Golden State by Ben Winters

Author:Ben Winters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2019-01-21T16:00:00+00:00

The rest is a fog of red, of shapes rushing within the fog. A swell of noise from outside on Grand Avenue, a tumble of shouting and footfalls and howling sirens.

Me and Paige are outside chambers, waiting as instructed by a regular policeman with his sleeves rolled up. We are seated on a hard-backed bench, side by side.

In my mind, the judge vomits blood and pinwheels down toward the carpet, and then again, and again. Reality cued and re-cued.

He is dying and he is in the kitchen at a party in Silver Lake, leaning in the doorframe after I have gone, sharing a joke with my wife. Ex-wife.

The courtroom has been emptied of litigants and lawyers, and they bustle about in the hallway, curious, reluctant to leave such excitement.

I am slumped, hollow, staring straight ahead. There is a pane of frosted glass inset in the dead center of the chamber door, and I stare at the glass, finding abstracted patterns.

This is what the world is, I’m thinking as the busy incident aftermath rushes around me, police and ambulance personnel, capture teams, and archivists. Life is one explosion after another, the Earth opening up again and again, sending out gouts of loose dirt, covering us up.

I am exhausted, but Aysa does not stop. She can’t. Aysa has her Day Book out and she has the judge’s blood-splattered Night Book out too, between us on the bench. She’s organizing her thoughts, trying to piece together what we have learned. Aysa has already apologized for letting herself be distracted by the verdict on Ms. Wells; apologized and then moved swiftly on. Aysa focuses on the work. Aysa carries on, riffling through her notes undeterred and undeterrable.

This is even though she, like me, is speckled with blood, dark droplets crusting on her forehead and on her neck. Even though we sit but feet from where his body still lies, awaiting the attentions of the regular police, of the medical examiner, the Record officers who are angling around with their handhelds and their mics, forging this remarkable event into history. The coroners who will, when it’s all over, bear him away.

We’ve already been interviewed, of course, and we’ll be interviewed again.

We are pursuing an anomalous death.

The judge may or may not have had relevant information…

We may never know…

“Okay, so,” says Aysa, flipping through her notes, forward and back, forward and back. “Here is what I don’t get. So the man is married. Okay. So he’s—he’s unfaithful.” She glances at me, a fleeting embarrassed wince. “He has affairs. Multiple affairs. Okay. So—but—”

I finish the thought, my voice empty and toneless. “But so what.”

“Right!” She nods slowly, twice. “Exactly.” A new cluster of cops swoops by, officious, belts jangling with their radios, a couple of boom ops close behind them.

“So what was the big risk here?” says Aysa. “Worst case scenario, he loses his job. Right?”

I shrug. “Maybe.”

“And maybe she would lose her job? Tester, I mean.”

I shrug again.

“But still, to—” She shakes her head. “To drink poison.

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