American by Day

by Derek B. Miller

  “What’s your plan?”

  “It’s her plan. She thinks he might come looking for her if he learns she’s in town looking for him.”

  “Unless he hides deeper.”

  “Maybe. But I’m not going to find him with either manpower or technical know-how. I’m not exactly running the NSA over here,” says Irv, glancing at Cory, who is right now trying to open a tape dispenser with the business end of a mail opener, which Irv figures is only going to end in tears. “I’m feeling optimistic about it. For this plan to work out though, Howard, I’m going to need some time.”

  “What kind of time?”

  “The time it takes to get it done. I need you to open that space for me, Howard. I don’t want people getting nervous. People usually mistake thinking for doing nothing because they can’t see anything. Especially politicians and the media. Which is why we’re all doomed, but no one asked me.”

  “So you already know what the answer is.”

  “I do.”

  “And you know why.”

  “I do.”

  “Lydia Jones was black.”

  “She was.”

  “She was a black woman. And now she’s dead.”

  “She is.”

  “Not just any black woman. A professor. An intellectual. A community leader.”

  “By all accounts she was sort of bookish. The quiet type.”

  “After the Jeffrey Simmons case was closed,” Howard says, ignoring Irv, “there have been calls—high level and important calls—for greater attention to the use of force by the police, as well as renewed concerns about racism and insufficient attention to cases involving black victims. The Jones family deserves justice, Irving. If the system tries to give you time on Dr. Jones’s case, it might look like we’re privileging the white perpetrator over the black victim by dragging our heels. I might also add,” says Howard, “the white male perpetrator over the black female victim. A white male who is a foreigner, and a victim who is American. Time is not on your side, and it is not ours to give. I suggest,” says Howard, “that we not stand with the arrogance of King Canute, who tried to hold back the waves.”

  Cory’s victory over the tape dispenser is—as Irv had anticipated—a Pyrrhic one, as he is now bleeding. He has inserted his index finger into his mouth and instinctively turned toward Irv, who is now shaking his head at him.

  “The thing is, Howard,” says Irv, “people always remember that story incorrectly. It wasn’t true that Canute commanded the waves to stop out of vainglory only to realize his own limits. It’s by a strange twist of fate we think of him as a negative example. It was quite the opposite. He sat on his throne on the shore of England and showed his subjects that the waves would not obey him—quite deliberately and theatrically. He then declared to his kingdom, and I’m quoting from memory here, Howard: ‘All the inhabitants of the world should know that the power of kings is vain and trivial, and that none is worthy the name of king but He whose command the heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.’ Unquote. More or less. So I beg to differ, Howard. I say, let King Canute be our guide. We too must recognize that there is but one King who commands over all of us, and we must obey the foundation of His law, and hold fast to our greatest truths. And if unto you, O Howard, the world delivereth a giant shovelful of shit and a fan against which to throw it, you might remind them of the good Lord Jesus Christ and our requirement to be actually good to one another, and not only appear to be so in the media—so says Proverbs 902 . . . 10. And if they are unconvinced by that, you can also remind them that the motto of the New York State Police is ‘Excellence Through Knowledge’ and has been since 1917. I do not like the way this case is becoming about optics rather than justice. I believe in my heart of hearts, dear Howard, that if we hold fast to the simple things, we will bring more justice to this world so help me God. You mark my words.”

  “Who taught you to talk like this, Irv?”

  “The Jesuits at Loyola—though you need to load them up on Glenlivet if you want to hear the really good stuff.”

  “Don’t fuck this up, Irv.”

  “Amen, Howard.”

  Shop Talk

  Irv directs Cory to put a white board and worktable in the jail cell, but the desk won’t fit, so it takes Cory the better part of three hours to unscrew the legs thanks to his cut finger and the stuck screws that probably haven’t touched oxygen since “I Like Ike” pins were all the rage.

  Once the command center is set up, Irv lays out the map with Sigrid’s marks. He’s asked Cory to run a long cord for his old mint-green Cortelco, which he’s placed on the corner of the desk; it has a pleasing heft and a sculptural certainty that he now uses to hold the map corner in place.

