by Nino Cipri
* * *
Snow scrunched beneath my boots as I made my way home that night. It was cold, and quiet: only the occasional hum of a car or smatter of distant voices on the wind disturbed the silence. I turned at the corner of Trumbull Avenue and slid my key into the door of Number 17.
Mrs. Long was already asleep. I knocked the worst of the snow from the bottoms of my boots and made my way upstairs, taking care not to let the door to my room slam shut. I locked it behind me. I probably didn’t need to—even when awake, Mrs. Long knew not to disturb me—but the possibilities that it excluded made things easier.
I hung my wet coat on the door and put the letter from Rick with the others, unopened. The tired old rubber band I was using to hold them all together snapped. I swore, stuffed them under the bed, and lay down, my head full of the usual letter-questions. How was Sarah? Did she miss me? Did Rick? He must; enough to keep writing every few months with no reply, at any rate. Unless he did it out of pity. Was he seeing anyone? I turned onto my side and stared at the wall.
I wondered, sometimes, if Rick had already been seeing someone else before the end—if maybe that was why he’d left—but I knew that I was just looking for an excuse to blame him instead of myself. There hadn’t been anyone else. Not in the universe I was living in, at least, although there must have been others in which other Ricks had been unfaithful to other mes. Not that I blamed them. I was the one who had pushed Rick away. And Sarah. I had lost them both, one day at a time, starting from the day I woke up on the operating table with the implant in my head and didn’t know which ‘me’ was me.
It helps if your life’s already in pieces when you get the heisen implant. Less to adapt to, that way.
I thumped the pillow. Feeling sorry for myself wasn’t solving Johnny’s murder. Wasn’t that why I had gotten the heisen in the first place? To be a better cop? It was in my head forever now, so I might as well make use of it. I closed my eyes.
We didn’t have the manpower to have someone watch the basement on West 23rd every hour of the day and night—if I wanted to see if anyone came back for the gun, I’d have to do it myself. But I couldn’t afford to spend all night on stake-out, not when there was so much work to do during the day. I’d be exhausted.
Unless it wasn’t me that went.
I imagined closing myself inside a box. It was something that they’d taught us during training, a visualization exercise: imagine that you’re Schrödinger’s cat. No one knows if you’re alive or dead. Except, in the quantum language of the heisen, it’s more than that: you’re both alive and dead, a million quantum cats existing in both states at the same time.
Alive and dead.
West 23rd Street and Trumbull Avenue.
Another me climbed out of bed and slipped into her coat.
* * *
The following afternoon, I went to speak to Vincent Quine. I’d gotten a full eight hours’ sleep the night before: nothing had happened over on West 23rd Street that was worth seeing, so I left that possibility thread to another me and decided, with a flick of the heisen, that I had been in my bed all along. I tracked down potential Quines, ignoring the more isolated and unstable possibilities that would send my investigation hurtling down an unpredictable path, such as finding him dead in the road on Ellen Street having been struck by a cab that skidded on a patch of ice.
In most universes I found him in a speakeasy joint above a bookstore on Evergreen Avenue. I’d been there before: it served awful bathtub cocktails, mostly to gangsters, and was little more than an attic space with a bar along one side. It had never really been worth raiding. I chose a universe in which I remembered the correct pattern of knocks to gain admittance and slipped through the door before the bartender could shut it. All conversation in the place went dead as I stepped inside.
“Afternoon, fellas.” They’d squeezed a pool table into the far corner since I’d last visited. Quine and a couple cronies stood around it, cues resting on their shoulders. There must have been ten, fifteen other hoods in there—half of them drinking, most of them smoking, all of them wearing suits. I looked each of them in the eye, one by one.
—a hand plunges into a coat pocket, but other hands are faster—
—a cacophony of bangs as hot lead screams across the room—
I spread my palms to show I was unarmed and looked towards the bar. “What’s a girl got to do to get a drink around here?”
Smoke drifted lazily towards the ceiling. For an awful moment I thought I was going to end up splattered across the wall, then someone laughed and the tension broke. Heads turned away; conversations resumed. The bartender hurried over with a waxen smile.
