Case of Lies

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  “Those are my witnesses,” she said. “I’ll take it from here.”

  “Want us to go in with you?” Kurt asked her. His eyes scanned the street traffic. It was noisy and hard to hear.

  “No, no, you guys go get something warm to drink. Take some pictures.” She wished the weather were more welcoming, that they had more to do, but Bob was looking around with interest. “I’ll break it off for the night at about six-thirty and call you.”

  “Be careful.”

  She stepped off the curb and crossed, looking back once to see Bob and Kurt still standing there, watching her. A moist breeze, the remnant of the rain, blew down the avenue.

  “Hello.”

  The three turned to her. Three young, scared faces.

  “We have come.” The young Indian man, Sumaraj Das, shook her hand. He wore a red cashmere muffler and an overcoat.

  “Hello, Silke.”

  Silke was pale but her expression was determined. “Yes, we are ready,” she said. “And this is Elliott. Raj? What are you doing? Are you all right?”

  Raj had closed his eyes and brought his hand up to his chest.

  “Raj?” Silke Kilmer said again, panic in her eyes. Then she made another sound, a grunt, a sound that this young lady would never have made in company, except that she had just been shot. Nina knew this instantly.

  “Uh.” Silke fell with Raj.

  Nina and Elliott tumbled against the short wall at the top of the stairs and fell behind it, entangled.

  Nina’s leg was still exposed. She pulled it quickly behind the shelter of the wall. Elliott was shouting something beside her, but she was feeling very quiet, paralyzed almost, praying, Please don’t let him shoot me, too.

  She heard screams. Nina opened her eyes. Elliott Wakefield crouched beside her, his glasses askew, peering around the wall toward the steps. He was about to jump out there. She pulled him back.

  “But-my friends!”

  “Someone else has to help them! He could be waiting for you to show your face!” Elliott comprehended this. He fell back against the wall and reached in his jacket and felt for something.

  “Do you have a gun?”

  “No! How could I get a gun through customs?”

  “Just sit tight,” Nina said. “We’re just going to sit here and not move.”

  “Did he kill them?” His eyes were wild.

  “Just sit tight!” The tall double doors burst open and several uniformed police officers came running out.

  After the ambulances left, after the police took them inside and questioned them at length; after Elliott had some sort of panic attack and had to be subdued and kept from running away; after the officer came in to tell them that Silke Kilmer and Raj Das hadn’t made it; long after full darkness came upon the town and the traffic noises subsided outside; after the German police woke up Sergeant Cheney at his home at Tahoe and confirmed the details of Nina’s story; after she gave them a false address for Kurt and said they’d be available for more questions the next day; after Elliott said to her in the cold waiting room, “What should I do?”; after all that, Nina and Elliott were released.

  It was past ten. Kurt and Bob waited for them at the back door. The Citroën was running at the curb, its headlights bright. A police officer walked them down to the car. Nina kept her arm around Bob.

  Kurt was waiting in the driver’s seat. Nina sat beside him. Bob and Elliott Wakefield sat in back.

  Nina realized he hadn’t made a plan during the long hours he had been waiting. Elliott lapsed into a daze in back, gazing dully out the window at nothing.

  “The first thing is, let’s get out of here,” Kurt said after a moment. He put the little car in gear and drove swiftly through the town.

  “My stuff,” Elliott said from the back seat. So he was still with them mentally. “At the hotel.”

  “We’ll have it picked up tomorrow, okay?”

  “But where am I going? To the airport?”

  “We can’t, not yet,” Nina said. “We have to stay at least through tomorrow. The police-”

  “Screw the police! It happened at the police station!”

  “You can stay with us,” Kurt said quietly, cutting through it again. “It’ll be safe. No one knows my address.”

  “Maybe he’s following us,” Bob said.

  “I’d know it.” Kurt was right. The Citroën’s humbleness provided a novel way to avoid a tail. They were on the autobahn, in the slow lane, moving so slowly the cars seemed to whiz past. Anybody following the Citroën would be obvious.

