Golden State

by Ben H. Winters

  I shouldn’t have to explain to Arlo why this won’t work. Whatever skill at this job I have amassed after doing it for nineteen years and counting, I am skeptical of my own ability to implant them elsewhere. And certainly Arlo in his semiretirement has no power to make me do it either, and neither does Mr. Alvaro, not really. That’s just not how the Service is organized.

  Arlo is my colleague but he’s also my friend, and I have known him for many years—he knew my brother. He knew my father. Which means that in a way he is like a brother to me, and he is like a father too, and what he is doing right now, with a charming shamelessness, is employing all of those associations to bend me to his will.

  “There is no one like you, Laszlo,” he says, imperturbable, flattering, shameless. “You know that. The Service needs you. Your State needs you. I need you.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you’re the best.”

  “That’s subjective.”

  “Stipulated. But listen.” He leans in closer. He lowers his voice. “This young lady is very special, Laszlo. I would like to see her mentored carefully. I need your help.”

  I look over at Paige. She waits at full attention, her hands behind her back, her mouth a tight line, adopting what she must believe to be the expected stance of the law enforcement officer. But we’re not law enforcement officers, not exactly. Soon she will gather up the regular rhythm of the Speculative Service. The idiosyncrasy, the casual atmosphere. We don’t stand in line, we don’t salute, we do our own thing.

  She’ll learn it all.

  “Okay, look,” I say, and Arlo catches the answer in my voice and leans back, clasps his hands together in a restrained triumphant gesture. “When we catch a case, Ms. Paige, you can go ahead and ride along beside me. Okay? And you can…I guess you’ll just pay attention and everything, but try not to get in the way. Okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is that what you’re after, Mr. Vasouvian?”

  “I want you to do whatever you feel comfortable with, Laszlo.”

  Paige begins, “And can I just say, sir—” I hold up a hand.

  “You don’t have to call me ‘sir,’ okay?”

  “Okay, sir. If you don’t mind, though, I would like to. It’s a sign of respect, sir. You’ve earned it.”

  “Stipulated,” I say. “But I’m just as happy for you to call me Mr. Ratesic.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Hey Laz,” Alvaro hollers from the board. “Got something for you. Maybe a good one to break in the new kid. If you’re taking her on. Are you taking her on or not?”

  I look at Paige. I hiss through my teeth, “Yeah,” and I extend my hand and Alvaro puts the piece of paper in it. “I’m taking her.”

  Arlo slides off my desk, pats me gently on the shoulder, satisfied, as well he should be, having gotten exactly what he wanted.

  We head up Vermont Avenue from downtown toward the scene, a simple scene of death on a lawn in Los Feliz.

  It’s not clear from the report, but what it sounds like is that there is no specific anomaly, just the regular police requesting the presence of the Service, just to be certain. You get that a lot. When there’s a body, they want to be double sure all the facts are in good clean alignment.

  I could take the 5, of course, a nice straight northbound shot, if I wanted to, and it might have bought us five minutes, but the stress of the highway isn’t worth it right now, not when I can give myself the pleasure of the surface streets, the pleasure of looking out the windshield at the various and beautiful Golden State rolling by. You get the streets and sidewalks of downtown, all the usual crowded midmorning bustle, the stop and start at the downtown intersections when you’re moving north and west around the administrative buildings and State services buildings that fan out from the Plaza. And then you escape the hive, pass under the highway and into the borderland, where you see the acres of industry, the factories and warehouses with their solar panel roofs winking back at the sun. And then, just north of that, the miles of farmland, lettuce and avocados, olives and all the rest of it, and then, just like that, you’re whipped back into the neighborhoods, the hip urban districts that line Vermont Avenue like a series of colorful beads: Echo Park, Los Feliz, Silver Lake.

  There’s a place in Echo Park, actually, a quarter mile off Vermont, that sells some very solid crullers, some of the best in the State, but there’s no time for a cruller just now, not with a scene of death waiting for us uptown.

