by Andrea Bartz
Tessa nodded. Her line of questioning, her certainty that it was someone else and had nothing to do with my friend-breakup fantasies, was giving me some relief, so I followed it, haltingly: “If we limit it to people who knew about the gun and where he kept it, it’s still a ton of people. He wasn’t secretive about it. We were more worried about it getting stolen than anything else. God, we were stupid.”
Tessa smiled sadly. “The age of invincibility,” she said.
“Exactly.”
She considered. “I take it you didn’t find anything helpful in your emails?”
“I don’t even know what I was looking for. Obviously I didn’t find one that was like ‘Hey, Lindsay, good thing I spotted you at the concert and not anywhere near Edie’s apartment on Friday.’ ” I shook my head. “I just don’t know, Tessa. I don’t know what I don’t know. And this goddamn video…it means that whatever I don’t know is a lot bigger than I realized.”
Softly: “Lindsay, I’m sure that whatever you’re worried about…that you said something, or saw something…I’m sure that’s not the case. The odds that everybody had it wrong and you’re just discovering this ten years later, based on this one totally inconclusive thing…” She opened both palms.
“Not everyone,” I countered. “Look at Sarah. Look at Kevin.”
“I hear you,” she said. “But at the same time, this seems like something where there’s no obvious way to get to the bottom of what happened. So if you just want me to listen, I’m here. But if you want my advice, I think you should just walk away. Nobody else is even thinking about this stuff all these years later.”
“If you thought someone had hurt your friend, wouldn’t you want to know?” I couldn’t tell her how much I needed to know, how I wouldn’t be able to live with myself until the truth had come to light. A tear slipped out and I brushed it away. “I’m a fact-checker, Tessa. If I’m grossly incorrect about this formative life event, I’d like to know. Besides, I’ve already requested the case files.”
“I understand.” Tessa leaned down and hugged me awkwardly. “Then I’ll help.”
Chapter 6
The next morning I woke up convinced I was overlooking something, something I’d looked at but not seen, a prickly cocklebur riding along unnoticed. Was it a photo on Facebook? A detail from the videos? I’d sent the August 21 clip to both Tessa and Damien, hoping one of them would notice something I hadn’t. Ugh, both of them listening to my voice, drunk and garbled: “I want to push her off this building!” I squeezed my eyes shut another moment and rolled out of bed.
Lloyd buoyed up in my mind, so I searched for him in my old email database. It didn’t take long to find my email to Edie from April, the day after Lloyd and I had finally hooked up, drunken sex three months in the making on my end and perhaps two hours on his:
E—my head is pounding and my insides all hurt and oh my god let’s never ever drink whiskey again, but I don’t even care because I am seriously walking on air. OH MY GOD. I like him so much it’s embarrassing. I am sitting in my cubicle beaming like an idiot even though I’m super hungover and my hair smells like smoke and I clearly didn’t shower before booking it into work. He is sofa king hot. I’ll tell you more about it tomorrow, but the short story is: REALLY GOOD. Remind me to tell you his story about the dishwasher. He got my number in the morning and said he’d text and I’m a liiiiittle bit panicking because I haven’t heard from him but I’m sure it’s fine. Gah, did that really all happen last night? I’m not sure I’d believe it if there weren’t witnesses. OMG. SO HOT.
I grinned retroactively at my airheaded tone. I’d seen Lloyd only a couple of times after that magical January night on the rooftop; Alex and Lloyd had had a falling-out shortly after, Edie had told me, one that precluded Alex from directly setting us up. I can’t remember now why I didn’t just take matters into my own hands, since I knew Lloyd personally, since it shouldn’t have been that hard to ask him out for drinks. He didn’t live in Calhoun, so I didn’t bump into him much; maybe he’d been coolly distant (“Oh, we’ve met before?”), and yet I continued crushing, undeterred.
The story of the dishwasher was gone, too, lost to the ages, but I remembered other pieces of that Monday night. Edie and I were hanging out in some strangers’ Calhoun apartment, a weird space with a hammock suspended from the ceiling, so loose that when you sat in it, your body sunk into an L. We were standing around, drinking bad whiskey out of mugs, when Lloyd and another dude walked in. It all felt a little miraculous: that he was there at all, that Alex (Edie’s new official boyfriend and Lloyd’s ex-friend) wasn’t; that Edie, knowing I had a huge crush on the guy, had given him a big wave and then backed away once he jangled over to say hello. I was blushing fire-red, but Lloyd had been friendly, had picked up the conversation. God, I could still remember it now: the mounting excitement as Lloyd didn’t turn away, the delightful realization that every time he took a few steps to refresh his glass or speak to someone else, he came back and rejoined me. That mutual unspoken thrill: This is happening.
I couldn’t recall much about the sex now except for a belated certainty that it was not good; at the time I was so thrilled to be making out, so grateful when someone chose to unwrap my body instead of the body of any of the other women in the room and building and Brooklyn and world. I had a vague memory of him crashing down next to me and falling asleep within seconds of coming, and I lay there smiling into the night, my heart beating fast: He likes me, he likes me, he likes me. Which, of course, made everything that came after all the more upsetting.
