A man in jeans, a blue pullover shirt, and a red hard hat came out of the office and strode toward where the foundations were being poured. He was tan and muscular and walked with a swagger, and he appeared to be wearing cowboy boots. He only went a short distance before climbing into a brown pickup truck with a tall antenna mounted on its rear bumper. A rubber ball had been run through with the antenna and rode halfway up it to keep it from whipping around with too much range and bashing into the truck roof.
As the man sat in the pickup, a large red truck pulling a flatbed trailer stacked with lumber snaked its way along the flat, curved street. It headed toward another far section of the subdivision, and the brown pickup followed, its antenna with the rubber ball doing a mad dance behind it as if trying to keep up.
Brant emerged from the office. He was wearing a red hard hat like the other man’s. He got in the LeBaron and drove toward where the lumber truck had stopped. The trailer bed tilted back on hydraulic lifts, and most of the lumber, bound in a mass with steel bands, slid smoothly from the flatbed onto the ground as the truck jerked and pulled away, its front wheels lifting momentarily then bouncing back down. The stack of lumber made a sharp, reverberating report like an echoing rifle shot as the boards slapped against the hard ground and one another. Another cloud of dust rose and hung in the air.
Brant parked behind the brown pickup and got out, and he and the other man in a hard hat stood talking to the truck driver, who had leaped nimbly from the trailer as soon as the lumber was deposited on the ground.
Brant slapped the truck driver on the shoulder, a bill of lading was signed, and the lumber truck drove the pattern of streets to turn around. It roared and clattered past Carver again on its way out of Brant Estates.
Work continued as Brant and the other man-whom Carver assumed was the foreman-wandered around checking on the job and coordinating events. Carver was learning something about home building, but little else. Brant seemed a plain vanilla guy, all right, just as Spotto had described.
Carver was getting bored, and he could only hang around so long before drawing attention, even if he was parked off the highway, well away from construction activity. If it weren’t for the cane, he could raise the car’s hood and pretend engine trouble for a while without looking suspicious. But even from a distance, a limping bald man with a cane might catch Brant’s eye and prompt recognition and curiosity. For a moment Carver himself even questioned what he was doing here. Private investigators didn’t generally spy on their clients.
Wondering if he’d gone hormonal in some sort of symbiosis with Beth, he put the LeBaron in drive and waited for a break in traffic before pulling out onto the highway.
What would be next for him, dry crackers for breakfast? Some world. A father. Again. He still hadn’t sorted that one out.
The LeBaron’s tires sang on the warm concrete as he drove toward the Del Moray public library.
In the library’s cool green reference room, Carver sat hunched at one of half a dozen microfilm viewers and scanned back issues of the
Portia Brant’s accident had been front-page news. According to witnesses, the Brant Mercedes might have been speeding when a car coming from the opposite direction crossed the dividing line and collided head-on with it. The photograph indicated that the cars had struck a glancing blow. Both drivers survived, as Spotto had said. Portia Brant, the passenger in Joel Brant’s Mercedes, hadn’t been wearing her seat belt and was decapitated.
The driver of the other car was a retired postal worker from New York named Sam Chavez. Thanks to his seat belt and air bag, he’d sustained only facial lacerations and a broken leg. His blood alcohol level was well beyond the point where he was legally drunk. Joel Brant’s alcohol level was just low enough to keep him from being legally drunk. He’d suffered only minor abrasions and contusions and hadn’t been hospitalized.
Carver concentrated on the viewer and followed the story from “Wife of Local Builder Killed in Head-on Collision” to “Portia Brant, AlA Accident Victim, Is Buried.” Portia’s photographs showed a beautiful dark-haired woman with kind eyes, a neck like a ballerina’s, and a knockout smile. There was a shot of mourners at her funeral. Joel Brant was visible standing among a knot of men wearing what looked like identical dark suits. Portia’s obituary mentioned no surviving family members other than her husband, and stated that she’d been president of the Del Moray Garden Club and had been active in local charities.
Carver stared at her photograph, at her smile and elegant neck. His mind flinched at imagining her beheaded by a slab of windshield glass or sharp-edged flying wreckage, and he wondered how much of the accident Brant remembered, how much of it troubled his dreams.
They had been driving home from an AIDS benefit ball at one of the big hotels when the accident occurred. Both had been drinking. The autopsy revealed that Portia’s blood alcohol content had been slightly higher than her husband’s.
Carver figured out how to work the viewer to make a copy of the image on the screen and fed it a quarter. Portia Brant’s photograph duplicated well. He made three more copies, then switched off the microfilm viewer and removed the reel.
Portia’s face haunted him. The death of a woman like that, the way she’d died, how might it have affected her husband beyond normal grief? If Joel Brant was psychologically askew after such an experience, who could blame him?
As long as it didn’t result in the stalking and killing of an innocent woman.
Feeling slightly queasy, Carver stood up and walked from the library, nodding to a stern-faced librarian on the way out.
Outside in the heat and sun, the nausea stayed with him. What now? Sympathetic morning sickness?
Pushing such nonsense from his mind, he decided his stomach was probably upset from the constant sideways motion of the microfilm being run through the viewer. Something like seasickness. He would skip lunch and drive directly back to the Brant Estates construction site and see if Joel Brant was still there.
The red convertible was gone from where it had been parked, and Brant was nowhere in sight. The cement mixers had gone, too. Carpenters were swarming over the studwork of a house near the recently poured foundations, and farther down the same street roofers were hard at work. Their hammering was a discordant symphony only slightly softened by distance.
Carver’s stomach was okay now, but his damaged rib was aching. He decided to drive to his office and find something to do that wasn’t strenuous or stressful. Maybe he’d even down one of the pills Beth had stuck in his hand as he was leaving the cottage that morning.
Half a mile down the highway he passed a low, flat-roofed structure with a sign proclaiming it to be the Egret Lounge. Despite the early hour, a row of vehicles was nosed tightly against the front of the building. They reminded Carver of suckling pigs lined against the side of their reclining mother.
One of them was the brown pickup truck driven by Brant’s foreman.
Carver braked the LeBaron and pulled onto the gravel shoulder, made a slow but tire-squealing U-turn, and parked two spaces down from the truck.
What he might learn in the Egret Lounge he wasn’t sure, but there was at least one person inside who knew Joel Brant.
23
The Egret Lounge was cool and dim inside. The mini-blinds along the front windows were sharply slanted so that bars of light traversed the low ceiling. A paddle fan, the kind that mounts flush with the ceiling to allow more headroom, was slowly revolving. It wasn’t needed to make the place cooler, but it seemed to be doing a pretty good job of keeping the tobacco smoke circulating. The Egret hadn’t yet caught up with the nonsmoking movement.
As Carver’s eyes adjusted to the dimness, he saw a long bar fronting about a dozen round tables with blue- and-white checked tablecloths on them. Each table had a napkin holder and a cluster of condiment bottles in its center, along with a large glass ashtray. Except for the bar itself, the Egret looked more like a restaurant than a lounge, though a lunch menu mounted behind the bar featured nothing other than hamburgers, cheeseburgers, and fried potatoes and onions.
The place smelled like fried beef and onions as well as cigarette smoke. Carver’s stomach, which had calmed down, gave a slight twitch. Country and western was also in the air, a Randy Travis soundalike singing in a deep, deep voice about God and the flag and an old hound and the wife and kids and something about a ’75 Ford. Carver
