They do a search party. It takes most of the afternoon, but they finally find Besom’s body washed way down the beach, fully dressed, still in his waders. He was chewed up some. The fish had been at him a little. But not a lot It hadn’t been that long.”
“He had his ID with him?”
“No, no ID, but the old man remembered that Besom said he was from Houston and was staying in a ‘motel’ in Brownsville. They start checking it out, calling the motels. In the meantime the Brownsville ME does an autopsy. Heart failure, drowning. They finally locate the motel, get in, find out from his things he’s with HPD and call us.”
Westrate was leaning back in his chair now, his arms up, his thick, hairy hands gripping the high back of the seat above his head. He was staring at Graver, his long upper lip taut and challenging.
“What do you know about the Brownsville ME?” Graver asked. “Is he reliable?”
“How the shit would I know?”
“Did Besom have a history of heart trouble?”
“God, I hope so.”
“What about IAD?”
Westrate nodded. “I talked to Katz just a little while ago. Pio Tordella and his partner-and Bricker and Petersen-are driving down there tonight, right now.”
“Who knows about it?”
“Everybody. The Brownsville police didn’t know what this was. Goddamned border town hicks. So when the local news says it wants to go along, they say sure, fine. They filmed the whole thing. Besom’s wife already knows, but we got the news people to hold off on the ID anyway pending notification of the family. But it’ll be on the news tomorrow night.”
He was still staring at Graver, almost in an accusatory manner as if he was waiting for Graver to justify what was happening.
“He needs to be reautopsied back here,” Graver said.
“Yeah, that’s what Katz wants too.” Westrate’s face hadn’t lost any of its tension in the telling of the story. He still looked as if he was going to explode. “You’ve already written the paper closing out Tisler?”
“I’ll finish it tonight.” From Westrate’s expression Graver guessed someone had already suggested there was a smell of fish here. “The second autopsy is critical.”
Westrate was still looking at him as he dropped his arms down and rested them on his desk. His forehead was oily. He looked like he’d been hot for a long time.
“Listen,” he said grimly, “I don’t care what the autopsy shows, this is too damned coincidental for me.”
Graver agreed with him, but he didn’t say so. He could hardly keep his thoughts on what Westrate was saying. He needed to get to Kepner. When Dean Burtell heard about this he was going to do something. Whatever was happening here, it didn’t look good for Burtell.
“You don’t believe it was a heart attack,” Graver said, trying to think in two directions at once.
Westrate’s eyes widened slightly as he tilted his head downward until he was again glowering at Graver from under his woolly eyebrows.
“Heart attack.” His voice was a mixture of anger and disdain. He was looking over his clasped hands, his two meaty fists gripping each other so tightly that Graver imagined them suddenly bursting and squirting all over the desk like tomatoes. “I don’t care if we find a living, breathing witness to Tisler’s suicide and the guy swears on a Bible that Tisler shot himself. I don’t care if we find a witness who saw Ray Besom fishing, saw him suddenly grabbing his chest and gasping and falling down in the goddamn water. I don’t care if we KNOW that’s exactly how they both died… it by God… looks… SUSPICIOUS!”
Dramatically jerking his head from side to side for emphasis as he spoke these last words, Westrate literally spewed spittle as he hissed “suspicious.” His face was as pink as a pistachio pod, and Graver could see even his scalp flushing through his thinning hair.
“HO-ly JE-sus!” Westrate exclaimed, falling back into his chair. Then suddenly he was up, jamming his hands into his pockets and stalking around his desk to the open door of his office where he stood looking out into the dark anteroom, jangling the change in his pockets.
Westrate’s histrionics were wasted on Graver, who could only think of Burtell and of how critical it was to be close to him now. He wished to God he had asked for taps the first time he spoke to Kepner. At that time Ginette would have been at work and, as it turned out, Burtell wouldn’t have been at home either. Kepner’s people would have had plenty of time. Graver looked at his watch. He had to get out of Westrate’s office.
“What do you want from me, Jack?” he asked.
Westrate didn’t answer immediately, but when he turned around Graver was disconcerted to see that his wrath had physically altered his features. His eyes were puffy, and pasty swags of flesh were forming beneath them; his cheeks, normally taut with obesity, now appeared swollen with a scattering of unhealthy, livid blotches. He unhurriedly closed the door to his office and came over and gave a quick jerk to the other chair in front of his desk and sat down in it facing Graver, his short log-like legs spread out.
“What do you think about all this?” he asked. His voice was uncharacteristically quiet, and for the first time ever Graver saw an expression on his face that conveyed, however slightly, a vague vulnerability.
Graver braced himself. He could see that Westrate was at his wit’s end, and he guessed the assistant chief was beginning to imagine, to see the foreshadowing of plots against him, against his career. What Westrate wanted was for Graver to say it first. He wanted to hear Graver say that something was wrong here.
“I think Tisler killed himself,” Graver said. “And I doubt if we’ll ever know why. And, until another autopsy proves otherwise, I’m going to assume Besom had a heart attack.”
Westrate’s face fell. “That’s it?”
“That’s what I think,” Graver said.
“These two deaths are exactly what they appear to be?” His voice rose with incredulity.
“I’ve got to think so in the absence of any evidence that indicates otherwise.”
“But just the fact that they died so close together… that doesn’t make you suspicious?”
“As a matter of fact it does…” Graver said.
Westrate’s eyebrows lifted in anticipation.
“…but I think we’ve got to be careful, Jack. I think we’ve got to be suspicious of our suspicions. It would be too damn easy to read something into these events that the facts don’t support” He paused and looked at Westrate. “You ever heard of ‘Occam’s razor’?”
Westrate stared at him.
“William of Occam was a fourteenth-century English philosopher who stated a kind of commonsense principle regarding lines of inquiry into the truth of a situation. It was stated in Latin, but translated it means: ‘Plurality must not be posited without necessity.’ A modern rendering might be, ‘An explanation of the facts should be no more complicated than necessary,’ or ‘Among competing hypotheses, favor the simplest one.’ Occam’s razor advocated cutting away all the unnecessary considerations that can clutter up a line of inquiry and sticking to the simplest theory consistent with the facts.”
Westrate’s expression portrayed a disgruntled impatience.
“I’ve got a lot of data that tells me Tisler committed suicide,” Graver elaborated. “The simplest explanation is that he did. I’ve got a lot of data that tells me Ray Besom had a heart attack. The simplest explanation, consistent with the facts, is that he did. So, unless we obtain other facts, facts that are inconsistent with the explanation, then the weight of my suppositions will have to fall with the simplest explanation.”
“Give me a break, Graver,” Westrate snapped, his small nostrils flaring with agitation at Graver’s professorial anecdote. “I’ve got four divisions to manage here.”
That sounded like a non sequitur to Graver. He wasn’t sure what Westrate meant, but it was clear he was sweating pearls over this. If he had suspicions that something was terribly wrong in CID, he sure as hell wasn’t going to say so now. He was too sly for that If he did express such a belief and it turned out that Besom did indeed have a heart attack, Westrate would end up sounding like a conspiracy theorist and an alarmist-one of my men kills himself, another one has a heart attack, ergo the CID is riddled by spys and cabalists. No, Westrate wasn’t going to risk that with anyone, especially not with Graver. But he believed it.
Once again the pager on Graver’s belt vibrated. Without looking down he turned it off.
“Is there something you want me to do?”
