The pager on his belt vibrated. He pushed back his coattail and looked down at the number. He didn’t recognize it But fewer than a dozen people had his new number, and he would want to talk to any of them. Without hesitating he turned around and walked back into the building to the pay telephone in the lobby. He set his briefcase on the floor, put a quarter in the slot, and dialed the number. It rang only once before someone answered.
“This is Graver.”
“Graver, good.” Victor Last sounded as controlled as ever, but there was an undercurrent of eagerness in his voice. “I’ve got something for you. I think you’re going to like this. Can you meet me now, at La Cita?”
“Not there,” Graver said. “Where are you?”
“I’m rather in the north part of the city,” Last said vaguely.
“Okay. There’s a little Italian restaurant called La Facezia just off Montrose. Do you know where Renard is?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, it’s very near that intersection, on Cerano.”
“I’ll find it,” Last said and hung up.
Graver pressed the lever on the pay phone, dropped another quarter in the slot, and dialed another number. When Lara answered on the third ring, her voice was husky with sleep.
“Lara, this is Graver.”
Pause.
“Yes… hello…”
“I’m sorry to have to wake you, but I need your help for a little while.”
“Now?”
“I’m afraid so, yes.”
“Yeah, okay, sure.” She was still a little fuzzy with sleep. “Uh… it’ll take me a few minutes to get dressed,” she said, sounding more awake now. “What do I wear?”
“Anything. I’ve got a meeting with someone at a small restaurant. I just want you to watch us from across the street.”
“Oh.”
“It’s no big deal. I just need another pair of eyes.”
There was a hesitation as if she were mulling over the questionable veracity of this claim. “Okay, where are you?”
“At the office.”
“Okay, I’ll be ready when you get here.”
“Oh, Lara, bring a fairly good-sized shoulder bag.”
He made good time since the traffic was sparse at this hour of night, and when he pulled up to her apartment fifteen minutes later, she was waiting for him at a small gate that led out of the courtyard that her apartment shared with three others. She was wearing a sleeveless summer shirtwaist dress of a dark color, maybe chocolate brown, and her thick hair was combed out, pulled back loosely, and clasped behind her head. She was carrying a shoulder bag which she held with one hand as she reached down to open the car door.
“You’re quick,” Graver said, as she got in and closed the door.
“Well, Jesus,” she said, “once I finally woke up… I don’t know why it took me so long to clear my head. Sorry.”
A hint of fragrance-though not perfume, something softer, the way he imagined her body, her skin, must smell-wafted into the car with her, and as Graver pulled back onto the street she settled into her seat, putting her purse between them and turning slightly toward him, angling her legs.
“I hope this dress is all right,” she said. “I thought, God, I shouldn’t wear anything with a light color.”
“No, that’s just fine,” Graver said. The dress, of course, fit her perfectly, buttoning up the front, the several topmost buttons left undone, the belted waist snug above her hips. Just having her there beside him relieved some of his exhaustion.
“You’ve been at the office all this time?” she asked. There was a note of concern in her voice, as if she sensed something important had taken place since she had seen him that afternoon.
“Most of it,” Graver said.
“Okay,” she said, “what’s happened?”
He related chronologically the things that had happened since he had seen her late in the afternoon. He told her of the results of his meeting with Neuman and Paula, about the Feldberg house and its contents, about Paula and Neuman interviewing Valerie Heath, about Burtell being tailed and of Arnette’s people getting photographs of his meeting with the unidentified man. The only thing he left out of sequence was Besom’s death, and when he told her about it, her reaction was much like Paula’s: a gasp of shock and instant suspicion.
She had been looking at him, but at this revelation she turned and looked out the windshield, watching the night go by and, for a few minutes, consulting her own thoughts. Graver would like to have been inside her head at that moment.
“This gets creepier by the hour,” she said finally, still looking out the windshield. She had crossed her arms under her breasts. “Of course, you don’t believe the heart attack business do you?”
“I don’t believe the autopsy tells the whole story.”
“God, I guess not You still think the thing to do is to keep this closed? Just the four of us, and Arnette?”
“That’s just about the only thing I am sure of now,” Graver said. “I’m doing that right, if nothing else.”
“I guess Westrate’s all over you?”
“He’s beside himself. He knows it’s going to look bad, but I keep assuring him nothing’s turning up. He smells something, and he’s suspicious, but he doesn’t know what to do about it except threaten me.”
Graver changed lanes. He had been watching his rearview mirror, but he saw nothing to make him suspicious. And if there had been someone there he would have picked them up in the sparse traffic.
“So then you do think Besom was killed.”
“I do,” he said.
Lara turned to look out the windshield again. “This is scary,” she said. “Really, really scary.”
“The frightening part is not knowing what the hell lies behind it. Not knowing why. If I knew why, then I think some of the other stuff would fall into place. Motive at least would be an indicator of how they might be thinking.”
“They’?”
“Whoever the hell ‘they’ are.”
They passed under the Southwest Freeway. Graver was looking at everything, the side streets, the parking lots of restaurants, service stations, but trying not to let Lara see what he was doing. Suddenly he was seeing something suspicious in everything. Everything seemed to be a collusion between a car he had seen five blocks ago and the one he was approaching down the street, or the one parked on a side street with the one parked in the shadow of a service station.
“What is it you want me to do?” she asked, shifting in her seat “You want me to sit in the car during this meeting, is that it?”
“No, not in the car,” he said, pulling his mind back to the moment “I’ve got to meet a man named Victor Last. Last was an informant for me years ago when I was still an investigator. He was a good source, productive, but I haven’t seen him or heard from him in about eight years. Then late Sunday night, after the ordeal with Tisler was over, after Westrate had finally left the house, Last called me. Sometimes informants do that, years later. If you’ve had a good relationship with them, they crop up, get in touch with you. Since his call I’ve met with him twice. I met him at a tavern Sunday night, and then last night he showed up at my house.”
“At your house? Christ You didn’t know he was going to be there?”
Graver shook his head. “No. And he’s an intelligent man; he knew better than that. The fact that he did it anyway worries me. He never would have done it in the past. Last claims to have ‘Accidentally’ come across some information about a security breach somewhere in the police department. Thinks it might have been in the CID. But he was vague about the details. Now, I think, he wants to give me a little more information.”
“But you don’t trust him so much now,” Lara said.
“That’s right. Though maybe I should. I just find it hard to believe he happens to be at the right place at the right time.”