  Irv never has liked modern telephones. The built-in loudspeakers deny privacy and also rob him of the tactile experience of being on a phone, not merely talking into one. It’s a bit like smoking. Who would smoke if you couldn’t hold the cigarette? Waving it around, hanging it from your lips—that’s where the fun is. Life has always seemed more real when you’re contending with gravity. Because in the end that’s what’s gonna get you.

  He considers using his gun as a counterweight for the other side of the map but thinks the better of it. It’s a pity, though. It would have been the first time it proved useful for something.

  Sigrid arrives at the station at eleven a.m.—not ten, as Melinda had—and she explains that it is five in the afternoon back in Oslo and she’s having some sleeping troubles. Irv nods. It could be the shape of the earth conspiring against her. It may also be worry. He’s seen women who are broken from the inside out and watched them apply a thin layer of paint to their lips and eyes and cheeks—not to attract attention but to divert it. Sigrid may be tired but she is unbroken and tries to divert nothing. “We’re going to need a picture of you for this plan to work. Something for the flyers we’re putting up.”

  Sigrid nods and asks for coffee, suggesting they revisit that discussion when she’s had time to wake up a bit, during which time Irv holds up his iPhone and snaps a picture of her.

  “Ah . . . wait a second,” Sigrid says.

  Irv does not wait a second and instead shows the photo to Melinda, who is standing nearby, and this makes Melinda’s face contort to the point where she excuses herself from the cell.

  “Let me see that,” says Sigrid.

  “All in good time.”

  “You can’t use that,” Sigrid says, and Irv smiles at her as he says, “What?” while his iPhone says SWISH! and the picture of Sigrid is sent into the metaverse.

  “What were you saying?” Irv asks innocently.

  “Who did you send that to?”

  “Frank Allman, out in Saranac Lake. Though maybe, out there in the blue sky, Duane Allman too. We miss you, Duane.”

  Sigrid sits herself down in the same spot as . . . Was it only yesterday? It feels like a week ago.

  Sprawled across the new desk in the jail cell is unexpected proof that Irv has been doing some actual police work in between juvenile pranks like photographing her in her current state. He has—based on a cursory assessment—done a solid job of pinpointing the most likely spots where Marcus will show up for supplies—assuming any of their grander assumptions are accurate.

  “Frank’s people will do the legwork and put up the posters,” he says.

  “Before you said flyers. Now you said posters. Posters are bigger, right?”

  “Yuge. By the way, I think you have something on the corner of your mouth there. What is that, a piece of muffin? I hope that doesn’t show up on the poster.”

  Irv notices that Sigrid, though plain at first sight, has a beautiful neck. She has a quality he’s seen many times in blondes: One moment they are the boring women next door who are as interesting as drying laundry, and the next—as though transformed with sunlight—they become angular and sultry. Sigrid has clearly been spending a lot of time in the wrong light, but her neck is a revelation and invites questions Irv hasn’t tho
ught to ask before.

  “How did you catch me at Target?” Sigrid asks.

  “I bribed Juliet and she ratted you out when you called in for help. Melinda was supposed to lose you, and I had Cory out back in case you went that way, which you did. But for the record, you actually did shake her. And she’s totally confused, poor kid.”

  “How could you have known to bribe Juliet?” Sigrid asks. “You couldn’t have possibly known I was coming from Oslo, and I went directly to you after leaving Marcus’s house. So how did you know of my connection to her?”

  “I didn’t. I bribed her before you got to town when we searched his house with the warrant. Told her I’d pay one hundred dollars for any information about Marcus, especially if he came back or anyone came around asking for him. Let me guess,” Irv adds. “You paid her something too?”

  “Two hundred.”

  “So she collected your two hundred first and then ratted you out for an additional one hundred from me.”

  “She’s a criminal mastermind,” Sigrid says.

  “Well . . . that’s six pieces of gum she doesn’t need to chew,” he says.

