“Husband?” says Ms. Paige. “Hold on. Captain Tester is a widow. Is this—”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” says the judge, looking up, finding my eyes. Looking not at Aysa, who interrupted him, but at me. “Is this not relevant to your ongoing investigation?”
He’s holding the book open with his palm, still looking at me. “Tell you what. I’ll skip ahead.”
“‘S. displayed her body in the doorway as if for my personal delectation, belied any dictums about the highest beauty being the product of the greatest delicacy. Her charm, the charm of S., was in her substance, her attractiveness a matter of superabundance and profusion. Tumbling yellow locks and a full flushed face, full lips parted around a red tongue, an admirable plumpness of breasts and of rear. Her body an inviting expanse, demanding circumnavigation.’”
“That’s enough,” Ms. Paige says, though it cannot be because she has realized what I have realized, that this is Silvie being conjured, Silvie that the judge is recalling with such rich pleasure. S. for Silvie. Silvie laughing at a suggestive joke, Silvie drifting as if by accident into his arms. The description is specific and precise, incontrovertible, slivers of weaponized truth. A husband, too, can be tragic.
“That’s enough,” says my partner again, but the judge does not stop, he reads on, sentences like wires that fall around Silvie and draw her into an empty bedroom. Lascivious, circling sentences that trace the lines of her body like fingertips.
I remember that damn party, somewhere in Silver Lake. Forty minutes in traffic to get there, the two of us sitting in stony silence all the way. I knew no one, wanted to meet no one. I left early, leaving Silvie to find a taxi home.
The judge remembers it too, he has it all written down, and he reads on, word after word: words that carefully unbutton the dress, words that reveal the pale wide flesh of belly and thighs, words that trace the silhouette shape of her waist, words that describe her hips and then clasp at the small of her back, traveling with the gauzy fuzz that climbs upward along her spine as it arches in abandonment.
I try to say something—I try to say “Stop,” I may even manage to say “Stop,” but he does not stop, he will not, his sentences gather steam and rhythm as he approaches the predictable climax of the paragraph, and then he is through, and he has made his monstrous point about the rings of truth, about context and omission: he has illustrated that no matter how much we know, there are parts of the story that are missing.
There are elements unknown and unknowable, whether we know it or not.
“Shall I go on?” he says, softly, daringly, wondering if I will take some dramatic action, smash into him with my fists, crash the crooked smile off his face.
“As I said earlier”—my voice is a coiled wire, my hands clutched into fists at my side—“we will take the book away and return it when we are through.”
“Very good.” He places the book on the desk, slides it toward me. “Enjoy.”
Paige reaches for the book as Judge Sampson drinks at last from the tumbler, grins sheepishly, opens his mouth, and vomits a long stream of blood, staggering forward and collapsing across the desk.
“What…” says Aysa, and I’m up from my chair, up and across the small room and catching him as he tumbles downward, forward, his eyes rolling back while blood is spurting and leaping out of his mouth, dark red mixed with yellow. He flings one hand out, grunting and snorting, and tries to steady himself on the desk, but he misses it entirely and goes toppling, headfirst, banging his forehead on its sharp wood corner. He’s dense in my arms and his front is covered with liquid, with the blood and bile that has exploded from his mouth. He passes, slippery, through my grip, shudders against my legs, and slams into the ground.
“What did you do?” I say to Judge Sampson, who is convulsing, his whole body shaking, his features swiftly going pale. I know what he did. I get down on the ground beside him and try to arrange him so that he’s sitting up, so he can’t choke on his vomit, but he’s dying before I can do anything. A second wash of blood and gore comes channeling up from his guts and rushes from his mouth.
Paige, somewhere in the corner of my vision, has thrown open the door of the chambers and is shouting to the bailiff posted outside.
“Call the regular police,” she tells him, and he shouts, “What did you do? What have you done?”
“Just call them!”
He is craning his neck to see past her, trying to see in, seeing me and the ruined body of the judge, the two of us like drunk lovers on the ground. “Your honor?” the bailiff says.
I’m covered in Judge Sampson’s blood, my tie dangling over his spit-stained chin and cheeks.
“Call them!” shouts Paige.
The rest is a fog of red, of shapes rushing within it. A swell of noise from outside on Grand Avenue, a clatter of footfalls and shouts.
Me and Paige are outside chambers, instructed to wait by a regular policeman with his sleeves rolled up. We are seated on a hard-backed bench, side by side.
In my mind, the judge vomits blood and pinwheels down toward the carpet, and then again, and again. Reality cued and re-cued.
He is dying and he is in the kitchen at a party in Silver Lake, leaning in the doorframe after I have gone, and he’s sharing a joke with my wife. Ex-wife.
The courtroom has been emptied of litigants and lawyers, and they bustle about in the hallway, curious, reluctant to leave such excitement.
Ms. Paige has her Day Book out and she’s organizing her thoughts, trying to piece together what we have learned. I am slumped, hollow, staring straight ahead. There is a pane of frosted glass inset in the dead center of the chamber door, and I stare at the glass, finding abstracted patterns.
This is what the world is, I’m thinking as the busy incident aftermath rushes around me, police and ambulance personnel, archivists, and documentarians. One explosion after another, the Earth opening up again and again, sending out gouts of loose dirt, covering us up.
I am exhausted, but Aysa does not stop. She can’t. Aysa has her Day Book out and she has the judge’s blood-splattered Night Book out too, between us on the bench. Aysa has already apologized for letting herself be distracted by the verdict on Ms. Wells; apologized and then moved swiftly on. Aysa focuses on the work. Aysa carries on, puzzling through her notes undeterred and undeterrable.
This is even though she, like me, is speckled with blood, dark droplets crusting on her forehead and on her neck. Even though we sit but feet from where his body still lies, awaiting the attentions of the regular police, of the medical examiner, the record officers who are angling around with their captures and their mics, forging this remarkable event into history. The coroners who will, when it’s all over, bear him away.
Regular police keep arriving at the scene, and there are now multiple capture teams on-site. We are being filmed even now, in our extremity, both of us smeared in gore.
We’ve already been interviewed, of course, and we’ll be interviewed again.
We are pursuing an anomalous death.
The judge may or may not have had relevant information…
We may never know…
“Okay, so,” says Aysa, flipping through her notes, forward and back, forward and back. “Here is what I don’t get. So the man is married. Okay. So he’s—he’s unfaithful.” She glances at me, a fleeting embarrassed wince. “He has affairs. Multiple affairs. Okay. So—but—”
I finish the thought, my voice empty and toneless. “But so what? Right? So what?”
“Right!” She nods slowly, twice. “Exactly.” A new cluster of cops swoop by, officious, belts jangling with their radios, a couple of boom ops close behind them.