by I.B. Holder
Chapter 5 Shadow
Chess rolled over on the carpet in the living room, she gave the standard “What kind of freak breaks into his own house?” look at her father, then seeing the desperation in his face, she changed her tone to teenage disinterest. “I was going to get the door you know – ah!” A sudden stab of pain rocked her backwards, eyes rolling down and away from her father.
Legacy looked Chess over. She began rubbing her thighs like they were on fire.
The clock struck six. Legacy looked at his watch, perplexed. He had been early.
In a relationship where consistency had dominated the landscape, this certainly wasn’t the regular homecoming. Something had been bothering Legacy since he left the building.
An hour later, there were take out Chinese cartons stacked in a small pyramid on the kitchen table. Legacy had started doing this kind of merry mealtime behavior early on after Chess' mother had died. It was all about the presentation of the food on the table – and very little about the food itself. Legacy wasn’t a cook. They hadn’t eaten a home cooked meal in years, with the exception of take out from “Home Cooked Caroline’s Bistro”. Legacy had no contact with his deceased wife’s family – he knew they existed, but even if they knew about him and Chess, they had never invited them to dinner.
The pyramid was a childhood remnant that turned into a mealtime tradition. Chess couldn’t eat any of the bottom cartons, until they’d both finished the top one. The top one always seemed to contain a mixture of steamed vegetables even though Legacy claimed to stack the boxes randomly. Legacy knew that she had certainly figured out his game by the time she was ten.
She walked into the kitchen, saw the food stacked on the table and announced, “Wow I’m shocked, steamed vegetables.” Her tone was drab and distant. “Let’s get this over with.”
This time the top container was stuffed full of the greasiest, sweetest, fried-est offshoot of modern Chinese cuisine, orange chicken. It was her favorite. She looked at her father for a moment, as his hand reached for the top container and he spooned most of it on her plate. His hands were steady but something else connoted nerves. Chess served the rice.
They ate in silence. Finally Chess turned to Legacy having speared a giant piece of chicken. She pointed the chopstick accusingly at her father and let a little teenage drama seep into the room. “Why the wood splintering entrance? All the freaky strangeness?”
“What freaky strangeness?” Legacy swirled a glass of scotch and sniffed the air above it. “I am feeling over regular if anything tonight.”
“You’re bothered. I know you want to know why the door was chained in the first place.” She reached over and drug her piece of sticky chicken through the rice on Legacy’s plate, leaving a slug-like sugary trail.
“I don’t.” He lied. “Will you eat this please?”
He pointed down on his plate. It was a well-known fact that Legacy liked almost nothing sweet.
Chess spoke with her mouth full. She scooped the offending trail off of her father’s plate. “A couple of your friends from work came by to drop off some paperwork–” Legacy leaned forward, but Chess cut him off “I used the SDP. I chained the door.”
It was the standard delivery protocol. It called upon Chess to get identification of any unexpected visitor, and then upon confirmation a delivery was acceptable, but only if the materials fit through the gap in the door created by the chain lock. Anything that was a shadow’s width wider than four inches had to be left outside or with the doorman.
Chess resented any rule that prevented her from being able to open her mouth or her own front door. She called Legacy’s rules “the prison code.”
Legacy sat leaning forward, but his head tilted and his eyebrows were arched. He should have known that they’d waste no time getting him all the documents for the case.
Chess shot him a questioning look.
The light in the room seemed to bend until it fell upon her face. She somehow soaked up the light in any room she entered even at fifteen when most kids duplicate every flaw they see in their parents then leave them in the dark. Her largest act of adult rebellion had occurred when she quit the debate team – to join the chess club. The most precious materials in the world existed somewhere in the interconnection of her heart and mind. Legacy felt her impatience build.
“Everything is in your study.” She added, “I moved a desk lamp in there so that you’d have light.”
Legacy paused as he pushed himself to his feet. “I worry about you.” He couldn’t look at her – he walked toward his study.
“There’s one scrapbook that didn’t fit through the doorway. I couldn’t open the door, so it’s still in the hallway.”
Legacy changed direction and walked toward the door.
Legacy bent over the scrapbook in the hall. His shadow crossed the dim light and disrupted the glare off of the plastic coated front page. An oily smear near the corner caught his attention. It meant next to nothing on its own, but like so many things it is a reaction of improbabilities and happenstances that add mass and create their own gravity. Forces not dissimilar to those that had put Legacy on this case often cannot be broken down into obvious components. Many things happened and Legacy was back in the game. In this present, however, in this hallway, it was a simple equation of width and the way a shadow crossed the page that put into prominence a meaningless smudge. It was hardly worth a second thought, really.
The next morning couldn’t have started worse. Light streaming through a large window in the study brought a wave of impulses to Legacy’s optic nerve. The residual effects of caffeine in his bloodstream fed these impulses. Legacy remembered blinking at five am and now two hours later his eyes were opening again.
