Page 35 of Take the Fall
“And one day this is the best story you’ve got,” I said. “Years out. Some kid on your knee who thinks you’ve always been boring. You don’t tell them the bad files. You tell them about the winter they benched you and the department sent you across the city to negotiate the safe return of a garden gnome named Gnorman, and you’ll make it the funniest thing they ever heard. But you have to actually go and do it first. You can’t dine out for thirty years on a case you walked away from.”
He looked at me a beat too long. Whatever was on my face, I didn’t get there in time to take it back.
“That is appalling,” he said. “That is emotionally manipulative and beneath you and it is working, which is worse.” He breathed out, long and slow. “Fine.Fine.Fucking Gnorman. Fine.”
He squared the three notes in his hands. That was how I knew. He could sayI’m leavingall afternoon, but the second his hands went back to the evidence, he was mine, and Almeida’s, and the building’s, until the thing was solved.
“I’m cracking it inside the hour,” he said, “and then I am never speaking of it again as long as I live.”
He would speak of nothing else for a year. I didn’t tell him that either.
“Walk me through it,” I said.
And just like that, the sulk fell off him like a coat, and the detective stepped out from underneath. He turned to the corkboard over the radiator and stopped in front of it like a scholar arriving at the Rosetta Stone.
“Because this,” he said, low and reverent, “is where the bodies are buried.”
It was notices. Only notices. I read them over his shoulder, because he plainly wasn’t going anywhere.
WHOEVER keeps putting COFFEE GROUNDS in the GREEN bin: grounds are COMPOST. We have been over this. We have been over this more than ONCE.
The laundry room is not a personal storage facility. Items left over 24 hours will be donated. This is a FINAL notice.Underneath, in a different pen, a second hand had added, smaller:it is not.
Please do not prop the front door for your delivery people. We are a home, not a thoroughfare.
“Three takes, three returns, a note each time,” Carlson said, brisk now, tapping Mr. Almeida’s little stack against his knuckles. “Start with what it isn’t. It isn’t a thief. A thief keeps the thing. This one gives it back, every time, then takes it again, so there’s a reason to leave the next note. The gnome’s not the point. Thenote’sthe point. The stealing is just how he gets you to read it.”
“All right.”
“Now. Where does Almeida keep finding them. Pinned here.” He touched the cork. “Inside. The lobby board, not stuck to the front step. So he’s got the inside of this building. Resident, or aresident’s key, or patient enough to wait by the door and slip in behind somebody’s groceries.” He held one of the gnome notes up beside the green-bin notice, then the laundry one, then the thoroughfare one. “And listen to the voice. The capitals. Thewe have been over this.The wounded, governessy, I’m-not-angry-I’m-disappointed of the whole production. Same heart on every one of these. Somebody who’s been writing into this building for years, one final notice at a time, and getting nowhere, and has finally escalated to hostage-taking because the notices stopped working.”
“You got all that off a corkboard.”
“I got atypeoff a corkboard. A type is most of the way to a man.” He ran his eyes down the wall of brass mailboxes, the numbers, and caught on one without meaning to, the way mine had the second we walked in. 402. Ours. His and mine, on a little brass door the size of a paperback, in a warm lobby that smelled of someone else’s dinner.
He didn’t say anything about it. Neither did I. But he stood a half-second too long in front of that wall with a ridiculous note in his hand, and the afternoon went quiet around us, and I thought about all the ways a man can run out of ordinary ways to say a thing, and I kept every one of them behind my teeth.
“Right,” he said, briskness coming back over him like a man pulling himself up off a step. “The scene. Come and see where they took him from.”
We went back out into the cold, and he stood at the edge of the garden bed with his hands in his coat pockets and his face gone solemn, and I came and stood beside him and looked at what we had come to look at.
It was a hole. A small, gnome-shaped absence in the dirt.
“There,” Carlson said, low.
“It’s a hole.”
“It’s a negative space, Hawley. It’s the shape of the thing that’s missing.” He crouched, one knee not quite to the cold dirt, and photographed it from three angles like it owed him answers. “See the edges. Clean. He wasn’t yanked, he was lifted, careful, two hands. You don’t take care with a thing you mean to wreck.” He straightened, brushing the cold off his palms. “Whoever’s got Gnorman loves Gnorman. Almeida said that the gnome never had a scratch when returned. Which fits. You don’t write three notes about a gnome you’re indifferent to.”
He was lit all the way through now. The gray gone from under his eyes, or papered over, the whole long line of him bent toward a hole in the dirt like it was the most interesting thing in Toronto, and God help me it was, because he was looking at it.
I have watched a lot of people work. It is the one thing I am genuinely good at, the watching, and I have stood in a hundred rooms and clocked who was lying and who was scared and who was about to run. I had never once, in eight years, watched a person do the thing they were built for and felt it land in my own chest like a hand. He read that ridiculous garden bed the way he read a grieving widow or a cornered kid, with the whole of his attention and none of it spent on himself, and I understood, standing in the cold being no use whatsoever, that his father had been wrong about him in every particular, and that I would have stood there in the wind all afternoon to keep watching him be right.
“You’ve gone quiet,” he said, not looking up.
“You’re monologuing at a flower bed. I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“It’s a crime scene.”
