I slouch across the lawn on Vermont, bent forward, moving slow but with big intent, the heavy man’s hurry, with Ms. Paige trotting along at my heels. I see the body and I move right to it, ignoring the crowds, ignoring the regular police, the capture crews, the gawkers—the shifting crowd that appears in the wake of a death, like insects coming up out of the ground after rain.
I push through the crowd, sighing. Growling, maybe. I’m making some kind of noise and all the regular cops and microphone operators and AV knuckleheads step back, wary. There’s sweat gathering at the back of my collar, sweat beading under my beard. The early-day cool has burned away and I’m roasting in my blacks. I’ve never minded the discomfort of the uniform, to be honest with you, full true; I always feel like the discomfort is part of the job. The discomfort is the job. It marks you out, sets you apart. You get to a scene and you’re already scowling, and everybody knows you’re there on business. Everybody is watching the boundaries.
“Sir?” says Ms. Paige, and I raise one hand—Gimme a second.
This is nothing. This is an empty dumb nothing.
The dead man was a roofer, and he died falling off a roof. Those are the facts, and they’re clear from the get-go, clear and plain. As Arlo would say, it’s true as daylight, true as doors on houses. The mansion is one of these expansive but unassuming old places, with the poured concrete and the Spanish tile, with the wide white patio and the rambling lawn. A modest two stories but turreted with balconies and pilasters and stone-carved cherubs peeking out from the corners of the porch. I shield my eyes and look up to the spot on the red tile roof where the man scrambled before he fell, and I note the patch of loose and broken tiles. A single piece of fractured gutter juts out like a broken bone.
I turn from the house to the body of the man. All the angles add up. He fell from the high pitch of the roof, scrabbled in vain to catch himself on the downspout, and died when he hit the ground.
Now the man’s body lies facing the sun, half on and half off the patio, eyes staring up at the golden blue of the morning. Wiry black hair and a wiry black mustache on a deeply tanned face. On the breast pocket of his green work shirt there’s a logo of a hand holding a hammer. Here are his limbs, all four splayed out against the manicured lawn in ugly incongruous angles; here is the slick of blood expanding out from underneath him, slowly seeping into the manicured lawn, spreading dark red onto the bone-white patio stone. Here is the wild mosaic of broken roof tiles surrounding him—the armload he’d been holding when he tumbled, the explosive shatter pattern around him testament to the force of the fall. Here is the trowel, flung out on the lawn, a crust of dried caulk along its lip.
I get out my Day Book, pin down this first set of flat facts in black ink, pressing hard so the carbons catch it. And then—I don’t know why exactly, but I do—I stay in my investigative crouch, a bear down low to the ground, paws planted to keep myself from toppling, roving my careful eyes over the man’s dead face. His skull has split and spilled but the weathered face is intact, unharmed. The eyes above the mustache are open wide, very wide, and he’s got this expression—and this is a subjective determination, this is hard to measure on the scale of what is and what is not So—but he looks terrified.
“Mr. Ratesic?” Paige is trying again, eager to learn, her own Day Book out and open. “What are you seeing?”
“Nothing,” I say, and stand up, heaving my body straight. “Not a thing.” I take one more look up at the house, shake my head. “You wanna tell me what we’re doing here?”
“What?”
“What was the impetus for the presence of the Service? Why were we called?”
“Oh. Um—should we ask?”
She gestures to the knot of regular police who are hanging around close to the house, pretending to do things, stealing glances at the two of us over here by the body. The dead man’s coworkers are doing the same thing.
And then there’s a team from the Record, circling Paige and me, gathering reality as it unfolds: the capture operator and his backup; the microphone operator, hovering at the prescribed distance, professional headphones bulky over her ears; the archivist and the archivist’s assistant.
“No,” I tell Paige. “I don’t want to ask them. I’m asking you. You looked at the call report, right? From Alvaro?”
“Yes. It just said they called it in. It said the Service was requested to discover the full and final truth. He said they said—”
“Who said?”
“The regular police.”
“What did they say?”
“They said there was something anomalous in it.”
“Anomalous?”
“Yes, that’s—” She takes a step back from me. I’ve got my hands jammed in my pockets. I am scowling, bent forward. “That’s what they said.”
“Meaning what?”
“What?”
“What does that word mean?”
“Meaning…you mean what does ‘anomalous’ mean?”
“Yes, Ms. Paige. Shared understanding is a bulwark. Clear and agreed-upon definitions of common terms are defenses against infelicity. Words mean what they fucking mean. So, what is the meaning of the word ‘anomalous’?”
My tone is not pleasant, I recognize that. If Arlo wants me to train this girl, well, then I’m going to train her. It is miserably hot out here—deadly hot. The sun is carving a rash into the skin above my collar.
“‘Anomalous’ means”—Paige takes a breath and stands erect and gives it to me, word for word from the Basic Law—“a mismatch of facts possibly indicative of the presence of a falsehood or falsehoods obscuring the full and final truth of a given situation. Sir.”
