An Absence of Light (6 page)

He pulled away from the curb and drove out of the cul-de-sac. Burtell, he thought, had reacted pretty much as Graver had expected. And then again he hadn’t. Though Burtell was indeed shocked at the news of Tisler’s death, shocked even that it had been suicide, his reaction seemed, somehow, to exceed the import of this grim news. It wasn’t that he had behaved inappropriately or ingenuously, or that his reaction was emotive. Burtell was not given to melodrama. It was just that his response was more inclusive, as though there were another dimension to the news, and that he was understanding more than Graver had told him. Graver didn’t doubt anything he saw. He simply had seen more than he was expecting.

But then the way Graver was looking at this might say more about himself than about Burtell. Perhaps the fact that Graver thought Burtell’s reaction to the news of Tisler’s suicide was more… reactive… than Graver had expected was because Graver himself felt so little. Or, at least, Dore would have said that. According to her, Graver was an “emotional cripple.” Someone else might have said that he was too analytical or reserved or low-key. But Dore had said “emotional cripple,” and the description had stung. In fact, Graver remembered at the time how much he had been hurt by that. Sometimes those words ran through his mind when his eyes and thoughts stopped momentarily on the cobblestone memento on his desk. Graver had spent a lot of time second-guessing his feelings after that, and he regretted that Dore had saved those words as her parting shot, after she had already filed for divorce, and they had almost stopped speaking. He would like to have talked with her about that, before the emotions that once had tied them together had been severed and cauterized. But it was too late now, and he was left to puzzle over this unflattering description in solitude. Maybe that was the way Dore had intended it to be—to leave the barb in the flesh after the sting, a lasting, reminding hurt.

It could be, though, that Burtell’s reaction was not really noteworthy. How was he supposed to have reacted? Could Graver have described a more appropriate response? What was an acceptable response when one is unexpectedly confronted with such things—outrageous acts that seemed to occur outside the realm of the probable? Tisler’s suicide had gone against the grain of everything they had understood about him, and perhaps such a deviation from expected behavior had elicited an equally surprising response from Burtell.

There is, after all, a natural framework for everything, Graver thought, ambits of behavior that evolve from a given society and a person’s place in it. There is an accretion of expectations that attach to our lives after a certain point. It is assumed that we will continue to behave as we always have behaved, that our personalities are set, an unavoidable amalgam of all the experiences we have had from birth to the present. If someone deviates from a behavior that we have come to expect from them, we are startled by it and remember it far more clearly than if they had acted predictably.

But it occurred to Graver that if by killing himself the benign and unremarkable Arthur Tisler had exceeded the parameters that others assumed of his personality, then perhaps he had done so with a clear, keen vision. Perhaps he had viewed his closing hour as an opening door, a way to liberation. Perhaps it was an act of rebellion against thirty-five years of docile predictability. By acting contrary to others’ expectations of him, he may have entered for the first time in his existence into a limitless freedom, though he had had to end his life to do it.

The old Georgian home of red brick and white wood trim sat back from a wrought-iron fence with fleur-de-lys finials that long ago had rusted away all their original paint and had acquired a dark, mossy patina. The fence and the lawn and the house were shaded by the canopies of third-generation water oaks that hovered over the property like silent old aunts whose job it was to observe the comings and goings of the generations and, perhaps, to whisper about them among themselves when the Gulf breeze, prowling inland from the sea, moved through their vast, heavy limbs.

Graver had grown immensely and immediately fond of the old house which he had bought from an elderly doctor, a childless widower who, with the practical bravery of a reasonable man of science, had decided to sell the house he had lived in all his adult life and check himself into a nursing home while he could still understand what he was doing and why he was doing it.

