The Slippage A Novel

FOUR




William’s phone buzzed with a text from Karla. “Turn on news,” it said. “Ch 9 now.” The fire commissioner stood at a podium, a bouquet of microphones in front of him and a whiteboard behind him. “We are now prepared to release a comprehensive profile of the man we think is responsible for the fires.”

A woman in the front raised her hand. The gesture displeased the commissioner, but he pointed at her anyway. “You’re sure it’s a man?”

“Reasonably so.”

A man in the back blurted out. “Can you tell us anything else?”

“I can,” the commissioner said. “I was about to.” He turned toward the whiteboard, scribbled in a blank space, and then turned back. “Based on the way the crimes have unfolded, we have determined that our suspect is a white male, almost certainly in his early to mid-forties, likely well educated. There’s a high probability that he is either unmarried or childless.”

A man in the front row leaned forward, taking his time with his question. “And what’s the motive?”

The fire commissioner sighed. “That’s where I was going next. He appears to be motivated by economic resentment rather than a personal grudge. These are only educated guesses, though, or interpretations.”

The woman in the front raised her hand again. “But definitely a man?” she said.

“They usually are,” the fire commissioner said.

“And what are we counting as the arson set?” said a man in the back.

“Clearly, it’s not every fire in town,” the commissioner said. Laughter surged briefly. “It’s the ones we’ve been talking about all along: the depot, the marina, the hardware store, the dollar store. There are erroneous reports about this last one, the warehouse.” That was the building adjacent to Tom’s old studio; William leaned closer to the screen. “That fire seems to have been set by a copycat,” he said. “This isn’t uncommon: a case starts to get publicity, and someone wants in on it. The warehouse fire was significantly smaller and significantly more amateurish, a kind of experiment.”

An experiment? The word went icily through William.


After two days of rain, the sun and heat had returned. The afternoon cooked the inside of the car. William found Tom’s Charger parked right outside his studio, fender now double dented. He went inside and knocked on the door, once, then a break, then again, as if it was a secret code. He heard shifting and scraping and then Tom came to the door and opened it. “Who is it?” he said, though he saw William’s face. Tom’s hair was in an uproar.

“Hey there,” William said. “I was just driving by. Thought I’d stop in to say hello.”

“Busy,” Tom said.

“Yes, I would like to come in,” William said. Tom opened the door a little more, maybe a foot wide, and William pushed his way in. Chaos possessed the studio: pencils snapped in half and disarranged on the desk, books open upside down next to beer bottles. The only work visible was a large-scale oil painting of one of Tom’s charts—a gradually descending line titled “How Well You Understand This Graph Over Time.”

“Wow,” William said, sitting down on the narrow sofa. “The place looks good.”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “I’ve been busy. But nice to see you. It’s been a while.”

“Not really,” William said. “Stevie’s thing was just last week.”

“It was?” Tom said.

“How did that go?” William said. “Last I saw, you were doing pretty okay with that girl by the bar.”

Tom bunched his brow and searched for the memory. “Katy? Karen? I don’t know. It was a twenty-four-hour flu. She was a nice girl, if you like that kind of thing, but I had to get back to work.”

“Right,” William said. “I see. What are you working on?”

“‘New pieces’ is what I’ve been telling people. But that’s not exactly true. I’ve been going through old work and reconnecting with it. Sometimes I’ve been pulling it into a different medium.” Tom pointed across the room. “Like that canvas over there. When I have to repaint the graphs, I remember them completely, in ways I thought weren’t possible anymore.”

William hunched forward and leaned his forearms on his knees, a technique he’d seen TV cops use to put suspects at ease. It was time to get what he’d come for. “Can I ask you something, Tom? You know that graph? The one about how much fire liked paper?”

Tom had started off toward the canvas. “Of course I know it. I made it. To me, it’s part of a larger comedy about the human arrogance that makes us think we control things—or rather, our refusal to believe what we’re shown repeatedly and conclusively, which is that we control nothing. I don’t believe in God, but I believe in the universe. And I believe that when the universe looks down upon us, it doesn’t see a species with an acceptance of its fate. It sees a species raging against that fate, and maybe it admires that stubbornness just a little.”

“Right,” William said. The sense that he was not quite listening was strong enough in his tone that Tom turned around. “I was out by the warehouse where you had your old studio,” William said.

“Oh?” There was a light in Tom’s eyes that seemed to make it difficult for him to see what was around him. “Why?”

“I wanted something from the alleyway. When I was out there, I talked to someone who saw you.”

“Who saw me?” Tom repeated.

“Who saw you going into the building the day of the fire.”

Tom was, all at once, as still as a Buddha, head down. He spoke finally, in a hushed voice that William couldn’t hear at first. William moved closer. “Cranston.”

“What?”

