An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  “She’s bathing,” Graver said.

  “Is she alone?”

  Graver shrugged and locked the door again after Neuman stepped inside. They made a quick check of the other rooms to make sure they were alone and then went into the family room where they could still hear the shower. Neuman looked at Graver.

  “There’s not going to be any easy way to do this,” Graver whispered. “We’ve got to go in there, and we’d better do it before she gets out of the shower. She might be able to get to a gun if we give her the chance. She might scream. Get your shield out.”

  Graver went first. The bedroom was a mess. The bed was unmade, and the only light on was a lamp beside it The bathroom door was open and the shower seemed to be running full blast. She sneezed, and then blew her nose. She coughed. The smell of soap and the dank of steam drifted out into the bedroom. A closet door was open and a tangle of clothes draped off crooked hangers above shoes and shoe boxes piled carelessly on the floor. There was a television under the windows that looked out to the canal and a large digital clock with red numbers sat on top of it. Her underwear was at the foot of the bed where she had shed it as well as a pair of shorts and a halter top. A bottle of suntan lotion lay on the floor in front of an armchair beside the bed. There was a copy of Cosmopolitan on the wadded sheets, its pages folded back to an article she had been reading.

  “We’ll let her get out of the bathroom,” Graver whispered hoarsely. “Don’t want her to lock herself in there. Stand back out of sight beside the door, and when she’s out I’ll identify myself. Don’t let her get back in there.”

  Neuman nodded and started toward the wall and immediately the shower stopped. Neuman plastered himself against the wall adjacent to the bathroom door, and Graver moved back out of sight near the closet.

  Both of them thought she would take some time to dry off, maybe brush her teeth, or blow-dry her hair, but to their surprise she came straight out of the shower and into the bedroom dripping water and without a towel. When she cleared the door Graver stepped away from the closet.

  “Police,” he said. “Freeze right there.”

  The minute he saw her he knew it wasn’t going to work that way. She immediately bolted, not back into the bathroom, but toward the bedroom door.

  “Police,” they both yelled.

  “Stop,” Neuman blurted and then lunged at her before she got to the door, knocking her sideways onto the bed where she fell into the tangle of sheets and started screaming. Neuman was on top of her instantly, wrestling her into the sheets as he tried to get his hand over her mouth, get the sheets into her mouth, the two of them rolling over and over as she flailed her arms and legs and squealed, tossing Neuman first one way and then the other from the sheer strength of her panic. Graver jumped on the bed too and together they managed to pin her between them, Neuman beneath her on his back with his arms locked around her, pinning her upper arms to her sides, his fists gripping each other under her heavy breasts, her wet hair in his face.

  She was facing Graver who was on top of her, pressing his knee into her sternum as he held a part of the sheet over her mouth with one hand and his shield in front of her face with the other. She stared at the shield wall-eyed. All three of them were heaving for breath.

  “Goddamn it,” Graver hissed. “We’re police.”

  Pause.

  Her eyes went back and forth between him and the shield.

  “You got that?” he asked.

  Pause.

  “Police,” he repeated.

  She nodded frantically.

  “I’m going to get off you,” he said. “Let you get some clothes on.” He shook his head. “Don’t fight this, okay?”

  She nodded, her wet hair flapping in Neuman’s face.

  He eased his hand off her mouth. “Say ‘okay,’ “he said.

  “Okay,” she panted.

  Graver eased off her, pulling the sheet up over her as best as he could as he did so.

  “He’s going to let go of you,” Graver told her. “Don’t try to get away again. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she blubbered, snatching at the sheet from all over the bed as Neuman gladly scrambled out from under her and rolled off the foot of the bed.

  The front of Neuman’s sport coat and trousers were dark with the water he had soaked off of her backside. He wiped his face which was dripping from the water from her hair. “Great,” he said, looking at his clothes as he slung the water off his hands.

  Valerie Heath quickly got the sheets around her and sat up against the headboard of the bed, gaping at them.

  “Do you understand that we’re police?” Graver repeated, standing at the foot of the bed and holding his shield out in front of him.

  “Yeah… yeah…” she stuttered. She looked at Neuman who was running his fingers through his rumbled hair.

  “You remember me?” Neuman wheezed.

  “Yeah…”

  “Do you have any idea why we’re here?” Graver asked, putting his shield back into his pocket.

  She shook her head.

  “I believe you do,” Graver said. He stared at her. “Speak to me,” he said, “so I’ll know you’re understanding me.”

  “I fuckin’ understand you,” she said, “you son of a bitch.” Her black hair was plastered to her forehead, and without her makeup her face was as featureless as a sheet of paper.

  “Good,” Graver said. “Now listen to me. We’re going to take you in for questioning.” He would explain later that he wasn’t exactly taking her in. “You’ve got yourself in a hell of a mess, Ms. Heath.” He put his gun away, made a swipe at his own hair with his fingers and sat down at the foot of the bed.

