naturally, the investigations he was involved in would be central to the inquiry. And therein lay the problem.
Westrate had to consider not only how best to protect the integrity of the CID files, but he had an additional concern. As assistant chief in charge of Investigative Services, he was responsible not only for CID, but also for Homicide, Narcotics, Auto Theft, and the Crime Lab. Tisler’s death had put Westrate in the unenviable position of having his left hand (Homicide) investigate his right hand (CID), a situation which was made even worse by the fact that his right hand was the most secretive Division in the department and never opened its file to anyone.
So Graver asked the next sticky question. “What about IAD?”
Westrate shook his head slowly, emphatically. “I’m going to deal with that I’ve already talked with Hertig, before I came over here.”
No surprise there.
“Are you going to try to restrict them?”
“Damn right I am,” Westrate snapped, his eyes boring in belligerently as if Graver himself had challenged him. “Nobody wants to relive that shit in the seventies. I’m not going to have anything like that on my watch.”
“That was an altogether different situation, Jack. They were using the CID to compile dossiers on political enemies. It was stupid. They should have expected to have their files seized. They had nobody to blame but themselves.”
“That may be,” Westrate said. “But Lukens is going to have to climb over my dead goddamned body to get to that file.”
Graver capped his fountain pen. “That may be wrongheaded thinking,” he said.
Westrate looked at him. “What?”
Westrate was bowing his neck at this hint of anything less than total endorsement.
“Come on, Jack. An intelligence officer’s death complicates the question of confidentiality,” Graver said. “We can’t very well refuse to turn over material evidence. I think we can argue for some editing of what they see, but I don’t know how we can refuse to let them see anything.”
“If Tordella determines this is a suicide, that’s great, best case,” Westrate said evasively. “No formal investigation. I’ll handle the administrative wars… you memorize Arthur Tisler.” He pointed the two index fingers of his clasped hands at Graver. “If somebody throws a question at you about that guy, I want you to be able to answer it with documentation, if there is any. I don’t want anybody to know anything about Arthur Tisler that you don’t already know about Arthur Tisler.”
Westrate was still sitting forward, the soles of his shoes planted flat on the floor, his forearms anchored to his knees, the shoulders of his suit hunched and rumpled, a physical reflection of his emotional disconcertion-and determination. The lighting in the living room was not all that good, but Graver clearly could see the moisture glistening on Westrate’s contentious upper lip. A lot was at stake, careers, and at least one man’s entire psychology. It seemed that Westrate was convinced-or knew-that a scandal was about to break. He seemed to be developing a siege mentality, to be taking his concern way beyond a prudent anticipation of events.
“Why did you come to me like this?” Graver asked after a moment. “You could have told me all this in the morning.”
“Okay,” Westrate said. “Fair enough.” He laced the fingers of both hands together and clenched them until the knuckles turned white. “We got a break with those turds shooting each other in Kashmere Gardens. That was an incredible piece of luck. I want to hold on to that” He raised a forefinger and wagged it slowly. “Insiders are going to know that we’ve got to be investigating this. SOP. But what I want to avoid is the suspicion that there’s something more than routine shit going on here. I hope to hell-I pray-that you find out that Tisler was up to his nostrils in gambling debts, or that he was a closet queer, or that he was a pedophile and was diddling half the four-year-olds in Harris County. But the last thing I want to discover is that he was dicking around with the intelligence file. I want his sin to be personal, not professional.”
Westrate was on the edge of the chair now, his stomach and pugnacious, tight-lipped face thrust forward, on the attack.
“The thing is,” he said, “I don’t want to give the impression that we’re afraid that it might be professional. I don’t want anybody to see me go into your office, and I don’t want anybody to see you go into mine. From now on we communicate only by secure telephone. Or, we meet like this, face to face, somewhere we know we won’t be seen. I don’t want the staff, yours or mine, to see us putting our heads together. I don’t want any scuttlebutt I don’t want any leaks. That’s how the press gets on to something like this. Some little tight-butted secretary, some damn daydreaming file clerk, sees shit and reports it I don’t want the internal rumor mill to feed on this. And I’ve already made this clear to Katz, too.”
Graver imagined that Westrate had been all over Katz, badgering him mercilessly to do this, to avoid that He very definitely had worked up a lather over this. Graver couldn’t make up his mind whether Westrate’s paranoia was routine theatrics or whether he was hiding something that Graver should have been smart enough to pick up on. The truth was, if Westrate was trying to maneuver him because of one of his innumerable hidden agendas, there simply was no way Graver could see it coming. Not at this point, anyway.
Westrate stood. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “Listen, Graver, I want you all over this. Any doubts, any questions, anything doesn’t look right, doesn’t add up, you get to me quick.” He opened his eyes wide. “Understand?’’
“I think I do.” Graver said.
Westrate gave a snappy nod as if to say good, then we understand each other and that is that. He wheeled around and headed out of the living room like a wild boar, on to other business. In a few seconds he was at the front door, pulling it open. “Call me,” he said without looking around and walked out.
Graver closed the door behind him and waited in the darkened entry hall, looking at the broken glow from the porch light as it came in through the refractions of the beveled glass on the door. He waited until the headlights of Westrate’s car came on and then watched as they moved slowly and crookedly away from the curb and disappeared obliquely skyward down the street.
Chapter 7
“I don’t much like the idea of you watching,” she said, looking out the car window down the little lane of trees which still glistened from the passing rain. The lane, too, was glittery from the shower earlier in the evening and an occasional wisp of steam broke loose from the pavement and hovered momentarily under the glow of the lamps before it rose slowly and joined the darkness.
“I want to see this,” Kalatis said. “Don’t think about me. Just do what you do.”
The woman was in her early forties with roan hair which she wore pulled back loosely and gathered behind her head. She was well built, having a figure that was not lean but which she kept much younger than its years by a lot of sweat and a grim determination to do battle without quarter against gravity and failing elasticity. Determination had marked her life. Her will was lapideous. Her ability to concentrate was singular. Her nerve was inflexible.
Panos Kalatis liked to use her because, over the years, she had learned to be afraid. The accumulating years had done that to her. That which constant threat had not been able to instill in her when she was younger, when he first had met her in Trieste, the creep of days passing one into the other, month into month, year into year, had accomplished with nothing more threatening than the moving hand of a clock. Diminishing time, the slow inevitable shrinking of it, had made her less rash. Life, which had been nothing to her in the past, acquired a looming significance. She still was deliberate, but the motivation now involved an equation of self-preservation. Kalatis liked to see her afraid. Thirty, even twenty years earlier, simply watching her walk across the street used to make the hair prickle on the back of his neck. Today her silent menopausal body had done what neither gun nor knife nor poison had done in her youth: it had taught her to fear, and her fear, though she kept it hidden, unacknowledged, had unmasked her mythology. She still was death, but now she was death of another sort.
He looked at her. She wore a bone-white silk blouse with long sleeves and a straight black dress. The flesh visible above the first button of her blouse was as white as the silk. He had not seen her breasts in fifteen years, and he wondered about them. So different from Jael’s… in every way.
“I don’t like it,” she said again.
These few-two, maybe three jobs-would be her last for him. He thought she had just about outlived her
