20 (7 page)

“There's the law,” the Detective said.

“Oh yes, the law. We believe in the law, don't we? First degree and second degree; felony and misdemeanor; murder, suicide, and accidental death. The coroner's inquest. The declaration. But tell me this—does the law ever say, ‘We don't know; it's a mystery and we simply don't know'? Not our law. We can't abide an unsolved mystery, can we? We don't believe in it so we make a declaration anyway: first degree or second degree; murder, suicide, or accident. But does the declaration make it so? Can every death be summed up by just one of three words? Does legal terminology, a court's declaration, tell you what actually happened—ever? Is it ever equal to the event itself?”

The Detective said nothing, but he sympathized with the idea, understood it implicitly—that organic quality, the formal beauty he found in every crime, a wholeness that could not be defined, only sensed viscerally. He had always tried to sketch that organism, that almost living form that was the crime, a form which, in some amoral way, he could appreciate aesthetically. The law, though, devoured subtlety, his complex sketch, his solution, with its ambiguities and shadings, with its own formal beauty, inevitably reduced into crude categories of guilt or innocence. There had been times when he had resented it, this profaning of his art; times when he would have agreed with Mrs. Klein's argument—but he wasn't about to admit that
now. Not while still trying to solve the case, not while she mocked his lifelong profession.

“For example,” Mrs. Klein said, “what if…what if the body that Dexter saw when he saw what he saw, the body we have tentatively identified as Andrew Klein, what if its fall were the result of not one of the possibilities, but all three? What if the body…”

“Mr. Klein?” the Detective suggested.

“All right. What if Mr. Klein were to a degree, but only to a degree, a participant in his own demise? Let's assume…yes, let's assume that at the time under question, about five o'clock yesterday evening, Mr. Andrew Klein, sitting in his living room, was suddenly struck by the notion that he'd like to take a walk. And who can say why? Perhaps his legs were stiff; perhaps he felt too warm in the living room or wished to watch the sea birds more closely, a particularly passionate hobby of his; perhaps he had a difficult problem to consider and needed to walk it out. Or perhaps it was just a whim, nothing more than the need to do something, anything, and with the cove before him, a walk was the first thing to come to mind. It could have been any of those reasons or a combination of some or all of them, or something else entirely, and very probably Mr. Klein himself couldn't say for sure. Perhaps it was simply an accident that he should have decided to take a walk, but regardless of our ignorance of his exact motivation, let's assume that Andrew Klein did decide to take that walk. And let's further assume that he took someone along with him, someone close to him, someone who understood him as well as, and perhaps better than, he understood himself.”

“His wife perhaps?” the Detective said.

He watched her closely now, sensed a change in her manner—an uneasiness, a tension—the first step perhaps on the road to confession. It was true, he well knew, what they said about criminals wanting to confess; lying by its very nature created a state of anxiety that begged for release. The interrogator, then, was merely guide, midwife, to a natural event; his job at all times to offer up peace of mind in exchange for the truth: the detective as priest.

Mrs. Klein stared at him. “Perhaps,” she said. “Perhaps it was his wife.”

“Let's assume that it was, shall we?”

She hesitated, tugging nervously on the border of her fisherman's sweater. “All right,” she finally said. “For the sake of the detective, we will assume that it was his wife…Mr. and Mrs. Klein strolling along the walkway of their dream house in Maine, their country retreat, chatting about this and about that as they approached the promontory point overlooking the cove. Who can say what a Nobel prize-winning physicist and his medieval historian wife would talk about on such a walk on such a day? The weather, perhaps? The Uncertainty Principle? The death of the American novel?” She stood up and turned her back to him, facing the cove. “Divorce, perhaps?”

The Detective twisted in his chair, struggling to get a view of her face; every nuance was crucial now, every subtle facial expression could qualify the meaning of her words. But she rotated away from him and hid herself until the moment had passed.

