An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  He started to dismiss them, then decided he had better underscore the seriousness of their situation. He crossed his arms and sat back on the desk again.

  “Obviously if Tisler’s been mishandling the file in some way, this is big trouble,” he said. “Anything we discuss here dies here. I didn’t choose you for this by tossing a coin, but because I thought you could do best what needs to be done.” He hesitated only a second. “You report only to me. Only to me. If you want to talk and I’m not around then keep it to yourself until you find me. There aren’t any other alternatives, no Plan B. Don’t put anything in writing except your notes unless I ask you to. While this is going on I’m available around the clock; it’s never too late, never too early. You’ve got my pager number. Use it That clear?”

  It was, and there were no questions.

  Chapter 12

  Graver had saved two aspects of Tisler’s life for himself: his personnel file and his contributor documents. He went to the back of the personnel file and started at the beginning.

  After graduating from the Academy, Tisler had spent three years in patrol and then began a steady tour through four of the departments in the investigations command, Robbery, Vice, Auto Theft, and a short stint in Narcotics. He twice had taken the exam for a sergeant’s slot, but his scores had never been high enough to put him in a good position for a promotion. His security clearance check for his entry to CID was routine and seemed generally to reflect Burtell’s assessment that Tisler was an orderly man. His credit report was immaculate. His indebtedness was small: a car, some household appliances, and a new house note that was only three years old. Job performance evaluations were remarkably lacking in distinction throughout his career, even during his first few years in CID.

  But eighteen months earlier he seemed to have come into his own as an organized crime investigator and had developed two lengthy and complex operations which ultimately resulted in joint operations with federal authorities and which yielded a dozen or more major arrests. The ongoing Seldon investigation was still another operation that promised to net him some significant players. Burtell was the analyst on each of these three investigations.

  Graver reached for the file box that contained the diskette copies of Tisler’s folders. There were ten investigators in OC, and each of them was responsible for eight to ten targets. That was too many for Graver to keep in his head. Swiveling his chair around to the computer, he popped in the first diskette. For the next two and a half hours, ducking out only for cups of fresh coffee, he pored over Tisler’s first big success.

  At twelve-twenty, he ejected the first diskette and stepped outside to go to the bathroom. Lara and several of the stenographers were heading for lunch, and he asked her if she would pick up a hamburger for him when they came back. He gave her some money, walked down the hall to the bathroom, and was back at the computer in ten minutes. He popped the second diskette in the CPU. The second investigation was more complex than the first one. When Lara brought his hamburger, he ate it at the screen, creating a pile of wadded paper napkins and filling his office with the heavy odors of mustard and onions.

  At a quarter to five Lara knocked on his door and came in with a sheaf of pink message slips in one hand and a cup of ice and a Dr Pepper in the other. She put the messages in front of him.

  “You’d better see these messages before I go home,” she said, pouring the Dr Pepper into the paper cup of ice. “And Chief Westrate called just now and said he was going to call you back in ten minutes.” She set the iced drink in front of him and straightened up, holding the empty bottle in one hand, the other hand on her hip.

  “Fantastic,” Graver said, stretching his back which seemed to have calcified in the shape of the soft curve of his chair. He reached for the cold drink. “You must’ve been reading my mind.”

  “Uh-huh. A pepper-upper.” She eyed his desk, still cluttered with the trash from his hamburger. “You’ve been cooped up in here too long,” she said, and started gathering up the greasy paper sack and the dirty napkins and tossing them in the trash. She went over to the windows, opened one of them with the leveraged help of a quick twist of her hips, and flapped her long fingers with their fire-engine red nails in front of her face. “Those onions! My God.”

  She turned around and looked at him. He was sipping his Dr Pepper, watching her.

  “So what’s the gossip,” he said.

  “About what you’d expect, I guess,” she said, hands on her hips again, palms vertical. “Art was so… un-extreme, if that’s a word.” She hesitated a second. “I went into his office to clean it out like you asked. Put his stuff in a box in my office to give to his wife. There weren’t many personal things.” She rocked one high-heeled foot sideways absently. “You been in his office much?”

  Graver shook his head, taking in the small movement of her hips as she rocked her foot.

  “On the inside of his door—you couldn’t see it unless the door was closed—was a centerfold. A black girl. And it wasn’t from Playboy. This was from some magazine that went in for the gynecological poses. I mean, she was spreading herself.” Pause. “I left it on the door. I don’t suppose his wife would want a ‘personal effect’ like that.”

  Lara was not being cute about this. In fact her expression and voice portrayed an element of sadness that Graver couldn’t quite interpret.

  “Well, I appreciate you going through his things,” he said. “Dean seems to be taking this a little harder than I would have expected. I just didn’t think I should ask him to do it.”

  “I didn’t mind it,” she said. “What about you? How are you doing?”

  “Fine,” he said, sipping the cold drink.

  She smiled, knowing he would say that, and nodded.

  “That’s good,” she said. Pause. “Anything else I can do for you?”

