Free Edge by Michael Cadnum Page B

wondered if I should bother him as he fussed with the folds of the robe.
    â€œZachary Madison,” he said, instead of hello.
    Do you call a detective mister? I wondered. “My dad is okay,” I said.
    â€œI was just inside,” he said, not smiling but delivering something with his bearing, a kindliness he could not have communicated with words. He tore two sheets from a roll of paper towels, one sheet after another, carefully.
    â€œYou’re a judge,” I said, nodding toward the robe under its One Hour Martinizing plastic. I meant it as a joke, but then I thought: I don’t know anything about this man.
    â€œChurch,” he said. My expression prompted him to add, “I sing in the choir.”
    I absorbed this information as though it mattered very much to me, and in a way it did. The car was a metallic blue, about the same color as my Honda, with a residue of car wax etched in around the Camry . The windows were smoke gray, the interior a mystery. A bumper sticker had been removed, leaving a ghost, a smidgen of glue. As I watched, the detective sprayed Windex on a bird dropping on the roof.
    â€œI forgot it was Sunday,” I said. Although my family had rarely gone to church, I was aware of religion as an activity, and I was familiar with Sunday as a day that began and ended the week, an island of relative stillness. We went to Glide Memorial in San Francisco once to hear an ex-mayor give a talk about famine in Eritrea, and one of my mother’s few friends was a thin, athletic woman who as a substitute organist played Bach energetically, mangling most of the other hymns.
    â€œMy wife convinced me to take it up,” he said. I was expected to say something about myself, what kind of music I liked, but instead I said, “You won’t be working today.”
    His posture was that of a man who would be hard to knock down, his feet spread just wide enough, his body balanced squarely. He let the Windex soak into a second curlicue of bird turd for a few moments, and then he wiped it. I was caught up in watching how careful he was. Spit works, too, I wanted to tell him. It’s the enzymes in human saliva. Great for dissolving bug scabs, anything.
    Detective Unruh took some pleasure in having an audience. “I usually work with a partner,” he said. “But she fell off a balcony.”
    â€œChasing a perpetrator,” I said, not asking, trying to get him to tell more.
    â€œTermites and dry rot,” he said. “Old Victorian three story, party time. She has herself a herniated disk and two broken legs. They are using a new improvement in surgical pins, gold electroplate. It’ll be a while before she runs wind sprints again.”
    â€œThat’s too bad,” I said.
    My words surprised him a little. I was just being polite, but I was serious, too. People look at me like this sometimes, the men friendly and measuring, the women ready to flirt. People tend to like me. He was getting ready to tell me something, the words ready in his mouth.
    â€œWe have a witness,” he said.
    I looked at him like someone stalling, trying to remember how to spell and define hypotenuse . But maybe it was the faintly religious weight to the word, like people who witness for Jesus, that confused me.
    He said, “A man who saw the shooting take place.”
    â€œWho?” I asked before I could think. I didn’t understand why it troubled me that someone had seen it happen, but it did, my dad suddenly helpless in broad daylight.
    â€œA merchant,” said the detective.
    The word sounded like something out of another century, caravans and camels, sacks of spices from the East.
    â€œHe came forward and said he saw it from beginning to end.” Everything the detective was saying sounded unreal and archaic. Came forward .
    â€œThere was a line-up,” I said, feeling far beyond my own personal experience.
    â€œWe use a line-up sometimes,” he said,