American by Day

by Derek B. Miller

“What else?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what else’? I have Marcus running away from his job. From his apartment. He left everything behind to an opinionated hooker.”

  “So it isn’t exactly open and shut.”

  “We have not decided to arrest him for the charge of murder yet, no. I admit that it is circumstantial, but the golden triangle of motive, means, and opportunity is starting to form a nice equilateral shape that I find pleasing.”

  “That’s a heuristic. It’s not an algorithm for proving causality,” says Sigrid.

  Irv smiles at her. His face brightens immediately and all sense of seriousness and weight is not only erased but seems to have been part of another past. He looks to Sigrid as though smiling is his natural state, and it is only by rallying his small reserve of adulthood and maturity that he can appear stern and focused.

  “Why are you smiling at me?”

  “I like the way you said that, especially for a woman for whom English is not her first language. No, it isn’t a conviction machine. I—for example—have motive, means, and opportunity to kill most journalists in this town and yet I don’t, I won’t, and if they end up dead it doesn’t mean I did it. It does mean, however, that it would be perfectly reasonable to suspect me of doing it if one had been hurled from a window. Right now, your brother is the only one inside my golden triangle. So I need to talk to him. And I am under some serious pressure to do so. And quickly. You don’t know the politics around here. You are a foreigner in a foreign land with foreign ideas and a laminated piece of plastic. Back to you. What do you want to share with me next?”

  “I’m not going to help you catch my brother.”

  “Now, now, Ms. Odegard. Cop to cop—we wouldn’t want to be obstructing justice or becoming an accessory after the fact, now, would we?”

  “I think there’s a hard line to be drawn,” says Sigrid, “between aiding a fugitive and not working for you for free.”

  “You’re smart,” says Irv, pointing at her and nodding his head. “A smart cucumber.”

  Sigrid says nothing.

  “And quiet. Do you have Asperger’s or something?”

  “No.”

  “You’re a quiet one,” he says quietly.

  “I think Americans can’t abide silence.”

  “You only got here yesterday.”

  “The pattern is robust.”

  Irv puts his finger back in the holster and leans back against the bars to his cell. “What kind of cop are you?”

  “I’m a section chief in Oslo.”

  “Oslo’s the capital.”

  “Yes.”

  “How big is it?”

  “The city is around six hundred and fifty thousand and the urban area is closer to a million.”

  “So you’re a capital-city cop with a serious job. And you’re how old?”

  “Forty.”

  “You’ve been promoted pretty fast. You must be talented or have good connections. What does your father do?”

  “He talks to ducks.”

  “Are they police ducks?”

  “No,” she says. And—worried she might be falling into the rabbit hole of pointless American banter—adds, “We’re a farming family. Marcus stayed in agriculture generally and I went off to the big city to fight crime.”

  “So we’ll go with smart and talented for now. You seen much in your time on the job?”

  “Yes.”

  “That face, right there? See, that’s interesting,” Irv says, pointing at her again. He uncrosses his legs and leans forward. “You’re quiet but you’ve got an expressive face. I’m guessing you’ve been through something. And recently. Which is why none of this fazes you. Your bar is set higher. Not just in your heart,” he says, tapping his chest, “but in your soul.”

  Sigrid leans back against the bars to put a little more distance between herself and Irv’s analysis. She glances at his cowboy boots and he notices.

  “Like ’em?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “They’ll grow on you.”

  “Do you really have time for all this?” Sigrid asks. “This useless talk?”

  Irv taps out a bongo solo on his knee and scrunches up his face. “It’s only useless if you don’t know how to listen to it. Meanwhile, we’ve looked in all the usual places and some exceptional ones to find Marcus and we can’t; every place Tommy Lee Jones would have us look, we’ve looked. But . . . you know . . . this is a very, very big country that is very, very easy to move around in. At the moment we’re watching the credit cards and stuff, but it’s quiet. What you could do is help us collect him. If he’s innocent, he walks. If not—it’s best no one gets hurt as we determine that, right?”

  “We’re at cross purposes, Sheriff.”

  “It’s family and you obviously believe in him. I get it. I’m not that cop in all the action movies who doesn’t get it. But he does have to come in and talk to us. He was the woman’s lover and there’s an eyewitness putting him at the scene of her death. So consider this,” Irv says, leaning forward again and resting his arms on his knees, “just in case you decide to get clever and try to find him on your own. I’ve got local police, state police, and FBI if I need it. I was born and raised here and I know this land and these people. You’re a foreigner. You don’t know anyone and you’re traveling alone. There is no way that one foreigner in an unfamiliar land can outfox the local police.”

  “I’ve seen it done,” says Sigrid. And she adds, “Recently.”

  “Against someone as smart as me?”

  “Too soon to tell.”

  “OK. But consider this. If we work together, and we find him together, you are guaranteed to be the first one in to talk him out. But if you go off on your own, and you don’t get there first? All bets are off.”

  “You haven’t called her death a murder yet.”

  “You don’t miss a thing, do you?”

  The case folder is still on Sigrid’s legs, and for the first time she turns her attention to it. She knows that Irv isn’t wrong, and if she were in his position, holding this same file, she would have made a similar appeal—though with fewer words.