  “Sir? Mr. Ratesic?”

  “Yeah?”

  Ms. Paige is looking at me avidly from the shotgun seat, but I am definitely not looking at her; I’m looking at the road. But I can feel her emotions in the shotgun seat, feel her anxiety and excitement, young Paige’s first-day jitters a living thing in the car with us.

  “So should I just, like, jump right in?”

  I scowl. “Jump right into what?”

  “What?”

  I feel her deflate. I feel it emanating from the shotgun seat, the crestfallen silence of someone who had a whole speech ready to roll out.

  “Jump into my—oh, I mean—just, like, my life story. When I first knew that I had the sense and everything. How I decided to go into the Service. The whole…I just meant…I don’t know. Sorry.”

  She wants to tell me about when she was nineteen years old, or fourteen, or twenty-two, whenever it was that she first saw something in the air, first realized what it was that she was feeling. She wants to tell me how she ignored it at first, because acknowledging and indulging this dangerous feeling would mean abandoning her desire to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an architect, or whatever, but how she eventually realized that she had a calling, a responsibility, that she could cultivate this new facility, this instinct, bring it up and bring it out, because then she could serve the State and it would be selfish not to, and it was, after all, the least she could do…

  And then I would tell her my own version of the story, so similar, I’m sure, to hers, with the only additional complication being my father, and then my brother, Charlie, him having done it all first, sensed it first and followed it first, his brilliance like a sun casting a shadow over my own career.

  My mood, which has already been spoiled by the encounter at Terry’s, by the unexpected burden of taking on a junior, is further clouded by this unexpected memory of Charlie, both welcome and unwelcome, a sudden flood of feeling: Charlie and what happened to Charlie. I can feel the smile slide off my face. Just then we pass the House of Pies, another favorite diner of mine, on the northern edge of Los Feliz; I am tempted to pull over, tell Ms. Paige to wait in the car, and get myself a piece of blueberry pie or something to take the edge off the day.

  But I don’t. I keep going. We’re almost there.

  “Listen, Paige.” I glance at her. “It’s Paige, right?”

  “Yes, sir. Aysa Violet Paige.”

  “I don’t want to hear your story. I don’t need it. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t need yours, and you don’t need mine.”

  “Oh. Right. I mean—sure.”

  Paige fidgets self-consciously in the shotgun seat, casting occasional nervous glances my way, otherwise staring out the window.

  This girl is my opposite, and I darkly wonder if Arlo put her in my car purely for the physical comedy. She is short, neat, black, and fully earnest in her countenance. And here I am, this too-big creature, my pale face and my black pinhole, my thick fingers gripping the steering wheel, thick red beard like a bristling animal over the wool of the suit, and my irritation with the world—which is really an irritation with myself—like armor, a chain mail layer rattling across my broad chest. And I don’t know what it is, I can’t tell you, but this kid’s face, everything in her face is different from everything I feel: she’s excited, almost agitated with her own excitement, as if all the great days of her life still ahead of her are jostling inside, creating a field of energy. And she believes that I am someone worth looking up to, som
eone worth learning from. And if you want to hear something true—big true, deep true—that does not feel terrible. It doesn’t feel terrible at all.

  “What matters is what happens now. In the field. What matters is how you marshal the abilities you’ve been granted, and how you harness them to real investigative skill. Okay?”

  “Okay. Yeah.”

  I drive a minute more. Dope shops and banks, coffee shops and dry cleaners.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Don’t be sorry.”

  “I just—”

  “I mean it, Paige. All of this?” I point at me, and then at her, meaning all of the interpersonal, all of the getting to know each other, all of the teamwork, the senior-junior BS, all of it. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is what happens in the world. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I think that might be it for conversation—I hope it is—but no.

  “So can you maybe tell me how it works?”

  “How what works?”

  “Oh, I just mean…where we’re going. Our interaction with the regular police, the different protocols. I mean, I know how it works, obviously. I’ve done plenty of simulations, and I’ve done all the reading and training and stuff. I just mean…in real life. In the field. Is there anything you think I maybe don’t know?”

