by Jess Walter
What kind of people have committed suicide because they were tired of life?
—Erasmus, In Praise of Folly
IX
ANYTHING YOU SAY
1 | SHE FINISHES READING
She finishes reading and sets the last legal pad down in her lap. Spivey is a pad behind—reading with a confused and cross look on his face, mustache twitching as his lips move with the big words. It’s three-thirty in the morning. As she slides the last pad over to Spivey, she remembers what Clark said: There aren’t even names for the crimes…Caroline stands, walks across the office to her desk, sits down, and calls information.
“Sunnyvale. California. A listing for Michael and Dana Langford.” As she waits to be connected Caroline’s attention drifts to the top of her desk and a photo of her parents on their wedding day. It is the only picture she has on her desk, and the only picture she has of them together—a small three-by-five in which her mother rests one gloved hand against the black tuxedo on her father’s chest. It is such a sweet, simple moment—her mother’s got something funny to tell her father, and he can’t wait to hear it. She’s tried to imagine it a million times, what her mother might’ve said at that moment, and she still has no idea. All she knows is that after fifteen years that’s the only thing she would take from her desk.
A woman answers on the fourth ring, “Hello?” Airy and easy at three-thirty in the morning. Either Dana is alive or her husband moves on quickly.
“I’m trying to reach Dana Langford,” Caroline says.
“This is.”
“My name is Caroline Mabry. I’m a police detective in Spokane.”
There is a pause and Caroline hears footsteps and a door easing closed, as if the woman has gone into another room. Then Dana says, in a hushed voice, “Look, I have no interest in pressing charges. You can’t do anything if I don’t press charges, right?”
“Actually, we don’t need the victim to press charges, no.”
“Please,” Dana continues. “It was just a misunderstanding between friends. No one was hurt. Did my husband call you?”
“No, your husband didn’t call.”
“I just don’t want anything bad to happen to Eli,” Dana says.
“Anything bad,” Caroline repeats, and thinks, She doesn’t know he’s dead. “Look, Ms. Langford, if you could just answer a couple of questions—”
“I won’t get Eli in trouble?”
“You have my word,” Caroline says. “We won’t be charging Eli with anything.”
Dana starts slowly and Caroline has to draw her out with questions. But soon enough, she’s just talking, telling the story of herself and Eli and a friend named Clark Mason, who all went to school together. As Caroline jots down notes, Dana explains Stanford and Michael, how they recruited Clark to find high-tech companies, how Eli’s interactive game, Empire, came to be one of their companies. It is a strange feeling, hearing Clark’s story from this angle, and as Dana begins to describe what happened the day Eli tried to kidnap her, Caroline imagines that her scribbled notes are a kind of staccato ending to Clark’s long confession:
Last Friday at 0600, Dana flew up from San Jose to meet Eli re: selling Empire. 0945 Eli picked her up at the airport. He was “edgy, nervous.” He drove her to his house “for meeting.” She was surprised: no furniture in house. Empty except prom photo above fireplace. Empty house, Eli’s pacing gave her creeps. At 1010 Eli borrowed her phone. Called Michael. Handed her the phone. Gave her note to read. Wanted money or would “hurt” her. Said she was in cabin in woods.
At first, Dana was confused. “I was not frightened.” Eli never threatened her with gun. She never saw gun. After she read note, they had a “friendly chat.” Felt she could walk away anytime. Didn’t try. They sat in empty living room, talking. Eli agitated. “I was worried about him. I’d never seen him like that.” She convinced Eli there was no money. No investors. They talked about high school. He started crying. Under great deal of stress. Eli: “I have nothing, no friends.” Dana cheered him up: “That’s not true. What about Clark?” 1115 Eli gave her phone back and she called Michael. Told him she was fine. Begged him not to call police. Eli drove her to airport. 1235 Dana caught flight back to Oakland/Alameda. 1645 Landed. Husband picked her up.
“And that was essentially it,” Dana says.
