— Oh, don’t you worry about me, Mr. J., she says. I’m just fine.
— A little brownie perhaps?
— You’re sweet, Mr. J.
And she kisses him on the cold of his cheek.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
The household fly is a masterpiece of evolutionary design: it can see virtually 360 degrees and can piece together a complete image no matter how weak the light. Its compound eye is an intricate honeycomb. Its retina is a convex curve, dotted with hundreds of hexagonal photoreceptors. Each lens of the eye — with support cells, pigment cells, a cornea — harvests its own light and creates a deep visual map.
The fly can spot movement in shadows, and can pick out distant objects with far more clarity than anything the human can accomplish. The result is a mosaic of light, color, pattern, and speed. The images the fly sees are smashed together in its brain. The more lenses used, the higher the resolution.
On a microscopic slide, the insect’s eye looks like an exquisite artwork, the tiling on the wall of a mosque, or the curve of a planet we haven’t yet found.
With the eye of a simple housefly we could see, in a nanosecond, all the intricacies of Chialli’s Restaurant, the tables arranged in diamonds, the door opening on the walk-in fridge, the frantic slice of the knife upon the carrot, the creased folds of the napkins, the busboy adjusting the crank on the espresso machine, the manager turning to the wall for a sly crotch adjust, the slide of the bread basket on the food-station trays, the hostess touching a pencil against her tongue, the clearing of the dead man’s plates from the table, the leap of hot oil from a pan.
As it is, there are twelve cameras in Chialli’s altogether, neatly hidden in corners around the restaurant. A two-year-old system with a sixteen-camera capability, ports still open for four. Updated software with one terabyte of storage. Good compression, resolution and a full-motion frame rate with thirty images per second. The sort of system that is good enough that the video technicians can pump it to a remote location and examine it off-site.
It is a well-known restaurant, highly rated, very Upper East Side. A long mahogany bar. Dark wood paneling along the walls. A hardwood floor. A series of stained glass — shaded lights hanging from the ceiling over the tables. The restaurant is known for its Italian cuisine with a surprising South American flavor. The wine list is extensive. The service, impeccable. The speciality of the house is branzino, lightly grilled with mango and peppers. The most popular dessert is tiramisu, prepared with a hint of cachaça. The lunchtime crowd is generally quiet, well-heeled: the ladies who lunch.
The digital detectives exit the twelve-camera matrix and click on the images one by one: the kitchen, the manager’s office, the hostess station, the dining room, the staff cloakroom, the rear courtyard. They layer them, bookend them, break them apart, look for tiny inconsistencies. Check the time stamps for offset. Zoom in, zoom out, build a dossier for themselves, examining the time close to the murder, 2:19 p.m., searching for anything out of the ordinary.
There, the coat-check girl, Laura Pedersen, with her book of tickets. There, the oyster shucker, Carvahlo, sharpening his knife. Here, the chef, Chad MacKenzie, adjusting his hair under his tall white hat. There, the manager, Christopher Eagleton, flipping through pages on a clipboard. There, Pedro Jiménez at the dishwashing station. Here, the dropped fork on the kitchen floor. There, the swing of the restaurant doors. Here, the busboy, Dandinho, guiding Mendelssohn to the table. There, Mendelssohn, wiping the napkin against his lip. Here, Elliot calmly sipping his Cabernet. There, the last glass of Sancerre that Mendelssohn ever drank. Here, the waitress, Rosita Oosterhausen, tapping orders on a keyboard and later pinching her nipple through her blouse seconds before she delivers the check, a tried and trusted way to increase tips.
There is a sequence, too, of the outer foyer of Chialli’s, from Mendelssohn’s arrival to the tail end of his goodbye.
There are a number of people to mark — not least Elliot Mendelssohn. He arrives late, big and bundled, in an overcoat and scarf. They watch him and his father dine at a rate of eight-by — the dab of napkins, the quick lift of fork to mouth, the pour of wine, no obvious arguments. They slow the video sequence down for Elliot’s casual stroll toward the front doors, the donning of his wool hat, his walk out into the snowstorm, still nothing overtly suspicious about him, no signal, no nod, no wink. He leaves at 1:52, twenty-seven minutes before the murder. Still, so many killings are arranged by family members and the detectives cannot rule out an accomplice: there is something about Elliot that is distinctly unlikeable, not least his insistence on speaking on the phone during large portions of lunch.
Then there is Pedro Jiménez who is absent from his dishwashing station for a full four minutes before the murder and five minutes afterward. Pedro, fifty-seven, has no record, no violent past. At 2:12 they watch him and the busboy, Dandinho, in animated discussion by the giant metal sink under the Brooklyn Cyclones poster. It is interesting to watch Pedro remove his apron and throw it on the ground, and to see Dandinho hold him by the shoulders. There is a short pushing match between the two men. Later when they are questioned, it is revealed that Dandinho is Brazilian, and Pedro is Costa Rican, and they have a South American soccer betting pool where some mistakes have been made in the general accountancy. Pedro tells them that he was in the bathroom at the time of the murder. There are, of course, no bathroom cameras, but they do catch footage of him moving down the corridor in the direction of the toilets, a plausible-enough alibi.
Sally James, too, is tagged, though only half-heartedly. They scrub backward on the video timeline to the early angle outside Chialli’s. They watch the dead man, alive, with Sally at his side. A shuffle to his walk, a distrust of the small coating of snow on the ground. The halting steps of one who refuses to tumble. The bite of wind active in his face. His body a little elongated from the angle. They enter the frame, actor-like, hitting their marks. The detectives halt the image and magnify, hold them in digital suspension, then click a slow motion forward. The pair hover at the entrance. She kisses him on the cheek, then Mendelssohn lets go of his nurse’s arm, shuffles forward, slope-shouldered, and stops at the restaurant door. A single flake briefly obscures him when blown against the screen.
The detectives make a note to check if Mendelssohn’s will has been recently changed, a not uncommon occurrence amongst nurses or housekeepers and their charges, though Sally James hardly seems the type.
It is what the cops call a shrapnel case — the pieces exploding left right center up and down. Could be mistaken identity. Could be a hate crime. There is also of course the possibility of the random psychotic episode: a homeless man thrown slightly off-kilter, or a desperate robber at large. But there is no wallet taken, no cell phone swiped. The point for the detectives is to find the focus, the muscles that have propelled the punch. Then they might be able to move it backward, through the ligaments to the bone and bring it back eventually to the raw moment of release.
Several theories are always less convincing than a single one, so for their primary one they remain with Elliot — there is certainly something there, though they cannot locate it yet: certainly it wouldn’t be unusual for the son to murder the father, it happens far more often than anyone acknowledges.