An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  There was a circle drive that exited on the other side of the lot, and where the front sidewalk met the drive a freestanding porte cochere of trellises covered with grapevines sheltered a black Alfa Romeo convertible. Neuman pulled up behind the Alfa and cut the motor. The two of them got out of the car and walked up to the porch and into the shade to the front door. The house was open to the breeze and you could see through to the porch in back. The daylight from the bright bay reflected dully off the burnished wooden floor in a long, luminous smear. Graver smelled gardenias on the breeze.

  Neuman rang the doorbell. Nothing happened at first, no sound in the house. He rang it again, and a woman’s voice from somewhere inside said, “I’m coming,” politeness tinged with impatience. They didn’t hear her walking on the floor because, as they immediately observed, she was barefooted. She was suddenly standing on the other side of the screen door, adjusting the drape of a white cotton shift she had just put on. The smear of light from the wooden floor behind her went right through the thin material to reveal to them the space between her legs all the way to her crotch. The cotton shift was all she was wearing. She tucked some dull brown hair behind an ear, and cocked her head up at Neuman, squinting a little at him.

  “Yeah?”

  “Hi,” Neuman said. “Is Eddie in?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Joe… Dearden.”

  “Jay Deer-den… ?” She said it to herself like it was the most ridiculous name she’d ever heard.

  “Yeah, Jay,” Neuman said.

  “Well…” she said, dropping her eyes, seemingly truly puzzled as to how to answer his question. Not a particularly intelligent-looking woman, she had sharp features and a weathered face with an abundance of sun-induced freckles. It was a common feature along the Gulf Coast. She did, however, possess a shapely figure.

  “He was expecting me,” Neuman said.

  “He was?” she squinted up at him again. She turned and looked into the darkness of the house. Neuman reached out and quickly but softly tried the screen door. It was open. She turned back to him. “Well, shit, he’s not here,” she said.

  “Who is it?” a man said from inside, his voice approaching.

  “It’s for Eddie… Jay Deer-den?” she said, emphasizing again the apparent peculiarity of the name to her.

  Like her, the man was suddenly in front of them, frowning into the light of the porch, standing partially behind the girl and wearing only a pair of jogging shorts with the word “Athletic” on the front of the right leg.

  Neuman immediately recognized him.

  This was the best they could hope for.

  “Hey, Rick,” Neuman said in a long-time-no-see tone of voice, using his name so Graver would know they were talking to Richard Ledet. Then he jerked open the screen door.

  Ledet hit the girl in the small of her back with both open hands, popping her head back and shoving her into Neuman who just as violently flung her aside as he lunged at Ledet. But the pilot’s bare feet had better traction on the wood floor, and he was three steps ahead of Neuman on a straight course through the kitchen toward the back porch to the bay. Luckily the screen door that led out of the kitchen to the porch was latched, and when Ledet hit it with his arms outstretched to shove it open ahead of him, his arms went through the screen. The cross brace of wood midway down the door caught him in the stomach, and the momentum of his weight took him crashing through it, but slowed him enough for Neuman to tackle him. The two men hit the floor of the porch with a whump and loud grunts.

  Graver was on top of Ledet almost as soon as he hit the floor, jamming the muzzle of his Sig-Sauer against Ledet’s temple so that the pain of it alone would keep him there even without the threat of what it could do to him if Graver pulled the trigger.

  Ledet froze.

  Neuman was up instantly, running back into the main room where he found the girl just getting up off the floor. She started to scream, and he clamped his hand over her mouth.

  Suddenly everything stopped.

  “Anybody else here?” Graver snapped at Ledet.

  The pilot hesitated and then said, “No.”

  Graver shoved the muzzle of the Sig-Sauer tighter against Ledet’s temple.

  “Swear to God,” Ledet said.

  “Put your hands behind your back.” Graver kept his knee in the small of Ledet’s bare back and cuffed his hands. Then he got up. “Okay, get up,” he said, but he didn’t help the pilot who took a moment to get to his knees, an awkward maneuver with his hands bound behind his back. When he was up, they walked back into the main room.

