Noah's Turn (13 page)

“Noah!”

He heard his name and thought it was ringing in his head, some ephemeral self calling from his prior life.

“Hey, Noah!”

He turned to his left and saw a man and a woman crossing the street through the night traffic. The man was smiling and they were coming toward him.

“Hey, this is crazy,” the man said. “I haven't spoken to you in over a year and two hours ago I left a message on your machine and now I run into you on the street.”

It was Jeffrey Lawrence, a slightly slimy TV producer Noah had worked for in the past.

“Sarah Bemalman, Noah Douglas.”

The woman, who was at least twenty years younger than the producer, smiled and thrust out a hand. Noah shook it and thought how so many men of Lawrence's age had to fuck younger women. It seemed epidemic. Was it another virus that had leapt from monkeys to man?

“That murder, that guy Patrick McEwen, you knew him, right?”

“Yeah”

“Fucking horrible. Scares the shit outta ya. Did you know him well?”

“Well enough.”

“I'm sorry. Horrible. Look, I called you because of
Always Running.”
He turned to the girl and explained
that
Always Running
was a series idea he and Noah had developed and pitched but no network wanted a political show in “this climate.”

“It was a great fucking idea. A satire of the inner workings of government bureaucracy,
Catch-22
in politics. They were insane to pass.” He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and turned back to Noah. “Now we have a buyer who's very interested, and I called you because I know you got dropped by your show. I still smoke.” He offered one to Noah, who accepted. Lawrence lit both.

Noah had smoked from time to time in his life while drinking but stopped because of a high blood pressure scare. However, at this moment he wasn't particularly concerned with his physical health.

“They want one scene that shows your kind of humour.” To the girl, “Politics scares everyone, that's why I love this. Noah is fucking great at it.” To Noah, “Can you write out that scene you used to pitch where the incumbent is shot? If that scene works as well on paper as you pitched it, I think this is a slam dunk.”

Noah had taken a couple of drags and very suddenly became dizzy. He didn't answer Lawrence and took a clumsy step backwards, then turned to walk away and
weaved, then tripped and fell to the pavement. Everything went silent and into slow motion. He knew he was lying on his back and could see Lawrence over him saying something and the girl standing behind Lawrence looking down with a concerned expression, but he couldn't hear a thing. He felt heavy and as if his body was sinking into the pavement. He thought he should say something like “I'm okay” but didn't feel like it. For a moment he thought he could will himself to keep sinking until he completely disappeared, then everything would be over. He saw Lawrence dialling his cellphone and he closed his eyes. The next thing he knew he was on his knees and he could hear Lawrence repeating, “Are you okay?” as he helped Noah to his feet.

“I'm fine. It was the cigarette. I had a lot to drink. The two together …”

“Fuck, we thought you had a stroke or a heart attack. I called an ambulance. I think you should go to emergency.”

“No! Why did you do that?! It was the fucking cigarette! Call them back! Cancel it!”

“I think you should get checked out.”

“I'm okay, I swear! I'll write the scene if you phone and cancel the fucking ambulance!”

Lawrence agreed. Noah knew that, like all producers, he could be negotiated with. Without another word, Noah turned and walked away.

N
oah woke up to his ringing phone. Like most mornings, his first thought was “I'm a killer.” This morning it was a sickening thought and the caller deepened his nausea. Detective Hopwood wanted to know if he would be available for a coffee in the afternoon at a place near Noah's apartment called Buena Bean. Noah agreed to meet him, hung up and flopped back onto his pillow and stared at the ceiling. How did Hopwood know where he lived? He hadn't given his address in their first meeting. He realized that Hopwood knew more about him than he had thought. And why coffee? Why not meet in the station again? Was this a set-up, some kind of chummy cop trick to lower his guard?

Hopwood squeezed the lemon rind over his double espresso. “I like this place. I'm not a shitty-coffee and doughnut cop.”

“I guess the cop and doughnut thing is a bit of a myth,” Noah said.

“Unfortunately, it isn't,” Hopwood said as he sipped his coffee. “There are a lot of dumb, fat cops who love their doughnuts. I'm no genius, but I try to control my weight. I played junior hockey before I became a cop. I was always in good shape and wanted to stay that way. But it gets harder every year. I'm a good fifteen pounds over my playing weight.”

Was he letting Noah know that he wasn't a dumb doughnut cop but a smart double-espresso cop who had Noah in his sights? Was this casual meeting Hopwood's way of narrowing the plank that Noah had to walk?

Noah was suspicious of the whole conversation and waited for the real agenda to reveal itself. Hopwood finished his espresso and sat back. He put both hands together as if in prayer and held them to his lips. This was the pose of a man who was thinking. He clearly
wanted to send that message to Noah. He didn't have the answer but he was trying to ask the right question. Noah suspected this non-threatening posture was meant to put him at ease but it did the opposite. It was a cop move and he wasn't sure where it was going.

“I think I have a case against the student you took on the night of the book launch.”