  Graver had to hand it to her. Lara had never once stepped over the line—albeit, for Lara, the line was a little further out there than it was for most people—during the past year, ever since Dore’s affair had made its way into public view of the gossip columns. But she certainly had given him every opportunity to find solace with her whenever he might have desired it And he had been sorely tempted. That he had not done so had nothing to do with professionalism or the fear that intimacy might ruin an enviable working relationship. He had never had any doubt that Lara could have managed to handle both. He wasn’t so sure about himself.

  He started to speak, but the telephone rang.

  “That’ll be Westrate,” she said, her smile fading to good-natured resignation as she headed toward the door. “I’m gone. See you in the morning.”

  “Lara,” he said.

  She stopped and turned around with her hand on the doorknob.

  “I do appreciate… everything.”

  She smiled again, this time with warmth and the intimacy of an unspoken understanding.

  “Wash out that coffee mug before you go home. Okay?”

  “It’s done,” he said, and picked up the telephone as she opened the door and walked out.

  “Graver.”

  It was Westrate, though he didn’t identify himself. “Katz called me just a few minutes ago,” he said. “He’d just gotten a call from Tordella who was still at the morgue. Coroner’s calling it a suicide too.” Graver could hear the relief, the near joy in Westrate’s voice. “Nobody sees any reason to suspect otherwise.”

  “Did they interview his wife?”

  “Yeah, early this afternoon.”

  “Who conducted the interview?”

  “Tordella and Petersen, I think.”

  “Nothing?”

  “I guess not. I just know Katz said they were satisfied so far, and that they’d probably write it up as self-inflicted tomorrow. He just wanted me to know.”

  Graver slumped back in his chair. He felt more than relief; it was almost elation.

  “But I still want a report from you people,” Westrate said. “We’ve got to give the CID a clean bill of he
alth. His wife’s already screwed on her insurance, anyway. Might as well confirm it, at least make a report on the probabilities. Guy doesn’t kill himself for nothing. Maybe there was a chippy or… I don’t know, something.”

  “It’ll be a while, Jack. Several days if we don’t want it to look like we’re sweeping it under the rug.”

  “Yeah, okay, take a week,” Westrate said. “Let me know how it’s going.”

  Westrate was off the telephone, and Graver turned his chair toward the glass wall. Early in the day the clouds had burned off and the hard blue sky stood empty and hot No thunderstorms today. The expressway was jammed chrome to chrome, a creeping flow of glittering glass and metal wrapped around the girth of downtown.

  He looked at his watch. It was five thirty-five, and the offices were empty. He thought about Westrate’s call. Everybody was relieved. Nobody’s ass was going to get singed over this after all. Everyone was pleased that Tisler seemed to have been so desperate as to have killed himself. The man had been driven to blast away his life for reasons none of them knew anything about, and so far no one, with the exception of Dean Burtell, seemed capable of working up anything more than a wince at his death.

  Chapter 13

  He turned his attention away from the windows and pulled Tisler’s contributor files over in front of him. “Contributor” was an umbrella term for persons who supplied the CID with information about criminal activity. They were the bread and butter of intelligence work and fell into two categories. “Sources” were contributors with no criminal involvements. They included police officers, federal agents, witnesses, and private citizens, mostly people who felt a moral duty to share information or suspicions about criminal activities.

  The other category was “informants,” people with criminal backgrounds, prisoners, parolees, probationers, bailees, arrestees, or suspects. Informants were most frequently motivated to share information for quite different reasons than their counterparts. Often they were simply offering information for money. Sometimes they informed for revenge, or jealousy, or in an effort to have “competitors” eliminated, or as “pay back” for some past service on their behalf by law enforcement officials. The reasons were endless, often complex, and usually emotionally charged.

  The personal identity of all contributors was closely held information, and their continued anonymity was a matter of enormous importance. Each contributor was assigned a control number which was used on all documents in place of the contributor’s name. Graver had gone to the Central Index File, which could be accessed only through a stand-alone computer system, and pulled Tisler’s name. Then he pulled up his contributor file which produced a column of four-digit control numbers. He then went into the confidential records safe and pulled the contributor folders bearing these control numbers.

  He opened the first folder with the same feeling that Paula and Dean Burtell must have had when opening the folders Graver had handed them that morning: What in the hell should he be looking for?

  “Graver.”

  He started, but wasn’t surprised that the voice he recognized was Paula’s.

  “I thought I was the only one here,” she said, leaning against the door frame, a manila folder dangling from her hand.

  “Come in,” he said, sitting back in his chair. He was glad to see her, glad to have someone to talk to. “Sit down.”

  Paula pulled herself away from the door frame and sat in one of the chairs in front of Graver’s desk, crossing her long legs and looking out the windows. Across the bayou the reflection of the falling sun ignited the skyscrapers like molten pillars against the cobalt sky.

  Paula frowned at the burning glass escarpments thinking, unhurried, absorbed in her thoughts which were, he imagined, so unlike everyone else’s thoughts, so singularly faceted, that if he read them in an anthology of thoughts he would recognize their style immediately. Normally Paula’s acerbic sense of humor was very much in evidence, and her attitude and conversation were sprinkled with wit heavily laced with sarcasm. Not a personality to everyone’s choice. But Graver liked her; and he liked the woman she was hiding. At the moment, however, he sensed a distinct sobriety.

