An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  “This part?”

  “The government doesn’t know how to handle people like Kalatis. There’s a lot of intelligence community overlapping. He’s a former foreign intelligence officer—that’s CIA. He’s probably working drugs—that’s DEA. Whatever he’s doing, he’s doing it Stateside—that’s FBI. So who gets him? CIA? DEA? FBI? Usually, everybody feels free to pursue their separate courses of inquiry.” She mashed out her cigarette in the ashtray. “And you know how well they cooperate with each other.”

  “Then you think Dean is working for a government agency?”

  “Well, not exactly.” Arnette lowered her eyes cautiously, and her thin fingers dropped to the ocher pack of cigarettes. She moved it a little, repositioned it, stood it on its side, stood it on its bottom. “The question is, does Dean know who he’s dealing with? What they’ve been doing, Marcus, is pretty far out It’s dirty. Being co-opted by the bad guys is pretty… sleazy. I don’t know who’s fooling whom here. I just think the guy’s got government written all over him… Dean has business with him… and they’re talking about Panos Kalatis.” She shrugged.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “with Kalatis getting into the picture, this becomes business to me, too. It turns out Dean’s reference to Kalatis is the first action the intelligence networks have had on this guy in almost a year. This is a fantastic opportunity for me, for my business. I want to get all I can on him. Now that we’ve both got a stake in him, you won’t have to bear the whole financial burden. And the guy at the fountain. I want to know who the hell he is, too. There are some things I can do that you won’t have to pay for, and I’ll simply pass along what I can.”

  Graver nodded.

  She leveled her eyes on him. “And I’ll expect you to do the same,” she added.

  Graver nodded again. “Sure, of course,” he said. “I appreciate it.” He straightened up in his chair, put his elbows on the table and held his head in his hands for a second and then dropped them.

  “We could be making a big mistake here,” he said, looking at Arnette. “Why should we believe that the information behind lister’s bogus investigations has to be originating with Kalatis? What if they’re coming from the people at the fountain? What if the unknown is providing the information, not Kalatis?”

  “We’re thinking Kalatis made the hits.”

  “Based on this, yes,” Graver said, tapping the dossier. “But what if we’re wrong about that? Dean mentions Kalatis, but we don’t know in what context If we hadn’t heard his name, if we didn’t know he existed, wouldn’t we be assuming the guy at the fountain was behind all this? We’d almost have to be. This dossier may have thrown us off track.”

  “Or put us on track,” Arnette countered, slipping another cigarette out of her pack. “We could have been making the wrong assumption. But, okay, let’s say we weren’t Dean is still talking to the guy at the fountain about Kalatis. Is he asking about Kalatis or reporting about him? Either way”—she waved the unlighted cigarette balanced between her thin fingers—”Kalatis is involved—somehow. Either way I can guarantee you’re going to be dealing with him.”

  She lit the cigarette. The background noises from the computer room drifted into their silence, a telephone ringing, voices, the occasional shrill beep of a computer complaining of a wrong entry. Graver knew Arnette was waiting for him to tell her what he was going to do. She wanted to know, and both of them knew he ought to tell her. Though he had made a career in intelligence, what he was doing now had as much to do with operations as with intelligence. She was more experienced in these kinds of intrigues, and she had seen a hell of a lot more of the havoc caused by men who killed as unthinkingly as they took a piss. She had come from a world where the processes were the same, but the stakes were higher and the rules often didn’t even fit in the picture at all. If he was about to do something that could have lethal results, he’d better understand that.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let me tell you what we’ve got.” He told her of Neuman and Paula’s interview with Valerie Heath and the subsequent take of names from her garbage. He told her how they were following up now. He did not mention Victor Last Then he said:

  “When I get back to the office, I’m going to have Neuman pick up Heath. He’s been wanting to do that… and that’s your advice too, assuming she’s at the bottom of Kalatis’s organization. We’ll see if we can’t get her to cough up some names. Time’s running out.”

  “You know you can’t let her out of your sight once you haul her in,” Arnette said.

  Graver could tell by her face that Arnette was eager to see this happen.

  “Yeah, I know that,” he said.

  “That’s a logistics problem. You can handle that?”

  “Yeah.” He didn’t have any idea how, but he knew she would like to have the job, and he didn’t want to give it to her.

  She studied him a moment, trying to see what he was thinking, he guessed. Then she said, “Okay, I’m going to run these names through my networks.”

  Arnette always wanted more names. Intelligence files were encrusted with layers of aliases, an entire field of study in itself. They were invaluable connectors.

  He nodded, and she continued to smoke. She was playing with the cellophane on her pack of cigarettes, and Graver imagined that if he could have been inside her brain the explosion of synapses would have resembled very much the static-like sound of that crinkling plastic. She was working on something.

  Graver’s pager vibrated at his waist.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said, pushing back his chair. “I guess you don’t have anything on Tisler’s computer.”

  Arnette mashed out her half-smoked cigarette. “No, nothing. But I’ve put a couple of other people on it I’m more hopeful now that he was squirreling away a lot of information. It could be a gold mine.”

  “And Dean?” Graver stood.

