Golden State Read online

  “I see,” she says. “Sure. I get it. But maybe…”

  “What? Maybe what?” I feel anger boiling up in me, I hear my voice rising, but I can’t stop. I didn’t want to have a partner anyway. Hadn’t I told Arlo that? Didn’t I say so? “Do you have something to add, Ms. Paige?”

  “No, just—” She looks longingly at the dead man. “Maybe if we just speculated—”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” I say it loud. I practically shout it. Somewhere, a rough cut officer is turning down the monitor at a transcription station, grimacing at the burst of distorted output.

  “No, sir. I just thought—”

  “I already said there’s no reason. You said it too, didn’t you? No cause for spec. You fucking said it!”

  I step closer to her, bellowing now, and she’s smart enough to keep her mouth shut.

  “There’s a corpse on the lawn, a broken roof. It’s a clear story, told by the flat facts. So you want to, what, start speculating, conjuring possibilities, right here at the scene? Maybe a low-flying plane knocked him off the roof. Maybe he was pushed by his evil twin!”

  The boom mic dangles her pole as close as she dares; the capture op inches in.

  “Listen to me, Paige: We start conjuring up alternate versions of realities, just for fun? Just so you can practice? Then guess what? We’re committing our own assault on the Objectively So. Then we have become the liars.”

  Paige’s chin has stiffened; she has crossed her arms. “I wasn’t proposing that we lie, sir.”

  “Unwarranted speculation is no better than lying, Ms. Paige. It is worse. You want to see how it’s done, here’s how it’s done: it’s better when it’s not done at all. Our job is to reinforce the Objectively So. Not stand around conjuring realities, alternate realities, every one of which might extend, evolve, metastasize.” I am barking now, hollering, furious at the idea that she might not hear and understand what I’m telling her. “And none of those realities can be collected back once released. Our job is to find the facts and travel between them, to walk carefully along lines of what’s true. And when we do speculate? When we do hypothesize? We do it carefully, conscientiously, in a controlled environment, and we don’t do it at all unless and until the facts support it. The Speculative Service is a bulwark. What is the Speculative Service?”

  “It’s a bulwark.”

  “Fucking right it is.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Now just—” I take a deep breath. Plant my hands on my hips, feel my feet beneath me. Try to get steady again. “Would you give me a second to do the stupid job?”

  I regret my outburst right away, of course.

  That’s me all over. Big and brave Mr. Laszlo Ratesic of the Service, dedicated officer of what is true, and a petty and short-tempered and thickheaded brute. Fully conscious of all his faults, wholly unable to correct them.

  “Idiot,” I call myself, and “asshole,” as I prowl around to the rear of the house, to where the pool stretches out in a perfect pristine rectangle, its even blue surface shimmering with the shadow of the house itself. I’ve come around to the back to make sure there aren’t any contraindicating facts, but really, just to have a second alone, alone with my lumbering thoughts, with my anger and self-recrimination—and with the capture op, lone representative of the Record. He has trailed me and stands now at a respectful ten-foot distance, his handheld trained on me, standing heavily on the lawn. Reality in progress.

  I think I’ve seen this op before—a shaggy-headed dude named Morgan or Marcus, something like that. Convention dictates that you ignore the Record’s representatives, but a lot of people will say hello, give a nod or a smile. Not me. I keep my hands deep in my pockets, stare by turns at the roof, the lawn, the pool.

  The sun scatters its golden light across the moment, glittering on the rooftop, glinting on the blue of the pool, dappling the deep green of the lawn. The damn roofer should have had the good sense to fall off this side of the house. He might have saved himself a broken neck. Might have drowned instead.

  There’s a back door, coming off the pool patio, a pair of elegant French doors that allow no clear view of whatever choices are made inside the house. I look up at that house, debating whether to take the extra five minutes to haul myself up there, push a ladder against the stuccoed white walls, and have a closer look at the spot where the roofing tiles gave way. Make sure. Make double and triple sure.