  “I am sure, Ms. Paige, there are many things you don’t know.”

  And then I just keep driving; I just leave that flat piece of truth unadorned, add no further context. I’m being a prig, I am aware of that, I am being a special kind of asshole. Indulging in rigorous literalism, answering questions to the letter, ignoring the spirit in which they were asked is a nasty and childish trick. But I can’t help it—I’m already regretting agreeing to this. I should have held firm with Arlo, told him to pin this particular ribbon on someone else’s chest. I value my time alone. I like driving by myself; I like working by myself. I like knowing that if I’m on the way to a scene of crime, and I feel like taking forty-five seconds to run into House of Pies and pick up a slice of blueberry I can then eat in the car, I can do that without anyone judging me or asking questions.

  Too late. We drive on. We’re almost there.

  3.

  I slouch across the lawn, bent forward, moving slow but with big intent, the heavy man’s hurry, with Ms. Paige trotting along at my heels. I see the body and I move right to it, ignoring the crowds, ignoring the regular police, the capture crews, the gawkers—the shifting crowd that appears in the wake of a death, like insects coming up out of the ground after rain.

  I push through the crowd, sighing. Growling, maybe. I’m making some kind of noise and all the regular cops and microphone operators and AV knuckleheads step back, wary. There’s sweat gathering at the back of my collar, sweat beading under my beard. The early-day cool has burned away and it’s hot as a mother out here—I’m roasting in my blacks. I’ve never minded the discomfort of the uniform, to be honest with you, full true; I always feel like the discomfort is part of the job. The discomfort is the job. It marks you out, sets you apart. You get to a scene and you’re already scowling, and everybody knows you’re there on business. Everybody is watching the boundaries.

  “Sir?” says Ms. Paige, and I raise one hand—Gimme a second.

  This is nothing. This is an empty dumb nothing.

  The dead man was a roofer, and he died falling off a roof. Those are the facts, and they’re clear from the get-go, clear and plain. As Arlo would say, it’s true as daylight, true as doors on houses. The mansion is one of these expansive but unassuming old places, with the poured concrete and the Spanish tile, with the wide white patio and the rambling lawn. A modest two stories but turreted with balconies and pilasters and stone-carved cherubs peeking out from the corners of the porch. I shield my eyes and look up to the spot on the red tile roof, where the man scrambled before he fell, and I note the patch of loose and broken tiles. A single piece of fractured gutter juts out like a broken bone.

  I turn from the house to the body of the man, and all the angles are adding up. He fell from the high pitch of the roof, scrabbled in vain to catch himself on the downspout, and died when he hit the ground. I get out my Day Book, pin down this first set of flat facts in black ink, pressing hard so the carbons catch it.

  “Sir?”

  “Let’s just do this, Ms. Paige,” I say. “Let’s get out of here.”

  The man’s body lies facing the sun, half on and half off the patio, eyes staring up at the golden blue of the morning. “A roofer,” I write, “with wiry black hair and a wiry black mustache on a deeply tanned face. On the breast pocket of his green work shirt there’s a logo of a hand holding a hammer. Here are his limbs, all four splayed out against the manicured lawn in ugly incongruous angles; here was a slick of blood expanded out from underneath him, slowly seeping into the manicured lawn, spreading dark red onto the bone-white patio stone. Here was the wild mosaic of broken roof tiles surrounding him—the armload he’d been holding when he tumbled, the explosive shatter pattern around him testament to the force of the fall. Here was the trowel, flung out on the lawn, a crust of dried caulk along its lip.”

  I get it all down, organizing the flats in neat columns on the pages of my Day Book, and then—I don’t know why exactly, but I do—I stay in my investigative crouch, a bear down low to the ground, paws planted to keep myself from toppling, roving my careful eyes over the man’s dead face. His skull has split and spilled but the weathered face is intact, unharmed. The eyes above the black mustache are open wide, very wide, and he’s got this expression—and this is a subjective determination, this is hard to measure on the scale of what is and what is not so—but he looks terrified.