Caroline looks back at her notes. There seems to be so much missing, and yet she’s not sure what it could be. “Did you talk to Clark at some point that evening?”
“Yes,” she says. “He called right after I got home. He must’ve heard from Eli. He was quiet. He seemed concerned. I asked him to make sure that Eli got some help, and he promised that he would.”
So Clark didn’t tell her that Eli was dead, or about the plan he’d set in motion between Eli and Michael.
It seems funny to her: Clark is sure of what he knows, and Dana is sure of what she knows, and yet we all live in a world that is partly imagined. We see some things, and the rest we fill in—motives and reasons as imagined as a joke shared between newlyweds on a wedding day forty years ago.
Caroline sets her pen down. “Can I ask you something personal?”
Dana hesitates. “Of course.”
“Why didn’t you and Clark get together?”
There is a long pause; Caroline is sure this woman must be wondering what kind of police officer would ask such a question.
“I don’t know,” Dana says. “Maybe it was timing. Or maybe it was just safer to imagine that we could have been good, without actually taking the risk. Sometimes I think we blew our only real chance back in high school.”
“Why—what happened in high school?” Caroline asks.
There is another hesitation. “It was at the prom,” Dana says. “Eli and I went together, but at the end of the night Clark and I ended up kissing in a hotel room.”
“Eli was jealous,” Caroline says.
“Clark and I just felt so badly that I think we stayed apart. It seems kind of ironic now, that Eli kept us apart and then later brought us together.”
“Do you think that’s why Eli let you go on Friday?” Caroline asks. “Because he still had feelings for you?”
“For me?” Dana seems confused. “Eli doesn’t have feelings for me.”
Now it’s Caroline’s turn to be confused. “But I thought—”
“Eli loves Clark,” Dana says. “Always has.”
And suddenly there it is: Eli turning Empire into a computer game to appease Clark; pushing Clark into politics to get close to him, then trying to defeat him when Clark married Susan; and the cruelty of that final note, on Eli’s e-mail when he returned from taking Dana to the airport.
“Did Clark know how Eli felt?”
“I don’t know,” Dana says, and she chooses her words carefully. “Sometimes Clark could miss things like that. It’s another reason we never got together, I think. He doesn’t always see what’s right in front of his face.”
When they are done Caroline thanks her, and hangs up without telling her that Eli has killed himself and that Clark tried to engineer the death of her husband. By all rights she should tell Dana, but something—maybe just fatigue—prevents her from doing it.
She thinks about how many times as a police officer she’s had to deliver news like that, telling parents that their children aren’t coming home, telling a wife that her husband has been in a car accident. For a while she would just blurt out the bad news because she couldn’t stand the look in their eyes as they tried to think of some good reason that a cop would come to visit. Then she learned to go slowly, to let the person gird himself for what was coming. But this time…hell, she just doesn’t want to do it.
When she sees Spivey go to the bathroom, Caroline walks into his office and takes the four yellow legal pads. Then she returns to her desk and takes the picture of her parents. Caroline stares at it for a moment, her mother’s hand on her father’s chest, everything she dreamed as a little girl, and then she slides the photograph into her bag and walks
out the door. Spivey has just returned from the bathroom; she hears his voice behind her. “Caroline?” But the door closes and she is outside.
It’s still dark, an hour before sunrise, and the air has a February chill, but it will be warmer this morning than yesterday, and warmer, she supposes, tomorrow. She climbs in her car, starts it, turns off her radio and cell phone, drives quietly through the dark city and up the South Hill to Eli’s house. She parks on the gravel between the house and the garage. The scene has been processed, the body removed; she imagines it in the slick plastic bag, cold and dark. Everyone has gone home. Police tape still blocks off the stairs to the carriage house. By tomorrow, even that will be gone.
