Free Silver Lake by Peter Gadol

was adorable as a little boy and he always seemed to be caught in mid-sentence. The detective herself had to chuckle at the shot of Tom and his teddy bear wearing matching lederhosen. Here was Tom in tennis whites clutching a racket. Tom by a lake, hair wet, a towel around his shoulders, lips blue. Tom as a teenager in the passenger seat of a convertible, arm over the side, too cool for school. Always speaking something and always, it seemed to Robbie, in a good mood.
    “Did Mr. Field mention anything that might have been causing him extra aggravation?” the detective asked.
    Robbie was tearing up.
    “Did he seem at all desperate?”
    What kind of lonely, Robbie thought. He couldn’t speak, and perhaps the detective knew not to push him. She gathered the photographs back in the envelope and put away the sketch book. She asked if she could step out to the patio for a brief moment to look at something again, and Robbie neither nodded nor shook his head no, but the detective went out back anyway.
    He was drenched with maudlin thoughts about how Tom’s death took time to stage: time to consider the drop, to tie the rope to the tree, to knot the rope and slip it over his neck. His death took thought, it took preparation, maybe for days, maybe for years. However, the police had not found a suicide note and they were never going to find anything resembling one, no matter how hard they searched. The dead man’s motive would remain hazy, and it was possible Tom was only messing around, inebriate, testing himself in a game of auto-brinkmanship. Also possible, he wanted to die, although Robbie could not accept this. It didn’t seem right, it didn’t fit.
    He looked out at the patio, where Detective Michaels appeared to have some interest in the wooden fence. With the detective occupied, Robbie pulled back the couch cushion and removed the black object, which was neither a wallet nor a credit card case. It was a palm-sized, gilt-edged address book. On the first page of the address book, in a somewhat younger hand but in the same firm small caps with which he’d signed his drawings, Tom had written his name. The little book must have fallen out of his pocket when he started to pull off his jeans or at some other point Saturday night.
    The pages were soft, worn by a decade of thumbing, and Robbie noted that nearly all of the entries had been struck through with a hard stroke of ink or lead, all of the names and numbers crossed out save only a few.
    The detective on the patio glanced up at the tree. She looked out toward the Reservoir, and then back at the house.
    Later, if he was going to be honest about it, Robbie would have to admit that his true adultery began here, because it was with a quickened heart and the sudden, switched-on heat of infidelity that, as Detective Michaels came back inside the house, Robbie shoved Tom’s little address book between the couch cushions, stood, and saw the detective to the door.
    • • •
    H E WAITED UNTIL THE NEXT MORNING when he was alone again in the house, Carlo having returned to the office. This time Robbie was glad to have him gone. The woman who answered the phone sounded like she’d been interrupted and Robbie identified himself as a friend of Tom’s. He was asked to hold a moment.
    He held a full minute before a decidedly older woman came on the line and said, “Yes.”
    “Mrs. Field,” Robbie said.
    “Yes.”
    “I’m Rob Voight. A friend of Tom’s. Calling from Los Angeles.”
    “Oh. Yes,” Tom’s grandmother said. “Hello.”
    “I wanted to call and say how sorry I am for your loss.”
    “Yes. Thank you, yes.”
    “I don’t know what the police told you—”
    “They told me, yes.”
    Tom’s grandmother sounded as though she were holding the phone at some distance from her face. She may not have been holding the phone for herself at all. Her breathing was arduous, her voice feeble.
    “I wanted to say I’m sorry,” Robbie said again.
    “Yes. Well. Tommy was