  But I’d only be doing it by way of apology to Ms. Paige, a half-assed dumb show of contrition: Look, maybe you were right. Maybe there’s one more flat fact to be found, another tile for us to lay into the mosaic. Only I know there’s not. What happened is what happened. It was a tragedy, maybe, but there is no anomaly, no lie hidden, obscured, and in wait beneath the surface, like a snake under the soil. All the facts are flat and simple. All the lines between them are clean and direct.

  I am not the monster that I sometimes appear to be. Not at the core, not down at the bone. I understand young Paige’s eagerness, her fervency, the fundamental truth of her, coming off the kid in waves. She wants to speculate because that’s what Speculators do. We are the ones with the power, and the license, to truck with lies—we can sense them, we can handle them, and we are empowered to emit them our own damn selves. To construct different versions of the truth so each can be tested, so all might fall away until only the real one remains.

  Ms. Paige just wants to do the damn work.

  And here I come to explode at her for committing the crime of caring too much? Of hoping to find something lurking beneath the surface?

  The question is, what kind of fundamental truth is coming off me?

  Back in front of the house, the ambulance has maneuvered onto the lawn and parked among the other emergency vehicles under the meager shade of the very tall palms, and now I shade my eyes and watch the men with their stretchers trot across the lawn to bear away the victim. The ambulance crew is trailed by its own capture team: more capture operators, more microphone bearers, more archivists. I watch them watching as the paramedics lift the body and arrange it on the stretcher.

  “Sir?”

  It’s her again. Tapping on my shoulder. Chin set, eyes clear, bowed but unbent. She has some nerve, this one; she has some fight in her for sure.

  And now the sunlight of good feeling fills me up, and I smile for what feels like the first time today. For what feels, indeed, like the first time in a good long time.

  “What is it, kid?”

  “I decided to speak to some of the witnesses, sir. As long as I was waiting.”

  She winces, waiting for me to holler at her, but I don’t.

  “And?”

  “And there’s someone I think you should speak to.”

  “It’s Buddy Renner. Like, ah, like ‘runner,’ person who runs, but with an e where the u goes—Renner. I’m thirty-six years old. I’m a manager. I was born in Pasadena, but I live down in South Beach now. These guys are my crew. I’m their manager. Not of the…not the whole company. I’m a field manager. I run this crew. Company manager is Lexie Herrimann. Two rs, two ns. Herrimann.”

  I put it all down in my Day Book, my stubby fat hundred-pager. I write in my book even though Renner’s rambling testimony is being captured by my pinhole and by the captures along the gutters of the house and in the trees, and by the roving team too. There are plenty of Speculators who don’t bother with the Day Book unless it’s a matter of clear and immediate importance, something that’ll surefire need to be on the Record. But I’m old-school. I like to do it right.

  “I was the one that found him, actually,” says Renner. “I got here at, ah, boy, I guess about—” He pauses, squeezes shut his eyes with the effort of recollection. “Six oh nine. That’ll…That’s…You can check the stretches on that, right? But so, okay, the crew was called for six thirty. So he was—Crane was—he was early, and I was early but not as early as him.”

  “You don�
��t all arrive together?” I ask, pointing to the three pickups along the driveway. “In the trucks?”

  “No. Ah—no, sir. You can. Some of the guys will come into the office, and—but, no. You can get to the work site, you get to the work site.”

  I nod for him to continue, and he swallows, takes a deep breath. He keeps glancing at the pinhole, same nervous little glance Ms. Tarjin kept doing. There are plenty of ground and air captures around, so people don’t understand why we have to have ’em, too, the point of view, and maybe it’s just psychological. Or maybe you can never have too much truth.

  “And so I found him—on the ground there. Just—that’s just how I found him.”

  The man is sputtering out facts, scattershotting every squib of truth that occurs to him. It’s irritating, but useful for investigative purpose.

  “Okay,” I tell him, battling my impatience. “We got that.”

