Schrödinger's Gun (3 page)

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 23
rd
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.

“Would you like a cigarette?”

She burst into tears.

I calmed her down eventually, patting her on the back and filling her lungs with an endless chain of Marlboros. She brought each one shakily to her lips, trying to control her sobs, and sucked the tiniest bit of smoke from it before exhaling and letting her hand sink back into her lap.

“Have you been to a doctor about your face?” I said eventually. Kitty pulled away as I tried to touch the bruise.

“No.”

“Looks bad.”

She stared at the potted plant in the far corner. “Johnny did it,” she said. “I saw him on West 19
th
a few days ago, the first time since he … moved out.” When I made no reply she flicked her doe eyes up to mine. “You know about that?”

I nodded slowly. She sniffed and looked back down.

“Chucked me for some other broad. A singer, or something. Anyway, I—this was the first time I saw him since he walked out, like I said. So I gave him a piece of my mind: told him I thought he was a rotten, dirty cheat and I hoped he died in a gutter. I said I'd hire the best divorce lawyers in Chicago and that I'd get what was mine if they had to turn him upside down and shake it loose. And he—and he—”

She covered her face and cried into her hands, her pretty little shoulders jerking with each sob. I patted her some more and went to get some water. I avoided universes in which it spilt this time.

“Thanks,” she said, once she'd had a sip. She put the glass back on the desk. “So I told him—what I just told you—and he—he did this.” She gestured to her cheek. “Told me I was a dumb bitch and that I wouldn't get a cent. Some old pal of his was going to get our marriage undone, say that we never—that I was never Mrs. Rivers. And he told me that if I came near him again he'd…” She bit her bottom lip and tried to stem the tears.

“It's okay,” I said, as gently as I could manage. I didn't know whether I should touch her again. In the end I got up, went around to her side of the desk and knelt beside her chair, looking up into her eyes. She rubbed away her tears and looked fiercely at me.

“Kitty,” I said. “There's one more thing I need to ask you; it's about the night Johnny was killed. Last time we talked you told me that you went to the distillery because Johnny hadn't come home and you were worried about him. That's not true, is it? He hadn't lived with you for weeks. What really happened that night?”

She looked over at the window. “
Her
,” she said eventually. “I wanted to see who she was—who he left me for. I hired a PI to shadow him. He found out where Johnny was living and told me that he went out most nights with a broad, so I decided I'd follow him. On the night he—the night he died—I waited outside his apartment. I figured she'd be there with him, but he came out alone. Got into his car. I hailed a cab and followed him. Ended up on 23
rd
, near his”—she glanced at me—“office. I waited in the cab, wanting to see if he came out with her—next thing I knew, I heard a gun go off, and I saw a man running away. So I got out of the cab, and—and…”

I put a handkerchief in her hand: she pressed it gently to her nose and blew. I touched her knee. It had been a long time since I had comforted anyone.

“It's okay,” I said, aiming for tenderness. “It's okay. Why didn't you tell me this before?”

Kitty's face was scrunched and wet. I fired up the heisen to try and tell if she was faking it, but what she did next was the same in every universe that I could see. “Because I—because I didn't want you to think—” She threw her arms around me, her chin digging into the inside of my shoulder. “Please don't think I killed him, oh please, I didn't kill him, I wouldn't kill him…”

I patted her small, soft back and let her sob into my sleeve.

*   *   *

Later that afternoon, over on the East side of Chicago, I watched the sun sink behind a square apartment block. I stood across the street, outside what had been the back yard of a brewery before the prohibition, my implant churning. The stack of letters bulged inside my pocket.

Rick had not kept his new address from me, as I had mine from him when I had moved out of our shared apartment. I guess he thought that one day I might want to come and see Sarah. Or, at least, that I would want to keep that possibility alive. A boy walked down the sidewalk carrying a violin case. The apartment block was blurred to me, like I had something in my eye; what was really happening, of course, was that the heisen was showing me all the thousands of possibility threads for this place laid on top of one another: lights in windows on or off in different combinations, graffiti gone or changed or further to one side. Hundreds of potential snowfalls fizzing in the air. In one or two universes, the boy with the violin case was a girl. Spectral figures moved behind the windows.

I tried to work out why I was there. I'd kept the lid on my curiosity for twelve years. I'd left forty-eight letters unopened. I'd always had the possibilities to fall back on—

—maybe Sarah doesn't hate me—

—maybe she wants to be a cop—

—maybe she wants to get the hell out of this messed-up city—

—but now, something was different. I counted the windows, up and along, trying to work out which was apartment 13B. A light came on just as I found it. The faint outline of a blonde head bobbed past the window.

Longing kicked me in the gut.

The girl—young woman, I suppose—drifted through the room, followed by a thousand other versions of herself. Some had short hair, some had long; some were beautiful, some were not; some had eyes that were grey and heavy, some wore smiles that were full of hope. I knew that she was—that they were—Sarah. My baby girl.

In one universe, faint as the very outside of a shadow, another woman appeared behind Sarah and placed an arm around her shoulders. She was in her early forties: strong chin, dirty blonde hair, hooded eyes. As I watched, I swear she looked right at me. I drank in the sight of her before the curtains closed.

I blinked. It had grown almost fully dark, and my breath was starting to come in clouds. The street lamps were orange. I took the bundle of letters from my pocket and extracted the earliest: coffee-stained, slightly yellowed, grimy from the old rubber band that had held it to the others until a day or two ago. As snowflakes settled wetly on the paper my memory threw up a conversation I had almost forgotten, one that I'd had with Sarah near the end:

“So, the cat is inside the box, okay, and there's a flask of poison in there, too, which can break open at any time. The cat might die and it might not. Now, we don't know if it's alive or dead in there until we open the box to check. Okay?”

I remember thinking that it was a dumb thing to do, trying to explain quantum physics to a six-year-old, but Sarah was a smart kid. She just looked up at me with her big, doleful eyes and listened.

“But it's not just that we ‘don't know', it's that there are really millions of
potential
cats, alive
and
dead, and opening the box collapses them all down into just one, which is alive
or
dead. That's what mommy's head-chip does.”

She considered this, eyes on her lap, for almost a minute, then looked up and said, “The cat must know.”

The Chicago evening closed around me. I looked up at the curtained window and then down at the letter in my hand. I plunged my thumb into the envelope.

*   *   *

I dozed standing up on West 23
rd
Street. As was usual by now, I was both there and in my bed in Trumbull Avenue at the same time, my implant straining to keep both possibilities open. It had gotten too cold even to snow: the sidewalks were locked in frost and my breath was as opaque as cigarette smoke. I huddled into the wall/pillow and closed my eyes.