the rest rooms, and it was occupied by a young man in his twenties, a post-modern boulevardier with an attitude. He wore his black hair in a ponytail and was dressed in a fashionably baggy tan suit with a black shirt buttoned at the neck, no tie. When he saw that Graver was waiting, he turned his back and kept talking. He was telling the person on the other end that he and a friend were going to a few clubs after dinner and why didn’t she catch up with them at Tocino’s at ten-thirty. Oh. Why? Well, tell him something. Tell him you’ve got a girlfriend who’s sick, throwing up all over the place, and you have to go see about her. What? Well, tell him…
Graver took out his shield, opened it, reached over the man’s shoulder, and dangled it in front of his face.
“Give me five minutes,” he said. The young man flinched and turned around slowly, his eyes fixed in cautious surprise. “Tell her you’ll call her back in five minutes. It’ll give her time to think of something.”
The young man did as he was told, then pressed down the hook with one hand, and gave the receiver to Graver. “Jesus,” he said with mocking respect, his machismo requiring some kind of disparagement to cover his loss.
“Thanks,” Graver said.
Neuman answered on the first ring.
“Everything all right?” Graver asked.
“Oh, sure… I just need to see you for a few minutes.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m just finishing a hamburger at a diner called Sid’s, off Montrose.”
“I know where it is. I’m not far away. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
When Graver got to the diner, Neuman was sitting in his car in front where he had parked to one side under an old mimosa. Graver pulled up beside him, and Neuman got out of his car.
“The place was too small to talk inside,” Neuman explained through Graver’s window.
Graver came around and each of them leaned against their cars. Though the night was clear, the air was damp, and heavy with the sweetness of the honeysuckle that grew in great clumps, frothy white with blossoms, against a board fence that disappeared around behind the diner.
“What’s on your mind?” Graver asked.
Neuman was holding his car keys and jangled them gently as if to get himself started.
“Well, first of all I checked out Tisler,” he said. “Thoroughly. Went after hidden income possibilities, real property-he’s got a little rent house in Sharpstown. Had it a couple of years. Paid minimum down, fifteen-year mortgage, and he’s plunking away monthly payments. I checked business involvements, savings accounts, all the banking possibilities. Nothing. Toys: vehicle and boat registrations. Nothing. I did all this in Peggy’s name too. And in Art’s middle name, Sydney. And in her maiden name, Mays. Nothing. If he had an extra income he wasn’t stupid about taking care of it I don’t know how far you want me to go with this. Background checks next? Whatever.”
Graver started to speak, but Neuman went on.
“But that’s not why I wanted to talk to you.”
Graver waited.
“I hope this isn’t out of school… or… out of line.” Neuman shifted his weight from one leg to the other. He had left his jacket and tie in the car and his shirt was wrinkled the way shirts get after long days squirming in chairs in front of computers, rummaging through files, sitting and standing, sitting and standing. “This, uh, I guess this falls into the ‘it-seemed-odd-at-the-time-but…’ category, for what it’s worth.”
Neuman’s nervousness was uncomfortably reminiscent of Paula’s behavior earlier. Graver sensed the chill of foreboding. Neuman jangled his keys and then plunged in.
“I think there may be something… irregular… about the way Art and Dean were working their investigations,” he said.
Graver’s stomach clinched. He couldn’t even imagine what he was about to hear, but as of that moment he accepted as fact what had been only a premonition up until then: the surprise he was about to hear would be the rule, not the exception, regarding whatever the events that precipitated Tisler’s death would come to be called. Whether it would be known in retrospect as a scandal, or an affair, or an ordeal, it was clear to Graver at this moment that he was involved in something that was going to cause an uproar. He was as sure of it as if he were looking back from five years in the future.
“I haven’t read the Seldon documents,” Neuman went on, “but I’d like to. Dean’s been helping me develop the Darley investigation, that protection racket stuff. In the past month it’s been moving fast, very fast, and Dean’s been pushing me to move quicker, collect a wider variety of information, move, move, move… I’ve been chasing the damn ball from one side of the court to the other, just barely keeping up. But at the same time Art’s Seldon operation has been really cooking too, and sometimes Art and I were in and out of Dean’s office on a revolving-door basis. Documents flying back and forth, stuff breaking that couldn’t wait. We got a little sloppy, I guess, leaving raw data notes, report drafts, stuff like that, on each other’s desks instead of hand-to-hand delivery… not being too careful, or careful enough, anyway.”
Neuman paused and swallowed, a shake of the keys.
“About a month, no, three weeks ago, I was working through the lunch hour to complete a report before I had to leave for a one-thirty meeting with an informant Dean had my folder on that particular informant and was writing up notes for me, things he wanted me to watch for, things he wanted me to get if I could. I was actually meeting two informants that day, and Dean said he’d leave the contributor folders for both of them, along with his notes for me, on his desk. He was hurrying out to meet his wife for lunch.
“When I was finished, I ran across the hall to his office. His desk was a mess. I grabbed the two folders and took them back to my office. I flipped open the first one, read his notes, flipped open the second one. The documents were out of order. The most recent reports should have been at the front, Dean’s notes on top. Instead, it was all scrambled. I leafed through the typed reports and found Dean’s handwritten notes buried almost at the back. But when I started reading them, they didn’t make sense. I didn’t recognize anything. In fact these were not pre-interview notes at all, but a post-interview contributor contact report It didn’t take me but a second to realize that what I had was a Seldon case document.”
“Then it was Art’s handwriting, not Dean’s.”
“No. It was Dean’s handwriting.”
“What? You’re sure?”
“Positive. I see it every day.”
“Was the typed report in the folder with it?”
“No,” Neuman said. “It wasn’t.” His voice was flat, and he actually had to clear his throat, a gesture that made Graver heartsick. “That’s the deal. At the top right-hand corner of the first page Dean had written in the date, underlined it and circled it This was on… a Thursday. The report was dated for Friday-of the next week.”
“You’re sure?” Graver asked again. He had to. It was hard to believe that Neuman wasn’t making a mistake. His heart was pounding.
“Oh, yeah. I had a calendar right there, and I checked. I kept reading. There were references to events that ‘had’ occurred on the Tuesday and Wednesday of the coming week-I checked those dates too. The whole thing was written in the past tense, as if the events had already happened.”
“Incredible,” Graver said.
“Yeah.” Neuman nodded, looking at him. “Pretty wild.”
Graver looked away. An occasional car had passed by on the street while they were standing there, and as his eyes took notice of yet another one, he realized that it was at that moment accelerating. Had it been stopped across from them? Had it only slowed? Was it something he should have noticed? He turned back to Neuman.
“So what did you do?”
“I, uh, I quickly looked at the other documents in the folder. It was in my folder all right, my CI. This thing had just gotten in there by accident.”
Neuman shook his keys. Graver could tell that he was pained by having to come out with this.
“I took the folder and ran back to Dean’s office,” Neuman continued, after taking a deep breath. “I picked through the pile of papers and folders there, trying not to disturb them. I played a hunch and went to the bottom, and sure enough I found another contributor contact folder. There was a two-digit difference in the contributor control number between this folder and mine. A transposition. It was a Seldon case folder. I found Dean’s handwritten notes to me about my CI inside the folder, right on top where I’d expected to find it I switched the
