Land of the Blind

by Jess Walter

  “Detective,” Sergeant Kaye says, “did you want me to call Sergeant Spivey?”

  “No,” she says. “I already did.” It is a big lie, in cahoots with so many smaller ones this weekend. Who knows how much time it will buy? But that’s all she wants now, a little more time before this whole thing gets away from her, a little more time for Clark before all of this comes down around him. She bends in closer to the computer and reads the scrolling message of the screen saver: EMPIRE. MAKE YOUR OWN RULES.

  At home, her screen saver alternates pictures of mountains from the Northwest. The mountains are relentless; they don’t care whether she’s composing a sonnet or a grocery list or a suicide note. After five minutes, the mountains rise and cover everything, and the words recede into the black.

  “What about your guy in the interview room?” asks Sergeant Kaye. “Is he connected to the DOA? You want us to read him?”

  And yet, she reminds herself, beneath the mountains nothing changes. The words are still there; all you have to do is touch a key and the screen comes alive.

  “I don’t know if he’s connected,” Caroline says, measuring her words, the lies coming easier now. “Put a guy on the door and I’ll talk to him when I get back.” She gives Sergeant Kaye the address and hangs up the call. Then she turns off her phone.

  Caroline takes a breath, leans over the keyboard, and uses her flashlight to press the space bar. The screen saver disappears and up comes an e-mail program. There is an open message in the inbox from deadeye@empire.com.

  Eli—

  Don’t do anything. I’m coming back there. Don’t move. I need to talk to you.

  I lied about everything. There is no more money. I’m sorry. For everything.

  It’s going to be okay.

  Clark

  Her head falls to her chest and the hope goes out of her. Why not just videotape himself? She’s shocked at how badly she wants Clark not to have done this.

  Of course there is another world. Just below this one. It is undisturbed. Perfect. Our intentions go there, and the things we can’t have. Regrets. Promises. Wishes.

  When we dream we are falling, this is where we go.

  She leans forward and, with her flashlight, turns the computer screen off. The e-mail fades as the picture pulls in on itself, universe collapsing, and then black. Caroline stares, as if she can’t believe she just did that. Okay, she thinks, now you’ve got some time.

  She backs carefully to the door, looks once more at the room, perfect and undisturbed. She can already hear the first siren, still blocks away. She slides her shoes on, backs out the door, and pulls it closed behind her.

  2 | THE DWARF LISTENS

  The dwarf listens intently, but with very little reaction, as Caroline explains that they haven’t positively identified the body, but she has every reason to believe that Eli Boyle is lying dead in the small apartment above his garage.

  “No shit,” says Louis Carver. He shakes his head. “Wow. He actually did it.”

  Caroline tenses. She’s said nothing about Clark Mason. “Who?”

  “Eli. He used to talk about it all the time, in this totally detached way, like it was just the most normal thing. We’d be talking about investments or what kind of car to buy and he’d just blurt out, ‘I could jump off a bridge.’ Or ‘What do you think of hanging?’ Just out of the blue, like that.”

  “No,” Caroline interrupts. “Eli didn’t kill himself. Somebody shot him.”

  They are on the porch of Louis’s house and he’s standing in the doorway, holding the screen door open as if she’s selling something he doesn’t need. He falls back against the door frame. He is about four feet tall, bowlegged and thick through the chest and trunk. He wears khaki pants and a sweatshirt that reads, simply, COLLEGE. His features are pleasant, though slightly crowded. A spit of brown hair covers his forehead; he is graying at the temples. “Eli was murdered?” he asks.

  “We think so.”

  “Who did it?”

  “We don’t know,” Caroline says. It occurs to her that Louis Carver does not seem terribly upset that his old friend and business partner is dead.

  She was feeling claustrophobic at Eli’s carriage house apartment—watching the evidence techs start to dismantle the room—when she remembered Louis’s name from the Fair Election Fund. She got his number from information, apologized for calling at ten o’clock, and asked if she could stop by to talk to him for a minute. She left Eli’s house without telling anyone, turned her phone off, and drove here, to this tidy daylight rancher in the Shadle neighborhood, on a street of honest, working-family houses.

