An Absence of Light (16 page)

“Afterward,” Graver asked, “did Dean ever indicate to you that he suspected something might have been disturbed?”

“No. It was just dumb luck that I realized what had happened and that I actually found the Seldon contributor folder at the bottom of the pile. But then, I guess that accounts for Dean’s misplacement of his notes in the first place.”

Graver stared past Neuman to the diner. It was a bare minimum eatery, mostly a counter with stools and a few tables next to the windows that faced the street Inside, a waitress was wiping off the counter. She stopped to adjust a hairpin and then went back to wiping the counter. The only other person in the place was an old man with a bulbous nose sitting at a window table holding a newspaper in his hands. But he wasn’t reading it He was staring out the window, daydreaming, his eyes fixed on the night.

Graver shifted his eyes back to Neuman. “You’ve had plenty of time to think about this,” he said. “What do you make of it?”

Neuman was quick to shake his head. “I don’t know. I don’t understand it I don’t know how Dean works his other cases, the tricks he uses to develop them. I’ve still got a lot to learn.” He paused. “But… uh, I don’t… I haven’t been able to put together a scenario that could explain what he was doing. I don’t know what he was doing.”

“Yes,” Graver said, “you do.”

Neuman was embarrassed, a little flustered. The keys jangled again. Graver stared at him.

“Looks like he was fabricating a contact report,” Neuman said.

“Yeah”—Graver nodded—”that’s what it looks like.”

Casey Neuman didn’t say anything, and as they stood there at the edge of the light from the diner windows Graver realized that he wasn’t going to say anything.

“Okay, Casey,” Graver said. He knew exactly what he was going to do. “You’re going to get your feet wet here, in a major way.”

Graver sat in his car and watched Neuman’s taillights disappear into all the other lights of the city. These revelations indicting Dean Burtell were hitting him hard. But he would have been a fool to start looking for innocent explanations. He wasn’t going to find them.

Instead of driving away, he got out of the car and went to the pay telephone near the front door of the diner. Taking a slip of paper from his wallet he dialed the number written there.

“Hello?”

It was the woman’s voice he had heard the previous evening when he had answered the telephone in his living room.

“I’d like to speak to Victor, please.”

“Who?”

“Is this Carney?”

Pause.

“Yes.”

“Victor told me you might be answering the telephone. This is Graver. I need to talk to Victor.”

“Oh. He’s not here.”

“Will you give him a message?”

“Okay.”

“Tell him I need to talk to him as soon as I can. He has several numbers. Tell him to call them until he gets me. I’ll be at the home number in half an hour.”

“Okay.”

For some reason he didn’t feel as though she was getting the full import of his message.

“Do you understand?” he asked.

“Yeah, sure, I understand.”

“Thank you,” he said.

He went back to the car again, got in, and closed the door. Turning an investigative eye on Burtell was going to be painful, not unlike what he had just been through with Dore. Jesus. His profession was built on the study of deception, he had seen it from every angle, examined it with a telescope and a microscope, dissected it, read about it, written about it, thought about it, watched it, listened to it, experienced it, done it himself, and still he seemed no less immune to it than in the beginning. Certainly Dore had proved that on a personal level. Now Burtell was making the professional point.

But then no one was really immune to it, ever. If you were going to have any peace of mind at all, if you didn’t want to live your life alone and in a misanthropic rage, you had to trust people. You had to allow them the freedom to be Judas. And it didn’t do you any good to indulge in philosophical indignation, because if you did—and if you were honest with yourself—eventually you would find yourself eating your philosophy along with your crow. Deception was too handy a human tool not to employ it sooner or later yourself.

