An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  Or, maybe not. Maybe after what had happened tonight, Graver would never be able to forget him.

  He drifted to the right-hand lane, slowed, and took the Harwin exit down off the expressway. He lifted his chin, to stretch his neck a little underneath the knotted tie as he made a mental note to move over the collar button. It would be the second one he had done in a week, confirming in a practical way what the bathroom scales had been indicating quantitatively for several months now. Which was fine with him. He always had thought he was too thin anyway. He was the only middle-aged man he knew who never gave a damn about what he ate.

  Harwin was a long street It ran east and west from the Southwest Freeway into Sharpstown, through good and not-so-good parts of the city depending on how long you stayed with it. To Graver’s right the streets grew sparse as he crossed over Brays Bayou, and vacant lots gave way to empty fields, black stretches of unlighted land. The tracks of the Southern Pacific Railroad angled in from the north as he approached the overpass of the Sam Houston Tollway, and then they turned parallel to Harwin as the lights of Andrau Airpark appeared in the near distance.

  He turned right onto Willcrest, slowed immediately, crossed the railroad tracks, and then rolled down his window and began peering out into the darkness to his left, out across the tracts of urban emptiness toward the isolated end of the airstrip. The odors of wet grass and weeds washed into the car. He was surprised that he couldn’t immediately see the lights of the patrol cars. The field appeared flat. He shifted his attention to the edge of the pavement. Pio Tordella had given him precise directions. The homicide detective told him he should begin looking for a little dirt road just after he crossed the railroad tracks. The road was unmarked, just ruts actually, going into the weeds and high grass.

  Since his was the only car on the long stretch of street, he crossed over to the oncoming lane and drove beside the caliche shoulder so the headlights could more easily pick up any break in the smooth margin of grass. Immediately they did.

  He turned off and quickly caught sight of the cherry and sapphire blips of a patrol car a hundred yards or so out into the emptiness, level with and almost obscured by the tops of the tall grass. Apparently it had not rained enough to make the ruts impassable. Leaning forward over the steering wheel, he followed them as well as he could, listening to the rasping of the high weeds as they bent and swept against the undercarriage of the car.

  The ruts fell slightly into a shallow, saucer-like depression, and then silhouettes of three or four cars popped up against the backdrop of the city lights far beyond the airfield. As he neared the cars, his headlights picked up bits of debris, ragged strips of plastic bags or wrappers caught in the weeds, a rusting chunk of something resembling a car fender, a glint of glass in the ruts, a sun-bleached crate, a flap of tin wedged into the dirt and weeds. The depression apparently was used as an illicit dumping ground, a catchall for the detritus that urban dwellers sloughed off continually like dead parts of themselves.

  Graver’s car rocked gently in the ruts as he approached the scene and pulled up beside the nearest patrol car. There were only two of them in addition to the detectives’ unmarked car, a police crime scene van, and the coroner’s van. And of course there was the other car, which had to be Arthur Tisler’s, a small-model Chevrolet several years old, the driver’s side door standing open. The car was of an unidentifiable dark color, blue perhaps, or green, from which the sun had leached its richer pigment leaving a powdery, scaly finish. Though it was the center of attention, it was peculiarly inconspicuous, a black hole, swallowing light.

  As he cut his headlights and got out of the car, two uniformed officers emerged from behind Tisler’s car un-spooling a yellow crime scene ribbon in a generous parameter. Pio Tordella, stocky and dark-haired, waded toward him through the tall, wet grass that was beginning to be tramped down around Tisler’s car. He walked in front of the lights of one of the patrol cars and came over to Graver.

  “Captain,” Tordella said, approaching Graver’s car as Graver closed the door.

  They shook hands, and in that first moment Graver observed Tordella’s soft eyes assessing him before they turned aside. Graver had spent six years in Homicide shortly after he came out of uniform, but for all of the fourteen years since then he had been in the Criminal Intelligence Division. Most of his career had been in intelligence work, chiefly as an analyst and, in the last four years, as the captain of the Division. He hadn’t been to a crime scene in nearly five years.

