Land of the Blind (24 page)

T
he dwarf listens intently, but with very little reaction, as Caroline explains that they haven’t positively identified the body, but she has every reason to believe that Eli Boyle is lying dead in the small apartment above his garage.

“No shit,” says Louis Carver. He shakes his head. “Wow. He actually did it.”

Caroline tenses. She’s said nothing about Clark Mason. “Who?”

“Eli. He used to talk about it all the time, in this totally detached way, like it was just the most normal thing. We’d be talking about investments or what kind of car to buy and he’d just blurt out, ‘I could jump off a bridge.’ Or ‘What do you think of hanging?’ Just out of the blue, like that.”

“No,” Caroline interrupts. “Eli didn’t kill himself. Somebody shot him.”

They are on the porch of Louis’s house and he’s standing in the doorway, holding the screen door open as if she’s selling something he doesn’t need. He falls back against the door frame. He is about four feet tall, bowlegged and thick through the chest and trunk. He wears khaki pants and a sweatshirt that reads, simply,
COLLEGE
. His features are pleasant, though slightly crowded. A spit of brown hair covers his forehead; he is graying at the temples. “Eli was murdered?” he asks.

“We think so.”

“Who did it?”

“We don’t know,” Caroline says. It occurs to her that Louis Carver does not seem terribly upset that his old friend and business partner is dead.

She was feeling claustrophobic at Eli’s carriage house apartment—watching the evidence techs start to dismantle the room—when she remembered Louis’s name from the Fair Election Fund. She got his number from information, apologized for calling at ten o’clock, and asked if she could stop by to talk to him for a minute. She left Eli’s house without telling anyone,
turned her phone off, and drove here, to this tidy daylight rancher in the Shadle neighborhood, on a street of honest, working-family houses.

“Murdered. No shit,” Louis says again.

A short, attractive woman—still, a foot taller than her husband, with ink-black hair—sticks her head around the corner of the doorway. She is wearing flannel pajamas and looks as if she just woke up. “Is everything okay?” Mrs. Carver asks.

“Eli Boyle is dead.”

If Louis reacted inscrutably to the news, his wife’s face registers outright disdain at hearing Eli’s name. “Oh.”

“He was murdered,” Louis tells his wife.

“That’s too bad,” she says flatly. A baby begins crying behind her, lost and sleepy. She puts her hand on Louis’s shoulder and turns around to go get the baby.

“Do you know if Eli had any family?” Caroline asks.

“No,” Louis says. “Just his mom, and she died several years ago.”

“Do you remember the last time you saw Eli?” she asks.

“Sure.” He rubs his eyes. “Two years ago. November of 2000.”

“Before or after the election?”

“After,” Louis says, seeming surprised that she knows about the election. “You must’ve talked to Clark already.”

“That’s actually one thing I wanted to ask you about. How would you characterize the relationship between Clark Mason and Eli?”

“They’re best friends. They—” Louis tries to read her face. “You think Clark had something to do with this? Clark
Mason
?” He covers his left eye. “One eye? Tall? Occasionally runs for Congress and gets his ass kicked? That Clark Mason?” Louis shakes his head violently. “No way. Clark wouldn’t do that. He couldn’t. The guy opens the window to let flies out of his house. He spent the last eight years baby-sitting Eli. What reason would he possibly have to kill him?”

Caroline climbs a step, bringing her closer and to eye level with Louis. “Your name was listed with Eli Boyle’s as one of two officers in a political action group.” She looks down at her notebook even though she knows the name. “The Fair Election Fund? You paid for the ads that called Clark Mason a carpetbagger?”

Louis comes all the way out now and lets the screen door close behind him. “That was a long time ago and we all—” His face is red and his eyes narrow. “Look, I didn’t even know…” He lowers his voice. “I just signed where Eli pointed. We had given so much to Clark’s campaign that I just assumed we were starting a fund to help him. When I saw in the paper what it was, I was furious. I was a hell of a lot angrier than Clark, if that tells you anything. I sure as shit wouldn’t have forgiven Eli for that. But there was Clark, a week later, telling me he couldn’t have won anyway. He was actually trying to get
me
to forgive Eli. He went on about how Eli took all this punishment when they were kids. What a hard childhood Eli had. Finally, I couldn’t listen anymore. I said, ‘Clark, you’re talking to a fucking dwarf here. I’m probably gonna need more than a tough childhood.’”

“And you left Empire right after that?” Caroline asks.

He nods. “Two weeks later. Sold my stock back to Eli at the option price. Walked out the door with about eighty grand and never looked back. If I’d sold a year earlier, before the crash, I could’ve gotten probably ten times that.”

