An Absence of Light

Graver chatted with her and followed her through the twilight and out a back door into the dark again. Mona moved slowly and loved to talk, which she did with the same lack of urgency as she did everything else. Her speech was heavily accented, but markedly precise, each word a whole thing separated beautifully from its neighbor. Though she preferred the domestic role, Graver knew that Mona had a university education and was actually more widely read than Arnette. He always enjoyed her company and was fond of the sound of her voice, to which he now listened with pleasure as they entered an arbor covered with grapevines and walked the short distance to the next house. They entered another screened porch there and with a few words and another kiss, Mona left him to enter the back door to the house alone.

The large room that he stepped into presented a dramatic change. It was brightly lighted with half a dozen computer work stations sitting against the surrounding walls. Two of the stations were occupied by matronly women who appeared to be data input clerks. A third station, a more complex system with an oversized screen that was jumping with colors and what seemed to be a series of continuously changing graphs, was being operated by a young man with a ponytail and a General Custer mustache and goatee. He wore a black T-shirt with a brilliantly embroidered parrot on the back, khaki pants, and tennis shoes. His right leg was bouncing hectically as he slumped back in his chair and occasionally jabbed at the keyboard as he sipped coffee from a Styrofoam cup that, for some reason, had a bent paper clip laced through the side of it like an earring. In the center of the room Arnette sat at a long table with a blond girl who looked like a college student, too young to be doing this kind of thing, Graver thought.

“Hey, baby,” Arnette said, looking up as he came in. She and the college girl, who was wearing a headset with a thin wire microphone that curved around in front of her mouth, were poring over the contents of a pile of ring binders. Every once in a while the college girl, who was wearing a bandanna-patterned halter top and, Graver presumed, a pair of shorts under the table, would turn her head aside and speak sotto voce into the microphone which was attached to a large transmitter that occupied one end of the table. With her left hand, she would touch this or that dial lightly, without looking at it, almost without thinking, as though it was an old habit, fine-tuning whatever it was going into her head. The room hummed with the white noise of electronic equipment.

“You have the tapes?” Arnette asked, putting a pencil behind her ear and reaching out her hand.

Graver retrieved them from his coat pocket and handed them to her along with the piece of paper with the parameters.

Arnette looked at the parameter notations and then handed everything to the girl.

“Get Corkie,” she said. The girl hit a button on the receiver’s control panel and muttered something into the thin mouthpiece. ‘’There’s nothing to tell you,” Arnette said to Graver. “Apparently Ginette didn’t go to her office. Her car was home when my people got there about four o’clock. We called her office. She had called in sick that morning. But Dean didn’t show up there until half an hour ago.”

Graver looked at his watch.

“What time did he leave the office?” Arnette asked.

“Must’ve been around three or three-thirty.”

“Five hours out of pocket, more or less,” Arnette calculated.

Graver felt the chest-constricting frustration of having lost the first move, though at the time he hadn’t seen those few hours as especially critical. He had moved as quickly as he had thought prudent. But now prudence seemed less desirable than knowing where Burtell had been for those five hours.

A young Asian woman with a masculine haircut and wearing a man’s undershirt and lace, spandex leggings came out of the next room and walked up behind the blonde, who handed the two tapes back over her head without looking around. The Asian took the tapes, looked at Graver, and walked away. She was wearing a single, red plastic earring about the size of Graver’s thumb and in the shape of an erect penis, complete with dangling scrotum.

“Have any idea about these tapes?” Arnette asked.

“No. Could be his personal bookkeeping for all I know.”

“But you think no one else knows about the computer.”

“I don’t know.”

Arnette’s eyes rested on him a moment, and then she turned her head slightly toward the blonde, but without taking her eyes off Graver, and said, “Tell Corkie to verify the integrity of those tapes.”

The girl muttered again into the microphone.

“And if I were you, Marcus, I’d tap him. You’d better let us tap him. You don’t have that much time.”