An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  Graver nodded, and got up. “Thanks, Arnette.”

  “What are you coming up with on your end?”

  “We got some leads last night, some names. Today we’ll start running them down.”

  “Look, when it begins to open up let us help,” she said, putting the photographs back into the envelope. “We’ll plug in the names on this end too.” She stood. “It’s too soon to get down about it, baby. You could be in for a long haul on this one. Get used to it.”

  Chapter 38

  When Graver got back to the office it was twenty minutes after nine. The receptionist was on the telephone as he passed her, and as he turned into the hallway to his office he caught Lara’s eye just as she was concluding a telephone conversation as well. She raised her eyebrows and lifted her chin to stop him, and he stepped into her office as she was putting down the telephone.

  “Nancy from Chief Hertig’s office just called a couple of minutes ago,” she said, writing something down as she spoke. “He wants to see you in his office as soon as you come in. She said to call before you started over.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And Paula wants to talk to you.”

  “Is that urgent?”

  “She was standing here when Nancy called. She said she’d get back to you after that.”

  “Okay, fine. Call Nancy back and tell her I’m on my way.” He turned around to walk out, paused, and turned back. “Listen, I appreciate last night,” he said.

  “My pleasure.” She smiled. “Did you get any sleep?”

  “Some. How about you?”

  “Slept like a rock,” she said “There just wasn’t enough of the night left.”

  He grinned, nodded, and walked out, leaving the CID without even having gone into his office.

  When Graver finally got over to the Administration Building and up to Hertig’s office, he was not surprised to find that Hertig was not alone. Westrate was there looking as though he might have slept two hours the night before, and so was Ward Lukens. When Graver walked in Westrate and Lukens turned and looked at him from their chairs in front of Hertig’s desk, but neither of them spoke or moved. It was clear they were both smoldering, and Graver guessed a considerable amount of heated conversation had preceded his arrival.

  “Good morning, Marcus,” Hertig said, smiling good-naturedly. He stood and came around from behind his desk extending his hand. The desk was a massive thing with an impressive telephone system taking up one side of it along with stacks of folders spilling papers, pictures of family, and a framed shield which Graver assumed was from his days as a detective. Behind him was a matching credenza so laden with awards and plaques and city seals and photographs of the chief with various people that it hardly was any use at all as a work space, though there was a stack of spiral-bound reports with colored covers, the sort of things that proliferated unstintingly in all kinds of government offices as proof and justification of employment.

  They shook hands.

  “Sit down,” Hertig said, gesturing to a chair to the side of his desk, near Westrate. Hertig was one of those rare birds, a man of sixty-two who actually had a law degree when he joined the police force in the late 1950s. He even had left the force for a while, practiced law, and then came back and eventually became chief. He was tall and lanky, a good-looking man with graying ginger hair and pale blue eyes whose appearance seemed more to suggest perhaps an academician rather than a law enforcement officer. He had been around a long time and knew very well the kind of rivalries that drove men like the two sitting in front of him.

  “We’ve been talking about Besom,” he said, getting right to the point as he returned to his chair and sa down. “Actually about Tisler and Besom.”

  “Look, I haven’t even had a chance yet to sit down a my desk this morning,” Graver interrupted. “Does any body in my office know about this yet?”

  Hertig looked at Westrate.

  Westrate shook his head.

  “Late last night,” Hertig resumed, “Besom’s bod was flown back to Houston, and at four-thirty this morning he was re-autopsied here as had been suggested.”

  “Who did the autopsy?” Graver interrupted again.

  Hertig paused. “Stern.”

  Clay Stern was the Chief Medical Examiner. It would have been done right.

  “He confirmed the results of the Brownsville coroner’s findings,” Hertig continued. “Essentially a heart al tack. Apparently, according to Mrs. Besom and Besom’ own medical records, he had no history of heart trouble As it turns out, he had a condition physicians refer to as; ‘widow maker.’ Doesn’t give any warning signs. No symp toms and therefore no suspicions.” He snapped his fingers. “Then it gets you.”

  Hertig nodded at his own explanation, and for a moment his blue eyes lost their focus. He put his hands or the arms of his chair. He pursed his lips, his head tilte forward in thought Then he reached out and picked u] some papers.

  “We’ve all read your report on Arthur Tisler, and what we’ve got here is a differing of opinions,” Hertig said.

  Graver looked at Westrate and Lukens. Both mer had fixed their eyes on Hertig like spaniels. Graver suspected they were watching him for any indication of tilte one way or the other, however subtle, however slight Ward Lukens was a couple of years older than Westrate and about half as heavy. He had thick, wiry brown hair wore unimaginative steel-rimmed glasses, and was so lacking in personality that Graver found him difficult to talk to. He was an honest man, however, and a stickler for rules, though these attributes were somewhat diminished by his maddening self-righteousness, and all of which made him the natural enemy of the conniving Westrate. Graver guessed that Hertig would have liked to strangle them both.

  “About the report?” Graver asked.

  “No. That seems clear enough. But about what to do now.”

