Ray Wood: Schrödinger's Gun

—a name, dropped into the silence—

“Mrs. Rivers,” I said, seizing the possibility before I really knew what I was saying. Quine twitched and caught the cue ball on its upper hemisphere. It floated off at a wide angle. “I don’t suppose you thought about her? She’s distraught.”

He stared at me for a moment, his blue eyes searching my face. Ice clinked into a glass somewhere behind me. Quine snorted, then coughed: for a moment, as his shoulders bucked, I thought that he was choking, then I realized he was laughing.

“Mrs. Rivers? You mean Kitty?” He shook his head and pulled a handkerchief from his inside pocket. “Distraught? If I had to put fifty dollars on it I’d say she was the one that did it. She—she didn’t tell you that she—?” He continued his exaggerated display of mirth, slapping the edge of the pool table for good measure. I stood and scowled at him.

“If you’ve got something to tell me, tell me.”

He wiped away imaginary tears. “Johnny Rivers,” he said, “didn’t want Mrs. Rivers to be Mrs. Rivers no more. You know how long they’ve been married? Eight months. That’s it. But then a month or two ago Johnny meets this other broad—beautiful young thing; an actress—and he falls hard for her, even harder than he did for Kitty. I know, I know, men are pigs.”

He laughed again as I stoked my implant into life. There were very few universes in which this story went any differently, which suggested that it was likely to be true. I sipped my drink as he continued.

“So the way I heard it was, Johnny promises this broad the moon; says he’ll marry her right away. Now, he knows that Kitty would fight tooth and nail for whatever she could get if he wants to divorce her, so—and this is the stroke of genius—he calls up Judge Binford—you know him?”

I did: he was a judge so crooked you could use him to uncork wine.

“He calls up Binford and asks if he can get the whole thing annulled. Get him to say that they were never legally married—never consummated, something like that—and that he don’t owe her a cent!”

He lapsed into laughter again, mirrored obediently by his cronies. My mind worked double-time. “And did he? Did he get the marriage annulled?”

Quine folded his handkerchief fastidiously into a square and tucked it back into his pocket. “I heard he was supposed to be sorting things out with Binford tomorrow afternoon.” He made a grimace. “I guess the appointment’s off.” He nodded at the pool table. “It’s your shot, Detective.”

My heisen let me pocket both the seven and the nine-ball in one dazzling, unlikely trick shot.

I lay on my bed in Trumbull Avenue and stood in an alcove on West 23rd Street at the same time, sheltering from the snow. When I closed my eyes I could still see the smirk on Vincent Quine’s face. I hadn’t bothered to check his alibi—the guys at Giordano’s would swear that he’d eaten there every night since he was in diapers if they thought that was what he wanted. Every piece of evidence he produced to the contrary only made me more certain he was guilty. Even so, I had to check out what he’d told me about Kitty Rivers. I’d asked Moore to find out her address and invite her in to talk to me, one-on-one. Hopefully I’d gained her trust during our last encounter. In the meantime, both she and Quine believed that the murder weapon had not been discovered. Whichever one of them had dropped the gun knew that it was still there somewhere, out of sight, potentially ready to betray them if it were found. It would be the work of an evening to come back and remove it.

Wind rushed through my bones. I could almost hear Rick’s voice in my head as I huddled closer to the wall. “Why bother?” he had asked me once. “Even if you bring this guy down now there’s gonna be about a million other universes where he gets away scot free, right?”

I remembered a summer evening, standing on the balcony with Sarah in my arms, trying to light a cigarette one-handed.

“Because if I don’t bother,” I said, “he gets away in a million and one.”

That was the Alano murder case, one of the first I’d worked after having the heisen implant. They’d tried to warn me what it would be like—I’d taken all the classes, scratched my head over the science, passed the temperament tests in the federal facility in Minnesota, learned all about goddamn Schrödinger’s goddamn cat—but nothing had prepared me for the reality of it all. Well, realities .

My baby girl, my joy, my Sarah—for those first few weeks I couldn’t look at her. Not without seeing a spectrum of all that she could or might or would never be, every glorious and terrifying possibility fanning out around her. I brushed against universes in which I slipped and dropped her off the balcony, or accidentally smothered her beneath a blanket. They were outside chances, but they followed me like specters. Rick was no better. He was suddenly a million different people—Rick if I said this, Rick if I said that; Rick who could fall out or back in love with me a thousand different ways—and I withdrew, not knowing which of him I loved.

I adjusted, over the next six years, but the damage had been done. I knew that Rick was ready to walk out and take Sarah with him. I knew that I deserved it, too. I’d become a ghost in my own family. I should have done something, but I couldn’t—somehow I couldn’t turn my back on all those possibilities. They plagued me, every day, showing me what our lives could be—what I could be—but I didn’t have the guts to go for one and shut out all the others. Then, one day, I came home to find all my immediate possibilities the same. The note on the kitchen table read:

We’ve gone—will write. R.

That’s one thing they don’t tell you about Schrödinger’s cat: you leave the lid on the box too long and the damn thing starves regardless. No quantum possibilities required.

“She’s over there,” Detective Moore told me when I got in the next morning. Kitty Rivers was drooping in a chair over by my desk. “She’s in a pretty bad way.” He handed me a mug of coffee and peered into my face. I knew that there were shadows underneath my eyes.

“Are you okay?” He laid a hand hesitantly on my shoulder. “I can talk to her if you want to rest.”

I looked at him—broad nose, big white teeth, face all concern—and smiled. I’d seen the possibilities these interactions bred—

—strong, soft arms around my back, hot breath against my cheek—

—but I always steered well clear of them. I shrugged him off and drew my collar up around my neck. Other mes knew whether that road led to any kind of happiness.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Anything else I need to know about?”

He turned and picked up some photographs from his desk. “Frank Campagna. Henchman for Johnny Rivers—muscle, I think, but in a position of trust. Shot dead yesterday getting out the barber’s chair. Colbourne sent these across this morning. Says the Montagnios have made no secret of their involvement.”

I riffled through the photographs. There was a lot of blood and broken glass. “So we know that the Montagnios are definitely out for Rivers and his gang,” I said, handing them back. “But did they send Quine to take out the boss first, make an example, or did his soon-to-be-ex-wife beat them to it?”

Moore gave an exaggerated shrug.

Kitty Rivers was staring at the wall when I went over to her. I put a hand on her shoulder from behind and she jerked as if electrocuted. Her beauty was haphazard today: her fashionable hat was pinned lopsidedly on her head, and her hair had deteriorated into a greasy mass of unwashed blonde. Her face was clean of makeup. Without it I could see, faintly but unmistakably, a yellow island of bruised flesh around her left eye. I pulled out my chair.