An Absence of Light

MONDAY
Chapter 10

The Second Day

When the radio alarm went off, Graver opened his eyes to a muted gray light. Without even moving, he could tell that the muscles in his neck and shoulders were drawn into knots.

After getting home late, Graver had sat up in bed for another hour trying to make notes for the next morning’s meeting. Though he found it hard to concentrate, he stayed with it until weariness and an aching back forced him to put aside his pencil and pad and turn out the light Then he had lain awake until the early hours of the morning thinking about Last He replayed their conversation, picked at every word Last had spoken, and wondered at his having appeared out of nowhere. Graver cautioned himself. This was no time to start believing in serendipity. Eventually he slipped into a restless sleep and the previous twelve hours melted into dreams of absurdity.

When he rolled over to get up, he found the legal pad and pencil among the rumpled sheets and threw them onto the floor at the foot of the bed. Resisting the temptation to fall back onto the pillow, he swung his legs over the side and sat there a moment, feeling heavy-headed and stiff. Then he stood slowly and walked into the bathroom, stepped into the shower, and turned on the cold water.

After bathing and shaving, he dressed and gathered up the dirty clothes that he had piled on the settee near the windows. After dropping off the clothes at the laundry, he stopped by a neighborhood bakery and bought a cinnamon roll, a small coffee, and a newspaper. The Kashmere Gardens shooting did make the headlines. The gunman holding the hostage had been killed in a barrage of gunfire after he shot his hostage on the small stoop of the garage apartment.

Graver quickly searched the rest of the paper, but there was no mention of Arthur Tisler’s death. Not a news item. He tossed the newspaper into a trash can and finished the cinnamon roll and coffee on the way downtown.

The Criminal Intelligence Division was located on the top floor of a doleful, three-story building at the back of the police headquarters compound on the northwestern edge of downtown. Separated from the architectural splendors of Houston’s building-boom years by the thundering concrete maze of ramps, piers, girders, and abutments of the Gulf Freeway, the homely, cement building had the peculiar distinction of having its single front door face outward from the back of the police compound rather than inward as did the other buildings. As a result, its ground floor had a marvelous view of the underbelly of the expressway where Buffalo Bayou screwed its way under the concrete superstructure, and the sticky weeds of summer grew out of control.

Graver parked in a small parking lot across the alley-like driveway that circled the building, and which was surrounded by a jungle of weeds that grew higher than his head and crowded right up to the lot’s margins. He got out of the car, locked the door, and inhaled the musty odors that emanated from the oozing and fetid cocoa waters of the bayou fifty yards away on the other side of the weedy embankment.

Lara Casares was always the first person in the office every morning. Always. She had been Graver’s secretary since the first day he stepped into the captain’s position four years earlier when he had pulled her from the stenographer’s pool where she had been a wasted talent Nearly everything about Lara was a surprise, beginning with her appearance. She was an attractive thirty-three-year-old Latina with an astonishingly fine figure, which included a bust of admirable proportions and killer hips which she thrice weekly Jazzersized and pounded to a white-hot firmness. She wore her clothes the way musclemen wore tight shirts, self-aware and lustily pleased with the whole damn thing. Though she had only a high school education, Graver guessed that her IQ must have been off the charts. She was everything a first impression might have suggested she wasn’t, dependable, discreet in a position where discretion was paramount, organized like a computer, always two jumps ahead of his every request, considerate, and sober as a nun when it came to her work, though she was something of a raucous lady on a personal level. Graver relied on her without reservation.

Beyond that, they shared a mutual attraction that had gone unacknowledged for longer than either of them ever would have predicted. Despite her strong personality, Graver knew that Lara was too smart to be the first one to openly address their attraction, which they both knew was loaded with potential problems. This was one instance in which she would not take the lead. As for Graver himself, his shattered marriage had not had the same effect on him that it might have had on most men. He was not more prone to fall into an affair. Rather, for reasons he did not allow himself to examine too closely, he was determined to keep his feelings for Lara at arm’s length, though now that the divorce was final he had to admit that there really was no longer any reason to do so. In fact, the truth was that at this time in his life he was probably closer to Lara than to anyone else.

When he walked into the office late, at half past eight, he said good morning to the receptionist and looked down the bare, narrow hallway to his left where the Division’s offices opened off both sides of the corridor, a series of identical doors, their facades appearing increasingly narrow as they progressed to the opposite end of an exceedingly long hall.

Nowhere were the strapped finances of the city’s budget more apparent than in these quarters. All of the offices, with the exception of his own, could not be described as anything more than cubicles. The offices on the right side of the hall were the more desirable ones because of the enormous advantage of being on the exterior wall of the building and therefore having small windows. On the other side of the hall the cubicles were like Cappadocian caves dug into the inside of the building. They were little more than coffins.

The door to the communications room was open and one of the printers was hammering away, dumping a roll of paper on the floor which was already littered with paper from reports that had come in over the weekend. The computers stayed alive around the clock to receive “contributions” from police officers-patrolmen and detectives-anywhere in the city.

