An Absence of Light (2 page)

“Yes,” Kalatis said. “I can imagine how he must feel.”

Down on the docks a man laughed softly, and feet shifted on the planks. Kalatis had spent many nights listening to waiting men talk. They smoked; they talked softly about everything from sex to death; they waited for signals; they waited for something to make their adrenaline squirt and shock them to life. When Kalatis was young he was one of those men, but now he was the one they waited for. Men had waited in the darkness for him all over the world, and he had learned that the feel of night was different everywhere, different in Trieste than in Prague, different in Lima than in Lisbon, different in New Orleans than Milan. But the darkness, well, the darkness was always the same.

“Then is there something specific you think I should do?” Faeber asked.

“No.” Kalatis dug his toes into the moist grass. “I only recommend that you second-guess yourself every time your heart beats. You know what must happen and what must not happen.” There was a pause, but Faeber said nothing. “Okay,” Kalatis said.

He whistled once sharply, and the murmuring voices stopped. Suddenly there was the sound of hurried footsteps on the pier, something bumped against the metal pontoons of the plane, and then the engine coughed and caught.

“They will take you back to Clear Lake and then drive you into the city.”

Faeber seemed suddenly uncertain, hesitant to leave as though he thought he had missed something, some instruction, something more specific. Kalatis only looked at him in silence knowing that with the pale light coming from Kalatis’s back Faeber could see little more of his features than his silhouette.

After an awkward moment, Faeber turned away and headed down the slope to the pier. Kalatis watched him and then when the darkness had covered him he listened to his choppy footsteps descending the stairs, his stride changing as he got to the dock and headed toward the plane.

Kalatis sucked his lungs full of the smell of the Gulf of Mexico and shrugged his shoulders forward to stretch his back muscles. He waited there on the sloping lawn while the moorings were untied from the plane and its engines slowly revved and whipped the water as it pulled away from the dock. Moving out into the Gulf, it picked up speed and then the pilot bore down on the throttle and the engines whined and beat the night air and in a moment it was airborne, climbing into the spangled black, its receding lights eventually becoming indistinguishable from the stars. He lost sight of it and even lost the sound of it as the surf reclaimed its rhythm on the night.

He turned around and looked toward the house. Jael was lying on her stomach in the hammock, and he could see it swinging, swinging. The cotton webbing of the hammock was white, and he imagined her dark skin against it and the way it protruded softly through the weave of the pattern in cocoa triangles.

From his car on the nearly deserted expressway, Marcus Graver watched the late June rain pass over the western margins of the city as the fading evening stained to a deeper green the dense canopy of water oaks and loblolly pines and magnolias that stretched to the horizon. A thin gleam of glaucous light, all that remained of the day, appeared briefly between the drifting, bruised clouds and the darkening trees, as if an unconscious eye had opened slightly, one last time.

Graver switched off the wipers and watched the eye close through the last spatters of the departing storm that stippled the windshield. Though he was agitated, impatient, only those who knew him well would have been able to tell. He was driving fast on the glistening, black ribbon that banked gently southward, the tires of his car sucking up rain from the pavement and spewing it out behind in a white hissing plume. The city’s lights had begun to coruscate against the Sunday dusk.

Graver would not have chosen Arthur Tisler if he had been asked to imagine this. Of all the men and women who worked under him, Tisler seemed the least remarkable, the least likely to have “things happen” to him. Arthur Tisler was the quintessential invisible man, and invisible men lived their lives without creating eddies of air around themselves; they died without incident, and in no time at all people found themselves saying, Arthur Tisler, my God, I haven’t thought of him in years.

Uninteresting was not a word inherently descriptive of low-key personalities, but, as Graver thought about it, in Tisler’s case this pale, lighter-than-air adjective was singularly appropriate. In his middle thirties, Tisler was of middle height and middle weight His hair, light brown, straight, baby-fine, was prematurely thinning in a little fuzzy swirl on the back of his head. He wore glasses, squarish metal frames of pewter color with a dark brown plastic trim on the upper half. He hadn’t much of a beard, tiny eyelashes, modest eyebrows that almost apologized for not making more of an impression, and a smallish nose that came rather to a point. He possessed, in fact, a forgettable face. Not too far in the future Graver would have to look at a picture of him to remember what he looked like.

