An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  But then no one was really immune to it, ever. If you were going to have any peace of mind at all, if you didn’t want to live your life alone and in a misanthropic rage, you had to trust people. You had to allow them the freedom to be Judas. And it didn’t do you any good to indulge in philosophical indignation, because if you did—and if you were honest with yourself—eventually you would find yourself eating your philosophy along with your crow. Deception was too handy a human tool not to employ it sooner or later yourself.

  The thing was, as with everything else deception had its dimensions. There were vast deceptions and small ones, there were trivial ones and mortal ones, there were those that hurt for a little while and those that devastated. Tonight, sitting alone in front of a nearly empty diner, Graver wasn’t sure anymore if the distance between these dimensions actually was all that great. It seemed to him that when men and women determined to employ this oldest of Satan’s skills, they implicitly agreed to sacrifice a little piece of themselves in the process. Perhaps it was only a bruise in the beginning, something easily sustained without great harm, hardly noticeable. But it never went away and every deception added to it and made it worse until it was large and rancid and began to eat at them from the inside. How much rot could a person tolerate, he wondered, before the rot began to be the thing that defined them?

  He ran his fingers through his hair, started his car, and drove away from the diner.

  Chapter 19

  Half an hour later Graver pulled up in front of his house. Looking at it through the windshield he thought the place looked particularly dreary in the darkness. He never left a light on for himself, even when he knew he was going to be working late, and he never had gotten one of those little timers at the hardware store even though he had been meaning to for months. He just didn’t think of it except at moments like this when he would like to have seen a light inside, even if it had to be one that he had turned on himself.

  The headlights of his car panned across the lawn as he turned into the cinder drive that was two cars wide and extended all the way back to the garage and the brick courtyard at the rear of the house. The instant they squared on the garage’s closed doors, they also picked up the glint from the chrome bumper of a car that had pulled around back into the courtyard.

  Graver cut his headlights and stopped. Neuman or Paula would have parked in front. Slowly he eased the car along the cinder drive until he was even with the side of the house. If anyone was inside and hadn’t already seen him, they wouldn’t see his car sitting in the drive if they looked out the front windows.

  Cutting the motor, he opened the car door and stepped out onto the cinder drive and eased the door closed until the latch clicked softly. He took a deep breath of the darkness which was heavy with the combined fragrances of the blossoming mock oranges and the huisache that grew against the rock wall on the other side of the car. For some reason his mind recalled the image of the spent flowers, yellow and white, which would cover the drive in a few weeks as the last of the blossoms retreated in the face of the scorching July temperatures. He reached back for his Sig-Sauer in its holster at his waist It was something he hadn’t done in a dozen years except when he had to qualify at the firing range.

  Holding the gun down at his side he eased along the cinder drive until he approached the back corner and the small Mercedes came into full view. He noted the license plate. He stood silently and scanned the night yard, hoping his eyes would quickly adjust to the varieties of darkness and shadows. The pool. The palmettos. The wrought-iron patio furniture. The bulky trunks of the oaks. He smelled cigarette smoke. Back to the pool.

  Jesus.

  His heart lurched at the realization that someone was sitting in one of the wrought-iron chairs on the patio at the near end of the pool. It was a man, staring straight across at him. Graver assumed the man had seen his car lights as he came into the drive, though he didn’t know whether he could yet see Graver at the corner of the house.

  “Graver. Is that you over there? I saw your headlights.”

  It was Victor Last. Graver was both relieved and furious. He always had kept his private life private, and especially from informants. It was bad business to let them know anything at all about your personal life. Maybe Graver had treated Last a little differently in this regard, but even so, showing up like this was clearly out of line. Or maybe Last himself saw it differently now that Graver was living alone.

  He scanned the yard one more time, though feeling pessimistic about his chances of spotting anyone else who might have been there. He returned the Sig-Sauer to its holster and stepped out from around the corner and started across the courtyard to the pool.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Last?” Graver asked, trying to control his voice.

  “I heard from Carney within five minutes of your call,” Last said. “She said you’d be home in half an hour and that you wanted to see me as soon as possible. I thought I could save some time.”

  Last said this in a most natural manner, as though he hadn’t the slightest idea that Graver might have objected to his showing up at his home.

  Graver sat down in one of the wrought-iron chairs across the table from Last The night was not overcast so the city lights did not provide a reflective glow by which Graver could see Last’s face. He did not like this. Last was much better at masking his voice than his facial changes. As far as Graver could tell, he was dressed much as the night before. Graver put his forearms on the wrought-iron table. The water in the pool was still and silent, the surface occasionally catching a glint of light as though it were a tightly stretched sheet of clear cellophane.

  “I want to hear more about what you alluded to the other night,” Graver said.

  “Oh?” Last’s head was motionless, alert. “I see.”

  “Don’t jump to any conclusions,” Graver said. “Did you expect me to let that go?”

  “I hoped not,” Last said, a touch of a smirk in his voice.

  “What is it you need, Victor?”