  “Murdered. No shit,” Louis says again.

  A short, attractive woman—still, a foot taller than her husband, with ink-black hair—sticks her head around the corner of the doorway. She is wearing flannel pajamas and looks as if she just woke up. “Is everything okay?” Mrs. Carver asks.

  “Eli Boyle is dead.”

  If Louis reacted inscrutably to the news, his wife’s face registers outright disdain at hearing Eli’s name. “Oh.”

  “He was murdered,” Louis tells his wife.

  “That’s too bad,” she says flatly. A baby begins crying behind her, lost and sleepy. She puts her hand on Louis’s shoulder and turns around to go get the baby.

  “Do you know if Eli had any family?” Caroline asks.

  “No,” Louis says. “Just his mom, and she died several years ago.”

  “Do you remember the last time you saw Eli?” she asks.

  “Sure.” He rubs his eyes. “Two years ago. November of 2000.”

  “Before or after the election?”

  “After,” Louis says, seeming surprised that she knows about the election. “You must’ve talked to Clark already.”

  “That’s actually one thing I wanted to ask you about. How would you characterize the relationship between Clark Mason and Eli?”

  “They’re best friends. They—” Louis tries to read her face. “You think Clark had something to do with this? Clark Mason?” He covers his left eye. “One eye? Tall? Occasionally runs for Congress and gets his ass kicked? That Clark Mason?” Louis shakes his head violently. “No way. Clark wouldn’t do that. He couldn’t. The guy opens the window to let flies out of his house. He spent the last eight years baby-sitting Eli. What reason would he possibly have to kill him?”

  Caroline climbs a step, bringing her closer and to eye level with Louis. “Your name was listed with Eli Boyle’s as one of two officers in a political action group.” She looks down at her notebook even though she knows the name. “The Fair Election Fund? You paid for the ads that called Clark Mason a carpetbagger?”

  Louis comes all the way out now and lets the screen door close behind him. “That was a long time ago and we all—” His face is red and his eyes narrow. “Look, I didn’t even know…” He lowers his voice. “I just signed where Eli pointed. We had given so much to Clark’s campaign that I just assumed we were starting a fund to help him. When I saw in the paper what it was, I was furious. I was a hell of a lot angrier than Clark, if that tells you anything. I sure as shit wouldn’t have forgiven Eli for that. But there was Clark, a week later, telling me he couldn’t have won anyway. He was actually trying to get me to forgive Eli. He went on about how Eli took all this punishment when they were kids. What a hard childhood Eli had. Finally, I couldn’t listen anymore. I said, ‘Clark, you’re talking to a fucking dwarf here. I’m probably gonna need more than a tough childhood.’”

  “And you left Empire right after that?” Caroline asks.

  He nods. “Two weeks later. Sold my stock back to Eli at the option price. Walked out the door with about eighty grand and never looked back. If I’d sold a year earlier, before the crash, I could’ve gotten probably ten times that.”

  “How many partners were there?” she asks.

  “Four minority partners: myself and Clark, Bryan, who was our tech guy, and Michael Langford, this investment and finance guy from the Bay Area.
We each had five percent of the shares, and since Bryan and I worked there, we also got salaries. Twenty-nine percent was divided among the investors that Michael brought in. Eli retained the other fifty-one percent. That was Clark’s doing, too. Eli was terrified that he was going to lose control of the game, so Clark set it up so that Eli’s share of the company could never drop below fifty-one unless Eli sold his stock, which of course he never did.”

  “So you left Empire because of the Fair Election Fund?”

  Louis looks past her. “And I had some real problems with the way Eli ran things.” He seems wary of saying more.

  “Look,” Caroline says, “I’m just trying to figure out who killed your friend. I don’t care about anything else. So tell me, why did you leave Empire?”

