“You know him?”
“Not well. I met him during my campaigns. Handshake, quick chat. I don’t think he voted for me.”
“You didn’t talk to him after Jeffrey’s death?”
“I’ve told you. That was a different county. We didn’t do it. I wasn’t going to start making rounds and confusing the matter.”
“You should have gone there. You made a big mistake.”
“All right. Fine. Thank you.”
Melinda has removed the phone from her ear and pressed the red image on the screen. She places her face closer to the vent and breathes in.
“Why would they not want justice for Lydia? Even if Lydia was a suicide—”
“We have no proof of that,” Irv says.
“. . . the black community could reasonably say it was indirectly caused by Roy’s killing of Jeffrey.”
“You can argue anything,” Irv says.
“Not convincingly, you can’t. And I would absolutely find that convincing. Wouldn’t you?”
Irv says nothing.
“I think any decent person would see that, whatever the law says. It would make sense for the black community to keep pressing for justice because she was, in effect, another victim of Roy Carman and everything that created him.”
Melinda makes a small cough. Both Irv and Sigrid look at her.
“I don’t mean to . . . well . . . I don’t see why this is a black thing,” says Melinda. “I mean . . . if cops killed a white kid everyone would be going nuts. If that white kid’s aunt ended up dead on a street corner it would be headline news. So why if they shoot a black kid, is it only the black people who are going nuts? I get why it’s a black thing also, but not why it’s a black thing only.”
“She’s right,” Sigrid says. “That’s a good question.”
“OK, look, people: This is not American Culture 101. You”—he points to Melinda with a rigid finger—“are in the doghouse for providing a leading question to an interviewee. It’s like Tourette’s with you. And you,” he says to Sigrid as he starts the car. “You are not Alexis de fucking Tocqueville here to study America’s prison and justice system. I’m not blithely accepting this suicide theory you’re pushing in the hopes that I won’t notice and it’ll soak into my brain. We still have every reason to suspect Marcus aside from the fact that he seems so gosh-darn nice. Well . . . nice people do bad things. This should not be news for grownups,” he says. His phone buzzes again and he looks down to see the name of the caller on the screen. “Goddamn journalist parasites.”
“My copy of Democracy in America was stolen.”
“Are you being a smart-ass?”
“My father gave me a copy. I didn’t realize that’s what the book was about.”
“There’s no safe place to stand around here,” Irv says to himself.
“Here’s what I’m thinking,” says Sigrid. “Lydia Jones had a nephew who was gunned down by a police officer and denied justice from his country. Lydia was broken. Marcus tried to help her and couldn’t, for which he blames himself. She killed herself using an open window. Ashamed and hurt, he runs away to the woods.”
“Good story. All neat and tied up. Here’s the thing, though. It’s complete speculation,” says Irv.
Irv flicks the car into gear and rolls them out of Gloria’s neighborhood as if pushed by a tailwind. Ten wordless minutes later he turns off at Exit 12 onto a road with franchise restaurants, chain stores, pawn shops, and stores that promise—in neon—to give advances on paychecks.
They turn right onto Allard Road, where they pass wooden houses in various states of disrepair. The lawns are weathered here, and chainlink fences separate properties, not ferns and flowers. It is mid-afternoon and two Latino men sit on lawn chairs studying the police car for intention as it glides down the wide street. No child waves as Irv squints at the mailboxes for the numbers.
Irv flicks the transmission into park behind a baby blue Delta 88 and sits for a moment, the air blowing, before turning off the engine. The house is painted brown with beige trimming on the windows. There is a faded plastic swing hanging at a slant from frayed yellow ropes in the front yard.
Irv rotates his body to speak with Sigrid and smacks his elbow against the bulletproof glass he forgot was there. He winces, draws breath, and tries again.
“Let’s get clear on the play before we take to the field, shall we? Number one: We’re going to take a ‘do no harm’ approach on this one. No theories. No wild speculations. No leading questions,” he says directly to Melinda, “and no efforts to outsmart them and make them say things that will help get Marcus off the hook. We’re here to get a lay of the land and understand why things aren’t adding up. Maybe we learn it. Maybe we don’t. But we tread softly. Gently. Gingerly. You know that word?” he asks Sigrid.
“No.”
“It means softly and gently.”
Sigrid does not interrupt.
“And so we’re all clear on my thinking at the moment: I am not convinced that a scholar on race relations or whatever she was would hurl herself out a window after the race-related death of a loved one rather than go fight City Hall. Anyone who knows anything about the history of civil rights in this country knows that people have endured living hell to get where we are today. It does not compute that a woman who has spent her career reading about abuse and self-sacrifice would toss herself out of a window when faced with more of the same. The only hint that she might have been clinical is your brother’s files. Meanwhile, he had zero credentials in psychology, and the fact that he downloaded a bunch of stuff from the internet could mean nothing more than he was trying to eff the ineffable. Or, you know, he planted it there deliberately and after the fact to cover his tracks. We’d have to check the . . . metadata or whatever the hell they do on television.”
“Irving,” Sigrid says.
He raises his hand to prevent her protest. “I don’t