The plank Noah now stood on narrowed by a few more inches. Of every possible outcome of his act that Noah had written and rewritten in his head, he had never included the student. He had earlier thought that the student could be a suspect but had never contemplated the implications of his actual arrest. Perhaps his job writing cop shows had had an influence and he could think of suspects as nothing more than actors in a drama.

“I can't put him at the scene with any hard evidence yet. We found a few of his prints in McEwen's office, but he had been there just days before the murder to plead his case for a better mark on an assignment. He doesn't have a solid alibi for what he was doing and where he was at the time of the murder, and his story about the incident at the book launch didn't match that of the witnesses. He also changed his story of what happened
with you that night from one interview to the next. He now claims he was there but didn't get into a fight with anyone. I have a gut feeling that this kid is our killer. He had been in McEwen's office and had seen the machete. He couldn't control his anger, as was evident at the book launch.”

“I pushed him. He didn't push me.”

“But there was provocation. You didn't just walk up to some quiet student minding his own business and push him into the water, am I right?”

“Yes.”

“I need you to help me out here and come down to the station and pick him out of a lineup. I know it was dark, which is working against us, but a positive ID is essential.”

Us, Noah thought. What the fuck does that mean? Is he pulling me into this fucked-up investigation, into railroading some innocent kid? Noah had read too many news stories in recent years about the wrongfully accused—men who had done ten and twenty years in prison for murders they didn't commit and all because the cops or prosecution twisted the case to get a conviction. They didn't want justice—they wanted a win.

“Do you think you can do it?” Hopwood asked.

“I think I could identify the guy I pushed.”

“This is really little more than a formality. You just have to look at a handful of photographs. I know he was at the book launch, I just want to make sure he's the guy you pushed.”

Noah hated the cliché “little more than a formality.” He had used it himself in his scripts when he was fucking over the suspect. He thought that Hopwood was more original than that. But who can tell these days whether TV is imitating life or life is imitating TV or even if it matters. Perhaps, Noah thought, it's all one big fucked-up intermingled system of social schizophrenia where reality has become irrelevant and the culture is a rabid animal chasing its tail and gorging on its own entrails.

“Are you free tomorrow at noon?” Hopwood was trying to get the last drop from his empty coffee cup, and before Noah could answer, he interjected, “They roast their own beans here.” He didn't say anything else. All these little moves were so obviously the tricks of the trade, the cat playing with the mouse. And even if Noah wasn't, in Hopwood's mind, the guilty mouse, he was to be played, because this is how cops relate to the world.

“Noon should be okay.”

On his way home from Buena Bean, Noah realized for the first time that his crime may not be exclusively his. No matter how he had previously defined his act, it had been only in terms of himself. Whatever it was, he had been solely responsible for it and its consequences. But now this other thing, this student. This wasn't a consequence he had intended. This wasn't part of “the act.” This was an injustice that not very many years ago he might have fought against in the streets. Not only would it be a wrongful conviction but more importantly it would no longer be Noah's crime. Or was Hopwood's case against the student all bullshit? Did his real case have Noah as the killer? Was the suspicion around the student only a decoy, a trick to get Noah thinking the way he was thinking at this moment?

Noah stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and gripped his head between his hands like any other crazy street person might do. He couldn't think like this. Every conversation interpreted and reinterpreted, picked apart like an autopsy searching for the clue that would reveal not how Noah died but how he would die. Perhaps this thinking came from the fact that he
had been a hypochondriac from an early age. It had started with a burst appendix. He had been at the lake with his family and they got him to the hospital just in time. From then on any little symptom had scared him. His family doctor used to say about symptoms, “When you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras.” He tried to pull himself together. He believed that a good part of being normal was acting normal. He put his hands in his pockets and walked and tried to identify the “horses” in Hopwood's thinking. The student was most likely Hopwood's main suspect. But why would the student lie about the fight at the book launch? Why lie when you're innocent? Why did Noah lie when he was guilty? He realized how unintelligible life could be when we try to sort out its truths from its lies and right from wrong. So we invent systems to address these questions, Noah thought. The system is nothing more than an intelligible narrative imposed on the chaos of human life. The Catholic Church was the system in a good part of the world for centuries. Islam another system, democratic capitalism another, as was National Socialism in Germany and communism in the Soviet Union. For each system to work, reality had to be bent to fit its form and laws written to justify the bending. Noah saw Hopwood
cherry-picking the facts he needed to make his case against the student while ignoring the more complex reality that could push it into the unknown. This, Noah realized, is the justice system.

He remembered reading how Nixon had been forced from office for the Watergate break-in and how this showed that the “American system worked.” Nixon hadn't been dumped for murdering a million Southeast Asians during the Vietnam War. They got him for, as Nixon himself correctly described it, “a third-rate burglary.” The system worked. What was missed was the reality the American narrative couldn't bend or legalize, a reality the system couldn't have withstood, and that was to prosecute Nixon and Kissinger for mass murder. As he walked, Noah wrote this essay in his head. If the system really worked, why weren't they prosecuted for mass murder? Because the system only had to work to maintain the appearance of democracy. This would allow America to move on without self-recrimination or guilt or responsibility. Hopwood was, Noah realized, only doing his job and looking for a smaller but similarly workable narrative.