An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  Burtell hesitated a beat beside the dark windows of the Mercedes and then turned and walked across the small lot to his car, unlocked it, and threw in his coat He looked back at the Mercedes which didn’t move, just sat there with its motor running, its air conditioner humming along with the cicadas in the dark heat. He got into his own car and started the engine, feeling a little queasy as he adjusted the air conditioner vents to blow directly on him. The goddamned Greek was just too spooky. He was so goddamned byzantine he made intrigue look like a game of checkers.

  Burtell put the car in gear and turned toward the narrow lane that led up past the condominium. The lights were coming on here and there in the condominium, and he wondered if the two women lived there or somewhere farther back in the neighborhoods. He drove past the Greek’s car, which sat motionless and dark, seeming to have an intelligence about it, a mute and incomprehensible cunning like one of those crusty bayou cockroaches that lived in the layered armor of the palm trees. Jesus Christ.

  “What do you think?” Kalatis asked as they watched the taillights of Burtell’s car climb the lane and disappear.

  Faeber was cautious. “He seemed sure of himself, that he had it under control.”

  “I think he was squirming,” Kalatis said. “Maybe he hasn’t got the guts to go through with this.”

  “Go through with it?”

  “If we don’t call it off. If we go through with it.”

  Faeber suddenly felt as if he had missed part of the conversation, that he hadn’t picked up on something crucial. Confused now, his mind scrambled to sort it out But he chose to say nothing else. He simply sat there wondering what in the hell was operating behind the black eyes of Panos Kalatis.

  Chapter 17

  Driving home, Graver went over and over the disturbing evidence Paula had laid out during the past two hours. There was no mistaking she had uncovered a breach in security that could have disastrous consequences. It was an intelligence director’s worst fear, and the bad news was compounded by the fact that an old, good friend seemed to be involved, if not at the very heart of it.

  In truth, this was something Graver still had not accepted, though he had given Paula every indication that he had. It simply was unbelievable. He was going to have to think himself into it. Like a mathematician, he possessed the problem and the theorem, but he had yet to construct a formula of proof. And he would have to see that formula played out, step by step, before he would be able to bring himself to see Dean Burtell as a traitor.

  The sticking point was motivation. Graver knew Burtell like a brother, and the motives seen most often in circumstances of betrayal simply did not figure into the equation. Greed? Dean liked to live well, but his affinity for upper-middle-class comforts hardly added up to avarice. Sexual obsession? Graver knew enough about human nature to know that that sort of thing could be held in secret for decades, even lifetimes, but often, if not always, there were indications, hints, of this proclivity in other aspects of the personality. But not in Dean Burtell. Revenge for imagined or actual wrongs? Burtell had never uttered a word along these lines. That, too, commonly exhibited itself sooner or later in someone who felt it strongly enough to seek it. Conflicting ideology or philosophy? Not a factor.

  But supposing Burtell had changed, and one of these elements had become an obsession for him, obsession enough for him to betray everything and everyone for it. Would not Graver have noticed the change? Even if Burtell had managed effectively to disguise the motive, would Graver not have noticed something, even some other alteration in his behavior? How could he possibly have missed it? Had Burtell, like Tisler, suddenly acted contrary to character without anyone seeing even minor indications of something amiss—in either of them?

  Graver had to admit that Paula’s line of deduction was artful and well constructed, but it did not seem to track with the human factor, an understanding of which also required a kind of sixth sense. Surely there was something here that didn’t add up. Surely, in this instance, appearances—the appearance of Burtell’s involvement—were deceiving. But then that was the problem, wasn’t it? Appearances had been deceiving. And now Graver, while accepting the axiom in the first instance, wanted to force it onto the second. It was the everlasting danger of counterintelligence, mirrors arranged to create the appearance of an infinity of the same image. Graver was on unstable ground, and it scared him.

