An Absence of Light (7 page)

Graver didn’t say anything to that Westrate was so immersed in the profession of covering his ass that no form of reasoning that worked to any other end was capable of penetrating his myopic self-interest. He was a savvy player without question, but he lacked the ability to see the larger picture insofar as it extended beyond his own person. It was a modern failing, this inability to think in terms of anything that did not affect you personally, so, in this, Westrate was a product of his times. His own career was the largest concept in his intellectual inventory, and whatever affected that career was the most important thing in life. He was a hollow man. And he probably would realize all of his ambitions.

Graver looked away, toward the hallway floor just outside the double doors. A solitary lamp in the entrance hall was throwing a gleam across the polished hardwood floor like the trail of the moon on water. There was more than just an air of desperation in Westrate’s manner and that made Graver cautious. Suspicious and cautious. He reached over to his desk and got a notepad off the top along with his old green fountain pen. He unscrewed the cap from the pen and made a few notes on the tablet, only doodles, but Westrate couldn’t see that. He took his time, underlined a few things.

“Let’s just talk worse case, here,” Graver said, looking up. “How are you going to handle this if it’s a homicide?”

Westrate’s face changed from sober to grim at this question. He clearly had been thinking about this.

“Nobody gets into the file,” he said. “Not without written
and
verbal approval from me.”

Westrate was no clumsy buffoon despite his streetwise, bully-boy manner. The man could play power politics with as much sophistication as the best of them, which was precisely why he was sitting here now. Inside maneuvering was as second nature to him as his bluster. But even though Graver disliked him, he had to admit sympathy with Westrate’s situation. He was going to have to make some decisions for which there were no clear precedents, an agonizing position for a bureaucrat. Tisler’s death was going to require a criminal inquiry and, naturally, the investigations he was involved in would be central to the inquiry. And therein lay the problem.

Westrate had to consider not only how best to protect the integrity of the CID files, but he had an additional concern. As assistant chief in charge of Investigative Services, he was responsible not only for CID, but also for Homicide, Narcotics, Auto Theft, and the Crime Lab. Tisler’s death had put Westrate in the unenviable position of having his left hand (Homicide) investigate his right hand (CID), a situation which was made even worse by the fact that his right hand was the most secretive Division in the department and never opened its file to
anyone
.

So Graver asked the next sticky question. “What about IAD?”

Westrate shook his head slowly, emphatically. “I’m going to deal with that I’ve already talked with Hertig, before I came over here.”

No surprise there.

“Are you going to try to restrict them?”

“Damn right I am,” Westrate snapped, his eyes boring in belligerently as if Graver himself had challenged him. “Nobody wants to relive that shit in the seventies. I’m not going to have anything like that on my watch.”

“That was an altogether different situation, Jack. They were using the CID to compile dossiers on political enemies. It was stupid. They should have expected to have their files seized. They had nobody to blame but themselves.”

“That may be,” Westrate said. “But Lukens is going to have to climb over my dead goddamned body to get to that file.”

Graver capped his fountain pen. “That may be wrongheaded thinking,” he said.

Westrate looked at him. “What?”

Westrate was bowing his neck at this hint of anything less than total endorsement.

“Come on, Jack. An intelligence officer’s death complicates the question of confidentiality,” Graver said. “We can’t very well refuse to turn over material evidence. I think we can argue for some editing of what they see, but I don’t know how we can refuse to let them see anything.”

“If Tordella determines this is a suicide, that’s great, best case,” Westrate said evasively. “No formal investigation. I’ll handle the administrative wars… you
memorize
Arthur Tisler.” He pointed the two index fingers of his clasped hands at Graver. “If somebody throws a question at you about that guy, I want you to be able to answer it with documentation, if there is any. I don’t want anybody to know anything about Arthur Tisler that you don’t already know about Arthur Tisler.”