  In truth, it would be better if Marcus came in. Whatever happened to Lydia Jones, it wasn’t caused by Marcus. He never exhibited an explosive personality, was never enraged, was never abusive to women, and has never been in a fight even as a boy, as far as she knows. His flaws run the opposite direction. He is too sensitive, too vulnerable. Her father used to say that he suffered from perspective. His view of the world is too broad to permit attention to the banal but otherwise necessary activities of life. In her two decades as a police officer, Sigrid has never once arrested a person like that for violence.

  She opens the file and what she sees startles her.

  During the past month she has reviewed hundreds of photos from the assault on the summer house in Glåmlia. When the emergency response team engaged the criminals inside, they had ascertained that they were armed, they were dangerous, and the hostage situation was fragile. They opted to go in shooting, which Sigrid supported. When it was over there was paperwork. She’s been looking at dead bodies all month.

  It isn’t Lydia Jones’s contorted and bloodied body on the sidewalk that surprises her. It is that Dr. Lydia Jones was black.

  “She was black,” says Sigrid.

  “You didn’t know that?”

  “No. I hadn’t had time to look her up or . . .” Sigrid stops short of saying “finish reading Marcus’s letters and look through his hard drive,” because it wasn’t necessary for Sheriff Irv Wylie to know about the letters. Or the hard drive.

  “Or . . . what?” asks Irv.

  “Hmm?”

  “You said, ‘or’ and I said, ‘or what’? You were about to add something.”

  “Brush my teeth,” Sigrid says.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s a Norwegian expression. Hard to translate.”

  Irv looks doubtful. “What’s your plan, Sigr
id?” he asks.

  “I’m working on it.”

  Sigrid watches Irv stand up and walk into the main room, where he calls to someone named Melinda and asks her to join them in the holding cells. When he steps back inside he speaks quickly:

  “There’s a Motel Six down the road,” he says. “Sixty-three ninety-nine a night plus taxes. Puts you at seventy bucks a night or so with taxes. But there’s no kitchenette, so you’re looking at twenty dollars a day in fast food and another couple for coffee and oddities. Add in the public transportation and a few cabs and you’re looking at at least a hundred and ten a day to stick around here, assuming you never go to the movies or have a drink. Now, I don’t know what they pay cops in Oslo, but if I can guess, that’s a painful bite if you’re here for a few weeks. It would be for me. And you already said your family’s in farming, and probably not the Big Agro type. So here’s what I think.”

  Melinda arrives and loiters by the door to the jail. She is a white twenty-something cop in uniform wearing a Beretta nine-millimeter in a black holster. She moves with it comfortably. That would put her in the job for at least a few years.

  “Melinda, this here is Sigrid Odegard.”

  “Ødegård,” Sigrid says, correcting his pronunciation.

  “What she said. She is the sister of Marcus . . . of the same family name. She’s come here from Norway looking for him. She’s gonna stay with you for a while so we can lend her a helping hand in that noble effort.”

  “OK.”

  “Why would you do that?” Sigrid asks.

  “Because the sheriff asked me to.”

  “Not you. You.”

  “So we know where you are and can more easily follow you around.”

  “Right. But I don’t know where he is.”

  “I believe you completely,” says Irv. “And I think your intentions are just and true. But I also suspect that you are going to track him down like one of those little sniffer dogs. You know the little sniffer dogs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like one of them. Maybe a beagle. Or a schnauzer.”

  “I can’t imagine why you think I’m going to be more successful. You just delivered a speech about how I can’t possibly find him by myself in a strange land.”

  “Not against us, no. But with us? Absolutely. And here’s why: We always have to leave the possibility for individuation during investigations. To us he’s an amalgam. A profile. A typification. But not a person. You, however, know him. You know what makes him . . . distinct. That means you have the edge on knowing how his personality might manifest as behavior. Also, I think you see the world differently than I do, Ms. Sigrid. I believe we, at the sheriff’s station, are seeing your brother’s world through a glass darkly, which is why we can’t find him. But through your clear blue Norwegian eyes we’re going to learn to see him face to face, and you know why? Because love never fails. And I believe you love your brother. So: Corinthians Thirteen. Who knew it was actually a foundation for a solid investigative strategy in a murder case.”

  The General Opinion

  Officer Melinda Powell is from Buffalo, New York, where she grew up with her mother, Lisa, and her father, Albert, in a white house with black shutters that was close enough to school so she could walk there, which was really nice because some of her friends had to take the bus every morning and the kids on the bus could be sort of mean, especially this wild kid named Benny whose parents got divorced when he was really young and no one ever seemed to talk him through it so he was crazy angry at everyone, and that made walking much better because in the winter she got to see all the snowmen people put up in their yard, with the coal and the carrots and the whole deal, and obviously no one pulled her hair or started her day off in a bad mood, which can mean a lot when you’re a teenager especially, and it all made growing up really nice even though it was sort of near the city and it had crime and stuff but not too much in her area, so really, she’s not exactly sure why she became a cop but she did and she just loves it because it feels like she can make a difference, and Sheriff Irv is just the greatest and he’s such an original thinker and straight shooter she knows she can learn a lot from him.

