“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 of 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.