  “If you scream when I take my hand down, I’ll knock you out,” Neuman told the girl. She nodded, and he cuffed her hands behind her as well and sat her on the sofa.

  “He says there’s no one else here,” Graver said.

  There was a sturdy rattan table and matching chairs to one side of the main room. A deck of cards was sitting on the table with a couple of empty beer bottles. Graver pulled out one of the chairs, turned it around, and told Ledet to sit down. Using another pair of handcuffs, Graver fastened one of Ledet’s ankles to the leg of the rattan table. It would at least keep him from bolting.

  “Watch them,” he said, and walked through the house, three bedrooms, three baths, kitchen, dining room, wide hallways, all the windows opened to the bay breeze. When he got back to the main room everyone was in the same position as he had left them.

  Graver pulled out another chair from the table where Ledet was sitting and sat down a few feet from him. The pilot was about Graver’s height, well built, no fat, and good muscle definition. He had black hair, a couple of days’ growth of beard, a straight narrow nose, and a suntan over an already swarthy complexion. He wore a very neat but full mustache. Graver studied him a minute. Ledet looked at him unflinchingly, but without belligerence. He was trying to figure it out.

  “Where’s Eddie?” Graver asked.

  “What’s the deal here?” Ledet ventured. “Who are you guys?”

  “The deal is we want to talk to Eddie,” Graver said. He crossed his legs and crossed his forearms in his lap as he leaned forward slightly, the Sig-Sauer still in his hand.

  “He’s on a trip.”

  “Where?”

  “Mexico, a charter job.”

  “What’s he flying?”

  “His little twin Beech.”

  “You know that for sure.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Well, we drove by the hangar,” Graver said. “The Beechcraft’s still there.”

  Ledet swallowed. “Well, that’s what he told me he was taking.”

  “Did he tell you where he was going?”

  “You mean where in Mexico? No, just a charter he said.”

  “When will he get back?”

  Ledet swallowed again. “He was supposed to be back today.”

  “Supposed to be?”

  “Yeah. I haven’t heard from him.”

  “We checked with the Gulf Airport office. The Beechcraft hasn’t been flown in three days.”

  Ledet shrugged quizzically.

  Graver looked at the girl. “Is this his girl you were in bed with?”

  Ledet frowned. “Eddie’s? Hell no.”

  “Who is she?” Graver asked, as if the girl weren’t there.

  “What, you mean her name?”

  “That would be good to know, yeah.”

  “Alice.”

  “Just Alice?”

  Ledet cut his eyes at her. “Uh… Alice…”

  “Gifford,” the girl said.

  “Oh, yeah,” Ledet said, remembering. “We just met last night… I didn’t remember…”

  Graver nodded. He thought a moment “When did you leave Atlanta?”

  Ledet’s face flickered with a newfound suspicion as he realized that this man knew where he lived.

  “Yesterday,” Ledet said, studying Graver warily.

  Graver had seen that look before, and it was not the expression he had hoped
to see.

  “This is actually very simple and straightforward,” Graver said, hoping to turn Ledet’s suspicions in another direction. “My code lines to Panos Kalatis are dead. I don’t know why they’re dead, but they are. I’m trying to get in touch with him. It’s a matter of extreme importance to me. To both of us. I want to use your code line to contact him.”

  Ledet’s mouth went slack, and he swallowed again as his demeanor changed to that of a man sitting in the hot seat That was more in keeping with the reaction Graver had hoped for. But Ledet didn’t respond. He seemed at a loss for words, suddenly seeing himself surrounded by a minefield. Considering the work Ledet had been doing for the last decade, Graver assumed that he understood some of the unspoken rules of the game. In the last few moments it would have occurred to him that these two men had barged in without any regard for hiding their faces. That had professional implications. They might be police—the suspicion of which Graver wanted to dispel for the moment—or if they were at the other end of the spectrum it could be that they didn’t care if Ledet and Alice saw their faces because when they left they would not leave behind any witnesses. This latter possibility was the one clearly on Ledet’s mind at the moment.