“Okay.” I nod, maybe a little disappointed to be deprived of the opportunity to further chastise. “Good.” Paige’s nervous face shows a quick shimmering smile.
“So what do you think? Where’s the anomaly?”
“I—” She looks at me. Then she looks back up at the house, back at the guy. “I don’t see it. I think he fell off the roof.”
“Yes,” I say. “Me too.”
“So maybe if we just—” She angles her head over to the crowd of officers again. “Maybe we ask?”
“Nope.”
“But—”
“Nope. The regular police do their thing, and we get back in our car.”
“But—wait.”
I’ve started walking away, and Ms. Paige puts a hand on my shoulder, and then shrinks back when I stop and turn to glare at her. A pause. A mourning dove makes its low coo from somewhere in the high trees. Along the lawn are the embedded captures, forever adding to the documented bulk of reality.
“Why would the cops call it in for nothing?”
“Free show.” I gesture over at them, the workaday police in their blue hats and khaki pants, proving my point, the whole herd of them staring back at us gape-mouthed. “Because being an ordinary precinct policeman is boring, Ms. Paige, and rubbing up against the great and mysterious Speculative Service is not. So they call us and they don’t lie, careful not to lie, but they say, ‘Oh, well, we wonder if there is something weird going on here, we just really want you guys to put eyes on it,’ but really it’s them wanting to put eyes on us. There’s not much we can do about it, it’s the way of the world, but we don’t have to indulge it by turning every tragic accident into the lie of the century.”
“I see,” she says. “Sure. I get it. But maybe…”
“What? Maybe what?” I feel anger boiling up in me, I hear my voice rising, but I can’t stop. I didn’t want to have a partner anyway. Hadn’t I told Arlo that? Didn’t I say so? “Do you have something to add, Ms. Paige?”
“No, just—” She looks longingly at the dead man. “Maybe if we just speculated—”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I say it loud. I practically shout it. Somewhere, a rough-cut officer is turning down the monitor at a transcription station, grimacing at the burst of distorted output.
“No, sir. I just thought—”
“I already said there’s no reason. You said it too, didn’t you? No cause for spec. You fucking said it!”
I step closer to her, bellowing now, and she’s smart enough to keep her mouth shut.
“There’s a corpse on the lawn, a broken roof. It’s a clear story, told by the flat facts. So you want to, what, start speculating right here at the scene? Maybe a low-flying plane knocked him off the roof. Maybe he was pushed by his evil twin!”
The boom mic dangles her pole as close as she dares; the capture op inches in.
“Listen to me, Paige: We start coming up with alternate realities, just for fun? Just so you can practice? Then guess what? We’re committing our own assault on the Objectively So. Then we have become the liars.”
Paige’s chin has stiffened; she has crossed her arms. “I wasn’t proposing that we lie, sir.”
“Unwarranted speculation is no better than lying, Ms. Paige. It is worse. You want to see how it’s done, here’s how it’s done: it’s better when it’s not done at all. Our job is to reinforce the Objectively So. Not conjure realities, every one of which might extend, evolve, metastasize.” I am barking now, hollering, furious at the idea that she might not hear and understand what I’m telling her. “And none of those realities can be collected back once released. Our job is to find the facts and travel between them, walk carefully along the lines of what’s true. And when we do speculate? When we do hypothesize? We do it carefully, conscientiously, in a controlled environment, and we don’t do it at all unless and until the facts support it. The Speculative Service is a bulwark. What is the Speculative Service?”
“It’s a bulwark.”
“Goddamn right it is.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Now just—” I take a deep breath. Plant my hands on my hips, feel my feet beneath me. Try to get steady. “Would you give me a second to do the stupid job?”
I regret my outburst right away, of course.
That’s me all over. Big and brave Mr. Laszlo Ratesic of the Service, dedicated officer of what is true, and a petty and short-tempered and thickheaded brute. Fully conscious of all his faults, wholly unable to correct them.
“Idiot,” I call myself, and “asshole,” as I prowl around to the rear of the house, to where the pool stretches out in a perfect pristine rectangle, its even blue surface shimmering with the shadow of the house itself. I’ve come around to the back to make sure there aren’t any contraindicating facts, but really, just to have a second alone, alone with my lumbering thoughts, with my anger and self-recrimination—and with the capture op, lone representative of the Record. He has trailed me and stands now at a respectful ten-foot distance, his handheld trained on me where I stand heavily on the lawn. Reality in progress.
I think I’ve seen this op before—a shaggy-headed dude named Morgan or Marcus, something like that. Convention dictates that you ignore the Record’s representatives, but a lot of people will say hello, give a nod or a smile. Not me. I keep my hands deep in my pockets, stare by turns at the roof, the lawn, the pool.
