Graver made a few more entries and then waited for the screen to quit flashing. When it stopped, he read the information: “Lewis O. Feldberg. Christ, he died in Fort Worth on August 3, 1958.”
Chapter 25
It was nearly dusk and the streetlights already had come on by the time Graver found the address of Tisler’s rent house in a dying neighborhood off Beechnut inside the Southwest Freeway. The area looked as if it had been developed in the late fifties and had started its decline fifteen years later-several streets of small ranch-style houses with low-pitched pebble and asphalt roofs and brick veneer wainscoting. He drove by the house once very slowly.
There was nothing about it that distinguished it, a fact that did not surprise Graver. Tisler wouldn’t have owned anything that distinguished itself. There was an old mulberry in the front yard growing close enough to the straight, short sidewalk for the tree’s roots to have burrowed up under it, buckling the concrete until it broke. Graver was glad to see that on either side of the front yard a dowdy ligustrum hedge marked the property lines. The front door was introduced by a little stoop with a wood railing the same height as the brick veneer. A dull black mailbox was tacked to one of the wooden posts that held up the stoop’s roof.
Turning around at the end of the street, Graver came back by the house just in time to see a light go on in one of the windows fronting the street. Momentarily startled, he quickly guessed what had happened and turned into the driveway, pulling his car right up to the garage door that faced the street.
Before he got out of his car, he bent down and picked up a crowbar from the floor on the passenger side. He had bought it in the hardware department of a discount mart just off the freeway only minutes before. Quickly closing the car door, he walked around the side of the garage and saw with relief that the hedge continued to the back of the property. At the rear of the garage he came to a gate in the chain-link fence which enclosed the backyard. He lifted the gate’s latch and went in. Even in the dull light he could see that the yard was badly in need of mowing and that, since it grew in dark clumps and tufts with bare spots scattered here and there, it was probably mostly weeds.
He stepped onto an uncovered concrete slab “patio” attached to the back of the house and walked to the door. An aluminum storm door was on the outside with a solid wooden one behind it Taking a small penlight out of his pocket, Graver shined it on the door frame. He didn’t believe that Tisler would have gone to the expense of having an alarm system installed, but if he had, it would have been difficult to hide on a house like this. Satisfied that none was there, he put the penlight in his mouth and directed the small beam at the edge of the aluminum door where he inserted the thinnest end of the crowbar and popped it open. Holding it open with his back, he did the same with the wooden door, which should have been more difficult but wasn’t, though it was noisier, which required him to work more carefully.
When he pushed open the door he found himself in a bare kitchen, and immediately noted the stale smell that a house acquired when it was long unoccupied. There were no tables or chairs, and there was nothing on the cabinets except a coffeemaker, its pot washed clean and sitting in its receptacle. A dish towel was folded beside it with a coffee mug turned upside down on the towel. The kitchen was separated from the adjoining dining room by a small bar and through the dining room Graver saw the soft glow from the light that he had seen come on earlier. He put down the crowbar on the kitchen counter and went through the dining room which was also bare except for a few cardboard boxes scattered in one corner. He continued into the living room. Here a few pieces of furniture were clustered together, an old sofa, a couple of armchairs, the lighted lamp on an end table beside one of the armchairs, and a coffee table with a few magazines neatly stacked in one pile in its center. Graver went over and picked up one of the magazines. They were all old issues of Newsweek. He put down the magazine and stepped around the coffee table to find the wall plug for the lamp. As he had guessed, he also found the electric timer that automatically turned on the lamp at irregular intervals.
The house was hot and stuffy, but Graver remembered seeing a window unit on the end of the house opposite the garage. He entered the hallway that opened off the living room and came immediately to a bathroom. Reaching around the corner in the dark, he found the light switch and turned it on. Again the room was empty except for a towel on the towel bar beside the sink, and on the rim of the sink, a bar of soap that was well used but cracking from the heat in the house. A packet of paper towels was torn open and sat next to the sink. There was a half-used roll of toilet tissue on the spool beside the toilet Nothing in the medicine cabinet.
Leaving on the light, Graver continued to an open door on his right, a bedroom. Empty. There was one more door at the end of the hallway, on his left It was closed. That would be the room where he had seen the air conditioner unit in the window. He went to the door, opened it, and flipped on the light.
In the center of the unfurnished room, with Venetian blinds pulled tightly closed over its windows, was a sizable computer setup. Graver stared at it with a mixture of dread and hope. This clinical-looking piece of hardware, the smell of its heat-warmed plastic filling the closed room with an odor distinct from the rest of the house, represented simultaneously a potential disaster and, perhaps, his best hope of dealing with it.
The work station itself was a flimsy-looking, L-shaped structure of thin metal and pressed wood, laden to overloading with what appeared to be a substantial computer system and laser printer. Graver walked over to it and surveyed the books on the single shelf above the monitor. They were only operating manuals for the hardware and the software. He looked at the system. Though not totally ignorant regarding computers, he was far from being proficient enough to be able to walk into a room, sit down at an unfamiliar system, and puzzle out its operation. He knew he would be lucky if he could even bring up the menu.
Still, just by looking at it, he could tell that this was a fairly large system-that much was given to him on the front of the CPU-and that it had a hard drive, two disk drives, and a port for a back-up tape. Graver pulled out the chair under the desk and sat down. He looked over the shelves and found the two tapes Tisler used for backup along with a small spiral pocket notebook where he recorded the alternating tapes and dates. Tisler’s last backup had been the day before he died. Graver flipped on the computer and waited for it to clear. When it was ready, he began tapping at the keyboard. After fifteen minutes he had used everything obvious and still hadn’t gained access. He began to have the uncomfortable feeling that he shouldn’t be pressing his luck.
Hoping that Tisler had not toyed with the backup procedures, he pecked around for a few minutes, found the parameters, and copied them down, knowing he would need them to access the backup tapes on another system. He double-checked his notes, suddenly afraid he was going to transpose some of the characters in the paths. After he was satisfied, he took the older of the two tapes and used it to run another backup of the hard drive.
While he was waiting, he went through each book on the shelves and found nothing. By this time Graver thought he knew Tisler well enough to know that anything significant was going to be on the tape, and that it would be well protected by a labyrinthine cryptosystem. The loose ends-and there were always loose ends-all seemed to have been kept neatly swept into an unseen corner of what once had been Arthur Tisler’s mind.
When the backup was completed, Graver retrieved the tape, put each of them in his pocket, and turned off the computer. The two tapes would give him everything that had been in the computer files the day before Tisler died, and everything that was on it now. If there were any discrepancies between the two, then Graver would know that someone other than Tisler had access to the computer. If there were no changes, he couldn’t be sure. The question was, did he now erase the hard drive to prevent anyone else gaining access? He decided to wait until he knew the two tapes were good. He took one last look at the computer, not entirely sure he wasn’t making a mistake by walking away from it, turned off the lights, and walked out of the room.