went down to the kitchen. It was too late to cook anything, and nothing in the refrigerator looked good to him anyway. Bored with the prospect of eating, even though the laps always made him ravenous, he poured out a bowl of cereal, sliced thin slivers of a nectarine onto it, added milk, and sat down at the kitchen table to eat.
He didn’t know what to do with his thoughts. Not wanting to think about Tisler for a while, he tried to make his mind blank. It was an exercise in futility. His Weltanschauung was thoroughly Westernized, and a blank mind was not an easy thing to come by. His meditations tended more toward the baroque.
Finishing his cereal, he stood wearily and took his empty bowl to the sink and rinsed it out, opened the dishwasher, and put the bowl and spoon into the washer. Taking a glass from the cabinet, he ran water from the faucet and stood at the sink as he drank it, looking out at the back yard. He could see the pool, and here and there a few yards from its margins the silhouettes of sago palms and palmettos; and in the near-dark he could make out the lower boughs of the oaks, too, with Spanish moss hanging from them in cheerless festoons that he found somber even in the best of times and which he now regarded with a painful sadness.
Then he heard the doorbell ring.
Instinctively he looked at his watch; it was nearly twelve o’clock. He set the glass on the counter, grabbed the hand towel that hung on the cabinet and dried his hands as he walked down the hallway to the front door. The light was off in the entry, but the front porch light was still on, and he could see the fractured figure of a man through the beveled glass of the door. He didn’t readily recognize this Cubist silhouette. Tossing the hand towel over his shoulder, he threw the dead bolt and opened the door.
Chapter 6
Jack Westrate was standing in front of him, his hands jammed into his pockets, his dark silk suit rumpled, shirt collar and tie undone. He was several inches shorter than Graver with a body frame that brought to mind words like bulwark and redoubt. He was decidedly stout, but it was the kind of heaviness that suggested a hard aggressiveness. There was nothing at all soft about Jack Westrate, in either his manner or his appearance.
“We’d better talk,” he said and clamped his mouth shut, his long upper lip and dimpled lower lip clinched tightly in determination.
Westrate was like a bully cur; he always tried to set the rules of engagement in his favor with an immediate challenge in the first seconds of encounter. But it was too goddamned late to be “challenged,” and Graver was in no mood to feel any sympathy for Westrate’s predicament. So he didn’t move or say anything, just hesitated long enough to make Westrate a little less confident, and then slowly backed away, pulling open the door. “Come on in,” he said.
Westrate was immediately inside the front hall, bringing with him his familiar dense odors of cologne and cigar smoke. He wheeled to the right where he saw lamps turned on in the living room, and walked in.
“Sit down, anywhere,” Graver said, gesturing vaguely around the room.
Westrate passed up the sofa and a wing chair and sat in a deep green leather armchair beside a table with a small Oriental lamp. Graver sat in his usual reading chair near his old mahogany desk, draping the hand towel on the brass handle of a magazine stand.
“I talked to Katz a little while ago,” Westrate said immediately. “After you guys left the scene out there.”
He sat forward in the chair, his forearms resting on his thick knees. His black hair was thinning, but he wore it military short anyway-screw the balding. Sometimes you could tell he had tried to comb it, but most often it was just there with no particular direction except on the bit of a forelock that he swiped occasionally with a little black comb he carried in the inside pocket of his coat Like Burtell, his beard was so thick it always shadowed the tight skin of his round face and hid like coal dust in the cleft of a belligerently square chin.
Graver said nothing. He crossed his legs and waited.
“Herb said they thought it was suicide.”
“That’s just…”
“Yeah, I know, preliminary. Still, it’s not a by-God-for-sure homicide.”
“No.”
Westrate worked his thick, diminutive shoulders nervously, his suit coat bunching up in a roll behind his stubby neck. He always dressed in expensive custom-made suits, silk and linen blends, tropical wools appropriate to the steamy climate of the Gulf Coast, but he wore them without regard, seemingly unaware of their cost, wallowing in his thousand-dollar “pieces” as though he were wearing Katz’s jogging uniforms. Graver rather liked that profligate flair about him, though he really couldn’t say why. It was just about the only thing that he could tolerate about the man.
“Okay. So. I wouldn’t have expected you to tell them, of course, if you had any reason to think differently. What about it?”
“I don’t know anything, Jack. I don’t disagree with what they’ve got to say because I don’t have the slightest idea why the guy’s dead.”
“No shit.” Westrate’s face was immobile. He was trying to discern a feint in Graver’s response, wondering if Graver was holding out on him. His suspicions were insatiable. Westrate had come out of the womb reading Machiavelli and suspecting his father of being a cuckold.
“No shit,” Graver said. “And I talked to Dean Burtell a while ago. If this has anything to do with Tisler’s work-suicide or homicide-Burtell doesn’t have a clue about it either. Can’t imagine.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Westrate seemed genuinely surprised. “That’s good to know. A relief.” He had expected the worst. He was the gamesman’s equivalent of a hypochondriac. Ironically, however, Graver had the uneasy feeling that this time Westrate had a good reason to be worried, though he didn’t say that.
“But beginning in the morning we’re going to review his investigations-”
“Yeah, great, that’s good,” Westrate interrupted. “I wanted to cover that with you. Get a white paper to me, something I can pass on to Hertig, confirming there’s no way the intelligence file has been compromised by this stunt.”
Stunt? Jesus Christ.
“The thing is,” Westrate said, his mouth tight with determination, “not to let this get out of hand. Get on it; stay on it; get it out of the way.” He chopped the space between his beefy knees with a thick hand.
Graver didn’t say anything to that Westrate was so immersed in the profession of covering his ass that no form of reasoning that worked to any other end was capable of penetrating his myopic self-interest. He was a savvy player without question, but he lacked the ability to see the larger picture insofar as it extended beyond his own person. It was a modern failing, this inability to think in terms of anything that did not affect you personally, so, in this, Westrate was a product of his times. His own career was the largest concept in his intellectual inventory, and whatever affected that career was the most important thing in life. He was a hollow man. And he probably would realize all of his ambitions.
Graver looked away, toward the hallway floor just outside the double doors. A solitary lamp in the entrance hall was throwing a gleam across the polished hardwood floor like the trail of the moon on water. There was more than just an air of desperation in Westrate’s manner and that made Graver cautious. Suspicious and cautious. He reached over to his desk and got a notepad off the top along with his old green fountain pen. He unscrewed the cap from the pen and made a few notes on the tablet, only doodles, but Westrate couldn’t see that. He took his time, underlined a few things.
“Let’s just talk worse case, here,” Graver said, looking up. “How are you going to handle this if it’s a homicide?”
Westrate’s face changed from sober to grim at this question. He clearly had been thinking about this.
“Nobody gets into the file,” he said. “Not without written and verbal approval from me.”
Westrate was no clumsy buffoon despite his streetwise, bully-boy manner. The man could play power politics with as much sophistication as the best of them, which was precisely why he was sitting here now. Inside maneuvering was as second nature to him as his bluster. But even though Graver disliked him, he had to admit sympathy with Westrate’s situation. He was going to have to make some decisions for which there were no clear precedents, an agonizing position for a bureaucrat. Tisler’s death was going to require a criminal inquiry and,