  But he was having a hard time formulating a response. Normally he would have done his “Kalatis who” routine, but if this guy had a telephone code… or even knew that the telephone codes existed, then that ploy was not likely to work. He would have to resort to something else.

  “Then you’re out of luck,” Ledet said, “Way out of luck.”

  “Oh?”

  Ledet nodded. “Eddie’s the only one who has it That’s always been the way we’ve done it Just Eddie.”

  “What about when you’re home?”

  Ledet shook his head. “If there’s work, Eddie calls me. I never talk to the guy. Kalatis, I mean. It’s Eddie.”

  “He calls you, Eddie does?”

  “That’s right.”

  “If he calls you, then you come and you do the job?”

  “That’s right That’s how it works.”

  “Then you must be expecting some work,” Graver said, motioning to Ledet with the Sig-Sauer. “Here you are.”

  Ledet stared at Graver and reluctantly nodded.

  “And what is it this time?”

  Ledet shook his head. “I don’t know. Eddie calls me, says, Rick, we got work, and I fly over here. I don’t know what the work is until I get here and he tells me.”

  “But you don’t know now.”

  “No, I don’t, because I haven’t seen Eddie.”

  “He wasn’t here when you got in yesterday.”

  “Right, he wasn’t.”

  This Graver did not believe. “But you do know that he’s on a charter to Mexico.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “But you were wrong about him using the Beech-craft.”

  “Well, yeah, I guess so. I mean, I only know what Eddie tells me. If he tells me the Beechcraft, then I think the Beechcraft What can I say? I can’t do anything about it if he changes his mind or… the plans change.”

  Graver nodded, thinking. He unfolded his arms and his legs and stood, still nodding a little. Turning away he walked along the smear of light, through the doors into the kitchen, and out the shattered screen door to the veranda. He looked out across the bay, out to where the horizon grew hazy, and the water and the sky did not meet in a clean, sharp demarcation but formed a gray seamless distance. From the porch here, he could hear the seagulls. Here, the breeze coming off the water was much warmer, even hot, not yet having the advantage of coming through the shady coils of the house. And here, too, instead of the fragrance of gardenias there was the murky smell of Gulf brine. He turned around and went back through the kitchen into the main room.

  He stopped beside the chair where he had been sitting and looked at Ledet and then at Neuman and Alice. Alice was petrified.

  “Put something in her mouth,” Graver instructed, and Neuman reached down and picked up the hem of Alice’s shift and stuffed it into her mouth. This bared her legs and her lap, which was punctuated by the darker hair of the upper part of her pubic triangle.

  Graver turned back to Ledet.

  “We’ve all got choices here… except her,” Graver said. “We’re going to use her. Whatever happens to her is up to you and me.” He waited a moment Silence. This was all spur-of-the-moment ad-lib, and he suddenly had the feeling he had just made a terrible tactical error. “I know you’ve flown Colin Faeber to Kalatis’s place a number of times. I need to go there.”

  Ledet stared up at Graver. He was scared, Graver could tell that, but Graver knew, too, that men who were afraid could also be very gutsy. Ledet was the kind of man who would call a bluff like this. After all, Graver had just handed him a nothing-to-lose deal. If Ledet was wrong it was the girl who would lose her life, not him. He could always talk, after he saw how serious they were.

  “I need to know how to get to Kalatis’s place,” Graver said.

  Ledet didn’t say anything. He just sat there. At that moment Graver knew he had screwed up. If he hadn’t been willing to pistol-whip one of them or both of them, then he should never have pretended he wasn’t a cop. If he had been from Ledet’s world, he would have already started with Ledet, and Ledet was now realizing that He knew the girl was not going to get shot Graver was furious at himself. He had pulled a rookie’s stunt, and it had cost him the small advantage that he had had.