The thing was, as with everything else deception had its dimensions. There were vast deceptions and small ones, there were trivial ones and mortal ones, there were those that hurt for a little while and those that devastated. Tonight, sitting alone in front of a nearly empty diner, Graver wasn’t sure anymore if the distance between these dimensions actually was all that great. It seemed to him that when men and women determined to employ this oldest of Satan’s skills, they implicitly agreed to sacrifice a little piece of themselves in the process. Perhaps it was only a bruise in the beginning, something easily sustained without great harm, hardly noticeable. But it never went away and every deception added to it and made it worse until it was large and rancid and began to eat at them from the inside. How much rot could a person tolerate, he wondered, before the rot began to be the thing that defined them?

He ran his fingers through his hair, started his car, and drove away from the diner.

Half an hour later Graver pulled up in front of his house. Looking at it through the windshield he thought the place looked particularly dreary in the darkness. He never left a light on for himself, even when he knew he was going to be working late, and he never had gotten one of those little timers at the hardware store even though he had been meaning to for months. He just didn’t think of it except at moments like this when he would like to have seen a light inside, even if it had to be one that he had turned on himself.

The headlights of his car panned across the lawn as he turned into the cinder drive that was two cars wide and extended all the way back to the garage and the brick courtyard at the rear of the house. The instant they squared on the garage’s closed doors, they also picked up the glint from the chrome bumper of a car that had pulled around back into the courtyard.

Graver cut his headlights and stopped. Neuman or Paula would have parked in front. Slowly he eased the car along the cinder drive until he was even with the side of the house. If anyone was inside and hadn’t already seen him, they wouldn’t see his car sitting in the drive if they looked out the front windows.

Cutting the motor, he opened the car door and stepped out onto the cinder drive and eased the door closed until the latch clicked softly. He took a deep breath of the darkness which was heavy with the combined fragrances of the blossoming mock oranges and the huisache that grew against the rock wall on the other side of the car. For some reason his mind recalled the image of the spent flowers, yellow and white, which would cover the drive in a few weeks as the last of the blossoms retreated in the face of the scorching July temperatures. He reached back for his Sig-Sauer in its holster at his waist It was something he hadn’t done in a dozen years except when he had to qualify at the firing range.

Holding the gun down at his side he eased along the cinder drive until he approached the back corner and the small Mercedes came into full view. He noted the license plate. He stood silently and scanned the night yard, hoping his eyes would quickly adjust to the varieties of darkness and shadows. The pool. The palmettos. The wrought-iron patio furniture. The bulky trunks of the oaks. He smelled cigarette smoke. Back to the pool.

Jesus.

His heart lurched at the realization that someone was sitting in one of the wrought-iron chairs on the patio at the near end of the pool. It was a man, staring straight across at him. Graver assumed the man had seen his car lights as he came into the drive, though he didn’t know whether he could yet see Graver at the corner of the house.

“Graver. Is that you over there? I saw your headlights.”

It was Victor Last. Graver was both relieved and furious. He always had kept his private life private, and especially from informants. It was bad business to let them know anything at all about your personal life. Maybe Graver had treated Last a little differently in this regard, but even so, showing up like this was clearly out of line. Or maybe Last himself saw it differently now that Graver was living alone.

He scanned the yard one more time, though feeling pessimistic about his chances of spotting anyone else who might have been there. He returned the Sig-Sauer to its holster and stepped out from around the corner and started across the courtyard to the pool.

“What the hell are you doing here, Last?” Graver asked, trying to control his voice.

“I heard from Carney within five minutes of your call,” Last said. “She said you’d be home in half an hour and that you wanted to see me as soon as possible. I thought I could save some time.”

Last said this in a most natural manner, as though he hadn’t the slightest idea that Graver might have objected to his showing up at his home.

Graver sat down in one of the wrought-iron chairs across the table from Last The night was not overcast so the city lights did not provide a reflective glow by which Graver could see Last’s face. He did not like this. Last was much better at masking his voice than his facial changes. As far as Graver could tell, he was dressed much as the night before. Graver put his forearms on the wrought-iron table. The water in the pool was still and silent, the surface occasionally catching a glint of light as though it were a tightly stretched sheet of clear cellophane.

“I want to hear more about what you alluded to the other night,” Graver said.

“Oh?” Last’s head was motionless, alert. “I see.”

