An Absence of Light (61 page)

There was a brief wait before he heard the car door open. Girlfriend? Cleaning woman? Micheson sneaking back into town early without telling his employer? He knew Murray had been watching the car since it entered and would be observing where it finally stopped, and that he already would have called in the license plate for verification.

Remberto was not so well hidden from Micheson’s side of the courtyard. In fact he was practically in plain view. His heart raced as his mind rushed past his few options, and then suddenly he heard the car door close… softly… the
single
click of a door gently pushed to, just enough to keep it from swinging open, though not fully shut He froze. That was not the proper sound.

He heard footsteps leaving the concrete drive, but they faded away rather than growing louder as they should have if the person was approaching Micheson’s gate. Then he heard them getting louder again—but they were at Connie’s gate. Just as they stopped he realized they were a woman’s footsteps, a woman wearing heels.

She had a key to the gate and opened it. Connie? Rayner Faeber deciding to try to reason with her husband? But Graver had told Arnette that the two women had been warned to stay away. Had one of them simply ignored his instructions?

Remberto’s change of position had been a mistake. He could feel the nerves in his groins tingling which meant his inner thigh muscles were being pinched by the ridges in the bricks. But he couldn’t move. Not now.

The woman came into view: early forties, roan hair, a little chunky, but stylishly dressed in a business suit Attractive. She reminded Remberto of a realtor who might deal in the tonier parts of the city. There was something business-like and practical about her—maybe the way she handled her shoulder bag, sure of herself—expeditious in her manner.

She walked straight to the front door without looking to the left or the right and again used a key to let herself into the condo. And though she did this without hesitation, she also did it carefully, making no noise. As soon as she closed the door Remberto pressed the handset.

“Murray! Murray, what’s the deal here? Who is this?”

When Murray spoke Remberto flinched because the voice came from back to his left side, through Micheson’s wrought-iron gate.

“Berto!” Murray was panting heavily, his muscled arms bared by the short sleeves of his T-shirt holding onto the gate as he pressed his forehead to the bars in an effort to see around the corner of the garage to Remberto. “The plates are
stolen!”

Remberto swung his left leg over the wall. There wasn’t enough room to jump down behind the palm—he had to remain hidden until he got to the ground—so he turned around facing the wall and lowered himself by his arms onto the ground in the tiny space between the trunk of the palm and the walls of the corner. Then he moved quickly, if stiffly, along the wall and came out at the gate.

Murray was already there having run back around the garage, and handed his Colt through the gate to Remberto as he reached up, grabbed the top of the front wall and pulled himself up and over, dropping into the courtyard with Remberto.

“What’s going on? What’s the story here?” Remberto asked, moving his weight from leg to leg to massage out the tingling.

“Shit, we don’t know. Computers say the plates are stolen, that’s all we know.”

Remberto was already moving to the front door, acting more on instinct now than a progression of reason. As he guessed, she had left the door unlocked, a bad sign, and he pushed it open as he pulled his own gun from his waistband.

Immediately inside there was a small foyer and a living room to their right and straight ahead stairs ascending to the second floor, turning halfway up and wrapping around over the entrance to the living room. They stood a moment and listened. Voices, distant and almost inaudible, came from upstairs. Luckily the stairs were carpeted, and they started up, Remberto first.

At the head of the stairs the landing went in both directions, so they had to stop and listen again. The voices were louder, from the left. Together they advanced down the narrow hall, past an open doorway to a darkened bedroom on the left, an open door to a darkened bathroom to the right, the voices coming from another room straight ahead. The woman’s voice grew louder as she stepped to the door of the room, almost in the doorway, her muted shadow from the oblique light of the sunlit room falling on the opened door. She must have been inches from being visible to them. Remberto ducked into the bedroom; Murray disappeared into the bath on the opposite side of the hall.

“The sooner the better,” she said. “I’ll do it if you want. It’s what I came for.”

