Let the Devil Out (21 page)

“Most people,” she said, “don't have your fortitude when it comes to the truth. It'll make this conversation easier if I don't have to hold anything back. And neither should you.”

Gage frowned at his tea as if he regretted ordering it. “So you're not a detective, then? You said ‘officer' when I sat down. You're not from Homicide?”

“I am not,” Maureen said. Why hadn't Detillier told this man, she wondered, that he'd be talking to a patrol officer? For the same reason, she realized, that she'd made him meet her in a restaurant full of black people and Creoles. To knock him off balance. “I am one of the first officers to become involved in your son's case. I was involved from the very beginning.”

“So you were with my son when he died,” Gage said, using his fingertip to press his glasses against the bridge of his nose. He did that whenever he finished a sentence, Maureen noticed, whether or not the glasses had moved.

“No,” Maureen replied. “I was not with him.” Time to test Gage's love of the truth. “As far as I know, Clayton was alone when he died.” He'd been found lying spread-eagled with his throat cut open like Leary had, Maureen thought. Like her, left in a place where he'd be found not long after he'd died.

“You're the one who found his body, then?” Gage asked.

“I am not,” Maureen said. “A college junior named—well, doesn't matter what his name was—found Clayton's body. Outside a bar uptown.”

Gage shifted in his chair. He reached into his bag again, tossed a pen on the table. Next came a yellow legal pad. He flipped through several pages of notes written in impossibly tiny, impossibly neat handwriting. “I know about where Clayton was found, how he was found. But maybe I could talk to that boy, then. I'd like to know exactly what he saw. I've been to that bar, but no one there was very helpful. I'll go back.”

“Talking to that witness is not going to happen,” Maureen said. “No way. And I'd advise you not to return to that bar. Clayton's murder remains an open police investigation. Conducting your own investigation would be considered interference, a criminal act.”

“Is that an official warning?” Gage asked. “Are you authorized as a patrol officer to give it?”

“Mr. Gage, I am here to help you,” Maureen said, “and as a courtesy to you and your family.”

Gage raised his hands, shaking his head, as if only then realizing he'd spoken those last thoughts aloud. “Okay. Of course. Understood. I just, I'm confused.” He paused, looked away from her, frowning at a television, not really watching what was on the screen, a rerun of the local news noon broadcast. Maureen watched the images play across his glasses. He said, “So why are you the one I'm talking to? I asked for that detective, Drayton.”

Maureen shook her head. “Drayton's no longer on the case. Consider yourself lucky.”

“They could've told me that when I called headquarters,” Gage said, pen at the ready. “So who has the case now?”

“I don't know,” Maureen said, lying, and not sure why she was doing it as she did it. “They don't tell me these things.”

“But you knew the other detective had been removed. You knew that.”

“Police station gossip,” Maureen said.

“But no one gossips about who gets the case?”

Gage took his glasses off, looked at them as if wondering where the moving images had gone. He put them back on. He waved his hand back and forth over the table. “And we're supposed to believe it's not intentional.”

“What's that?”

“The lies, the confusion, the manipulation.” Gage picked dead skin from his bottom lip, studied it, flicked it off the tip of his thumb. He leaned back in his seat, crossing his arms over his sunken chest. “Did you know that it took the coroner three weeks to find me, to tell me that my son had been murdered?” He pinched his bottom lip. “The little bits, the specks of information we get, so that we think we're getting answers, that we're being paid attention to. They toss us crumbs, like we're birds at the park, and call it a meal. Call it a courtesy.”

“I can tell you why it took so long to find you,” Maureen said.

“Sometimes I'm shocked they looked for me,” Gage said. “I'm surprised Clayton didn't go right to the incinerator like some homeless nobody.”

Maureen took a deep breath. She needed to settle him down if she wanted to control the conversation. “I'm sorry it's so frustrating, especially in a time of such grief. Believe me, I empathize. I work in the system. It can be infuriating.”