* * *
On Sunday, the unlikeliest day for bureaucratic progress, the case files appeared in my inbox, compressed into an attachment like a present ripe for the opening. In a few seconds, I had everything open: the coroner’s report, police notes, incident report, autopsy report—a novel-length pile of information all about my onetime best friend’s death. I checked the total page count: 124 pages, too long to print. So I clicked on whatever came first alphabetically and began reading. It was an autopsy report, dense and clinical:
Autopsy authorized by: Dr. Allan Dennis for New York City
Identified by: Fingerprints and dental comparison
Rigor: Absent
Livor: Purple
Age: 23
Race: White
Sex: Female
Length: 65 inches
Weight: 117 pounds
Eyes: Green
Hair: Red
Body heat: Refrigerated
God, I could practically hear Dr. Dennis bleating off the stats to a lab tech with cool detachment, Edie’s body on a table just like on TV shows. The report described her clothing next: just the polka-dot bra, stained with blood, and the red lacy thong. Such an undignified way to die.
EXTERNAL EXAMINATION: This is the unembalmed body of a white female which weighs approximately 117 pounds. and measures 65 inches in height. The physique is ectomorphic. The head hair is red, wavy, and long, measuring approximately 21 inches in greatest length. The irides are green.
Ew, which? Try who, asshole. I did some searching: “ectomorphic” means thin and delicate; irides are irises. Jargon fogging up such simple truths.
The teeth are natural. The fingernails are painted purple. There is a small transverse pale linear scar in the lower quadrant of the abdomen. Other distinctive markings are absent on external examination.
I leaned back and breathed heavily. My gut was threatening to take over, an expanding ball of nausea and alarm, but I fought it back with research mode. This is what I do, I told myself. I research.
RADIOGRAPHS: Postmortem radiographs of the head and neck reveal several radiopaque fragments in the front-right skull/brain. Cranial X-rays demonstrate sizable missile fragments in the central head region with additional fragments i
n the right forehead region and smaller fragments dispersed throughout the midcranial region.
I searched for “radiopaque” and then felt stupid for not just sounding it out: opaque to an X-ray or similar radiology. Duh.
INTERNAL EXAMINATION: A 2.5-inch circular area of scalp hemorrhage is present around a gunshot entry wound in the forehead region. Additionally, an individual 3-inch circular scalp hematoma is present over the vertex as well as a hemorrhage surrounding the laceration over the external occipital protuberance. The calvarium is intact. Upon its removal diffuse subarachnoid hemorrhage is evident. The brain weighs 1,280 grams. There is a perforating track through the brain, described below. Other than this, no underlying abnormalities are evident in the brain.
I was shaken enough to pause my reading and search for it: The average weight of an adult female’s brain is 1,198 grams. Smarty Edie.
PATHOLOGIC DIAGNOSES: Gunshot wound of the head
Entrance: Side of the head; close range of fire
Path: Skin and subcutaneous tissue of midline parietal scalp, frontoparietal skull, dura, frontoparietal brain lobes, corpus callosum, base of the skull, hard palate, tongue, and floor of mouth
Associated injuries: Laceration of the right medial cathus of the eye, extensive skull fractures, and contusions of the left and right periorbital tissue
Missile: Multiple fragments of copper-colored metal in the brain and sinuses weighing, in aggregate, 162.8 grains
Okay—a handgun bullet would be at least 120, maybe 180 grains. I hated that I knew this, that so much gun information was tucked away in my own brain.
OPINION: This 23-year-old white female, Edith Iredale, died of a gunshot wound to the head. According to reports, the decedent was found in her apartment with an antique pistol near her body. Autopsy revealed a close-range entrance gunshot wound to the side of the head that fractured the skull and damaged the brain. Fractures at the base of the skull caused the appearance of bruising around both eyes. This gunshot wound also damaged the roof of the mouth (hard palate) and the tongue.
Postmortem toxicological testing revealed a blood alcohol concentration of 0.054. There was a high level of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (202 ng/mL) in the blood.
Whoa. Alcohol I expected, but drugs? I searched for it and it rang a distant bell: Molly, a potent form of MDMA that had a resurgence in the spring of 2009. A fifth of Calhoun’s residents were probably on it on any given Friday. But Edie?
The presence of gunpowder stippling, gunpowder particles, and soot on the skin surrounding the entrance defects is consistent with a close range of fire (less than 2–3 inches). Gunshot particles deep in the brain tissue suggest a close-range shot consistent with suicide, although accidental death should still be considered a possibility.
I could only skim the rest: section by section descriptions of opening her up with a Y-shape incision, peeling out her organs, weighing them, making pithy observations. Then there was a matrix repeating the levels of drugs and booze in her splayed-open body. The report ended on a note of finality, some of the only improperly used periods capping five pages of sentence fragments:
CAUSE OF DEATH: Gunshot wound to the head.
MANNER: Suicide.
