An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  This time Mona Isaza answered the door. Graver had missed her earlier that day, so they embraced in the dark screened room as he had embraced Arnette earlier, and Mona called him “bah-BEE” and kissed him on the neck. She smelled, as always, of cooking, of something oniony and of the cornmeal masa she used almost every meal to make fresh tortillas. Mona was about the same height as Arnette, though heavier, despite which she was in many ways the more feminine and graceful of the two women. She was pure Zoque Indian from southern Oaxaca, with the finely defined lips, heavy eyebrows, and black eyes that were often seen in the sculptures and drawings of Francisco Zúñiga’s beloved Indian women. Whereas Arnette wore her hair in one thick braid, Mona wore two long ones, each falling in front of her shoulders over heavy bosoms. She customarily wore simple, cotton dresses, thin from long use, as if she were a poor campesino.

  “The Lady wants you next door,” Mona said, smiling and perhaps mocking just a little bit the imperious manner Arnette sometimes employed to control the cadre of eccentrics who worked for her. Closing the door behind them, she and Graver entered the twilight of Arnette’s living room. “It has been such a while since I have seen you,” she said softly, unhurriedly. “I was sorry to miss you yesterday.”

  Graver chatted with her and followed her through the twilight and out a back door into the dark again. Mona moved slowly and loved to talk, which she did with the same lack of urgency as she did everything else. Her speech was heavily accented, but markedly precise, each word a whole thing separated beautifully from its neighbor. Though she preferred the domestic role, Graver knew that Mona had a university education and was actually more widely read than Arnette. He always enjoyed her company and was fond of the sound of her voice, to which he now listened with pleasure as they entered an arbor covered with grapevines and walked the short distance to the next house. They entered another screened porch there and with a few words and another kiss, Mona left him to enter the back door to the house alone.

  The large room that he stepped into presented a dramatic change. It was brightly lighted with half a dozen computer work stations sitting against the surrounding walls. Two of the stations were occupied by matronly women who appeared to be data input clerks. A third station, a more complex system with an oversized screen that was jumping with colors and what seemed to be a series of continuously changing graphs, was being operated by a young man with a ponytail and a General Custer mustache and goatee. He wore a black T-shirt with a brilliantly embroidered parrot on the back, khaki pants, and tennis shoes. His right leg was bouncing hectically as he slumped back in his chair and occasionally jabbed at the keyboard as he sipped coffee from a Styrofoam cup that, for some reason, had a bent paper clip laced through the side of it like an earring. In the center of the room Arnette sat at a long table with a blond girl who looked like a college student, too young to be doing this kind of thing, Graver thought.

  “Hey, baby,” Arnette said, looking up as he came in. She and the college girl, who was wearing a headset with a thin wire microphone that curved around in front of her mouth, were poring over the contents of a pile of ring binders. Every once in a while the college girl, who was wearing a bandanna-patterned halter top and, Graver presumed, a pair of shorts under the table, would turn her head aside and speak sotto voce into the microphone which was attached to a large transmitter that occupied one end of the table. With her left hand, she would touch this or that dial lightly, without looking at it, almost without thinking, as though it was an old habit, fine-tuning whatever it was going into her head. The room hummed with the white noise of electronic equipment.

  “You have the tapes?” Arnette asked, putting a pencil behind her ear and reaching out her hand.

  Graver retrieved them from his coat pocket and handed them to her along with the piece of paper with the parameters.

  Arnette looked at the parameter notations and then handed everything to the girl.

  “Get Corkie,” she said. The girl hit a button on the receiver’s control panel and muttered something into the thin mouthpiece. ‘’There’s nothing to tell you,” Arnette said to Graver. “Apparently Ginette didn’t go to her office. Her car was home when my people got there about four o’clock. We called her office. She had called in sick that morning. But Dean didn’t show up there until half an hour ago.”

  Graver looked at his watch.

  “What time did he leave the office?” Arnette asked.

  “Must’ve been around three or three-thirty.”

  “Five hours out of pocket, more or less,” Arnette calculated.

  Graver felt the chest-constricting frustration of having lost the first move, though at the time he hadn’t seen those few hours as especially critical. He had moved as quickly as he had thought prudent. But now prudence seemed less desirable than knowing where Burtell had been for those five hours.

  A young Asian woman with a masculine haircut and wearing a man’s undershirt and lace, spandex leggings came out of the next room and walked up behind the blonde, who handed the two tapes back over her head without looking around. The Asian took the tapes, looked at Graver, and walked away. She was wearing a single, red plastic earring about the size of Graver’s thumb and in the shape of an erect penis, complete with dangling scrotum.

  “Have any idea about these tapes?” Arnette asked.

  “No. Could be his personal bookkeeping for all I know.”

  “But you think no one else knows about the computer.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Arnette’s eyes rested on him a moment, and then she turned her head slightly toward the blonde, but without taking her eyes off Graver, and said, “Tell Corkie to verify the integrity of those tapes.”

  The girl muttered again into the microphone.

  “And if I were you, Marcus, I’d tap him. You’d better let us tap him. You don’t have that much time.”