She goes past the carriage house and walks up to the main house, shines her flashlight on it and catches dark wood and gabled eaves. The back doorknob turns in her hand and Caroline steps inside. She’s not sure what she’s looking for, just that there is one shot to account for. Her footfalls echo in the empty house and she shines her flashlight around—dusty hardwood and old flowery wallpaper, bookshelves and pillars. She comes into the living room and is amazed at the view through the picture window, the city lights laid out full beneath her.
On the wall behind her, then, she sees what she came for and starts to put it together: Eli in this room with Dana, nervous, paranoid, and yet still the same odd, shy kid who can’t even bring himself to show his gun to the woman he’s supposed to be kidnapping. As they talk he loses his nerve, sees that she is telling the truth, that there will be no money. He drives her to the airport, and when he arrives home he goes up to his apartment and checks his e-mail. And there he finds the message that Clark sent from San Jose—I lied about everything. There is no more money.
And then—
Caroline shines her flashlight above the fireplace where a bullet hole—round and jagged, unmistakable in the plaster—is framed by the square dust outline of a picture frame.
She finds the picture itself on the floor in front of the fireplace, blown off the wall by the gunshot. The glass is shattered but the frame is intact. Caroline picks it up and turns it over in her hand, expecting to find the nickel-size bullet hole through Clark’s young face. But his face is still there, smiling, his arm thrown around the eighteen-year-old version of Eli Boyle, whose head is now gone, a small, ragged hole in the crisp paper of a faded photograph.
Jesus, even at the end, after all he’d done, Eli didn’t have it in him to hate Clark as much as he hated himself. She can imagine him staring at the photograph on the floor, then walking back outside, his arm limp at his side, going upstairs to the carriage house, sitting at the computer and reading Clark’s message over and over: I lied about everything. Is it spur of the moment, a shudder, a frenzy, a delirium, a dream? She tries to imagine it; maybe it’s because she hasn’t slept all weekend, but Caroline can only see it as a kind of fatigue, of giving up, the gun falling against his cheek, eyes pressed shut. Enough.
Rest now.
She is close, too close to stop now. And only one more thing to do. Caroline slides the prom photo into her bag next to the legal pads and walks toward the door. And she thinks maybe it’s all we can do sometimes to save ourselves.
2 | SHE FINDS HIM
She finds him at dawn, sitting on a ledge atop the Davenport Hotel, staring out at the city. She sees him from the car as she drives up, sees his feet first, dangling from the terra-cotta molding that rests like a crown on the twelfth floor of the old brick hotel. Apparently he doesn’t see her, and in Spokane on a Sunday morning there is no one else on the street to see him; no movie crowd has gathered to crane their necks to see if the loon really jumps, no firefighters stand below with nets, no priests or uniformed cops lean out the window to console, cajole, and capture. She sees only a single man, hair licked by the wind, 130 feet off the ground, staring out from the top of a building.
She parks and steps out of her car. The Davenport Hotel rises dark and empty before her, burning at its base from the glow of construction lights. On these lower floors, behind braces of scaffolding, the restored terra-cotta gleams like new teeth.
She could climb the scaffolding to an open window. That’s probably what Clark did. Instead, she peers through the automatic double doors. A janitor is working inside, wearing headphones and running an electric mop across the marble floor, no doubt cleaning up from one of the parties or wedding receptions they have here on the weekends in the restored ballroom. The hotel is four or five months from reopening and already people are straining to get in, to glimpse the history and the promise, to see for themselves if it’s really coming back.
Caroline pounds on the glass, but the janitor can’t hear her. She waits until he swings the sweeper her way and then she waves her arm. The janitor looks up, then shakes his head: No.
Caroline presses her badge against the glass and finally the janitor comes over. He reads her badge through the glass, then searches the ring on his belt for the proper key. He opens the door without saying a word. She explains that they picked someone up at the hotel two days earlier, and she just needs to have a look around.
