An Absence of Light (14 page)

“Redfish,” he heard himself say, and he broke off the first wedge of orange and tossed it into his mouth, his rod cradled in the crook of his left arm, as his eyes found the little pad of pudendum where the mile of thighs came together at her pelvis. The wild, fragrant buds of citrus burst and squirted in his mouth as he bit into the fruit.

“Redfish,” she said.

He nodded. “What are you doing way down here?” he asked, managing to drag his eyes back to hers.

“Beth,” she said, turning to her dog. “Sometimes we go all the way, right down to the Rio Grande and old Mexico. The walk’s nothing to her, with those legs. And it keeps me in shape, too.”

“No shit,” he said, tossing a second wedge of orange into his mouth. He bit into it, a second burst of citrus, and she cocked her hip and smiled at him.

“You like that.” She grinned.

He was looking at her breasts when the second wedge of orange turned to napalm in his throat, vaporized napalm, a spray of napalm instantly saturating his sinuses, ripping up into the hollows behind his eyes, actually coloring his vision. He saw scarlet everything, bikini, breasts, navel, smile, and as he staggered back into the red surf he knew he was dying. His trachea and lungs and heart were melted, already dissolved by the napalm, and even the murky Gulf water could not extinguish it.

The last thing he was aware of was the girl bent over him trying to open his mouth, but his jaws had locked down tight on his tongue, and she could only grab and pull at his lips and cheeks.

Frustrated, she gave up and stood for a minute watching him convulse, watching him suck in enough surf to drown even though he was past drowning. When he stopped jerking and flailing in the water, she bent down and worked at his mouth again, finally managing to pry it open. She took out the piece of his tongue he had bitten off and fished around in the sides of his mouth for the orange pulp, digging around the base of his gums, sloshing the frothing salty water into his mouth to make sure it was all washed out.

In a few moments she was finished, and she stood and stepped back away from him. She bent and washed her hands in the water, picked up some sand and rubbed her fingers with it and then washed them off again. Then she stepped back out of the water and watched him roll in the tide, watched him finally go face down, and pitch heavily with the slam of each wave in the rolling surf. After a minute or two, she looked up the beach where she came from, and then she called the greyhound and started walking back, her long, tan legs sauntering, her thick black hair blowing in the Gulf breeze.

Some of the seagulls stayed with him, reluctant to leave, sliding along the margins of the water, back and forth, dipping down, squeaking in the wind. Finally they, too, moved on and in a little while they were all gone, the girl, the dog, and the gulls.

They sat in the car with the windows rolled down, one of only two cars in the small, otherwise empty lot, a niche carved out of the vast Memorial Park that surrounded them like a rain forest. The lot was at the terminus of a narrow lane that circled around and down behind a chic condominium tower that overlooked the verdant margins of Buffalo Bayou. In the failing light of dusk an arched footbridge with a wrought-iron gate was still visible fifty yards away where it led from the parking lot across a creek to the walking paths that followed the northern bank of the bayou. On the other side of the bayou, obscured by the dense wall of the park’s semitropical vegetation, the emerald golf links of the River Oaks Country Club sloped up toward the city’s most prestigious neighborhood.

Panos Kalatis let a gentle blue tendril of cigar smoke leave his mouth and drift out the car window into the boggy evening air. He was sitting behind the steering wheel, his seat pushed back so that he could turn a little to the passenger beside him and at the same time, with only the slightest movement of his head, be able to see the other man in the back seat.

“No one had any inkling of this, I suppose,” Kalatis said, throwing a quizzical look at Burtell in the back seat “No
intelligence
about the possibility.” He had just pushed the buttons at his elbow and rolled down all the windows in the car.

“No, nothing,” Burtell said. “You normally don’t have intelligence about suicide,” he added dryly. He wanted to say something else, but he held his tongue. There would be time to say what he wanted to say.

“Then you do think he killed himself?” Kalatis asked, still looking over the back of the seat.

“Yeah, I think he killed himself,” Burtell said grudgingly. He was having a hard time swallowing his anger, his disgust at the two men in front of him.

Kalatis nodded, regarding Burtell with a meditative silence.

“You don’t think they could’ve gotten it wrong?” Faeber asked.