  “Silke,” Elliott said, and began sobbing.

  PART THREE

  We must know; we will know.

  – DAVID HILBERT

  23

  NINA TOSSED IN THE BED AS if floating on a creaky ship in a storm. Yellow streetlight fanned through the blinds.

  She was through sleeping. Maybe she could sneak by Elliott’s couch and get a glass of milk. She threw back the covers and padded quietly toward the kitchen. But Elliott, dressed in Kurt’s bathrobe, was poking at the fireplace. The living room was stuffy, almost hot. He had turned on a small lamp on the side table.

  “Hello,” he said. Red, swollen eyes turned her way.

  “Sorry to bother you. I was just on my way to the kitchen. How are you doing?”

  “I’m hungry,” Elliott said. They never had gotten around to dinner. Elliott had cried all the way to Wiesbaden, then lay down on the couch, turning his back to them, and fell into a sniffly slumber while Nina, Kurt, and Bob tiptoed around him. Though she had tried to act calm around the others, Nina had been struggling with her own emotions, fright and outrage, and her own exhaustion from the trauma of the shooting and the hours of questioning overcame her early. But now, in the middle of the night, the event boiled up and pushed her back into wakeful consciousness with a new emotion. Guilt. She had initiated this sequence.

  “Then we’ll eat.” She went into the kitchen, found a pan and melted some butter, and added a half-dozen eggs, moving quietly so as not to wake Bob and Kurt, although in the old apartment with its thick walls they might as well have been a block away.

  Elliott followed her. “My father makes them with curry and tarragon,” he said. He sounded pitiful. He was a complete stranger, but Nina felt she knew him well. She had been thinking about him, sought him, for some time, and the fact that he had been saved with her linked them.

  “Will salt and pepper do? I could grate in some cheese.”

  “Sure. Anything. I’m starving.”

  “Do you want to talk?” she asked Elliott when the plates were set on the coffee table.

  “This is good.” He was already eating like someone famished. He had a doughy face, not unpleasant, rimless glasses, tousled sandy hair. A budding academic if she had ever seen one.

  But few academics would say what Elliott said next. “I’ll kill whoever did it,” he said. Nina sat down next to the fireplace, which began baking her right side, wondering how to respond. “I’ll do anything. What should I do?”

  “Your life is in danger.”

  “So’s yours.”

  “And my client’s and maybe others.”

  “It’s all about that stupid robbery. How many people has he murdered?”

  “Four,” Nina said. “Sarah Hanna, Chelsi Freeman. And your friends.”

  “My friends. I’ll do the deposition. I’ll lay out everything I know. I told the officer here-when he took me in the back room-I told him everything I could think of.”

  “That would be courageous of you, to do a deposition in my case now.”

  “Do we have to do it here, though? He’s here.”

  “I’d feel more comfortable back at Tahoe. I have a friend there, a private investigator, who can help us both with protection.”

  “Is my father in danger? He’s disabled. But we have an alarm system.”

  “I don’t know. But you should alert him,” Nina said honestly. “Let’s do this. Let’s go back to Tahoe and get you
on the record as fast as possible. You can talk to the police there. Then go home to Seattle, and you and your father can decide what to do.”

  “I can’t figure out if it was the money or my notebook,” Elliott mumbled. “Do you have any whiskey?” Kurt had a table near the kitchen with bottles on it. Elliott brought back a glass for her.

  When he had stretched out again on the couch and had a good slug of the stuff, Nina said carefully, “What’s your guess? Was it the money?”

  “You already know about it? The card counting?”

  “Mm-hmm.” She thought, What were these kids up to?

  “We had about thirty-five thousand in winnings and about twenty for the original stake in Silke’s purse.”

  “You had fifty-five thousand dollars on you the night of the robbery?”