  He stopped at a seafood restaurant on Shepherd and the hostess took him to a small table for two by a window. Graver had not eaten at so many tables for two in his entire life as he had in the last six months. It was a constant and ironic reminder that dining, like sex, was an activity that, ideally, was expected to be done in pairs.

  After ordering a dinner of fried shrimp and a bottle of Pacifico beer, he took out his pocket notebook and jotted down a few points that Paula had made that he wanted to rethink. Taking notes was an old habit that was hard to break, and he collected his thoughts much better in the company of old habits.

  When his food arrived, he put away his notebook and ordered a second Pacifico. As he ate, he let his attention wander to the other diners, imagining the relationships of the people at each table. It was a favorite diversion, but one that he forced on himself now in a deliberate effort to take his mind off Burtell. It was not an entirely successful endeavor. When he finished eating, he did not order coffee, but quickly motioned to his waiter for the bill, paid it, and left.

  As he was walking out to his car, he felt the pager on his belt vibrate. He looked down at the number, and then turned around and went back into the restaurant. There was only one pay telephone in the anteroom outside the rest rooms, and it was occupied by a young man in his twenties, a post-modern boulevardier with an attitude. He wore his black hair in a ponytail and was dressed in a fashionably baggy tan suit with a black shirt buttoned at the neck, no tie. When he saw that Graver was waiting, he turned his back and kept talking. He was telling the person on the other end that he and a friend were going to a few clubs after dinner and why didn’t she catch up with them at Tocino’s at ten-thirty. Oh. Why? Well, tell him something. Tell him you’ve got a girlfriend who’s sick, throwing up all over the place, and you have to go see about her. What? Well, tell him…

  Graver took out his shield, opened it, reached over the man’s shoulder, and dangled it in front of his face.

  “Give me five minutes,” he said. The young man flinched and turned around slowly, his eyes fixed in cautious surprise. “Tell her you’ll call her back in five minutes. It’ll give her time to think of something.”

  The young man did as he was told, then pressed down the hook with one hand, and gave the receiver to Graver. “Jesus,” he said with mocking respect, his machismo requiring some kind of disparagement to cover his loss.

  “Thanks,” Graver said.

  Neuman answered on the first ring.

  “Everything all right?” Graver asked.

  “Oh, sure… I just need to see you for a few minutes.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m just finishing a hamburger at a diner called Sid’s, off Montrose.”

  “I know where it is. I’m not far away. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  When Graver got to the diner, Neuman was sitting in his car in front where he had parked to one side under an old mimosa. Graver pulled up beside him, and Neuman got out of his car.

  “The place was too small to talk inside,” Neuman explained through Graver’s window.

  Graver came around and each of them leaned against their cars. Though the night was clear, the air was damp, and heavy with the sweetness of the honeysuckle that grew in great clumps, frothy white with blossoms, against a board fence that disappeared around behind the diner.

  “What’s on your mind?” Graver asked.

  Neuman was holding his car keys and jangled them gently as if to get himself started.

  “Well, first of all I checked out Tisler,” he said. “Thoroughly. Went after hidden income possibilities
, real property—he’s got a little rent house in Sharpstown. Had it a couple of years. Paid minimum down, fifteen-year mortgage, and he’s plunking away monthly payments. I checked business involvements, savings accounts, all the banking possibilities. Nothing. Toys: vehicle and boat registrations. Nothing. I did all this in Peggy’s name too. And in Art’s middle name, Sydney. And in her maiden name, Mays. Nothing. If he had an extra income he wasn’t stupid about taking care of it I don’t know how far you want me to go with this. Background checks next? Whatever.”

  Graver started to speak, but Neuman went on.

  “But that’s not why I wanted to talk to you.”

  Graver waited.

  “I hope this isn’t out of school… or… out of line.” Neuman shifted his weight from one leg to the other. He had left his jacket and tie in the car and his shirt was wrinkled the way shirts get after long days squirming in chairs in front of computers, rummaging through files, sitting and standing, sitting and standing. “This, uh, I guess this falls into the ‘it-seemed-odd-at-the-time-but…’ category, for what it’s worth.”