“I doubt it,” Burtell said tersely. Faeber was out of his element. The questions sounded stupid coming from him. He was merely mimicking Kalatis’s role, hoping that by going along with his own needless interrogatories he was ingratiating himself with the Greek.

“But if he was murdered, they’d want to keep that quiet, wouldn’t they?” Kalatis offered.

“You mean a cover-up? No way. Not a cop killing, not in CID.”

“I’ve seen it done before,” Kalatis said.

“Oh, Jesus, Panos. Come on.” Burtell shook his head, impatient with the idea.

Kalatis nodded calmly and leaked more smoke into the failing light. Just then two women in bright nylon jogging shorts and sport bras jogged into sight on the other side of the footbridge and stopped, their run completed, in the clearing at the end of the path. They paced restlessly as they caught their breath and then after a few moments they started across the footbridge to the parking lot.

Kalatis followed them with his eyes as they made their way across the lot and started up the narrow lane toward the condo. “The question is,” he said, still watching the women, “how is this going to affect us?”

“The question is, did he leave anything behind?” Faeber said.

Kalatis looked into the back seat, the dark circles around his eyes visible even in the twilight.

“If he left anything in that area it would have to be personal,” Burtell said. “His own little record-keeping operation or something. There’s nothing like that in CID. He didn’t have any kind of setup like that at the office.”

“How can you be sure of that?” Faeber asked.

“It’s my goddamned business to be sure of it,” Burtell said evenly. He hated having to answer Faeber. Faeber was important to Kalatis, no doubt about it. His data banks, his sleazy nature, his venality were all useful tools to Kalatis, but the man seemed to enjoy a closeness to the Greek that his talents did not warrant. Burtell was frustrated that he had not gotten beyond the business of these investigations. He had thought that by now he would have, but for some reason Kalatis had closed the door. Perhaps he had sensed a greater ambition in Burtell than he saw in either Besom or Tisler; perhaps he was wary of a more clever man.

No one said anything for a moment Kalatis was turning the cigar in his mouth, keeping the butt of it damp, tasting the tobacco. With the women out of the picture there was nothing to distract their attention from the cicadas throbbing in the thickets of the park, the late June heat intense enough to keep them singing hours into the night.

“I wouldn’t want to lose everything we’ve gained so far,” Kalatis observed.

Burtell was attentive to every nuance in Kalatis’s voice. His tone was not threatening, but it might have carried a thin imputation, or maybe it was simply an old-fashioned portent of imagined consequences, the kind of thing you perceived between the lines when the juices in your glands squirted into action and turned you cold even before you understood why. In this business, there was an entire language, an invisible lexicon that was only apprehensible in just that way, with your juices, elliptical communications conveyed solely in those absent spaces between the apparent You understood because there was a portion of a primitive instinct left within you that you could not define or explain, except that it had to do with survival.

“All this preparation, this significant capital investment,” Kalatis went on.

Burtell had to reassure him. “Look, Marcus Graver is writing a report that will close this down. Everybody wants this over, and everybody wants it clearly to
appear
to be over.”

Kalatis had been staring through the windshield at the park where the surrounding trees were quickly turning from deep blue-greens to sooty black, their towering presence darker than the darkening sky. He turned and looked into the back seat again.

“What about Graver? He’s good enough to get onto this, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, he’s good enough,” Burtell said matter-of-factly. But he suspected Kalatis already knew that.

“Then we’ve got to worry about him.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so.”

“He’s in a very awkward situation, Panos,” Burtell said wearily. “I think he’ll follow Homicide’s lead. He’ll almost have to. If he insists on pursuing suspicions of conspiracy, he’s going to run into resistance from Westrate. Westrate’s not going to want to hear any of that kind of talk. No matter how suspicious Graver may be—and I don’t know that he is, this is just for the sake of your argument—regardless of any suspicions he may have, he’s the kind of guy who’s very good at making reality checks on himself. Homicide says suicide. IAD says suicide. He has no tangible evidence that Tisler was doing anything out of the ordinary. No matter what his suspicions, he’s going to let it go. He’s an empiricist.”

Kalatis emitted a coil of cigar smoke, still looking over the back of the seat “An ‘empiricist,’ uh-huh,” he said with pointed boredom.

Burtell doubted the Greek knew what that meant To hell with him, let him wonder.

