An Absence of Light (47 page)

“You know once you asked me why I never seemed hurt or sad or bitter because of the way Colin treats me?”

“Yes.”

“I gave you some fluffy answer.”

He nodded.

“The truth is that by the time you and I met in Veracruz, I had already been through that ‘hurt’ stage of our so-called marriage. It was past, well past. I should have listened to his first wife. She actually came to see me once, before I married him. A nice woman. I liked her, which should have been warning enough.” She paused and looked at Last. “That makes sense,” she said, “but I’m not sure you’d understand it. Anyway, when everything she had warned me about began proving true, I saw the handwriting on the wall.”

She paused and raked the fingers of one hand through her hair. “I’m not a total bitch,” she said, “but I’m not a patsy, either. We’d been married a couple of years, this house was new, and his business had just undergone a giant growth leap. Boom. Suddenly the business was huge. That was because Brod Strasser and another guy had bought into it.”

“Who was the other guy?”

“A Greek—a weird man if you ask me—named Panos Kalatis.”

“Colin told you all this?”

“God, no.” But she didn’t say how she knew. “Actually, these men own controlling interest now, or Strasser does, through one of his holding companies. Poor Colin’s just an employee for all practical purposes. A highly paid errand boy, no longer his own man. The man’s smart, Colin is. I’m not saying he’s not smart. It’s just that… I didn’t have much respect for the choice he made.

“Once he’d sold out, figuratively and literally, I thought to myself: okay, where am I, exactly? I’m married to a man who’s indifferent to me, treats me like an outdated appliance. I could live with that, I guess, for a while, if the benefits were good. I mean extraordinarily good.”

“But they weren’t.”

“No, not in the long term, I didn’t think. Colin makes this fabulous salary, but he doesn’t have a piece of the action. Fabulous salaries are great as long as you’re employed. But people get fired. I mean, the 1980s are littered with surprised executives. They thought it would never end too. But it always does. People like Strasser and Kalatis
own
the action. They don’t get fired. And when Colin’s no longer any use to them they’ll throw him away like something they’ve wiped their behinds on. He’s only a breath away from losing everything… whenever it suits them. And then where would that leave me?”

She reached out and took one of the tea rose pillows and held it in her lap, her arms wrapped around it. She looked at him a moment before she continued.

“So I made up my mind to get something out of this… relationship. I thought, well, if they can buy information I can too. I hired a first-rate private investigator. He documented on film and tape Colin’s affair with his secretary. In flagrante, as they say. It was rather erotic footage, if you could forget who they were. When I had had enough of it, when my sick curiosity had been indulged ad nauseam, I told the guy thanks and paid him off. Then I contacted the secretary and had her come over here one afternoon when Colin was out of town.

“We sat in the living room over there,” she said, looking through the walls of glass, “and I showed the videos to her. She was stunned and frightened. Ashamed. I kept playing them until she simply ducked her head and wouldn’t watch them anymore. It was cruel of me and, frankly, I surprised myself. By this time I didn’t think I had any emotional investment left in the man, but I found that I was getting some kind of unseemly satisfaction out of this perverse humiliation of her. But finally I stopped.

“I really didn’t blame her, after all. The woman’s intelligent, a superb executive secretary. She knew sleeping with the boss was going nowhere but, on the other hand, it wasn’t hurting her at all at bonus time, and he was continually giving her all these gifts. I know what executive secretaries do. I used to be one. I know what it’s like. A good one practically runs the company, but she never gets any credit for it and compared to some of the men executive officers—who do a hell of a lot less than she does—her salary’s paltry. She thinks, what the hell, she deserves the perks she gets from sleeping with the bastard. She knows all about the boss’s personal life—this woman knew Colin and I hadn’t had sex in two years. She knows all about the business. Where it’s strong, where it’s weak. Where all the corporate skeletons are buried. Who’s got clout, who hasn’t. But most important: she has access.”

Rayner stopped and looked at her hands. She was doing something with her fingers, more precisely her fingernails, looking at them as though she could see what she was doing, though Last doubted she could in the pale, watery light. Then she looked up and went on.

