Excerpted from YEAR OF THE MOUNTAIN, via APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL PRESS. Available for preorder now.
That night he dug out a box from the closet in his bedroom. He removed stacks of papers and set them on his bed in no particular order, then stared at them for a long time until eventually he started sorting them into piles: the photos into one, the witness interviews into another, the coroner’s report and additional medical workups into a third, and his own notes into a fourth. When he’d done that he further sorted them based on dates, making piles and sub-piles for each month of the investigation until he ended up with eight months sorted, and a total of thirty-eight individual piles. After that he took a break to smoke and look out the window, not at anything in particular but rather at the general hard grayness of it all.
He returned to the case files with what felt like a fresh burst of energy and started reading chronologically with a transcript of the 911 call that brought the department to the scene. 47 North 8th Street between Bedford and Driggs. An artsy, residential block right in the heart of Williamsburg with a trendy bar on each corner and graffiti that attracted tourists. An unusual scene for a murder due to the socioeconomic reality of the neighborhood, but a murder scene nonetheless. In apartment 2A, a two bedroom railroad apartment occupied by Robert Selden and Matthew Brookes, both twenty four at the time, both recent liberal arts college graduates, both aspiring artists, both interns at different art galleries. Robert Selden made the call. He told the operator that something really bad had happened, something really, really bad. When the operator asked him to be more specific he said his friend had been killed, in the passive voice, and when the operator asked him to elaborate further, and to confirm that his friend was, in fact, dead, he said that he couldn’t possibly not be dead, because his skull was shattered and his brains were spilled across the floor like food. His exact words. An odd thing to say. And an observation that did not really match up with Chidlock’s own observation of the victim, which he confirmed by fanning the crime scene photos across his pillow. If he had to he would say the brains were scattered, like ashes, not spilled like food or food-like in any way. The apartment smelled strongly of marijuana. It was cluttered with various random things, among them empty beer growlers and smudgy sketchpads and books that had turned into coasters. The walls were covered with drawings of heavy black shapes that might be either human figures or some kind of invented language. When he arrived, about an hour after uniformed officers had secured the scene, he found Robert Selden sitting at the small table in the kitchen, leaning forward with his face down on his forearms and his scapulas protruding so his t-shirt looked like two little tents, an officer standing just behind him. Chidlock walked through both bedrooms to get to the living room, where the officers, gathered around the body, parted to make space for him. For a few minutes they stood in silence, looking down at Matthew Brookes, the dry brains scattered outward like sand, or maybe like snow, irradiated by a frame of sunlight, until one of the uniformed officers said that it seemed like a drunken spat. A lovers’ quarrel, he said. Chidlock asked if the roommate had confessed. The officers shook their heads. Another officer said the roommate claimed he found the victim when he’d returned home this morning from his girlfriend’s apartment. Another officer, for reasons that Chidlock wasn’t sure he followed, said that these kids were all fucked in their heads. These leftists. They fetishized oppression but they couldn’t escape their privilege, which explained why they were all gay, every single one of them. Because no one could tell them they weren’t, and in being gay or pretending to be gay they got possession over their own little acreages of persecution, when it suited them. But it also made them feel ashamed, so they did a lot of drugs. Chidlock asked what any of that had to do with the man whose brains were scattered across the floor. The officer said he was just saying. Chidlock told him to go out and get coffees for everyone.
Chidlock poked around the room for a murder weapon, but there was none to be found. He paused for a moment to gaze at a row of growlers on the windowsill that caught the morning sunlight and smoldered like amber. Then he returned to the kitchen and asked Robert Selden what had happened. Robert looked up at him as if he was surprised to find someone in his kitchen. He explained that he’d come home around 9 a.m. and made coffee, indicating the french press on the counter. While it brewed he’d gone to his bedroom to change, which was the first bedroom off the kitchen. The door to Matthew’s room was closed and Robert assumed he was still sleeping. So he’d returned to the kitchen and sat with his coffee until he realized he needed something from the living room.
What, asked Chidlock?
A sketchpad, Robert said. He said it was common for him to pass through Matthew’s room to get to the living room while Matthew was sleeping, that he did it all the time without waking him. So he let himself into Matthew’s room but found the bed was empty, at which point he assumed Matthew was out.
Where would he have gone? Chidlock asked.
