karen > Books: bookriot-read-harder-challenge-2018‎ (21)

”Josephine is like no one else I’ve ever known. She’s smart and independent. Caring. When I’m with her everything just feels…right.” He was smiling, but then heaved a sigh. “I hope we can finish up this case before we get married.”

“Why is that?” Nita wondered aloud.

“Because I worry that by working at the hotel, she may be in danger the closer we get to this Sin Sombra character. As much as I want to catch him, I can’t let my work put her in jeopardy.

People are tied together in one way or another. Most men want to believe we are alone and dependent upon ourselves. But I had learned long ago life is like one big knot around your neck from the day you are born. Everyone in the world is tugging on their separate ends.

The trick is learning how to live without having the life choked from you.

Thermopylae. Masada. Agincourt.
And now, Haxan, New Mexico.
We go where we’re sent.
We have names and we stand
against that which must be faced.
Through a sea of time and dust,
in places that might never be,
or can’t become until something is set right,
there are people destined to travel. Forever.
I am one.

The howls sounded like they were circling Haxan in an ever-moving ring, closing in. It gave you the crawlies.

Without thinking, I rested my hand on my gun.

It was then the howling stopped, and an uneasy silence filled the night air.

"Sir. Please, sir."

Inspector Bacon turned. Two boys had arrived, breathless, on bicycles. Their faces were full of eager pleading.

"Please, sir, can we see the body?"

"No, you can't," said Inspector Bacon.

"Oh, sir, please sir. You never know. We might know who she was. Oh, please, sir, do be a sport. It's not fair. Here's a murder, right in our own barn. It's the sort of chance that might never happen again. Do be a sport, sir."

...

"Take 'em in, Sanders," said Inspector Bacon to the constable who was standing by the barn door. "One's only young once!"

One evening in late November Robert came home a bit shaken. There were some etchings for sale at Brentano’s. Among them was a print pulled from an original plate from America: A Prophecy, watermarked with Blake’s monogram. He had taken it from its portfolio, sliding it down his pants leg. Robert was not one to steal; he hadn’t the nervous system for theft. He did it on impulse because of our mutual love of Blake. But toward the end of the day he lost courage. He imagined they were on to him and ducked into the bathroom, slid it out of his trousers, shredded it, and flushed it down the toilet.

I noticed his hands were shaking as he told me. It had been raining and droplets trickled down from his thick curls. He had on a white shirt, damp and sodden against his skin. Like Jean Genet, Robert was a terrible thief. Genet was caught and imprisoned for stealing rare volumes of Proust and rolls of silk from a shirt maker. Aesthetic thieves. I imagined his sense of horror and triumph as bits of Blake swirled into the sewers of New York City.

We looked down at our hands, each holding on to the other. We took a deep breath, accepting our complicity, not in theft, but in the destruction of a work of art.

“At least they’ll never get it,” he said.

“Who are they?” I asked.

“Anyone who isn’t us,” he answered.

The most frustrating part of being stuck in the system were the penalties it seemed I received for improving my life. On a couple of occasions, my income pushed me over the limit by a few dollars, I'd lose hundreds of dollars in benefits. Due to my self-employment, I had to report my income every few months. Earning $50 extra could make my co-pay at day care go up by the same amount. Sometimes it meant losing my childcare grant altogether. There was no incentive or opportunity to save money. The system kept me locked down, scraping the bottom of the barrel, and without a plan to climb out of it.

I thought of how many times the police, firemen, and paramedics had come to our building in the last couple of months; of the random checks to make sure living spaces were kept clean or to make sure broken-down cars in the parking lot had been repaired; to patrol us so that we weren’t doing the awful things they expected poor people to do, like allowing the laundry or garbage to pile up, when really, we lacked physical energy and resources from working jobs no one else wanted to do. We were expected to live off minimum wage, to work several jobs at varying hours, to afford basic needs while fighting for safe places to leave our children. Somehow nobody saw the work; they only saw the results of living a life that constantly crushed you with its impossibility.

Even though I really needed it, I stopped using WIC checks for milk, cheese, eggs, and peanut butter — I never seemed to get the right size, brand, or color of eggs, the correct type of juice, or the specific number of ounces of cereal anyway. Each coupon had such specific requirements in what it could be used for, and I held my breath when the cashier rang them up. I always screwed up in some way and caused a holdup in the line. Maybe others did the same, since cashiers grew visibly annoyed whenever they saw one of those large WIC coupons on the conveyor belt. Once, after massive amounts of miscommunication with the cashier, an older couple started huffing and shaking their heads at me.

My caseworker at the WIC office even prepared me for it. The program had recently downgraded their qualifying milk from organic to non-organic, leaving me with a missing chunk in my food budget I couldn’t afford to make up. If at all possible, I tried to give Mia only organic whole milk. Non-organic, 2 percent milk might as well have been white-colored water to me, packed with sugar, salt, antibiotics, and hormones. These coupons were my last chance for a while to offer her the one organic food she ingested (besides her boxes of Annie’s macaroni and cheese).

