Land of the Blind

by Jess Walter

  “Did three and some at Walla Walla for that shit. ’Course I remember.”

  “In the arrest report, you said that you found five hundred grams of cocaine outside your apartment.”

  He shrugs and tries to smile. “Yeah. That’s a good one to try in court, huh? Fuck I was thinking? I found it! Stupid-ass motherfucker.”

  “So did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Find a half-kilo of cocaine outside your apartment?”

  He stares at her and his eyes narrow, as if he’s trying to figure her angle. “What the fuck is this—”

  “Look, I’m just asking a question.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You don’t want to tell me what happened in ’98?”

  “You’re fuckin’ with me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You won’t believe me.”

  “I might.”

  “Okay. You want to know?” He chews his bottom lip. “I’d been out two months, but I was straight. The one good thing about state time is you can get off the shit, you know? You probably don’t believe me, but I was pissin’ clean those two months.”

  He looks down at a crudely drawn tattoo on his arm, as if it would finish the story for him. “Had a car, a little apartment downtown, a job washing dishes. Most times that shit don’t work for me—goin’ straight. It’s boring. But Walla Walla changed everything. I hated that place so much, I’d have washed every fuckin’ dish in the world to stay out.

  “Then one afternoon, I come out of my apartment to go to work, and there’s a car parked next to mine. Brand-new fuckin’ Mercedes-Benz. Beautiful car. Charcoal-colored ragtop. I mean…we didn’t get us a lot of Benzes parked outside my building. Nobody’s around and the top and windows are down. No other cars in the alley. So I looked in. I mean, how could I not? Be like some chick sitting topless on your sidewalk, you know? You gotta look. Don’t mean nothing. Just means you looked.”

  He wipes his brow at the memory.

  “It was sitting right there in the driver’s seat. Half a brick. I never had that much weight myself—not in coke—but I seen guys cut from packages like that. Shit. I don’t know if the guy was coming back for it, if it just fell out, if it was a drop. I don’t know shit except it’s sitting there on the driver’s seat, like everything I ever wanted in my life, like someone left it just for me. Like God or something just woke up that day said, ‘You know what, Pete, ol’ buddy, even assholes deserve a break sometimes.’

  “I don’t even remember grabbing it. Next thing I know, I’m driving away, checking my rearview mirror, that thing in my lap.” He cradles his hands as if holding a baby. He smiles. “I made sure no one was behind me and then I cut a seam and did a line while I was waiting for a red light. Oh! Pure as a hug from your mama. Shit was amazing.” He laughs and his eyes roll back. “Best four minutes of my life.”

  “Four minutes?”

  “That’s about how long I drove before the cops swarmed me. Uniforms. Four rollers. I figured they was watchin’ the Benz, but when I told ’em I found it in that car, they just laughed at me.” He shakes his head. “They got a big kick out of that. ‘He found it! Motherfucker found it!’

  “I said, ‘You mean you guys wasn’t watchin’ that Benz back there?’ They just laughed at me. ‘What Benz?’ they said. I swore so much that’s what happened, they drove me back down the alley to check it out. But the car was gone.

  “In court, the cops said that some dude had called in, said he saw a guy in a gold Nova driving north on Division with a big bag of coke in his lap. Bang, strike three, judge gives me a fuckin’ nickel. You know, I’ve had bad luck, but to have some fucker call in when I’m doing a line in my own car? That shit’s unfair.”

  Pete shrugs, as if he’s bored with his own story. “Yeah, yeah, so poor me, huh? What’s this got to do with Eli Boyle?”

  Caroline looks down at the Department of Motor Vehicles report for Eli Boyle that she just printed out. She slides it across the table.

  Pete picks it up and reads it, his lips moving as he does.

  She watches Pete’s face as he reads that Eli Boyle has registered only one car in the last four years, a gunmetal gray 1998 Mercedes-Benz SL500 convertible. Pete looks up from the paper, his face blank, as if he can’t comprehend this, as if he’s never imagined that such patterns could be at play in his life, that he could be subject to such elaborate forces, the shadows, the world beneath this one.