  Neuman’s nervousness was uncomfortably reminiscent of Paula’s behavior earlier. Graver sensed the chill of foreboding. Neuman jangled his keys and then plunged in.

  “I think there may be something… irregular… about the way Art and Dean were working their investigations,” he said.

  Graver’s stomach clinched. He couldn’t even imagine what he was about to hear, but as of that moment he accepted as fact what had been only a premonition up until then: the surprise he was about to hear would be the rule, not the exception, regarding whatever the events that precipitated Tisler’s death would come to be called. Whether it would be known in retrospect as a scandal, or an affair, or an ordeal, it was clear to Graver at this moment that he was involved in something that was going to cause an uproar. He was as sure of it as if he were looking back from five years in the future.

  “I haven’t read the Seldon documents,” Neuman went on, “but I’d like to. Dean’s been helping me develop the Darley investigation, that protection racket stuff. In the past month it’s been moving fast, very fast, and Dean’s been pushing me to move quicker, collect a wider variety of information, move, move, move… I’ve been chasing the damn ball from one side of the court to the other, just barely keeping up. But at the same time Art’s Seldon operation has been really cooking too, and sometimes Art and I were in and out of Dean’s office on a revolving-door basis. Documents flying back and forth, stuff breaking that couldn’t wait. We got a little sloppy, I guess, leaving raw data notes, report drafts, stuff like that, on each other’s desks instead of hand-to-hand delivery… not being too careful, or careful enough, anyway.”

  Neuman paused and swallowed, a shake of the keys.

  “About a month, no, three weeks ago, I was working through the lunch hour to complete a report before I had to leave for a one-thirty meeting with an informant Dean had my folder on that particular informant and was writing up notes for me, things he wanted me to watch for, things he wanted me to get if I could. I was actually meeting two informants that day, and Dean said he’d leave the contributor folders for both of them, along with his notes for me, on his desk. He was hurrying out to meet his wife for lunch.

  “When I was finished, I ran across the hall to his office. His desk was a mess. I grabbed the two folders and took them back to my office. I flipped open the first one, read his notes, flipped open the second one. The documents were out of order. The most recent reports should have been at the front, Dean’s notes on top. Instead, it was all scrambled. I leafed through the typed reports and found Dean’s handwritten notes buried almost at the back. But when I started reading them, they didn’t make sense. I didn’t recognize anything. In fact these were not pre-interview notes at all, but a post-interview contributor contact report It didn’t take me but a second to realize that what I had was a Seldon case document.”

  “Then it was Art’s handwriting, not Dean’s.”

  “No. It was Dean’s handwriting.”

  “What? You’re sure?”

  “Positive. I see it every day.”

  “Was the typed report in the folder with it?”

  “No,” Neuman said. “It wasn’t.” His voice was flat, and he actually had to clear his throat, a gesture that made Graver heartsick. “That’s the deal. At the top right-hand corner of the first page Dean had written in the date, underlined it and circled it This was on… a Thursday. The report was dated for Friday—of the next week.”

  “You’re sure?” Graver asked again. He had to. It was hard to believe that Neuman wasn’t making a mistake. His heart was pounding.

  “Oh, yeah. I had a calendar right there, and I checked. I kept reading. There were references to events that ‘had’ occurred on the Tuesday and Wednesday of the coming week—I checked those dates too. The whole thing was written in the past tense, as if the events had already happened.”

  “Incredible,” Graver said.

  “Yeah.” Neuman nodded, looking at him. “Pretty wild.”

  Graver looked away. An occasional car had passed by on the street while they were standing there, and as his eyes took notice of yet another one, he realized that it was at that moment accelerating. Had it been stopped across from them? Had it only slowed? Was it something he should have noticed? He turned back to Neuman.

  “So what did you do?”

  “I, uh, I quickly looked at the other documents in the folder. It was in my folder all right, my CI. This thing had just gotten in there by accident.”