The house always had seemed to be just the right size for them, even when the twins got to be teenagers and the place was filled with their migrations of friends, and the smell of Dore’s cooking permeated the large rooms. For years he and the twins together had mowed the rambling lawn and cleaned the pool where the languorous summers were animated by swimming parties and barbecues. Dore had loved the place as much as he had, and most of their eighteen years there had been full of good times and good memories. Mostly. Then several years ago, after the twins had gone away to college, a worm had gotten into the apple. It was as if every minor incompatibility that he and Dore had managed to subordinate, in deference to the welfare of the family they had made, began to grow into insurmountable differences. In the end it all came to no good, and he was left with the house, a kind of consolation prize for having lost everything else. And now the twins were in graduate schools on separate coasts, each engaged to be married, and he was left pretty much to himself.

He parked in the gravel driveway, locked the car, and followed the sidewalk to the front porch. He had forgotten to leave on the front porch light, so he fumbled in the dark for the keyhole, finally found it, and let himself in, turning on the porch light behind him as he closed the door. He threw the dead bolt and took his suit coat off as he started up the stairs.

Throwing his coat on the unmade bed, he sat down and started taking off his shoes. He undressed, hanging his clothes in his closet across from Dore’s, the door of which he kept closed. Walking into the bathroom, he took off his underwear and kicked them into the clothes basket He took his swimsuit off the hook near the shower door and put it on, avoiding looking at himself in the mirrors. Grabbing a towel along with his goggles and lap watch, which he kept on a shelf near his washbasin, he walked out of the bathroom, removed his dress watch, tossed it on the bed, and started down the stairs. As he walked through the house, he turned on the lights and left them on behind him, through the main hallway, into the kitchen, and out into the back patio.

It was a simple pool, rectilinear, and long enough for lapping. Graver did not turn on the pool lights or the yard lights, though he could see the dial of the watch in the cast-off glow from the patio. The summer night air enveloped his bare skin like a warm breath as he walked to the edge of the pool, dropped his towel, and sat on the edge with his legs in the water as he pulled on his goggles. When they were in place, he slipped into the water which had a slightly cooler feel to it because of the passing rains. Normally, after soaking up the sun all day, it was as warm as a womb.

He swam forty minutes in the dark, the steady back and forth of his laps causing the waves in the water to rock the flappers in the skimmers, a gentle, hollow clapping that died out as it crossed the lawn to the hedges of honeysuckle and jasmine. He had done it so much he could tell within five minutes when he almost had swum his allotted time. Tonight he pushed himself a little more, added ten more minutes to the half hour and picked up the pace as well. When he finally finished, his lungs were sucking for air, and he had to hang on to the side of the pool a while before he could pull himself out.

Upstairs he changed into a pair of casual trousers and an old dress shirt, stepped into a pair of loafers, and went down to the kitchen. It was too late to cook anything, and nothing in the refrigerator looked good to him anyway. Bored with the prospect of eating, even though the laps always made him ravenous, he poured out a bowl of cereal, sliced thin slivers of a nectarine onto it, added milk, and sat down at the kitchen table to eat.

He didn’t know what to do with his thoughts. Not wanting to think about Tisler for a while, he tried to make his mind blank. It was an exercise in futility. His
Weltanschauung
was thoroughly Westernized, and a blank mind was not an easy thing to come by. His meditations tended more toward the baroque.

Finishing his cereal, he stood wearily and took his empty bowl to the sink and rinsed it out, opened the dishwasher, and put the bowl and spoon into the washer. Taking a glass from the cabinet, he ran water from the faucet and stood at the sink as he drank it, looking out at the back yard. He could see the pool, and here and there a few yards from its margins the silhouettes of sago palms and palmettos; and in the near-dark he could make out the lower boughs of the oaks, too, with Spanish moss hanging from them in cheerless festoons that he found somber even in the best of times and which he now regarded with a painful sadness.

Then he heard the doorbell ring.

Instinctively he looked at his watch; it was nearly twelve o’clock. He set the glass on the counter, grabbed the hand towel that hung on the cabinet and dried his hands as he walked down the hallway to the front door. The light was off in the entry, but the front porch light was still on, and he could see the fractured figure of a man through the beveled glass of the door. He didn’t readily recognize this Cubist silhouette. Tossing the hand towel over his shoulder, he threw the dead bolt and opened the door.