“How many partners were there?” she asks.

“Four minority partners: myself and Clark, Bryan, who was our tech guy, and Michael Langford, this investment and finance guy from the Bay Area. We each had five percent of the shares, and since Bryan and I worked there, we also got salaries. Twenty-nine percent was divided among the investors that Michael brought in. Eli retained the other fifty-one percent. That was Clark’s doing, too. Eli was terrified that he was going to lose control of the game, so Clark set it up so that Eli’s share of the company could never drop below fifty-one unless Eli sold his stock, which of course he never did.”

“So you left Empire because of the Fair Election Fund?”

Louis looks past her. “And I had some real problems with the way Eli ran things.” He seems wary of saying more.

“Look,” Caroline says, “I’m just trying to figure out who killed your friend. I don’t care about anything else. So tell me, why did you leave Empire?”

“Well, for starters, there
was
no Empire. Not the way we were selling it. Not like it was supposed to be.” He leans back and searches for the words. “After we got the money everything was different. We got an office, hired illustrators and writers and coders. Every six months, we’d put on a show for
the investors, tell them what they wanted to hear, let them see whatever real progress we’d made. Then we’d fake the rest. They want the game on CD-ROM? We put the preview on CD-ROM. They want it on the Internet? We put the preview on a Web site. They want streaming video, multitexturing, 3-D graphics, photorealistic rendering? Fine. As soon as we finished a presentation, we’d go back to work on the next presentation.

“But the game never played. It didn’t work. We kept putting options on the car and hoping the investors wouldn’t realize there was no engine. We spent all our time making presentations for the venture capital people, and in the end that’s all we produced: presentations. You know the key to getting rich back then?”

Caroline shakes her head no.

“Never finish. Always be six months from shipping. That’s when you have the most potential, when you haven’t messed up yet. Every year I kept thinking they were going to pull the plug when they realized we didn’t have a game, and every year some new idiot stepped forward with another million.

“Meantime, Eli was getting this reputation as a genius, going on and on about the realms and the levels of being, about how people wouldn’t
play
Empire, they would
live
it. He sounded like some kind of guru. And the game was like a ghost, a rumor. You’d see it referred to in
Red Herring
and
Wired
and
The Industry Standard,
a sentence here or there—‘sources say that when Empire is ready, it will change the entire perception of gaming,’ that kind of shit. All the insiders knew about it. Once I read that some company was working on ‘an Empire-style interactive game.’” He laughs.

“Eli was so secretive and controlling, that just fed the whole thing, made it seem that much more mysterious and cutting edge.
Because
the game never appeared, I think it actually got better and better in people’s minds. Like a striptease. You show people a glimpse and they put the rest together in their minds. By ’98, everyone wanted to license our game, or buy us outright: Microsoft, Sega, Nintendo.”

“But you didn’t sell?”

“Eli wouldn’t even consider it—maybe because he knew there was nothing to sell. And he wouldn’t go public, which we needed to do if we were ever going to raise enough capital to really develop the game. And every time he said no, it seemed to increase the demand and the interest by VC investors.”

“What did Clark think of all of this?”

“The rest of us wanted to sell—Bryan, me, Michael especially. It drove Michael crazy, especially when Eli started acting so paranoid and insecure. Michael even suggested we have Eli committed at one point. But Clark never wavered in his support for Eli. He was going back and forth between here and Seattle and California, doing legal work for other start-ups, doing real well for himself. But no matter how much money he made, he always came back here and took care of Eli.

“They were like brothers. It was Eli who talked Clark into running for Congress. Clark said that maybe he should go for a smaller office first—city council or state legislator—but Eli told him to go for the whole thing. Paid for half his campaign.”

Caroline stares at her notes. Something is missing. “So if it was Eli’s idea and he was financing the campaign, why spend the money trying to defeat him?”

“I don’t know,” Louis says carefully. “I never talked directly to Eli about it.”

“But you have an idea?” Caroline asks.

Louis rubs his bottom lip. “At the end of ’99 everything was going great. We were making progress on the game. I was even starting to think we might actually have it up and running by the following year. We had offices and a warehouse, fifteen people working for us. It was a year before the election, and Clark went back to Seattle to raise money for his campaign. When he came back he brought that woman with him, and that’s when everything seemed to change.”

“Susan.”

