An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  He hung up the telephone and looked at his watch. Kalatis had said the documents would be there in half an hour. Great Gilbert had been only minutes away from quitting for the night anyway, and the telephone call had broken his concentration. He turned off the light in his office and walked into his apartment There was a small kitchen there, a well-furnished bar, a sitting area with a couple of sofas and several armchairs for entertaining. There were plants scattered about, an enormous television, and a view of the entire Galleria area below and, just slightly to the right, the shimmering skyline of downtown. Around the corner was a large bedroom with a generous bath and a Jacuzzi with the same view as in the living room.

  Gilbert made himself another drink, kicked off his shoes—he had taken off his tie long ago—and settled down in front of the television, flicking the remote control until he came to the Playboy channel. Forty minutes passed quickly, lubricated by several more drinks, and when the security phone rang he quickly punched in the numbers to let Kalatis’s messenger into the elevator. Deliveries from Kalatis were not rare, and his emissaries had the routine well rehearsed.

  In five minutes the buzzer to the main office reception area sounded, and Gilbert got up and walked out through his office carrying his drink and without bothering to put on his shoes. When he entered the reception area he almost dropped his glass. Standing on the outside of the glass wall was Kalatis’s emissary, Jael.

  Gilbert actually stopped. She was wearing a simple, deep-burgundy cocktail dress which hung off her shoulders like a sheet of water. Gilbert was stunned. She held up a manila envelope against the glass, a gesture that seemed to jar him into action. He walked to the receptionist’s desk and buzzed open the glass panel door.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, smiling and reaching out the envelope. “Panos called you about this?”

  Gilbert nodded stupidly. He could see her goddamn nipples.

  “I’m so sorry it is so late. You know Panos,” she said with a rueful wrinkle of her brows and a little shrug. Gilbert would have given fifty dollars to see her shrug that away again. “Everything is so… hectic… so busy there. He was leaving for a business trip… everyone was busy. No one but me to come.”

  No one but her to come. Gilbert loved her choice of words… and her accent He didn’t know what the hell kind of an accent it was, and he didn’t care. He always had thought she was one of the hottest-looking women he had ever laid eyes on. Panos’s woman, some kind of Middle Eastern blood was what he guessed, but that didn’t matter either. She was just an incredible thing. Lean and young and buxom and dark, eyes like a goddamn cat’s. He may have been staring at her, he didn’t know. He already had drunk enough to make such fine distinctions indistinguishable.

  She looked at his glass and smiled. He reached out for the envelope, and he thought she kind of held on to it when he took it.

  “What have you drinking there?” she asked.

  “Oh, uh, scotch. Whiskey.”

  She nodded, still smiling like she had caught him doing something… naughty.

  “Uh”—he gestured vaguely—”you… want”—he gestured more vaguely, maybe toward her with the glass—”something?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “To drink… with you?”

  And it was at that moment that Panos Kalatis slid out of Gilbert’s mind for good. The spice of the present instant was overwhelming. He reached for the door which he suddenly realized she had been holding open with her… hip.

  “I don’t have to hurry to go back,” she said, brushing past him. “It is so busy there, and anyway, they will everyone be gone away when I am back there.”

  “You came by yourself?” he asked with appropriate concern in his voice as they made their way through his office and into his apartment.

  “Oh yes,” she said, looking around, locking on the view of the city from the sitting room windows.

  “What would you like to drink?” he asked, tossing the envelope into a chair and going straight to the bar.

  “Cuba Libre,” she said, standing at the windows.

  Cuba Libre. She goddamned looked like Cuba Libre. He managed to make it, as well as another scotch for himself, though he was in a bit of a fog, and he wasn’t sure he made it as good as he could have. He spilled some of each on his hands as he made his way over to her, and then was momentarily disconcerted to find her sitting primly on the sofa in front of the television, back straight, hands in her lap, breasts dripping burgundy, watching a man humping a woman on what appeared to be a motorcycle in a rainstorm.

