Eli-
Don't do anything. I'm coming back there. Don't move. I need to talk to you.
I lied about everything. There is no more money. I'm sorry. For everything.
It's going to be okay.
Clark
Her head falls to her chest and the hope goes out of her. Why not just videotape himself? She's shocked at how badly she wants Clark not to have done this.
Of course there is another world. Just below this one. It is undisturbed. Perfect. Our intentions go there, and the things we can't have. Regrets. Promises. Wishes.
When we dream we are falling, this is where we go.
She leans forward and, with her flashlight, turns the computer screen off. The e-mail fades as the picture pulls in on itself, universe collapsing, and then black. Caroline stares, as if she can't believe she just did that. Okay, she thinks, now you've got some time.
She backs carefully to the door, looks once more at the room, perfect and undisturbed. She can already hear the first siren, still blocks away. She slides her shoes on, backs out the door, and pulls it closed behind her.
2
The dwarf listens intently, but with very little reaction, as Caroline explains that they haven't positively identified the body, but she has every reason to believe that Eli Boyle is lying dead in the small apartment above his garage.
"No shit," says Louis Carver. He shakes his head. "Wow. He actually did it."
Caroline tenses. She's said nothing about Clark Mason. "Who?"
"Eli. He used to talk about it all the time, in this totally detached way, like it was just the most normal thing. We'd be talking about investments or what kind of car to buy and he'd just blurt out, 'I could jump off a bridge.' Or 'What do you think of hanging?' Just out of the blue, like that."
"No," Caroline interrupts. "Eli didn't kill himself. Somebody shot him."
They are on the porch of Louis's house and he's standing in the doorway, holding the screen door open as if she's selling something he doesn't need. He falls back against the door frame. He is about four feet tall, bowlegged and thick through the chest and trunk. He wears khaki pants and a sweatshirt that reads, simply, COLLEGE. His features are pleasant, though slightly crowded. A spit of brown hair covers his forehead; he is graying at the temples. "Eli was murdered?" he asks.
"We think so."
"Who did it?"
"We don't know," Caroline says. It occurs to her that Louis Carver does not seem terribly upset that his old friend and business partner is dead.
She was feeling claustrophobic at Eli's carriage house apartment – watching the evidence techs start to dismantle the room – when she remembered Louis's name from the Fair Election Fund. She got his number from information, apologized for calling at ten o'clock, and asked if she could stop by to talk to him for a minute. She left Eli's house without telling anyone, turned her phone off, and drove here, to this tidy daylight rancher in the Shadle neighborhood, on a street of honest, working-family houses.
"Murdered. No shit," Louis says again.
A short, attractive woman – still, a foot taller than her husband, with ink-black hair – sticks her head around the corner of the doorway. She is wearing flannel pajamas and looks as if she just woke up. "Is everything okay?" Mrs. Carver asks.
"Eli Boyle is dead."
If Louis reacted inscrutably to the news, his wife's face registers outright disdain at hearing Eli's name. "Oh."
"He was murdered," Louis tells his wife.
"That's too bad," she says flatly. A baby begins crying behind her, lost and sleepy. She puts her hand on Louis's shoulder and turns around to go get the baby.
"Do you know if Eli had any family?" Caroline asks.
"No," Louis says. "Just his mom, and she died several years ago."
"Do you remember the last time you saw Eli?" she asks.
"Sure." He rubs his eyes. "Two years ago. November of 2000."
"Before or after the election?"
"After," Louis says, seeming surprised that she knows about the election. "You must've talked to Clark already."
"That's actually one thing I wanted to ask you about. How would you characterize the relationship between Clark Mason and Eli?"
"They're best friends. They-" Louis tries to read her face. "You think Clark had something to do with this? Clark Mason?" He covers his left eye. "One eye? Tall? Occasionally runs for Congress and gets his ass kicked? That Clark Mason?" Louis shakes his head violently. "No way. Clark wouldn't do that. He couldn't. The guy opens the window to let flies out of his house. He spent the last eight years baby-sitting Eli. What reason would he possibly have to kill him?"
Caroline climbs a step, bringing her closer and to eye level with Louis. "Your name was listed with Eli Boyle's as one of two officers in a political action group." She looks down at her notebook even though she knows the name. "The Fair Election Fund? You paid for the ads that called Clark Mason a carpetbagger?"
Louis comes all the way out now and lets the screen door close behind him. "That was a long time ago and we all-" His face is red and his eyes narrow. "Look, I didn't even know…" He lowers his voice. "I just signed where Eli pointed. We had given so much to Clark's campaign that I just assumed we were starting a fund to help him. When I saw in the paper what it was, I was furious. I was a hell of a lot angrier than Clark, if that tells you anything. I sure as shit wouldn't have forgiven Eli for that. But there was Clark, a week later, telling me he couldn't have won anyway. He was actually trying to get me to forgive Eli. He went on about how Eli took all this punishment when they were kids. What a hard childhood Eli had. Finally, I couldn't listen anymore. I said, 'Clark, you're talking to a fucking dwarf here. I'm probably gonna need more than a tough childhood.'"
"And you left Empire right after that?" Caroline asks.
He nods. "Two weeks later. Sold my stock back to Eli at the option price. Walked out the door with about eighty grand and never looked back. If I'd sold a year earlier, before the crash, I could've gotten probably ten times that."
"How many partners were there?" she asks.
"Four minority partners: myself and Clark, Bryan, who was our tech guy, and Michael Langford, this investment and finance guy from the Bay Area. We each had five percent of the shares, and since Bryan and I worked there, we also got salaries. Twenty-nine percent was divided among the investors that Michael brought in. Eli retained the other fifty-one percent. That was Clark's doing, too. Eli was terrified that he was going to lose control of the game, so Clark set it up so that Eli's share of the company could never drop below fifty-one unless Eli sold his stock, which of course he never did."
"So you left Empire because of the Fair Election Fund?"
Louis looks past her. "And I had some real problems with the way Eli ran things." He seems wary of saying more.
"Look," Caroline says, "I'm just trying to figure out who killed your friend. I don't care about anything else. So tell me, why did you leave Empire?"
"Well, for starters, there was no Empire. Not the way we were selling it. Not like it was supposed to be." He leans back and searches for the words. "After we got the money everything was different. We got an office, hired illustrators and writers and coders. Every six months, we'd put on a show for the investors, tell them what they wanted to hear, let them see whatever real progress we'd made. Then we'd fake the rest. They want the game on CD-ROM? We put the preview on CD-ROM. They want it on the Internet? We put the preview on a Web site. They want streaming video, multitexturing, 3-D graphics, photorealistic rendering? Fine. As soon as we finished a presentation, we'd go back to work on the next presentation.