He nodded, but he seemed preoccupied. All the failure that Rayner had predicted would come to him-because of his scheming with Kalatis-had arrived. They were through with him. He had served his purpose, and he wasn’t even sure what it had been. Still holding his coat, he walked out of the office.
Connie watched him leave. Through the open door of his office, she saw him walk through her office and into the reception room. She heard the receptionist speak to him, but he didn’t answer. She heard the soft ping of the door as he pushed it open and walked out into the hallway.
She stepped over to his desk, picked up the telephone, and called Rayner Faeber.
Chapter 66
They agreed to meet the two women in the parking garage of the Stouffer Hotel in Greenway Plaza. That was Rayner’s idea. Graver didn’t care where they met and considered himself lucky that she had hit Last’s pager when she had because the two men were just about to leave La Facezia’s and go their separate ways.
As they approached the top of the ramp on the level where they had agreed to meet, Last spotted their car.
“There they are,” he said. “The BMW.”
A large, midnight blue BMW sedan with deeply tinted windows was waiting in one of the parking spaces facing the outside of the garage, its nose up against the low barrier wall so that the occupants had a good view looking out of the shaded shelter to the northwest, toward the Galleria and the Transco Tower. The noon sun was baking the city, sending undulating heat waves out over the treetops and glinting here and there off glass and chrome.
Graver pulled up to the same wall, but parked several spaces away. As the two of them got out of the car and closed their doors, Last looked at him over the top of the car.
“Oh yeah. I said your name was Gray.”
“Gray?”
“Yeah. G-r-a-y.”
“Forget that. Don’t use a name at all,” Graver said, and they walked over to the BMW. Last motioned for him to get into the back seat behind the passenger while he walked around behind the car to the driver’s side. Graver waited until Last opened his door first and then followed his lead.
When they closed their doors, Graver found himself very close to two attractive women who were turned half around in their seats, looking at him intently with professionally cosmeticized faces. The BMW was purring softly, its air conditioner whispering a gentle current of chill air. These were women who did not believe that just because you were conspiring to extort millions of dollars you had to subject yourself to the tortures of sweating through your dress in a Houston parking garage. The air conditioner, therefore, was a necessity. Graver was grateful for it. The heavily padded interior was a cool, quiet world that smelled of secrets, of questionable intent, and of expensive perfume.
“Rayner,” Last said, indicating the strawberry blonde in front of him. “And Connie,” he said, indicating the woman in front of Graver. “This is the man I was telling you about,” he said to the women.
They both nodded and said hello. Rayner looked at Graver as though she might have thought he was a professional killer, an assessment which she seemed to find pretty damn interesting. She was probably in her early forties, full-bodied, and wearing a dress that accommodated the white, liquidy cleavage Last had so precisely described. She was indeed a pretty woman, and Graver could see why Last had had no trouble seeing things from her point of view. She wore a collection of diamonds on one hand and an emerald cabochon on the other. She kept wanting to smile, but never quite managed to do it.
Connie was considerably more professional. In her early thirties, she was stylishly thin with frosted shoulder-length hair. She wore a double-breasted, black and white business suit, and her hazel eyes drilled into Graver as though she fully intended to see the bullshit in him before he even opened his mouth and revealed it himself.
“You said you had gotten some telephone numbers from Faeber,” Last said, looking at Connie.
She hesitated, her eyes still on Graver.
“Wait a minute,” Graver said. “I think I should set a few things straight first, so that we understand our situation more clearly.” He looked back and forth between the two women. “Victor has told me that you might have a certain amount of access to a man named Panos Kalatis through Colin Faeber. I have business with Kalatis. For various reasons I’ve lost contact with him. I don’t know anything about your intended business, and all you know about mine is that I want access to Kalatis-and that’s all you need to know. But given that, I’m here to see if there’s some way we might be able to help each other.”
When he finished that brief statement, both women were looking at him with wide-eyed absorption. They were silent.
“I told him about the telephone numbers,” Last said.
“Do you know about the deaths?” Connie asked abruptly. Her eyes had never moved from Graver.
“Which ones?”
He thought she winced.
“A guy named Tisler.” She waited, but Graver didn’t react. “A guy named Burtell.” She waited. Graver didn’t say anything. “And Besom and Sheck and Gilbert Hormann.”
On this last one her voice cracked, and it was Graver’s turn to wince. Jesus Christ.
“Yes,” he said. “I know about them. How do you know about them?”
“Colin told me about them this morning,” she said shakily. “I didn’t know anything about any of that.” She cut her eyes at Last and Rayner. “Nobody told me anything about any of that.”
“Where is Faeber?”
“I thought you were only interested in Kalatis?” she said.
“I thought the idea was that we’d do what we could to help each other,” Graver responded. “Faeber could help me get to Kalatis.”
“Not anymore,” Connie said. For the next few minutes she explained what had happened that morning, leaving out the part about sending Faeber to her condo.
Graver watched Rayner and from the look on her face she was hearing this for the first time too. Connie had played her cards very close to the vest. Several times during her explanation Rayner and Last exchanged glances. Graver kept his eyes on Connie. She was nervous, almost testy.
“When Faeber called those numbers,” Graver said, after she had finished, “what was the procedure?”
“He called the number and left a message. They would call him back.”
“Then it’s almost certain we can’t trace the numbers,” he said. “I’d guess they’re using a digital clearing box. It’ll be in a rented apartment somewhere. Since there are different numbers for different dates, there are probably several locations, several boxes. The return calls will also go through the clearing boxes, scrambling the signals so that a trace will stop at the box. All we’ll find at the end of the trace is an unfurnished apartment with a little black box sitting on the floor. They’ve probably got several apartments so if one is tracked down they’ll be able to clear calls out of the others.” He stopped. “Who do the numbers put him in contact with?”
She looked down at the card which she had been holding in her lap behind the seat and read the names. “Panos. Dean. Rick. Bruce. Ray. Eddie.”
“Rick and Eddie? Do you know anything about them?”
She shook her head. “I just know they’re pilots.”
“You know they’re pilots?”
“Yeah. They’re a couple of the guys who pick up Colin and take him to Kalatis’s place. He told me.”
“Okay. Wait a minute.” Graver got out of the BMW and walked to his car. He sat down in the front seat, picked up his handset, and called Arnette. Then he went back to the BMW carrying the handset with him.
“What was that?” Connie said as soon as he closed the door. She seemed to be the only one talking.
“You said Faeber would be flown to Kalatis’s?” Graver asked, ignoring her question.
“That’s what Colin says. Kalatis flies him there when he wants to talk to him.”
“Do you recall Faeber ever saying how long the flight was?”