  “Well, for starters, there was no Empire. Not the way we were selling it. Not like it was supposed to be.” He leans back and searches for the words. “After we got the money everything was different. We got an office, hired illustrators and writers and coders. Every six months, we’d put on a show for the investors, tell them what they wanted to hear, let them see whatever real progress we’d made. Then we’d fake the rest. They want the game on CD-ROM? We put the preview on CD-ROM. They want it on the Internet? We put the preview on a Web site. They want streaming video, multitexturing, 3-D graphics, photorealistic rendering? Fine. As soon as we finished a presentation, we’d go back to work on the next presentation.

  “But the game never played. It didn’t work. We kept putting options on the car and hoping the investors wouldn’t realize there was no engine. We spent all our time making presentations for the venture capital people, and in the end that’s all we produced: presentations. You know the key to getting rich back then?”

  Caroline shakes her head no.

  “Never finish. Always be six months from shipping. That’s when you have the most potential, when you haven’t messed up yet. Every year I kept thinking they were going to pull the plug when they realized we didn’t have a game, and every year some new idiot stepped forward with another million.

  “Meantime, Eli was getting this reputation as a genius, going on and on about the realms and the levels of being, about how people wouldn’t play Empire, they would live it. He sounded like some kind of guru. And the game was like a ghost, a rumor. You’d see it referred to in Red Herring and Wired and The Industry Standard, a sentence here or there—‘sources say that when Empire is ready, it will change the entire perception of gaming,’ that kind of shit. All the insiders knew about it. Once I read that some company was working on ‘an Empire-style interactive game.’” He laughs.

  “Eli was so secretive and controlling, that just fed the whole thing, made it seem that much more mysterious and cutting edge. Because the game never appeared, I think it actually got better and better in people’s minds. Like a striptease. You show people a glimpse and they put the rest together in their minds. By ’98, everyone wanted to license our game, or buy us outright: Microsoft, Sega, Nintendo.”

  “But you didn’t sell?”

  “Eli wouldn’t even consider it—maybe because he knew there was nothing to sell. And he wouldn’t go public, which we needed to do if we were ever going to raise enough capital to really develop the game. And every time he said no, it seemed to increase the demand and the interest by VC investors.”

  “What did Clark think of all of this?”

  “The rest of us wanted to sell—Bryan, me, Michael especially. It drove Michael crazy, especially when Eli started acting so paranoid and insecure. Michael even suggested we have Eli committed at one point. But Clark never wavered in his support for Eli. He was going back and forth between here and Seattle and California, doing legal work for other start-ups, doing real well for himself. But no matter how much money he made, he always came back here and took care of Eli.

  “They were like brothers. It was Eli who talked Clark into running for Congress. Clark said that maybe he should go for a smaller office first—city council or state legislator—but Eli told him to go for the whole thing. Paid for half his campaign.”

  Caroline stares at her notes. Something is missing. “So if it was Eli’s idea and he was financing the campaign, why spend the money trying to defeat him?”

  “I don’t know,” Louis says carefully. “I never talked directly to Eli about it.”

  “But you have an idea?” Caroline asks.

  Louis rubs his bottom lip. “At the end of ’99 everything was going great. We were making progress on the game. I was even starting to think we might actually have it up and running by the following year. We had offices and a warehouse, fifteen people working for us. It was a year before the election, and Clark went back to Seattle to raise money for his campaign. When he came back he brought that woman with him, and that’s when everything seemed to change.”

  “Susan.”

  “We went to high school with her—although she’d probably deny it. Clark was completely different after they got married. All of a sudden he’s hanging around at the Manito Country Club, acting like one of them. Part of it was the campaign—Clark needed the support of those people, I guess. But to Eli, it was a betrayal. Pure and simple. And if there was one thing that Eli couldn’t stand, it was disloyalty. He was always sort of distrustful, but he was getting paranoid. After a while, he even accused me of working with Michael behind his back, trying to sell Empire out from under him.”

