An Absence of Light (22 page)

“Jesus Christ. Marcus.” Paula was incredulous. “I don’t believe that. Did he expect you to swallow that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I hope so.”

“Son of a bitch.” Paula was shaking her head. “That’s outrageous. That means the investigation is just vapor.” Her eyes were wide as she gaped at Graver. “Besom. What about Besom? What are we going to do about him? We at least ought to go through his office. And Dean’s too, for God’s sake.”

Neuman was shaking his head. “No, that’d be a mistake. They’re not going to have any tangible evidence in their offices, Paula. And they’d know for sure if we went in there. We’d only be giving ourselves away.”

“Look, when he left to go fishing he didn’t know Tisler was going to kill himself,” Paula said, turning to Graver. “Like you said, they’ve been doing this for so long they have their routine down pat. But maybe they’ve grown complacent, too, a little careless, maybe.” She turned back to Neuman. “Look at Dean’s screwup with your folders, Casey.”

Graver stood and walked to the windows. Once again late afternoon was muting the colors of the city. He was beginning to hate this office. He had seen too much of it, and he was dreading how much more of it he was going to have to see before this was over.

“No, I’ve thought about going through their offices, too,” he said, half-turned away from them, “but I think Casey’s right. Besides, I can’t believe they’d leave anything incriminating while they were away for any period of time.”

“But Dean…”

“Yeah, I know that, Paula, but I think he must’ve been working on those drafts at the time he left. Yes, he left them there… even in the wrong folders, but he was only going to be gone for an hour. Yes, he was careless, maybe even complacent But he’s not going to do something like that and leave it overnight or for two weeks while he’s on vacation. Especially now, after what’s happened. I think Casey’s right It wouldn’t be worth the risk.”

He stepped back to his desk and, standing beside it, turned another page in his file.

“Casey, you said Tisler had rental property.”

“Right. In Sharpstown.”

“Did you check it out? Did you see if there were renters?”

“No.”

Graver sat down at his desk and turned around to his computer. “What’s the address?”

“Six twenty-three Leiter.”

Graver pulled up the street index in the city directory.

“Lewis O. Feldberg, 555–2133.”

He pulled up the name index. “Four Feldbergs,” he said. “Lewis O. at 623 Leiter… is retired.”

Graver tapped the keys a few more times and brought up the Water Department records. “The old man sure as hell doesn’t use much utilities. Minimum billing. And, apparently, he moved into the place shortly after Tisler bought it. Feldberg started paying the utility bills just a few weeks later.”

He kept tapping. “Mr. Feldberg’s never had a traffic ticket.”

“That’s hard to believe,” Paula said.

Graver tapped some more.

“Last time Mr. Feldberg registered to vote was in 1956,” he said.

“That’s
hard to believe,” Paula repeated. “Go to vital stats.”

Graver made a few more entries and then waited for the screen to quit flashing. When it stopped, he read the information: “Lewis O. Feldberg. Christ, he died in Fort Worth on August 3, 1958.”

It was nearly dusk and the streetlights already had come on by the time Graver found the address of Tisler’s rent house in a dying neighborhood off Beechnut inside the Southwest Freeway. The area looked as if it had been developed in the late fifties and had started its decline fifteen years later—several streets of small ranch-style houses with low-pitched pebble and asphalt roofs and brick veneer wainscoting. He drove by the house once very slowly.

There was nothing about it that distinguished it, a fact that did not surprise Graver. Tisler wouldn’t have owned anything that distinguished itself. There was an old mulberry in the front yard growing close enough to the straight, short sidewalk for the tree’s roots to have burrowed up under it, buckling the concrete until it broke. Graver was glad to see that on either side of the front yard a dowdy ligustrum hedge marked the property lines. The front door was introduced by a little stoop with a wood railing the same height as the brick veneer. A dull black mailbox was tacked to one of the wooden posts that held up the stoop’s roof.