Tom’s head snapped up. “That was the name of my psychology professor in college. He used to talk about how people project their own negative ideas onto others. He wrote a whole book about it. He said that suspicion was like a black butterfly, and that what darkened it was the shadow of the person looking.”

“Okay,” William said. “The next time I’m in a library or a bookstore, I’ll check it out.”

“You could use a copy right now,” Tom said. Now he was staring at William intently. “Unless I’m wrong, you’re accusing me of something.”

It sounded stupid when Tom said it. “No,” William said. “Not accusing. Just being overly curious.”

“I’ll say. Can I ask how you know about the fire graph?”

“You must have mentioned it to me.”

“And yet, I didn’t,” Tom said.

William’s scalp tightened. “Never mind. We don’t have to talk about this.”

“We don’t have to do anything,” Tom said, his voice louder. “We all have choices. So what I’d like to know is why you chose to end up in my studio on a day I’m teaching, and why you somehow found your way into a folder that I’m not showing anyone.” Now he was almost thundering. “How does a man come to be in a place like this, looking at things he shouldn’t?” He paused, as if at the top of a hill, and then started down it. “And not looking at them alone, either.”

Silence sealed the room. William sat down. “Oh,” he said. “That. It’s not happening anymore.” He paused.

“I’m not going to say anything to Lou or anyone else,” Tom said. “It doesn’t matter to me who you spend your time with. What does matter to me is what you’re saying right now.”

William struggled for a foothold. “But you were there that morning, right? In the studio?”

“I was looking for something,” Tom said. “I found it and I was gone from there by noon. When was the fire? Early evening?”

“I don’t know.”

“That might be useful information when you’re building a case,” Tom said. He picked up a brush, pointed the handle at William. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. The next time we meet, let it be under better circumstances.” He turned his back on William, lifted the brush to his canvas, left it there to make a growing point. When William’s hand was on the doorknob, he spoke again. “And count yourself lucky that there will be a next time,” he said. “I don’t know if I should feel proud or ashamed that I’m letting you get away with acting reckless like this.”

“Like I said, it’s not happening anymore.”

“Not that,” Tom said. “I mean the way you treated me.” He turned back to the canvas and painted a horizontal line that ran to the end of the canvas, where it went straight down along the edge. William went out to sit in his car and wonder what he had done—or rather, why he had done it. He had misread the available evidence and then perpetuated the delusion just because it shone brighter than everything around it. It was a distraction from the blunt, dull expanse of the rest of his life. Without Emma, he had entered a kind of poverty. The currency was energy, and he was not able to hoard it or spend it. He turned on the radio and left it tuned between stations, trying to make out the words that bobbed to the surface of the static.

Four days later, out in Jerroldtown, police surrounded the home of a sixty-two-year-old retired professor named Thomas Lareaux, who promptly came to the front door with a gun. Lareaux fired at an officer, who fired back. Wounded, he fell to the ground. He was arrested and placed in an ambulance. One wall of his small house, according to a department spokesperson, was papered over with photographs of the buildings that had been set on fire over the past months, including the bus station, the hardware store, Sunny Isles Marina, and the East Side warehouse. The car dealership and Birch Mutual were not among them. Lareaux drove a blue pickup truck, said an undercover policewoman, who may well have driven a black Pontiac.


Lareaux was scheduled to be arraigned Thursday afternoon. William cut short his meeting with Wallace out at the lot and picked up Christopher at school. “Special unplanned stop,” he said.

“Okay,” Christopher said.

“We are going to see a master criminal of our time,” William said.

“Okay,” Christopher said.

They joined a knot of people at the base of the courthouse steps, at first only about a dozen, but then twice that, and then they were at the center of a lake whose shore was receding. The first police car that pulled up discharged a young black man, who passed the crowd without incident. The second contained Lareaux.

The gunshot had winged him in the left arm, and he wore a sling, which made him easy to spot. He was escorted by a policewoman toward the crowd, and voices went up as he approached: jeering voices, scornful voices, but also curious ones. “Why did you do it?” one woman said. Her tone had an unimaginable innocence.

Lareaux wore glasses in life, but they had been taken from him, and he stared obtusely into the crowd with sad, far-wandering eyes. “I have a political agenda,” he said. “Those who think they are in power must be taught otherwise. We are too beholden to self-appointed masters. We must tear them down.” The papers had uncovered their own rationale: Lareaux had a grown son who had been in and out of mental facilities his whole life; he had worked at four of the sites and been fired from three of them. The names of his son’s former supervisors were neatly lettered beneath the photographs on his wall.

