cuffed her hands behind her as well and sat her on the sofa.
“He says there’s no one else here,” Graver said.
There was a sturdy rattan table and matching chairs to one side of the main room. A deck of cards was sitting on the table with a couple of empty beer bottles. Graver pulled out one of the chairs, turned it around, and told Ledet to sit down. Using another pair of handcuffs, Graver fastened one of Ledet’s ankles to the leg of the rattan table. It would at least keep him from bolting.
“Watch them,” he said, and walked through the house, three bedrooms, three baths, kitchen, dining room, wide hallways, all the windows opened to the bay breeze. When he got back to the main room everyone was in the same position as he had left them.
Graver pulled out another chair from the table where Ledet was sitting and sat down a few feet from him. The pilot was about Graver’s height, well built, no fat, and good muscle definition. He had black hair, a couple of days’ growth of beard, a straight narrow nose, and a suntan over an already swarthy complexion. He wore a very neat but full mustache. Graver studied him a minute. Ledet looked at him unflinchingly, but without belligerence. He was trying to figure it out.
“Where’s Eddie?” Graver asked.
“What’s the deal here?” Ledet ventured. “Who are you guys?”
“The deal is we want to talk to Eddie,” Graver said. He crossed his legs and crossed his forearms in his lap as he leaned forward slightly, the Sig-Sauer still in his hand.
“He’s on a trip.”
“Where?”
“Mexico, a charter job.”
“What’s he flying?”
“His little twin Beech.”
“You know that for sure.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Well, we drove by the hangar,” Graver said. “The Beechcraft’s still there.”
Ledet swallowed. “Well, that’s what he told me he was taking.”
“Did he tell you where he was going?”
“You mean where in Mexico? No, just a charter he said.”
“When will he get back?”
Ledet swallowed again. “He was supposed to be back today.”
“Supposed to be?”
“Yeah. I haven’t heard from him.”
“We checked with the Gulf Airport office. The Beechcraft hasn’t been flown in three days.”
Ledet shrugged quizzically.
Graver looked at the girl. “Is this his girl you were in bed with?”
Ledet frowned. “Eddie’s? Hell no.”
“Who is she?” Graver asked, as if the girl weren’t there.
“What, you mean her name?”
“That would be good to know, yeah.”
“Alice.”
“Just Alice?”
Ledet cut his eyes at her. “Uh… Alice…”
“Gifford,” the girl said.
“Oh, yeah,” Ledet said, remembering. “We just met last night… I didn’t remember…”
Graver nodded. He thought a moment “When did you leave Atlanta?”
Ledet’s face flickered with a newfound suspicion as he realized that this man knew where he lived.
“Yesterday,” Ledet said, studying Graver warily.
Graver had seen that look before, and it was not the expression he had hoped to see.
“This is actually very simple and straightforward,” Graver said, hoping to turn Ledet’s suspicions in another direction. “My code lines to Panos Kalatis are dead. I don’t know why they’re dead, but they are. I’m trying to get in touch with him. It’s a matter of extreme importance to me. To both of us. I want to use your code line to contact him.”
Ledet’s mouth went slack, and he swallowed again as his demeanor changed to that of a man sitting in the hot seat That was more in keeping with the reaction Graver had hoped for. But Ledet didn’t respond. He seemed at a loss for words, suddenly seeing himself surrounded by a minefield. Considering the work Ledet had been doing for the last decade, Graver assumed that he understood some of the unspoken rules of the game. In the last few moments it would have occurred to him that these two men had barged in without any regard for hiding their faces. That had professional implications. They might be police-the suspicion of which Graver wanted to dispel for the moment-or if they were at the other end of the spectrum it could be that they didn’t care if Ledet and Alice saw their faces because when they left they would not leave behind any witnesses. This latter possibility was the one clearly on Ledet’s mind at the moment.
But he was having a hard time formulating a response. Normally he would have done his “Kalatis who” routine, but if this guy had a telephone code… or even knew that the telephone codes existed, then that ploy was not likely to work. He would have to resort to something else.
“Then you’re out of luck,” Ledet said, “Way out of luck.”
“Oh?”
Ledet nodded. “Eddie’s the only one who has it That’s always been the way we’ve done it Just Eddie.”
“What about when you’re home?”
Ledet shook his head. “If there’s work, Eddie calls me. I never talk to the guy. Kalatis, I mean. It’s Eddie.”
“He calls you, Eddie does?”
“That’s right.”
“If he calls you, then you come and you do the job?”
“That’s right That’s how it works.”
“Then you must be expecting some work,” Graver said, motioning to Ledet with the Sig-Sauer. “Here you are.”
Ledet stared at Graver and reluctantly nodded.
“And what is it this time?”
Ledet shook his head. “I don’t know. Eddie calls me, says, Rick, we got work, and I fly over here. I don’t know what the work is until I get here and he tells me.”
“But you don’t know now.”
“No, I don’t, because I haven’t seen Eddie.”
“He wasn’t here when you got in yesterday.”
“Right, he wasn’t.”
This Graver did not believe. “But you do know that he’s on a charter to Mexico.”
“Yeah, right.”
“But you were wrong about him using the Beech-craft.”
“Well, yeah, I guess so. I mean, I only know what Eddie tells me. If he tells me the Beechcraft, then I think the Beechcraft What can I say? I can’t do anything about it if he changes his mind or… the plans change.”
Graver nodded, thinking. He unfolded his arms and his legs and stood, still nodding a little. Turning away he walked along the smear of light, through the doors into the kitchen, and out the shattered screen door to the veranda. He looked out across the bay, out to where the horizon grew hazy, and the water and the sky did not meet in a clean, sharp demarcation but formed a gray seamless distance. From the porch here, he could hear the seagulls. Here, the breeze coming off the water was much warmer, even hot, not yet having the advantage of coming through the shady coils of the house. And here, too, instead of the fragrance of gardenias there was the murky smell of Gulf brine. He turned around and went back through the kitchen into the main room.
He stopped beside the chair where he had been sitting and looked at Ledet and then at Neuman and Alice. Alice was petrified.
