qualify at the firing range.
Holding the gun down at his side he eased along the cinder drive until he approached the back corner and the small Mercedes came into full view. He noted the license plate. He stood silently and scanned the night yard, hoping his eyes would quickly adjust to the varieties of darkness and shadows. The pool. The palmettos. The wrought-iron patio furniture. The bulky trunks of the oaks. He smelled cigarette smoke. Back to the pool.
Jesus.
His heart lurched at the realization that someone was sitting in one of the wrought-iron chairs on the patio at the near end of the pool. It was a man, staring straight across at him. Graver assumed the man had seen his car lights as he came into the drive, though he didn’t know whether he could yet see Graver at the corner of the house.
“Graver. Is that you over there? I saw your headlights.”
It was Victor Last. Graver was both relieved and furious. He always had kept his private life private, and especially from informants. It was bad business to let them know anything at all about your personal life. Maybe Graver had treated Last a little differently in this regard, but even so, showing up like this was clearly out of line. Or maybe Last himself saw it differently now that Graver was living alone.
He scanned the yard one more time, though feeling pessimistic about his chances of spotting anyone else who might have been there. He returned the Sig-Sauer to its holster and stepped out from around the corner and started across the courtyard to the pool.
“What the hell are you doing here, Last?” Graver asked, trying to control his voice.
“I heard from Carney within five minutes of your call,” Last said. “She said you’d be home in half an hour and that you wanted to see me as soon as possible. I thought I could save some time.”
Last said this in a most natural manner, as though he hadn’t the slightest idea that Graver might have objected to his showing up at his home.
Graver sat down in one of the wrought-iron chairs across the table from Last The night was not overcast so the city lights did not provide a reflective glow by which Graver could see Last’s face. He did not like this. Last was much better at masking his voice than his facial changes. As far as Graver could tell, he was dressed much as the night before. Graver put his forearms on the wrought-iron table. The water in the pool was still and silent, the surface occasionally catching a glint of light as though it were a tightly stretched sheet of clear cellophane.
“I want to hear more about what you alluded to the other night,” Graver said.
“Oh?” Last’s head was motionless, alert. “I see.”
“Don’t jump to any conclusions,” Graver said. “Did you expect me to let that go?”
“I hoped not,” Last said, a touch of a smirk in his voice.
“What is it you need, Victor?”
“I find myself a little short just now,” he said, resting an elbow on the edge of the table, the cigarette in the air. “I’d like to reestablish our former relationship.”
“Same as before?”
“Well… not quite. I’m very short, actually.”
“How much?”
“Double.”
Graver looked at Last’s silhouette. His voice was very firm on this. He was sure of himself.
“Victor, I couldn’t give you that if you had proof the mayor was a pedophile. It’s not a matter of bargaining. It’s a matter of empty purses up there. We just don’t have it At the time we were working together you were the highest-paid person we had. I can’t do it.”
“Come on, Graver,” Last scoffed gently. “That was eight years ago. Doubling it is not really like doubling it, for Christ’s sake. Inflation. Cost of living. The bloody economy, all that Even if you paid me the same rate it would be more.”
“I can’t do it.”
Silence. Last smoked his cigarette.
“I can give you twenty percent more,” Graver said. “That would put you at the top again.”
“I’m flattered,” Last said dryly.
“That’s all I can do. I’m sorry.” Pause. “But I won’t pay even that if your information’s no good.”
“Okay, fine. When can you pay me?”
“Let me hear your story.”
Last was still again. The cigarette’s ember moved from the table to his face and there was a brief, rosy glow as he sucked on it and fleetingly lighted his upper cheeks and eyes. Then he was back in the dark.
“You’re a gentleman, Graver. I’ll trust you on that.”
Graver was relieved. He knew that Last trusted him, that wasn’t it. It was the fact that Last didn’t hold out for bigger money. If his information had been stunning, he would have. What Graver might have here was a good lead. It wasn’t going to be something that was going to knock him out of his chair.
“Okay,” Last said. He dropped his cigarette on the tile under the table and put his shoe on it. He dropped his arms to the arms of the chair, relaxed. When he began talking, his voice was mellow, soft, unhurried.
“I started to tell you last night about going to a party at this fellow’s house here in Houston-”
“What was his name?” Graver interrupted.
“I’ll get to that,” Last said, unperturbed. “This man and his wife had a very strange house. Ugly, actually. Modern. One level, spare design, glass rooms around a series of atria. Kind of modular and rambly, if you can imagine. Odd. There were a lot of people, but it wasn’t a raucous affair. It was a talking party. A little combo doing soft, white noise stuff and people standing around in clutches holding drinks. Yuppie sorts. New Age sorts. And the ever-present business sorts.
“At one point in the evening the lady who accompanied me to the party went to the loo. When she came back she was all atitter. Seems the loo was rather vulnerable visually, to an outside courtyard. The toilet was actually out in the open in the bedroom-so was the shower-and the only privacy was provided by the thick foliage surrounding the bedroom. No privacy in the room itself, so that you pissed away right there in front of all the other ladies who might wander in to check their hair, or cosmetics, or whatever. She, of course, didn’t trust the density of the foliage on the other side of the glass walls. She said there was another bedroom around the corner, and a woman she met in this first bedroom said the arrangement was similar. My lady friend asked this woman if she’d been here before, and she said, oh, yes. And my friend asked what about peepers. The lady laughed and said, no it wasn’t at all what it seemed. No one could see in because of garden walls and all that. That was part of the intent in the architectural design. To make one feel that one was living au naturel.
“I decided to check it out The place had a kind of honeycomb arrangement, rooms and atria interconnected. You could be in one glass room and look across one of the several atria to the next glass room. Glass and mirrored hallways connected these sort of modules.
“Anyway, after a while I slipped outside for a smoke. Everyone was inside, of course, addicted to the air- conditioning, not wanting to muss themselves with the humidity. I didn’t know but what there might be someone outside, so I was very casual about it, lighting a cigarette right away so as to be able to explain myself if I needed to.
“Of course, it turned out that the visual security of this place was not at all what this woman had believed, not once you were inside the garden walls, which you achieved by simply coming inside the house and then going outside. Each of these eccentric bedrooms was indeed enclosed in its own small, high-walled courtyard, and stuffed with plants, palms and such. But, each courtyard also had outside the wall a small, unobtrusive ledge built along the footing of the wall. If you stepped onto the ledge you could look over the wall and see everything inside. There were also hose bibs there, and a watering hose, the ostensible purpose, I’m sure, for the ledge being there.”
Last stopped and lighted another cigarette. He smoked a moment.
“The house was roughly the shape of a hexagon or octagon or something, you know, roundish but having straight walls. I stayed well out of the light in the irregular lawn interrupted by shrubbery. Came to the first bedroom. Stepped up on the ledge and looked over. Sure enough, laughably, a woman perched on the potty, her dress gathered up around her, looking rather defiantly, I thought, straight out the glass wall at me. I ducked reflexively and then came back up and saw her still there, still staring at me, her feet splayed, her hands resting in her lap and holding a bunch of tissue. She couldn’t see me at all, even if I’d raised my hands and waved at her. I think the glass walls were coated somehow, to make the outside more opaque. I watched her finish, dry herself,