A man from the rear of the crowd ran out and tried to shove Lareaux. “I had a friend you almost killed,” he said. “If he’d been on time to work, who knows what would have happened?” Someone else flung a paper cup filled with ice at Lareaux’s head. Then, suddenly, a section of the crowd surged forward. William was jostled. He caught sight of Christopher taking an elbow from a big man bumped by an even bigger one; the boy went down into the middle of the lake of people. A young woman, also teetering, stepped on Christopher’s hand, and William heard him cry out in pain. When a space opened up, Christopher was gone.

The woman who had stepped on him was following Lareaux up the courthouse stairs, yelling now. William went up the steps too. He tried to get an elevated vantage. He looked at his side of the street, at the other side. He checked both corners. Christopher was nowhere to be found. William called his name and waved, first one hand and then both, already imagining the news report: the missing boy had been in the company of his mother’s friend, who was unemployed as a result of a workplace assault.

Lareaux was inside now, and the people who remained on the stairs were yelling at each other. William paced from one edge of the courthouse to the other until he saw Christopher, or at least a spot that was the same deep green as his shirt, sitting on a bench far down the block.

He hurried over.

“I didn’t know where you went,” Christopher said, his voice thin with panic.

“I didn’t go anywhere,” William said. “You did.”

“Not my fault,” Christopher said. He was pressing his right thumb into the center of his left palm. William moved it aside and found a deep bruise. The ridge of the palm was swollen. “It’s fine,” Christopher said, trying to hide the hand behind his back.

“We should get it X-rayed to make sure it’s not broken.”

“But it’ll be okay?”

“What do you think?” William said, but he was asking, not telling, and he could see that Christopher could see that. And so William said yes. When they pulled up in front of the house, Christopher said nothing, just took his backpack with his good hand and dragged it behind him up the front path.

Tom came over that night, unannounced, the anger of the previous week evaporated, and joined William and Louisa in front of the television for what they all knew was the end of the line, in a sense. They ordered food and watched footage of the courthouse riot, and Tom said he thought he saw William, and William said he hadn’t even gotten out of his car, and Louisa said he should have gotten as close as possible, that things like that didn’t happen every day, and then the news was on to sports, and Louisa switched off the set and started picking up plates, and Tom left, and the two of them sat there in silence and William watched his wife, wondering what would happen next.


Karla called for lunch. “Tomorrow,” she said crisply, not quite asking. When William arrived at the restaurant, she was sitting, menu already closed.

He started in with something he had just heard. “My old company is about to take a fall.” Fitch had called him early that morning from the stairwell at work, breathless in his act of espionage, and brought him up to date. “The new salesman was sent back to San Diego without an explanation,” William told Karla. “Independent consultants have been to the offices at least twice, guys in dark suits who look like Secret Service and don’t talk much to anyone. Apparently, the company made false and misleading statements regarding their investment properties and didn’t vet investors properly. And that’s not even the worst of it. The worst of it is, there’s a paper trail.”

“Business, even immoral business, is distinguished from casual deception by the presence of records. My father used to say that all the time.”

“That’s a big thing to say all the time.”

She didn’t smile, not even a little. She fingered the collar of her blouse. “What were you thinking, William?” she said finally.

“About what?”

“About yesterday. A child in a mob scene like that?” She leaned forward, hands up underneath the tabletop as if she was weighing it.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m sure you are.” She kept her eyes on him. “I’m just not sure it matters.”

“How’s his hand?”

“It’s okay. Soft cast. He can’t really eat or write, which is going to make it a rough week.” She put her head down. When she looked up, her eyes were wet. “I don’t think you should spend any more time with Chris.”

He slid his hand across the table, but Karla stiffened. “Stop,” she said. “I think partly I was using you to spend time with him so that I wouldn’t have to. As he gets older, I get more worried that I can’t do this alone. I can’t worry about that anymore.”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t help out now and then.”

“It does,” she said. “You’re not his father.”

“But this isn’t fair to him.”

“It’s not fair for him if you stick around this way,” she said. “This is something I mismanaged. Let’s change the subject.”

“There’s nothing to change it to.”

“Well, then we’re done here.”

William paid, desperately, as Karla stayed at the table. Her tears were already over. He walked her out to her car, and she got into the driver’s seat and put on her sunglasses. “You know you’ll have to forgive me,” he said.

“It’s not about me,” she said. “Also, you know that thing you did where you told Chris you knew his father?”

“Yes?”

She shook her head and said nothing, with an expression that made it look like there was nothing more to say.

At home, William went into the junk room and looked through pictures of Lareaux’s arraignment. One of them had been taken as Lareaux stepped out of his car in front of the courthouse. All the drama was in the right half of the frame, while the left was clotted with a disorganized mass of courthouse visitors, some fixed on the source of the tumult, others occupied with other business. At the leftmost edge of the photo, William spotted himself, with his arm around Christopher, coming through the fringe of the crowd. He printed a copy of the picture, folded it up, and put it at the bottom of the drawer of his bedside table.