Schrödinger's Gun

by Ray Wood

  “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 Rivers 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.

  “Have you been to a doctor about your face?” I said eventually. Kitty pulled away as I tried to touch the bruise.

  “No.”

  “Looks bad.”

  She stared at the potted plant in the far corner. “Johnny did it,” she said. “I saw him on West 19th a few days ago, the first time since he … moved out.” When I made no reply she flicked her doe eyes up to mine. “You know about that?”

  I nodded slowly. She sniffed and looked back down.

  “Chucked me for some other broad. A singer, or something. Anyway, I—this was the first time I saw him since he walked out, like I said. So I gave him a piece of my mind: told him I thought he was a rotten, dirty cheat and I hoped he died in a gutter. I said I’d hire the best divorce lawyers in Chicago and that I’d get what was mine if they had to turn him upside down and shake it loose. And he—and he—”

  She covered her face and cried into her hands, her pretty little shoulders jerking with each sob. I patted her some more and went to get some water. I avoided universes in which it spilt this time.

  “Thanks,” she said, once she’d had a sip. She put the glass back on the desk. “So I told him—what I just told you—and he—he did this.” She gestured to her cheek. “Told me I was a dumb bitch and that I wouldn’t get a cent. Some old pal of his was going to get our marriage undone, say that we never—that I was never Mrs. Rivers. And he told me that if I came near him again he’d…” She bit her bottom lip and tried to stem the tears.

  “It’s okay,” I said, as gently as I could manage. I didn’t know whether I should touch her again. In the end I got up, went around to her side of the desk and knelt beside her chair, looking up into her eyes. She rubbed away her tears and looked fiercely at me.

  “Kitty,” I said. “There’s one more thing I need to ask you; it’s about the night Johnny was killed. Last time we talked you told me that you went to the distillery because Johnny hadn’t come home and you were worried about him. That’s not true, is it? He hadn’t lived with you for weeks. What really happened that night?”

  She looked over at the window. “Her,” she said eventually. “I wanted to see who she was—who he left me for. I hired a PI to shadow him. He found out where Johnny was living and told me that he went out most nights with a broad, so I decided I’d follow him. On the night he—the night he died—I waited outside his apartment. I figured she’d be there with him, but he came out alone. Got into his car. I hailed a cab and followed him. Ended up on 23rd, near his”—she glanced at me�
��“office. I waited in the cab, wanting to see if he came out with her—next thing I knew, I heard a gun go off, and I saw a man running away. So I got out of the cab, and—and…”

  I put a handkerchief in her hand: she pressed it gently to her nose and blew. I touched her knee. It had been a long time since I had comforted anyone.

  “It’s okay,” I said, aiming for tenderness. “It’s okay. Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  Kitty’s face was scrunched and wet. I fired up the heisen to try and tell if she was faking it, but what she did next was the same in every universe that I could see. “Because I—because I didn’t want you to think—” She threw her arms around me, her chin digging into the inside of my shoulder. “Please don’t think I killed him, oh please, I didn’t kill him, I wouldn’t kill him…”

  I patted her small, soft back and let her sob into my sleeve.

  * * *

  Later that afternoon, over on the East side of Chicago, I watched the sun sink behind a square apartment block. I stood across the street, outside what had been the back yard of a brewery before the prohibition, my implant churning. The stack of letters bulged inside my pocket.

  Rick had not kept his new address from me, as I had mine from him when I had moved out of our shared apartment. I guess he thought that one day I might want to come and see Sarah. Or, at least, that I would want to keep that possibility alive. A boy walked down the sidewalk carrying a violin case. The apartment block was blurred to me, like I had something in my eye; what was really happening, of course, was that the heisen was showing me all the thousands of possibility threads for this place laid on top of one another: lights in windows on or off in different combinations, graffiti gone or changed or further to one side. Hundreds of potential snowfalls fizzing in the air. In one or two universes, the boy with the violin case was a girl. Spectral figures moved behind the windows.

  I tried to work out why I was there. I’d kept the lid on my curiosity for twelve years. I’d left forty-eight letters unopened. I’d always had the possibilities to fall back on—