  “Listen,” he said, trying to sound calm and sane to her, trying not to sound like a policeman, “I’ll be honest with you. I don’t believe you fully understand what it is you’re involved in here.” He paused. “The people you’re working for have killed two police officers. Detectives.” He looked at her in the dim light of the lamp. All he could see was belligerence. “As of this moment, your life isn’t worth a dime either. I’ll explain why when we have more time. If we decided we didn’t want to talk to you after all, if we walked out of here right now and left you alone, you wouldn’t make it through the night Even if you got in that brand-new Corvette of yours and drove it like hell all night… you wouldn’t see the sunrise.” He held his eyes on her. “Believe me.”

  He didn’t see anything in her face.

  “We’re getting ready to close down the whole operation, Valerie,” he lied, “but we’re going to try to save as many lives as we can. We don’t want anybody else killed. We have reason to believe that they’re going to start killing some of you. They know they’re near the end of this, and they’re trying to cut their losses. Unless we have your help, the people you work for, the people at the top, are going to get away with it We don’t want something for nothing. We want to deal. We can save your life, sure. But if you agree to cooperate with us we’ll also do our best to keep you out of prison. After all, you’ve been used.” He paused. “There’s no need in you serving time for something you didn’t really understand. Especially if they all skip out on you.”

  This time he saw something working in her eyes. As she calmed down she began to think, and Graver had the feeling that thinking was going to do her a lot of good. Maybe.

  “Now listen,” he said, “we need to get out of here as soon as we can. We’ve got a boat out in the canal. Why don’t you get dressed. This is not a good place to be.”

  “Let me see that shield again,” she said.

  Graver took out his shield again and handed it to her. She took it and leaned over under the lamplight and looked at it very closely. She passed her fingers over the face of the shield. Then she handed it back to him. She looked at Neuman.

  “I knew that goddamned insurance story was phony,” she said.

  “I need a little more practice,” Neuman said.

  “No shit.” She relaxed a little.
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  “Why don’t you get dressed,” Graver said, standing.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said with exaggeration, looking at each of them.

  “One of us is going to have to watch you,” Graver said. “You know we can’t turn our backs on you. Choose whichever you want.”

  “Oh, give me a break, “she said, flinging aside the wet sheet as she crawled off the bed. “This jerk here has already had his hands all the hell over me. What am I gonna do, get modest all of a sudden?”

  She walked naked to her dresser, opened the drawers, and started looking for panties and a bra. She didn’t hurry, glancing at them a couple of times, letting them get a good look at her two-toned body as she seemed unable to immediately find what it was she was wanting.

  “Get several changes and put them in a bag,” Graver said, turning and walking out the bedroom door. He threw a look at Neuman who rolled his eyes and wiped his face one more time.

  Chapter 46

  By the time Valerie Heath had gotten dressed—for some reason she selected a wraparound skirt with an orange and brown pattern of African motifs and a sleeveless white blouse—and had put some clothes in a weekender bag, she and Neuman were on pretty good terms. The same elements in his personality that enabled him to work easily with the ever thorny Paula seemed also to appeal to Valerie Heath.

  While Neuman was charming her, Graver had picked up a small flight bag from another bedroom and had searched the house, gathering a considerable cache of false IDs and some paperwork and documents that he didn’t take the time to read. He just swept everything into the bag.

  Valerie was nervous at the idea of Neuman driving her Corvette into the city, but was finally convinced it was necessary. So as Neuman drove away from the front of her house, she and Graver stepped onto Ollie’s boat, a craft that did not much impress her.

  Graver avoided the issue of handcuffs until they got to Ollie’s place, thinking any scene she might make there would attract less attention than on her own patio and dock. But he hadn’t needed to worry. She accepted them, along with a waist chain, with a little obligatory grousing and willingly got into the passenger side of the front seat.

  On the way into town Graver prepared her for her unorthodox “custody.” He said that because of the deaths of the two police officers, a special undercover task force had been put together and that he was in charge of it He said that there were two factions inside the police department One faction wanted to throw the book at her because of her “role,” while the other faction—himself, Neuman, and others—wanted to give her a break in exchange for what information she could provide them. What they would like to do when this was all over was simply cut her loose in exchange for her cooperation. She wouldn’t need to call a lawyer because they weren’t going to charge her with anything if she agreed to go along with them. Otherwise she was going to risk spending the rest of her life in prison.

  Graver talked in a conversational way, explaining all of this to her as if she were being trained for a new job. He answered her questions, lying to her easily and readily, whatever it took to prep her to be ready to spill her guts once they started questioning her. He could tell by her questions what her fears were, and he played to those with the dexterity of a psychoanalyst Valerie Heath was not a brilliant person, which was part of the reason she had found herself in her present situation.

  By the time they got to the edge of the city and he told her he was going to have to blindfold her, she accepted the idea as aggravating but not necessarily un-police-like. Graver radioed Neuman that he was going to pull over for the blindfold, and the two cars exited onto an access road. Once the blindfold was in place, Graver did not talk to her again. The first time she asked a question, Graver only said “Shhhh” very softly, and not another word was spoken until he slowed to pull to the curb in front of his house. He was glad to see the lights on in the house and the garage door closed as he had instructed.