  “What is that?” he said stupidly, standing flat-footed with the wet glasses in his hands.

  “They having some love,” she said equanimously. She pronounced it “lowve.”

  She might have said it was going to be clear to partly cloudy, but then she smiled at him in such a way that entirely obliterated this alternate possibility.

  Not once during the next half hour did Gilbert Hormann ask another question. Not of her. Not of himself. Not of Fate or of Good Fortune. Not of God. He never asked why it was that he should be naked on the sofa with this incomparable hetaera, Jael. He never asked why he should have her breast in his mouth or feel what he was feeling between her legs. He never asked himself why it should be his good, dumb luck to be in the Jacuzzi with her, swilling scotch and sliding all over her while the city lights went round and round in the vast, black firmament He never asked any questions at all until he was aware of holding his mouth open because she had asked him to, and looking past her glistening breasts above him to see her holding an eyedropper… an eyedropper… over his opened mouth.

  But then it was too late.

  His heart stopped. While he was exhaling, something invisible squeezed out what little air was left and held his chest and lungs in an excruciatingly painful vacuum. He was agog with pain, specific pain. He could feel his face turning scarlet, empurpling, and could sense the arteries in his heart growing thin, attenuated, dissolving, flooding the muscle in a hemorrhage of uncontained blood. He watched helplessly as Jael pulled her hand away, the dropper still poised, hesitant, with a clear drop on the very end of it He could see it, right on the very end of the glass ampule, and her breasts inviting even now at this very terrifying moment when he was thinking, God he had screwed up, her breasts inviting him to have one more mouthful.

  She got out of the Jacuzzi very carefully and stepped onto a towel she had laid out ahead of time. He hadn’t noticed. She knelt beside the Jacuzzi, turned off the circulating pump, and released the water. As the basin emptied, she patted herself dry, watching the water disappear, leaving the pinkish Gilbert Hormann lying in the bottom like a great hairless bear.

  Carefully folding the damp towel in a very precise square, she put it on the step to the Jacuzzi and knelt on it as she took the sprayer hose from its seat on the side of the basin and began washing down the body and the inside of the tub. She got back in the tub with him and turned him over, washing him thoroughly, washing the sides of the tub to make sure none of her head hair or pubic hair remained. She opened his mouth and sprayed it out and then took shampoo from the shelf of the tub and washed his hair, and hosed him down again very thoroughly, having to turn him over once more.

  When she was satisfied, she refilled the Jacuzzi and restarted the circulating pump. The body floated awkwardly in the swirling water, moving oddly as the currents pushed it about. She wiped down the steps to the Jacuzzi with the towel on which she had been kneeling, and then put it in a plastic trash bag she found in the kitchen.

  Before dressing she went into the living room and got her glass, washed it, and returned it to the liquor cabinet Then she took a hand towel from the kitchen and wiped down all the table surfaces around the sofa so that there would not be too many damp rings for one glass. She took Hormann’s clothes that were scattered about and draped them with reasonable carelessness on a chair in the bathroom, put his shoes near the chair, as though he had just kicked them off there, and put his socks on top of them.
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  When everything was to her satisfaction, she went back into the living room and picked up her dress from the floor and slipped it on over her head. She picked up one of the magazines from a coffee table—a Newsweek—and returned to the bath where she tossed it into the Jacuzzi. She also turned over the glass from which Hormann had been drinking and left it rolling around in a circle on the side of the tub.

  All of this was probably unnecessary. Panos had thoroughly researched the man’s medical records. Chronic high blood pressure. They had used precisely the right chemistry. Still, she liked to do everything every time. It was a good habit.

  She picked up the manila folder she had brought, picked up her plastic bag containing her towel and walked out of the apartment leaving the lights on. Turning out the lights in his office, she walked out through the reception area, buzzed herself out, and disappeared down the hall to the elevators.