  “You get used to it. With three of us, we felt pretty safe. We took measures. We never flashed that much money. We stayed in cheap places and drove cheap cars. But I was winning some big hands that night, and somebody may have noticed and followed us.”

  “Where were you playing?”

  “Harrah’s first. Then Prize’s. We had supper, then we gambled for about four hours. About average. Who told you about the card counting?”

  “Silke, on the phone.” Silke wouldn’t have objected to Nina using her name to elicit the story, Nina felt sure. “She had the cash?”

  “Oh, God. Silke.”

  “No offense, Elliott,” Nina said gently, “but it sounds to me like you were in love with Silke.”

  “I’m still in love with her. I’ll never love anybody else. Only her.” He drank some more, but his voice stayed steady. “Let’s have another one.”

  “Let’s wait, Elliott. Talk to me a little more first.”

  “Okay.”

  “You had already crossed the street and you walked through the covered entry to the vending machines when it happened, right?”

  “The three of us. Silke was thirsty. I gave her some change for a soda. She had just put the money in the vending machine when this guy comes in from the street with a ski mask on.”

  “What else do you remember about him?”

  “I’m sure Silke told you this. He-something was wrong with his left leg. The foot turned outward. But he could still move fast.”

  “Yes. He moves very fast.” So it had definitely been the shooter who followed Nina and Bob at Spooner Lake. Bob had told her about the limp. “He has been watching me and my son too,” she said, her voice shaking. “He tried to kill us, too.”

  “God, I’m sorry.”

  “What happened then?”

  “He came up behind us and said, ‘Turn around slowly.’ I couldn’t see the gun very well, but I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I had never seen a real gun before. There wasn’t much light. The window to the office was right behind us and I was hoping the clerk was dialing 911. Raj said, ‘Everyone please be cool.’ Silke pressed up against him. Her bag was hanging off her shoulder.

  “The man said to Silke, ‘Give me your bag.’ She took it off and laid it on the ground in front of her. Then he said, ‘Empty out your pockets and take off your jackets and leave them, too.’ I couldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?” Nina said.

  “Because my notebook was in the inside pocket of my jacket. I always carry it on me. I just couldn’t let him have the notebook. I couldn’t.”

  “What was in the notebook, Elliott?”

  “The proof I’m working on. I’ve been working on it for a long time.”

  “Tell me about this proof.”

  “What’s your math background?”

  “Average.”

  “Let’s just say, it’s about predicting large primes and factoring large composite numbers.”

  “I found out that you were working on prime number theory from the bookstore at Tahoe.”

  “The Crandall-Pomerance book? I did buy it there.”

  “So I’ve been doing some reading myself.”

  “It’s pretty abstruse,” Elliott said. “You’re not going to get much just diving in. You need a background in number theory and quantum mechanics.”

  “I’m a lawyer,” Nina said. “That’s what I do all day, make sense out of difficult sets of facts. Each case has its own realm of knowledge and I learn the basics fast.”

  Elliott shook his head. “Not this stuff,” he said.

  “It’s just logic, a special vocabulary, processes,” Nina said. “Go ahead, talk to me. Pretend I’m Leibniz or Fermat. They were both lawyers, weren’t they? Are you working on the Riemann Hypothesis?”

  Elliott closed his eyes and stretched his back. “Not anymore. I think it will never be proved or disproved. The Riemann Hypothesis is fun to play with, but it doesn’t predict where the primes are.”

  “I thought that was how the mystery of the primes was going to be solved.”

  “I tried for a long time. If you look at an X ray of Riemann’s Zeta Function, you see two curved lines overlapping in different ways around the zeros. The lines are out of phase with each other. Two phases are superimposed on each other within a very short interval. I was looking for the equations that would bring the phases back into coherence. I decided the Riemann function is too indirect to find an exact error term. Even using a quantum mechanics model.”

  It sounded like gobbledygook, but amazingly well-spoken gobbledygook, considering the state Elliott was in. He was staring into his empty glass as though it contained a secret. His face was slack and exhausted.

