“Sir?”
It’s her 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 what feels, indeed, like the first time in a good long time.
“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 speak to.”
“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 the 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 purpose.
“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 it—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 we are constructing together. 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 accuse him and he’ll have confirmed his own worst fear.
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. And this man Renner is nervous because he’s afraid we’ll think that he’s lying, not because he is. He looks away from me while he’s talking, finds the more sympathetic eyes of Officer Paige.
She’s dying to be like