A pool of papers had been carefully laid out in rows and columns on the floor. He had put them there for a reason, something in his mind connected the contents better when they were viewed as part of an overlapping puzzle.
Words were running together in his head, but the facts of the case were clear, too clear. Legacy often wondered if recognizing the motives and basic human condition of the sickest people on earth made him laudable or loathsome. He had been introduced to some new tricks of the sick mind and felt a little disturbed that none of them gave rise to any level of surprise.
Legacy hadn’t said goodbye to Chess that morning. He left home at his normal time, but he was occupied up his exit with videotapes that had been stacked beside the briefs. He had saved them for last because the images of a crime can be so powerful that the details get hidden behind the potent emotional noise. It was like the light that penetrated his eyelids this morning – it flooded his perceptions and he couldn’t see clearly until he’d looked away.
He was happy to look away from the video when it finished.
The tapes were the kind of thing that most decent people look away from immediately, but others are simply fascinated with it. Legacy knew that it would be the first thing that Wagner would want to talk about. She’d want to know his thoughts. Unfortunately, he was collecting the thoughts of the perpetrators of the crime, not his own reactions to their work. It wouldn’t be easy to explain that to her. He walked the path to the subway.
A man shaking a tambourine stood in the entrance with a sign that read, “I only play for money.” It was a very modern take on panhandling. It was an artist putting himself above his audience. Legacy could feel his mind borrowing from his surroundings; sometimes it was like watching another consciousness at work. He found that his mind obliged him by constructing a portrait of the kind of people he was pursuing.
He clenched his jaw, and it felt like a creaky vice as the two plates of teeth came together. He was uncomfortable. Legacy felt his involvement pulling at him in a way that he didn’t like. There was no warm embrace from the facts of this case.
Wagner waited at the desk opposite Legacy’s. The scowl on her face was the same as the previous day, but the suit that she was dressed in was a
shade darker than the day before.
“You didn’t see it coming?” Legacy wasn’t much for morning pleasantries.
“Don’t you like my suit?” It was exactly, precisely and explicitly the thing she least wanted to talk about.
“It won’t work for today.” Legacy quickly moved to his desk. He cleared one of the case sections and dumped a load of papers out of his briefcase. He picked out a roll of film and turned to Wagner.
“I need these blown up until they cover that wall.” The long white wall had scattered photos from other cases. He passed over the film.
“I’m not your assistant.” She stood defiantly. Her suit stood with her, both seeming to be insulted. “And what do you mean this won’t work for today?”
“Later, I’m going to send you downtown to solicit adult movie stars in the area – and they’ll think you’re a narc if you’re dress like that.”
“I am a narc.”
“Be that as it may.” Legacy beckoned with a single finger. He knew Wagner’s greatest fear. “I know you didn’t expect that girl to die. I’m telling you right now that the girl they have now, the one that’s about to finish – is safe. We have at least a week.”
Wagner looked at him like the words he’d spoken were in some lost foreign language. “How do you know?”
“And pick up some coffee on your way back, ask –” He realized he didn’t know her name. “My secretary knows how I like it.”
Legacy was pushing around the papers on his desk, just as if the arrangement was some kind of puzzle. He heard Wagner’s final comment and it rang in his ears.
“I want to hear your thoughts on the case when I get back.
Of course she did. Everyone did. The troubling fact was that he hadn’t really developed any thoughts of use at all. There was no astonishing revelation or infallible blueprint that had formed overnight. After a night of study, he knew these men, but he was no closer to them.
Wagner needed to hear that the steps she was taking in her high-heeled leather uppers were steps closer – in reality, Legacy knew that they were simply taking steps. Whether closer or farther, he had no idea.
If she had known him better, this was the kind of game that would get Legacy a polite elbow to the bridge of his nose. She didn’t know him well enough to hit him, yet.
Telling someone what they want to hear is probably the least prosecuted crime in the world. Legacy let his mind wander into the morality of his actions. It’s only when the words cross the line into a lie that anyone really gets upset. Yet if a deliberate lie gets a person closer to their greater goal, is it really such a bad thing? Had Legacy announced that now he was certain that their task was impossible to complete in the time they had been given, if he’d told her how careful and methodical he perceived the criminals to be, it would have been a self-serving diagnosis. There would have been nowhere to go.
He knew the moment would come when he had to give Wagner his thoughts. An eager person could have the tasks he’d sent her on done in two hours, so he expected Wagner to burst in the door any moment.
He closed his eyes. The sound of the clattering music from his stereo was like a struggle in the background. It mimicked what was going inside Legacy’s head. Time slowed. Legacy sifted through the case filtering every grain of possibility, sweeping over it again and again like the second hand on a clock. The clock barely moved before he opened his eyes again.