  Maybe that’s what’s going through his head, Caroline thinks, or maybe that’s just me. Because all Pete says is, “Motherfucker.”

  “He hired an investigator to find you,” Caroline says. “I guess he knew what time you went to work and he parked there, figuring you wouldn’t be able to resist.”

  Pete shakes his head and reads the DMV report again. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “I don’t…I don’t know,” he says quietly. She watches the disbelief on his face become something else, sadness over those lost three years, maybe, or the wonder over whether he could’ve stayed clean. Then his face changes again, and this new emotion is unmistakable—cheeks reddening, eyes narrowing, lips closing in.

  Caroline stands and motions to the guard. She takes the report from Pete. “Listen, I’ll put in a word with the prosecutor,” she says. “Tell him you helped me. Maybe they’ll give you a break.”

  The guard comes in, but Pete is staring off, miles away.

  “Oh, and if you’re thinking about paying Eli a visit when you get out,” Caroline says, “you’re about three days too late.”

  4 | SHE’S LOST CLARK

  She’s lost Clark. Of all the terrible things that could happen now—and there are others—this is the most terrible; Caroline has no idea what to do next. She stands in the doorway of Interview Two and stares, unbelieving, at the empty chair. No legal pads. No pen. No coffee cup. It’s as if he were never here. Now that she could finally sit across from Clark and say, Look, I know what happened, there is no Clark to sit across from.

  She’d come back to drop the whole thing in his lap that way—Eli Boyle and Pete Decker and Louis Carver, all of it—to tell him that his time was up and his confession was over. Oh, it’s over all right. She steps out into the hallway to look for the uniform that Kaye was supposed to post on the door, but there’s no one. Fucking Kaye. She begins moving toward the front desk.

  “Caroline!”

  She turns. Spivey is at the other end of the hall, coming out of the bathroom, wearing jeans and a Mariners sweatshirt, with his cop haircut and that ridiculous caterpillar of a mustache on his thin upper lip. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “There was a guy in Interview Two—”

  “Mason?”

  “Yeah,” Caroline says. “You know where he is?”

  “I cut him loose.”

  “What?” She begins stalking toward Spivey. “When?”

  “I don’t know. Fifteen minutes ago. After I finished questioning him.”

  “You questioned him?”

  Spivey laughs bitterly. “Yeah, that’s what we do with witnesses. Remember? We don’t throw them in a room and disappear for two days. You want to tell me—”

  “You didn’t charge him?”

  “Who?”

  “Mason.”

  “Charge him with what? Being a fucking nut job?”

  “What about the body? Boyle?”

  “What are you talking about, Caroline? The suicide you found?”

  “Suicide? There was no gun.”

  “Sure there was. We found it in the lawn, right where Mason said he threw it. Said he freaked out, grabbed the gun, opened the door, and threw it across the lawn. Kept saying he was responsible. But don’t worry. I took care of him. Put the fear of God into him, told him we could charge him with evidence tampering if he didn’t put down his pen and cooperate.”

  She falls back against the wall. “Suicide
?”

  “Yeah, the vic had powder residue all over his fingers. His prints were all over the gun. From the angle, the ME said it had to be self-inflicted. Straight up through his noggin.” Spivey puts his forefinger against his cheek, elbow tight against his side, to demonstrate. “We tested Mason’s fingers just to be sure. No powder residue. Besides, he’s got an alibi. Boyle’s neighbors heard a gunshot at four P.M. Friday. Your boyfriend was on an airplane at four. It’s all here.” He waves a single sheet of paper.

  Caroline grabs it and reads. Spivey has typed it up. Clark has signed it.

  Statement of Clark A. Mason:

  I certify that the following statement is truthful and complete. I arrived at Spokane International Airport at approximately 4:10 P.M. on February 10, 2002, after a personal trip to San Jose, California. Worried about the emotional state of my friend Eli Boyle, I proceeded immediately to his residence on Cliff Drive, whereupon I found Boyle dead, having shot himself in the head with a .38-caliber handgun. Running to the body, I picked up the gun, went outside, and threw it across the lawn. I was nervous and emotionally agitated and I left the scene without notifying authorities. Later, I was approached by Spokane police officers at the Davenport Hotel, and I agreed to tell them what happened.