  But that wasn’t what put the uneasy look in Tordella’s expression. Rather, that had to do with Graver’s work. Criminal Intelligence was a controversial division. It was sometimes disdained, sometimes resented, sometimes feared, but invariably it was regarded with a degree of deference. Graver had tried to develop a thick skin against these attitudes. He understood them and tolerated them. People who were known to collect secrets for a living could not expect to be treated with warm cordiality. Graver knew that the look of concern in the detective’s face reflected his understanding of what fate had set in his path. The death of one of the secret keepers was a death of import, in fact, it was unprecedented, and Tordella did not know what to expect. It was not a case he would have chosen to be assigned to if he had had the opportunity to make a choice.

  “It’s a mess, Captain,” Tordella warned him tentatively. His voice was soft and modulated, his pronunciation precise. He had a thick mustache that threatened to become unruly, and he had a habit of nibbling at one corner of it with his lower teeth.

  Graver looked around at the collection of glistening cars, their shiny surfaces beaded from the passing rain. The metally smell of hot car engines mixed with the odor of damp weeds. The headlights of the patrol cars, the angle of the vehicles, including his own, reminded him of a study in visual perspectives, all the elements in the composition situated to draw the viewer’s attention to the focal point of the canvas: the car with the open door, one of Tisler’s legs protruding stiffly across the sill.

  “He had his ID with him?” Graver asked.

  “Yeah,” Tordella said. “In his inside coat pocket.” He reached into his own coat and pulled out a plastic bag, with Tisler’s wallet and shield in it. The inside of the bag was smeared with blood.

  Graver felt a momentary optimism. Then maybe it was suicide.

  “By the way, you had some good luck,” Tordella said.

  Graver pulled his eyes away from the bag and looked at the stubby detective. “What.”

  “I wasn’t first out,” Tordella said. “Not ten minutes before this call came in there was a shoot-out at a convenience store out in Kashmere Gardens. The clerk at the store shot a couple of guys who tried to rob him. Killed one on the spot. Wounded the other one who then killed the clerk and ran off, shooting every which way and wounding a woman outside. Right now he’s holed up in a garage apartment about a block from the store—with a hostage. Caused a lot of radio action. Everybody in the pressroom headed out there, and by now I imagine all their cruise cars are either there or headed there.”

  Somebody swore sharply with a hiss, and Graver and Tordella looked over to Tisler’s car where a man in street clothes, maybe the coroner’s investigator, was walking away from the opened car door, stamping his foot and wiping it on the grass. He swore again.

  “Anyway,” Tordella said, turning back to Graver, “Then this came in. The kid over there who called it in” —he looked in the direction of one of the young uniformed officers—”thought he was a detective and said over the radio that he had a ‘suicide.’ If anybody was listening, I imagine it was a pretty dull prospect compared to the Kashmere show. I don’t think anybody in the media even knows we’re out here.”

  “Yeah,” Graver said, “that’s a break, a good break.” He looked toward Tisler’s car again.

  “He was an investigator, wasn’t he?” Tordella asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Was he working tonight?”

  “Jesus, I wish I knew,” Graver
said.

  Tordella nodded. His large, dark eyes were heavy and, despite his anxiety, lent an air of calm to his demeanor. “What squad?”

  “Organized Crime.” Graver knew how that must have sounded, replete with implication.

  Tordella nodded again, meditatively. “IAD guys are on their way out,” he said.

  Internal Affairs automatically made every officer-related shooting. This was going to give Jack Westrate a heart attack.

  “And Captain Katz is on the way too,” Tordella added. He was referring to Herb Katz, Graver’s counterpart in Homicide. “Lieutenant had already gone out to Kashmere Gardens,” Tordella explained.