“We went to high school with her—although she’d probably deny it. Clark was completely different after they got married. All of a sudden he’s hanging around at the Manito Country Club, acting like
one of them
. Part of it was the campaign—Clark needed the support of those people, I guess. But to Eli, it was a betrayal. Pure and simple. And if there was one thing that Eli couldn’t stand, it was disloyalty. He was always sort of distrustful, but he was getting paranoid. After a while, he even accused
me
of working with Michael behind his back, trying to sell Empire out from under him.”

Before Louis can finish, his wife shows up at the door with a round, red-faced baby boy, maybe three months old. “It’s cold, Lou. Why don’t you come inside?”

“We’re almost finished,” Caroline says.

Beaming, Louis opens the door and takes the baby from his wife.

“Oh, Louis,” says his wife. “I don’t think the detective came here to look at babies.” Her hand rests on Louis’s shoulder.

“Eighty-fifth percentile,” Louis says proudly. The baby pulls his fist to his mouth and starts sucking, and Louis hands him back through the doorway.

When his wife and baby are gone, Louis turns back to Caroline. “That’s the other reason I left, right there. I met Ginger about the same time Clark got married. It made Eli crazy. He said I was abandoning him. He had this investigator that he hired every once in a while, and he had the guy follow Ginger because he was convinced she was a plant hired by another game company to steal our secrets. I just laughed. ‘Secrets, Eli? What secrets? We don’t even have a game.’

“You know what he said? He said, ‘Come on, Louis. Why else would she sleep with you? Don’t you think she’d rather fuck a normal-size guy?’ This was right around the time he spent all that money to defeat Clark. I’d finally had enough of his paranoia and viciousness. So I left. Took a bath on my shares and walked away.”

Louis chews on his lip. “There was a time when I would have told you that Eli Boyle was my best friend, when I would’ve done anything for him. But a few minutes ago…when you told me that he was dead…to be honest? I didn’t feel a thing.”

“But you don’t know any reason why Clark would kill him?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Well,” she says, “someone had a reason. Did he have enemies, anyone who might have wanted him dead?”

“You could start with about two dozen investors,” Louis says. “There’s me. Bryan, our old tech guy—Eli drove him out. Michael, the money guy.”

Then something occurs to Louis. “You said enemies? That’s funny. I only heard Eli use that word once to describe someone. It was 1998, I think. Eli was in his office, reading the paper, this big grin on his face. I asked what was up, and he showed me this little newspaper story about a guy arrested with a bunch of cocaine in his car. Eli said he’d had the investigator find the guy. I said that was quite a coincidence, and Eli gave me the strangest look. Really creepy. You know? Like it was no coincidence.

“‘See this?’ Eli said. ‘This is what I do to my enemies. Remember that.’”

“What did he mean?”

“I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.”

“Did you know the guy?”

“Oh, sure,” says Louis. “We went to high school with him. Mean, wiry asshole, used to terrorize Eli at the bus stop.”

P
ete Decker scowls when he comes into the county jail interview room and sees who has interrupted his sleep. Scraggly haired and yawning, in the jeans and T-shirt that he was wearing this afternoon when Caroline tackled him on the sidewalk, Pete turns back to the guard.

“What’d they do, assign me my own cop?” he asks. Then he turns to Caroline. “You ain’t done enough for me today?”

She had a hell of a time convincing the jail commander to let her talk to an inmate late Saturday night, but Caroline finally persuaded him that Pete had vital information in a homicide investigation and that she didn’t have time to go through normal channels.

Her cell phone vibrates. She looks down. Spivey. He must’ve finally been called out to Eli Boyle’s house. It won’t be long now. Caroline reaches down and turns off her phone.

“I just need to ask you a couple of questions,” she tells Pete.

He crosses his arms. “I don’t like when you ask me questions.”

“You mentioned someone, a guy that Clark used to fight at the bus stop when you were kids.”

“Yeah.” Pete finally sits down.

“Eli Boyle.”

“Yeah, that’s him. Weird fuckin’ kid.”

“When did you see him last?”

Pete shrugs. “I don’t know. Twenty years? About the same time I saw Clark the last time.” He gestures toward the jail guard standing at the door behind him. “I don’t bump into too many people from the old neighborhood.”

“Uh-huh.” She looks down at her notes from the interview with Louis Carver. “Do you remember anything about your arrest in ’98?”

“Did three and some at Walla Walla for that shit. ’Course I remember.”

“In the arrest report, you said that you
found
five hundred grams of cocaine outside your apartment.”

He shrugs and tries to smile. “Yeah. That’s a good one to try in court, huh? Fuck I was thinking?
I found it!
Stupid-ass motherfucker.”

“So did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Find a half-kilo of cocaine outside your apartment?”