  Renner’s a sweaty mess, in the same dark green shirt and dark green pants of the dead man and the rest of his crew: day laborers in heavy work clothes and sturdy boots, roofers and tar pourers and layers of tile, all of whom are still milling about in the unaccustomed state of having nothing to do, waiting in the shade of the single broad-branched aspen under which they have been corralled. They’re smoking, murmuring to one another, casting occasional nervous glances at all the cops and capture teams.

  I reconfirm all the flat facts that Renner has already provided to Ms. Paige, who now stands beside me, reading along from her notes. Her Day Book, I notice, is gold, with gold-lined pages. I roll my eyes. There are no regulations on it—nothing in the Basic Law says the Service has to have dark-colored everything. But gold?

  Renner and his crew—among them the dead man, Mose Crane—have been working the roofing job here at 3737 North Vermont for nineteen days, doing a series of patches and small repairs above the master bedroom suite.

  “Officer Paige stated to me that you stated to her that Mr. Crane has a clean work record, as far as you know, with no previous reported accidents.” I watch him, stone-faced. “Is that true?”

  Renner blinks. “Is it true that I stated it to her?”

  “No. Not—” I take a deep breath, in and then out again. Come on. “It’s a two-step verification, Mr. Renner. Can you confirm that the information that you previously provided to Officer Paige was true and complete?”

  “Oh yeah. Yes. T and c. Yes, sir. Uh-huh.”

  Paige writes in her book. Renner wipes his forehead with a handkerchief, the same deep green as his work clothes.

  All the unspoken truths of this conversation are clear to me, the invisible beams undergirding the surface truths we are constructing together. Renner is frightened of me, of me and my big ugly face and also of the Service itself. He is afraid not of being caught lying, because he knows he’s not lying, but of being thought to be lying. He’s afraid that out of his anxiety about being thought to be lying he will stumble into blurting out some small untruth and I’ll catch it on the air and accuse him and he’ll have confirmed his own worst fear.

  I could put him at ease, if I wanted to. I know very well he’s hewing to the line, as best he’s able. I’ve seen plenty of liars in my day. I’ve seen their distorted asseverations feathering the air as they emerge from the false shapes of their mouths. I’ve stared into their furtive eyes; I’ve smelled the stink of bullshit rising off them in waves. And this man Renner is nervous because he’s afraid we’ll think that he’s lying, not because he is. He looks away from me while he’s talking, finds the more sympathetic eyes of Officer Paige.

  She’s dying to be like me, a pillar of the law, a servant of the good and true, but she’s got enough of the civilian still in her bones that when meeting a stranger she wants to hold his hand and tell him, “It’s okay, it’s okay, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  All of these structural underpinnings are clear to me, as visible as underwater architecture, but irrelevant. I have my Day Book out. I have work to do.

  I coax from Renner the information that Crane worked six of the last seven days.

  “And actually,” he adds suddenly, “he wasn’t on the schedule for today. Did I already say that?”

  “No,” I say. I stop writing. I hold him with my gaze. “You didn’t already say that.”

  “I’m sorry.” He winces. “I’m really sorry.”

  “So wait, Mr. Renner,” Paige says. “He wasn’t supposed to be here?”

  “No, miss. Ma’am.” Renner shakes his head urgently. “He wasn’t. Do you want me—” He stops, tilts his head forward. “Should I show you the schedule?”

  “Yeah.” I hold out my hand. “You should.”

  He digs it out of his backpack, a thin sheaf notebook with a crinkled yellow cover, bent at all four corners, and I aim my pinhole at the book, take a capture of the relevant page, and hand it to Paige so she can take her own.

  “I’ve already got it, sir.”

  I look at her and say, “Get it again.”

  “Yes, sir. Of course, sir.” She gets it again.

  “Had this man, Crane, given you any indication that he was intending to come in today?”

  “No, sir,” says Renner.

  “And is there any reason you can think of that he would have done so?”

  “You mean…any reason he would have given me—”

  “No.” I sigh. People. “Any reason he would have come in today?”

  “No, sir. No.”