  That was irrelevant, Katz would have been called anyway. And Katz probably already had called Jack Westrate who, as assistant chief in charge of Investigative Services, was Graver’s and Katz’s superior. But Westrate wouldn’t be appearing in the dark, weedy field. His domain of concern was the gassy, background realm of ramifications and politics, not events. He would be frantic about this, of course, he even would be in a state of panic, but for all the wrong reasons.

  “What do you think?” Graver asked finally. He wanted a measure of Tordella’s gut reaction. He wanted the experienced detective’s feel for the scene.

  “Well, I’ve been here only a little while myself,” he said pointedly, shaking his head, “but not knowing anything else about it, just looking at it, I’d lean toward suicide.”

  Graver was relieved, but only momentarily. Still, at this point, even a temporary reprieve was welcome. They didn’t say anything for a minute, watching the woman from the Crime Scene Unit as she videotaped the car and its contents, working it from every conceivable angle and perspective. When she was finished, Graver felt the detective looking at him. Taking his eyes off the car, he looked around. Tordella’s sagging eyes were emotionless, his mouth slightly puckered on one side as he worked at the ends of his mustache.

  “Okay, let’s take a look,” Graver said.

  Tordella ducked his head, and they started toward Tisler’s car. Though there hadn’t been enough rain to create mud, it was damp enough to cause the soil to cake to Graver’s shoes. Tordella stopped him behind the yellow ribbon that had been stretched on the ground in front of the open car door and was held in place by a couple of sticks jabbed into the dirt.

  “We’re still looking for something over there,” he said, gesturing vaguely toward the other side of the ribbon.

  In the headlight beams of the patrol unit, Graver could see Tisler’s leg under the steering wheel, slanting awkwardly with his foot out the open door, his body slumped into the darkness toward the passenger seat. The beams backlighted the window of the open door on the driver’s side, setting aglow the rusty splatter on the glass, the particulate matter that had been part of the contents of Tisler’s head.

  Buttoning his suit coat so the tails wouldn’t be in the way, Graver stepped over the yellow ribbon and walked up to the door, careful about the grass at his feet He put his hands in his pockets, set his jaw, and looked inside.

  Tisler had been sitting behind the steering wheel when the shot was fired, but his upper body was now laying over on the passenger side, his blasted head partially submerged in the black syrup that had pooled in the depression of the seat His right leg was twisted awkwardly under the steering wheel column, his left one stretched full-length, sticking out the door. His right arm was flung out, hanging over the edge of the seat, and under it on the floor was a handgun, an automatic. There was a world of blood, and Graver could smell it, an oddly precise odor, a kind of musty sweetness, like something that had been stored in a dank cellar, something old. It was, he thought, an odor that probably had not changed in all the millennia of human history, that surely had smelled exactly like this ever since the day that Cain became the first man to breathe it.

  Tordella pointed at the inside of the doorjamb, at the button that allowed the light to come on when the door was opened.

  “He wedged a wooden match next to the button to keep it pushed in,” he said. “I guess maybe he sat here a while before he did it and didn’t want to attract attention.” He gestured toward the dashboard. “Radio’s on, but the volume’s turned down. You wonder why he didn’t just turn it off.”

  “And the door was open like this?”

  “Yeah, just like this. And look.” Tordella leaned across in front of Graver and pointed to the edge of the open door. “I think the damned bullet nicked the door frame. That’s what we’re looking for in the grass there, the slug.”

  “There’s no note?”

  “We haven’t found one”—Tordella shrugged, nibbling at his mustache—”but we haven’t gone through all of his clothes yet, or the car.”

  He shone his flashlight around inside the car. A pair of trousers on a coat hanger covered with clear plastic was hanging behind the passenger’s side in the back; a pink laundry slip was stapled to the plastic. There was nothing else in the back seat, no litter, no clutter, no overlooked gum wrappers.

  “Was he a neat person, like this?” Tordella nodded at the back seat.

  “He was neat,” Graver said.