  Hertig was enough of a lawyer to want to see where Graver would go with this given as little direction as necessary. But Graver wasn’t going to venture anything without being presented with a specific question. He simply looked at Hertig and waited. Hertig waited. And then Graver thought he saw something like amusement come to the surface behind Hertig’s pale eyes, and then it was gone.

  “Ward has the feeling that two deaths, regardless of the seemingly innocent circumstances, are too much of a coincidence,” Hertig said with a tilt of his head toward Lukens. “He thinks there ought to be a major audit of your OC unit” He paused, keeping his eyes on Graver. “How do you feel about that?”

  “Obviously the deaths have startled us too,” Graver said, looking at Westrate and back to Hertig. “And Jack has already grilled me about this.” Graver chose the verb deliberately. It would be to his advantage if the other two men thought Westrate had treated the deaths with an appropriate skepticism, even though Graver knew that that skepticism had more to do with paranoia than a levelheaded consideration of the implications the deaths might have for the integrity of their intelligence system.

  “I don’t think an audit of the kind you’re talking about is an advisable thing under these circumstances,” Graver continued, “for several reasons. First of all, there’s the matter of a lack of evidence—forensic or investigative—that would indicate anything is at play here other than coincidence.” Graver went on to cover the same points he had covered the night before when he had spoken to Westrate and used the example of Occam’s razor. If they decided to initiate an audit, it would be based solely on suspicion or hunch and not on fact or evidence or inexplicable inconsistencies or lacunae in the chain of procedure. Or, and Graver only implied this, it would be for some other reason… internecine squabbling, panic, butt-covering, or poor judgment.

  “Two, if an audit is conducted it will have the inevitable effect of disrupting morale. It would be impossible to keep such an investigation quiet, and once it’s known, there’s no way we can avoid having it perceived as anything but a witch-hunt, no matter what we called it.”

  Hertig was still sitting with his forearms o
n the arms of his chair and his hands gripping the ends. His face had lost its equanimous and beatific expression of a mediator and had grown sober with concentration.

  “Three, there’s the inevitable question of parameters. If our internal audit of Tisler is to be redone it won’t be such a problem. He was handling eight targets, most of them inactive except for semiannual updates. But Besom supervised ten investigators in OC Some have as many as ten targets. That’s well over a hundred targets. If you’re concerned about Besom’s role in regard to his investigators and their targets, you can’t afford to let a single one of those go without a thorough audit Otherwise there wouldn’t be any use in doing it This isn’t the sort of thing that lends itself to random sampling.”

  Graver paused. He looked at each of them. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t do it—though I personally don’t believe it’s justified—but I am saying we’d better be sure we’ve made our decision to do so based on sound reasoning.”

  That was it Hertig’s eyes were on Graver, and he was nodding, little shallow bobs as he thought Without changing position in his chair he swiveled around slowly to the two men in front of him.

  “Jack, I guess you go along with this.”

  “Yes, sir,” Westrate said with alacrity, sensing the momentum turning in his favor.

  Hertig looked at Lukens. “Ward, you have anything else to add?”

  “I sure do,” Lukens said, looking deliberately at Graver and then back at Hertig. “That all sounds wonderful and well thought out… and prepared. But it doesn’t discount the circumstances, and I have to say that I just don’t buy this coincidence scenario.”

  Lukens was tense, having to work hard to control his voice. He straightened himself in his chair. “Graver’s little lecture sounds very neat, but all of you know damn well that if we always waited for substantial evidence to initiate an investigation in this business, we could cut our personnel by half. If something’s going on in CID, the people involved aren’t going to provide us with ‘evidence.’”

  He turned to Westrate. “You’ve got better people than that over there, don’t you, Jack?”

  Then back to Hertig. “That’s an absurd prerequisite for suspicion, and an absurd prerequisite for initiating an investigation or inquiry.” Lukens squared on Graver. “And I’m surprised to hear it coming from you, Graver. That was facile footwork, but I don’t believe a word of it, and I don’t even think you do.”

  Back to Hertig. “If something’s gone wrong over there, Charlie, it’s not going to hit us over the head. I think what we’ve got here is a break, and if we don’t recognize that we’re screwing ourselves. Jesus. Even if I’m wrong, we ought to audit the situation just to satisfy ourselves that I am wrong. Or let’s just talk about PR, then. That’s the worst possible reason for doing something, but it is another reason nonetheless. Tonight Besom’s death is going to be on the news, and it’s only a matter of time before you’re going to find yourself having to explain these two deaths to those reporters who are always hoping to get a byline over another story of an HPD screw-up. Suicide? Heart attack? Trust us?” He paused. “At the very least we ought to be able to tell them a ‘routine inquiry’ is under way.”

  Graver was cringing inside, waiting for Westrate to explode, but much to his surprise it didn’t happen. Westrate was a gamesman even more than he was a hothead, and he sensed that it was to his advantage right now not to do the obvious. But he had to say something, and though his face was livid, his tone was even.

  “Routine inquiry, Ward? How do you do a routine inquiry into a heart attack? We’ve already got a report on Tisler. Why don’t we tell them, ‘Well, it’s a hell of a deal, boys, but one killed himself and one died of a heart attack. Shit happens.’ If there’s no inquiry they’ve got a message right there that says there’s just nothing to inquire about Nothing to explain.”