Or, maybe not. Maybe after what had happened tonight, Graver would never be able to forget him.

He drifted to the right-hand lane, slowed, and took the Harwin exit down off the expressway. He lifted his chin, to stretch his neck a little underneath the knotted tie as he made a mental note to move over the collar button. It would be the second one he had done in a week, confirming in a practical way what the bathroom scales had been indicating quantitatively for several months now. Which was fine with him. He always had thought he was too thin anyway. He was the only middle-aged man he knew who never gave a damn about what he ate.

Harwin was a long street It ran east and west from the Southwest Freeway into Sharpstown, through good and not-so-good parts of the city depending on how long you stayed with it. To Graver’s right the streets grew sparse as he crossed over Brays Bayou, and vacant lots gave way to empty fields, black stretches of unlighted land. The tracks of the Southern Pacific Railroad angled in from the north as he approached the overpass of the Sam Houston Tollway, and then they turned parallel to Harwin as the lights of Andrau Airpark appeared in the near distance.

He turned right onto Willcrest, slowed immediately, crossed the railroad tracks, and then rolled down his window and began peering out into the darkness to his left, out across the tracts of urban emptiness toward the isolated end of the airstrip. The odors of wet grass and weeds washed into the car. He was surprised that he couldn’t immediately see the lights of the patrol cars. The field appeared flat. He shifted his attention to the edge of the pavement. Pio Tordella had given him precise directions. The homicide detective told him he should begin looking for a little dirt road just after he crossed the railroad tracks. The road was unmarked, just ruts actually, going into the weeds and high grass.

Since his was the only car on the long stretch of street, he crossed over to the oncoming lane and drove beside the caliche shoulder so the headlights could more easily pick up any break in the smooth margin of grass. Immediately they did.

He turned off and quickly caught sight of the cherry and sapphire blips of a patrol car a hundred yards or so out into the emptiness, level with and almost obscured by the tops of the tall grass. Apparently it had not rained enough to make the ruts impassable. Leaning forward over the steering wheel, he followed them as well as he could, listening to the rasping of the high weeds as they bent and swept against the undercarriage of the car.

The ruts fell slightly into a shallow, saucer-like depression, and then silhouettes of three or four cars popped up against the backdrop of the city lights far beyond the airfield. As he neared the cars, his headlights picked up bits of debris, ragged strips of plastic bags or wrappers caught in the weeds, a rusting chunk of something resembling a car fender, a glint of glass in the ruts, a sun-bleached crate, a flap of tin wedged into the dirt and weeds. The depression apparently was used as an illicit dumping ground, a catchall for the detritus that urban dwellers sloughed off continually like dead parts of themselves.

Graver’s car rocked gently in the ruts as he approached the scene and pulled up beside the nearest patrol car. There were only two of them in addition to the detectives’ unmarked car, a police crime scene van, and the coroner’s van. And of course there was the other car, which had to be Arthur Tisler’s, a small-model Chevrolet several years old, the driver’s side door standing open. The car was of an unidentifiable dark color, blue perhaps, or green, from which the sun had leached its richer pigment leaving a powdery, scaly finish. Though it was the center of attention, it was peculiarly inconspicuous, a black hole, swallowing light.

As he cut his headlights and got out of the car, two uniformed officers emerged from behind Tisler’s car un-spooling a yellow crime scene ribbon in a generous parameter. Pio Tordella, stocky and dark-haired, waded toward him through the tall, wet grass that was beginning to be tramped down around Tisler’s car. He walked in front of the lights of one of the patrol cars and came over to Graver.

“Captain,” Tordella said, approaching Graver’s car as Graver closed the door.

They shook hands, and in that first moment Graver observed Tordella’s soft eyes assessing him before they turned aside. Graver had spent six years in Homicide shortly after he came out of uniform, but for all of the fourteen years since then he had been in the Criminal Intelligence Division. Most of his career had been in intelligence work, chiefly as an analyst and, in the last four years, as the captain of the Division. He hadn’t been to a crime scene in nearly five years.