He stares at her and his eyes narrow, as if he’s trying to figure her angle. “What the fuck is this—”

“Look, I’m just asking a question.”

“Bullshit.”

“You don’t want to tell me what happened in ’98?”

“You’re fuckin’ with me.”

“I’m not.”

“You won’t believe me.”

“I might.”

“Okay. You want to know?” He chews his bottom lip. “I’d been out two months, but I was straight. The one good thing about state time is you can get off the shit, you know? You probably don’t believe me, but I was pissin’ clean those two months.”

He looks down at a crudely drawn tattoo on his arm, as if it would finish the story for him. “Had a car, a little apartment downtown, a job washing dishes. Most times that shit don’t work for me—goin’ straight. It’s boring. But Walla Walla changed everything. I hated that place so much, I’d have washed every fuckin’ dish in the world to stay out.

“Then one afternoon, I come out of my apartment to go to work, and there’s a car parked next to mine. Brand-new fuckin’ Mercedes-Benz. Beautiful car. Charcoal-colored ragtop. I mean…we didn’t get us a lot of Benzes parked outside my building. Nobody’s around and the top and windows are down. No other cars in the alley. So I looked in. I mean, how could I not? Be like some chick sitting topless on your sidewalk, you know? You gotta look. Don’t mean nothing. Just means you looked.”

He wipes his brow at the memory.

“It was sitting right there in the driver’s seat. Half a brick. I never had that much weight myself—not in coke—but I seen guys cut from packages like that. Shit. I don’t know if the guy was coming back for it, if it just fell out, if it was a drop. I don’t know shit except it’s sitting there on the driver’s seat, like everything I ever wanted in my life, like someone left it just for me. Like
God or something just woke up that day said, ‘You know what, Pete, ol’ buddy, even assholes deserve a break sometimes.’

“I don’t even remember grabbing it. Next thing I know, I’m driving away, checking my rearview mirror, that thing in my lap.” He cradles his hands as if holding a baby. He smiles. “I made sure no one was behind me and then I cut a seam and did a line while I was waiting for a red light. Oh! Pure as a hug from your mama. Shit was amazing.” He laughs and his eyes roll back. “Best four minutes of my life.”

“Four minutes?”

“That’s about how long I drove before the cops swarmed me. Uniforms. Four rollers. I figured they was watchin’ the Benz, but when I told ’em I found it in that car, they just laughed at me.” He shakes his head. “They got a big kick out of that. ‘He found it! Motherfucker found it!’

“I said, ‘You mean you guys wasn’t watchin’ that Benz back there?’ They just laughed at me. ‘What Benz?’ they said. I swore so much that’s what happened, they drove me back down the alley to check it out. But the car was gone.

“In court, the cops said that some dude had called in, said he saw a guy in a gold Nova driving north on Division with a big bag of coke in his lap. Bang, strike three, judge gives me a fuckin’ nickel. You know, I’ve had bad luck, but to have some fucker call in when I’m doing a line in my own car? That shit’s unfair.”

Pete shrugs, as if he’s bored with his own story. “Yeah, yeah, so poor me, huh? What’s this got to do with Eli Boyle?”

Caroline looks down at the Department of Motor Vehicles report for Eli Boyle that she just printed out. She slides it across the table.

Pete picks it up and reads it, his lips moving as he does.

She watches Pete’s face as he reads that Eli Boyle has registered only one car in the last four years, a gunmetal gray 1998 Mercedes-Benz SL500 convertible. Pete looks up from the paper, his face blank, as if he can’t comprehend this, as if he’s never imagined that such patterns could be at play in his life, that he could be subject to such elaborate forces, the shadows, the world beneath this one.

Maybe that’s what’s going through his head, Caroline thinks, or maybe that’s just me. Because all Pete says is, “Motherfucker.”

“He hired an investigator to find you,” Caroline says. “I guess he knew
what time you went to work and he parked there, figuring you wouldn’t be able to resist.”

Pete shakes his head and reads the DMV report again. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me.”

“I don’t…I don’t know,” he says quietly. She watches the disbelief on his face become something else, sadness over those lost three years, maybe, or the wonder over whether he could’ve stayed clean. Then his face changes again, and this new emotion is unmistakable—cheeks reddening, eyes narrowing, lips closing in.

Caroline stands and motions to the guard. She takes the report from Pete. “Listen, I’ll put in a word with the prosecutor,” she says. “Tell him you helped me. Maybe they’ll give you a break.”

The guard comes in, but Pete is staring off, miles away.

“Oh, and if you’re thinking about paying Eli a visit when you get out,” Caroline says, “you’re about three days too late.”