Well he didn’t go anywhere, Robert said, frowning.
But if he had, said Chidlock, where would it have been? What was your first instinct?
Robert shrugged. Maybe for a run?
Go on, said Chidlock.
So I walked into the living room.
Was the door between Matthew’s room and the living room open or closed?
Closed.
Go on.
So I walked into the living room and found him.
And what did you do?
I called the police.
Before you called the police, what did you do?
Robert shrugged and shook his head. I guess I stood there for a few seconds, maybe a couple minutes, I don’t know. It couldn’t have been very long.
Did you move anything?
No.
Did you touch him?
No.
So you just stood there and then you called the police.
I texted my girlfriend, Robert said. First I texted my girlfriend.
Why did you text her?
I don’t know.
Can I see?
Robert took out his phone and opened his messages, then angled the phone for Chidlock to see. He had texted a photo of Matthew’s body, to which his girlfriend had responded with a trail of texts: OMG and WTF and Rob what’s going on? and then another WTF.
Why did you do that? Chidlock asked.
I don’t know, said Robert. I think I was in shock.
Chidlock asked him if, when he returned home, the front door was locked or unlocked.
I don’t remember.
I need you to remember. This I need you to remember.
Robert gritted his teeth and shut his eyes as if it hurt to comb his memory. It was unlocked, he said. It had to have been unlocked.
Chidlock asked what he did after he called 911.
I think I sat here, Robert said, and then proceeded to open his sketchpad and start drawing small lines, all connected like little branches, which struck Chidlock as an admission of guilt.
Though it turned out it wasn’t, because his story checked out. The coroner put Matthew’s time of death sometime between midnight and 3 a.m., and Robert’s girlfriend corroborated his story. More importantly, surveillance footage put Robert exiting the Bedford subway station at 8:59 a.m. and again passing the bodega on North 8th at 9:02 a.m. in the direction of his apartment. He appeared calm, normal. There was no activity on his phone between then and the picture he sent to his girlfriend at 9:27 a.m. or between then and the call he made to police at 9:29 a.m. So he was ruled out, even if it was not lost on Chidlock that his behavior was strange. Though strange behavior was not a crime. People were allowed to be strange. So Chidlock shifted his focus to 47 North 8th Street’s other tenants—had anyone heard or seen anything?—while simultaneously the Department pulled additional surveillance from the surrounding businesses and CSI got to work on the apartment. But the days turned over and the neighbors provided nothing, and the surveillance footage that Chidlock was able to obtain did not seem to show anyone entering or leaving the building who was not supposed to be there—though there was no direct view of the entrance and plenty of blind spots surrounding it. CSI found nothing by way of prints or DNA that could be deemed useful. And Matthew’s phone offered no indication that he’d had any plans or visitors the night of his death. By the end of the first week after he was killed, the investigation started to feel like it was stalling.
So Chidlock made a trip up to SoHo, to the art gallery where Matthew Brookes interned. He spoke to the receptionist, a young man with long, white hair, who went to fetch the gallery’s director. While Chidlock waited he eyed the art on the walls: paintings of brawny men with resolute yet terrified expressions, leveling guns forward at the viewer so the guns’ barrels were these wide, dark holes in the foreground, and behind the men, cowering, were women and children, the men’s wives and offspring, Chidlock assumed, hiding behind their husbands’ and fathers’ strong shoulders. Hiding from Chidlock, it seemed, as if he wished to hurt them—or was meant to be made to feel as if he wished to hurt them. Then he was approached by the gallery’s director, a small woman perhaps his age though dressed much younger, wearing perfume that reminded Chidlock of burning plastic, who introduced herself as Imogen Creech and lamented Matthew’s death in a tone that felt practiced, though not necessarily disingenuous. Before Chidlock could ask her anything, she asked him what he thought of the paintings. And then again before he could answer she began explaining what they meant: a commentary on masculinity and firearms, a critique of the myth of the good guy with a gun and a satire of the patriarchy and the primitive reverence for the nuclear family, an explication of the idolatry of violence and the fantasy of lethal defense in an age of gun worship and corporate sanctioned bloodlust, and yet also a demonization of the spectator, an allocation of guilt, or presumed guilt, onto the viewer, transforming them into a threat, but also toying with the ambiguity of victimhood, an exercise in perspective, and a reflection of a world in which even looking at a man’s family could get one’s brains blown out.