“Good to see you, Detective. Here—on the house.”
Awful-tasting cocktail in hand, I made a beeline for the pool table. Quine was leaning halfway across it, squinting down his cue. He was a big guy. Most of it was muscle, although when he undid his jacket I could see a hairy fold of beer gut through the gaps between his shirt buttons. His slick black hair was lovingly oiled. Chicago legend had it that he had a messy scar on his leg from a badly-healed bullet wound: he’d plugged it with a finger during a gunfight and had refused to go to a hospital.
“Came down to the nine, I see.”
He squinted up at me. In all but one of the universes spread out in front of me he made the shot and won the game—I thought victory might make him more amenable, so I chose one of those. The balls clacked together and the nine-ball shot into the pocket, the cue ball bouncing softly off the cushion and carrying on around the table. With the heisen’s help I pinned it first try beneath my index finger as it came towards me.
“Fancy a game?”
Neither of us spoke while I set up the balls inside the diamond. It was obvious that I wasn’t on a social call. I took off my coat and flicked my hair out of my collar, wanting to see Quine sweat while he tried to work out how much I knew. He handed me a pool cue, chalked end first.
“So, Detective,” he said. “Are my tax dollars paying for you to come play pool nowadays, or are you here on business?”
I took the cue and dusted the little cube of chalk around the tip. “Johnny Rivers is dead.”
He nodded gravely. “So I heard. God rest his soul.”
I watched him cross himself and tried to gauge his reaction. I had expected him to feign ignorance. “You’ve certainly got your ear to the ground,” I said. “He’s not been cold forty-eight hours.”
“News travels fast in Chicago. You break.” He placed the cue ball behind the line and stepped aside with a gentlemanly bow. One of his cronies lifted up the rack. “Besides,” he said, as I chose a possibility that gave me a good break without potting any balls, “he was a friend of mine.”
I tucked my hair behind my ear. “Don’t take me for a fool, Vince. Everyone and her mother knows he was the biggest rival you lot had in this part of town.”
“Well, Detective, you know what they say. Keep your friends close, and your enemies”—he pocketed the one—“closer.” He shot again and bounced the two into a cluster of high balls, leaving the cue ball penned in near the corner pocket. “But that’s it, isn’t it? You want to pin Johnny’s murder on me. Jeez. You know what—I ain’t even surprised, what with the way your boys have been on my back lately. Need a suspect for a lineup? Get Vincent Quine. Someone done a robbery? Must be Vincent Quine. Seems like a cat can’t have kittens in this town without me getting blamed for it.”
“Oh yeah,” I said, sliding the cue into the groove between my thumb and forefinger. “Poor, innocent you.”
By my count, Quine had dodged three murder charges already that year, all of them dropped due to lack of evidence. The prostitute who had agreed to testify against him for the Dickson murder had been lured to her death by Montagnio goons pretending to be federal agents. Her body turned up in Lake Michigan a month after she disappeared. No way to prove anything, of course, but the story spread fast enough to make any other potential witnesses think twice about doing
society a favor. I opened up a universe in which I made the cue ball hop over the eight and roll into the two, just to put me back in the game. Suddenly I didn’t want to lose.
“What you got on me this time, then?” Quine took a gulp of his drink while he considered his next shot. “Prints? Witnesses? A little handwritten note saying ‘Detectives, you ain’t picked on Vinnie Quine enough—he did it!’?”
I jumped universes as his cue came forwards, grabbing hold of a possibility thread in which he slipped and struck the cueball on one side. It spun off slowly at an angle and collided with the seven.
“Whoops.” I knew that I was pushing it, using the heisen to manipulate the game to this extent, but I wanted that smirk wiped off his face. It was only when two balls smacked together with a gunshot crack that I remembered the trap that I had come to set.
