I sit down. I close my eyes. I can’t see Ms. Paige but I know what she does: she settles back and closes her eyes beside me.
I shift in my chair, arch my back slightly, clench my teeth. This is the part I hate, the moment of descent, how it’s like a trap door opening, the world giving away beneath you, a lurch and a drop, down into dark below. I jerk and twitch. One forearm shoots out rigid, fingers clutching, my body instinctively seeking to keep a grip on the world, and then I let go but I hate how it feels: something grabbing at me, speculation clutching a foot and a leg and dragging me into its darkness—
Which is just what it is for me—a darkness: a cold room, cold and dark, a cave or a cavern, filled with shadow. I can’t see the edges of it, don’t know how far it goes. It’s only a dark room, lit by a single candle, a small, fierce orange glow, and now they float forward—stray postulates like tiny, shifting, orbiting stars, glinting in the hazy penumbra cast by the single light.
Crane was a burglar.
Simple. The closest fire.
“A burglar,” I say out loud, twitching in my chair, and Aysa says it back.
“A burglar.” And then, “A Peeping Tom.”
“A Peeping Tom,” I say, sending that spark out into my own darkness, watching it take up orbit.
“A burglar—a ring of burglars,” says Aysa beside me.
That’s what it is, that’s all we do, trading back and forth, dancing together toward and then away from possibilities, scattered sparks, the void pinpricked by glitters of speculation, the mind glowing and dimming, glowing and dimming, and you sit there with head turned, the body just a body, a hollow thing grimacing in a chair while inside—
A burglar—
One of a group of burglars—conspiracy—cabal—
Or… but…
Crane the pervert—monster—madman—
—a man of no family or station, a drifter, itinerant, man of missing days—
Or, or…
—depressive, isolated, lonesome, and alone—seeing the height of the house as a chance, a weapon—up on the precipice, wanting to do it, dying to die—
So, so…
It’s the house, the house, the house that wants him, not he that wants the house—
That’s Ms. Paige bringing the house into it, not just the man but the house itself, the place and the meaning of the place, sending a new bright spark into my field of vision, burning me awake and out of it.
I fly from the darkness, eyes wide open.
“Shit,” I say, standing up unsteady. “Shit.”
“What?” says Ms. Paige. “What is it? You have something?”
“No. Yes. I don’t fucking know.” I rub my knuckles into my eyes, clearing away stars. “I have something that I know I don’t have.”
Aysa studies me avidly, and I should take the time to explain, but I don’t feel like it. I get up, sighing, and smash my pinhole down onto my head. Damn it. The house. The stupid house.
“You watch your way through the relevant stretches, Ms. Paige. Okay? It’s gonna be boring, but that’s what you do. Go from stretch to stretch, and don’t skip the ins and outs. Anyone comes in, catch a still of the face. Anyone even comes into the frame.”
“Yes, sir. Where are you going?”
“Someone I gotta talk to.” And then, off her look—eager, curious—“Someone I gotta talk to alone.”
10.
“The past is a dangerous country.”
“Unknown and unknowable.”
“This is true.”
“And always shall be.”
“Well, well, Mr. Speculator. Twice in the same day.”
“Lucky you, right?”
“Yes, yes. Lucky me.”
Captain Elena Tester beckons me into her cluttered office, and we’re both smiling as she shakes my hand, but there’s displeasure in her smile, right behind the teeth. She doesn’t like me being here in her office this morning; she doesn’t like that I didn’t call first, doesn’t like what any of this implies. It’s one thing to run into each other at a crime scene, two law enforcement professionals crossing paths on the job; it’s another thing entirely for me to be darkening her doorway less than twenty-four hours later, unannounced but clearly on official business.
Nobody stopped me from coming in, by the way. Not outside, under the fluttering flag of the Bear and Stars. Not in the elevator or coming down the hall. The regular police and the Speculative Service have divergent jurisdictions, discrete but coterminous, but nobody’s going to stop a Spec on his rounds. The black clothes and the pinhole function like a passport, offering free movement within the Golden State. Stand back, stay clear.
So Captain Tester is surprised to see me, and she’s not happy, but this shouldn’t take long. I just need to clear this up.
I point to one of the three straight-backed chairs that form a semicircle around her desk. “Any one of these?”
“Of course.”
I sit. I pull papers out of my briefcase.
“So. Elena. I have to ask you a few questions.”
“Okay, Laszlo.”
“Four or five questions. Possibly more, depending on your answers.”
She gives out a little impatient puff of air. “Okay, Laszlo. I’m ready. Let’s go.”
I nod and smile. My pinhole is capturing. Her pinhole is capturing. The room is capturing. Captures on the doorframe, captures in the corners. A capture on her desk rotating slow, taking a sweep.
“I am going to read back to you the statement you gave to me yesterday, in Los Feliz. At 3737 Vermont Avenue.”
“Statement?”
“The—what? The statement you gave me this morning, at—”
“We were having a conversation, Laz.”
“Yes.” I clear my throat. “But you did state it. It was a statement.”
“Well, definitionally…” She stops, takes a deep breath. I notice that her hands are tight on the edge of her desk. Holding fast to reality, her reality. “No, it’s okay. You’re right. Of course you are right, Laszlo.” She hops up abruptly. “Hey, do you want coffee?”
“I’ve had some. Thank you.”
“I’ll make myself one, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t.”
I wait. She drums her fingers on the corner of the little sink along a wall of her office, beneath the wide southerly window, while her machine burbles and brews. We are in two different places at the same time. We are a Speculator and a police captain working together to establish facts, and also simultaneously we are two friends, two people just talking. There are words and there is context; there are declarations and there is the ground in which those declarations are planted.
The coffee maker issues a final small-motor exclamation and hisses out its mud-brown stream. Now that I can smell the coffee I want some after all. Too late now.
“So,” says Elena. “My statement.”
“Yes. I asked you what you were doing at 3737 Vermont Avenue this morning, and you said, ‘I caught it on the scanner.’ You said, ‘I live near here. On Talmadge.’ You said, ‘As long as I was in the area, I thought I’d babysit the homeowner.’” I look up from my Day Book and she’s waiting expectantly. “That was your statement.”
“Okay,” she says flatly, which of course is not an answer.
“Elena. Captain Tester. I’m asking if those are true statements.”
Elena’s astonishment spreads through her body, a tightening fury: her back straightens, her hand curls tightly around the coffee cup, denting the paper sides. The pupils of her eyes narrow to knife ends. “You’re asking me if I’m lying.”