  Clark A. Mason

  The statement falls to her side. It’s not right.

  “So what the hell got into you?” Spivey is not finished lecturing. “Letting that poor wack job sit in here sweating all weekend, convincing himself he’s a murderer?”

  Caroline ignores him. “The thing he was writing. His statement. Did you read it?”

  “Oh, I looked at it—four notebooks of crazy shit about growing up with the dead guy and going to the prom. Listen, you are not a psychiatrist, Caroline, and no matter how much you want to help someone—”

  “Where is it?”

  “What?”

  “The statement. Where is it?”

  “He said he wanted you to have it. I put the whole thing on your desk.”

  Caroline turns away from Spivey, walks into the Major Crimes office, and switches on the light. She finds the four legal pads stacked neatly and begins flipping through the first one, looking for…what? She can feel adrenaline, and for a moment, she forgets that she hasn’t slept for two days.

  “Listen, Caroline,” he says, “I’m serious about this. You really fucked up this weekend. I’m gonna have to write this up, you know.”

  She sets the first section down and starts flipping the pages of the second legal pad, Clark’s handwriting loosening as he gets tired. The words pour over her like water; none of it sticks. Maybe Spivey’s right; Clark is crazy.

  “I don’t know why you didn’t just call me,” Spivey says, “why you have to make everything so difficult all the time.”

  She sets the second legal pad down and starts skimming the third. More rambling. She’s about to set it down when the last sentence catches her attention. “…the world would be a better and simpler place if Michael Langford were not in it.”

  “Where’s the gun?” she asks without looking up.

  “What?”

  “The gun. You said you found the gun in the grass. Where is it?”

  “On my desk. God damn it, Caroline—”

  She brushes past him, reaches for a box of surgical gloves on the counter, and grabs one as she stomps past the cubicles to Spivey’s glass-walled office.

  He follows her in. “I’m not kidding here, Caroline! You really fucked up—”

  She can take no more. “I fucked up?” She spins on her heel and up into his face. “Patrol found this guy on the twelfth floor of a vacant building. Staring out a window.”

  Spivey shrugs. “So?”

  “So before you kicked him loose, did you consider why a depressed guy might go up to the twelfth floor of a vacant building by himself?”

  Spivey takes a step back. “Oh.”

  She turns away, reaches into the plastic bag, and removes the black handgun, an evidence tag wrapped around the trigger guard. “Or did you ask yourself why, when Mason’s friend is lying there dead, his first thought is to pick up the gun?” Caroline releases the pin and flips the gun open. She holds it up and stares at Spivey through the empty chambers. “Two,” she says.

  “What?”

  She holds out the gun for him to see. “There are two empty chambers. One slug went through Boyle. So where’s the other one?”

  It is remarkably quiet in these offices at one-thirty on a Sunday morning. Caroline’s eyes drift from Spivey to the gun and finally to the stack of legal pads, on top of which Clark has written, in big block letters, STATEMENT OF FACT.

  …the less honest I was, the more famous I should be. The very limit of human blindness is to glory in being blind.

  —St. Augustine, The Confessions

  VIII

  Statement of Fact

  1 | YOU’RE PROBABLY WONDERING

  You’re probably wondering how a man falls so far so fast—how an idealistic, socially conscious lawyer one day finds himself planning a murder, of all things, how a man who’s never broken any laws (okay, there were a few narcotics statutes) skips over all the other felonies and misdemeanors and goes straight for a premeditated murder. Of course, the explanation begins with my overpowering ambition and, especially, my unfailing blindness to the desires and motivations of people around me. But there are two other forces at work here, and between them, these two hard cases are undoubtedly the cause of more criminal acts than all the other suspects combined:

  Love.

  And politics.

  This is the shape of my confession, then, a dark story of love and politics, a reckoning, a cautionary tale of how far one man can fall in this world. And to describe a fall, of course, one must start with height.