Graver turned and walked past Lara’s office and stuck his head in. She was on the telephone, and he pointed to his office and went on. By the time he had settled behind his desk and made a couple of notes, Lara came in the door with his Charlie Chan mug full of fresh coffee. She set the mug in front of him with a napkin, straightened up, and tugged once sharply on the hem of her red suit jacket.

“You left this on your desk over the weekend-with coffee in it. There was mold in it this morning,” she said pointedly.

Every morning when Graver came into his office, he found his desk clear and neatly arranged, a condition in which he seldom left it. Lara was responsible. She dusted the amber glass shade on the lamp he had brought from home to offset the anemic fluorescent lighting in the ceiling. She made sure that the marbled fountain pen that Nathan had given him was in the narrow green glass tray on the front of his desk. She made sure the bone-white coffee mug with its silhouette of Charlie Chan on it that Natalie had given him was clean. And she made sure that his book-style calendar was held flat open with the black, smoothly worn cobblestone that a hundred years ago he and Dore, slightly inebriated and laughing, had dug out of a narrow lane near St. Paul’s Cathedral.

That was another thing about Lara. She had an intuitive understanding of the lingering power of small things, of old gifts from a son and daughter, or of a mnemonic cobblestone that was not a reminder of the woman who was no longer his wife, but of the girl he once had married.

“Sorry,” he said, motioning for her to close the door, which she did, coming back and standing in front of his desk.

“Some bad news,” he said. “Arthur Tisler was found dead in his car last night. It looks like he killed himself.”

Her mouth dropped open, and she sat down slowly in one of the chairs.

“My God,” she said. “He killed himself?”

“That’s what it… seems.”

“Seems?”

“It’s got to be investigated, Lara, that’s all.”

“I know, but… My God…” Her black eyes looked at him, and he could see her remembering Tisler.

“Of course Westrate’s worrying about damage control, the way it’s going to look.”

“Nobody knows about this yet?”

“Burtell knows. He notified Peggy Tisler last night.”

“Jesus, poor woman.”

Graver would have liked to talk to her a while, just discuss it as he would have done with Dore years ago, but there wasn’t time. Reluctantly he moved on.

“I guess you’d better call each of the squad supervisors and have them meet me in here at nine o’clock,” he said. “I’ll let them take care of telling their people. And you’d better hold all calls for me for the rest of the day except any from Jack Westrate or anyone in Homicide or IAD.”

He briefly explained to her about the requisite inquiry and how it would have to take precedence over the normal routine of his responsibilities. Graver monitored the activities of his squads by the daily review of a steady stream of investigation summaries, intelligence reports, initial investigation summaries, operational requests, contributor management reports, and on and on, a seemingly endless flow of cumbersome but necessary forms, files, contracts, vouchers, records, summaries, lists, and logs. All of these-all but the most urgent of them-would now have to be set aside until Graver could complete a report that would give the CID’s file a clean bill of health, free from any stain of Tisler’s suicide. Lara was going to have to help him deal with more than he could handle.

At nine o’clock the three squad supervisors filed into his office. Ray Besom was the fourth, though absent on his Fishing trip. Graver told them straight out what had happened. He told them as much as he had told Burtell the night before, but none of them was close to Tisler and kept their reactions to a soft curse or a wincing, jaw-clenching frown. He explained everything, the situation at the scene, who was on the investigation from Homicide and IAD.

“And I’m going to head our own inquiry myself,” he said. “Review his investigations, make sure we’re all right.” They all knew what he meant. He looked at Matt Rostov, a thin, angular man in his early forties, who supervised the Research and Analysis Squad. “Matt, if it’s all right with you, I’d like to pull Dean Burtell and Paula Sale to help me. Can you spare them for a week maybe?”

Rostov nodded and said sure.

“When you go back to your office would you let them know I’ll be calling them a little later in the morning?”

Again Rostov nodded. Sure.

“I’m going to get Casey Neuman out of OC also.”

“What about the people in OC,” asked Lee Stanish, “they know yet?”

Stanish had been in Ray Besom’s position as head of the Organized Crime Squad four years earlier. He was a superb supervisor, and Graver had moved him to the Anti-Terrorist Squad when the supervisor there had retired. He had had an excellent relationship with his investigators and never had thought that Besom had done a good-enough job with his old group.

“Not yet,” Graver said. “I’m talking to them after this. I decided against making a general announcement. It’s touchy, and there’s a lot pending. I just thought it would be best if we kept it low-key.”

Everyone nodded, everyone understood, and Graver dismissed them. Only Bob Penck, who supervised Technical Services had said nothing, which was normal for him. He might have said something if a bomb had gone off in the office… or maybe not.

After they left, Graver asked Lara to go ahead and call in all nine of the Organized Crime Squad’s investigators. He got a fresh cup of coffee from across the hall and waited for them sitting at his desk. When they filed in, all of them expecting a bombshell since they never had been called in as a group before, they all stood around the walls, none of them wanting to take any of the three chairs in front of Graver’s desk. So Graver stood too, and repeated the story of Arthur Tisler’s death for the fourth time.