  Paige is looking back and forth between me and the witness, her brown eyes wide, absorbing, watching, learning.

  “What about coming in early?”

  “What—do you mean—”

  “Any reason to explain why he would do such a thing?”

  “No.”

  “Did any of your guys usually start early?”

  “No. I mean—” He pauses, canvasses his mind for stray facts. “Not that I know of.”

  “Any reason why Crane might have?”

  Renner shrugs.

  Paige looks at me, and I shrug too. Whatever the reason that Crane was at work unscheduled, it is almost certain that he never put it on the Record. Never wrote it down, never mentioned it to a coworker, never muttered it to himself, meaning it never got captured, transcribed, and preserved. Which means that this small piece of reality, this flat fact—the reason Mose Crane came to work even though he wasn’t supposed to—died when his head hit the ground and the neurons in his brain stopped firing. A subsidiary victim of the larger tragedy.

  It catches me in the gut, a quick surge of mourning for a piece of truth that has been and is gone.

  “No, actually, if anything, now that I think of it, Crane was usually late.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “He was always working a bunch of jobs is the thing. Like, he worked for us, we worked for other folks. Freelance gigs. A lot of times he’d be coming right to us from another thing.”

  “Roofing?”

  “Or—yeah, I think. Or other kinds of construction, contracting. I remember him coming in late one morning, bunch of months ago, already half dead from working all night. Working under the table on some mansion in the Hills, something. Nobody likes cheap labor more than rich people, you know?”

  I nod. Deep truth, that right there. “And was that unusual?”

  “Um,” he says cautiously. “I don’t know what you mean by ‘unusual.’”

  “Do other guys do that?”

  “Oh. Sometimes.”

  “Was he working another job at the present time?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know. No? I’m sorry. I’ll have to check.”

  Renner is going to have to check on a lot of things. I write down all that he has told us, pushing each flat fact hard into the paper so the thin carbon layer can do its magic and transfer it to the dupe page underneath. The tip of the pen is like a needle, and each fact is a butterfly, and what we do is we pin it to the board, collect it and catalog it for later consideration. Paige is in the corner o
f my eye with a small smile at the corners of her lips, because she has discovered more facts, proved to herself, if not to me, that there is indeed more here than meets the eye, and maybe she’s right and maybe she’s not.

  The man was named Crane, and he worked more jobs than this one.

  And this man Crane was at work today though not scheduled, for reasons no one can say.

  He started work early today, for reasons that no one knows.

  Each is an interesting fact, and each fact, each piece of truth, is valuable and precious in and of itself, every fact beloved in our good and golden world, and Paige can smile all she wants to, but I’m still not seeing any way to arrange these new facts in a shape that contradicts the base, brutal, powerful truth of the morning: He was a roofer and he fell off the roof. Still, I write them all down. Still, I transfer each new piece of truth to my Day Book, pushing down hard, and when the conversation is over Renner stamps my pad and I stamp his, and he stamps Paige’s pad and she stamps his too, and all of us have officially had this conversation and this conversation will always have occurred. It is on the Record.

  Paige closes her Day Book, and I’m about to say something—maybe challenge her to tell me what she thinks might matter in all that we have found—when I hear the distinct sound of a door closing. Someone is emerging from the house. The capture ops swivel to catch the new arrival, and so does Paige, and so do I.

  4.

  “A cow has four stomachs.”

  “A person has one.”

  “These are facts.”

  “These things are so.”

  “What are you doing here, Mr. Speculator?”

  “Oh, you know,” I say. “Working.” I point to the patch of broken grass, splotched with blood and boot prints. “A guy fell off the roof.”

  “So I heard.”

  I shake hands with Captain Elena Tester and then, after a pause, we hug, very briefly. A small capture crew, two guys, has peeled off from the main scene to get us from additional angles. There’s a bank of audios out here too, planted along the edge where the lawn meets the driveway, pure-audio captures angling their motion-sensing bulbs toward us, silent observers in the grass.