  Before Louis can finish, his wife shows up at the door with a round, red-faced baby boy, maybe three months old. “It’s cold, Lou. Why don’t you come inside?”

  “We’re almost finished,” Caroline says.

  Beaming, Louis opens the door and takes the baby from his wife.

  “Oh, Louis,” says his wife. “I don’t think the detective came here to look at babies.” Her hand rests on Louis’s shoulder.

  “Eighty-fifth percentile,” Louis says proudly. The baby pulls his fist to his mouth and starts sucking, and Louis hands him back through the doorway.

  When his wife and baby are gone, Louis turns back to Caroline. “That’s the other reason I left, right there. I met Ginger about the same time Clark got married. It made Eli crazy. He said I was abandoning him. He had this investigator that he hired every once in a while, and he had the guy follow Ginger because he was convinced she was a plant hired by another game company to steal our secrets. I just laughed. ‘Secrets, Eli? What secrets? We don’t even have a game.’

  “You know what he said? He said, ‘Come on, Louis. Why else would she sleep with you? Don’t you think she’d rather fuck a normal-size guy?’ This was right around the time he spent all that money to defeat Clark. I’d finally had enough of his paranoia and viciousness. So I left. Took a bath on my shares and walked away.”

  Louis chews on his lip. “There was a time when I would have told you that Eli Boyle was my best friend, when I would’ve done anything for him. But a few minutes ago…when you told me that he was dead…to be honest? I didn’t feel a thing.”

  “But you don’t know any reason why Clark would kill him?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Well,” she says, “someone had a reason. Did he have enemies, anyone who might have wanted him dead?”

  “You could start with about two dozen investors,” Louis says. “There’s me. Bryan, our old tech guy—Eli drove him out. Michael, the money guy.”

  Then something occurs to Louis. “You said enemies? That’s funny. I only heard Eli use that word once to describe someone. It was 1998, I think. Eli was in his office, reading the paper, this big grin on his face. I asked what was up, and he showed me this little newspaper story about a guy arrested with a bunch of cocaine in his car. Eli said he’d had the investigator find the guy. I said that was quite a coincidence, and Eli gave me the strangest look. Really creepy. You know? Like it was no coincidence.

  “‘See this?’ Eli said. ‘This is what I do to my enemies. Remember that.’”

  “What did he mean?”

 
“I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.”

  “Did you know the guy?”

  “Oh, sure,” says Louis. “We went to high school with him. Mean, wiry asshole, used to terrorize Eli at the bus stop.”

  3 | PETE DECKER SCOWLS

  Pete Decker scowls when he comes into the county jail interview room and sees who has interrupted his sleep. Scraggly haired and yawning, in the jeans and T-shirt that he was wearing this afternoon when Caroline tackled him on the sidewalk, Pete turns back to the guard.

  “What’d they do, assign me my own cop?” he asks. Then he turns to Caroline. “You ain’t done enough for me today?”

  She had a hell of a time convincing the jail commander to let her talk to an inmate late Saturday night, but Caroline finally persuaded him that Pete had vital information in a homicide investigation and that she didn’t have time to go through normal channels.

  Her cell phone vibrates. She looks down. Spivey. He must’ve finally been called out to Eli Boyle’s house. It won’t be long now. Caroline reaches down and turns off her phone.

  “I just need to ask you a couple of questions,” she tells Pete.

  He crosses his arms. “I don’t like when you ask me questions.”

  “You mentioned someone, a guy that Clark used to fight at the bus stop when you were kids.”

  “Yeah.” Pete finally sits down.

  “Eli Boyle.”

  “Yeah, that’s him. Weird fuckin’ kid.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  Pete shrugs. “I don’t know. Twenty years? About the same time I saw Clark the last time.” He gestures toward the jail guard standing at the door behind him. “I don’t bump into too many people from the old neighborhood.”

  “Uh-huh.” She looks down at her notes from the interview with Louis Carver. “Do you remember anything about your arrest in ’98?”