John Goldbach - The Devil and the Detective

EAnéeJ: I have no family anywhere near here, and I have no friends I want to stay with. I want to be in my home, even though Gerald was murdered here — I won’t be scared away. Why don’t you stay here, too?

RJ: I should keep some distance from things.

EAnéeJ: Think about it. Anyway, come over soon.

RJ: I will …

EAnéeJ: Bye.

RJ: Bye.

( Call terminated at 1336h. I return the phone to its mount shortly after pressing the end key. )

Flowers, I thought, weren’t such a bad idea after all. I called the florist, whose shop was just down the street, and I asked if I were to go through with my order, for forty dollars, to 19 Tower Street, could I maybe get a lift with the delivery driver. She asked me where I live and I told her and then she said, ‘Okay, sure. He’ll pick you up in twenty minutes.’ I prepaid over the phone with my Visa and asked for a receipt. While waiting I brushed my teeth again and reapplied underarm deodorant and sprayed on a little eau de toilette, a gift from a former girlfriend, and I also put on a clean shirt, even though the other wasn’t dirty, because I wanted to appear fresh, despite the hangover. The delivery driver will be here any minute, I thought, and I put on my coat and grabbed a notepad and pen, put them in my inside pocket, and I grabbed my keys, with a small penknife and small flashlight on the keychain. I drank two glasses of ice water. I wondered whether I was forgetting anything, then I grabbed my wallet. I grabbed my sunglasses, too, remembering what a friend’s uncle said to me once: ‘Never leave home without your wallet, keys and sunglasses.’ I looked at my watch and decided to wait out front for the flower delivery driver, since he was doing me a favour.

The delivery driver showed up in a small black hatchback, and the back of the car was full of bouquets. The passenger-side seat, too, had a large bouquet on it but the driver, Darren, made some space for it in the back. Darren was tall and slim and I’d guess seventeen, though he told me on the car ride that he studied philosophy and history at one of the local universities, so he was probably around twenty, if not a few years older than twenty; nevertheless, he looked like he was seventeen. He asked why I don’t drive and I said it’s because I don’t have a car or a driver’s licence. He asked what I did for a living and I told him that I’m a private detective. I thanked him for picking me up. ‘No problem,’ he said. The car, obviously, smelled of flowers; at first it was pleasant, though as Darren drove, slowly, I started to develop an acute headache.

I said to Darren, ‘Do the flowers ever get to your head?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘All the time. Crack your window.’

I opened my window slightly, so as not to damage the flowers.

‘You have a headache?’ said Darren.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘though I’m also hungover.’

Darren drove fast and told me a story about a philosopher, one from a small mountain village, a hundred-odd years ago, who leaves his cottage and goes into town so as to get some flour, sugar, eggs, milk and meat, if there is meat, from a store that a friend of his, a philosopher too, runs from home. The two philosophers meet — Philosopher A, the one who leaves his cottage to go get supplies, and Philosopher B, the one who runs a small shop out of his home — and talk for hours about politics, science, art and love and drink mugs of some sort of mead. Philosopher A’s convinced, Darren told me as he drove, that love as such, that love qua love, is nothing more than misfiring Spirit, Spirit clouding one’s senses, confusing one and leading one astray, that is to say, blinding one: blinding one as a prisoner. But Philosopher B says, Spirit’s what clouds your so-called senses, for it’s what grants you the ability to imagine love in the first place. Love, too, can confine, he says, yes, true. But so-called Spirit, the fantasy of Spirit, this is necessary to possess the illusion, to be able to even have illusions — to generate more illusions one need be inhabited ab initio with so-called Spirit, says Philosopher B to Philosopher A. I know, says Philosopher A, that’s why I think love’s a lie. If Spirit’s present in the beginning, as a sort of initial state, then once illusions are acquired, begetting more and more illusions, in time some illusions — ones based on non-truths, of course — transmogrify, mutatis mutandis , into exalted love. If this exalted love’s born from lies, lies generated by Spirit, then eo ipso , he says, love’s a lie. Although love may be a lie, as you yourself say, says Philosopher B to Philosopher A, it does bring to light some certainties on occasion. For example? says Philosopher A. Well, for example, after loving — while loving, even, from time to time — we can be sure that we are really separate, that some sort of commingling, even temporarily, a commingling of Spirit, never becomes one. We are always separated, says Philosopher B to Philosopher A, who responds by saying, You’re probably right. Then Philosopher A tells Philosopher B about a young man, a man in his late twenties, who is visited one night by the Devil. The Devil comes to the young man, he comes to him on a street corner, and says to the young man as he’s walking: There are things you’ll never know, as I’m sure you already know, things beyond your comprehension, and there are things you do know, things you have no idea you know, and it’s impossible for you to free yourself of this knowledge, although this knowledge is beyond your comprehension, too. And then the Devil laughed, says Philosopher A to Philosopher B, said Darren while driving me and the bouquet to Elaine’s. I asked Darren what the young man said in response. He said nothing, Darren said. I asked Darren what Philosopher B said to Philosopher A after the story, and Darren said he said that although it’s important to recognize the bottomless pit in others, it’s also important not to be dragged into that hole, and that although we’re separate and alone, it is in fact possible to drag someone into a pit. Then Philosopher A said, Omne verum vero consonat . And that’s it, said Darren. We pulled up to Elaine’s house and I thanked Darren for the ride and the story and then I asked why he told me this story, and he said he wasn’t sure, that he’d just read it somewhere, and that he wanted to see what I made of it, seeing as I’m a detective. I told him I wasn’t sure what to make of it, though I’d think on it. I tipped him the few dollars I had in change. He said thanks and gave me his card and I took my bouquet and he drove off in the flower-filled hatchback.

Elaine answered the door dressed in jeans and a black woollen turtleneck sweater. She said hello and then sneezed. ‘ Gesundheit, ’ I said. She thanked me. I handed her the bouquet. I told her that I’d picked it up for her. She said she loved lilies. She seemed genuinely surprised and touched. This was my first time entering the Andrewses’ home. It seemed bigger on the inside than it did from the outside — much bigger, in fact. I followed her into the kitchen where she was drinking a cup of steaming tea. She offered me one and I accepted. She asked me if I take sugar or milk or lemon and I said lemon would be good, for there was a lemon out on a cutting board. We drank tea in silence and that was fine by me. For a minute, I even started to read the newspaper sitting on the kitchen table. A developer wanted to build on an ancient Cree burial site. Elaine started to speak and told me about phone calls she’d been receiving; when she picked up, the person on the other end wouldn’t say anything, simply waited, waited for her to get frustrated and hang up, but she said she wouldn’t hang up, that she’d give the person on the other end a piece of her mind , telling them that they’re sick fucks to fuck with a woman whose husband’s just been murdered, bloodily murdered with a knife to the chest, and that if they weren’t such goddamn cowards they’d speak up, say their piece, then leave her alone. I asked her how many of these phone calls she’d received and she said seven. Seven over the past eight hours. I asked her if she’d told the police and she said, ‘Fuck the police.’ We sat sipping from steaming mugs of tea and I thought about the phone calls and the murder and wondered if they were related: it sounds counterintuitive, but she was a beautiful woman, I thought, one who might perhaps attract these kinds of callers. I asked her if she’d ever received calls like that in past and she said yes but not so many in one day, in the past they were spread out, spread out over days, weeks, months, she said. I asked her if the calls started after she married Gerald. And she told me she’d been getting the calls since moving into the house I was standing in, the house Gerald was recently murdered in, and then I asked if I could see where she found the body.