  “What do you think about all this?” she asked, turning to him and raising the folders in her hand, her bracelets clacking on her wrist.

  “There’s something new on that,” Graver said. He told her about the call from Westrate.

  “No shit?” She was frowning.

  “Surprised?”

  “I don’t know. I just…” She shrugged. “Then I guess that takes the pressure off.”

  “It does, but we’ve got to write an assessment report anyway.” He rubbed his eyes, wiped his hand over his face, and leaned his elbows on the desk “What do I think? I scanned Tisler’s investigations on the computer. Most of them were pretty much in overdrive it seemed to me. Except the Alan Seldon opening. Everything was taking a back seat to that.”

  Paula nodded, and though she said nothing, he could tell she had something on her mind.

  “What about you?”

  She leaned her head back and looked at the ceiling. Paula’s spontaneity sometimes made her seem ten years younger than her age. He could see her eyes fixed on the acoustic tile above them. She swallowed, and her Adam’s apple rose and fell the length of her long throat Finally she raised her head and straightened up in the chair, turned a little more squarely to him.

  “You know, five years ago when I first came here, Tisler was a mediocre investigator,” she said bluntly, getting right down to business. “Actually, less than mediocre. His track record was lousy. But about eighteen months ago things changed. He had two long investigations in succession—Probst and Friel. Remember them?”

  “Sure. They were good operations.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Paula said. “They both netted big-time results when we turned them over to operations. Now, with this Seldon thing, it looks like he was onto another big one.” She paused and looked squarely at Graver. “I know I was supposed to be reviewing only the five open investigations Tisler was working with Dean, but I happened to think of those other two cases and went to the archives and pulled them. As I read over those two operations—and the beginnings of the Seldon business—one question kept popping into my mind over and over: How in the hell did he get so good all of a sudden?”

  Graver had settled back, resting his elbows on the arms of the chair.

  “I don’t know that he was suddenly all that good, was he?” he asked. “Probst and Friel were outstanding collection efforts, no doubt about it, but Tisler had eight or ten other targets whose progress was anything but exemplary.”

  “Okay, fine, but to my way of thinking that makes Probst, Friel, and Seldon all the more… curious,” Paula persisted. “They’re outstandingly atypical.”

  Graver watched her closely.

  “All day I’ve been reading over the reports of these three investigations,” Paula went on. “They share some interesting commonalities: an extraordinarily lean and orderly collection plan, big results, Dean as the analyst, and… all the contributors were sources.”

  “All of them?”

  “All that mattered,” she said. “There were a couple of informants thrown in, but they provided only incidental take. Think about it. We’d be lost in this business without informants, right? Even with all their detrimental baggage. But what we’d really like to have are sources. Sources have no criminal histories for defense attorneys to parade out to discredit the witness. Sources have no plea bargains to arrange in exchange for their testimony. Sources have no messy criminal personalities to baby-sit and fret over. They’re just well-informed, conscientious citizens, clean and smelling of soap, eager and willing to help law enforcement with their little bits of invaluable information. Right?”

  Graver nodded.

  “Well, it seems that in these three investigations Tisler stumbled onto an embarrassment of riches. Suddenly he had nothing but sterling silver sources. These are the only three of his investi
gations in all his years in CID in which this has happened. The rest of the time he had to make do with a pretty shoddy line-up of informants.”

  She paused to let this soak in, and then her crossed leg began swinging. Something changed in her expression too, a slight adjustment in her mouth, a tightening at the corners of her eyes. She seemed to be hesitating before making her next point But she went on.

  “The initial leads in these things—all three of them—may have been Tisler’s,” Paula said, tapping the folders on her lap with an index finger. “But from then on he would have worked closely with Dean. It’s a sure bet Dean guided the investigations and constructed the format for collecting the information. And Besom, of course, as Tisler’s squad supervisor, would have followed every bit of this step-by-tep.”

  Graver straightened up in his chair. He leaned forward with his forearms on his desk, picked up a pencil, and began bouncing the eraser end of it off the top of the old, iron-gray cobblestone. He was interested.

  Paula turned her chair sideways and pulled another chair around to face her. She kicked off her shoes and propped her feet on the horizontal brace that supported the legs and used her inclined thighs as a lap desk. She flipped to the first page of her legal pad.

  “First, just a quick overview of two cases where Tisler’s sources did such an extraordinary job for him. Okay?”

  Graver nodded, watching her. Paula was quite capable of becoming obsessive about an investigation. It was one of the characteristics that made her a superior analyst.

  “The Probst investigation,” she said, looking at her notes. “Ray Probst owned a temporary employee service that specialized in providing temps to banks and insurance companies. He used his temps as spies to acquire information on persons who had sizable personal incomes. Using their computers, the temps targeted the homes and even the items there that could be easily stolen, certain kinds of PC’s, televisions, jewelry, art work, silver, everything. After the thefts, all the stuff was warehoused in small outlying airports and eventually flown to Mexico and points south for resale in the black market.