Synar, tell them she moved away a long time ago. I said, What? He said, somebody might call you about her, just tell them she moved away and that’s all you know. That pissed me a little. I didn’t say he could do that, give my number to somebody. He didn’t explain any more than that. I was pissed, but I didn’t say anything else. I was afraid of losing my situation. At that time the money was already coming in big-time. I’d never had anything like that before. I didn’t want to lose it. I worried about it a long time, was scared every time the phone rang. But when nobody ever called I forgot about it… until she called,” she said, nodding at Paula.
“When you want to get in touch with Don, how do you do it?” Graver was leaning back against the headboard of the bed. His tie was undone.
“Telephone number. I call it, leave a message, he calls me back. The number changes every four or five weeks.”
“What’s the number?” Neuman asked.
“Forget it,” she said. “I called him yesterday and the thing’s dead. And I haven’t heard from him.”
“Do you think Don has other people like you, buying information from several sources?”
“Oh, sure he does. He told me. In so many words, anyway.”
“How many other people do you think there are?”
“No idea. He just said this was a big operation. And he had this system down pretty good. Rules. Sometimes when we meet he says something like, well, he’d better get going and run his ‘other’ traps. Gives me the impression I’m not the only one he’s feeding money to and collecting information from.” She thought a moment “To tell you the truth, sometimes I think there might be other people like Don, too. You know, working for this ‘client’”
“Have you ever heard of the name Panos Kalatis?” Graver asked.
She shook her head. “No, I think I’d remember that one.”
“Have you ever heard Don speak of a Greek guy?”
“Greek?” She frowned then shook her head again. “No Greek.”
They talked to Valerie Heath for more than an hour. Twice Lara went downstairs to get her more coffee and once Heath had to stop to go to the bathroom. Though Lara said nothing during all this, Paula, Neuman, and Graver went over and over the information, approaching it from different angles, rephrasing her answers into new questions that put a slightly different perspective on the subject Heath’s responses never wavered, and she responded as candidly as she had thrown off the sheets in front of Neuman and Graver. It seemed that having once decided to give it all up, she did so without reservation. At times it even seemed to Graver that she was oddly relieved to do it. And he noticed, too, that she was responding to the very human emotion of being flattered to be the center of attention.
“If we needed to talk to Don,” Graver said, “how would we get in touch with him?” As he asked this, he took Bruce Sheck’s contributor ID record out of a manila folder and held his picture up in front of her.
“Damned if I know,” she said. “Just that phone number.” Her eyes went to the photograph. She stared at it Slowly her expression changed. “Well, I’ll be damned.” She started nodding slowly, a smile almost forming on her mouth. “That’s him. That’s ol’ Don C. himself.”
Chapter 48
Graver was walking around the kitchen with his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows pulling sandwich meat and cheese out of the refrigerator, pickles and olives and onions out of the pantry, bread from the bread box, handing a knife to Neuman and indicating to him to start slicing. He was talking to Paula who was sitting at the table taking notes.
“I want you to drain every little detail out of her,” he was saying. “What companies these people were in; what were their exact positions; what kind of data they were providing; what kinds of businesses Don wanted information from; what kinds of information; the names of the firms this computer hacker pulled information from; who was his shift supervisor-the supervisor was probably being paid off since he had to know the hacker wasn’t cleaning offices. Everything you can think of that could help us later when we start piecing this together.”
He took another knife out of the holder on the cabinet and started slicing the onion.
“All in all it wasn’t a bad call,” Graver said. “She did put Sheck in place for us, and there’s a load of detail to be mined from those sources in each of those five companies.”
“Sheck’s going to be harder to get our hands on than Valerie was,” Neuman said, stacking the bread slices on a plate. “It seems to me he’s a pretty savvy operator, an old hand at this sort of thing.”
“I think you’re right” Graver finished the onion and started slicing tomatoes. “He has all the earmarks of a professional. Heath even used the term ‘running’ for Sheck’s handling of his sources. She got that from him. The guy’s got an intelligence background. And that brings us to Kalatis. This guy belongs to Kalatis.”
“With Mossad? He sounds American to me.”
“I don’t think it makes any difference anymore,” Graver said. He was frustrated and angry. “Boundaries are disappearing everywhere. For people like this, loyalties don’t have anything to do with where you’re born or where you live or with family or homeland. Their loyalties don’t operate under flags. They put their lives on the line for international monetary units: the dollar, the deutsche mark, the pound, the yen.”
He put the slices of onions and tomatoes on a large platter with pickles and olives, but left the cold cuts in the brown butcher’s paper the way Lara had brought them from the grocery.
“The problem is,” he said, “we haven’t made a hell of a lot of progress on the big picture here.” He opened a sack of potato chips and a sack of corn chips and then went to the refrigerator again and took out a bottle each of mayonnaise and mustard. “You guys want regular mustard or that other, the spicy kind?”
“Regular,” Neuman said.
“Spicy,” Paula said.
Graver put them both on the cabinet.
“There’s beer and soft drinks in the refrigerator,” he said and started putting together a sandwich while Paula began clearing the table of its collection of notepads and Heath’s assortment of forged identities. When Graver finished the sandwich, he cut it in half diagonally, put it on a plate with both kinds of chips and some olives, and got a beer from the refrigerator. He opened it, put the plate and the beer on a tray with a napkin and walked out of the kitchen.
They were sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed like a couple of schoolgirls, the cards between them.
“Jesus Christ!” Valerie said, walling her eyes from beneath her shock of parched, black hair. “Look at the butler, will ya. You make that yourself?”
“Yeah,” Graver said, putting the tray down on the floor beside Lara.
“Thanks,” Lara said.
“You don’t have a wife?” Heath asked. “You divorced or what?”
“You sure you don’t want something?” he asked her.
“Well… not a sandwich.” She grinned, running her eyes over him.
Graver walked out of the room and looked at his watch. Arnette had called well over an hour ago. Something should have happened by now. As he passed his bedroom he glanced in the open door and stopped. He stepped inside. His bed had been made and Lara’s off-white linen suit was spread out on it. An open suitcase was on the other side of the bed. He walked over and looked in the suitcase. There were slips, a couple of silk blouses. Lingerie. The cups of the bras tucked into each other, the panties folded once. There was the familiar fragrance of fading perfume that lingered in women’s suitcases, even when they were empty. He walked to Dore’s closet and opened the door. There were three dresses hanging there, isolated in the empty space that echoed even in the silence. He closed the door and walked back into the bedroom, pausing once again at the opened suitcase. He stared at the lingerie and resisted an impulse to reach down and touch the lace on the upper parts of the bras, the slippery silk. He turned away and quickly walked out of the room.
Downstairs Paula and Neuman were sitting at the kitchen table eating and talking, a steno pad and ballpoint pen lying beside Neuman’s plate. Graver went to the cabinet and started making a sandwich for himself.
“Okay, let me run this by you,” Neuman said, wiping his mouth with a napkin and picking up the pen as he leaned over his notes. “Sheck is somewhere higher up in the chain for whoever’s buying the information. It’s a