  “What I’m worried about here, Irv,” says Sigrid, crossing a leg, “is that you have a very specific idea about what happened and now you’re working your way backwards toward proving it. It’s harder to be proved wrong that way, and investigators have a tendency for theory-fixation.”

  “I like it when you talk shop like this,” Irv says.

  “This is what I can talk about best in English.”

  “What’s hardest for you to talk about in English?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “Well played.”

  “What I try to emphasize at home, with my staff,” Sigrid says, “is how to take an exploratory approach rather than building a formal hypothesis, testing it, and reformulating it with findings. Investigation shouldn’t be an experimental science, both because it’s the wrong approach and also because cops aren’t scientists trained at falsifying claims. In my experience, if an investigator picks a hypothesis too soon it starts to look like a convenient conclusion rather than a target for refutation. You know Charles Peirce?”

  “No.”

  “Founder of Pragmatism?”

  “Sure,” he lies.

  “He talked about the ‘provisional entertainment of an explanatory inference.’ It means we have to hold an idea loosely at first and allow new pieces of knowledge to enrich our understanding rather than sum things up too quickly and be wrong too early. It requires an open mind and a comfort with ambiguity that most cops don’t have. It also requires police leadership that isn’t pushing cops to close cases as soon as possible.”

  “I’m not the top of the food chain, Sigrid. There is a big and hungry leadership above my head that thinks I like look like a cupcake.”

  “You need to get us the time we need to learn and act wisely.”

  Irv gives Sigrid a wide-open and innocent smile that Sigrid doesn’t buy for a second but still, and strangely, has some effect on her. He actually opens his arms expansively as if to physically pull Sigrid into his charismatic orbit: “So,” he says, “this is the part where I’m supposed to argue with you, and be the tough guy, and put you in your place because you’re . . . you know . . . just a woman. The thing is, that’s not going to happen. I like women. I think they’re swell. And I’m OK with ambiguity. It’s the sea in which I swim. So let’s break with convention and say that I find you reasonable and articulate. Tell me then, O Wise One of the Far North: How do you suggest we come at a recorded statement that includes the phrases ‘I did this, I did this’?”

  “As facts in your case for which we don’t yet have a basis for interpretation.”

  “That . . . is actually convincing. You’re serious about this investigative stuff, huh?”

  “I am an investigator,” Sigrid says.

  “The pickle that I’m in, Chief—and this has nothing to do with my love for ambiguity or women, because let’s face it: they’re a matched set—is that I’m worried that your neo-zen-pragmatism is going to slow us down. And I have reasons to speed things up, and it isn’t because I’m an idiot.”

  “Why do you want to speed things up?”

  “Put simply, because something is chasing me.”

  “Doing things right usually speeds things up,” Sigrid says.

  “You know what? That can be true. But it isn’t always true. Because it’s most true when people care about the quality of the results. Usually they don’t, though. They care about perception, and it’s easier to perceive something in motion, and fast is more exciting than slow. My worry, Sigrid, is that the results they want are for themselves. They want conclusions that make them look good. Not everyone wants justice. Certainly not everyone I work for.”

  “You work for the people who elected you.”

  Irv doesn’t reply. He sits there, quietly, looking at her. He is expressionless.

  Sigrid looks away from him toward the ancient green telephone on the desk as though it might ring. It does not.

  “Tell you what I’m going to do,” Irv says. “I’ll follow your lead for seventy-two hours while Frank Allman puts up posters all around the lake and we hope to God Marcus calls in because he wants to avoid getting shot. Now . . .” he says, leaning back against the bars and crossing his legs. “What do you have on your brother that we don’t? You’re too strategic to have given me everything. Please tell me.”

  “I don’t know anything for certain yet,” Sigrid says, neglecting to mention the existence of a USB stick named Ferdinand. “But I do have his letters to my father over the past year. I’ve only skimmed them. But I’m hoping they will illuminate something about his relationship with Lydia, at least from his perspective.”

  “That will help.”

