moment of birth rather than chosen death. The sea wind was brisk, and the canvas awning, rolled out to shield from the sun, rustled and snapped overhead.
McGregor was standing with just his fingertips slid into his pants pockets, as if he liked to stay ready for action. He was chewing on something infinitesimal and hard, working it around with his long jaw, probing now and then with his tongue to find out how he was doing. Carver could hear a faint clicking as McGregor’s eyeteeth slipped off the stubborn morsel and met with enough force to dismay a dentist.
“So, we know each other again,” Carver said. He watched McGregor turn his head and spit out whatever it was he’d been chewing, barely parting his lips.
“You betcha,” McGregor said. “Pals, you and me, right down the line. We done okay in this thing, Carver. Might even call us heroes.”
“Might,” Carver said. He knew McGregor had read Elana’s suicide note, which was in the white envelope the stricken Adam had clutched in his fist on the beach. “Why’d she hang herself?” Carver asked. “She’d just got her son back. Was it the cancer? She knew she wasn’t going to recover.”
“Wasn’t that,” McGregor said. He straightened his tall body awkwardly, as if his back were stiff, then walked over and sat down opposite Carver. He ran his tongue across the wide gap between his front teeth and folded his big hands. He seemed to consider not telling Carver about the note’s contents, but only for a second; pals all the way. He said, “She was, in a manner of speaking, Emmett’s accomplice.”
Carver remembered Elana’s beauty and gentleness and reacted instinctively, as Adam might have. Protecting her memory in Adam’s stead. Carver’s obligation. He’d done things to this family. “Bullshit! She hated Emmett. He tried to rape her.”
“That’s true,” McGregor said. “Still, she had no choice but to cooperate with him. She married young, before she knew Adam Kave, and had a child. Her husband was killed in Korea. Afterward, while she was grieving, she fell in love with and married a guy who made her life pure hell and caused severe depression. She ran away from her new husband and her son, and probably herself. Years later she was penniless and in trouble, and she remembered things she’d heard about Adam Kave even though she’d never met him. She came to the Fort Lauderdale area and got to know him under an assumed identity, and ingratiated herself until he helped her financially and in other ways. It was a desperate kind of con she worked on him, but not an unusual one, what with all the unattached big-rich assholes in Florida. Then she unexpectedly fell in love and married him, and never could muster the guts to tell him the truth.”
McGregor smiled nastily, loving the effect this was having on Carver. “Some juicy suicide note, hey?” he said. “Never know what you’ll find when you kick over a gold rock and study these wealthy families. I seen it time and again.”
Carver’s mind was numb except for some far corner that was trying to fit all this together. Trying to accept it as truth. McGregor helped him.
“Elana had to stay silent or have Adam and the kids learn about her long-ago relationship with Emmett, and the blackmail money she’d been paying Emmett for years, in amounts small enough to escape Adam’s notice. She was Emmett’s former wife, Carver. Her maiden name was Jones. She was the woman who met Emmett Kave at the Orlando motel. Joel Dewitt’s mother.”
Carver said, “Sweet Christ!” And full realization rolled over him.
McGregor laughed. “Explains some things, don’t it?”
“Some things. Other things can never be explained.”
“Don’t you believe it,” McGregor said. “The guy doing the explaining just has to be convincing, is all. Way the world works, pardner.”
“Did she actually think she could marry Adam without Emmett ever finding out her identity?”
“Sure. Remember, the brothers were estranged, hated each other, and never saw one another. There’s so many rich jokers in this part of Florida, they get married and divorced all the time without anybody’s picture getting on the society page-not that Emmett would read the society page. And she hadn’t planned on love rearing its nasty head. Once she fell for Adam and didn’t want to lose him, she had no choice. She was desperate.”
“Did Dewitt know about all this?”
“I was interrogating him when you called and told me Elana was dead. He knew about everything. That was how Emmett got him to go along with the plan. Dewitt was getting even with the woman who abandoned him as a child, and he thought he had some kind of moral claim on the Kave fortune. Once Elana died before Adam, Dewitt was out in the cold forever. Adam ain’t the charitable type.”
“Then Dewitt knew Paul was his brother.”
“Hey, don’t look so shocked, Carver. Cain did it to Abel. And these guys are only half brothers.”
“But Nadine. .”
“So Dewitt was plugging his sister-hell, there was a lotta money at stake.”
Wind off the ocean whipped the canvas awning again, cracking it like a sail. The breeze felt cool on Carver’s face and he realized he was perspiring. He was nauseated and wanted to get away from McGregor immediately. Didn’t want to look at him or hear his voice ever again.
He stood up shakily with his cane and shoved his chair back, almost tipping it over. His mind still trying to assimilate what had happened, he limped toward the door to the house. He knew his way through the place and out.
Behind him McGregor said, “We oughta work together again sometime, tough guy. Ain’t we a fuckin’ team?”
Chapter 37
Carver wanted to attend Elana Kave’s funeral, but he found out too late that she’d been cremated. There’d been only a brief, private memorial service. Adam Kave had wanted it that way.
Three months later Carver read in the
Lieutenant McGregor was now Captain McGregor and in charge of Internal Affairs, investigating reports of corruption within the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. Justice was blind, all right.
Carver spent his days at Edwina’s, rising early and limping down to a flat stretch of beach. He’d leave his cane on the warm sand, slither awkwardly into the surf until he was floating free and graceful, and take long, therapeutic swims.
Occasionally Paul Kave would drive up A1A from Hillsboro and join him. They both loved the sea and liked to test themselves against it.
They’d roam far enough out from shore to worry Edwina. One man of maimed body and the other of maimed mind, struggling against the incoming waves.
Strong swimmers.
During unlikely moments, Carver would find himself wondering whether Adam Kave had suspected all along that there’d been something between Elana and Emmett, and had held his silence to protect the possession he’d most treasured. But not even Adam could answer that one with certainty, Carver decided.
And it was something he never asked Paul.
Some things you left alone.
