Chapter 7: Under the Console Table
It was a hundred and five millimetres long and thirty-eight wide and it weighed about ninety grams.
Black plastic with a gray band. Four buttons. A screen the size of a postage stamp.
It had cost me sixty-one dollars in a shop on Milwaukee Avenue in March and I had paid for it out of my own money.
I mention the money because eleven months later a lawyer spent forty minutes on it, trying to find out who had bought it for me.
Nobody bought it for me. I bought it. I have the receipt. I keep everything.
Marco reached under the table and took it out with two fingers, by the ends, the way you pick up something you have been told not to touch.
He stood up with it flat on his palm.
The red light went on and off on his palm. It was still recording. It had been recording for one hour and thirty-one minutes.
Victor said, “What is that?”
Marco said, “It’s a voice recorder.”
“Is it on?”
“Yes, sir.”
The word that came out of the room next was mine, and I said it before I had made any kind of decision about it.
I said, “It’s mine.”
I could have said nothing. I have gone over that a great many times.
If I had said nothing it would still have had my prints on it and my voice on it, so it would have taken about nine minutes instead of none.
But I did not calculate. I said it because it was mine and because I had been raised by a woman who could not bear a thing to be looked for.
Serena stopped picking up cards.
She did not look at me. She had her back three-quarters turned and she stopped, with a card in her hand, and did not straighten up.
That is the only reaction I ever saw from her that whole night, and I saw it out of the side of my eye, and I have never been able to prove it happened.
Victor said, “Yours.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You had a recorder running in my house.”
“Yes, sir.”
“For how long?”
And here is where I made the mistake, or the thing that looked like a mistake for about six weeks and then stopped looking like one.
I said, “Since March.”
Because that was true. Because he had asked how long, and the answer to how long was since the eleventh of March.
But if you are standing in a foyer at eight o’clock at night with a hurt child and a woman who has just been contradicted about a camera, and the nanny says since March —
It does not sound like a medical log. It sounds like a person collecting.
I watched it land. That one I did watch.
Victor’s face still did not change, but something behind it moved and settled somewhere different.
I said, “It isn’t what you think it is.”
He said, “You don’t know what I think it is.”
Which was fair. He was right and I was already talking too fast.
I said, “Dr. Moreno asked me to —”
And he put up his hand.
Not sharply. He put it up the way you stop a car at a gate.
“Not now.”
Three chapters from here I will be standing under a strip light in a police room being asked the same question by somebody who does let me finish, and I will finish it, and it will take four minutes.
That night in the foyer it took two words to stop me, and I stopped.
I have never entirely forgiven myself for stopping, and I do not know what else I could have done.
Marco said, “Sir, do you want me to bag this?”
He said it quietly. It was the correct question and it was nine years of his training talking.
Victor said, “No.”
Marco said, “Sir —”
“No.”
That was the second time I heard him say a word twice, and both times it was no.
He put out his hand for it.
Marco did not want to give it to him. I could see the whole of that in his face and it took about a second and a half.
Then he tipped his palm and let it slide into Victor Blackwood’s hand, and stepped back, and put his torch in his pocket.
Victor held it up in front of him, at about the height of his own chin, and turned it over once.
The screen said REC and it said 01:31:44, and the numbers went up while he was holding it.
He was not a technical man. He owned eleven buildings and four ships and he did not know how to work a sixty-one-dollar recorder.
But there are only four buttons on it, and one of them is a triangle.
He found it with his thumb.