“Yeah?”
“How are you choosing what to read?”
“I’m reading everything.”
“There’s a lot to read.”
“I read wicked fast. I remember most things, too,” she says before she sticks a Bic pen into her mouth and starts chewing on the end of its blue cap.
“You remember those girls in high school who liked to highlight the entire book?”
“Yeah.”
“They had trouble separating what was important and what was simply interesting. We don’t want to be like them.”
“Can I ask you something?” Melinda says.
“All right.”
“How’d’ya give me the slip back at Target?”
“You haven’t figured it out yet?”
“I’ve been thinking about it. I can’t figure it out.”
“That’s a lot to admit,” Sigrid says.
“Irv knows.”
“I believe it.”
“Look, you win, OK? Just tell me.”
“Think it through in pieces. I went down the hallway. What’s at the end of the hallway?”
“The bathrooms.”
“Say it again.”
“The bathrooms.”
“One more time.”
“The bathrooms.”
“And where did you go?”
“To the bathrooms.”
“No. You didn’t.”
Melinda stops chewing on the pen tap which has become warm and malleable. “I went into the women’s bathroom.”
“Right.”
“But you weren’t in there.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Because you’d gone into the men’s bathroom.”
“That’s right.”
“And when you heard me talking to myself and opening the stalls you just walked right out the front door without a care in the world.”
“That’s right.”
“I’m an idiot.”
“No, you’re not. A woman did that to my partner and me once. Only she didn’t come out at all because he was at the end of the hall, waiting. She just stayed there until we left entirely. Neither one of us even thought to look in the men’s room. What I learned from that failure is how hard it is to see the world in a new way and break our own habits. In this case, it really was a two-person job. Alone, you had to check one bathroom first because there was no other way. Only natural you’d check the women’s. As soon as that happened, I won.”
“I get it,” Melinda says. “I gotta start changing my perspective on some things.”
“And sometimes we need to ask for help. Oh, and that reminds me. This eyewitness of yours. Chuck. He says he saw Marcus and Lydia on the corner of the street by the building. How is it he happened to be there?”
“I don’t know. I mean . . . his story checked out. What he says he saw lines up with the emergency call, so we figured we’re good.”
“Logically you are. Legally you’re not. The two are only vaguely related. You need to find out what he was doing on that corner and why. I’m going to be too busy with other things, but you need to stay on that, OK?”
“Are there a lot of senior women cops in Norway?” Melinda asks.
“Yes.”
“That must be something.”
“I haven’t given it much thought,” Sigrid says.
“I can’t even imagine that,” Melinda muses.
“Melinda,” Sigrid says, returning her to the files, “have you noticed anything that might seem relevant to Marcus and his interest in depression?”
“I’ve found kind of the opposite, actually.”
“You’ve noticed things irrelevant to Marcus?”
“Exactly.”
“Like what?”
“Mostly this is about depression in black women.”
The D Word
Dr. Lydia Jones’s best friend was Gloria Dillane. Irv said she’d been on his to-interview list but he hadn’t swung around to seeing her yet on account of it seeming unimportant compared to Chuck’s eyewitness testimony, the 9-1-1 call, and there being no suspects other than Marcus.
Sigrid, however, wants to go see her immediately after reading Marcus’s queries into depression. Irv is unconvinced. They sit at his desk in the main police room sipping Nescafé from chipped mugs.
“We know Lydia died from a fall,” Sigrid says. “We know Marcus was there, and I believe he felt . . . What’s the word? It’s not ‘responsible.’ It starts with a ‘c.’”
“Complicit.”
“Less than that.”
“Culpable.”
“That’s it.”
“Which comes from the Latin meaning ‘fault’ or ‘blame.’ We keep going back there you’ll notice,” Irv says.
“Only because you picked the word. Yes, something obviously happened up there on the building. He could have pushed her but what I think is that he failed to stop her from jumping. Maybe the experience of losing Jeffrey was instrumental in her death in ways we don’t fully understand. Lydia had deep reasons to be depressed. And maybe she was prone to it, or else on medication. Maybe she was in therapy. All this would matter. Her best friend would know. The reason you thought she was unimportant is because you weren’t thinking like Charles Peirce.”
“You’re a little annoying.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not saying it’s impossible,” Irv says.
“Great. Let’s go.”
“It won’t change anything that I have to deal with.”
“That makes no sense.”
“That’s because you don’t have enough information to make sense of the situation yet. You just got here. I’ve been here the whole time.”
“I’ll wait in the car,” she says.
Irv drives and Melinda rides shotgun, forcing Sigrid into the back seat. Irv says there’s a New York State regulation that prevents civilians from riding in the front, though Sigrid is reasonably certain Irv just made that up. She doesn’t mind, though. It’s a tactic she’s used often with her own staff. The younger ones always think that the senior officers know absolutely everything. But the senior officers know that no one knows absolutely everything because the rules keep changing without notice. What the senior ones do know, however, is what it was like to be young and look up to the seasoned veterans. So they use that particular insight to simply make shit up that the younger ones are likely to believe. And it works every time.
Sigrid taps on the bulletproof glass as they drive to Ms. Dillane’s house. Melinda unlocks it and slides open the glass.
“What’s this for?” Sigrid asks, tapping the glass, feigning ignorance.
“Our protection.”
“From what?” she probes.
“The crazies in the back seat. You don’t have this in Norway?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Same reason we don’t have anything we don’t have: we don’t need it.”
“Why don’t you need it?”
“I suppose because there have been fewer than fifty Norwegian officers killed since 1945. None in a police car as far as I know.”
“Wow.”
Sigrid sits back. “People aren’t walking around with guns all
