“Wash out that coffee mug before you go home. Okay?”
“It’s done,” he said, and picked up the telephone as she opened the door and walked out.
“Graver.”
It was Westrate, though he didn’t identify himself. “Katz called me just a few minutes ago,” he said. “He’d just gotten a call from Tordella who was still at the morgue. Coroner’s calling it a suicide too.” Graver could hear the relief, the near joy in Westrate’s voice. “Nobody sees any reason to suspect otherwise.”
“Did they interview his wife?”
“Yeah, early this afternoon.”
“Who conducted the interview?”
“Tordella and Petersen, I think.”
“Nothing?”
“I guess not. I just know Katz said they were satisfied so far, and that they’d probably write it up as self-inflicted tomorrow. He just wanted me to know.”
Graver slumped back in his chair. He felt more than relief; it was almost elation.
“But I still want a report from you people,” Westrate said. “We’ve got to give the CID a clean bill of health. His wife’s already screwed on her insurance, anyway. Might as well confirm it, at least make a report on the probabilities. Guy doesn’t kill himself for nothing. Maybe there was a chippy or… I don’t know, something.”
“It’ll be a while, Jack. Several days if we don’t want it to look like we’re sweeping it under the rug.”
“Yeah, okay, take a week,” Westrate said. “Let me know how it’s going.”
Westrate was off the telephone, and Graver turned his chair toward the glass wall. Early in the day the clouds had burned off and the hard blue sky stood empty and hot No thunderstorms today. The expressway was jammed chrome to chrome, a creeping flow of glittering glass and metal wrapped around the girth of downtown.
He looked at his watch. It was five thirty-five, and the offices were empty. He thought about Westrate’s call. Everybody was relieved. Nobody’s ass was going to get singed over this after all. Everyone was pleased that Tisler seemed to have been so desperate as to have killed himself. The man had been driven to blast away his life for reasons none of them knew anything about, and so far no one, with the exception of Dean Burtell, seemed capable of working up anything more than a wince at his death.
Chapter 13
He turned his attention away from the windows and pulled Tisler’s contributor files over in front of him. “Contributor” was an umbrella term for persons who supplied the CID with information about criminal activity. They were the bread and butter of intelligence work and fell into two categories. “Sources” were contributors with no criminal involvements. They included police officers, federal agents, witnesses, and private citizens, mostly people who felt a moral duty to share information or suspicions about criminal activities.
The other category was “informants,” people with criminal backgrounds, prisoners, parolees, probationers, bailees, arrestees, or suspects. Informants were most frequently motivated to share information for quite different reasons than their counterparts. Often they were simply offering information for money. Sometimes they informed for revenge, or jealousy, or in an effort to have “competitors” eliminated, or as “pay back” for some past service on their behalf by law enforcement officials. The reasons were endless, often complex, and usually emotionally charged.
The personal identity of all contributors was closely held information, and their continued anonymity was a matter of enormous importance. Each contributor was assigned a control number which was used on all documents in place of the contributor’s name. Graver had gone to the Central Index File, which could be accessed only through a stand-alone computer system, and pulled Tisler’s name. Then he pulled up his contributor file which produced a column of four-digit control numbers. He then went into the confidential records safe and pulled the contributor folders bearing these control numbers.
He opened the first folder with the same feeling that Paula and Dean Burtell must have had when opening the folders Graver had handed them that morning: What in the hell should he be looking for?
“Graver.”
He started, but wasn’t surprised that the voice he recognized was Paula’s.
“I thought I was the only one here,” she said, leaning against the door frame, a manila folder dangling from her hand.
“Come in,” he said, sitting back in his chair. He was glad to see her, glad to have someone to talk to. “Sit down.”
Paula pulled herself away from the door frame and sat in one of the chairs in front of Graver’s desk, crossing her long legs and looking out the windows. Across the bayou the reflection of the falling sun ignited the skyscrapers like molten pillars against the cobalt sky.
Paula frowned at the burning glass escarpments thinking, unhurried, absorbed in her thoughts which were, he imagined, so unlike everyone else’s thoughts, so singularly faceted, that if he read them in an anthology of thoughts he would recognize their style immediately. Normally Paula’s acerbic sense of humor was very much in evidence, and her attitude and conversation were sprinkled with wit heavily laced with sarcasm. Not a personality to everyone’s choice. But Graver liked her; and he liked the woman she was hiding. At the moment, however, he sensed a distinct sobriety.
“What do you think about all this?” she asked, turning to him and raising the folders in her hand, her bracelets clacking on her wrist.
“There’s something new on that,” Graver said. He told her about the call from Westrate.
“No shit?” She was frowning.
“Surprised?”
“I don’t know. I just…” She shrugged. “Then I guess that takes the pressure off.”
“It does, but we’ve got to write an assessment report anyway.” He rubbed his eyes, wiped his hand over his face, and leaned his elbows on the desk “What do I think? I scanned Tisler’s investigations on the computer. Most of them were pretty much in overdrive it seemed to me. Except the Alan Seldon opening. Everything was taking a back seat to that.”
Paula nodded, and though she said nothing, he could tell she had something on her mind.
“What about you?”
She leaned her head back and looked at the ceiling. Paula’s spontaneity sometimes made her seem ten years younger than her age. He could see her eyes fixed on the acoustic tile above them. She swallowed, and her Adam’s apple rose and fell the length of her long throat Finally she raised her head and straightened up in the chair, turned a little more squarely to him.
“You know, five years ago when I first came here, Tisler was a mediocre investigator,” she said bluntly, getting right down to business. “Actually, less than mediocre. His track record was lousy. But about eighteen months ago things changed. He had two long investigations in succession-Probst and Friel. Remember them?”
“Sure. They were good operations.”
“Oh, yeah,” Paula said. “They both netted big-time results when we turned them over to operations. Now, with this Seldon thing, it looks like he was onto another big one.” She paused and looked squarely at Graver. “I know I was supposed to be reviewing only the five open investigations Tisler was working with Dean, but I happened to think of those other two cases and went to the archives and pulled them. As I read over those two operations-and the beginnings of the Seldon business-one question kept popping into my mind over and over: How in the hell did he get so good all of a sudden?”
Graver had settled back, resting his elbows on the arms of the chair.
“I don’t know that he was suddenly all that good, was he?” he asked. “Probst and Friel were outstanding collection efforts, no doubt about it, but Tisler had eight or ten other targets whose progress was anything but exemplary.”
“Okay, fine, but to my way of thinking that makes Probst, Friel, and Seldon all the more… curious,” Paula persisted. “They’re outstandingly atypical.”