  “He’s been at home all day, and he hasn’t made any calls. And now that I know more about what’s going on here, I doubt that he will. He’s way beyond that kind of thing.” She picked up her pack of cigarettes. “But that just increases the probability he’ll take another trip soon, maybe tonight At the very least he’ll have to go out to make telephone calls.” She stood also. “What’s your sense about Ginette? You think she knows? Is she involved?”

  “I don’t know. She seems… not to be as rattled as Dean, not as distracted maybe.” He shook his head. “My first reaction is to think that she doesn’t know. But… it’s only a sense, a feeling.”

  “Okay, then,” Arnette said. “Let’s both keep plugging away. This can’t go on much longer without something breaking open.”

  Arnette came around the end of the table and opened the door to the computer room where the work was still tilting along at full bore, the high-speed, light-speed, almost-silent chip labor of the twenty-first century enabling fewer than a dozen people to move a frighteningly vast amount of data in milliseconds. When Graver allowed himself to dwell on it very long, he almost despaired. It was marvelous what man had learned to do with nothing more than an electrical spark. But somehow, he felt as though man was also only the alchemist’s apprentice. He knew a bit of God’s technology, but he understood considerably less of the divine moral sense that would enable him always to use it wisely. As history had proved all too consistently over the millennia, man’s head was still ahead of his heart.

  Chapter 43

  When Graver got back to his car, he looked at his pager. The call-back number was Paula’s at the office. He made his way back through the neighborhoods to Holcombe and then headed north on Kirby Drive. By the time he got back to the CID offices it was just after four o’clock. He stopped in front of Lara’s opened office door.

  “I’m sorry about lunch,” he said.

  She stopped typing on her computer and looked at him. “No problem.” She shook her head. “I ate as much of it as I could.” She grinned. “Did you finally get something?”

  “I ate a very bad hamburger
on the way. Listen, would you check with me before you leave this afternoon?”

  “Sure,” she said, looking at him with dark-eyed curiosity, hoping he would elaborate.

  “Thanks.” He turned and walked away. But instead of going to his office, he started down the long corridor of doorways. Ahead of him people meandered in and out of their cubicles, and as he passed opened doors he heard snatches of conversations, telephones ringing, clicking of fingers on computer keyboards. The door to Besom’s office was open and Ted Leuci was sitting in Besom’s chair with a cardboard box on the floor between his feet It was half-filled with a miscellany of knickknacks. Besom liked knickknacks, little stuffed animals with suction cup feet, a ceramic log-cabin with a pencil sharpener in the chimney, a little wooden outhouse that suddenly popped apart into half a dozen pieces when you pulled the tiny door handle, a jokey fisherman’s yardstick with an exaggerated scale, a roadrunner made of nuts and bolts and wire welded together. The place was a junk shop.

  “How’s it going?” Graver asked.

  Leuci sat back in his chair. He looked around the office. “Okay,” he said, arching his spine. “I got rid of the paperwork first, to keep it moving.” He looked down into the box. “Now this… stuff.” He shook his head. “He had more crap…”

  Graver nodded and moved on down the hall, past a few closed doors until he came to Paula’s, which was open. He stopped. She was sitting with her back to the door, her swivel chair rocked back with her feet propped on the low windowsill. She was writing on the legal pad which was resting on her thighs.

  “You have something?”

  She swiveled around. “Yeah,” she said, and motioned for him to come in, which he did, closing the door behind him.

  Paula was definitely in her end-of-the-day mode. The belt of her shirtwaist dress was undone and hanging loose, and her hair was pulled back in a tacky little wad and held in place with a blue rubber band. Her lipstick was gone hours ago, and she wasn’t wearing shoes. The expression on her face reflected some irritation. Graver leaned one shoulder against the door and put his hands in his pockets. The only other chair in the room was stacked with books and ring binders and catalogues and directories. It was too overloaded and had been that way too long for Paula to pretend anymore that the chair had been designed for sitting.

  She rested a bare foot on the shield of one of the chair’s ball casters and crossed her legs, again tilting back the chair.

  “I went to the Red Book and checked into the bank,” she said. “Gulfstream National Bank and Trust is owned by a holding company, Gulfway International Investments. I managed—after considerable hassle—to get a faxed copy of Gulfway’s Annual Franchise Tax Filings. In addition to the bank’s officers, there are five board members listed. Two live out of state, in California. I started checking into the local three. One is a petroleum engineering company executive. It turns out he’s a huge donor to a Cistercian monastery operation out in the mountains of New Mexico—odd but true. I put him on the back burner.

  “The second local is the founder of Hormann Plastics, a plastics manufacturing company, guy named Gilbert Hormann. Hormann’s business raised a flag from the get-go because of the chemicals and drug combination of the Seldon deal.

  “And the third local guy… Colin Faeber.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Graver said, straightening up.” Have you talked to Neuman?”

  “I’ve paged him. He’s gone down to the courthouse.”

  “When did you page him?”

  “Just now; just a minute ago.”

  Graver looked at his watch. “He can’t be there much longer. The place closes in a few minutes.” He looked at Paula. “What do you have on him—on Faeber?”

