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, take a capture of the relevant page, and hand it to Paige so she can take her own.
“I’ve already got it, sir.”
I look at her and say, “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, it is almost certain 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. Which means that 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, we 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 indeed 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 started work early today, for reasons that no one knows.
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, and Paige can smile all she wants to, but I’m still not seeing any way to arrange these new facts in a shape that contradicts the base, brutal, powerful truth of the morning: He was a roofer and he fell off the roof. Still, I write them all down. Still, I transfer each new piece of 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.
Paige closes her Day Book, and I’m about to say something—maybe challenge her to tell me what she thinks might matter in all that we have found—when 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.
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.”