An Absence of Light

“Okay,” Westrate said. “Fair enough.” He laced the fingers of both hands together and clenched them until the knuckles turned white. “We got a break with those turds shooting each other in Kashmere Gardens. That was an incredible piece of luck. I want to hold on to that” He raised a forefinger and wagged it slowly. “Insiders are going to know that we’ve got to be investigating this. SOP. But what I want to avoid is the suspicion that there’s something more than routine shit going on here. I hope to hell-I pray-that you find out that Tisler was up to his nostrils in gambling debts, or that he was a closet queer, or that he was a pedophile and was diddling half the four-year-olds in Harris County. But the last thing I want to discover is that he was dicking around with the intelligence file. I want his sin to be personal, not professional.”

Westrate was on the edge of the chair now, his stomach and pugnacious, tight-lipped face thrust forward, on the attack.

“The thing is,” he said, “I don’t want to give the impression that we’re afraid that it might be professional. I don’t want anybody to see me go into your office, and I don’t want anybody to see you go into mine. From now on we communicate only by secure telephone. Or, we meet like this, face to face, somewhere we know we won’t be seen. I don’t want the staff, yours or mine, to see us putting our heads together. I don’t want any scuttlebutt I don’t want any leaks. That’s how the press gets on to something like this. Some little tight-butted secretary, some damn daydreaming file clerk, sees shit and reports it I don’t want the internal rumor mill to feed on this. And I’ve already made this clear to Katz, too.”

Graver imagined that Westrate had been all over Katz, badgering him mercilessly to do this, to avoid that He very definitely had worked up a lather over this. Graver couldn’t make up his mind whether Westrate’s paranoia was routine theatrics or whether he was hiding something that Graver should have been smart enough to pick up on. The truth was, if Westrate was trying to maneuver him because of one of his innumerable hidden agendas, there simply was no way Graver could see it coming. Not at this point, anyway.

Westrate stood. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “Listen, Graver, I want you all over this. Any doubts, any questions, anything doesn’t look right, doesn’t add up, you get to me quick.” He opened his eyes wide. “Understand?’’

“I think I do.” Graver said.

Westrate gave a snappy nod as if to say good, then we understand each other and that is that. He wheeled around and headed out of the living room like a wild boar, on to other business. In a few seconds he was at the front door, pulling it open. “Call me,” he said without looking around and walked out.

Graver closed the door behind him and waited in the darkened entry hall, looking at the broken glow from the porch light as it came in through the refractions of the beveled glass on the door. He waited until the headlights of Westrate’s car came on and then watched as they moved slowly and crookedly away from the curb and disappeared obliquely skyward down the street.

Chapter 7

“I don’t much like the idea of you watching,” she said, looking out the car window down the little lane of trees which still glistened from the passing rain. The lane, too, was glittery from the shower earlier in the evening and an occasional wisp of steam broke loose from the pavement and hovered momentarily under the glow of the lamps before it rose slowly and joined the darkness.

“I want to see this,” Kalatis said. “Don’t think about me. Just do what you do.”

The woman was in her early forties with roan hair which she wore pulled back loosely and gathered behind her head. She was well built, having a figure that was not lean but which she kept much younger than its years by a lot of sweat and a grim determination to do battle without quarter against gravity and failing elasticity. Determination had marked her life. Her will was lapideous. Her ability to concentrate was singular. Her nerve was inflexible.