  Sigrid learns all this between the time she leaves the police station and the time she enters the passenger-side door of Melinda’s prowler. She wonders how much more she might have learned from Melinda if she’d actually asked a question.

  Melinda eventually asks Sigrid where she wants to go first and Sigrid—in an effort to blend in by bonding—says, “I think we should try Marcus’s secret hideout. Have you looked there yet?”

  Maybe the delivery was too dry, because Melinda says, “No. That’s a great idea! Do you know the address?”

  Sigrid has read someplace that culture is all about language. It seemed reasonable when she read it. Now that she is speaking English she should have been transformed into an American of sorts. But clearly that is not happening and she isn’t fooling anyone. There must be something deeper going on.

  “I was telling a joke,” Sigrid explains.

  “Really?”

  Melinda pulls out into traffic. Sigrid has no idea where they are going.

  Or maybe Sigrid has it backwards. Maybe Melinda is a comic genius.

  “Wait. Are you joking?” Sigrid asks.

  “No. Are you joking about me joking?” Melinda asks.

  “No,” says Sigrid. “I’m being serious.”

  “When Irv said you’re from Norway, did he mean, like, your heritage? Minneapolis or St. Paul?”

  “No. The actual country.”

  “Huh. So . . . why do you think your brother killed that woman?”

  “Your name is Melinda, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Melinda, there is a difference between what we call the investigative question and the interview question. The first one is what you secretly want to know. The second one is what you ask in order to learn it. They are seldom the same question. That’s the science. The art is engaging your subject into revealing information you want to know through indirect questioning. If you’re treating me as an interviewee here, and you want me to reveal information, you’re going to have to try harder. I won’t blame you for doing it, but you’re going to need to raise your game if you want to win. OK?”

  “I don’t remember this coming up in the police academy.”

  “They were probably teaching you to shoot instead.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing. Where are we going?”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “You first.”

  “Nowhere, really,” Melinda admits. “I was just driving around hoping to ask you a few questions.”

  “OK. I need to buy some clothing. Mine were stolen.”

  “That sucks.”

  “That’s the general opinion.”

  “I’ll take you to Target, where you can ‘expect more and pay less.’”

  “That sounds ideal.”

  The prices at Target are so low that Sigrid feels a momentary pang of guilt for the abducted and enslaved children who surely weaved the clothing with their tiny little fingers. It is unsettling, though, how quickly that feeling fades as she holds up a pair of not-half-bad-looking jeans being sold on sale for twelve dollars: the price of coffee and a muffin in Oslo.

  Melinda stands, bored, like a little sister being dragged around town. “They stole your suitcase?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re gonna need a new suitcase,” Melinda concludes.

  “They have suitcases here too?”

  “They got everything.”

  Sigrid’s shopping is partly a solitary affair and partly a team effort because Melinda is obviously under orders not to leave her alone for too long. She does, however, leave her alone long enough for Sigrid to snag the few items she is going to need to carry out her own work in parallel to that of the police department. Luckily, these items are small enough to slip under the clothing in the cart.

>   Melinda follows Sigrid toward the bathrooms and waits at the end of the short hallway for her to return.

  Five minutes later, on reemerging, Sigrid says to her, “I’m still here.”

  “We’re all on the same side,” Melinda says, neither convincingly nor enthusiastically.

  “Of course we are,” Sigrid agrees.

  At the cash register Melinda eyes over the purchases Sigrid isn’t hiding from her in the bag at her feet. “Good haul?” she asks.

  “I can’t complain.”

  She might have complained, though, because the cashier tried to stack the returned coins on top of the slippery receipt rather than handing over the coins first. They slid off and fell to the floor.

  “Sorry. That happens all the time,” the girl says.

  “So why do you keep doing it?” Sigrid asks.

  “What?”

  On the plus side, Sigrid bought a suitcase and new wardrobe for less than the price of the suitcase alone in Oslo with its twenty-five percent sales tax.

  The parking lot grew crowded while they were inside. Sigrid looks at her surroundings as they place the suitcase and its contents into the trunk of the police car.

  It is a rather desolate place, Sigrid notes, but no worse than certain areas of Oslo that are really an embarrassing knot of roads, roundabouts, warehouses, and sprawl. Areas like Økern. Adding to the general mood of disrepair and neglect is a shack-turned-bar tucked behind the Target that may have once been a homestead in the 1800s and remains standing only because it refused to sell out or fall down. It is the kind of structure that looks to be propped up by spite.

  “What’s that?”

  “Biker bar. The Inferno. Mean place.”

  “You ever break it up?”

  “They’re like hornets. They just come back again later.”

  Melinda starts the car and switches on the police radio. Unlike in Oslo, where there is constant chatter, here it is mostly quiet.

  As Melinda pulls out of the parking lot Sigrid decides to level with her. “You realize I’m going to have to shake you at some point and carry on alone?”

  “I’ve been told to follow you but not get in your way,” Melinda says, not taking her eyes off the road.