The janitor shrugs and goes back to his mop. Caroline walks past the elevators and peeks into the lobby—she is not above longing, herself. She looks up at the paneled skylights, at the ornate railing on the second-floor walkway overlooking the marble-floored square, a fountain at its center. She closes her eyes and tries to hear the water trickling, the crowds, bellhops and porters, tropical birds, the cars motoring up to the door, Lindbergh and Earhart and Fairbanks sitting in chairs in the lobby. And Thomas Wolfe, downing his Scotch, grabbing his hat, preparing to leave Spokane “through land more barren all the time.”
She opens her eyes on the dark, empty lobby—maybe a person can only spend so much time in empty buildings composing elegies. Caroline walks back and presses the button for the elevator. She is relieved when she hears the car coming down. The stairs might’ve killed her. Forty-eight hours without sleep.
The elevator is framed in gold-leaf pillars, oak leaves and clusters, but inside it is pure freight, the walls and railings papered and taped, a carpenter’s sawhorse left in the center of the car. She rides up leaning on the sawhorse, the elevator motor and cables mumbling about morning and sleep, until the doors open onto the top floor of old rooms and Caroline emerges into a dusty hallway where the remodeling is still mostly theoretical. The first sunlight streams in from the east bank of windows onto a floor in which the lath-and-plaster walls have been removed and what remains is the bones of these rooms, framed in new honey-colored two-by-fours and a few old, gray beams and headers. She feels the breeze from the open window and walks toward it.
He is sitting on the ledge, his back to her, sky beginning to turn in front of him. She sticks her head out and feels the cool air, gasps a little. Spring comes with a hangover in Spokane—late, regretful, sometimes staggering back to bed. She slides her bag out onto the ledge and then begins to climb out the window, bracing herself on the window frame. She feels his ice-cold hand on her arm, helping her out on the wide guttered ledge. She sits next to him, shivers against the cold.
“You found me,” he says.
“I found you.”
They are facing north. Before them is downtown Spokane and the river channel, beyond that the gently sloping hills blanketed with homes and a simple, honest grid of streets. The whole thing is flatter than she would think. When you’re on those streets the hills seem imposing, but from here it is a graceful and good incline, like a man propped on a pillow in bed, reading a book.
She looks past Clark, to the east, where the sky is clear and the sun streaks down the long river valley all the way from Idaho, framed by long straight rail lines and a bolt of freeway. Then she looks west, to where the dark sky is trying to hold on to threats.
“It’s beautiful,” she says. “I hope I didn’t interrupt anything.”
“I was just trying to get up the nerve,” he says.
“What were you waiting for?”
>
“Sunrise,” he says.
They both turn and look at the sun, still cradled in the foothills to the east.
“You wait long enough you might freeze to death instead.”
“I probably don’t have the nerve for that, either.”
Caroline reaches in her bag, takes out the legal pads, and sets them down in front of Clark. Then she gives him the prom photo.
“Did you tell Dana?” he asks.
“No,” she says. “I didn’t tell her about Eli and I didn’t tell her about you.”
Clark stares out to the north again, leans back against the brick, and closes his eyes. “Do you know the worst part? Eli never told her it was my fault, that it was all my idea. He let me off the hook.”
A jet tears across the clean sky above them, east to west, high and noiseless, its stream carving the blue until it hits dark clouds and disappears. Caroline picks up the yellow legal pads. “So is that it?”
“Hmm?” He turns to face her.
“The confession. Is that all of it?”
“Yeah. I guess it is.”
“What now?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “What do you normally do?”
“What do we do?” She shrugs. “If someone turns himself in to the police and admits that he intended to commit murder? Committed acts furthering that crime? Entered into a conspiracy? We usually say you have the right to remain silent. That anything you say can be used against you. That you have the right to an attorney, but if you can’t afford one we’ll give you an overworked one who just got out of law school and will go into private practice the week your case goes to trial.”
He smiles a little bit. “Am I under arrest?”
“I haven’t decided,” she says. “My sergeant thinks you fucked this up so much, there’s probably nothing to charge you with. He thinks we should try to have you committed.”