An Absence of Light

Graver hit the fast forward again and went to the end with Alice gasping and squealing at the skittering acrobatics of her fellow tavern habitue. The next tape was more of the same, this time including Ledet and two women whom Alice, with visible disappointment, did not seem to know. The last tape was what Graver had thought he might find. This one included Ledet, and Redden again-and two more girls. But this time they were little girls, clearly underage, just on the borderline of puberty.

Alice gasped again, but then clapped her hands over her opened mouth in a gesture of shock and, after a few minutes, with loathing on her face, she turned away. Graver turned off the tape.

As if on cue, the telephone rang. It was the report from the ATF. All the guns were from a shipment stolen from a South Florida gun shop nearly two years earlier.

Graver hung up the telephone and walked around the bed and sat down on the edge of it facing Ledet on the floor. He stared at him a moment.

“If it was up to me,” he said, “I’d take you out back on the beach and shoot you in the head. I’ve never shot a man, but I don’t think-in this instance-it would bother me. Not more than a few minutes, anyway.” He paused. “But the truth of the matter is what ultimately happens to you isn’t going to be up to me. There will be a prosecutor, a judge, and a defense lawyer. You’ll get a lawyer who will do everything in his power to mitigate the circumstances here, the coke, the stolen guns, the little girls, but he won’t be able to do you any good if this is all he’s got to work with.”

Graver looked over at the stack of guns, at the pile of tapes, taking his time to think about it.

“I wish I didn’t need your help,” Graver went on, “but I do. And if you help us, you’ll also be helping yourself, though I regret this. Your lawyer will take what you do for us and milk it for all it’s worth. I personally don’t think you ought to benefit a scintilla-you know what a scintilla is, it’s about as little as your mind can imagine-I don’t think you should benefit even that much for helping us. I think you ought to be forced to do it by law. I think you ought to get the needle if you don’t help us, maybe life if you do. But your lawyer will do a lot better than that… unfortunately.”

Alice was listening to this with her mouth dropped open slightly, as if she couldn’t believe this pretty sober thing she had gotten herself into when she agreed to this one-night stand.

Graver stood up from the bed and walked around and got the maps and came back and stood in front of Ledet.

“You want to try to make it a little easier on your lawyer?”

According to Rick Ledet, Eddie Redden was one of three principal pilots for Panos Kalatis. Redden kept a pager with him at all times and was on call twenty-four hours a day. His instructions from Kalatis were delivered to him in a variety of ways, sometimes by telephone, sometimes by personal messenger, sometimes at the conclusion of one of his flights. Ledet himself went along as copilot or flunky assistant, whatever was needed.

“What are the reasons for the flights?” Graver asked. They were sitting in the large main room again, at the rattan table, the flight maps spread out in front of them. Neuman was taking notes and Alice was in the back bedroom. Graver decided she had heard just about all she needed to hear of what was happening, so he asked her to stay in the bedroom while they finished talking. Now that she knew they were police, she was compliant and-after they removed the telephone and told her she could watch television-relatively content to wait it out and see what happened next. After all, this little ordeal was going to make good tavern talk when it was all over.

“Just about everything and anything,” Ledet said. He was smoking, raising both cuffed hands every time he wanted a puff on his cigarette. “But about eighteen months ago Kalatis kind of reorganized the pilots and put me and Eddie exclusively on runs with people and money. That’s our main cargo. We take out a lot of cash. A lot of cash.”

“From his drug operation?”

“That’s what Eddie says some of it is. And some of it’s from other kinds of business. Kalatis and Faeber sold information of some sort.”

“How much money, how often?”

“I do a money haul with them about once a month. How much? Shit, Eddie said millions, and I guess it must be. They load these reinforced cardboard storage boxes into the plane, you know, the kind with handles cut into the ends, and a top that fits down over it I saw inside one of them one time, one of the guards let me look, and the bills were stacked in there nice and neat, banded and labeled. It’d already been counted, and they knew just exactly how much was in each box. Millions, like Eddie said. We have thirty or forty of these things stacked in the cabin. A box of cash is heavy, quite a load.”

“So they take money out of the country about once a month…”