An Absence of Light

Kalatis followed them with his eyes as they made their way across the lot and started up the narrow lane toward the condo. “The question is,” he said, still watching the women, “how is this going to affect us?”

“The question is, did he leave anything behind?” Faeber said.

Kalatis looked into the back seat, the dark circles around his eyes visible even in the twilight.

“If he left anything in that area it would have to be personal,” Burtell said. “His own little record-keeping operation or something. There’s nothing like that in CID. He didn’t have any kind of setup like that at the office.”

“How can you be sure of that?” Faeber asked.

“It’s my goddamned business to be sure of it,” Burtell said evenly. He hated having to answer Faeber. Faeber was important to Kalatis, no doubt about it. His data banks, his sleazy nature, his venality were all useful tools to Kalatis, but the man seemed to enjoy a closeness to the Greek that his talents did not warrant. Burtell was frustrated that he had not gotten beyond the business of these investigations. He had thought that by now he would have, but for some reason Kalatis had closed the door. Perhaps he had sensed a greater ambition in Burtell than he saw in either Besom or Tisler; perhaps he was wary of a more clever man.

No one said anything for a moment Kalatis was turning the cigar in his mouth, keeping the butt of it damp, tasting the tobacco. With the women out of the picture there was nothing to distract their attention from the cicadas throbbing in the thickets of the park, the late June heat intense enough to keep them singing hours into the night.

“I wouldn’t want to lose everything we’ve gained so far,” Kalatis observed.

Burtell was attentive to every nuance in Kalatis’s voice. His tone was not threatening, but it might have carried a thin imputation, or maybe it was simply an old-fashioned portent of imagined consequences, the kind of thing you perceived between the lines when the juices in your glands squirted into action and turned you cold even before you understood why. In this business, there was an entire language, an invisible lexicon that was only apprehensible in just that way, with your juices, elliptical communications conveyed solely in those absent spaces between the apparent You understood because there was a portion of a primitive instinct left within you that you could not define or explain, except that it had to do with survival.

“All this preparation, this significant capital investment,” Kalatis went on.

Burtell had to reassure him. “Look, Marcus Graver is writing a report that will close this down. Everybody wants this over, and everybody wants it clearly to appear to be over.”

Kalatis had been staring through the windshield at the park where the surrounding trees were quickly turning from deep blue-greens to sooty black, their towering presence darker than the darkening sky. He turned and looked into the back seat again.

“What about Graver? He’s good enough to get onto this, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, he’s good enough,” Burtell said matter-of-factly. But he suspected Kalatis already knew that.

“Then we’ve got to worry about him.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so.”

“He’s in a very awkward situation, Panos,” Burtell said wearily. “I think he’ll follow Homicide’s lead. He’ll almost have to. If he insists on pursuing suspicions of conspiracy, he’s going to run into resistance from Westrate. Westrate’s not going to want to hear any of that kind of talk. No matter how suspicious Graver may be-and I don’t know that he is, this is just for the sake of your argument-regardless of any suspicions he may have, he’s the kind of guy who’s very good at making reality checks on himself. Homicide says suicide. IAD says suicide. He has no tangible evidence that Tisler was doing anything out of the ordinary. No matter what his suspicions, he’s going to let it go. He’s an empiricist.”

Kalatis emitted a coil of cigar smoke, still looking over the back of the seat “An ‘empiricist,’ uh-huh,” he said with pointed boredom.

Burtell doubted the Greek knew what that meant To hell with him, let him wonder.

“You have confidence that Tisler didn’t have some kind of mental meltdown and leave something behind?” Faeber challenged again. “I mean, the man shot himself, for God’s sake!”

“Colin, you son of a bitch,” Burtell snapped. “The poor bastard told me what you did.” Faeber quickly looked at Kalatis, who turned away, undoubtedly disgusted with Faeber’s clumsy double take. “You wanted to ‘guarantee’ his loyalty? How goddamned bumbling can you be?”

“We had to do that,” Kalatis interjected. He pulled at the knot of his tie, twisting his neck this way and that and unbuttoned his shirt collar, opening it wide. The heat seemed to have grown more oppressive with the fading light. Burtell had pulled off his suit coat a long time ago and laid it in the seat beside him. Faeber hadn’t loosened anything or removed anything.