“Jesus,” the man sobbed. “No… no. Just… just step outside… just… downstairs.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m going.” She stepped into the doorway and out of the room into the hall. Her left hand rested on a shoulder bag hanging from her left shoulder, and her right hand hung straight down at her side, holding a handgun with a silencer. She took several steps but then stopped, turned, stepped back to the door and raised her gun straight out level with her shoulder.

In that instant both Remberto and Murray burst out into the hall and yelled at her in the same instant that the explosion of a single gunshot reverberated from inside the room. Wheeling around smoothly, her arm never dropping from its leveled position, her silencer coughed one, two, three times, ripping into the door facings on either side of the hall as Remberto and Murray fell back into the rooms. They looked across the hall at each other and waited—the advantage was theirs.

Silence.

Murray turned on the bathroom light and found a hand mirror on the vanity. He turned off the light, and in a moment the mirror moved out from the door frame. She was standing squared at them, her feet planted firmly, slightly apart, her legs flexed in competition shooting form, both arms out in front of her now supporting the gun. The silencer coughed again, and Murray’s mirror disintegrated.

Silence.

“What are you going to do?” Murray yelled. “Jump out the window?”

Silence.

“Who are you?” she asked, her voice calm, almost conversational.

“We’re not police,” Murray said. “And we’re not a follow-up from Kalatis.”

Silence.

“You didn’t shoot him,” he said. “We know that.”

“Does that make any difference?”

“It does to me,” Murray said cryptically.

Silence.

“I don’t want this to have a bad ending,” Murray said. “Why don’t you—”

The silencer coughed again—once—followed by the sound of a falling body. Murray grabbed a shard of the broken mirror and held it out against the door frame. He could see her lying on the floor.

“Shit,” he said, and darted his head out, then back. “I think she did it,” he said, looking across at Remberto.

Remberto looked around and saw the dark spreading on the carpet under her head, her body lying almost inside the bedroom door she had just stepped through. The gun was out of her hand, partially concealed under the hem of her skirt.

“Yeah,” he said, “she did.”

They came out of their doorways and approached her carefully, nonetheless, but she was clearly dead. Remberto stepped over her into the bedroom which actually had been turned into a study with a desk and bookcases, a sofa, and chairs. Faeber was sprawled on the floor, his legs over the legs of an overturned chair in which he had been sitting, facing the windows. The blow from the large handgun he had used had knocked him over backward.

Remberto stepped back into the hall.

“Faeber shot himself too,” he said.

Murray was down on his knees pulling off one of the surgical gloves that the woman had been wearing.

“I want to see just who the hell this gal is,” Murray said. “Look in her shoulder bag. I need some paper.”

Remberto opened the purse; it was completely empty.

“Shit,” Murray said.

Remberto stepped into the study and found an envelope which he brought back. Murray took it, lifted the woman’s bare hand, bent her arm back, and dipped the ends of her fingers in her blood. He carefully made two complete sets of prints and then dropped her hand and stood, waving the envelope to dry the prints.

The two men looked at each other.

“I don’t know,” Murray said finally, shaking his head. “What a goddamned creep show. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Even if Graver could understand the maps, he knew it was going to be to his immediate advantage to have as much leverage as possible against Ledet.

The first thing he did was to bring everyone into the bedroom. He put Ledet on the floor, cuffed now at his ankles as well as his wrists, and had Alice sit on the edge of the bed. He laid out all the firearms on the bed and called out the serial numbers on each of them to Neuman who jotted them in his notebook. Then Graver called a friend at ATF and gave him the information, Redden’s telephone number, and hung up.

Then he turned on the television that was standing on a bureau across the room from the foot of the bed, punched on the VCR, and slipped in the first tape. The first several were standard, low-budget, professionally-produced porno films, and Graver fast-forwarded through them, suspecting these weren’t going to have what he was looking for. Cassette number four was home-produced right there in the bedroom where they were sitting. It “featured” Eddie Redden—Neuman identified him—and a couple of girls, a thin, black-haired girl with prune-sized breasts and bruises on her buttocks, and a narrow-hipped blonde with black pubic hair and bosoms as large and distended as overfull udders.