  So let me just say this: I was rich.

  I use this as the measure of my success because it is the gauge of my generation, a generation which will fade from even the shortest history because we contributed so little in the way of art and politics and bravery, because our currency was…well, currency. We were an entire cut of people in their twenties and thirties still running creative and procreative juices but spending the current of our days discussing stock options and price-to-earnings ratios and small market capitalization and “What’s in your 401(k)?”

  Since profanity is nothing without a tease—a glimpse of flesh beneath the satin—it is a fair question to ask: How rich was I?

  At the peak of my wealth, in 1999, I had seven million dollars in various checkbooks, savings accounts, stock portfolios, retirement accounts, and pants pockets. I had a condo in downtown Seattle, a new BMW roadster, a new Range Rover, and a vintage Harley-Davidson motorcycle. I was shopping for a boat. Now by the standards of the founders of Microsoft and Amazon and countless other late-century techno-thieves, my portfolio was little more than cab fare, but to me it was as much money as existed in the world.

  I remember the first time it occurred to me that I was rich: in 1997, when I was making one of my rare visits to see my parents. I stood in their driveway as my father paced around my Harley.

  “It’s a beaut,” he said. “How much was it?”

  “It really wasn’t too expensive.”

  “How much?” he asked.

  When I told him that it cost thirty-two thousand dollars, he laughed giddily, but then his face set and he cocked his head. “Huh,” he said, and he didn’t have to tell me that it was more than he’d earned any year of his life.

  I won’t bore you with the details of my windfall, the picks and splits, the mergers and offerings, the good fortune that I convinced myself was good analysis. Suffice it to say that after I helped Eli get Empire off the ground (at least conceptually; in other ways, that Spruce Goose would remain forever grounded), I returned to Seattle and threw myself into the hunt for technology start-ups, to show Dana that I could succeed in her world or, rather, in her husband’s world. I worked nonstop, hounding the city for raccoon-eyed com
puter geeks, for Microsoft drones looking to break off from the mothership, for coders and programmers, dreamers and brainstormers, people with the slimmest ideas as long as they involved somehow hunching over a keyboard and staring into a glass box. I read newspapers and trade magazines, hung out at cyber cafés and the technology departments of local universities. I beat the bushes until, by 1998, I’d flushed three dozen successful start-ups out into the open for Michael’s venture capital riflemen, and written the contracts and done the various other legal work for five successful IPOs. You have probably heard of some of these companies, and may have even owned their stock, the most noteworthy being CybSysTechTronic (CSTT—the nation’s premier producer of data cap transponders and backup port regulators for wireless modem and data recovery chips) and Myonlineshoestore.com, which was, for eight wonderful months, the number two online shoe store in the whole country.

  Not all of my companies were successful, of course, and after the crash a certain newsmagazine looking to describe the irrational frenzy of the late nineties listed among the heavily funded and lightly considered tech businesses one discovery of mine: MousePants (later MousePants.com), which manufactured computer-friendly clothing, beginning with cargo pants with small mouse pads on the thighs (I suppose we should’ve stopped production once we saw the ubiquity of laptop rollerballs and touchpads, but even without the eponymous gimmick this was a good-looking, comfortable pant).

  From the outside, the legal part of my job was not glamorous—a daily diet of IPO’s, recaps, mergers and acquisitions, management buyouts, divestitures, bridge financing, debt and equity placement, credit lines, reorganizations, and countless other functions that were simply a shifting of money from one pocket to another. First for Michael and Dana, and later for one of Seattle’s bigger law firms (I will not tempt action from those carnivores by mentioning the partners on their letterhead), I worked as a buffer, as Michael said, between Chad and Charlie, drafting paper maneuvers that ensured Charlie would give Chad an endless supply of money and Chad would give Charlie “a position” in some emerging tech business. Any guilt I felt over our…exaggerated display of Empire quickly faded when I saw the speculative prospects that brought in millions in seed money and made our game seem as established as Monopoly, when I saw that the point of this new economy was not some finished machinery, but the money that greased it so fully that it would take five years to realize the machine was running only on that grease.