  Neuman shook his keys. Graver could tell that he was pained by having to come out with this.

  “I took the folder and ran back to Dean’s office,” Neuman continued, after taking a deep breath. “I picked through the pile of papers and folders there, trying not to disturb them. I played a hunch and went to the bottom, and sure enough I found another contributor contact folder. There was a two-digit difference in the contributor control number between this folder and mine. A transposition. It was a Seldon case folder. I found Dean’s handwritten notes to me about my CI inside the folder, right on top where I’d expected to find it I switched the handwritten pages to their proper folder, put the Seldon folder back on the bottom of the pile where I’d found it and got the hell out of there.”

  “Afterward,” Graver asked, “did Dean ever indicate to you that he suspected something might have been disturbed?”

  “No. It was just dumb luck that I realized what had happened and that I actually found the Seldon contributor folder at the bottom of the pile. But then, I guess that accounts for Dean’s misplacement of his notes in the first place.”

  Graver stared past Neuman to the diner. It was a bare minimum eatery, mostly a counter with stools and a few tables next to the windows that faced the street Inside, a waitress was wiping off the counter. She stopped to adjust a hairpin and then went back to wiping the counter. The only other person in the place was an old man with a bulbous nose sitting at a window table holding a newspaper in his hands. But he wasn’t reading it He was staring out the window, daydreaming, his eyes fixed on the night.

  Graver shifted his eyes back to Neuman. “You’ve had plenty of time to think about this,” he said. “What do you make of it?”

  Neuman was quick to shake his head. “I don’t know. I don’t understand it I don’t know how Dean works his other cases, the tricks he uses to develop them. I’ve still got a lot to learn.” He paused. “But… uh, I don’t… I haven’t been able to put together a scenario that could explain what he was doing. I don’t know what he was doing.”

  “Yes,” Graver said, “you do.”

  Neuman was embarrassed, a little flustered. The keys jangled again. Graver stared at him.

  “Looks like he was fabricating a contact report,” Neuman said.

  “Yeah”—Graver nodded—”that’s what it looks like.”

  Casey Neuman didn’t say anything, and as they stood there at the edge of the light
from the diner windows Graver realized that he wasn’t going to say anything.

  “Okay, Casey,” Graver said. He knew exactly what he was going to do. “You’re going to get your feet wet here, in a major way.”

  Chapter 18

  Graver sat in his car and watched Neuman’s taillights disappear into all the other lights of the city. These revelations indicting Dean Burtell were hitting him hard. But he would have been a fool to start looking for innocent explanations. He wasn’t going to find them.

  Instead of driving away, he got out of the car and went to the pay telephone near the front door of the diner. Taking a slip of paper from his wallet he dialed the number written there.

  “Hello?”

  It was the woman’s voice he had heard the previous evening when he had answered the telephone in his living room.

  “I’d like to speak to Victor, please.”

  “Who?”

  “Is this Carney?”

  Pause.

  “Yes.”

  “Victor told me you might be answering the telephone. This is Graver. I need to talk to Victor.”

  “Oh. He’s not here.”

  “Will you give him a message?”

  “Okay.”

  “Tell him I need to talk to him as soon as I can. He has several numbers. Tell him to call them until he gets me. I’ll be at the home number in half an hour.”

  “Okay.”

  For some reason he didn’t feel as though she was getting the full import of his message.

  “Do you understand?” he asked.

  “Yeah, sure, I understand.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  He went back to the car again, got in, and closed the door. Turning an investigative eye on Burtell was going to be painful, not unlike what he had just been through with Dore. Jesus. His profession was built on the study of deception, he had seen it from every angle, examined it with a telescope and a microscope, dissected it, read about it, written about it, thought about it, watched it, listened to it, experienced it, done it himself, and still he seemed no less immune to it than in the beginning. Certainly Dore had proved that on a personal level. Now Burtell was making the professional point.