff was in.
It felt good to get out of the hot car and straighten up. As he got closer to the building, he noticed small gold lettering near the bottom of the blue-tinted window, spelling out the name of the company. Very discreet. When he opened the door, a bell chimed and a thin woman of about forty seated behind a low gray reception desk smiled at him. The office was surprisingly plush, done in grays and blues. The reception area was small, though. There was a door behind the woman’s desk that no doubt led to bigger and better things.