Read Online 20 by John Edgar Wideman - Free Book Online

little of them all, 33.33 percent of each. Perhaps all murders are accidents…and suicides, too. Perhaps each murder victim is, to a degree, a co-conspirator, an accomplice in his own death. A man walks the city streets late at night and is killed by a thief, and who's to say—does he himself even know—if he chose to walk those streets because he secretly wished it to happen? And how many times, at the last crucial moment, have people hesitated to rescue themselves from some accidental or murderous danger—isn't that suicide, too?”
    â€œThere's the law,” the Detective said.
    â€œOh yes, the law. We believe in the law, don't we? First degree and second degree; felony and misdemeanor; murder, suicide, and accidental death. The coroner's inquest. The declaration. But tell me this—does the law ever say, ‘We don't know; it's a mystery and we simply don't know’? Not our law. We can't abide an unsolved mystery, can we? We don't believe in it so we make a declaration anyway: first degree or second degree; murder, suicide, or accident. But does the declaration make it so? Can every death be summed up by just one of three words? Does legal terminology, a court's declaration, tell you what actually happened—ever? Is it ever equal to the event itself?”
    The Detective said nothing, but he sympathized with the idea, understood it implicitly—that organic quality, the formal beauty he found in every crime, a wholeness that could not be defined, only sensed viscerally. He had always tried to sketch that organism, that almost living form that was the crime, a form which, in some amoral way, he could appreciate aesthetically. The law, though, devoured subtlety, his complex sketch, his solution, with its ambiguities and shadings, with its own formal beauty, inevitably reduced into crude categories of guilt or innocence. There had been times when he had resented it, this profaning of his art; times when he would have agreed with Mrs. Klein's argument—but he wasn't about to admit thatnow. Not while still trying to solve the case, not while she mocked his lifelong profession.
    â€œFor example,” Mrs. Klein said, “what if…what if the body that Dexter saw when he saw what he saw, the body we have tentatively identified as Andrew Klein, what if its fall were the result of not one of the possibilities, but all three? What if the body…”
    â€œMr. Klein?” the Detective suggested.
    â€œAll right. What if Mr. Klein were to a degree, but only to a degree, a participant in his own demise? Let's assume…yes, let's assume that at the time under question, about five o'clock yesterday evening, Mr. Andrew Klein, sitting in his living room, was suddenly struck by the notion that he'd like to take a walk. And who can say why? Perhaps his legs were stiff; perhaps he felt too warm in the living room or wished to watch the sea birds more closely, a particularly passionate hobby of his; perhaps he had a difficult problem to consider and needed to walk it out. Or perhaps it was just a whim, nothing more than the need to do something, anything, and with the cove before him, a walk was the first thing to come to mind. It could have been any of those reasons or a combination of some or all of them, or something else entirely, and very probably Mr. Klein himself couldn't say for sure. Perhaps it was simply an accident that he should have decided to take a walk, but regardless of our ignorance of his exact motivation, let's assume that Andrew Klein did decide to take that walk. And let's further assume that he took someone along with him, someone close to him, someone who understood him as well as, and perhaps better than, he understood himself.”
    â€œHis wife perhaps?” the Detective said.
    He watched her closely now, sensed a change in her manner—an uneasiness, a tension—the first step perhaps on the road to confession. It was true, he well knew, what