  “Somebody might’ve cleaned it up. Or I guess he might’ve. You know, the way they do sometimes.”

  There were a lot of myths about suicides, about how they often carefully planned their deaths, about their oddly scrupulous behavior before they died, about the strange logic of their dementia. But Graver never had been impressed by any of that. He did not find such generalities particularly convincing because he did not think of suicides as a single, peculiar species with specific, identifiable characteristics. Mentally disturbed people committed suicide. Intelligent, well-balanced people committed suicide. Cowards committed suicide and heroes too. Richard Cory killed himself, as did Judas. And Socrates. Graver saw very little in such a diversity that lent itself to generalization. He was invariably suspicious of simple, formulaic explanations to anything; axioms made him uneasy.

  A small, twin-engine aircraft came whining down the tarmac toward them and lifted off so low over their heads that Graver could feel the props rumbling in his chest. Everyone turned and looked up at it, toward the sound of it, lifting up into the darkness.

  “I guess we’ll get started, then,” Tordella said, pulling on a pair of latex gloves, popping the latex at his wrists. “I don’t suppose you have any ideas about this.”

  Graver shook his head. “Not a clue. His squad supervisor is Ray Besom. Normally he would know if Tisler was working tonight, but he’s on vacation, a fishing trip down near Port Isabel. And I imagine Dean Burtell might know.”

  “Burtell?”

  “He’s the analyst who works with Tisler most of the time.”

  Tordella nodded some more, studiously avoiding Graver’s eyes as he interlaced the fingers of his hands and tamped the gloves tight.

  “Okay. Well, look, stop us if you want to see something or have questions or anything,” he said, flicking a glance at Graver. “Otherwise, considering who we got here, I’m going to work it up in detail.”

  Graver turned and walked back to his car, out of the white glare of the headlights. Pio Tordella was only the first in a long line of people who were going to be looking over Graver’s shoulder on this one. The unexplained death of an intelligence officer had the effect of producing the maximum amount of suspicion with the least hope of having it resolved. There was no way to avoid the immediate assumption by others that something had gone terribly wrong in the Division where secrets were the stock in trade.

  Leaning against the front fender, Graver watched them play out what had become a modern ritual of American urban culture. For a few hours the evening had been cooled by the passing showers, but now the stifling heat was already returning, and the night was growing steamy. It was difficult to tell whether the moisture enveloping his skin was from the incredible humidity or from seeping perspiration. The unusually wet spring and early onset of summer heat had spawned a richness of insects in the tall, weedy gr
ass from which they now emerged in swarms that grew thicker by the minute, fogging to the bright beams of the squad car, flitting like sparks in the reflected light.

  While Tordella’s partner disappeared behind the dark side of Tisler’s car, Tordella consulted with the coroner’s investigator and the woman from the Crime Scene Unit Standing in the glittering cloud of insects, he talked, gesturing with his pale latex hands, his figure casting jerky shadows across the gaping door of the car behind him.

  Graver looked at Tisler again, at his skewed leg glimpsed in the fluttering darkness, and he could almost make himself believe that Tisler had moved, that the awkward sprawl of his torso was a posture of resistance, as if, in the unexpected terror of that God-abandoned last moment, he had changed his mind and was struggling desperately to keep from being swallowed headfirst into the black throat of eternity.

  Chapter 3

  Herb Katz lighted a cigarette. He was wearing a jogging suit, though Graver knew that Katz probably had not jogged fifty yards since he left the Police Academy more than twenty years ago.

  “What did Westrate say when you called him?” Graver asked.

  He and Katz were leaning back against the front of Graver’s car watching Charlie Bricker and Hodge Petersen from the Internal Affairs Division pore over the car and its contents with Tordella and his partner. The lights on the patrol car had been replaced with portable floodlights from the CSU, and the two unit investigators were dusting the car and gathering samples.

  “‘Son of a bitch!’ “Katz said, imitating Westrate’s strident voice. “Why didn’t you call him?”