But that wasn’t what put the uneasy look in Tordella’s expression. Rather, that had to do with Graver’s work. Criminal Intelligence was a controversial division. It was sometimes disdained, sometimes resented, sometimes feared, but invariably it was regarded with a degree of deference. Graver had tried to develop a thick skin against these attitudes. He understood them and tolerated them. People who were known to collect secrets for a living could not expect to be treated with warm cordiality. Graver knew that the look of concern in the detective’s face reflected his understanding of what fate had set in his path. The death of one of the secret keepers was a death of import, in fact, it was unprecedented, and Tordella did not know what to expect. It was not a case he would have chosen to be assigned to if he had had the opportunity to make a choice.

“It’s a mess, Captain,” Tordella warned him tentatively. His voice was soft and modulated, his pronunciation precise. He had a thick mustache that threatened to become unruly, and he had a habit of nibbling at one corner of it with his lower teeth.

Graver looked around at the collection of glistening cars, their shiny surfaces beaded from the passing rain. The metally smell of hot car engines mixed with the odor of damp weeds. The headlights of the patrol cars, the angle of the vehicles, including his own, reminded him of a study in visual perspectives, all the elements in the composition situated to draw the viewer’s attention to the focal point of the canvas: the car with the open door, one of Tisler’s legs protruding stiffly across the sill.

“He had his ID with him?” Graver asked.

“Yeah,” Tordella said. “In his inside coat pocket.” He reached into his own coat and pulled out a plastic bag, with Tisler’s wallet and shield in it. The inside of the bag was smeared with blood.

Graver felt a momentary optimism. Then maybe it
was
suicide.

“By the way, you had some good luck,” Tordella said.

Graver pulled his eyes away from the bag and looked at the stubby detective. “What.”

“I wasn’t first out,” Tordella said. “Not ten minutes before this call came in there was a shoot-out at a convenience store out in Kashmere Gardens. The clerk at the store shot a couple of guys who tried to rob him. Killed one on the spot. Wounded the other one who then killed the clerk and ran off, shooting every which way and wounding a woman outside. Right now he’s holed up in a garage apartment about a block from the store—with a hostage. Caused a lot of radio action.
Everybody
in the pressroom headed out there, and by now I imagine all their cruise cars are either there or headed there.”

Somebody swore sharply with a hiss, and Graver and Tordella looked over to Tisler’s car where a man in street clothes, maybe the coroner’s investigator, was walking away from the opened car door, stamping his foot and wiping it on the grass. He swore again.

“Anyway,” Tordella said, turning back to Graver, “Then this came in. The kid over there who called it in” —he looked in the direction of one of the young uniformed officers—”thought he was a detective and said over the radio that he had a ‘suicide.’ If anybody was listening, I imagine it was a pretty dull prospect compared to the Kashmere show. I don’t think anybody in the media even knows we’re out here.”

“Yeah,” Graver said, “that’s a break, a good break.” He looked toward Tisler’s car again.

“He was an investigator, wasn’t he?” Tordella asked.

“Yeah.”

“Was he working tonight?”

“Jesus, I wish I knew,” Graver said.

Tordella nodded. His large, dark eyes were heavy and, despite his anxiety, lent an air of calm to his demeanor. “What squad?”

“Organized Crime.” Graver knew how that must have sounded, replete with implication.

Tordella nodded again, meditatively. “IAD guys are on their way out,” he said.

Internal Affairs automatically made every officer-related shooting. This was going to give Jack Westrate a heart attack.

“And Captain Katz is on the way too,” Tordella added. He was referring to Herb Katz, Graver’s counterpart in Homicide. “Lieutenant had already gone out to Kashmere Gardens,” Tordella explained.

That was irrelevant, Katz would have been called anyway. And Katz probably already had called Jack Westrate who, as assistant chief in charge of Investigative Services, was Graver’s and Katz’s superior. But Westrate wouldn’t be appearing in the dark, weedy field. His domain of concern was the gassy, background realm of ramifications and politics, not events. He would be frantic about this, of course, he even would be in a state of panic, but for all the wrong reasons.