  “I find myself a little short just now,” he said, resting an elbow on the edge of the table, the cigarette in the air. “I’d like to reestablish our former relationship.”

  “Same as before?”

  “Well… not quite. I’m very short, actually.”

  “How much?”

  “Double.”

  Graver looked at Last’s silhouette. His voice was very firm on this. He was sure of himself.

  “Victor, I couldn’t give you that if you had proof the mayor was a pedophile. It’s not a matter of bargaining. It’s a matter of empty purses up there. We just don’t have it At the time we were working together you were the highest-paid person we had. I can’t do it.”

  “Come on, Graver,” Last scoffed gently. “That was eight years ago. Doubling it is not really like doubling it, for Christ’s sake. Inflation. Cost of living. The bloody economy, all that Even if you paid me the same rate it would be more.”

  “I can’t do it.”

  Silence. Last smoked his cigarette.

  “I can give you twenty percent more,” Graver said. “That would put you at the top again.”

  “I’m flattered,” Last said dryly.

  “That’s all I can do. I’m sorry.” Pause. “But I won’t pay even that if your information’s no good.”

  “Okay, fine. When can you pay me?”

  “Let me hear your story.”

  Last was still again. The cigarette’s ember moved from the table to his face and there was a brief, rosy glow as he sucked on it and fleetingly lighted his upper cheeks and eyes. Then he was back in the dark.

  “You’re a gentleman, Graver. I’ll trust you on that.”

  Graver was relieved. He knew that Last trusted him, that wasn’t it. It was the fact that Last didn’t hold out for bigger money. If his information had been stunning, he would have. What Graver might have here was a good lead. It wasn’t going to be something that was going to knock him out of his chair.

&nb
sp; “Okay,” Last said. He dropped his cigarette on the tile under the table and put his shoe on it. He dropped his arms to the arms of the chair, relaxed. When he began talking, his voice was mellow, soft, unhurried.

  “I started to tell you last night about going to a party at this fellow’s house here in Houston—”

  “What was his name?” Graver interrupted.

  “I’ll get to that,” Last said, unperturbed. “This man and his wife had a very strange house. Ugly, actually. Modern. One level, spare design, glass rooms around a series of atria. Kind of modular and rambly, if you can imagine. Odd. There were a lot of people, but it wasn’t a raucous affair. It was a talking party. A little combo doing soft, white noise stuff and people standing around in clutches holding drinks. Yuppie sorts. New Age sorts. And the ever-present business sorts.

  “At one point in the evening the lady who accompanied me to the party went to the loo. When she came back she was all atitter. Seems the loo was rather vulnerable visually, to an outside courtyard. The toilet was actually out in the open in the bedroom—so was the shower—and the only privacy was provided by the thick foliage surrounding the bedroom. No privacy in the room itself, so that you pissed away right there in front of all the other ladies who might wander in to check their hair, or cosmetics, or whatever. She, of course, didn’t trust the density of the foliage on the other side of the glass walls. She said there was another bedroom around the corner, and a woman she met in this first bedroom said the arrangement was similar. My lady friend asked this woman if she’d been here before, and she said, oh, yes. And my friend asked what about peepers. The lady laughed and said, no it wasn’t at all what it seemed. No one could see in because of garden walls and all that. That was part of the intent in the architectural design. To make one feel that one was living au naturel.

  “I decided to check it out The place had a kind of honeycomb arrangement, rooms and atria interconnected. You could be in one glass room and look across one of the several atria to the next glass room. Glass and mirrored hallways connected these sort of modules.

  “Anyway, after a while I slipped outside for a smoke. Everyone was inside, of course, addicted to the air-conditioning, not wanting to muss themselves with the humidity. I didn’t know but what there might be someone outside, so I was very casual about it, lighting a cigarette right away so as to be able to explain myself if I needed to.

  “Of course, it turned out that the visual security of this place was not at all what this woman had believed, not once you were inside the garden walls, which you achieved by simply coming inside the house and then going outside. Each of these eccentric bedrooms was indeed enclosed in its own small, high-walled courtyard, and stuffed with plants, palms and such. But, each courtyard also had outside the wall a small, unobtrusive ledge built along the footing of the wall. If you stepped onto the ledge you could look over the wall and see everything inside. There were also hose bibs there, and a watering hose, the ostensible purpose, I’m sure, for the ledge being there.”

  Last stopped and lighted another cigarette. He smoked a moment.

  “The house was roughly the shape of a hexagon or octagon or something, you know, roundish but having straight walls. I stayed well out of the light in the irregular lawn interrupted by shrubbery. Came to the first bedroom. Stepped up on the ledge and looked over. Sure enough, laughably, a woman perched on the potty, her dress gathered up around her, looking rather defiantly, I thought, straight out the glass wall at me. I ducked reflexively and then came back up and saw her still there, still staring at me, her feet splayed, her hands resting in her lap and holding a bunch of tissue. She couldn’t see me at all, even if I’d raised my hands and waved at her. I think the glass walls were coated somehow, to make the outside more opaque. I watched her finish, dry herself, and get up, and flush the toilet.

