Reed Coleman - Empty ever after

“No big deal in that, right? Shit, in Janus alone, how many guys are out there with size nine running shoes?”

“You don’t understand, Mr. Prager. These weren’t just any men’s size nine running shoes.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“These were Shinjo Olympians.”

“Shinjos? I’ve never heard of-”

“-Shinjos. That’s right.” He cut me off. “No one has. Not no one, very few people have. That’s because they stopped making the Olympians model in 1976 and the company went out of business is 1987.”

“Thank you, deputy.”

I about-faced. Robby said something to me, but the blood pounding in my ears was too loud for me to hear him. I sat in my front seat for what seemed like hours. The next thing I was fully conscious of was unlocking the door to my condo.

The sun filled my rearview as I drove along the Belt Parkway to the Gowanus. This part of the Belt could be beautiful, especially in early morning. From Bay Parkway west, the roadway swooped along the shoreline and you could race with container or cruise ships sailing beneath the Verrazano and into the hungry mouth of New York Harbor. The deep blue of the water could seem almost structural and not a trick of light. In the orange of the sun the patches of rust on the skin of the gray bridge came alive. Not today. Today I was blind to beauty, to nearly everything, but I had made this drive so often I could do it in a coma.

Aaron and I owned four stores. City On The Vine near the American Museum of Natural History was our first. Two years ago we ventured into the wilds of New Jersey and opened Que Shiraz in Marlboro. Red, White and You was our big volume location on Long Island. But our second store, Bordeaux In Brooklyn on Montague Street in the Heights, was closest to my house and to my heart. I’d run the store for years and even after I turned it over to a new manager, it was my base of operations. It was also less than three blocks away from the offices of Prager amp; Melendez Investigations, Inc. That was no accident. I had to go into the store, but I had other business first.

When I got off the elevator at 4 °Court, I found Devo doing yoga in the hallway outside our office door. Carmella and I picked 4 °Court Street for practical reasons. Besides its proximity to the State Supreme Court Building and the Brooklyn Tombs, it was filled to the brim with law firms. Funny how cops have no use for lawyers until they’re off the job and looking for work. Then it’s no longer about them having use for lawyers, but lawyers having use for them. And if you are going to feed off their scraps, you better have a good seat at the trough. 4 °Court was front row, ringside, orchestra. Well over half the jobs we worked were farmed to us by lawyers or other investigative firms that shared our address.

Devereaux Okum-Devo-was a thin black blade of grass with a shaved head, soft voice, vaguely feminine features, and a shaman’s eyes. He was in his early thirties and claimed he came from down South somewhere, but would never say exactly where. Frankly, he was more off-worldly than out-of-state. He had that’70s David Bowie mojo working. It was probably foolish, but Carmella and I never pressed him too hard on his background.

What we knew about him was that he was a vegan with a sweet disposition and formal manners who was great at what he did and worked harder at it than anyone else in the firm. Devo did gadgets. Gadgets, that’s what modern investigations were all about. From tracking devices to cameras to computers, he had it covered. We paid him a big salary and had several times offered to get him licensed, even to give him a piece of the business. He had so far resisted our offers. He seemed content. I had known what that was like once, being content.

“Hey, Devo.”

He didn’t say anything, slowly letting out a deep breath, prayerfully pressing his palms together in front of him, a few inches from his chest. He turned to me, removing a sleek, white metallic box from his shirt pocket.

“Good morning, Moe.”

“What’s that?”

“This,” he said, removing the earphones, “is the coming revolution.”

“Looks like a cigarette case, not a revolution.”

“It’s an Apple product that won’t be out for another few months yet.”

I didn’t bother asking where or how he’d gotten hold of it. He was always getting things logic and the law dictated he shouldn’t have.

“What does it do, tune your circadian rhythms and access the internet?”

“It stores and plays music.”

“It plays music, that’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“How much did it cost?”

That elicited a sheepish smile.

“Okay, I’ll bite. How much will it cost regular schmos like me?”

“Around four hundred bucks,” he said.

“Just to play music.”

“Just to play music,” he repeated.

“Some revolution. They won’t be able to give those things away.”

“We’ll see.”

I had called Devo before hitting the Dewar’s the night before. I wanted him to come in early specifically to discuss my dead brother-in-law’s voice mail message from the great beyond. Until I could get a copy of it-and I meant to get a copy-I wanted to have some idea of what I was dealing with. When we sat down in my office, I described as closely as I could what I had heard on Katy’s machine. I tried to mimic the intonation of the voice, the timing involved in the dialogue, etc. Devo didn’t hesitate to ask the million dollar question.

“Was it Patrick’s voice?”

“He’s dead.”

“Moe, I did not ask if it was actually him calling. I asked if it was his voice. Those are two very different things.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We spoke only once, very briefly, but Katy seemed pretty convinced. Katy would know her brother’s voice.”

Devo was unpersuaded. “She has not heard his voice in twenty years.”

“Twenty-two plus, but who’s counting? I don’t think that matters. I haven’t heard my mom’s voice in longer than that and I’d recognize it.”

“Possibly. I think it is situationally dependent, Moe, but let us come back to that in a moment. First, tell me if there was anything obviously mechanical about the voice. Was it robotic? Did it sound spliced? Were there inappropriate pauses? Was it scratchy like an old vinyl recording? Was there any background noise?”

“No, there was nothing like that. It sounded pretty much like I did it for you before. Why? Does that mean it wasn’t doctored?”

“No, not at all. With a reasonable laptop and software you can download from the internet, you can make sound sit up and beg or fetch the newspaper. There would be no limit to what a person or persons with more formidable resources could do. I simply wanted to make certain that we are not dealing with pranksters or rank amateurs.”

“Okay, rank amateurs and pranksters eliminated.”

“Did the voice sound conversational?”

“See, Devo, that’s harder to answer. There were so few words exchanged and Katy was so emotional… and not for nothing, but what were you talking about before when you said recognition was situationally dependent?”

“Simply that the events of Sunday sensitized Katy for the call on Monday. The caller might just as easily have phoned late Saturday night before the desecrations were spotted, but he didn’t. Why do you suppose that is?”

“Because Katy had to be primed to recognize the voice. The stuff at the gravesite played with her head. It got to those last shreds of hope and denial we hide deep inside.”

Devo smiled a smile at me that made me feel like an apt pupil. Maybe he’d put a gold star next to my name.

“Do you have enough to make an educated guess about whether it was someone imitating Patrick’s voice or some digital wizardry?” I asked.