“You have confidence that Tisler didn’t have some kind of mental meltdown and leave something behind?” Faeber challenged again. “I mean, the man shot himself, for God’s sake!”

“Colin, you son of a bitch,” Burtell snapped. “The poor bastard told me what you did.” Faeber quickly looked at Kalatis, who turned away, undoubtedly disgusted with Faeber’s clumsy double take. “You wanted to ‘guarantee’ his loyalty? How goddamned bumbling can you be?”

“We had to do that,” Kalatis interjected. He pulled at the knot of his tie, twisting his neck this way and that and unbuttoned his shirt collar, opening it wide. The heat seemed to have grown more oppressive with the fading light. Burtell had pulled off his suit coat a long time ago and laid it in the seat beside him. Faeber hadn’t loosened anything or removed anything.

“You
thought
you had to do that,” Burtell clarified. He wasn’t going to let Kalatis weasel out of that so easily. Faeber cut his eyes at Kalatis to see how he was going to react to Burtell’s challenge, but Burtell didn’t give a damn. He went on. “Whatever reason you had to doubt him was a stupid reason. Somebody way overplayed this. Somebody didn’t know what they were doing. You pushed him, and you lost him. Now you’ve got a dead man on your hands, and you want me to make sure it doesn’t mean anything. Well, I can’t do that.”

“We’re only suggesting,” Kalatis said with calculated patience, “that you need to be sure about what you’re telling us.”

Faeber nodded in agreement.

Burtell didn’t like this alliance he was seeing between the two men in front of him. He didn’t like being on the defensive. Something was poisoning the well.

“There’s… nothing… in… CID,” Burtell emphasized. “If he’s got something squirreled away outside, I can’t be responsible for knowing anything about that. If he did that, it’s because he was desperate, felt like he’d been pushed up against the wall.” He let this hang in the sticky air for a moment “It didn’t have to be that way.”

There was a long silence, Kalatis and Faeber half-turned in the front seat, Kalatis looking away now, out the windshield. He was big, and he often reminded Burtell of a minotaur. It was an apt image: Kalatis, his feet planted firmly in front of the doorway to darkness, guarding a subterranean maze of lies.

“What about Seldon, then?” Kalatis asked. He was holding his cigar, looking at its glowing tip. “What do we do now?”

“You forget about it,” Burtell said. “It’s gone, done.”

Kalatis turned his head slowly toward Burtell. “Oh, I don’t think so, my friend. I just said a moment ago that I didn’t want to lose my situation here.”

“You’ll lose that and everything else if you try to force this,” Burtell warned. “We can’t screw around with Graver too much, Panos. We won’t get by with it very long.”

“What do you mean?” Kalatis asked softly, smiling. “We’ve been screwing him for two years.”

“No, we’ve been lying to him for two years,” Burtell clarified. “There’s a difference. Tisler’s death, that’s screwing with him. Any idiot can tell lies, but you’ve got to be at the other end of the IQ scale if you want to deal successfully with Marcus Graver’s suspicions.”

“So it’s over?” Faeber was incredulous.

“Seldon is, yes,” Burtell said. “We put everything on hold for right now. Let everyone relax over there. Wait until Ray gets back from his vacation and then see if we can’t restructure, pull this back together.”

Kalatis had turned back to looking out the windshield. From where they sat they could see the tops of the downtown skyscrapers rising out of the darkness, just beginning to glitter in the twilight.

“Okay,” Kalatis said suddenly with a huge sigh. He tossed his cigar out onto the asphalt of the parking lot “We’ll get with Besom when he gets back. When is that?”

“Tomorrow,” Burtell said.

“Okay,” Kalatis continued. “We’ll get with him, get his opinion. Let’s give this some thought Work up the options. If we want to go on with the operation, how do we do it? Are the gains worth the risks? What do we do if Graver does come up with something?” He looked at Burtell and then at Faeber. “You know what we need.” Again to the back seat “I’ll be in touch.”

That was all there was to it.

Kalatis turned around to face the steering wheel and hit the buttons on his armrest that controlled the windows. As the windows were going up Burtell picked up his suit coat, feeling as though he ought to say something else, but not knowing just exactly what or just exactly why. Nothing more was said, so Burtell opened his door and got out He closed the door just as the windows locked into place, and Kalatis started the car and flipped on the air conditioner.