The sun scatters its golden light across the moment, glittering on the rooftop, glinting on the blue of the pool, dappling the deep green of the lawn. The damn roofer should have had the good sense to fall off this side of the house. He might have saved himself a broken neck. Might have drowned instead.
There’s a back door, coming off the pool patio, a pair of elegant French doors that allow no clear view of whatever choices are made inside the house. I could take an extra five minutes to haul myself up onto the house, push a ladder against the stuccoed white walls, have a closer look at the spot where the roofing tiles gave way. Make sure. Make double and triple sure.
But I’d only be doing it by way of apology to Ms. Paige, a half-assed dumbshow of contrition: Maybe you were right. Maybe there’s one more flat fact to be found, another tile for us to lay into the mosaic. Only I know there’s not. What happened is what happened. It was a tragedy, maybe, but there is no anomaly, no lie hidden beneath the surface, like a snake under the soil. All the facts are flat and simple. All the lines between them are clean and direct.
I understand young Paige’s eagerness, her fervency. The fundamental truth of her comes off the kid in waves. She wants to speculate because that’s what Speculators do. We are the ones with the power, and the license, to truck with lies—we can sense them, we can handle them, and we are empowered to emit them ourselves. To construct different versions of the truth so each can be tested, so all might fall away until only the real one remains.
Ms. Paige just wants to do the damn work.
And here I come, condemning her for the crime of caring too much? Of hoping to find something beneath the surface?
The question is, what kind of fundamental truth is coming off me?
Back in front of the house, the ambulance has maneuvered onto the lawn and parked among the other emergency vehicles under the meager shade of the very tall palms, and now I shade my eyes and watch the men with their stretchers trot across the lawn to bear away the victim. The ambulance crew is trailed by its own Record team: more capture operators, more microphone bearers, more archivists. I watch them watching as the paramedics lift the body and arrange it on the stretcher.
“Sir?”
It’s Paige again. Tapping on my shoulder. Chin set, eyes clear, bowed but unbent. She has some nerve, this one; she has some fight in her for sure.
And now the sunlight of good feeling fills me up, and I smile for what feels like the first time today. For the first time in a good long while.
“What is it, kid?”
“I decided to speak to some of the witnesses, sir. As long as I was waiting.”
She winces, waiting for me to holler at her, but I don’t.
“And?”
“And there’s someone I think you should meet.”
“It’s Buddy Renner. Like, ah, like runner, person who runs, but with an e where the u goes—Renner. I’m thirty-six years old. I’m a manager. I was born in Pasadena, but I live down in South Beach now. These guys are my crew. I’m their manager. Not of the…not the whole company. I’m a field manager. I run this crew. Company manager is Lexie Herrimann. Two rs, two ns. Herrimann.”
I put it all down in my Day Book, my stubby fat hundred-pager. I write in my book even though Renner’s rambling testimony is being captured by my pinhole and by the captures along the gutters of the house and in the trees, and by the roving team too. There are plenty of Speculators who don’t bother with the Day Book unless it’s a matter of clear and immediate importance, something that’ll surefire need to be on the Record. But I’m old-school. I like to do it right.
“I was the one that found him, actually,” says Renner. “I got here at, ah, boy, I guess about—” He pauses, squeezes shut his eyes with the effort of recollection. “Six oh nine. That’ll…That’s…You can check the stretches on that, right? But so, okay, the crew was called for six thirty. So he was—Crane was—he was early, and I was early but not as early as him.”
“You don’t all arrive together?” I ask, pointing to the three pickups along the driveway. “In the trucks?”
“No. Ah—no, sir. You can. Some of the guys will come into the office, and—but, no. You can get to the work site, you get to the work site.”
I nod for him to continue, and he swallows, takes a deep breath. He keeps glancing at my pinhole, same nervous little glance Ms. Tarjin kept doing. There are plenty of ground and air captures around, so people don’t understand why we have to have ’em too, the point of view, and maybe it’s just psychological. Or maybe you can never have too much truth.
“And so I found him—on the ground there. Just—that’s just how I found him.”
The man is sputtering out facts, scattershotting every squib of truth that occurs to him. It’s irritating, but useful for investigative purposes.
“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 the matter. 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. 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 he’ll have caused his own worst fear to come true.
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. This man Renner is telling the truth. But he looks away from me while he’s talking, finds the more sympathetic eyes of Officer Paige.
And she, meanwhile, is 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, capture the relevant page, and hand it to Paige.
“I’ve already got it, sir.”
I look at her. “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, we have to face the possibility 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. 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, he 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 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 was here early, earlier than anyone else.
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. But Paige can smile all she wants to—I’m still not seeing any way to arrange these new facts in a shape that contravenes the base truth of the morning: He was a roofer and he fell off the roof. Still, I write it all down. I transfer each 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.
And then I hear the distinct sound of a door closing. Someone is emerging from the house. The capture ops swivel to catch the new arrival, and so does Paige, and so do I.