“And the uh—” I say.
And then I’m just frozen, I’m sitting there, holding my head in my forehead. Right at this moment I have to decide, is the thing, am I going to leave town and go north to Maine and find a house on Casco Bay and sit there and stare out the window with my sidearm and wait, or am I going to stay here and do my work and finish my case. My cases.
“Palace?” says Culverson.
“The files,” I say, I clear my throat, I sit up on my stool, stick a finger in my ear to block out the TV and the bad music, reach for a blue book. “What about the files?”
“Ah, yes, the files,” says Culverson. “The terribly helpful Mr. Gompers basically says we’re up the metaphorical creek, on that front.”
“Huh,” I say.
“Just eyeballing the file cabinet, he says there are maybe three dozen files missing, but he can’t tell me what the claims were, or who was working on them, or anything. They gave up on computer files in January, and there are no backups of the paper files.”
“Bad luck,” I say, I get out a pen, I’m writing, I’m getting it all down.
“Tomorrow I’m going to try and track down some friends and family on this Eddes girl, give ’em the bad news, see if they know anything.”
“I’ll do that,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“Sure.”
“You sure?”
“I’ll take care of it.”
I get off the phone and pack up my notebooks, sliding them one by one into the pocket of my blazer. The question as before is why. Why does anybody do this? Why now? A murder, calculated, cold blood. To what purpose, for what gain? Two stools over the mustache man makes his agitated harumphing noise again, because the infomercial has been broken into by a news report, women in abayas somewhere, running in a panic through a dusty marketplace.
He turns my way with doleful eyes, shakes his head, as if to say, boy oh boy, huh? and I can tell he’s about to try to talk to me, have some sort of human moment, and I don’t have time, I can’t do it. I have work to do.
At home I peel out of the clothes I’ve been wearing all day—to the morgue, to the National Guard, to the scene of crime—and I stand in the bedroom and look around.
Last night past midnight I woke in this room, in this same darkness, and Naomi was framed in the doorway, slipping her red dress over her head in the moonlight.
I’m pacing, thinking.
She put on the dress and she sat on the mattress and she started to talk—to tell me something—but then she stopped herself, “Forget it.”
I walk slowly in a circle in my bedroom. Houdini stands in the doorway, unsure, unsettled.
Naomi started to say something, and then she stopped, and then instead she said that, no matter what happened, it was real and good and right. And she won’t forget it, no matter how it ends.
I pace in a circle, snapping my fingers, biting at the ends of my mustache. Real and good and right, no matter how it ends is what she said, but she was going to say something else, instead.
In my restless dream the bullet that tore through Naomi’s skull becomes a ball of fire and rock charging through Earth’s fragile crust, gouging trenches into the landscape, blasting away sedimentary rock and soil, goring into the ocean floor and sending up spumes of boiled ocean. Deeper and deeper it goes, plowing forward, releasing its stores of kinetic energy, as a bullet rips through a brain, tearing through warm clots of gray matter, severing nerves, creating blackness, pulling thought and life down around it as it goes.
I wake up with the dead yellow light of the sun filling my bedroom, with the next phase of the investigation having announced itself in my head.
A tiny little thing, a little lie to follow up on.
2.
It’s not my murder, it’s Culverson’s murder, but here I go again back toward downtown, back to the Water West Building, like an animal who’s witnessed some scene of violence and keeps on restlessly returning to the place of horrid fascination. There’s some goon marching in circles around Eagle Square, big parka and a fur hat and an old-fashioned sandwich board—DO THEY THINK WE’RE STUPID in big cartoon bubble-letters—and he’s ringing a bell like a Salvation Army Santa Claus. “Hey,” he hollers, “do you know what time it is?” I duck my head, ignore him, push open the door.
The old guard isn’t here. I take the stairs up to the third floor, and I don’t politely call out hello from reception, I just go ahead on in and find Mr. Gompers behind his walnut desk.
“Oh,” he says, startled, and half rises, unsteadily, to take me in. “I, uh, I went over everything with the other gentleman last night. About poor Naomi.”
“Yeah,” I say. He’s graduated from a tumbler to a pint glass of gin. “Not everything, though.”
“What?”
My insides feel cold, like my organs have been removed, separated from one another, packed back inside me in mud. I slam my hands down on Gompers’s desk and lean in; he rears back, fleshy face retreating from my glare. I know what I look like. Unshaven, gaunt, the one dead eye with an uneven halo of brown puffy bruising around the clean white of the gauze.
“When I talked to you last week, you told me that the parent company in Omaha is obsessed with fraud prevention.”
“What? I don’t know,” he mumbles.
“Okay, well, here,” I say, tossing the thin blue book on the desk in front of him, and he flinches. “Read it.”
Gompers doesn’t move, so I tell him what it says. “You claimed that all your company cares about is protecting the bottom line. You said the board chairman thinks he’s going to buy his way into heaven. But yesterday you told Detective Culverson that there are no duplicates of those files.”
“Yeah, see, we went to an all-paper system,” he mumbles. “The servers…” He’s not looking at me, he’s looking at a picture on his desk: the daughter, the one who went off to New Orleans.
“You’ve got the whole office checking and double-checking those claims, there’s no computer backup, and you’re telling me there’s no hard copies being made? No duplicate set squirreled away somewhere?”
“Well. I mean…” Gompers looks out his window, and then back at me, steeling himself to make one more run at it. “No, I’m sorry, there’s—”
I grab the glass from his hand and I hurl it against the window pane and it explodes and rains ice and gin and chips of glass onto the rug. Gompers stares at me, gaping like a fish. I picture Naomi—all she wanted was to write one perfect villanelle—see her fetching this man fresh bottles of alcohol from the corner store, and then I’m grabbing him by his lapels and lifting him out of his chair and up onto the desk, his blubbery neck trembling at the pressure of my thumbs.
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Where are the copies?”
“Boston. The regional office. State Street.” I slacken my grip, just ever so slightly. “Every night we run off everything and overnight them. The overnights, they keep ’em in Boston.” He says the words again, pleading, pathetic. “The overnights… okay…”
I let go of him, and he drops down onto the desk, slides miserably back into his chair.
“Look, Officer—” he says, and I interrupt him.
“I’m a detective.”
“Detective. Variegated, they’re shutting the franchises one by one. They’re looking for reasons. Stamford. Montpelier. If that happens here, I don’t know what I’ll do. We have no savings. My wife and I, I mean.” His voice is trembling. “We won’t make it.”
I stare at him.