A white waitress without an expression appears with two pitchers of coffee that hug her hips like misbegotten twins—one caffeinated, the other not. Irv raises a finger to the brown one and the woman pours its soul into a cup trimmed with a single red stripe. Sigrid says nothing and the woman pours for her on the assumption that anyone here would need coffee.
Irv removes two maroon vinyl tomes from their pinned position between the ketchup and napkin dispenser and hands one to Sigrid.
“What’s this?” she asks.
“The menu.”
Sigrid opens it. It contains a thousand options ranging from T-bone steak to blueberry pancakes.
“They have all this?”
“Yes,” says Irv.
“At one in the morning?”
“Yes,” says Irv.
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
Irv orders a toasted corn muffin and a glass of apple juice. Sigrid reads about a bagel with “lox.”
“What’s that?”
“Smoked salmon. I think it’s Yiddish. Now it’s American.”
“Laks, L-A-K-S, is the Norwegian word for salmon.”
“Aren’t Yiddish and Norwegian both basically German?”
“No.”
“OK.”
Sigrid orders it and settles into her booth. Irv removes a map from his black canvas bag and spreads it out over the table. It displays the northern region of the Adirondacks.
“How were you going to find him?” Irv asks her.
“How were you going to find him?” Sigrid asks.
“Manpower. Wanted posters, a hundred cops, interviews, show his face around, circle him, surround him at night. Throw in some dogs. We have sweaters from his house. No one ever washes sweaters. Those armpits are like ambrosia to the bloodhounds. But you don’t have manpower or dogs. You’re alone. How was that going to work?”
“Differently.”
“Why don’t you trust me?” Irv asks her. He shifts his weight into the corner by the window and lifts his right leg onto the bench.
“Tell me about Jeffrey Simmons,” Sigrid says.
“Melinda said you were curious about that. How’s that connected to your brother?”
“Through Lydia Jones,” Sigrid says.
“OK, but not directly. Jeffrey was shot. It was tragic. Months later, Lydia falls to her death and your brother was right there. And Chuck. And the phone call. I’m not seeing a connection between Jeffrey’s tragedy and Lydia’s.”
“Are you sure?” Sigrid asks.
“I’m sure that I have no reason to think there is.”
“Which isn’t the same thing.”
“True. But I have no reason to suspect that Lydia Jones’s death is connected to the missing Lindberg baby either, though I accept that the world has invisible levers and the universe is a vast and complex thing. Why are we talking about this?”
“Whether or not Lydia’s death is connected to Jeffrey’s might be a secondary issue to whether Jeffrey’s death is connected to Marcus’s circumstances.”
“You’ve entirely lost me.”
“What worries me, Irving, is trigger-happy cops shooting people for no reason. That’s the . . .”—Sigrid pauses for a term—“the thing they have in common that connects them.”
“The common denominator between Jeffrey and Marcus?”
“Right. You can see why that might interest me in a manhunt for my brother who is suspected of murder.”
“That isn’t a concern in this case.”
“Is it because my brother is white?”
“That’s unfair.”
“To whom?”
“Been here for two days and you have America all figured out, huh? That’s very European of you, you know that? You aren’t the first tourist who’s passed through here pissing on the trees.”
“I’ve read about the Jeffrey Simmons case,” Sigrid says. “Roy Carman is a racist murderer with a badge. Which happens. What’s inexplicable is why the grand jury didn’t even consider the case worthy of going to court, let alone did a court find him guilty and get him off the street.”
Irv lifts a butter knife and spins it across the thick of his palm the way Sigrid had seen schoolmates do with pens back home. As he performs the trick he stares at Sigrid.
“Jeffrey Simmons may have been young,” Irv says quietly, “but he was five foot eight inches tall. That’s about your height. He was wearing a black hooded sweatshirt with the name of a rap gang on it, and he was wearing dark glasses. It would have been impossible for anyone to know what age he was without standing right in front of him or talking to him. He was holding a toy gun, yes. But it was not a pink water pistol. It was a realistic-looking object. Roy Carman, something of a hothead, responded to a call from a neighbor saying she saw a black man in a hood carrying—and I’m quoting here—‘what looks like a gun,’ unquote. Seeing two children running from this mystery figure when he arrived, Roy threw himself into harm’s way, burst from the car, and told the perp to drop the weapon. Jeffrey did not drop the weapon, and Roy engaged him with his service pistol. The result was tragic. No question. But it is not obvious where he made an error in action or judgment. It was just bad luck.”
“Jeffrey was pretending to be a character from a storybook. His luck would have been different if he’d been white.”
“Maybe,” he concedes. “But unfortunately Jeffrey was the exact profile of what we arrest around here at a disproportionately high rate: African American males between seventeen and twenty-five wearing either gang or rap-related clothing.”
“There’s a difference between the general and the particular,” she says.
“Yes, there is. But the space between them is a universe of problems.”
“Let me tell you what I see when I look at this situation, Sheriff,” says Sigrid. “I see a little boy playing with his friends on his own front lawn when an armed police officer bursts out of a squad car only meters away and inside of two seconds—that is an actual measure taken from the video camera—murdered that child in front of his mother, who was watching him play from the kitchen window. What I’m telling you—as a police professional and as someone who has commanded armed assaults—is that Jeffrey was dead the moment Roy hit the accelerator in his car rather than the brake at thirty meters away. Because the only reason to drive that close to someone suspicious is to make sure you don’t miss when you shoot them.
