After Elliot leaves, Mendelssohn waits and sips his wine. He rises a little unsteadily on his feet and goes to the bathroom, returns to linger at his dessert. He pays with credit card, signs his bill, makes his way through the rows of empty tables. Both the waitress and the coat-check girl help him with his coat. The detectives would like to tell them to stop, to do something entirely different, to have Mendelssohn sit down, please wait, don’t move, stop the world on its curve, decide against whatever it is he is doing, change the course of the world with lethargy.
One click, and then he is gone. What frustrates them most is the outdoor camera, by the front-door foyer. The angle is perfect, but all they can see is Mendelssohn as he steps out into the storm, tugging his collar sharply, tapping his walking stick on the ground, pausing a moment, not visibly upset, moving forward. Thirty-seven seconds later he falls back into the frame, his Homburg spinning from his head. He smashes back against the ground. They see the assailant step into the frame for a fraction of a second. A dark figure bending down as if to whisper something to Mendelssohn. Baseball hat, a puffy jacket. It’s always so much easier to solve a case in the summertime — no hats, no scarves, no covered faces. But it’s winter and he’s a man of indeterminate race, impossible to tell, even in zoom, shadowed and hurried. He appears to have a scarf around his mouth and he wears a hat with curved letters, possibly a B or an 8 and a C or an O. They enhance it further, crop it, copy it, send it to video forensics. At a quarter of a second of digital footage — thirty frames per second — they have 7.5 images of the hat. After four hours of examination, they come back to say that it’s B.C. braided on the brim. The detectives immediately go to Google to see if Elliot went to Boston College, but Elliot is a Harvard boy through and through. Still, the assailant is someone with enough gumption to wear a Boston hat in Yankeetown.
They split the screen and sift the images as thoroughly as possible, watching only the crucial moments in real time. The rest is speeded up so that there is a silent-movie quality to the footage, Mendelssohn eating quickly, donning his coat, moving herky-jerky toward the door on his walking stick, but then they slow him down as he steps outside, is gone from the image, and then reappears, frozen in midfall, frozen again a second later, his face a gasp of surprise: How dare you punch me, before his head cracks open in a pool of dark blood.
There is no camera on the employee entrance, located ten yards down Madison Avenue, a simple metal door that leads past the bathrooms back into the kitchen. The only other obvious angle to the assault is from the traffic-cam on the light pole at Eighty-sixth and Madison: a wide view remotely accessed from traffic control. The quality is low, but the scope is wide. On any other day it might complement the restaurant footage — the tideline of taxis, the baleful swarm of dented trucks — but today it is obscured by snow blowing directly onto the lens, beginning with droplets that melt on the screen at first but then accumulate one by one, coalescing, a gathering curtain of white. It starts with flakes that melt and burn against the heat of the lens, stay a moment, rivulet along the screen. Then they arrive in more rapid flurries. They build, layer, vault upward into the camera, like a crowd of rioters obscuring the crime. At the time of the murder the only thing that can be seen through the granules of snow are the headlights of the approaching cars, small and spectral as they make their way up the avenue. No figures. No faces. No men in baseball caps. No images of an assailant running down the street.
Moments after the assault, the granules pick up the vague swirl of blue-and-red siren lights until eventually the street is closed off and the footage becomes a static portrait of headlights. There is no soundtrack, but the detectives can almost hear the car horns blaring in frustration, until the word murder begins to filter among the stalled cars and they fall silent.
The detectives look for cameras in the nearby stores and banks, but there are none with a suitable angle onto the front of Chialli’s. Yet they know that there is a solution embedded in the footage somewhere, or perhaps there is another camera to be found in the shops along Madison Avenue, or some other digital eye that is witness to the day. It’s a simple logic — a crime has been committed and therefore an answer must be available, somewhere, somehow. Nothing is elementally unsolvable. It’s an obvious physical law. If it happened, it can be unraveled. The difficulty comes in the sheer amount of work that must be done to sift through the footage. Even if they find a glimpse of a man in a B.C. hat — in the subway at Lexington Avenue, or walking quickly uptown away from the scene — they will have nothing to tie him directly to the punch.
Just as a poem turns its reader into accomplice, so, too, the detectives become accomplice to the murder. But unlike our poetry, we like our murders to be fully solved: if, of course, it is a murder, or poetry, at all.
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
In he walks, a ball of bristle and fear. The phone shoved against his ear. In trouble again, no doubt. He shakes off his overcoat at the coat check. Drips of snowmelt on the floor in a wide constellation. The coat-check girl gives him the once-over. He removes his scarf to reveal a neck that could fold over itself several times. There is something of the ancient walrus about Elliot, imposing and lumbering at the same time. He exposes the big bald head with a whip-off of the hat and gestures across the restaurant with a single finger raised: Wait for me, but don’t expect me to hurry. He turns away from the coat-check girl and cups his hand over the phone. A serious call indeed. An anger in the bend of his body. A touch of the Irish about him. Red and veiny. What happened to Eileen’s fine genes? Maybe they all went in Katya’s direction. Strange how it happens. We never really become fathers to the whole experience. We become, instead, the sons of our sons. What happens to them, then, happens to us. So be it. That’s my boy in the corner of the restaurant, shouting now into his cell phone, and here I sit, with a glass of water, watching, and the truth of the matter is that I couldn’t love him any more or dislike him any less — the curse of the father. Could somebody please quietly shut him up and guide him over here to my favorite table so that he can shake my hand, maybe even kiss my freckled forehead, say hello, and slide silently into his seat and be the charmer that he once was? Maybe the snow will interrupt the cell-phone signal and we can sit in peace, and when was the last time we actually spoke to each other, not just pleasantries? When oh when did I say a word to him that truly meant something?
He reaches for his glass of water — and thank the heavens, he can see Elliot getting off the telephone. Hurry on now, son, you’re making quite a fuss, another fifteen minutes of my life gone to waste.
Snow really hammering down outside now. A swell of intent, slantwise along the street. Mach shnell, son. Join me.
Across the room, Elliot raises his finger once again, this one in apology, or what seems like apology at least, and begins to dial once more.
Oh, to hell with manners, which waitress is mine? Can’t remember, though she’s been at the table at least twice already. Is it the tall blonde or the small blonde or the medium blonde or the medium-medium blonde with the ponytail? The new manager, it seems, has a stake in a hair-dye company.