When I’d scoffed at losing the benefit to purchase organic whole milk, my caseworker nodded and sighed. “We just don’t have the funding for it anymore,” she’d told me. I somewhat understood, since a half gallon had a price tag of nearly four dollars. “The obesity rates are going up in children,” she added, “and this is a program focused on providing the best nutrition.”

“They don’t realize that skim milk is full of sugar?” I asked, allowing Mia to climb out of my lap so she could play with the toys in the corner.

“They’re also adding ten dollars for produce!” she added brightly, ignoring my grumpy attitude. “You can purchase any produce you want, except potatoes.”

“Why not potatoes?” I thought of the large batches of mashed potatoes I made to supplement my diet.

“People tend to fry them or add lots of butter,” she said, looking a little confused herself. “You can get sweet potatoes, though!” She explained I’d have to purchase exactly ten dollars’ worth or less, and I wouldn’t be able to go over, or the check wouldn’t work. I wouldn’t get any change if the produce I selected rang in under ten dollars. The coupons didn’t have any real monetary value.

That day at the store, with it being the last month of organic milk, I wanted every bit I could get.

“Your milk isn’t a WIC item,” the cashier said again. “It won’t ring up that way.” She started to turn to the young man bagging our other groceries and sighed. I knew she was going to tell him to go run and get the right kind of milk. It happened to me with the eggs all the time.

My checks weren’t expired, but the store had already updated their system. Normally, I would have cowered, taken the non-organic milk, and run out, especially with two old people shaking their heads in annoyance. I glanced at them again and caught the man standing with his arms crossed and head tilted, eyeing my pants with holes in the knees. My shoes were getting holes in the toes. He loudly sighed again.

I asked to speak to the manager. The cashier’s eyebrows shot up as she shrugged her shoulders and put up her hands in front of me, like I’d pulled out a gun and ordered her to give me all her money.

“Sure,” she said, evenly and coolly; the voice of a customer service representative faced with an unruly shopper. “I’ll get the manager for you.”

As he walked over, I could see his flustered employee following behind him, red-faced and gesturing wildly, even pointing at me, to explain her side of the story. He immediately apologized and overrode the cash register. Then he rang up my organic whole milk as a WIC item, bagged it, and told me to have a wonderful day.

As I pushed my cart away, my hands still shaking, the old man nodded towards my groceries and said, “You’re welcome!”

I grew infuriated. You’re welcome for what?” I wanted to yell back at him. That he’d waited so impatiently, huffing and grumbling to his wife? It couldn’t have been that. It was that I was obviously poor, and shopping in the middle of the day, pointedly not at work. He didn’t know I had to take an afternoon off for the WIC appointment, missing $40 in wages, where they had to weigh both Mia and me. We left with a booklet of coupons that supplemented about the same as those lost wages, but not the disgruntled client whom I’d had to reschedule, who might, if I ever needed to reschedule again, go with a different cleaner, because my work was that disposable. But what he saw was that those coupons were paid for by government money, the money he’d personally contributed to with the taxes he’d paid. To him, he might as well have personally bought the fancy milk I insisted on, but I was obviously poor so I didn’t deserve it.

”Here’s what you should have been told, and told again, from the day you were born: of all Canista’s cubs, Fox has suffered the most from the cruelty of the furless. Dog longs, more than anything, to fit in. He thrived in the Graylands, digging a comfortable place for himself as a servant to the furless. He was fed and cared for, but there were terms to his acceptance. He would live as a prisoner, tethered at the end of a rope. Soon he was so well fed on the spoils of then furless that he forgot all memory of his time in the wild, and he lacked the desire to free himself. He lived in a pack with the furless as his leader. His own will withered like a plant without water.

“Wolf was an ancient and noble creature, the largest and fiercest cub of Canista. He would not be controlled by the furless. He ran to the Snowlands, the frozen realms beyond their reach, where he howled to his ancestors to save him. But in his eagerness to be free, he found himself in a land so brutal that he needed the help of his enemies to stay alive, for a lone wolf cannot feed his cubs. In time, fights emerged between the wolves, battles for the best of the kill, for the warmest place to sleep. The strongest claimed that they were kings and that weaker wolves were their slaves. A system of control emerged, more brutal and no less binding than the furless’s imprisonment of Dog. In the end, despite his size and power, Wolf cowered before the spirits and bowed to the rule of the pack. Confused and superstitious, he forgot how to survive alone.”

[…]

Siffrin went on. “Only Fox had the courage to live without rules, without the hierarchies of others - to hunt and survive in freedom and peace. For while Wolf and Dog are so brutalized that they will gladly kill their own kind, Fox avoids conflict at all cost. She does not yearn to control others - only to live by her own wits. She does not scare or torture her prey, like a cat - she does not gain pleasure from the chase. For that, she is distrusted by her brutish cousins, the other sons and daughters of Canista. For her independence, she is tormented by the furless. The Graylands are haunted by snatchers, who round up foxes and take them away. Even in the Wildlands the furless hunt us, using dogs and poison to kill us. They shoot us with metal sticks and gas our dens. They give us no peace.”