Jack Westrate was standing in front of him, his hands jammed into his pockets, his dark silk suit rumpled, shirt collar and tie undone. He was several inches shorter than Graver with a body frame that brought to mind words like bulwark and redoubt. He was decidedly stout, but it was the kind of heaviness that suggested a hard aggressiveness. There was nothing at all soft about Jack Westrate, in either his manner or his appearance.

“We’d better talk,” he said and clamped his mouth shut, his long upper lip and dimpled lower lip clinched tightly in determination.

Westrate was like a bully cur; he always tried to set the rules of engagement in his favor with an immediate challenge in the first seconds of encounter. But it was too goddamned late to be “challenged,” and Graver was in no mood to feel any sympathy for Westrate’s predicament. So he didn’t move or say anything, just hesitated long enough to make Westrate a little less confident, and then slowly backed away, pulling open the door. “Come on in,” he said.

Westrate was immediately inside the front hall, bringing with him his familiar dense odors of cologne and cigar smoke. He wheeled to the right where he saw lamps turned on in the living room, and walked in.

“Sit down, anywhere,” Graver said, gesturing vaguely around the room.

Westrate passed up the sofa and a wing chair and sat in a deep green leather armchair beside a table with a small Oriental lamp. Graver sat in his usual reading chair near his old mahogany desk, draping the hand towel on the brass handle of a magazine stand.

“I talked to Katz a little while ago,” Westrate said immediately. “After you guys left the scene out there.”

He sat forward in the chair, his forearms resting on his thick knees. His black hair was thinning, but he wore it military short anyway—screw the balding. Sometimes you could tell he had tried to comb it, but most often it was just there with no particular direction except on the bit of a forelock that he swiped occasionally with a little black comb he carried in the inside pocket of his coat Like Burtell, his beard was so thick it always shadowed the tight skin of his round face and hid like coal dust in the cleft of a belligerently square chin.

Graver said nothing. He crossed his legs and waited.

“Herb said they thought it was suicide.”

“That’s just…”

“Yeah, I know, preliminary. Still, it’s not a by-God-for-sure homicide.”

“No.”

Westrate worked his thick, diminutive shoulders nervously, his suit coat bunching up in a roll behind his stubby neck. He always dressed in expensive custom-made suits, silk and linen blends, tropical wools appropriate to the steamy climate of the Gulf Coast, but he wore them without regard, seemingly unaware of their cost, wallowing in his thousand-dollar “pieces” as though he were wearing Katz’s jogging uniforms. Graver rather liked that profligate flair about him, though he really couldn’t say why. It was just about the only thing that he could tolerate about the man.

“Okay. So. I wouldn’t have expected you to tell them, of course, if you had any reason to think differently. What about it?”

“I don’t know anything, Jack. I don’t disagree with what they’ve got to say because I don’t have the slightest idea why the guy’s dead.”

“No shit.” Westrate’s face was immobile. He was trying to discern a feint in Graver’s response, wondering if Graver was holding out on him. His suspicions were insatiable. Westrate had come out of the womb reading Machiavelli and suspecting his father of being a cuckold.

“No shit,” Graver said. “And I talked to Dean Burtell a while ago. If this has anything to do with Tisler’s work—suicide or homicide—Burtell doesn’t have a clue about it either. Can’t imagine.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Westrate seemed genuinely surprised. “That’s good to know. A relief.” He had expected the worst. He was the gamesman’s equivalent of a hypochondriac. Ironically, however, Graver had the uneasy feeling that this time Westrate had a good reason to be worried, though he didn’t say that.

“But beginning in the morning we’re going to review his investigations—”

“Yeah, great, that’s good,” Westrate interrupted. “I wanted to cover that with you. Get a white paper to me, something I can pass on to Hertig, confirming there’s no way the intelligence file has been compromised by this stunt.”

Stunt? Jesus Christ.

“The thing is,” Westrate said, his mouth tight with determination, “not to let this get out of hand. Get on it; stay on it; get it out of the way.” He chopped the space between his beefy knees with a thick hand.