4.

“A cow has four stomachs.”

“A person has one.”

“These are facts.”

“These things are so.”

“What are you doing here, Mr. Speculator?”

“Oh, you know,” I say. “Working.” I point to the patch of broken grass, splotched with blood and boot prints. “A guy died.”

“So I heard.”

I shake hands with Captain Elena Tester and then, after a pause, we hug, very briefly. A small capture crew, two guys, has peeled off from the main scene to get us from additional angles. There’s a bank of audios out here too, planted along the edge where the lawn meets the driveway, pure-audio captures angling their motion-sensing bulbs toward us, silent listeners in the grass.

“It’s nice to see you, Laszlo.”

“Yeah. You too.”

And it is nice to see her—of course it is. I mean, what am I going to do, lie? It’s nice to see her, and it also stings; it’s nice to see her, and it also brings me right back close to a whole bank of memories I spend a lot of time trying to avoid.

“So, what? Falls off the roof, right?” says Tester. “Dies on the ground?”

“That’s certainly what the flat facts suggest.”

She glances at the spot on the lawn, the bent green stalks, patches of red blood. The body is long gone, en route to the morgue, where the doctors will do their thing, gather up any final facts from inside the dead man’s body before they put it underground.

“So who called you people?” she asks.

I adjust my pinhole. “You don’t know?”

“Why would I know?”

“What?”

We peer at each other, mutually bemused, and then we both start laughing at the same time. I like Elena well enough. Not a lot, but I don’t really like anybody a lot. Elena Tester is a colleague, in that loose definition of the word that includes all law enforcement officers in the Golden State, or might even take in the whole government, depending on your definition of “colleague.” The Speculative Service and the regular police operate in different but frequently overlapping realms, and Elena and I have worked together a couple dozen times over the years. Mainly I know her personally.

“It’s been a while,” says Elena softly, and I nod, start to say “Yup,” and because I’m a hollow version of the sturdy old bear I think I am, my throat catches on the small flat word, so I just swallow it back and don’t say anything. Because of course I mainly know Elena through Silvie, and in the long declining curve of my marriage, I haven’t seen much of Silvie’s friends. Not lately.

It takes me a second to fight out of that little prison of a moment, and Tester gives me the time I need. She’s a pretty decent soul, Captain Tester, not that she shows it off too often. Short-haired and tight-featured and direct, she’s a tough nut, professional and severe, droll when she wants to be. Like all regular police, she wears an octagonal blue cap with a short brim and a pinhole capture in the center of it to gather up reality. Right now it’s pointed at me as mine is pointed at her, our respective points of view entering simultaneously into the Record.

“You were going to tell me who called it in,” she says.

“It’s not clear,” I say. “Old Vasouvian got it as a tip from one of yours, some overeager officer of the law, and instead of tossing it in the junk heap as was most likely merited, Alvaro sent us out.”

“‘Us’? I thought you folks worked alone. You especially.”

“Oh, I do, Elena. Believe me, I prefer to.”

I tilt my head toward Ms. Paige. “I’m supervising someone. The, uh—” For some reason it’s embarrassing. I jut my big chin toward the trees. “Young lady over there.”

Officer Paige is diligently reinterviewing her way through the crowd of Crane’s coworkers, scribbling furiously in her gilded Day Book.

“Laszlo the teacher. Wise mentor. How’s that playing out?”

“Oh, you know. Fine. Although I did shout at her for no reason.”

“Laz.”

“Not no reason.” I cross my arms. “She was getting ahead of the facts. Unwarranted speculation.” I scratch the heat on the back of my neck. “It wasn’t a big deal, really. I guess I took a bit of a tone.”

You did?” says Tester, wide-eyed. “I’m shocked.”

“Ha ha.”

She is not actually shocked, obviously. It is a joke—not a lie but a distortion of truth for intentionally comedic effect, understood as false on its face by everyone present, not to mention anyone listening in the provisional office right now, or listening later for the Record. You know all this already; you know the rules. You are familiar with the Basic Law. Humor causes no oscillation in the So, any more than any other form of small social falsehood: obvious hyperbole, inoffensive teasing, plain flattery—the whole constellation of innocuous and lubricating half-truths.

“Okay. Well.” Elena shrugs. “Let me know, will you, if there’s anything to it.”

“To what?”

“To this. The—” She points at the lawn. “The matter at hand.”

“Sure.”

“Hey. Are you okay, Laszlo?”

I sigh. “No.”

“Is it Silvie?”

“For the most part.”

“You miss her?”

“Yes. Yes. I do.”

Tester nods. That’s all she’ll get out of me, and she knows it. No deeper forms of truth will reveal themselves, and she knows well enough not to dig. A question is a cup you hold out to be filled, and there are those who will always fill it to the brim, pour in all the truth they can think of, until it overflows and spills out and spreads across the table. That’s not me. Me, I’ll give you what’s precisely true and no more; I’ll answer your question and shut up.

“Captain Tester? What about you?”

“What?”

“What are you doing here?”

She furrows her brow, just for an instant, as if surprised by the question, and I don’t know if it’s my own state—exhausted, hot, irritated at Ms. Paige and irritated at my own irritation—but for whatever reason my attention goes keen around Tester’s momentary pause. Suddenly the clean sunlit air is alive with drifting particles, flickers and flecks. I don’t know what.

“I caught it on the scanner,” Captain Tester is saying. “I live near here, you know? On Talmadge.” I’m watching her face. I don’t know what I look like to her, I don’t know if she can tell what I’m thinking, but she keeps talking. “Sometimes I like to stop by a scene. Sometimes these…” Another half-second pause. “Anyway. As long as I was in the area, I thought I’d babysit the homeowner while the scene officers did their thing. Take something off their plate. You know the figure?”

“Of course.”

“Just procedure,” she says with a final nod, and I’m wondering at her words, wondering at myself for wondering. Is Captain Tester reminding me of the division between our respective domains, between the world of police business and that of speculative affairs? Is she brushing me back? Does she know she’s doing it? The wind teases at the tops of the fat-trunked aspens and the skinny palms that line the yard. The lenses of the captures glint in the greenery.

“Anyway.” Captain Tester smiles, gives me a reassuring pat on the shoulder, colleague to colleague, and heads back to her car.

Officer Paige is over on the far side of the lawn. She has finished with the workmen and she’s watching me. She has been watching the whole time; I can tell from here that she has never lost track of me for a second.

“Hey,” I say. “Paige.” I crook a finger and here she comes, ardent student, springing across the lawn like a deer.

“Yes, sir. What is it?”

I refocus my attention on Tester, who’s climbing into her unmarked car. She raises a hand to me. A captain of the regular police.

“Do we know whose house this is?”