Turning around at the end of the street, Graver came back by the house just in time to see a light go on in one of the windows fronting the street. Momentarily startled, he quickly guessed what had happened and turned into the driveway, pulling his car right up to the garage door that faced the street.

Before he got out of his car, he bent down and picked up a crowbar from the floor on the passenger side. He had bought it in the hardware department of a discount mart just off the freeway only minutes before. Quickly closing the car door, he walked around the side of the garage and saw with relief that the hedge continued to the back of the property. At the rear of the garage he came to a gate in the chain-link fence which enclosed the backyard. He lifted the gate’s latch and went in. Even in the dull light he could see that the yard was badly in need of mowing and that, since it grew in dark clumps and tufts with bare spots scattered here and there, it was probably mostly weeds.

He stepped onto an uncovered concrete slab “patio” attached to the back of the house and walked to the door. An aluminum storm door was on the outside with a solid wooden one behind it Taking a small penlight out of his pocket, Graver shined it on the door frame. He didn’t believe that Tisler would have gone to the expense of having an alarm system installed, but if he had, it would have been difficult to hide on a house like this. Satisfied that none was there, he put the penlight in his mouth and directed the small beam at the edge of the aluminum door where he inserted the thinnest end of the crowbar and popped it open. Holding it open with his back, he did the same with the wooden door, which should have been more difficult but wasn’t, though it was noisier, which required him to work more carefully.

When he pushed open the door he found himself in a bare kitchen, and immediately noted the stale smell that a house acquired when it was long unoccupied. There were no tables or chairs, and there was nothing on the cabinets except a coffeemaker, its pot washed clean and sitting in its receptacle. A dish towel was folded beside it with a coffee mug turned upside down on the towel. The kitchen was separated from the adjoining dining room by a small bar and through the dining room Graver saw the soft glow from the light that he had seen come on earlier. He put down the crowbar on the kitchen counter and went through the dining room which was also bare except for a few cardboard boxes scattered in one corner. He continued into the living room. Here a few pieces of furniture were clustered together, an old sofa, a couple of armchairs, the lighted lamp on an end table beside one of the armchairs, and a coffee table with a few magazines neatly stacked in one pile in its center. Graver went over and picked up one of the magazines. They were all old issues of
Newsweek
. He put down the magazine and stepped around the coffee table to find the wall plug for the lamp. As he had guessed, he also found the electric timer that automatically turned on the lamp at irregular intervals.

The house was hot and stuffy, but Graver remembered seeing a window unit on the end of the house opposite the garage. He entered the hallway that opened off the living room and came immediately to a bathroom. Reaching around the corner in the dark, he found the light switch and turned it on. Again the room was empty except for a towel on the towel bar beside the sink, and on the rim of the sink, a bar of soap that was well used but cracking from the heat in the house. A packet of paper towels was torn open and sat next to the sink. There was a half-used roll of toilet tissue on the spool beside the toilet Nothing in the medicine cabinet.

Leaving on the light, Graver continued to an open door on his right, a bedroom. Empty. There was one more door at the end of the hallway, on his left It was closed. That would be the room where he had seen the air conditioner unit in the window. He went to the door, opened it, and flipped on the light.

In the center of the unfurnished room, with Venetian blinds pulled tightly closed over its windows, was a sizable computer setup. Graver stared at it with a mixture of dread and hope. This clinical-looking piece of hardware, the smell of its heat-warmed plastic filling the closed room with an odor distinct from the rest of the house, represented simultaneously a potential disaster and, perhaps, his best hope of dealing with it.

The work station itself was a flimsy-looking, L-shaped structure of thin metal and pressed wood, laden to overloading with what appeared to be a substantial computer system and laser printer. Graver walked over to it and surveyed the books on the single shelf above the monitor. They were only operating manuals for the hardware and the software. He looked at the system. Though not totally ignorant regarding computers, he was far from being proficient enough to be able to walk into a room, sit down at an unfamiliar system, and puzzle out its operation. He knew he would be lucky if he could even bring up the menu.

