“What did you do?” I say to Judge Sampson, who is convulsing, his whole body shaking, his features swiftly going pale. I know what he did. I get down on the ground beside him and try to arrange him so that he’s sitting up, so he can’t choke on his vomit, but he’s dying before I can do anything. A second wash of blood and gore comes channeling up from his guts and rushes from his mouth.
Paige, somewhere in the corner of my vision, has thrown open the door of the chambers and is shouting to the bailiff posted outside.
“Call the regular police,” she tells him, and he shouts, “What did you do? What have you done?”
“Just call them!”
He is craning his neck to see past her, trying to see in, seeing me and the ruined body of the judge, the two of us like drunk lovers on the ground. “Your honor?” the bailiff says.
I’m covered in Judge Sampson’s blood, my tie dangling over his spit-stained chin and cheeks.
“Call them!” shouts Paige.
The rest is a fog of red, of shapes rushing within it. A swell of noise from outside on Grand Avenue, a clatter of footfalls and shouts.
Me and Paige are outside chambers, instructed to wait by a regular policeman with his sleeves rolled up. We are seated on a hard-backed bench, side by side.
In my mind, the judge vomits blood and pinwheels down toward the carpet, and then again, and again. Reality cued and re-cued.
He is dying and he is in the kitchen at a party in Silver Lake, leaning in the doorframe after I have gone, and he’s sharing a joke with my wife. Ex-wife.
The courtroom has been emptied of litigants and lawyers, and they bustle about in the hallway, curious, reluctant to leave such excitement.
Ms. Paige has her Day Book out and she’s organizing her thoughts, trying to piece together what we have learned. I am slumped, hollow, staring straight ahead. There is a pane of frosted glass inset in the dead center of the chamber door, and I stare at the glass, finding abstracted patterns.
This is what the world is, I’m thinking as the busy incident aftermath rushes around me, police and ambulance personnel, archivists, and documentarians. One explosion after another, the Earth opening up again and again, sending out gouts of loose dirt, covering us up.
I am exhausted, but Aysa does not stop. She can’t. Aysa has her Day Book out and she has the judge’s blood-splattered Night Book out too, between us on the bench. Aysa has already apologized for letting herself be distracted by the verdict on Ms. Wells; apologized and then moved swiftly on. Aysa focuses on the work. Aysa carries on, puzzling through her notes undeterred and undeterrable.
This is even though she, like me, is speckled with blood, dark droplets crusting on her forehead and on her neck. Even though we sit but feet from where his body still lies, awaiting the attentions of the regular police, of the medical examiner, the record officers who are angling around with their captures and their mics, forging this remarkable event into history. The coroners who will, when it’s all over, bear him away.
Regular police keep arriving at the scene, and there are now multiple capture teams on-site. We are being filmed even now, in our extremity, both of us smeared in gore.
We’ve already been interviewed, of course, and we’ll be interviewed again.
We are pursuing an anomalous death.
The judge may or may not have had relevant information…
We may never know…
“Okay, so,” says Aysa, flipping through her notes, forward and back, forward and back. “Here is what I don’t get. So the man is married. Okay. So he’s—he’s unfaithful.” She glances at me, a fleeting embarrassed wince. “He has affairs. Multiple affairs. Okay. So—but—”
I finish the thought, my voice empty and toneless. “But so what? Right? So what?”
“Right!” She nods slowly, twice. “Exactly.” A new cluster of cops swoop by, officious, belts jangling with their radios, a couple of boom ops close behind them.
“So what was the big risk here?” says Aysa. “That maybe he would, what? Lose his job, right?”
I shrug. “Perhaps.”
“Maybe she would lose her job? Tester, I mean.”
I shrug again.
“But still, to—” She shakes her head. “To drink poison. Okay, the Specs are here, we’re asking questions. Bad luck, yes. A guy dies on his roof, we start rooting around, find out he’s a bad husband. But it’s kind of—”
“An overreaction.”
“Yes.” She snaps her fingers. “Exactly. It’s just… small.”
“Yeah. Also…” I press my knuckles into my eyes. Trying to wake up. “Also, the man had poison to hand.”
“Right!” says Aysa. “Right! So why? Why? Why is he that worried about his affair with Tester being discovered? Unless that’s not what he was worried about. Maybe that’s what Tester was worried about. Maybe Sampson was worried about something else.”
“Huh,” I say, and I feel her waiting for me to say more, but I don’t.
She is dying for it. She wants the two of us to sit here on this cold bench, shoulder to shoulder, and close our eyes and be borne away by speculation. She wants us to sit here in the illuminating darkness and churn through the maybe so’s, fill the courtroom air with possibilities, test each for soundness, jump off from this platform to the next one.
But I’m in no mood for