Westrate was still sitting forward, the soles of his shoes planted flat on the floor, his forearms anchored to his knees, the shoulders of his suit hunched and rumpled, a physical reflection of his emotional disconcertion—and determination. The lighting in the living room was not all that good, but Graver clearly could see the moisture glistening on Westrate’s contentious upper lip. A lot was at stake, careers, and at least one man’s entire psychology. It seemed that Westrate was convinced—or knew—that a scandal was about to break. He seemed to be developing a siege mentality, to be taking his concern way beyond a prudent anticipation of events.

“Why did you come to me like this?” Graver asked after a moment. “You could have told me all this in the morning.”

“Okay,” Westrate said. “Fair enough.” He laced the fingers of both hands together and clenched them until the knuckles turned white. “We got a break with those turds shooting each other in Kashmere Gardens. That was an incredible piece of luck. I want to hold on to that” He raised a forefinger and wagged it slowly. “Insiders are going to know that we’ve got to be investigating this. SOP. But what I want to avoid is the suspicion that there’s something more than routine shit going on here. I hope to hell—I pray—that you find out that Tisler was up to his nostrils in gambling debts, or that he was a closet queer, or that he was a pedophile and was diddling half the four-year-olds in Harris County. But the last thing I want to discover is that he was dicking around with the intelligence file. I want his sin to be
personal
, not professional.”

Westrate was on the edge of the chair now, his stomach and pugnacious, tight-lipped face thrust forward, on the attack.

“The thing is,” he said, “I don’t want to give the impression that we’re afraid that it might be professional. I don’t want anybody to see me go into your office, and I don’t want anybody to see you go into mine. From now on we communicate only by
secure
telephone. Or, we meet like this, face to face, somewhere we know we won’t be seen. I don’t want the staff, yours or mine, to see us putting our heads together. I don’t want any scuttlebutt I don’t want any leaks. That’s how the press gets on to something like this. Some little tight-butted secretary, some damn daydreaming file clerk, sees shit and reports it I don’t want the internal rumor mill to feed on this. And I’ve already made this clear to Katz, too.”

Graver imagined that Westrate had been all over Katz, badgering him mercilessly to do this, to avoid that He very definitely had worked up a lather over this. Graver couldn’t make up his mind whether Westrate’s paranoia was routine theatrics or whether he was hiding something that Graver should have been smart enough to pick up on. The truth was, if Westrate was trying to maneuver him because of one of his innumerable hidden agendas, there simply was no way Graver could see it coming. Not at this point, anyway.

Westrate stood. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “Listen, Graver, I want you all over this. Any doubts, any questions, anything doesn’t look right, doesn’t add up, you get to me quick.” He opened his eyes wide. “Understand?’’

“I think I do.” Graver said.

Westrate gave a snappy nod as if to say good, then we understand each other and that is that. He wheeled around and headed out of the living room like a wild boar, on to other business. In a few seconds he was at the front door, pulling it open. “Call me,” he said without looking around and walked out.

Graver closed the door behind him and waited in the darkened entry hall, looking at the broken glow from the porch light as it came in through the refractions of the beveled glass on the door. He waited until the headlights of Westrate’s car came on and then watched as they moved slowly and crookedly away from the curb and disappeared obliquely skyward down the street.

“I don’t much like the idea of you watching,” she said, looking out the car window down the little lane of trees which still glistened from the passing rain. The lane, too, was glittery from the shower earlier in the evening and an occasional wisp of steam broke loose from the pavement and hovered momentarily under the glow of the lamps before it rose slowly and joined the darkness.

“I want to see this,” Kalatis said. “Don’t think about me. Just do what you do.”

The woman was in her early forties with roan hair which she wore pulled back loosely and gathered behind her head. She was well built, having a figure that was not lean but which she kept much younger than its years by a lot of sweat and a grim determination to do battle without quarter against gravity and failing elasticity. Determination had marked her life. Her will was lapideous. Her ability to concentrate was singular. Her nerve was inflexible.