I love reading true crime, but I’ve always been aware of the fact that, as a reader, I am actively choosing to be a consumer of someone else’s tragedy. So like any responsible consumer, I try to be careful in the choices I make. I read only the best: writers who are dogged, insightful, and humane.

It was inevitable that I would find Michelle.

I’ve always thought the least appreciated aspect of a great true-crime writer is humanity. Michelle McNamara had an uncanny ability to get into the minds of not just the killers but the cops who hunted them, the victims they destroyed, and the trail of grieving relatives left behind.

He was brazen. Twice he entered homes, pressing on undeterred when he knew victims had spotted him and were frantically dialing the police. Children didn’t bother him. He never hurt them physically, but he would tie up the older ones and put them in another room. He put Jane’s toddler son on the bedroom floor during the attack. The boy fell asleep. When he awoke, he peered over the bed. The EAR had left. His mother lay bound in strips of torn towels and was gagged with a washcloth. He mistook the ligatures for bandages.

“Is the doctor gone?” he whispered.

It was a little after four a.m. when the first officer entered the opened rear patio door, hesitantly making his way toward the woman calling out to him. She lay face down on her living room floor, naked, her wrists and ankles tied behind her with shoelaces. A ski-masked stranger had just spent an hour and a half terrorizing Fiona and her husband. He brutally raped her. Fiona was five two, 110 pounds - a wisp of a woman. She was also a native Sacramentan, in possession of a dry, matter-of-fact manner, a clear-eyed resilience that belied her petite size.

“Well, I guess the East Area Rapist is the South Area Rapist now,” she said.

After spending enough hours with them, I’ve noticed a few things about detectives. They all smell vaguely of soap. I’ve never met a detective with greasy hair. They excel at eye contact and have enviable posture. Irony is never their go-to tone. Wordplay makes them uneasy. The good ones create long conversational vacuums that you reflexively fill, an interrogation strategy that proved to me through my own regrettable prattle how easily confessions can be elicited. They lack facial elasticity; or rather, they contain it. I’ve never met a detective who pulled a face. They don’t recoil or go wide-eyed. I’m a face maker. I married a comedian. Many of my friends are in show business. I’m constantly surrounded by big expressions, which is why I immediately noticed the lack of them in detectives. They maintain a pleasant but vigorous blankness that I admire. I’ve tried to imitate it, but I can’t. I came to recognize subtle but discernible shifts in the blankness - a narrowing of the eyes, a jaw squeeze, usually in response to hearing a theory they’ve long since eliminated. A veil comes down. But they’ll never tip their hand. They’ll never tell you, “We already looked into that angle ages ago.” Instead they’ll just absorb it and leave you with a polite “Huh.”

In their reserve and in virtually every other way, detectives differ from show-biz folks. Detectives listen. They’re getting a read. Entertainers get a read only to gauge their influence on a room. Detectives deal in concrete tasks. I once spent an hour listening to an actress friend analyze a three-line text that hurt her feelings. Eventually I’ll see the cracks in a detective’s veneer, but in the beginning their company is an unexpected relief, like fleeing a moodily lit cast party loud with competitive chatter and joining a meeting of determined Eagle Scouts awaiting their next challenge. I wasn’t a native in the land of the literal-minded, but I enjoyed my time there.

"Are you the person that found the body? Tell me that you aren't."

"I did find the body. Also, I had sort of a reaction to it, and I may have, you know, thrown up a tiny amount in there."

"I've been in there," said Maddocks.

"Maybe it was more of a moderate amount."

"There are gallons of vomit on the floor."

"I was surprised!"

"Hi, everyone! Guess where I am now?"

Murdered, said Twitch chat. Is it murdered?

"It's not murdered," I told them.

"Buried alive," someone guessed. "Like in that old Twilight Zone episode."

"That was the Outer Limits," said another Twitch chatter, and then a flame war began, as it obviously would, given that we were on the Internet.

…the secular nature of small-town Dutch communities and the down-to-earthness of its people. If a sane person sees a disfigured seventeenth-century witch appear in a corner of the living room, he runs for his life. If a Dutch person sees a disfigured seventeenth-century witch appear in a corner of the living room, he hangs a dishcloth over her face, sits on the couch, and reads the paper.

”Well, you can get a long way if you keep in mind that the Founding Fathers Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed this is a Christian country, established on Christian principles, and that’s how our laws are framed.”

Unfortunate that Toreth’s knowledge of Christianity was more or less limited to expressing feelings like, “Jesus fucking Christ, this case is a pain in the arse.”

”Do you know the basic principle of coercive interrogation?” Toreth asked.

“Hurting people?” Grimm suggested.

Toreth laughed. “No, that’s just an option. Interrogation is about changing priorities. Making people value the things that you control. When someone will swap the information you want for five minutes’ rest, or a sip of water, then you win.”

”Investigator, 343 is an enormously profitable brand. We have lifestyle strategies in place for all our product, and that includes their closedown. Ideally, we shift fanbase to another product within our stable, at least until they move out of our demographic. 343 had good long-term projections, but even another year or two would let us complete their cycle in a controlled way, with better fan retention.”