  “Minimal: home address, business address. I didn’t go any further because I knew Neuman was on it, and I didn’t see any use in duplicating work. So I dug up this stuff on Hormann.”

  “Okay, fine. Look, if he calls tell him to come on back here and then the two of you come down to my office. We’ve got some planning to do.”

  Chapter 44

  It was almost five-twenty and nearly everyone had left or was leaving. As he passed Lara’s office she was straightening her desk, putting things away. They looked at each other, and she picked up a notepad and followed him into his office. She closed the door behind her.

  “When I went out earlier I went to Arnette’s,” Graver said, taking off his coat and hanging it on the rack behind his desk. He rolled up his shirtsleeves as he walked back around his desk and looked out the windows. He reached back and put his hands on either side of the small of his back and pressed hard against the rigid muscles. He turned around. “She had some new information based on the conversation she had taped between Dean and the guy at the Transco fountain. Dean’s in this very deep. Deeper than… I wanted to believe.” He told her about Panos Kalatis.

  By the time he had finished, he had paced back and forth the length of his office several times. He had massaged his back the entire time and had loosened his tie somewhere in the process. Finally he walked around and sat down behind his desk. When he finished he was sitting with his elbows on his desk, the fingers of both hands working the muscles at the back of his neck.

  Lara said nothing for a moment She was sitting with her back against the back of her chair, straight and correct, the way you were supposed to sit though no one ever did. Her posture conveyed a comfortable efficiency, a natural preciseness, and she studied him from a mind that rarely portrayed ambivalence, an attribute that appealed to Graver because it was so alien to him. He did not understand that kind of uncluttered mental process.

  “I guess I’m missing something… significant,” she said, the fingers of her right hand toying with the top button on her blouse, “but I don’t necessarily see it that way.”

  “What, that he’s mixed up in this?”

  “I guess he’s ‘mixed up in it,’ “she said. “I just don’t think it’s necessarily… a criminal involvement I mean, what if this man at the fountain is a government person, like Arnette believes. Maybe Dean’s working for him… undercover for a federal agency. If he is… he’d have to keep it from you, wouldn’t he?”

  “You’re right,” he said. “That’s true, and that kind of thing happens. But it’s rare. Rare enough for it not to be a serious consideration here. I’d like to believe it… but…”

  “What do you believe, Marcus? What do you realty think Dean is doing?” she asked suddenly. The use of his first name caught Graver by surprise and focused his attention. “Have you—Marcus Graver, not Captain Graver —honestly ruled out that… you might be misreading what’s happening?”

  Graver checked a quick response, something passionless and flavorless—and dishonest—right out of the knee-jerk guidebook. They stared at each other over the desk. She did not blink. Her expression did not convey that she had offered him a challenge. She simply had asked an honest question and was waiting for him to give her—and himself—an honest answer.

  “No,” he said finally, slumping back in his chair. “I haven’t ruled it out And that’s… a very good reason why I probably should have turned this over to someone else.” He paused, but she said nothing. “I haven’t even admitted to myself what I’m doing. No, I’m not buying it yet. But if it’s true,” he said, his own eyes moving thoughtfully to the cobblestone, “if he’s dirty… I want to be the one to deal with that. I guess that’s part of the irrationality of… attachments, of a friendship. It feels like… as if it would be cowardly of me, maybe it seems it would even be cruel of me, to let someone else deal with this. If it turns out badly, I ought to be the one to handle it. I mean, entirely aside from my job, on a personal level, I ought to be the one to pull the switch.”

  His choice of words surprised him. Jesus. As Freudian slips go, that was a grim one.

  She continued staring at him, her eyes almost losing their focus as she thought She stopped toying with the button, and her hand dropped to her lap.

  �
�I don’t know if I could do it the way you’re doing it,” she said, “but I can see how you would want to.”

  “How I would want to?”

  “After what you’ve been through… with your wife”—she looked him squarely in the eyes as if she were saying she was not going to dodge the hard issues anymore, the personal issues—”I’m not really surprised you’d want to see this resolved in a way that would allow you to have control over it.”

  “Why is that?” He could tell she was getting at something.

  “If you turned it over to someone else, that would almost be like having another relationship dissolve without your having had anything to say about it I can see why you’d want to be involved in this no matter how painful it was for you.”

  Graver was speechless at this observation. This wouldn’t have occurred to him in a million years. Was this a valid line of speculation? Could something so deeply contained, so personal, as Dore’s leaving him really affect the way he was handling this investigation? Jesus Christ. Unwittingly, Lara had raised once again the issue of his greatest fear. Whether it dealt with Dore and his failed marriage, or whether it dealt with his relationship with Dean Burtell and this case, or whether it even dealt with his relationship to her, the issue of self-deception nagged at Graver like an obsession, and he wondered if Lara had seen how thoroughly it had come to preoccupy him.

  There was a knock on the door, and Paula pushed her way in with Neuman immediately behind her.

  “Oh.” She started, looking back and forth between the two of them. “Sorry, I thought everyone was gone.”

  Graver and Lara were looking around at her, obviously having been engaged in a conversation that was not entirely business.