I leaned back and breathed deeply through my nose, waiting for my stomach to unclench. Then I opened another file folder: dozens of free-floating emails between the police department and city officials. They swirled like snowflakes, unindexed, and I thought dully of my own emails from that era banging around on my server. I opened one at random: It was a New York City Police Department spokesman telling city employees that Edie probably killed herself. “Police are on the scene of a possible suicide in Bushwick that occurred by 11:30 p.m. I will provide you with updates,” it read. A two-liner, letting everyone know no foul play was suspected.
I clicked on a folder named after the detectives assigned to the case and realized it contained notes from their interviews with us, handwritten in comically terrible handwriting and scanned. There was one from their discussion with me, labeled LBACH, which touched off a strange thrill in my ribs. I opened it and struggled to read the jottings:
Bach, Lindsay
#594
23 yo
Friend for abt 1 year, met through Sarah
Call next morning, returned to scene
Night of incident: Roof w Kotsonis, Kwan, Reed approx 9:30 pm. Drinking beer, gin prep by Reed. Reed left for Matchless 10 (CHK). Grp to concert in 6E approx 11. Took cab home (CHK)
Fight with Iredale on Saturday 8/15 re: “controlling,” unexpected
Conf. breakup bw Iredale + Kotsonis around 7/4; cause unknown
Decedent moody, withdrawn
Iredale “never used drugs”
I remembered that interview, a few days after Edie’s death: the freezing-cold interrogation room done up to look a little cozy with a coffee machine and ugly cushions on the chairs. I’d felt so young and scared, tempted to ask if I should really be speaking to them without my parents being present.
And the notes were so vague. Had I told the cops that I’d headed to 6E with the crew or that the rest of them went out while I hailed a cab? I scanned the jottings again: interesting that I’d said Kevin had made our first drinks; I thought it was Alex. I looked around for notes from my friends’ questionings and brought up Alex’s, squinting again to read the scrawls:
Kotsonis, Alex
#488
24 yo
Met Iredale in winter, approx. January 2009, can’t confirm. Building, other apt.
Dated 3/09-7/09. Lived w Reed, Kwan & Iredale moved in 4/09 (apt 4G, scene of unattended death)
“Growing apart” no details
Night of incident: Last saw decedent approx. 5:30 pm. Night of: apt w Bach, Reed, Kwan 9:30, then roof; Reed to Matchless Greenpoint. Drinking gin; no drugs. Left for 6E (CHK) w Kwan and Bach.
I leaned back and pursed my lips around a long, slow exhale. There—Alex knew I went to the show. Although the notes made it sound like we’d gone directly, while the Flip cam video showed I’d made my way from the roof to SAKE. How drunk had we all been? I heard Alex’s voice again, low and trundling: I want that bitch out of my apartment!
I scanned the notes from the interview with Sarah, whose last name they erroneously spelled “Quan” (or, once, “Kwon”) instead of “Kwan.” It started the same as Alex’s and mine—the origin story of their friendship, mention of a meaningless fight not long before, similar memory of the beginning of The Night. Then:
“Tiny fight” w Bach when Bach left; Quan & Kotsonis to concert apt 6E check.
I read it twice more, my eyes circling back at the end as if it were music and I’d bumped against a repeat symbol. A tiny fight? I thought hard but couldn’t remember anything, either the dustup itself or a later mention of it. There was the burbling sound on the Flip cam video a few minutes in, but nothing I could decipher. Had it happened in my memory’s seams, while we were worm-holing between the roof and the concert? Although she said here in the report, too, that I hadn’t gone along to 6E. A direct contradiction, one the detectives hadn’t caught.
I’d read once that in emotionally distressing moments, your brain can rewrite an ending, stitch together a memory that feels real. After Columbine, for example, the school principal swore he’d made it through a job interview with a potential new teacher and had offered him a gig, while everyone else—the candidate, his secretary—insisted he hadn’t gotten nearly that far. Distressed, we construct realities that feel just as real as the world around us. Whose brain had concocted a new version of that night—mine or Sarah’s?
I kneaded the back of my neck. All these factoids, all these nuggets I took such
pleasure in uncovering as a fact-checker—not pleasure, exactly, more like scratching an itch, stamping out a red-hot drive to know, discover, confirm. Making the world orderly and predictable and objectively real. I’d always assumed I’d wound up as a fact-checker by accident, when there were more open roles in research than in the features department. But maybe some part of me had always been scratching away, clawing at the coating over things I’d forgotten.
I pulled my messages up in front of the detectives’ notes and texted Sarah: “Can you call me?” I stared at the screen, willing the bubble to appear that would mean she was responding, but…nothing. I thought briefly of looking at her social feeds, trying to gauge where she was right now, why she was taking so long to reply. In 2009, it was harder to keep tabs on people. You had to wait for them to come to you. I suddenly remembered long nights of drawing out text conversations with boys—seeing their responses, setting my phone down, sipping a beer, and taking three hours to respond. Just ’cause.
Alex, then. Everything tightened at the idea of confronting him, of speaking to the dude who’d spoken so poorly of Edie moments before she died. I had no idea he’d had that revulsion pulsing just under the surface. But it was like jumping into a cold lake: I found his number in his email signature and texted before I could think about it. He wrote back right away: “Whoa hi!”