“Don’t jump to any conclusions,” Graver said. “Did you expect me to let that go?”

“I hoped not,” Last said, a touch of a smirk in his voice.

“What is it you need, Victor?”

“I find myself a little short just now,” he said, resting an elbow on the edge of the table, the cigarette in the air. “I’d like to reestablish our former relationship.”

“Same as before?”

“Well… not quite. I’m
very
short, actually.”

“How much?”

“Double.”

Graver looked at Last’s silhouette. His voice was very firm on this. He was sure of himself.

“Victor, I couldn’t give you that if you had proof the mayor was a pedophile. It’s not a matter of bargaining. It’s a matter of empty purses up there. We just don’t have it At the time we were working together you were the highest-paid person we had. I can’t do it.”

“Come on, Graver,” Last scoffed gently. “That was eight years ago. Doubling it is not really like
doubling
it, for Christ’s sake. Inflation. Cost of living. The bloody economy, all that Even if you paid me the same rate it would be more.”

“I can’t do it.”

Silence. Last smoked his cigarette.

“I can give you twenty percent more,” Graver said. “That would put you at the top again.”

“I’m flattered,” Last said dryly.

“That’s all I can do. I’m sorry.” Pause. “But I won’t pay even that if your information’s no good.”

“Okay, fine. When can you pay me?”

“Let me hear your story.”

Last was still again. The cigarette’s ember moved from the table to his face and there was a brief, rosy glow as he sucked on it and fleetingly lighted his upper cheeks and eyes. Then he was back in the dark.

“You’re a gentleman, Graver. I’ll trust you on that.”

Graver was relieved. He knew that Last trusted him, that wasn’t it. It was the fact that Last didn’t hold out for bigger money. If his information had been stunning, he would have. What Graver might have here was a good lead. It wasn’t going to be something that was going to knock him out of his chair.

“Okay,” Last said. He dropped his cigarette on the tile under the table and put his shoe on it. He dropped his arms to the arms of the chair, relaxed. When he began talking, his voice was mellow, soft, unhurried.

“I started to tell you last night about going to a party at this fellow’s house here in Houston—”

“What was his name?” Graver interrupted.

“I’ll get to that,” Last said, unperturbed. “This man and his wife had a very strange house. Ugly, actually. Modern. One level, spare design, glass rooms around a series of atria. Kind of modular and rambly, if you can imagine. Odd. There were a lot of people, but it wasn’t a raucous affair. It was a talking party. A little combo doing soft, white noise stuff and people standing around in clutches holding drinks. Yuppie sorts. New Age sorts. And the ever-present
business
sorts.

“At one point in the evening the lady who accompanied me to the party went to the loo. When she came back she was all atitter. Seems the loo was rather vulnerable visually, to an outside courtyard. The toilet was actually out in the open in the bedroom—so was the shower—and the only privacy was provided by the thick foliage surrounding the bedroom. No privacy in the room itself, so that you pissed away right there in front of all the other ladies who might wander in to check their hair, or cosmetics, or whatever. She, of course, didn’t trust the density of the foliage on the other side of the glass walls. She said there was another bedroom around the corner, and a woman she met in this first bedroom said the arrangement was similar. My lady friend asked this woman if she’d been here before, and she said, oh, yes. And my friend asked what about peepers. The lady laughed and said, no it wasn’t at all what it seemed. No one could see in because of garden walls and all that. That was part of the intent in the architectural design. To make one feel that one was living
au naturel
.

“I decided to check it out The place had a kind of honeycomb arrangement, rooms and atria interconnected. You could be in one glass room and look across one of the several atria to the next glass room. Glass and mirrored hallways connected these sort of modules.

“Anyway, after a while I slipped outside for a smoke. Everyone was inside, of course, addicted to the air-conditioning, not wanting to muss themselves with the humidity. I didn’t know but what there might be someone outside, so I was very casual about it, lighting a cigarette right away so as to be able to explain myself if I needed to.