“It's
built
to be infuriating,” Gage said, “for anyone who has a thought in his head. That's my point. That's its power. It's the power the tar pits had over the dinosaurs.”

“And the rest of us, those of us without thoughts?”

Gage didn't think she was funny. “For the thoughtless, for the passive, it offers enough to pacify. I often wish I was one of them.”

“Right,” Maureen said. “The crumbs.”

She slid her coffee mug aside, folded her hands on the table.

“We couldn't find you, Mr. Gage, because Clayton didn't carry a single valid form of ID. His driver's license wasn't only out of date, it was fake. We had no access to any records of him. We had to use the truck, registered to you, at an address you haven't lived at in years. A house that was condemned and torn down.” Maureen paused. “A lot of effort was in fact expended trying to find you. You're a hard man to track down. And that doesn't seem to be accidental. You can't dodge the system and then complain when it doesn't serve you.”

Gage looked away, taking a deep breath, using the moment to collect himself. He smoothed his tie with one hand and turned back to Maureen. “When y'all find a car, abandoned, stolen, whatever, and you need to find out about it, what do you use?”

“The license plate,” Maureen said, “the registration. If that's no good, like in your son's case, we go to the VIN. We can get a lot from that usually.”

“And a gun,” Gage said. “You recover a gun used in a crime, or take one off a criminal, you look for the serial number, run it through your computers, see if that gun has a history.”

“True. That's why people try so hard to destroy the serial numbers. Destroying that number can hide a lot of bad things.”

“When you were born,” Gage said, “you got your name, Maureen, which your parents gave you, based on their desires and their histories. Do you know the history of your name?”

“Of the name Maureen? I have no idea. I know my mom wanted me named after her mother, Morrigan, which is the name of some war goddess from Irish mythology. My father thought it was too … aggressive. And he worried it was too weird for where we lived. He was a soft, uncreative man. Maureen was a compromise. Another battle my mother lost to my father's charm, to hear her tell it. Or maybe that was Grandma Fagan who said that, the Morrigan of the story.” She shrugged. “That's the history as my mother tells it. My father isn't around to argue.”

“So, as I said,” Gage said, “your name is the product of your parents. Well, the next thing you got when you were born was your Social Security number, which the government gave you. Now why was that?”

Maureen sighed. She had every confidence Leon Gage would answer his own question if she let him. She resisted the urge to check the time on her phone. Why had she agreed to this meeting? This was the guy Detillier had pinned his hopes on? Good luck with that. He carried his share of rage, that was for sure, but she was having a hard time imagining him cutting someone's throat in a cemetery. He seemed like the kind of man who yelled at the television news. Maybe that was why he kept throwing glances at the TV.

“We pay into the system when we start working,” Maureen said, “and then we get paid by it when our turn comes. I guess. Sounds pretty simple and fair to me. You give, then you get. I haven't thought about it much.”

Gage chuckled. “That's exactly the way they want you. Thoughtless. Oblivious.”

“Ah,” Maureen said, nodding. “The ominous
they
. I was wondering when
they
would show up.” Maybe, somehow, she thought, this conversation would get entertaining.

“You know anyone who goes to work at birth?” Gage asked. He checked his watch, glanced at the television again. His mouth hung open. He appeared to be thinking, calculating what he would say next. He refocused on Maureen. “Why give you a number then? You won't work for at least, what, fifteen years after you're born. Why is that number assigned at birth?”

“Because it's our serial number,” Maureen said, shrugging in surrender to Gage's wisdom. “And Social Security is a scam, a veil or distraction to cover up that fact. It's how the government controls us. I have seen the light. I thought you wanted to talk about your son?”

“You're making fun of me,” Gage said. “I don't mind. Everyone does. In the beginning. We're conditioned to think a certain way. It's a strange education; I went through it myself. But you wait, you'll find yourself thinking about what I said here today. At night. When you're alone, when you turn on your computer. That's how it starts. The questions make too much sense to ignore.”

