It was fairly massive, and hard to take in all at once, especially given how many dozens of pages there were with giant Xs through the entire text: but I did my best; the margins of each page, including the ones that were evidently being redacted, had been crammed to bursting with handwritten notes in tiny script, which I was able to read only with careful effort. These notes were often peppered with question marks, sprouting up like dandelions on either side of the page: S family leaves immediately or later? D questioned and released? A directly involved? AG returns call or called back? Answering tapes in whose custody since ’86? MH knows? EG body disposition? MG disposition? DH disposition? SH disposition? AW disposition? AR disposition?
It all looked like somebody’s personal project, the sort of thing that gets exhumed from someone’s effects after they die and everybody’s surprised: I didn’t know he was working on anything, he never talked about anything of the sort, it must have been a private project or something. My errand, as I saw it, was to retrieve the story from the center of all this, which was, as far as I could see, either that a young person named Siraj had taken advantage of a disorganized situation to commit at least two murders, for which he had never been charged; or, just as possibly, that a group of teenagers squatting a former adult bookstore had conspired to murder the owner of the property and a developer trying to buy it, and had gotten away with it.
But the book seemed to be ducking the question entirely, which, to put it mildly, makes for odd reading in the field of true crime. Red herrings are common, of course—writers will milk a bad lead for fifty pages before it fizzles out. But this wasn’t that. Of the two stories it seemed to be telling, the “Alex killed two people and left town” one felt truest to me, but Derrick seemed a likelier suspect: he had skin in the game, and would have been the one most personally insulted by the sale. The damage visited upon the victims’ bodies felt like the mark of a person with a real grievance. I liked Derrick better than Alex for that. There was also Seth: I knew from my own past that kids like Seth were often placed on a pharmaceutical cocktail at an early age, and that they learned to tweak the recipe depending on the effects they preferred. I could believe, easily, in Seth defending his home away from home with extreme force. Castle doctrine. It appeals to unexamined but deeply held instincts.
The manuscript broke off abruptly, in the middle of a sentence; I searched to see if maybe there’d been pages out of order somewhere in the last chapter or two, but came up empty-handed, save for the stray documents that kept gumming up the works. Parking garage tickets, quarterly student evaluations, blurry printouts of police scanner transcripts.
Then I went upstairs and got on the Internet to see what other information was floating around out there about the case, reasoning that there had to be something; and of course there was more than something, and that’s when I called Gage.
7.
WELL, HE SAID, naturally that’s the thing, you can’t just come right out and say what happened, you have to save it or else there’s no book, there’s no story, there’s just some facts, and that’s not what people are looking for in a crime book, writers have several ideas about why people want to read crime but it doesn’t really matter why, is the thing, what matters is that people want to feel like they got, I don’t know, a full helping, their money’s worth, enough, you know, Wambaugh is great at this, or was, is he dead now, I can’t remember. Anyway, he makes you wait, I have my own style and I try to get a few more cards on the table a little earlier, but still you have to hold a few things back, you have to work up to the payoff so that when you get there it feels like there was some purpose in the journey, a satisfying twang when you finally release the string, a general settling in to the moment they’ve been waiting for. Some people actually write their endings first, just so they can get it out of the way, I’ve told people in workshops to try that if endings are giving them trouble, but that’s not me: I have to keep learning as I go, otherwise I’ll lose interest, generally speaking this has been a winning ticket for me, except that the whole experience of the last however many, Jesus, years, that’s obviously exposed some major weaknesses in the method, which I was pretty confident about before, I’m honestly in conflict about it now, because the whole situation is a little disastrous even if the near-term solution, “write a different book,” right, is staring me right in the face.
Right, I said, I mean, that’s my question, from what I’ve been able to dig up about the case I just, I’m not quite sure I get it, a lot of the details of the case in your manuscript I can’t find, you know, at all, I can’t find anybody else talking about them, I can’t—
Corroborate, he said, the word you’re looking for is “corroborate,” that’s what the copy editor asked me, we’d already agreed on the draft, my editor liked it well enough before it got to the copy editor’s desk, but once it landed there she called me up, Tania her name is, she’s incredibly bright, and she says, There’s a lot here.
Then she asked for some historical sources, and I had those, newspaper clippings, stuff about the property, my documentation was super-good on that stuff, maps, deeds of transfer, receipts, it’s great when you can find actual paper receipts, ledgers, I specialize in objects, they’re the tools of my trade, and I sent those along and she called again a week later and she said, This is all great, you’re the best; it feels good imagining she’s got other writers who make her job harder, and here I am with all my stuff in order, I think I luxuriated in that feeling for an extra few seconds because I knew it couldn’t last, and then she asked me whether anybody could corroborate the details about Siraj’s family.
Because nobody wants to get sued, Gage said. You understand? And they’ll come for the publishers before they come for the authors, because authors generally don’t have any money, but again, while that would be the usual-case problem, it wasn’t actually the problem at hand here, that problem was only just now about to break through the skin and start wriggling its little head around. That was really how it felt to me, you know, like a worm inside my book waiting to eat through the pages and leave me with nothing, you probably already know this, but that’s what a bookworm actually is, a type of maggot that eats paper or possibly is only looking for the paste that binds the pages together, I ran across something about it researching something several years before all this, but now I was thinking, there’s a third kind of bookworm, first there’s the one who reads a lot of books, and then there’s the one who eats through them, and then there’s the kind you hatch yourself when you write one, did I tell you Jesse Jenkins’s mother wrote to me while I was living at the place in Milpitas?
No, I said, you didn’t. Well, he said, she did, giant long letter, I don’t think I can really talk about it, pretty raw stuff, but it was weighing heavy on me, you can imagine, his mom, still alive after all that, still trying to push forward somehow, I mean all that was a long time ago for me, but then I started to wonder what actually constitutes a long time, I’m not sure a person’s ever actually old enough to ask himself that question, but I’d been asking it anyway and wondering, it was Jana’s letter that sort of opened up the amphora for me or something, do you follow me? No, I said, I don’t think so.
Oh, he said, well, think about an archaeological dig, right, imagine yourself finding an old jar that used to store perfume thousands of years before you were born, and then opening it up, and sniffing at the rim, and then you—
Oh, OK, sure, I said, I get it.
Yeah, that’s what it was like, I was in some kind of haze, there was this wet cloud that traveled with me, it had a very complex bouquet, he said, laughing a little. It was not a happy laugh. So when Tania called and asked me for corroboration, I don’t really remember what my original plan had been if it came to that, but I kind of got sloppy with her, and I said, Oh, I don’t think we have to worry too much about Siraj’s family, and she was like, Menlo Park, you said, wasn’t it, and I said, Sure, if that’s what I said, and that was kind of the butterfly on the branch with the snowflake that falls from it at the top of the mountain or whatever. The avalanche that crushes the village, you know, that kind of thing.
* * *