One of a group of burglars—conspiracy—cabal—
Or…but…
Crane the pervert—monster—madman—
—a man of no family or station, a drifter, itinerant, man of missing days—
Or, or…
—depressive, isolated, lonesome, and alone—seeing the height of the house as a chance, a weapon—up on the precipice, wanting to do it, dying to die—
So, so…
It’s the house, the house, the house that wants him, not he that wants the house—
That’s Ms. Paige bringing the house into it, not just the man but the house itself, the place and the meaning of the place, sending a new bright spark into my field of vision, burning me awake and out of it.
I fly from the darkness, eyes wide open.
“Shit,” I say, standing up unsteady. “Shit.”
“What?” says Ms. Paige. “What is it? You have something?”
“No. Yes. I don’t fucking know.” I rub my knuckles into my eyes, clearing away stars. “I have something that I know I don’t have.”
Aysa studies me avidly, and I should take the time to explain, but I don’t feel like it. I get up, sighing, and smash my pinhole down onto my head. Damn it. The house. The stupid house.
“You watch your way through the relevant stretches, Ms. Paige. Okay? It’s gonna be boring, but that’s what you do. Go from stretch to stretch, and don’t skip the ins and outs. Anyone comes in, catch a still of the face. Anyone even comes into the frame.”
“Yes, sir. Where are you going?”
“Someone I gotta talk to.” And then, off her look—eager, curious—“Someone I gotta talk to alone.”
10.
“The past is a dangerous country.”
“Unknown and unknowable.”
“This is true.”
“And always shall be.”
“Well, well, Mr. Speculator. Twice in the same day.”
“Lucky you, right?”
“Yes, yes. Lucky me.”
Captain Elena Tester beckons me into her cluttered office, and we’re both smiling as she shakes my hand, but there’s displeasure in her smile, right behind the teeth. She doesn’t like me being here in her office this morning; she doesn’t like that I didn’t call first, doesn’t like what any of this implies. It’s one thing to run into each other at a crime scene, two law enforcement professionals crossing paths on the job; it’s another thing entirely for me to be darkening her doorway less than twenty-four hours later, unannounced but clearly on official business.
Nobody stopped me from coming in, by the way. Not outside, under the fluttering flag of the Bear and Stars. Not in the elevator or coming down the hall. The regular police and the Speculative Service have divergent jurisdictions, discrete but coterminous, but nobody’s going to stop a Spec on his rounds. The black clothes and the pinhole function like a passport, offering free movement within the Golden State. Stand back, stay clear.
So Captain Tester is surprised to see me, and she’s not happy, but this shouldn’t take long. I just need to clear this up.
I point to one of the three straight-backed chairs that form a semicircle around her desk. “Any one of these?”
“Of course.”
I sit. I pull papers out of my briefcase.
“So. Elena. I have to ask you a few questions.”
“Okay, Laszlo.”
“Four or five questions. Possibly more, depending on your answers.”
She gives out a little impatient puff of air. “Okay, Laszlo. I’m ready. Let’s go.”
I nod and smile. My pinhole is capturing. Her pinhole is capturing. The room is capturing. Captures on the doorframe, captures in the corners. A capture on her desk rotating slow, taking a sweep.
“I am going to read back to you the statement you gave to me yesterday, in Los Feliz. At 3737 Vermont Avenue.”
“Statement?”
“The—what? The statement you gave me this morning, at—”
“We were having a conversation, Laz.”
“Yes.” I clear my throat. “But you did state it. It was a statement.”
“Well, definitionally…” She stops, takes a deep breath. I notice that her hands are tight on the edge of her desk. Holding fast to reality, her reality. “No, it’s okay. You’re right. Of course you are right, Laszlo.” She hops up abruptly. “Hey, do you want coffee?”
“I’ve had some. Thank you.”
“I’ll make myself one, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t.”
I wait. She drums her fingers on the corner of the little sink along a wall of her office, beneath the wide southerly window, while her machine burbles and brews. We are in two different places at the same time. We are a Speculator and a police captain working together to establish facts, and also simultaneously we are two friends, two people just talking. There are words and there is context; there are declarations and there is the ground in which those declarations are planted.
The coffee maker issues a final small-motor exclamation and hisses out its mud-brown stream. Now that I can smell the coffee I want some after all. Too late now.
“So,” says Elena. “My statement.”
“Yes. I asked you what you were doing at 3737 Vermont Avenue this morning, and you said, ‘I caught it on the scanner.’ You said, ‘I live near here. On Talmadge.’ You said, ‘As long as I was in the area, I thought I’d babysit the homeowner.’” I look up from my Day Book and she’s waiting expectantly. “That was your statement.”
“Okay,” she says flatly, which of course is not an answer.
“Elena. Captain Tester. I’m asking if those are true statements.”
Elena’s astonishment spreads through her body, a tightening fury: her back straightens, her hand curls tightly around the coffee cup, denting the paper sides. The pupils of her eyes narrow to knife ends. “You’re asking me if I’m lying.”
“Yes, Elena. Captain. Yes.”
“And wouldn’t you know?”
I nod, conceding the point. “If you had dissembled outright, Captain, yes. I would have caught it.”