  “I watched for a bit, two more ladies. This was rather fascinating, I found, the different little ways they tended to themselves. I finished my cigarette and decided to go around to the other bedroom. I passed the next atrium, another room of guests, and was just about to round the next shallow corner when I became aware of voices ahead of me, just around the corner. I stopped, held my breath, and listened. Yes, indeed. Two men’s voices. I eased to the corner, next to which, luckily, a loquat tree was standing. Using this as a screen, I peeped around. Two men were standing on the ledge at the foot of the garden wall of the next bedroom. They were watching whatever women were in the bedroom, but they were doing so as though the action in there was rather sort of incidental entertainment Their drink glasses were sitting atop the wall, as were their raised elbows, and they were smoking and in conversation.”

  Last paused to take another puff on his cigarette. He seemed to be thinking of how to proceed, maybe even, Graver thought, savoring the story.

  “Now, this is weird, I know,” he said, “but I overheard this one guy expressing disbelief, believingly expressing disbelief, if you know what I mean. The second man said, no, it was true. It had been some time getting arranged, but that they finally had done it He said their ‘access’ to intelligence ‘and its processes’ was solid and had been tested several times. The first man wanted to know how long this had been going on. ‘A while,’ was all the second man said. They paused a bit, sipped their drinks, and watched someone in the loo. The second man stepped down off the ledge, lighted a cigarette, and stepped up again.

  “Second man said he understood the first man was having trouble with a certain competitor. He asked what it would be worth to him to rid himself of this guy. First man said his volume would jump thirty percent. Second man asked would he be interested in eliminating him. First man asked was a pig’s ass pork.”

  Last stopped at this and laughed. “American eloquence. I hadn’t heard that one. Stunning.” He smoked. “The second man said they needed to talk about that First man said he didn’t know of anything his competitor was doing that was illegal. Second man said that didn’t matter, things could be worked out” Last paused. “They got interested in someone in the loo again and then the first man wanted to talk about it some more. Just think a bit about it, the second man said. They would get together again and explore the idea some more. They polished off their drinks, very quietly watched someone in the loo for a few minutes, and then the second man said they’d better get back or they’d be missed. That was it. I had to get out of there.”

  Last brought his hand to his mouth again, and the tip of the cigarette glowed and died.

  “I didn’t hear anything about the police in that,” Graver said. “Everyone has intelligence capabilities now. Business, industry.”

  “But when the second fellow asked the first if he wanted to eliminate his competitor, the first said his competitor wasn’t doing anything ‘illegal.’ Why would that figure into the picture at all if they weren’t cops? Who moves against illegalities? Who could use an ‘illegality’ as a means to close down a business?”

  Graver shook his head, not altogether convinced. This wasn’t exactly the kind of thing he thought he was going to hear. It was too vague.

  “Did you get a good look at these guys?”

  “I think so. Their profiles, anyway.”

  “The owner of the house wasn’t one of them?”

  “No.”

  “Who owned the house?”

  Last shifted in his chair. “How’s that going to help you?”

  “I don’t know. It sure as hell won’t help if I don’t know.”

  “You want me to find out these two guys’ names? I’ll do that.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Look, this man collects ‘native American’ art I’m trying to interest him in pre-Columbian stuff. It could be very good for me. Pre-Columbian is going to be very big. The free trade business is going to open up Mexican-interest marketing possibilities. I’m the newest thing in his life right now, Graver. Some of your clubfooted boys start mewling about asking questions, and this guy’s going to ask why people are sno
oping around him all of a sudden. He’s going to say to himself: Victor Last shows up and now people are asking questions.” Last took one more hit off his cigarette and dropped it to the tile and stepped on it “I don’t have to explain this kind of thing to you, Graver.”

  “No, you don’t And I don’t have to explain to you that what you’ve just told me is interesting. I think it’s mildly amusing that men stand outside bathrooms and watch women urinate, but this definitely is not good take, Victor.”

  Graver could see enough to see Last grinning across the table.

  “Well, I suppose it depends on what it is you’re looking for, doesn’t it,” Last said. He shifted in his chair, crossed his legs the other way. “You want names.”

  “Of course I do. And let’s see if we can’t find out if ‘the second man’s’ intelligence operation is in the police department or in the American Southwest Meat Packers Association.”

  Last clucked his tongue at Graver’s sarcasm and stared across the table. “Come on, Graver,” Last said softly, “tell me. Didn’t I hit on something?”

  Graver’s response was immediate and a surprise even to himself.

  “Okay, Victor. The truth is, no, you didn’t hit on anything. If you’ve discovered a breach in CID security, it’s news to me. But if you have discovered something, I sure as hell want to know more about it. I’m just not convinced you have, that’s all.”

  Last nodded, slowly and for several moments. “Okay, Graver,” he said finally, pushing his chair back and standing up. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Graver stood too.

  “You still swim laps?” Last asked, his hands in his pocket as he looked down at the water.

  “Yeah.”

  Last nodded his head. “Very disciplined. Admirable. Really.”