  Nina persevered. The lawyer’s tool is asking questions. “Then-how are you approaching it?”

  “Well, quantum mechanics has a fatal flaw-it doesn’t explain why individual events happen. Bohr said not to think about it. What a crock. I went back to early Einstein,” Elliott said. “He always thought that the universe wasn’t based on random events, as quantum theory says. He said God doesn’t throw the dice. Elementary particles may seem to move randomly, but that’s only because the real laws are behind the quantum veil. And they are deterministic, Newtonian laws.

  “Classical physics, behind the quantum veil, can use all variables and is therefore continuous. But quanta are discrete information packets. As information passes through the quantum veil, some of it is lost because it becomes discrete. What is not random looks random.”

  Nina nodded. “We have a legal concept that is very similar. It’s called the corporate veil. An individual incorporates, and the corporation becomes a protective veil between the individual and the rest of the world. If someone wants to sue the person, they can’t. They can only sue the corporation, and the individual’s money is protected.”

  “The real treasure is hidden behind the veil,” Elliott said. He tried to grin, but his face just twitched a little. “Yeah. In the case of the quantum veil, the underlying pattern is hidden behind the veil.”

  “Sometimes you can pierce the veil in law. Get at the hidden assets.”

  “That’s what I think I did. I pierced the quantum veil. I think I really may have done it. I don’t know why it happened to be me who figured it out.”

  “Why does physics come into it?” Nina asked.

  Elliott said, “What’s a number? Ah, shit, this is what Silke and I used to talk about.”

  He got up and came back with another small tumbler of whiskey, and Nina realized that his expansiveness would soon turn to the snoring escape of deep drunkenness. In the meantime, though, this young man she had sought for so long was lying on a couch a few feet away, talking into the air, and the moment would never recur. She felt, as she had before, urgently and without much foundation, that Elliott’s work had a profound relationship with Sarah Hanna’s death. She intended to go wherever he wanted to go.

  “What’s a number?” she answered. “It’s that thing you count with.”

  “One sheep, two sheep. What’s a one?”

  Nina held up a finger.

  “No,” Elliott said. “That’s a finger. ‘One’ is an abstract piece of
information. ‘One’ doesn’t pick your nose. True?”

  “True.”

  “What’s a hydrogen atom?”

  Nina said, “Let me guess. Another abstract piece of information?”

  “Correct. It’s the energy state of the atom, in terms of the forces that bind its electron to its nucleus, as described in Schrödinger’s equation. That and other mathematical descriptions constitute an atom. The information about its behavior is all there is. There is no other ‘there’ there.”

  “You mean the hydrogen atom isn’t a thing?”

  “All we can know about it is the math, which completely describes it. There’s nothing else to be said about it. It’s real in the way you and I are real. We’re made of atoms.”

  “Okay. But what has the hydrogen atom got to do with locating and factoring prime numbers?”

  “Prime numbers are raw information. They have the same properties as fermions-the elementary particles that make up things like hydrogen atoms.”

  Nina said, “Are you telling me that you think numbers are real, like particles?”

  “What does ‘real’ mean? I’m telling you they’re the same thing. They have identical properties, so they’re identical. The basic problem with both of them is the same: location, the exact location of each quantum and the exact location of each prime. The Riemann real part one-half corresponds precisely with the fermion spin of one-half. The symmetry of the Riemann zeros corresponds to fermion symmetry. And of course fermions contain odd numbers of subparticles, just as primes are odd-numbered, except for the number two, which is too close to the beginning of the number line to worry about. And the fermions behave randomly within a specific set of limits, just like the primes. The identities go on and on.”

  “Very interesting.”

  “And on and on,” Elliott said very definitely. He had sat up straight and was now for some reason holding his glass so that he could see it in the mirror above Kurt’s fireplace.

  “I think I’ll have a shot of that whiskey,” Nina said. She poured herself a shot of Jim Beam. Maybe it would help her understand.