“Just a middle-aged couple strolling along the edge of the cove's cliff, their cove, their cliff; they are silly enough to think that they own them. Just a middle-aged couple chatting about this and about that. It's a January day in Maine, a cold and windy day as all January days in Maine are; there's a blustery wind, fickle, now pushing, now pulling, a challenge to their balance as they walk along the cliff's edge, ernes rising from within the cove helplessly, inevitably, like air trapped in water. A blustery January day in Maine, a middle-aged couple, a promontory point rimmed by a walkway and its railing—do you get the picture?”

The Detective momentarily glanced out through the glass wall, then turned back to Mrs. Klein. “Yes,” he said.

“All right, then. Mr. and Mrs. Klein are standing at the promontory point within the walkway's cul-de-sac, leaning right against the railing there, a low railing really, waist high so that it doesn't obstruct the view. And then it happens, the provocation: a gust of wind perhaps, a slip of the foot, some accidental agent; the precipitator, pushing them into this moment, pushing him against the railing and over it, Andrew Klein dangling for an instant on a fulcrum, back arched over the railing, hands cast into the air, balanced, time suspended…”

“And Mrs. Klein?”

“And Mrs. Klein facing him, watching him, this man, her husband, her
…her accomplice, this man she knows better than he knows himself, this man balanced far an instant between the solid ground and the distant ocean, between life and death. And perhaps, just perhaps, she sees in his eyes a plea; not the plea we take for granted, but its opposite, a plea to be left alone, a plea to let this accident happen, a sign that he wishes it to happen, has always wished but never had the courage on his own. She sees this conjectured plea, Mrs. Klein does, and because she knows him better than he knows himself, knows that he wants, has always wanted, this accident to happen, because she is his accomplice in all things in spite of herself, she lets him drop—like the ernes in reverse, she lets him drop, helplessly, inevitably away from her and into the ocean. And what is that? Not legally but really, not in court but in life—an accident? a suicide? a murder?”

Her voice died away as if it, too, were falling into the cove, and turning toward the ocean as it disappeared into silence, she stared into the distance, arms folded, the fisherman's wife keeping her anxious vigil again.

“Perhaps,” the Detective said, “just perhaps in this moment we're talking about, Mrs. Klein sees a different plea in her husband's eyes; perhaps she does see the plea we take for granted: the plea for life. And perhaps as she sees this plea, she realizes suddenly that
she
wants, that
she
has always wanted this accident to take place, and realizing this, she lets him fall. A possibility, is it not?”

“Yes,” she said softly, still staring toward the cove. “Yes, a possibility.”

“And perhaps she not only lets him fall. Perhaps in that moment of realization that she wants, has always wanted, this accident to take place, perhaps she decides to help it take place. Perhaps she disturbs the balance, tips the fulcrum, helps the accident along…”

Mrs. Klein turned toward him, her eyes, though, directed above and beyond him, preternaturally still. “Perhaps,” she said in a whisper.

The Detective studied her, oblivious to everything but her face, to everything but the case which had distilled itself into this face in this moment—his detective's instinct which carried him now, which controlled him, which became him in this moment, sensing the pressure point, her need to confess.

“Did she, Mrs. Klein?” the Detective asked gently. “Did Mrs. Klein push her husband off the cliff?”

He waited, watching her silently as she dropped her gaze gradually, lowering her line of vision to the chair where he sat: a slow focusing, a curious stare, as though she had just noticed his presence there. Her skin was ghost-white, her hands at her sides; her fingers pinched the nap of her skirt.

“Do you know about Descartes?” she said. “Shall I tell you about Descartes? Shall I give you the lecture, a lesson in history from the medieval scholar?”

“Descartes?”

“Did you know that a historian is a detective too, that a historian seeks something definite too, that just like you I'm in the business of reconstructing crime, the crime of our past? I do that. I collect evidence; sift through the clues, the artifacts; examine motives, relationships, culpability—yes, culpability, too. And there's where we differ, you and I, Andy and I, because I assign blame. It's a historian's most sacred duty, even if only a feedback mechanism for the generations to come, even if it's just a corrective adjustment for the social gyroscope. I assign blame, declare it aloud. Descartes, I say, Descartes: guilty as charged.”

“What are you talking about?”