“You know I wouldn’t be wasting time chewing fat if we had solid dirt on you,” I said. I watched him as I sipped my cocktail. Did he look relieved? Was he thinking of a stubby pistol, dropped in a scramble up the stairs? I made a show of estimating the angle needed to bounce the cue ball off the cushion in order to connect with the two. “But you had means, motive, and opportunity, so—”
“I also have an alibi.” He ran the back of a finger over his lips as he surveyed the table. “I was eating at Giordano’s, over on the other side of town. All night. Ask anybody.”
“Giordano’s?” I said, as he took his shot. “Come on, you’ve got to do better than that. The Montagnios as good as own that place.”
The two knocked the six into a pocket.
“Hey—if I was there, I was there. What do you want me to do, puke up some pasta to prove it?”
He grinned and took another shot, once again ensuring that I had to make mine from an unfavorable position. I chalked my cue. With a bit of possibility manipulation I managed to ping the nine close to a pocket a few times without fouling, although I was careful not to be too lucky. (There were a couple one-in-a-million shots that I knew would tick Quine off, but I had my temper enough under control not to risk it.) We played in silence until there were only two balls on the table. It was Quine’s shot when my implant buzzed.
—a name, dropped into the silence—
“Mrs. Rivers,” I said, seizing the possibility before I really knew what I was saying. Quine twitched and caught the cue ball on its upper hemisphere. It floated off at a wide angle. “I don’t suppose you thought about her? She’s distraught.”
He stared at me for a moment, his blue eyes searching my face. Ice clinked into a glass somewhere behind me. Quine snorted, then coughed: for a moment, as his shoulders bucked, I thought that he was choking, then I realized he was laughing.
“Mrs. Rivers? You mean Kitty?” He shook his head and pulled a handkerchief from his inside pocket. “Distraught? If I had to put fifty dollars on it I’d say she was the one that did it. She—she didn’t tell you that she—?” He continued his exaggerated display of mirth, slapping the edge of the pool table for good measure. I stood and scowled at him.
“If you’ve got something to tell me, tell me.”
He wiped away imaginary tears. “Johnny Rivers,” he said, “didn’t want Mrs. Rivers to be Mrs. Rivers no more. You know how long they’ve been married? Eight months. That’s it. But then a month or two ago Johnny meets this other broad—beautiful young thing; an actress—and he falls hard for her, even harder than he did for Kitty. I know, I know, men are pigs.”
He laughed again as I stoked my implant into life. There were very few universes in which this story went any differently, which suggested that it was likely to be true. I sipped my drink as he continued.
“So the way I heard it was, Johnny promises this broad the moon; says he’ll marry her right away. Now, he knows that Kitty would fight tooth and nail for whatever she could get if he wants to divorce her, so—and this is the stroke of genius—he calls up Judge Binford—you know him?”
I did: he was a judge so crooked you could use him to uncork wine.
“He calls up Binford and asks if he can get the whole thing annulled. Get him to say that they were never legally married—never consummated, something like that—and that he don’t owe her a cent!”
He lapsed into laughter again, mirrored obediently by his cronies. My mind worked double-time. “And did he? Did he get the marriage annulled?”
Quine folded his handkerchief fastidiously into a square and tucked it back into his pocket. “I heard he was supposed to be sorting things out with Binford tomorrow afternoon.” He made a grimace. “I guess the appointment’s off.” He nodded at the pool table. “It’s your shot, Detective.”
My heisen let me pocket both the seven and the nine-ball in one dazzling, unlikely trick shot.
* * *
I lay on my bed in Trumbull Avenue and stood in an alcove on West 23rd Street at the same time, sheltering from the snow. When I closed my eyes I could still see the smirk on Vincent Quine’s face. I hadn’t bothered to check his alibi—the guys at Giordano’s would swear that he’d eaten there every night since he was in diapers if they thought that was what he wanted. Every piece of evidence he produced to the contrary only made me more certain he was guilty. Even so, I had to check out what he’d told me about Kitty Rivers. I’d asked Moore to find out her address and invite her in to talk to me, one-on-one. Hopefully I’d gained her trust during our last encounter. In the meantime, both she and Quine believed that the murder weapon had not been discovered. Whichever one of them had dropped the gun knew that it was still there somewhere, out of sight, potentially ready to betray them if it were found. It would be the work of an evening to come back and remove it.