  “Mr. Ratesic?” Paige is trying again, eager to learn, her own Day Book out and open. “What are you seeing?”

  “Nothing,” I say, and stand up, heaving my body straight. “Not a thing.” I take one more look up at the house, shake my head. “You wanna tell me what we’re doing here?”

  “What?”

  “What was the impetus for the presence of the Service? Why were we called?”

  “Oh. Um—should we ask?”

  She gestures to the knot of regular police who are hanging around close to the house, pretending to do things, stealing glances at the two of us over here by the body. So, too, are the dead man’s coworkers, all in the same green shirts he’s wearing, all milling uncertainly in the shadow of the house, murmuring together, looking warily at their fallen comrade.

  And then there’s a team from the Record, circling Paige and me, capturing reality as it unfolds. The capture operator and his backup. The microphone operator, hovering at the prescribed distance, professional headphones bulky over her ears. The archivist and the archivist’s assistant.

  “No,” I tell Paige. “I don’t want to ask them. I’m asking you. You looked at the call report, right? From Alvaro?”

  “Yes. It just said they called it in. It said the Service was requested to discover the full and final truth. He said they said—”

  “Who said?”

  “The regular police.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They said there was something anomalous in it.”

  “Anomalous?”

  “Yes, that’s—” She takes a step back from me. I’ve got my hands jammed in my pockets. I am scowling, bent forward. “That’s what they said.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “What?”

  “What does that word mean?”

  “Meaning…you mean what does ‘anomalous’ mean?”

  “Yes, Ms. Paige. Shared understanding is a bulwark. Clear and agreed upon definitions of common terms are defenses against infelicity. Words mean what they mean. So, what is the meaning of the word ‘anomalous’?”

  My tone is not pleasant, I recognize that. If Arlo wants me to train this girl, well, then I’m going to train her. It is miserably hot out here—deadly hot. The sun is carving a rash into the skin above my collar.
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  “‘Anomalous’ means”—Paige takes a breath and stands erect, spits it out, word for word from the Basic Law—“a mismatch of facts possibly indicative of the presence of a falsehood or falsehoods obscuring the full and final truth of a given situation. Sir.”

  “Okay.” I nod, maybe a little disappointed to be deprived of the opportunity to further chastise. “Good.” Paige’s nervous face shows a quick shimmering smile.

  “So what do you think? Where’s the anomaly?”

  “I—” She looks at me, uncertain. Then she looks back up at the house, back at the guy. “I don’t see it. I think he fell off the roof.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Me too.”

  “So maybe if we just—” She angles her head over to the crowd of officers again. “Maybe we ask?”

  “Nope.”

  “But—”

  “If we can’t spot it ourselves, we don’t keep digging. They put the body in the ambulance and they drive him away. The regular police do their thing, and our part is over. We get back in our car.”

  “But—wait.”

  I’ve started walking away, and Ms. Paige puts a hand on my shoulder, and then shrinks back when I stop and turn to glare at her. A pause. A mourning dove makes its low coo from somewhere in the high trees. Along the lawn are the embedded captures, forever adding to the documented bulk of reality.

  “Why would they call it in if there isn’t anything?”

  “For the free show.” I gesture over at them, the workaday police in their blue hats and khaki pants, proving my point, the whole herd of them staring back at us gape-mouthed. “Because being an ordinary precinct policeman is boring, Ms. Paige, and rubbing up against the great and mysterious Speculative Service is not. So they call us and they don’t lie, careful not to lie, but they say, ‘Oh, well, we wonder if there is something weird going on here, we just really want you guys to put eyes on it,’ but really it’s them wanting to put eyes on us. There’s not much we can do about it, it’s the way of the world, but we don’t have to indulge it by turning every tragic accident into the lie of the century.”