  It was understood, of course, that they didn’t have authorization for a wiretap, but such formalities were never a consideration when you were operating in Kepner’s world. She also had access to technology that was several cuts above what the CID could afford on its stressed municipal budget and which significantly reduced the risk of detection. Getting the Information was the name of the game. Not Getting Caught was the other name of the game. There was a lot of ingenuity in between.

  Graver stood there and looked at her waiting for him to answer and could feel the sweat oozing to the surface of his skin. He knew that unless he explicitly instructed otherwise there would be no tapes of the Burtell wiretap, that it would be only a listening effort, a means by which he could hope to steal a march against the target, of gaining an edge in the contest And he knew, too, that in this level of competition people didn’t break into a sweat over what he had to decide. Still, he could feel the sweat.

  The blonde at Arnette’s elbow leaned to her and said a few words.

  “Okay, you got a good copy on the tapes, Marcus,” Arnette said. She stared at him. “What about it? You want the tap?”

  He nodded. “Go ahead,” he said.

  Chapter 28

  Graver thought about it all the way back to Tisler’s rent house. Did he really know enough to justify what he was doing now, going completely outside channels with his own investigation? Considering Westrate’s outsized ambitions, considering who was involved and who might be involved, yes, he thought it did. What he had to keep in mind, however, was that in the end it was not Westrate to whom he ultimately would have to answer. The implications here were larger even than Westrate’s ambitions. And if the conspiracy went no further than the three men he had identified so far, the fewer people involved in the investigation the greater the chance—though still a slim chance—that the police could keep it entirely under wraps.

  So, until Graver had a more informed perspective, he was going to keep what he knew confined to the few people he trusted. One of his greatest fears was that his inquiry, if discovered by people at the command level, would be derailed for poli
tical reasons. He had seen it happen too often.

  He found that going back into Tisler’s rent house was far more eerie than entering it for the first time. The first time he had not been so much anxious as curious. Then he had expected to find something, though he had no idea what Now, however, he was fearful of encountering some one.

  But it was a groundless anxiety, and he easily entered through the back door again, went to the bedroom at the far end of the house where he quickly turned on the computer and erased the hard drive. He hoped to God that Arnette’s people didn’t screw up the only thing that was left of Tisler’s curious cache.

  Just as he was making his way through the kitchen to the back door, he felt his pager vibrate at his waist He pushed the button to turn it off but didn’t look at the calling number until he was back in his car and headed away from Tisler’s house. As he was driving, he held the pager near the dash lights and saw Westrate’s office number. He pulled off the street at a car wash and called in.

  Westrate answered on the first ring.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, hearing Graver’s voice. “Where the hell are you?” Graver told him. “Better get down here to my office. Something’s happened.”

  That was all Graver knew for twenty minutes, the length of time it took him to come in on the Southwest Freeway, park in front of the Administration Building, and get upstairs to the fourth floor where he found the stout assistant chief alone in his office. Others had been there, however. Two Styrofoam cups with the dregs of coffee sat on the front edge of Westrate’s desk, and there were cigarette butts in the ashtray along with one of Westrate’s half-smoked cigars.

  Westrate was sitting behind his desk in an incredibly wrinkled white shirt, tie undone, cuffs turned back, a thick hand nervously taking occasional swipes at the thinning bristles on his ball-like head. He didn’t get up as Graver walked in, and he didn’t ask Graver to sit down. The place reeked of smoke, and Westrate’s desk was in disarray.

  “Ray Besom is dead,” Westrate said, scowling from under his heavy eyebrows. He said it as if Graver had something to answer for, and Westrate was by God expecting the answer right then.

  Graver had the sudden, irrational thought that he had somehow been at fault, that he had miscalculated something and, as a result, Besom was dead. Burtell popped into his mind, Burtell and the five missing hours.

  “What happened?” He felt short of breath.

  “Heart attack while he was fishing. They found him still in his waders, washed up on the beach.”

  “Heart attack?”

  “Yeah, goddamned heart attack!”

  “He’s in Brownsville?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who’s •they’?”

  “Brownsville police,” Westrate said heavily. He bent his round head and held it in his two thick hands, elbows on the desk, the thinning spot in his short hair tilted at Graver. “Sit down.”

  Graver sat in one of the chairs in front of Westrate’s desk. Westrate dropped his hands and looked up at Graver and noticed the two Styrofoam cups. “Shit, give me those.” He stood and snatched the two cups with one hand, slopping some of the coffee as he dumped them into the trash can at the side of his desk. “Shit,” he said again, opened a desk drawer, yanked out a wad of tissues and mashed them down on the splash of coffee. He rubbed it around as he leaned over, stretching his short arms across the desk. Graver could see a tuft of wiry black hair on his chest sticking up through his open collar. There was wiry black hair on his forearms and on the backs of his hands and on the tops of his fingers. Westrate flopped back down in his chair as he leaned over and with one hand dunked the wad of wet tissues into his trash can.