“Mr. Gage,” Maureen said, “do you consider yourself a Sovereign Citizen?” Fuck it, she thought. Why not come right out with it? If he was going to open that door, she figured, she might as well walk through it. She was losing her patience with Gage's condescending tone. If Detillier and Atkinson wanted finesse in the questioning, they could sit with this tedious bastard their damn selves.

Gage gestured for the waitress to refill his iced tea. He waited until she brought back the glass to speak. Maureen noticed he never looked at her once. Never thanked her.

“Do I consider myself a free man?” Gage said. “Do I consider myself a unique legal and spiritual individual, with human rights and freedoms endowed to me by my Creator and enshrined, at one time in history, into man's law by the Founding Fathers? Yes, I do.” He fished the lemon from his tea, squeezed every last drop of juice from it. “Do I belong to a specific group whose members answer to that name, or any name? I do not. You can't be the first person I described and also be the second.” He leaned forward over the table. “You have to choose.”

“Are you familiar with the Watchmen Brigade?” Maureen asked.

“I've heard of them.”

“Are you a member?”

“I am a member of the human race,” Gage said. “Everything else is subservience.”

“Do you believe in their cause?”

Gage grinned. “I get the feeling you and I would define their cause very differently. I believe that patriots exist in this country. That they thrive here. They always have. I believe they do their thankless work in the service of freedom in each of our fifty states. I believe there are many more of them than you know, or care to think about.”

He checked his watch, glanced across the room at the television.

“
Freedom
,” Maureen said. “You like that word. Your kind always do. Your eyes light up when you say it, like a baby shown a brightly colored ball.”

“It's an important word,” Gage said. “Everybody loves it. Empires tremble at its sound. It belongs to no one
kind
. It's Joshua's trumpet. Unfortunately, only a few people truly understand what it means.”

“I'm gonna guess that you're one of those people,” Maureen said.

“The great myth of the past one hundred and fifty years is the end of slavery. The War of Northern Aggression was like every war about the expansion of power by the already powerful. It wasn't about anybody's freedom. It was about the
expansion
of slavery.

“Certainly, our national slavery mutated, like a disease, like a virus, hiding itself in order to survive. Growing, changing, always consuming as monsters do—as the government tossed aside its Stone Age weapons of whips and chains and learned to use its great new modern weapons of debt and taxation. You are a tool, Maureen. A faceless machine with a serial number. You're a car, a computer, a gun with a number used to track your personal history and financial value to the host. You live, you work, you breathe, and you breed to feed the government. You don't buy a house from the men who built it. You buy it from the bank. You don't buy a car from the men who built it. You buy it from the bank. Where do you think the bank's money goes? Up the food chain to the already fat.

“And you, you risk your life every day for this system that devours you, that owns you, that makes you its enforcer. And yet the work you do doesn't earn you a place to live. No, for that you need to embrace forty years of debt to a billion-dollar company so they can buy whatever politicians make sure the system that enslaves you stays in place. You work like a slave, live like a slave, punish the other slaves, and because they let you dress in the blue colors of the American overseer, you call yourself free.”

Gage checked his watch again. Maureen wondered why he had even come to this meeting. Why had he arranged it? Clearly he had someplace more important to be, and yet she could see he enjoyed unspooling his lecture. A long time had passed, Maureen figured, since he'd had the chance to lay his sermon on the uninitiated, on someone who hadn't heard every one of his dumb theories a thousand fucking times. She felt immense gratitude for whomever it was waiting on him. She felt sympathy for the poor bartender in whatever backwoods south Louisiana saloon who had to listen to this shit night in and night out.

“I see the spark of truth in you,” Gage said, restless in his seat. “Every soul comes to the truth from different directions, like the streams to the sea. There is no one way home. You want to let them lie to you, that's your choice, it's not like you can stop them, but don't lie to yourself. That's the greatest sin. The only prisoner God hates is the one who holds fast to his cell after He has opened the door.”