Panos Kalatis liked to use her because, over the years, she had learned to be afraid. The accumulating years had done that to her. That which constant threat had not been able to instill in her when she was younger, when he first had met her in Trieste, the creep of days passing one into the other, month into month, year into year, had accomplished with nothing more threatening than the moving hand of a clock. Diminishing time, the slow inevitable shrinking of it, had made her less rash. Life, which had been nothing to her in the past, acquired a looming significance. She still was deliberate, but the motivation now involved an equation of self-preservation. Kalatis liked to see her afraid. Thirty, even twenty years earlier, simply watching her walk across the street used to make the hair prickle on the back of his neck. Today her silent menopausal body had done what neither gun nor knife nor poison had done in her youth: it had taught her to fear, and her fear, though she kept it hidden, unacknowledged, had unmasked her mythology. She still was death, but now she was death of another sort.

He looked at her. She wore a bone-white silk blouse with long sleeves and a straight black dress. The flesh visible above the first button of her blouse was as white as the silk. He had not seen her breasts in fifteen years, and he wondered about them. So different from Jael’s… in every way.

“I don’t like it,” she said again.

These few—two, maybe three jobs—would be her last for him. He thought she had just about outlived her usefulness.

“How much longer do you think you can do it this way?” Kalatis asked. It was a cruel question, but for Kalatis cruelty was an amusement, his own feelings long ago having been seared beyond such subtleties.

“What do you mean?” she said, opening her purse and looking around inside for something.

“Using your body. Maybe you ought to consider another angle. Something more… suitable…”

“Suitable,” she said, looking into her purse. She took out a tube of lipstick and applied it without looking in a mirror. “Suitable…” She nodded, lightly pressing her lips together, staring out the windshield.

Kalatis guessed her insouciance was only feigned. He imagined she was furious. He thought that if the light in the car were brighter he would be able to see on the pale flesh across her cleavage the appearance of the blushed marbling that flared there when she grew impassioned. In the old days, in Trieste, he would watch for that delicate reddening whenever they went to bed together. She was always in such control he couldn’t tell what she was feeling—her sexual engagement, like everything else she did, was done with a cool deliberation that did not give way to abandon until the very last moment At first it was a puzzling thing for him because he never knew how he was doing, and sometimes the end caught him by surprise. Until he discovered the secret of her blushing bosom. She could control everything except that very specific behavior of her anatomy.

“What did he do to you?” she asked, closing her purse.

“This man?”

She nodded.

Panos put his hands on the steering wheel and stretched his legs and sighed. “He is very wealthy. He has two airplanes. One of these airplanes was seen where it should not have been. He knows it was there. He knows it should not have been there.” Panos turned and looked at her. “I believe he has been unfaithful to me… in his way.” He grinned.

The telephone between them rang before she could respond to that, and Panos answered it.

“Yes.” He listened a moment “Thank you.” He put down the telephone. “He is with two other men, but he has just asked for his bill.”

She opened the door of the Mercedes and got out The private club was in an old, ivy-covered brick building and sat in the center of a thickly wooded grounds. The narrow lane that led to it was one-way, entering from one side of the grounds to a small parking lot and exiting on the other side. Kalatis was parked very near the entrance to the small lot, and she had to walk nearly fifty yards, passing through the dim wash of a streetlamp before she rounded the end of a hedge to the parked cars.

As he watched her walk, Kalatis had to admit she was far from losing her touch, or her shape, or, certainly, her sexual appeal. Though he would never let her know that. Whatever her fears of aging might have been, they were premature, but he liked seeing her afraid nonetheless.

There were only six or seven cars in the small lot that could not have held more than twice that number when it was full. The club was very exclusive indeed. She had met the man on two occasions only recently, while she was in the company of someone else, but it was enough for her to have made an impression on him, enough to give him a reason to think about her after she was gone. This would not have worked with ninety-five percent of the men Kalatis knew, but in his middle age Toland had become rash about sex. Irresponsible.