  “The only thing is,” she adds with a smile, “they’re in Norwegian.”

  Relevant Irrelevancies

  For the remainder of Thursday and much of Friday, Sigrid learns to rely on Melinda, who proves herself to be organized, enthusiastic, and productive. She also follows instructions even though Sigrid has no authority here. At one point Melinda smiles awkwardly at her after completing some tedious but helpful background reading, and Sigrid is forced to ask—again—why she is being smiled at.

  “I’ve never had a woman boss before.”

  She considers Melinda’s age. “How many bosses have you had?” she asks.

  “That isn’t it,” the deputy explains. “There are sixty-two sheriff’s offices in New York State and never, in the three-hundred-year history of New York, has a woman ever held the job of sheriff. There have been some women undersheriffs, though. I find the title awkward.”

  Melinda sits at Irv’s desk in the jail cell with strict instructions not to answer his phone. Irv himself has returned to the main room so he can attend to a range of topics he refers to as “his job.” That has left Sigrid alone with Melinda, and she is starting to understand—to a point—how the young woman thinks. She visualizes Melinda’s process as a work of art. One produced by Jackson Pollack: not so much drippy as nonlinear, abstract, and impossible to follow even if you like the results.

  “Melinda,” Sigrid now says, sympathetically. “America is in the dark ages. You are not supposed to be excited to work for me. You are not supposed to be pleased that men might someday let you do the same thing as them if you’re both obedient and twice as qualified, which is actually the recipe for a mental breakdown, not a productive life. You need to slip out of this, OK?”

  “Snap.”

  “What?”

  “Snap out of it.”

  “It isn’t slip?”

  “No.”

  Colloquial phrases are not the only lessons Melinda has been teaching her, though. Irv, as it happens, is responsible for more than Sigrid had first assumed. Aside from Melinda and Cory and the others she’s met in the office, the wider force has a total of twenty-six deputy sheriffs, though most of them work elsewhere. T
here is a drug task force, a recreation patrol unit that patrols the Canadian border, a K9 unit, a sheriff’s emergency response team—much like her own Delta Force back home in Oslo—who are trained in special weapons and tactics, a school resource officer, and Irv’s jurisdiction swells to a not-insignificant population of 100,000 summertime residents.

  The sheriff, she’s noticing, commands all this with the easy posture of someone running a children’s football team. His primary attention, however, is this case. Lydia’s death and Marcus’s disappearance matter a great deal. What she wants to know is why.

  Exhausted by Melinda and curious about Irv’s commitments, she asks if he’d be willing to come back to the jail cell with her.

  His eyebrows rise like those on a retriever, but without an argument he sends Melinda back to her own desk in the main room and rejoins Sigrid.

  Across from Irv, Sigrid cups her hands over the headphones to better isolate the sounds and listens to Marcus’s 9-1-1 call over and over again, trying to burrow into it and find a truth that might be hidden in the pauses between the phrases. She listens to the background hum and passing noises. She takes notes on what she hears. But it isn’t working. She was hoping for a quick fix, a decisive piece of evidence that would turn the investigation around, but she knows this kind of magical thinking is for children. Yes, there is the occasional clue, but more often than not, police work is about constructing plausible stories and, in the end, being sufficiently confident of the story constructed to pass it on to the prosecutors, thereby making it their problem.

  When she first started listening to the message she had hoped she could build . . . not so much a competing story line but a better argument, an argument rooted in black earth itself. After what seems like a hundred passes through the tape, though, she still has nothing. Nothing to exonerate her brother, nothing to direct her toward another conclusion. So she changes her tactic. Rather than try to find a new solution, perhaps she can falsify the existing one.

  Sigrid removes her headphones. Every time she listens to the events she pictures the scene. The building, the street, the woman’s body, Marcus speaking into the phone. She assembles the images from the sounds. Every image is wrong—every color, every angle—because she has never seen this place. Never been there. Never stood where Chuck stood. She is staring deeply into a picture she has created on her own. It is a destructive path, and she removes the headphones and sits back.