“Smelled it,” she says, giving the words a tight contemptuous spin. “Or—sensed it? Isn’t that it?”
“Well—no. Not exactly. But yes. If you were lying outright, yes, I would have known. If there was important context that was left to the side, I would need you to tell me that.” I have a file in my lap. A manila folder, plain cover, unmarked tab. Elena is looking at it closely. “I would need you to tell me that now.”
She sets down the coffee and sits in her chair, glaring at me, and she can be angry if she wants to be, but the woman stood there and made a small proffer that was true but incomplete, and we both know it—at least, I thought I knew it before, but only now, looking at her eyes, feeling the cold fury my questions have inspired, do I know it for sure. She didn’t lie, but she did something just as bad, arguably worse, especially for someone in her position, high on the org chart of the regular police, a pillar of law enforcement just like me: she has not lied, but she has found a way not to have to. She dug herself a rabbit hole of conversational cleverness and leapt inside it. Arlo Vasouvian, the expert, the guru, could tilt his head back, half shut his eyes, and recite the entire statute, the complete philosophical and legislative history of context and omission: If someone says X instead of Y, that is a lie; if someone says X but not Y, we have then a case of relative relevance. Context is everything. Context is infinite.
There is some violation here, but I don’t know yet what it is.
“Was there, possibly, some further information that you might not, in the moment, have thought relevant?”
“Yes,” says Tester immediately. “Possibly there was.”
Her eyes remain on mine. Her body has not relaxed. Captain Tester has conducted many interrogations of her own over the years—I am not the only experienced investigator in the room. I feel conscious of my own bulk, my shape inside the tight space of the chair, the room, the moment. I feel
myself in the small wood chair, bent toward Elena, hunched and ursine. We stare at each other like two animals in a forest clearing. There are pictures on her desk: her kids. Her husband, Al, who died in the line a few years back. Her friends. I wonder if there are any pictures of Silvie. I want to look. I won’t look. I don’t.
“The house on Vermont is deeded to a woman named Karen Sampson.”
“Stipulated,” says Tester immediately, but I’m not accepting stipulations. She has to know I won’t be. I open the file I’m holding and take out three pieces of paper, material evidence, and I spread them out on the desk in front of her like a gambler laying down cards. The mortgage deed to the house. The certificate of occupancy. A carbon of the purchase from the previous owner. I ask the question again.
“Karen Sampson owns that house? And she lives there?”
“Yes.”
The next page is a one-sheet backgrounder on Sampson. These documents I didn’t need to pull from the identity office. I simply went downstairs to the twenty-ninth floor, on my way from my office to here. I simply spent half an hour doing public Record searches. Karen Sampson is a notable individual—a lot of this information I’m now producing came right out of the most recent edition of Notable Individuals.
“Ms. Sampson is a producer of recorded music.”
“Yes.”
“And she has a criminal history. She’s spent time in jail. Various drug offenses. A driving-while-drunk, nine months ago.”
Elena’s answers have started to come less readily. “Yes. That’s—correct. She’s—Karen—has struggled. As we all have.”
I am quite aware of Sampson’s troubled past. I have the arrest records. I reviewed them back in my office, half expecting to find Tester’s signature on the arrest reports. But they weren’t there. I was surprised by that.
“What else, Mr. Ratesic?”
“Do you need more coffee, Elena? Do you need to take a break?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
I turn to the final sheaf of papers in my slim file.
“Ms. Sampson is one of your oldest friends.”
“Yes.”
More papers come out of my file, and I can fan them on her desk. Photocopies of pictures of the two old friends together, arm in arm on the beach, a windy day, a much younger and more carefree Elena Tester holding her hat down so it won’t blow away. I array the pictures, six of them, fan them out flat in an order of my devising. A picture of Elena Tester, out of uniform in a peach dress, beaming behind Karen Sampson (née Ambrose) on her wedding day. Elena looks upward, at the ceiling, looking like she wants to fly up through it and escape into the air.
“Elena, listen to me. I don’t think that you killed anyone. I don’t think you had anything to do with any of this. But I have an obligation, now that a case has begun, to dispel any possible anomalies. And your withholding yesterday is one of those. Okay?”
She says something very softly, a sound with no motion of the mouth, as if her lips are refusing to move.
“What?”
“I said go ahead, Laszlo. Ask your fucking questions.”
I sigh. I find the right page in my Day Book and ask my next question. “When you heard the address on the scanner, were you concerned about the potential consequences of a death and subsequent investigation on this property?”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes,” she says, and gives me my words back to me, my words in my voice, like she’s a deck replaying the cued stretch. “When I heard the address on the scanner, I was concerned about the potential consequences of a death and subsequent investigation on this property.”
“So you rushed to the scene to protect your friend Karen.”
That’s it, I think. I’ve arrived at the heart of it, and I will collect my flat fact, gather up the small piece of the truth I’ve come for, and go back to the roofer and his missing boxes.
But she’s not answering. She is staring at me again, the cold fury back in her eyes.
“No,” Tester says flatly, and I blink. “No?”
“No. I did not rush there.”
