An Absence of Light

Chapter 18

Graver sat in his car and watched Neuman’s taillights disappear into all the other lights of the city. These revelations indicting Dean Burtell were hitting him hard. But he would have been a fool to start looking for innocent explanations. He wasn’t going to find them.

Instead of driving away, he got out of the car and went to the pay telephone near the front door of the diner. Taking a slip of paper from his wallet he dialed the number written there.

“Hello?”

It was the woman’s voice he had heard the previous evening when he had answered the telephone in his living room.

“I’d like to speak to Victor, please.”

“Who?”

“Is this Carney?”

Pause.

“Yes.”

“Victor told me you might be answering the telephone. This is Graver. I need to talk to Victor.”

“Oh. He’s not here.”

“Will you give him a message?”

“Okay.”

“Tell him I need to talk to him as soon as I can. He has several numbers. Tell him to call them until he gets me. I’ll be at the home number in half an hour.”

“Okay.”

For some reason he didn’t feel as though she was getting the full import of his message.

“Do you understand?” he asked.

“Yeah, sure, I understand.”

“Thank you,” he said.

He went back to the car again, got in, and closed the door. Turning an investigative eye on Burtell was going to be painful, not unlike what he had just been through with Dore. Jesus. His profession was built on the study of deception, he had seen it from every angle, examined it with a telescope and a microscope, dissected it, read about it, written about it, thought about it, watched it, listened to it, experienced it, done it himself, and still he seemed no less immune to it than in the beginning. Certainly Dore had proved that on a personal level. Now Burtell was making the professional point.

But then no one was really immune to it, ever. If you were going to have any peace of mind at all, if you didn’t want to live your life alone and in a misanthropic rage, you had to trust people. You had to allow them the freedom to be Judas. And it didn’t do you any good to indulge in philosophical indignation, because if you did-and if you were honest with yourself-eventually you would find yourself eating your philosophy along with your crow. Deception was too handy a human tool not to employ it sooner or later yourself.

The thing was, as with everything else deception had its dimensions. There were vast deceptions and small ones, there were trivial ones and mortal ones, there were those that hurt for a little while and those that devastated. Tonight, sitting alone in front of a nearly empty diner, Graver wasn’t sure anymore if the distance between these dimensions actually was all that great. It seemed to him that when men and women determined to employ this oldest of Satan’s skills, they implicitly agreed to sacrifice a little piece of themselves in the process. Perhaps it was only a bruise in the beginning, something easily sustained without great harm, hardly noticeable. But it never went away and every deception added to it and made it worse until it was large and rancid and began to eat at them from the inside. How much rot could a person tolerate, he wondered, before the rot began to be the thing that defined them?

He ran his fingers through his hair, started his car, and drove away from the diner.