  “That’s your interpretation of what it would ‘say,’ Jack,” Lukens rebutted. “To somebody else it might ‘say’: cover-up.”

  Everyone fell silent for a moment Hertig was nodding, but he was looking at the calendar on his desk. Graver knew he did not want to have to tell the media that the Organized Crime Squad of the Criminal Intelligence Division was being audited following the deaths of two of its officers within the last forty-eight hours. That was like striking a match to gasoline. He practically would be writing the headlines himself. Lukens knew that too, but Graver guessed he figured his own angle was worth a try. He might get lucky. But he didn’t.

  Hertig leaned forward in his chair, rested his forearms on his desk, and looked at Lukens.

  “Ward, I can’t see committing all that manpower and time—which is money—to this,” he said. “I think we’ve just got to call it hard luck, bad timing, a hell of a coincidence. I don’t think we can justify it I just don’t.”

  That was the end of it. They were dismissed. Westrate had the good sense to simply walk out of the office without gloating, though Graver guessed he was cackling inside. He didn’t even hang back to talk to Graver who was the last one out of the office. Each of them went back to their offices in silence.

  It was hard to call which way the scales would go from one day to the other when it came to interdepartmental rivalries. Graver guessed that this time the well-known tug of war between Westrate and Lukens had worked to Lukens’s disadvantage. Somehow his arguments for an inquiry seemed specious in light of his long-standing antagonism with Westrate. The next time it might go the other way. That was the kind of decision that men in Hertig’s position had to make sometimes, and Graver wondered how comfortable Hertig actually was with his ruling. He wouldn’t have been surprised to know that he had gotten no satisfaction out of it at all.

  Certainly Graver himself felt decidedly frustrated. He had argued precisely in opposition to his own feelings, which were much closer to Lukens’s. It galled Graver that he had had to be so helpful to Westrate. But if he hadn’t argued as he did, the decision might have gone the other way, and to have had his Division invaded by Internal Affairs investigators would have wreaked havoc on his own operation. Even so, Graver felt a little queasy about what he had just done.

  Chapter 39

  The meeting with Charlie Hertig had lasted less than forty-five minutes and by ten-fifteen Graver was walking into his office. He tossed his briefcase onto his desk and was taking off his coat when Lara came in behind him with his Charlie Chan mug filled with coffee. She closed the door behind her and put the coffee on his desk with a paper napkin.

  “Oh, God, fantastic,” he said, sitting down behind his desk and pulling the coffee over in front of him. “Hertig wasn’t in any mood to offer coffee this morning. I’ve been dying for a cup.”

  “How did it go?” she asked, sitting down in one of the chairs. She was wearing a straight skirt of off-white linen with a pearl-white blouse, her fingernails freshly painted, her long hair tucked up in a loose Gibson girl. He had no idea how she found the time it must take to look so perfect.

  He told her about the meeting.

  “That was awkward,” she said.

  Graver nodded, swallowing a sip of coffee. “Very. But for once, bureaucracy is in our favor.” He looked at her. “Has the word seeped out about Besom?”

  “All the way out. Some of our people found out about it this morning, while you were in the chief’s office, when they received calls from newspaper reporters asking about it.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “I’ve gotten together the forms and things for his family, and I’ve talked with personnel and put the paperwork into the mill over there. This is becoming depressingly familiar.” She studied him. “You all right?”

  “What’s the matter, don’t I look all right?”

  “You look pretty tired.”

  “I am pretty tired.” He sipped some coffee. “I’m not putting out any statements to the press, so if they call don’t even bother with them. Refer everyone to Westrate’s office. That’s something I’m not even going to worry about.
”

  They talked for a few minutes about the previous night, and he told her about seeing Arnette’s surveillance photographs from Burtell’s meeting at the fountain. He told her about the man and woman who were acting as countersurveillance and how he thought surely they would be the pair from La Facezia.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t the same couple?” She had leaned forward slightly in her chair, fascinated by his recounting of the surveillance operation against Burtell. “I mean, what about disguises?”

  “I just don’t think so. I don’t think they were even the same ‘type’ of people. But then, maybe I didn’t pay as much attention to them at La Facezia as I should have.” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “This is just so incredible about Dean. I’m sorry, but I’m still finding it hard to… buy.”

  Graver looked at her. “Of course you do. That’s the whole point of it.”

  “But you do too.”

  He nodded and could feel the weight of the whole ordeal pulling down on the flesh of his face. “That’s the whole point of it,” he repeated.

  “Okay.” She nodded, dropping her eyes. “I know.”

  “Now, why don’t you have all the OC people come down here.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  Within fifteen minutes the nine remaining investigators had crowded into Graver’s office, sitting in the few chairs, leaning against the walls, a couple on the floor. Neuman was on the far side of the room. Graver went around behind his desk and proceeded to tell them what had happened. He was straightforward, told them everything he knew—at least what Westrate had told him—and said that, as with Tisler, they would be informed as soon as they knew anything about funeral arrangements.