handwritten pages to their proper folder, put the Seldon folder back on the bottom of the pile where I’d found it and got the hell out of there.”
“Afterward,” Graver asked, “did Dean ever indicate to you that he suspected something might have been disturbed?”
“No. It was just dumb luck that I realized what had happened and that I actually found the Seldon contributor folder at the bottom of the pile. But then, I guess that accounts for Dean’s misplacement of his notes in the first place.”
Graver stared past Neuman to the diner. It was a bare minimum eatery, mostly a counter with stools and a few tables next to the windows that faced the street Inside, a waitress was wiping off the counter. She stopped to adjust a hairpin and then went back to wiping the counter. The only other person in the place was an old man with a bulbous nose sitting at a window table holding a newspaper in his hands. But he wasn’t reading it He was staring out the window, daydreaming, his eyes fixed on the night.
Graver shifted his eyes back to Neuman. “You’ve had plenty of time to think about this,” he said. “What do you make of it?”
Neuman was quick to shake his head. “I don’t know. I don’t understand it I don’t know how Dean works his other cases, the tricks he uses to develop them. I’ve still got a lot to learn.” He paused. “But… uh, I don’t… I haven’t been able to put together a scenario that could explain what he was doing. I don’t know what he was doing.”
“Yes,” Graver said, “you do.”
Neuman was embarrassed, a little flustered. The keys jangled again. Graver stared at him.
“Looks like he was fabricating a contact report,” Neuman said.
“Yeah”-Graver nodded-”that’s what it looks like.”
Casey Neuman didn’t say anything, and as they stood there at the edge of the light from the diner windows Graver realized that he wasn’t going to say anything.
“Okay, Casey,” Graver said. He knew exactly what he was going to do. “You’re going to get your feet wet here, in a major way.”
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.
Chapter 19
Half an hour later Graver pulled up in front of his house. Looking at it through the windshield he thought the place looked particularly dreary in the darkness. He never left a light on for himself, even when he knew he was going to be working late, and he never had gotten one of those little timers at the hardware store even though he had been meaning to for months. He just didn’t think of it except at moments like this when he would like to have seen a light inside, even if it had to be one that he had turned on himself.
The headlights of his car panned across the lawn as he turned into the cinder drive that was two cars wide and extended all the way back to the garage and the brick courtyard at the rear of the house. The instant they squared on the garage’s closed doors, they also picked up the glint from the chrome bumper of a car that had pulled around back into the courtyard.
Graver cut his headlights and stopped. Neuman or Paula would have parked in front. Slowly he eased the car along the cinder drive until he was even with the side of the house. If anyone was inside and hadn’t already seen him, they wouldn’t see his car sitting in the drive if they looked out the front windows.
Cutting the motor, he opened the car door and stepped out onto the cinder drive and eased the door closed until the latch clicked softly. He took a deep breath of the darkness which was heavy with the combined fragrances of the blossoming mock oranges and the huisache that grew against the rock wall on the other side of the car. For some reason his mind recalled the image of the spent flowers, yellow and white, which would cover the drive in a few weeks as the last of the blossoms retreated in the face of the scorching July temperatures. He reached back for his Sig-Sauer in its holster at his waist It was something he hadn’t done in a dozen years except when he had to