“Goood Lorrrd!” Alice blurted, leaning forward on her hands on the bed and gaping at the television. “My Gahhhd! That’s Katie Mayhew and… and that old girl that hangs out at Remo’s Inn in Kemah! What’s her name… Deena… or Reena or something like that? Look at thaaaat! Look at what…”

Graver hit the fast forward again and went to the end with Alice gasping and squealing at the skittering acrobatics of her fellow tavern habitué. The next tape was more of the same, this time including Ledet and two women whom Alice, with visible disappointment, did not seem to know. The last tape was what Graver had thought he might find. This one included Ledet, and Redden again—and two more girls. But this time they were little girls, clearly underage, just on the borderline of puberty.

Alice gasped again, but then clapped her hands over her opened mouth in a gesture of shock and, after a few minutes, with loathing on her face, she turned away. Graver turned off the tape.

As if on cue, the telephone rang. It was the report from the ATF. All the guns were from a shipment stolen from a South Florida gun shop nearly two years earlier.

Graver hung up the telephone and walked around the bed and sat down on the edge of it facing Ledet on the floor. He stared at him a moment.

“If it was up to me,” he said, “I’d take you out back on the beach and shoot you in the head. I’ve never shot a man, but I don’t think—in this instance—it would bother me. Not more than a few minutes, anyway.” He paused. “But the truth of the matter is what ultimately happens to you isn’t going to be up to me. There will be a prosecutor, a judge, and a defense lawyer. You’ll get a lawyer who will do everything in his power to mitigate the circumstances here, the coke, the stolen guns, the little girls, but he won’t be able to do you any good if this is all he’s got to work with.”

Graver looked over at the stack of guns, at the pile of tapes, taking his time to think about it.

“I wish I didn’t need your help,” Graver went on, “but I do. And if you help us, you’ll also be helping yourself, though I regret this. Your lawyer will take what you do for us and milk it for all it’s worth. I personally don’t think you ought to benefit a scintilla—you know what a scintilla is, it’s about as little as your mind can imagine—I don’t think you should benefit even that much for helping us. I think you ought to be forced to do it by law. I think you ought to get the needle if you don’t help us, maybe life if you do. But your lawyer will do a lot better than that… unfortunately.”

Alice was listening to this with her mouth dropped open slightly, as if she couldn’t believe this pretty sober thing she had gotten herself into when she agreed to this one-night stand.

Graver stood up from the bed and walked around and got the maps and came back and stood in front of Ledet.

“You want to try to make it a little easier on your lawyer?”

According to Rick Ledet, Eddie Redden was one of three principal pilots for Panos Kalatis. Redden kept a pager with him at all times and was on call twenty-four hours a day. His instructions from Kalatis were delivered to him in a variety of ways, sometimes by telephone, sometimes by personal messenger, sometimes at the conclusion of one of his flights. Ledet himself went along as copilot or flunky assistant, whatever was needed.

“What are the reasons for the flights?” Graver asked. They were sitting in the large main room again, at the rattan table, the flight maps spread out in front of them. Neuman was taking notes and Alice was in the back bedroom. Graver decided she had heard just about all she needed to hear of what was happening, so he asked her to stay in the bedroom while they finished talking. Now that she knew they were police, she was compliant and—after they removed the telephone and told her she could watch television—relatively content to wait it out and see what happened next. After all, this little ordeal was going to make good tavern talk when it was all over.

“Just about everything and anything,” Ledet said. He was smoking, raising both cuffed hands every time he wanted a puff on his cigarette. “But about eighteen months ago Kalatis kind of reorganized the pilots and put me and Eddie exclusively on runs with people and money. That’s our main cargo. We take out a lot of cash. A lot of cash.”

“From his drug operation?”

“That’s what Eddie says some of it is. And some of it’s from other kinds of business. Kalatis and Faeber sold information of some sort.”

“How much money, how often?”