“She was sobbing, distraught. I could tell that in her mind she had lost everything. I started talking to her. I said, look, relax, relax. Truth is, the marriage was over, and you were just the next in line. That’s okay, really. I admitted that I was angry but not because I loved the man. I was just angry at being used by him. And I said that, frankly, she should be angry about being used too. I said I wasn’t going to do anything with the videos. I said I didn’t think either of us would get what we deserved out of a nasty divorce battle. I calmed her down, got her to thinking. And then I said that we’d both be better off putting our heads together and try to come up with a way to earn ourselves a little security out of all this. I told her that neither one of us had any protection, any security for the future. We could both end up on the sidewalk tomorrow with nothing. Nothing. And it could happen so easy.” She paused. “I presented her with a proposition.”

As Rayner talked, Last sat with his back against the wall and slowly felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. Surrounded by the aqueous light of Rayner’s peculiar world, he listened to a woman he had been cultivating for eight months, waiting for just the right opportunity to use her and their affair as a stepping-stone to his own fortune, only to have it slowly revealed to him that he had been thrusting in the moonlight with Morgan le Fay. As she talked his heart alternately hammered and started as he thought that at any moment she was going to blast him to hell for his many months of calculated intercourse. He felt as though this woman had been reading him like a newspaper, and she was about to deliver the coup de grace.

But it didn’t happen. Instead, he listened to the story of how two women, invisible in plain sight, had gathered enough information—about DataPrint… and related businesses called Concordia Investments and Hormann Plastics and Hermes Exports and Strasser Industries—to have the two of themselves killed on the spot. When she finally came to a stopping point, they sat in silence among the silk and glass and fragrance of heather and for the first time in his life Last didn’t know whether to scream in jubilation or horror. He had discovered either the mother lode of all his adventuring, or he had just listened to his own death warrant. He honestly could not place a bet on which it might be. The odds were skewed by the magnitude.

“Jesus… Mary… and Joseph,” he said.

She was looking at him as though she were awaiting his assessment She wanted to know what he thought.

“Rayner,” he swallowed, “listen to me.” His mouth was cottony. “This could get you killed… I mean, I cannot believe you’ve gone this far. Do you have any idea how… exposed, how vulnerable you are? Both of you.”

“Only in the last few months,” she said. “When we began to piece together the drugs part of it. That scared the shit out of us.”

Last looked at her. He thought he could sense the fear in her now, but at the same time he didn’t know why he hadn’t sensed it before. Who, exactly, had he been deceiving all these months? Her or himself?

“How long have you been doing this?” he asked.

“Nine months. We had to take it slow,” she said with unintended understatement. “We didn’t want to screw it up. You know, little by little, checking and double-checking, take a step and listen. Take another step and listen.”

He waited a moment, not wanting to seem too eager.

“You have documentation?”

“Of course. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”

“But…” And then it dawned on him. “She—the secretary—continued her affair with Colin?”

Rayner nodded. “She had to. I don’t think this would have worked otherwise. Every time he took her, she took him.” She smiled. “Talk about poetic justice…”

“And she’s still sleeping with him?”

“I hope so.”

She was looking at him, her face only a few feet away from his, through the clear water. In the instant before she spoke he anticipated her.

“We’ve gone about as far as we can go,” she said, “without some help.” He could almost see her holding her breath, hoping she hadn’t made a mistake about him. “Do you want in on this?”

Neuman could see the glow from the fire in the South Shore Harbor Marina even before he turned off NASA Road 1 into the Swan Lagoon development of Nassau Bay. Cars were slowing along the highway to puzzle over the orange light reflecting off the bottom of the Gulf clouds that were drifting inland, and when he turned into the neighborhood street that would take him to Sheck’s house, people were standing on their front lawns looking toward the fire.

Sheck’s house was a modern one-story bungalow on a winding street lined with palms and green lawns and in a price range not unlike Valerie Heath’s. Neuman parked in the front drive, hiding the car as best as he could behind a screen of oleanders, and got out, hardly noticed by the scattered clusters of people standing in their front lawns across the street looking in his direction. The back of Sheck’s house was right on the water and almost directly across the lagoon from the marina.