  “Yesterday he was fishing at this spot, a place called Boca Chica near Port Isabel,” Westrate began. “Goes there every year. Some old fart took him by boat You can’t get there in a car. This is about five yesterday afternoon. According to Besom’s wife it was his last night down there. He was supposed to get up early this morning and drive home. Anyway, this old guy’s supposed to come back later last night, nine o’clock, and pick him up. Nine o’clock comes, old fart is there, but no Besom. He waits an hour. Waits an hour and a half. Says he putters his boat in the direction Besom said he’d be walking, shining his spotlight on the beach. No Besom. He goes back to Port Isabel. Docks his boat and goes to a bar and drinks and worries about it. Tells some friends what’s happened. They say, well, shit, if the guy wanted a ride he should’ve showed up.”

  Westrate let his head flop back against the high hack of his chair.

  “This is all coming from the Brownsville police,” he said. “Old fart goes home and goes to bed for Christ’s sake. But he’s had a lot to drink and doesn’t wake up until ten o’clock the next morning. That’s this morning, today. But he can’t get Besom off his feeble old mind. Gets in his boat and goes back out there, putters along the beach again, goes a mile or so and finally spots this bunch of fishing gear piled up beside an old beached shrimper. But no Besom. He goes back in, calls the Brownsville police because this place, Boca Chica, is in Brownsville’s jurisdiction. They do a search party. It takes most of the afternoon, but they finally find Besom’s body washed way down the beach, fully dressed, still in his waders. He was chewed up some. The fish had been at him a little. But not a lot It hadn’t been that long.”

  “He had his ID with him?”

  “No, no ID, but the old man remembered that Besom said he was from Houston and was staying in a ‘motel’ in Brownsville. They start checking it out, calling the motels. In the meantime the Brownsville ME does an autopsy. Heart failure, drowning. They finally locate the motel, get in, find out from his things he’s with HPD and call us.”

  Westrate was leaning back in his chair now, his arms up, his thick, hairy hands gripping the high back of the seat above his head. He was staring at Graver, his long upper lip taut and challenging.

  “What do you know about the Brownsville ME?” Graver asked. “Is he reliable?”

  “How the shit would I know?”

  “Did Besom have a history of heart trouble?”

  “God, I hope so.”

  “What about IAD?”

  Westrate nodded. “I talked to Katz just a little while ago. Pio Tordella and his partner—and Bricker and Petersen—are driving down there tonight, right now.”

  “Who knows about it?”

  “Everybody. The Brownsville police didn’t know what this was. Goddamned border town hicks. So when the local news says it wants to go along, they say sure, fine. They filmed the whole thing. Besom’s wife already knows, but we got the news people to hold off on the ID anyway pending notification of the family. But it’ll be on the news tomorrow night.”

  He was still staring at Graver, almost in an accusatory manner as if he was waiting for Graver to justify what was happening.

  “He needs to be reautopsied back here,” Graver said.

  “Yeah, that’s what Katz wants too.” Westrate’s face hadn’t lost any of its tension in the telling of the story. He still looked as if he was going to explode. “You’ve already written the paper closing out Tisler?”

  “I’ll finish it tonight.” From Westrate’s expression Graver guessed someone had already suggested there was a smell of fish here. “The second autopsy is critical.”

  Westrate was still looking at him as he dropped his arms down and rested them on his desk. His forehead was oily. He looked like he’d been hot for a long time.

  “Listen,” he said grimly, “I don’t care what the autopsy shows, this is too damned coincidental for me.”

  Graver agreed with him, but he didn’t say so. He could hardly keep his thoughts on what Westrate was saying. He needed to get to Kepner. When Dean Burtell heard about this he was going to do something. Whatever was happening here, it didn’t look good for Burtell.

  “You don’t believe it was a heart attack,” Graver said, trying to think in two directions at once.

  Westrate’s eyes widened slightly as he
tilted his head downward until he was again glowering at Graver from under his woolly eyebrows.

  “Heart attack.” His voice was a mixture of anger and disdain. He was looking over his clasped hands, his two meaty fists gripping each other so tightly that Graver imagined them suddenly bursting and squirting all over the desk like tomatoes. “I don’t care if we find a living, breathing witness to Tisler’s suicide and the guy swears on a Bible that Tisler shot himself. I don’t care if we find a witness who saw Ray Besom fishing, saw him suddenly grabbing his chest and gasping and falling down in the goddamn water. I don’t care if we KNOW that’s exactly how they both died… it by God… looks… SUSPICIOUS!”

  Dramatically jerking his head from side to side for emphasis as he spoke these last words, Westrate literally spewed spittle as he hissed “suspicious.” His face was as pink as a pistachio pod, and Graver could see even his scalp flushing through his thinning hair.

  “HO-ly JE-sus!” Westrate exclaimed, falling back into his chair. Then suddenly he was up, jamming his hands into his pockets and stalking around his desk to the open door of his office where he stood looking out into the dark anteroom, jangling the change in his pockets.

  Westrate’s histrionics were wasted on Graver, who could only think of Burtell and of how critical it was to be close to him now. He wished to God he had asked for taps the first time he spoke to Kepner. At that time Ginette would have been at work and, as it turned out, Burtell wouldn’t have been at home either. Kepner’s people would have had plenty of time. Graver looked at his watch. He had to get out of Westrate’s office.

  “What do you want from me, Jack?” he asked.