“So ‘rush’ is imprecise,” I concede, irritated by the quibble, especially now, when she’s in such a hurry to wrap this up, for me to get out of her hair. “I withdraw the ambiguous verb. You went there, with more than typical speed. Okay? To do what? To—”
“I didn’t go there,” says Tester. “Truth. Truth and then context: I was there already.”
“You were…there already?”
I’ve never been a big fan of that figure: the mind races. Minds do not race. At least, mine doesn’t. Thoughts don’t whip in wild circles like small storms, chasing themselves around in pointless frenzies. When I visualize my thoughts I see them emerging half formed from some unseen basal station, bubbling up as if from a seafloor, rising and cohering, gaining mass as they combine. The mind does not race; it conjures, it swells.
“You were already at your friend’s home at six twenty-nine in the morning?”
“Yes,” she says. “I was there.”
“Was Karen in the house?”
“No.”
“Were you alone in the house?”
“No.”
I feel it—I feel it all at once and all over my body, in the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet. Not the distinct atmospheric warp of a lie entering the near air, but something more elemental, something plain: the sick shock of understanding, rushing through me like the world tilting. It’s an astonishing feeling, keen clarity like sunlight. I lean closer, lower my voice, as if there’s any privacy possible. As if the room isn’t capturing every word so each can be transcribed later on, the truth forever bubbling out from itself, the Objectively So endlessly accreting upon itself and growing like life, growing like life grows.
“Do you…” I say slowly. “Do you, in addition to your relationship with Ms. Sampson, have a relationship with Ms. Sampson’s husband?”
Elena gives her head a small tight nod, but that’s not enough and she knows it’s not enough. I could get up right now, stuff my papers back in my bag, make some apologetic noises, and go. If this is all it is, it’s nothing. A scrap, a tatter of incidental truth, something that slid off the roof along with the roofer, like a dead leaf that tumbled from the gutter as it tore free. And maybe if I didn’t already find the dictionary that was not—maybe if Mose Crane didn’t have days missing from his Record—maybe I’d even do it. Let Elena off the hook and shuffle backward out of her office.
But I can’t do it now. Now it’s too late.
So I make her confirm it for the Record. I make her say it louder, which she does, too loud, pointedly loud. “I have a relationship with Karen’s husband.”
“And what is his name?”
“Barney Sampson,” she says, and in her voice I can hear that it’s all gone, any trace of residual affection between Elena Tester and myself is gone now, never to return. Extramarital affairs aren’t illegal, of course; lying about them is illegal, as all lies are illegal, but Elena didn’t do that either. She was simply doing something in secret, hidden from everyone but not from the Record, because nothing is hidden from the Record. She hoped that her friend Karen would never find out, and she certainly hoped that no Speculator would ever lope into her office with an investigative agenda that happened to intersect with her infidelity.
Everything is on the Record, just waiting to be discovered: the whispered confession, the stolen kiss. This is not the goal of our good and golden systems; the goal is simply the maintenance of reality as it occurs, so that all can live together within the same sheltering truth, safe within the strong high walls of the Objectively So. We may keep secrets from one another, but not from the Record, and if life is therefore made more difficult for the adulterer or the petty-cash-box pilferer, for the student with his eye on his deskmate’s paper or the worker who clocks in late, well surely that’s a price worth paying—or even, looked at differently, not a price at al
l, but a benefice. A gift we are given by the ever-presence of truth.
Captain Elena Tester, right about now, isn’t quite seeing it that way. Her face has colored. She stares at me, eyes lit with anger, as I press on.
“How long have you had a relationship with Mr. Sampson?”
“Judge,” she says.
“What?”
“Judge Sampson.”
He is a judge in the Court of Aberrant Natural Phenomena. His courtroom is on Grand Street, in one of the old slate-gray justice buildings. Those who come before the ANP are most often referred from the Social Services divisions, but it certainly would not be unusual for the regular police, including officers under Tester’s jurisdiction, to be called to offer testimony before him. These facts paint a certain picture, and I record its outline in my Day Book, keeping my face neutral. Not just an intimate problem but a professional problem, a conflict of interest problem. A conflagration of problems for Elena Tester. I have walked in here today and lit a fire on her desk.
“And now here is my question for you, Mr. Speculator.”
Elena stands up, places her palms flat on the desk. Whatever this question is, I am supposed to answer it and then go. Our interview is over. “Are you quite comfortable, destroying my life offhandedly? Destroying Barney’s life? Because a man happened to fall off of his roof? Is that a decision that you feel happy about?”
“No,” I say. “Not happy.”
“But content.”
I think that over for a moment, judging the true, full meaning of the word “content.”
“My professional responsibility is to follow this incident until its truth is full and final,” I say quietly. “My personal hope is that it causes you no unnecessary grief.”
“Oh,” she says. “Great. My personal hope is that you can go fuck yourself. Do you have any more questions for me, Mr. Ratesic?”
“No, ma’am,” I say. “Not at this time.”
She glares at me, the rims of her eyes gone red, as I rise to go. I’m at the door with all my papers gathered up, and when I look back, Tester stares at me coldly, with hatred but as if from a great distance.
“You weren’t good enough for her, Laszlo.”
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