He didn’t go to the front door but casually walked around to the side of the house, found a wooden privacy fence with a gate and went into the back yard. From here the fire in the marina looked like a conflagration as it reflected from both the clouds and the surface of the bay water, the fire itself the brightest point between the two illuminations. The entire marina seemed to be burning.

Throwing a glance at the back of the house to make sure he didn’t miss the obvious—a light, someone standing at a window or door—he moved along the thick hedges that lined both sides of the back yard for privacy from the neighbors and stood near a pier at the edge of the water and looked across. He could hear sirens and bullhorns and the wailing of emergency vehicles, the cacophony hanging in the moist, still air as though the entire confusion were taking place in an amphitheater. As he stood there with his feet in the damp grass, it was hard for him to believe that Burtell was over there, burned up in a fire that no one understood yet. For a moment he wondered what it had been like for Burtell to be blasted into the next life.

He looked at the fire, which was close enough for him actually to see the flames, fed by the gasoline and oil from the boats. It was the first time he had ever had a friend die violently, and he was surprised at the disconnectedness of such an event. Somehow it seemed at once unreal and at the same time so real as to be nauseating.

The voices of people on the other side of the hedges brought him back to the moment They were talking about the fire, speculating. Someone had a scanner and the crackle and scratch of transmissions came through the hedges more clearly than their voices.

He turned and walked back to the house, easing along in the darkness of the hedges. At the back of the house there were several doors. The first one seemed to open into the garage. There were sliding glass doors that opened onto the broad patio and lakefront, common to most of the homes that opened onto the view of the water. Then, beyond that, there was a kind of courtyard enclosed on three sides by another set of dense hedges and another door. It looked as if it might be an outside entrance to a separate apartment or room.

Neuman took the latex gloves out of his coat pocket and tugged them on and used his lock picks to open the door that he assumed gave access to the garage. He was right. Closing and locking the door behind him, he took a penlight from his pocket and shone it around the garage which was empty except for a motorcycle. He went over and felt the engine which was cold. Seeing nothing else of immediate interest, he went to a small workbench against one of the walls and selected several types of screwdrivers and put them in his coat pocket Another door near the one through which he had entered opened into a laundry and utility room where he paused to look through the cabinets for plastic garbage bags. He found them, took one out of the box, and then went through another door into the kitchen.

Bruce Sheck’s house was a bit more lived in than Valerie Heath’s, though it reflected both the carelessness and selective habits of a bachelor’s life. The living room at the front of the house facing the street was practically ignored with a modicum of furnishings. There were three bedrooms. Two of them were like the living room, furnished with the bare necessities but otherwise entirely untouched. But the combination family room and kitchen was where he seemed to have spent all his time. The television was there and scattered around were a few nudie magazines, a pair of sweat clothes in the middle of the floor as if he had just stepped out of them, some fishing poles stacked in a corner near the patio doors along with a pair of old tennis shoes and a small ice chest There were some aviation maps lying on the kitchen table, the first thing Neuman had seen that he thought ought to go into the plastic bag.

The kitchen was better furnished than Neuman had anticipated. Sheck had not been a gourmet There was an abundance of TV dinners in the refrigerator along with a good stock of beer, half a watermelon, orange juice, milk, and the miscellaneous makings for sandwiches. The pantry and cabinets held the expected staples and there were two old pizza boxes in the trash next to the electric range.

Neuman moved into Sheck’s bedroom. The clothes in his closet ran to jeans and casual shirts, a few sport coats, and only three pairs of dress trousers. In the corner of the closet he found an expensive Weatherby deer rifle and shells, two extraordinarily expensive Italian-made shotguns and four or five boxes of shotgun shells along with two well-used bird sacks and an old set of deer horns tied together at the base with a short piece of cord lying on top of a pair of hunting boots. He checked the closet closely for hidden doors or compartments in the walls or under the carpet.