Chidlock asked why she chose to say it like that.
Say it like what? she asked, and then asked if there was a charity to which she could make a donation in Matthew’s name.
Chidlock told her that was a question for the family, then asked her if she’d noticed Matthew acting strangely, or if he’d received any visitors at the gallery lately.
No and no, Imogen Creech said, holding her hands at her waist and peering at Chidlock through the thick frames of her glasses in a way that seemed like she was struggling to see him.
Chidlock gave her his card and returned to Brooklyn and went through the case files on his desk, focusing on the forensics, which were sparse, and on the head wound, which was ferocious, which must have required a ferocious amount of strength, an inhuman amount of strength. As if a monster had done it. Or a machine.
A few days later he received a call from Imogen Creech asking if he could meet. He took the train into Manhattan in the evening and met her at a bar in the West Village with brick walls that felt too rustic to be the genuine walls of the building’s interior and Chinese lanterns strung along the brick. Music played softly that reminded Chidlock of a song his grandmother made up.
Imogen ordered them scotches, which they drank in silence for nearly ten minutes before she finally said, “So,” as if she was about to launch into something, a disclosure, a secret that was eating her alive. But she said nothing else.
Chidlock asked if she lived nearby.
“Just up the street,” she said, then said that everyone in New York lived just up the street, no matter where they were, even if they weren’t in New York when they said it. She said that New York was like a wrinkle in the fabric of space that forced everything in the universe together. “You could rip me to pieces and scatter me through space, and I’d always be just up the street from my apartment. Do you know what I mean?”
Chidlock said he did, in a way.
“When I was a girl I used to hate when my mother said the word me,” Imogen said. “It felt like the word was taking her away. I don’t think parents should use the word me around their children. I don’t think it’s fair.” Then she said, “Do you remember when you learned that your parents were going to die?”
“My mother died when I was born.”
“I remember when I learned it,” said Imogen. “I was in kindergarten, and there was a girl in my class named Dani whose mother got cancer, and then all of a sudden she was dead. We had an assembly about it. I remember seeing Dani when she came back to school a week later. She seemed alright, which was frightening, because if I wasn’t paying attention I could forget that she was different. If we were in the recess yard playing handball, she would be having fun like everyone else, and she would seem normal, just like the rest of us. But then all of a sudden I would remember that she didn’t have a mother anymore, and it was like a trapdoor opening up under her feet, except instead of falling through it something else fell out of her, though it wouldn’t change how she acted, just how she was.”
Chidlock shrugged and finished his scotch.
“Do you ever read Mary Whiton Calkins?” Imogen asked.
Chidlock said no, then excused himself to smoke a cigarette. Outside, looking down at the constellations of tar and dried gum on the sidewalk, he decided Imogen Creech was guilty. Not for Matthew Brookes’ death—though maybe for that too—but guilty nonetheless. Of a great many things. And she knew that Chidlock knew it. She wanted him to know it. He went back into the bar and offered to pay the tab, but she told him not to be silly. Then they walked to her apartment, which wasn’t quite up the street but wasn’t more than a few blocks away. The apartment was not remotely as ostentatious as Chidlock had expected, and there was far less artwork on the walls than he had feared. They undressed in her living room with the lights on and without speaking. Only once they were both naked did they touch, and then only with their hands, as Imogen led Chidlock into her bedroom where they lay on their backs, side by side, their fingers intertwined, until they fell asleep. Chidlock dreamed about making his way down a hill riddled with obstacles, and when they woke up early, at the same moment, they made love, or something adjacent to love, their breath stale, and neither of them finished. Then Chidlock took the train back to Queens. Eight months later the case went cold, and six months after that he retired. He took home only two souvenirs from his twenty six years on the job: his service weapon and the case files for the murder of Matthew Brookes, which now he gathered from his bed and returned to their box, feeling as if there was something he was supposed to do, though the feeling was profoundly distant, as if it belonged to someone else and the universe had simply misplaced it in him, which was an honest mistake, and frankly it was a miracle that it didn’t happen more often.
-- Max Halper is the author of the novels Lamella and The Meadow and the Misread. His work explores systems of intimacy and violence. You can find more at max-halper.com.