Still, just by looking at it, he could tell that this was a fairly large system—that much was given to him on the front of the CPU—and that it had a hard drive, two disk drives, and a port for a back-up tape. Graver pulled out the chair under the desk and sat down. He looked over the shelves and found the two tapes Tisler used for backup along with a small spiral pocket notebook where he recorded the alternating tapes and dates. Tisler’s last backup had been the day before he died. Graver flipped on the computer and waited for it to clear. When it was ready, he began tapping at the keyboard. After fifteen minutes he had used everything obvious and still hadn’t gained access. He began to have the uncomfortable feeling that he shouldn’t be pressing his luck.

Hoping that Tisler had not toyed with the backup procedures, he pecked around for a few minutes, found the parameters, and copied them down, knowing he would need them to access the backup tapes on another system. He double-checked his notes, suddenly afraid he was going to transpose some of the characters in the paths. After he was satisfied, he took the older of the two tapes and used it to run another backup of the hard drive.

While he was waiting, he went through each book on the shelves and found nothing. By this time Graver thought he knew Tisler well enough to know that anything significant was going to be on the tape, and that it would be well protected by a labyrinthine cryptosystem. The loose ends—and there were always loose ends—all seemed to have been kept neatly swept into an unseen corner of what once had been Arthur Tisler’s mind.

When the backup was completed, Graver retrieved the tape, put each of them in his pocket, and turned off the computer. The two tapes would give him everything that had been in the computer files the day before Tisler died, and everything that was on it now. If there were any discrepancies between the two, then Graver would know that someone other than Tisler had access to the computer. If there were no changes, he couldn’t be sure. The question was, did he now erase the hard drive to prevent anyone else gaining access? He decided to wait until he knew the two tapes were good. He took one last look at the computer, not entirely sure he wasn’t making a mistake by walking away from it, turned off the lights, and walked out of the room.

Leaving the house the same way he had come in, he made sure both back doors were firmly closed even though their locks were broken. As he was pulling out of the driveway another light went on in the house, this time in the empty bedroom across the hall from the computer. Arthur Tisler was very thorough.

He stopped at a convenience store and called Arnette from a pay phone.

“You’re damned impatient,” she said, hearing his voice.

“I’m not checking up,” he said. “I’ve got something for you.” He told her what it was.

“Did you get the parameters?”

“I did.”

“This is going to take some crypt work,” she cautioned, “and crypt work, baby, is not what it used to be. These days, sometimes its simply impossible to get where you want to go.”

“I’m bringing them over.”

“We’ll be here,” she said.

It struck Burtell as an odd place to meet, but he paid his three dollars in the lobby, asked the location of the Modern Israeli Photography exhibit, and ascended the north foyer steps of the Museum of Fine Arts. Tuesday night was not the usual night for the museum’s late hours, but the hours had been extended this week because of several special exhibits. Even so, the viewers were sparse as Burtell ascended another tier of stairs to a maze of exhibit panels set up in the largest exhibition hall.

He crossed his arms and began looking at the photographs. In less than five minutes he rounded a set of panels and met Panos Kalatis, a program rolled up in one hand, the other hand in his trousers pocket, leaning slightly forward to study a photograph among a series taken in a kibbutz. He was wearing gray dress slacks, a pink shirt opened at the neck, and a navy linen blazer with a gold crest on its breast pocket.

Kalatis continued to study the photograph as Burtell stood there.

“Sometimes parts of the Israeli coast remind me of Greece,” he said, straightening up, but keeping his eyes on the photographs. “Harsh. Olive trees. Rocks. You can’t really tell in these black and white photographs, but the light is the same too. Especially in the late summer.”

He moved to the next photograph. A young couple in khaki walking shorts and sandals were moving just ahead of him, talking softly. He said nothing more until, after a few moments, the couple rounded the exhibit panels to the other side. Burtell came up beside him again.

“I thought we ought to talk, just the two of us,” Kalatis said. “Without Faeber.” He stepped close to another photograph, but then moved quickly to the next one. “You don’t much like him, do you?”