  Chapter 57

  They crowded into the darkroom, Graver, Arnette, Neuman, who was still trying to absorb what had been revealed to him in the three common little houses on Rauer Street, and Boyd, who was handling the canister. In the room’s cool redness everyone looked pale and conspiratorial, intent on the object in Boyd’s hands.

  “You don’t think this is some kind of bomb, a booby trap, do you?” Boyd mused, only half in jest as he put the first twist on the cap. No one said anything.

  “I just want to know if it’s film,” Graver said. “Then I’ll get out of your way.”

  It was a long-threaded cap, as was customary with such waterproofed containers, and when it finally came free Boyd laid it on the worktable. Holding it over his opened hand, he turned it over in the palm of his hand, and a tightly coiled, shiny black scroll fell into his hand.

  “It’s film,” he said. “Already developed.” He stretched out the roll between his hands, one high in the air, the other down below his waist. “Microfilm.”

  “Okay, that’s good enough for me,” Graver said. “How long will it take you to get something.”

  “I can get you the first frame—microfiche—in about twenty minutes.”

  They stepped out of the darkroom leaving Boyd to his magic and walked around the corner to the main computer room. Every work station was being used and the room was chattering with keystrokes. Quinn was at her radio, writing in a notebook, and speaking with professional ennui into her pencil-sized microphone. Neuman took it in quickly, trying not to gawk, but naturally wanting to see as much as possible. Arnette smiled and stopped.

  “This is Quinn,” she said to Neuman, but not interrupting the girl for an introduction. “Right now she’s fielding reports from the South Shore Harbor. We’ve got stringers, much like a newspaper does. When something big like that happens they bring us up to speed. Every call is computer-recorded and the reports are tallied and the information is assigned a value, very much like a value code is given to an informant or a source. We keep track of both the quality and the volume of information from each stringer. Sometimes that pays off in ways you wouldn’t expect.”

  She walked around the room slowly, clockwise.

  “These two women are working on Tisler’s computer data. This is still a very long shot,” she said, looking at Graver, “but they’ve gotten through some doors, made some progress. Over here, this guy’s working on trying to ID the guy who met Burtell at the Transco Fountain. We haven’t found him, but we’re getting updates on these people so it’s actually a useful exercise for us. It’s been a while since I updated my photo file, and it’s expensive, so you don’t want to do it without a good reason.

  “Dani,” she said, pointing to the girl at the next station, “is running leads on Brod Strasser. You guys stumbled onto some of the most reclusive boys in the business. Take Kalatis. We think he bought a place in the Houston area around 1989. We think he’s been spending about half his time here since then, but we can’t verify it Our real estate stringers say they don’t think so, that there are no shell residential purchases they can’t open up. They’re wrong, but we can’t prove it He owns a private plane, a Desault Falcon. We know that it’s in the name of his pilot, a former Israeli Air Force instructor. We know when he leaves Colombia in that thing… and that’s all we know. Once, in 1989, we nailed it at Hobby. It stayed there three days. Now, I know the guy’s been back here in it, but we can’t prove it We think he’s paying off an air traffic controller in Honduras—Tegucigalpa. He enters the country at that little narrow Gulf of Fonseca, crosses Honduras, and comes out over the Bay Islands as somebody else. Then to be safe, he’s using a private strip somewhere around Houston instead of one of the airports. But we can’t prove it.”

  She stopped without explaining anything about the last three or four work stations.

  “And it goes on and on,” she said. “We’re always chasing down something.”

  She headed toward the library and Graver and Neuman followed. As they walked in, Graver’s handset that he had left on the library table was buzzing. He picked it up. It was Paula.

  “Graver, everything went okay with Heath. She’s gone. But as soon as we got back to your place Ginette Burtell drove up right behind us. She’s hysterical. She thought you’d be home. She says she thinks that Dean is dead. She’s really unglued. Lara’s with her.”

  Graver’s heart sank.