“How could it happen, I ask myself? How could such shortsightedness exist, such self-delusion? The man was a Catholic, a religious man, schooled by Jesuits. His Catholicism mattered to him; they say that as an adult he always asked himself how the Jesuits at La Flèche would receive his work. He refused to see it, though; he refused to admit to it; became indignant at the mention of it. It's just hypothetical, he would say, my work is hypothetical; it isn't necessarily applicable. My work is theoretical, so it can't be a threat. And because he could say that to himself, because he could fool himself with that rationalization, he kept on with his work. This Catholic, this religious man, kept right on destroying the very world he relied on, the very beliefs which gave him comfort and purpose. He turned heaven into a clockwork; he turned God into an idea; he robbed them of meaning; he robbed them of mystery. Descartes killed for all those who came after him what he himself valued most. He was the true end of the Middle Ages; he was the real father of the Modern Age: the first man who could destroy his own world and call it theoretical.

“Are you with me so far? Has my fellow detective kept up with me? Because
I'm going to leave you behind now; I'm going to make the leap of faith. I'm going to take up the historian's prerogative and say: guilty, Descartes, guilty as charged.”

“Guilty of what?”

“Murder, fellow detective. Descartes killed God.”

Mrs. Klein paced in front of the Detective, an absent-minded, irregular path across the thick orange rug; he focused on her face, tried to concentrate and force the connections, but nothing made sense. The feeling, though, was still there, the instinct of the detective, the belief that this was all part of the confession, a need to reduce tension, a gradual, perhaps allegorical revelation of her involvement—if only he could decipher it.

“What are we talking about, Mrs. Klein?”

“The motive, of course. We're talking about the motive for the murder…” She paused, a wan and bitter smile flickering across her features. “I mean, of course, the
hypothetical
murder of Andrew Klein.”

“And what would that motive be?”

“Revenge. Revenge for the death of God.”

“You mean to say that Mrs. Klein killed Mr. Klein because Mr. Klein killed God?”

“Let's say that he was an accomplice in the death of God. It's a possibility, isn't it?”

The Detective shook his head.

“You don't believe it?”

“I believe that Mrs. Klein believes it, but…”

“But it's subjective, is that it? It's not the objective truth? It's not what the detective sees when he sees what he sees? Of course not. How stupid of me even to suggest it. The detective, a son of Descartes in a manner of speaking, doesn't believe in God alive or dead, does he?”

“Not as a motive for murder, he doesn't.”

“No, no—of course not. We'll have to try something different then, won't we?” She paced silently for a moment, her face a caricature of concentration, mimed sarcasm; then, as if inspired suddenly, she turned to him. “Has the detective ever been in love? Has he ever been married?”

The Detective hesitated, shades of his earlier suspicion reappearing, his distrust of her, his reluctance to be exposed personally. But it was much too
late to worry about involvement; he had already lost his professional distance, and, too, he still believed they were nearing an answer, that just beyond one of these bends in their meandering conversation, the solution awaited him.

“Yes,” he said, “I've been married.”

“Good. Well start from there then; well start from the top. It's always a good idea to start from what you believe in, and since the detective believes in marriage, marriage it is—the motive for the murder, the hypothetical murder of Andrew Klein.”

“Marriage is the motive?”

“No, revenge is still the motive, but revenge for the death of a marriage instead of revenge for the death of God. You do believe in the death of a marriage, don't you? The detective can see that, can't he? It is a possibility, is it not?”

The Detective said nothing, felt the conversation turning again—on him, out of his control, like his leg, like his heart, like the last two years of his life, a man adrift in a current he no longer had the strength to resist, a man afraid. And Mrs. Klein seemed to feed on his weakness as she probed him with her bulging eyes.

“Yes, I can see that he does; he believes in its possibility. But let's analyze it, shall we? Let's take the possibility and analyze it for its likelihood, stretching our minds to meet its implications. We need to flesh it out a bit, this motive; we need something a little more specific. An etiology of a murder, a history of causes, if you will. How about…” She nodded to herself. “Yes, how about infidelity—infidelity on the part of the victim's wife?”