  He radioed Neuman behind him to go into the drive ahead of him and park the Corvette in whichever of the two garages Lara had not used for her car. Graver then immediately rolled down his window and turned his head to the outside as though he was talking to someone outside the car.

  “Signal the guys at the back that we’re coming around,” he said, and quickly rolled up the window, waited a moment, then pulled down the driveway to the back of the house, parking the department car out of sight from the street as Last had done two nights before. He cut the motor.

  “Okay, Valerie. Here we are,” he said. “We’re going to take you inside the house now.”

  Lara met them at the back door, stepping out of the way as she pulled it open. She had changed into a pair of jeans and a conversation-stopping tank top. Paula was standing in the entrance to the kitchen behind her.

  Just as they all got into the kitchen Graver’s pager vibrated at his waist He looked down and recognized Arnette’s number.

  “Wait right here,” he said, and walked out of the room leaving them standing there in silence. He went into the living room and called Arnette.

  “Okay, baby, your man’s on the move again,” she said. Graver looked at his watch: it was 10:30. He could hear voices coming over radios in the background.

  “You don’t know anything about where he’s going?”

  “Nothing. No calls came in or out of his place. He just got up and left. But it looks like he’s going through the same maneuvers as last time. The guy’s relentless.”

  “I’ve just picked up Heath,” Graver said.

  “She’s going to talk?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good. Milk her. Let me know if we can use any of it I’ll call you with news from this end.”

  Graver hung up the telephone and stood at his desk a moment A weighty disappointment settled on him again at Burtell’s betrayal. It had never been completely obliterated by the fast pace of the developing events, but sometimes it confronted him anew, and it struck him hard again as it had when he had first realized it He turned and walked back out into the hallway and down to the kitchen where everyone was standing just where he had left them.

  “Okay,” he said, taking Valerie Heath’s arm again, “we’re going upstairs.”

  He took her up, guiding her carefully, taking her around the landing to Natalie’s bedroom. Once inside, he turned on the light and let Neuman untie her blindfold. He didn’t remove her handcuffs. She blinked a few times and looked around.

  “You know Paula,” he said. Heath nodded, looking her over quickly with a sarcastic what-else-is-new expression. “And this is Lara,” he said. Heath nodded again, giving her the same eye-flicking appraisal.

  “What about the cuffs?” she asked, holding out her hands.

  “Not yet,” Graver said. He was curt, and didn’t offer any explanations. “Are you hungry?”

  She shook her head and sat down on the end of the bed. “Can I have a cigarette?”

  “Not in here,” Graver said.

  “Coffee? Can I get a cup of coffee then?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Paula, will you give me a hand?”

  Downstairs Graver went straight to the kitchen and started a pot of coffee while Paula dumped the overnight bag out on the kitchen table and began going through the documents. When the coffee was going, Graver sat down across from her. Paula had laid out six false Texas driver’s licenses, all with Heath’s picture on them—in a few she wore blond wigs—but with different names, birth dates, and identifiers, including licenses for Irene Whaley, who subscribed to magazines at Heath’s house, and Frances Rupp, who had bought the Corvette. There were bank account cards for each of the licenses, all at different banks, all of them containing money. All of the accounts together totaled nearly three hundred thousand dollars. “In-credible,” Paula said.

  Chapter 47

  “I met Don C. about three years ago,” she said, cradling the coffee in her cuffed hands as she sat at the foot of the bed with her legs crossed yoga-style. Her white blouse was unbutt
oned low enough to reveal the long cleavage of her weighted breasts. “Met him in a bar. I was coming off a bad marriage, a bad marriage, and I was depressed and broke. Don struck up a conversation with me, heard my story, and said he could use a kind of gofer girl to help him do his little stuff. That’s what he called it, his ‘little stuff.’ It didn’t take any convincing, that’s for damn sure. Shit, I jumped at it.”

  She shook her head, remembering. “Truth is, I would’ve worked for that guy for nothing.” She looked at Lara who was sitting in a chair across from her as if she thought Lara would understand. “Guy’s”—she nodded and lifted an eyebrow wryly—”a stud. A real one. Not some Happy Hour Yuppie, but a guy who’s got muscles and never went to a gym an hour in his life.” She shook her head. “Anyway,” she said, glancing around at Graver who was sitting at the head of the bed with a tape recorder, “all I did was, I went to parking garages and malls and places like that and took manila envelopes from people—it was usually women but sometimes guys—and gave them envelopes of cash in return. I knew it was cash. Don told me. And I knew it wasn’t drugs… I mean, flat manila envelopes? Besides, I opened the ones that weren’t sealed good and looked. Sometimes it was microfiche or computer printouts or just photocopies of documents.”

  “What kind of documents?” Neuman asked. He was sitting on the floor leaning back against the wail, his legs straight out on the carpeted floor. He was taking notes on a steno pad.