  “Why does she think he’s dead?”

  “That explosion. Local stations broke into network programming with it. She says Dean kept a boat in a slip at South Shore Harbor.”

  “Christ.”

  “I think you’d better get over here. She says she has something to tell you. Apparently Dean had been afraid the last few days. She says he had given her a message to give to you in the event of his death. I think she’s frightened, too. I don’t know… there seems to be more to this. I think you’d better get over here.”

  “Did she wonder why you and Lara were at my place?”

  “Yeah, but I just told her we were in the middle of something. You’d better come on.”

  “Okay, I’m coming right now.”

  “You heard from Neuman?” There was an edge of concern in Paula’s voice.

  “He’s with me. He got something from Sheck’s. I’ll fill you in when I get there.”

  Chapter 58

  By the time Graver got home, Ginette Burtell was sitting quietly with Lara on the sofa in the living room, each turned slightly to the other, their knees just touching as they talked. Lara, who had a softer touch than Paula and with whom Ginette was more familiar because she saw her every time she came into the office to see Dean, had a natural ability to communicate on a visceral level and a manner that was immediately discernible as genuine and without calculation. It was the kind of candid compassion that Ginette needed at that moment, and Lara apparently had been able to calm her.

  When Graver walked into the room Ginette stood up immediately.

  “Marcus,” she said. “Thank God.” She wore no makeup to hide the fact that her eyes were red and swollen, and her fashionable skirt and blouse were wrinkled as if she had been wearing them too long and had no interest in their condition.

  “We’ve got to talk,” she said quickly, her voice cracking on the last word. Her face wrinkled as Graver came over to her and took her hands, which were twisting a tissue.

  “Okay, Ginny, it’s okay,” he said, getting her to sit down again with him as Lara stood and started to leave the room. “Ginny,” Graver said, “you don’t mind if Lara stays, do you?”

  She shook her head and buried her face in the tissue, grabbing others from the box on the sofa. Graver glanced at Lara.

  “Ginny, I know you’ve got something to say that you feel is important,” Graver said. “I don’t want to miss anything. This is all very complicated. I’m going to ask Paula to come back in too. We need all the help we can get on this, and of course Paula… works with Dean”—he almost said “worked”—”and needs to hear this.”

  She nodded again and Graver again looked at La
ra, who left to get Paula from the kitchen where Graver had found her a few moments earlier nursing a cup of coffee and looking thoroughly uncomfortable. Graver had paused only a moment to speak to her when he came in the back door. She quickly had told him of his messages and handed a piece of paper with the calls on it: Westrate and Olmstead as Graver had guessed, each a couple of times—Graver deliberately had turned off his pager when he had left the house earlier—and Victor Last.

  “Do you want anything to drink?” Graver asked. He was turned toward her on the sofa.

  “No, I… no,” she said, wiping her nose and putting all of her energy into an effort to gain control of herself. “I’m sorry.”

  “No need to be,” Graver said. “If you’ll just try to think of everything… every detail, it’ll help us get to the bottom of this.”

  As Lara and Paula came back into the room and found chairs, Graver told Ginette to start from the beginning, to take her time, and not to be disconcerted if he had to interrupt her a number of times to ask questions.

  “God, I don’t know how to start,” she said. “I saw the news bulletin… South Shore Harbor. We keep a sailboat out there and I think… I think that’s where Dean was going when he left the house tonight.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because he had a meeting… with someone. When he had meetings he used the boat sometimes.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He let it slip one time, a reference. Something hadn’t been cleaned up when we went out there to go sailing, and he said oh he’d forgotten to take care of it after the last meeting. I saw him cringe, you know, kind of. I guessed it had something to do with work, so I didn’t say anything further. I tried not to quiz him. That’s always hard, trying to ignore all the… inexplicable things.”

  “But there are a lot of boats out there, Ginny,” Graver said. “Why do you think Dean was on the boat that blew up?”