  Ledet was almost grinning at him now. He knew he was dealing with a law enforcement officer of some kind. Graver knew some men who wouldn’t have hesitated to beat that smirk off Ledet’s face, to pound a little doubt into him, but Graver had never operated that way. It just wasn’t in him.

  The girl was crying, her body shaking with sobs, her mouth stuffed with her own dress, her eyebrows contorted, anguished, tears streaming down her face. Graver felt like a heel. The girl was the only one who had suffered here, and he hated himself for standing her up in front of a bogus firing squad. It had been an unnecessary cruelty, and he should have known better than to have subjected her to it.

  Ledet looked over at her, and then looked back to Graver. He definitely knew that Graver was a cop. But Alice didn’t Between sobs she was trying to talk, yelling at the level of a high hum, a strident, muffled pleading.

  Graver looked at her, and nodded for Neuman to remove the gag.

  “I know, I know,” she blurted, coughing, mucous mixed with tears stringing from her nose. “Don’t kill me, God, no, I know, I know. I…” she gasped for breath and coughed.

  Graver nodded for Neuman to remove her handcuffs, and then he looked at Ledet who was now watching Alice with a concerned frown.

  Going into the nearest bedroom, Graver returned with a box of tissues which he gave to Alice who grabbed at them like a drowning woman. She blew her nose and wiped her face, blew her nose again, trying to get the best of her hysteria so she could prove that she was useful and didn’t deserve to be killed.

  “What is it?” Graver asked. “You know what?”

  Alice wiped tear-logged strands of hair out of her face and coughed some more.

  “I know about flying,” she said, finally finding her voice. “I used to date a pilot…” she stopped in mid idea and looked at Ledet who was eagerly waiting to see what she was up to. “You prick,” she shrieked and spat at him, a mouthful that hit him squarely in the middle of his throat and slobbered down onto his bare chest.

  “Hold it,” Neuman said from behind her, reaching out and grabbing her shoulders as he forced her back down on the sofa.

  Alice was glaring at Ledet so fiercely Graver believed she would have shot him if she could have gotten her hands on his gun. As far as she was concerned she had just watched Ledet demonstrate that he was willing to give her up to be shot rather than tell this man what he wanted to know. Maybe this was going to work to Graver’s advantage after all.

  “What is it?” Graver asked. “You’d better tell me what y
ou know.”

  “Alice! You stupid bitch,” Ledet croaked.

  “I know where his goddamned navigational maps are, by God,” she announced triumphantly. “You want to know where the son of a bitch flies, look on his maps. I found them this morning while he was sleeping.” She looked at Ledet “I’ve been around the block a few times, mister.” She was furious. “When you went to get that coke last night I followed you into that other guy’s room. You was so whiskey-whipped you didn’t know shit from Shinola. I just stood in the door naked as a jaybird and watched you. Took you forever. Saw you take out the coke, a couple of guns”—she cut her eyes at Graver then—”I saw it all. Ammo”—eyes back to Ledet—”porno tapes.”

  “These guys are goddamn cops,” Ledet yelled. “Nobody was going to shoot you, dammit! Stupid bitch! Dammit!”

  She frowned at Graver, then at Ledet, then back at Graver. “That right?”

  “Sort of,” Graver said. He came over and stood squarely in front of her. “Let me tell you something. If what you say is true, this guy is going to prison, and he won’t be coming out again until he’s old enough to collect his social security—if ever. If you take sides with him, you’ll go down with him.”

  “What do you mean, go down with him? All I did was snort some of this asshole’s coke and screw him. What do you mean ‘go down with him’?”

  “If you know about ongoing criminal activities and conceal it, you’re an accessory,” Graver said, not putting too fine a point on it.

  She looked at Ledet. “I knew you were an asshole the second you walked into that bar, mister. I couldn’t of had a better day in my life than the one I’d of had if I’d just walked out of that bar right then.”

  Wiping her nose one more time, she got up from the sofa, gave a tug to the hem of her shift and walked past Ledet, throwing a look at him that told him she was going to burn his ass.