Wind rushed through my bones. I could almost hear Rick’s voice in my head as I huddled closer to the wall. “Why bother?” he had asked me once. “Even if you bring this guy down now there’s gonna be about a million other universes where he gets away scot free, right?”
I remembered a summer evening, standing on the balcony with Sarah in my arms, trying to light a cigarette one-handed.
“Because if I don’t bother,” I said, “he gets away in a million and one.”
That was the Alano murder case, one of the first I’d worked after having the heisen implant. They’d tried to warn me what it would be like—I’d taken all the classes, scratched my head over the science, passed the temperament tests in the federal facility in Minnesota, learned all about goddamn Schrödinger’s goddamn cat—but nothing had prepared me for the reality of it all. Well, realities.
My baby girl, my joy, my Sarah—for those first few weeks I couldn’t look at her. Not without seeing a spectrum of all that she could or might or would never be, every glorious and terrifying possibility fanning out around her. I brushed against universes in which I slipped and dropped her off the balcony, or accidentally smothered her beneath a blanket. They were outside chances, but they followed me like specters. Rick was no better. He was suddenly a million different people—Rick if I said this, Rick if I said that; Rick who could fall out or back in love with me a thousand different ways—and I withdrew, not knowing which of him I loved.
I adjusted, over the next six years, but the damage had been done. I knew that Rick was ready to walk out and take Sarah with him. I knew that I deserved it, too. I’d become a ghost in my own family. I should have done something, but I couldn’t—somehow I couldn’t turn my back on all those possibilities. They plagued me, every day, showing me what our lives could be—what I could be—but I didn’t have the guts to go for one and shut out all the others. Then, one day, I came home to find all my immediate possibilities the same. The note on the kitchen table read:
We’ve gone—will write. R.
That’s one thing they don’t tell you about Schrödinger’s cat: you leave the lid on the box too long and the damn thing starves regardless. No quantum possibilities required.
* * *
“She’s over there,” Detective Moore told me when I got in the next morning. Kitty Riv
ers was drooping in a chair over by my desk. “She’s in a pretty bad way.” He handed me a mug of coffee and peered into my face. I knew that there were shadows underneath my eyes.
“Are you okay?” He laid a hand hesitantly on my shoulder. “I can talk to her if you want to rest.”
I looked at him—broad nose, big white teeth, face all concern—and smiled. I’d seen the possibilities these interactions bred—
—strong, soft arms around my back, hot breath against my cheek—
—but I always steered well clear of them. I shrugged him off and drew my collar up around my neck. Other mes knew whether that road led to any kind of happiness.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Anything else I need to know about?”
He turned and picked up some photographs from his desk. “Frank Campagna. Henchman for Johnny Rivers—muscle, I think, but in a position of trust. Shot dead yesterday getting out the barber’s chair. Colbourne sent these across this morning. Says the Montagnios have made no secret of their involvement.”
I riffled through the photographs. There was a lot of blood and broken glass. “So we know that the Montagnios are definitely out for Rivers and his gang,” I said, handing them back. “But did they send Quine to take out the boss first, make an example, or did his soon-to-be-ex-wife beat them to it?”
Moore gave an exaggerated shrug.
Kitty Rivers was staring at the wall when I went over to her. I put a hand on her shoulder from behind and she jerked as if electrocuted. Her beauty was haphazard today: her fashionable hat was pinned lopsidedly on her head, and her hair had deteriorated into a greasy mass of unwashed blonde. Her face was clean of makeup. Without it I could see, faintly but unmistakably, a yellow island of bruised flesh around her left eye. I pulled out my chair.
“Would you like a cigarette?”
She burst into tears.
I calmed her down eventually, patting her on the back and filling her lungs with an endless chain of Marlboros. She brought each one shakily to her lips, trying to control her sobs, and sucked the tiniest bit of smoke from it before exhaling and letting her hand sink back into her lap.