“Remind me, Mr. Speculator,” says Petras. “What is the inciting anomaly at issue?”
“Pardon me, ma’am?”
“You have come here regarding Judge Sampson. But the original investigation began elsewhere?”
“Yes.”
“And what was that matter?”
Maybe if the day had begun differently. Maybe if I wasn’t standing here with the judge’s blood on my shirtfront, with his memory of Silvie blazoned on my mind.
“I understand your authority, ma’am, but I am here to ask you questions and not the other way around.”
She holds my gaze for a moment, another one, and then directs herself to my partner.
“What is your name, young lady?”
“Ms. Aysa Paige, ma’am.”
“Ms. Paige, two and four are even numbers.”
“One and three are not.”
“What is the original anomaly you and your partner are after?”
“Ma’am? I—I would have to—to respect Mr. Ratesic’s authority, as far as discussing our investigation.”
Our Acknowledged Expert does not rise from her desk. She barely moves, in fact. her head. She speaks very carefully, putting each new word precisely in its place.
“Ms. Paige, my office would be happy to make available to you a laminated copy of the chain of command of the law enforcement divisions of the Golden State, including the position of the Speculative Service, in which you serve, relative to this office, and at the head of which I sit. I am asking you a direct question with a simple answer.”
Paige looks at me. I look at the ground.
“We are investigating anomalous circumstances relating to a death,” she says.
“Death of whom?”
“Crane, ma’am. A man named Mose Crane.”
“Foul play?”
“No.”
“Merely anomalous? Potentially?”
“That is—right. Correct.”
“Where?”
Aysa’s answers are coming quickly now, either out of deference or fear or some combination of the two.
“On Vermont Avenue. At Judge Sampson’s home, ma’am.”
“Ah,” says Petras, and she tilts her head up and thinks. “Ah.”
Mr. Doonan softly shuts the door, returning from the inner office. I don’t recall seeing him leave. He passes a note to Petras, who writes on it and passes it back.
“Madam Expert,” I begin, and Doonan stops me, pointing at the clock.
“Mr. and Ms. Speculator,” he says blandly, “your time has elapsed.” I don’t move. Aysa doesn’t move. Doonan steps between us and Ms. Petras, drawing his suit coat together and buttoning it like he’s closing a door. “The Expert is a busy woman, as you know, and your allotted time has long since elapsed.”
“Sit down,” Ms. Paige tells him.
“Respectfully, miss,” Doonan begins, and Paige says, “I said sit the fuck down,” and I hope she knows I love her—not with some goony-eyed romantic love but with the fierce, true love of respect. One Speculator to another. I love Ms. Paige fierce and true and I will love her forever.
“Have a seat, Mr. Doonan,” says Petras, and he does. She places her hands over her eyes, and when she removes them all of the tension is gone from her face. She smiles pleasantly, robotically, as if we are here after all to seek her wise counsel, to ask about appropriate strategies for sentencing or community policing.
“As you may be aware, Mr. Speculator,” Petras begins, “we on the committee have certain prerogatives regarding matters of epistemological certainty.”
“What?”
This is off topic. I don’t know what this is, but I don’t like it.
“That is, the State has vested in me the power to determine, under certain circumstances, when matters can be deemed inscrutable. Impossible to be weighed as true or not true, and therefore dangerous.”
She gives me her bland smile. I know what she means, the ultimate power of the State, the authority to designate things as unknown and unknowable, beyond the reach of speculation. But I don’t see what that has to do with this—until I do.
“Wait.”
“Mr. Doonan would be happy to provide you with documentation of the statutory authority to which I refer.”
I see it now—the danger that has entered the room in the slipstream of her murmuring tone.
“Ms. Petras, hold on.”
“Upon review of the case currently under discussion—”
“You haven’t reviewed it. You—”
“—my office is taking the official step of declaring the matter of the death of Mose Crane—”
She is just reeling it off, chapter and verse, reciting it like Arlo would, except not to flaunt her knowledge of the Basic Law but to build it as a wall.
“Hold on.”
The trap was not clear until it was too late—the ground did not shift until I stepped onto it. Oh. Oh shit.
“—as unknown and unknowable.”
“Laszlo?” says Aysa, confused, uncertain. Mr. Doonan is still writing. There are three notebooks on his desk now, just the three. Outside the window of the bungalow, carts putter past, important people going from one important place to another, clutching folders bulging with important papers.
I have been carrying around the small light of my investigation, like a man cupping a candle under his palms, hoping for it to stay lit, and instead I’ve brought it to the one person with the power to snuff it out between two fingers. I don’t even look at Ms. Paige right now. I can’t. I can’t bear to watch her realize what I’ve done. What an idiot I am.
“I declare the truth of the death of Mose Crane, and all matters flowing therefrom, to be unknowable.” She nods at Doonan, who nods back at her. He is writing in his Day Book, a big silver number with silver-edged pages. The captures are rolling. It’s all being lost, before my eyes. “All relevant truth that can be collected has been collected,” she says.
“No,” I say. “It hasn’t.”
“Well.” She stands, and holds out her hand. “It has been, though. And let me add, finally, also, on behalf of the Golden State: thank you for your efforts in this matter.”
It is the end of the conversation. She holds out her pad for me to stamp, and I stamp it, and Paige stamps it too. Too late I have figured it out, too late to draw the line that I should have drawn already.
E is not for Elena at all. E is for Expert.
“Okay,” says Petras brightly, as if we’ve just come in. “Was there anything else I can help you folks with today?”
17.
Everybody keeps everything. Archiving is a bulwark. You do it. I do it. We have to do it.
I do it now, down in the crawl space beneath my small house, I unpack all of the flat facts I’ve collected, my whole paper trail of the day that was, a day’s worth of living. Conversation stamps and stamps of presence, the receipt from passing through the gate arm at the administrative campus, the receipt for every cup of coffee and donut consumed, the record of my interrogation by the regular police in the hallway outside Judge Sampson’s chambers. The slip of stamped paper I was handed on the seventh floor of the Service building, when we turned over Sampson’s Night Book to evidence processing.
I tear today’s pages of notes clean from my Day Book, one at a time, careful to leave the carbons in place.
My motions are deliberate, slow, careful. I have performed this ritual many times. Once for every day of my adulthood. Those notes relating to the death I was investigating and am not investigating any longer I fold in half, and then fold in half again, make of them a small hard square, a stiff packet with four sharp corners, and this I slide last into the bag and seal it. Mose Crane is dead, but his death is not an event for me. It is gone from my mind.