Chapter 6: Blue Lights on Juniper Lane
The patrol car came down Juniper Lane slowly, without a siren, its lights washing the street in slow turns of blue and red. Andre saw the color first on the side of his own house, a smear moving across the gray siding, then on the fence boards, then across the faces of his friends. No one at the table had been watching the street. The gate was still open from where Marjorie had pushed through it, and through that gap the whole yard was suddenly on display.
Terrence set down the tongs. He had been turning ribs with the steady patience of a man who did careful work with his hands all week, and he kept his hands where they could be seen without making a show of it. Diego stood up slowly and rested his forearms on the back of the chair in front of him. Kevin, who had been in the middle of a sentence about grilling temperatures, stopped talking altogether. His phone stayed face down on the table.
Andre felt the heat leave his face. The grill was still smoking lightly. A platter of corn sat covered with a clean towel. Four plates were set out, and only two had been touched. A cooler by the steps held soda and bottled water, and a single six pack of beer, still closed, sweated in the shade. In the sudden quiet, those ordinary details seemed to arrange themselves into evidence, and he resented that he was already thinking of them that way in his own yard.
Marjorie stepped forward before the car had fully stopped at the curb. She lifted her phone in one hand, not to record, but as if presenting a credential. Her cream colored jacket was spotless despite the grass. She had composed her face into concern, the practiced look of someone bringing a problem to the proper authorities, and she moved toward the gate with the confidence of a guide leading officials into a site she had already described for them.
Two officers got out. The older one closed his door with a soft, deliberate push and took in the street before he looked at the yard. The younger officer came around the front of the car with a notebook already in hand, her eyes moving from fence line to gate to patio to faces. Neither of them hurried, and neither put a hand anywhere near a weapon.
Good afternoon, the older officer said. His name tag read Lindstrom. We got a call about a disturbance at this address. Mind if we come in through the gate and talk for a minute?
Andre said of course, and heard how formal he sounded, as if he were welcoming inspectors instead of standing in his own backyard on a Saturday he had planned for weeks. He gestured toward the open gate and stepped back to give them room, though it was his ground to decide who stood on it. Lindstrom nodded his thanks as he entered. Sato followed, pausing to look at the latch.
Marjorie began speaking at once. She described raised voices, aggressive posturing, men drinking heavily and refusing to lower music that had been blasting for hours. She used the word intoxicated twice. She said she had tried to handle it neighbor to neighbor and had been met with hostility. While she spoke, she pointed at the patio speaker, then at the table, then at Terrence, whose size seemed to be doing work in her story that his stillness did not support.
Lindstrom listened without interrupting, his face giving nothing back. Sato wrote a few words and then stopped writing and simply looked. The speaker under the eave was dark. No light showed on its face. No music came from anywhere on the street except, faintly, from two houses down, where someone had a radio on a porch so low it barely carried. The only sounds in Andre's yard were the tick of the grill cooling under its lid and ice settling in the cooler.
Lindstrom turned a slow half circle, comparing what he had been told with what was in front of him. The comparison did not favor the call. The grass was newly cut, the fence stood straight, and the bulbs Andre had hung that morning waited unlit for an evening that now felt very far away.
We are going to ask a few questions, Lindstrom said, speaking to everyone and to no one in particular. His tone stayed level and unhurried. Just to get clear on what is happening here today. If you would all stay where you are for the moment, we will make this quick.
Andre nodded. Beyond the open gate, a neighbor across the street had come out onto a porch and was watching without pretending otherwise. Another curtain moved. The blue lights kept turning, and in each interval the cookout looked less like a celebration and more like a scene strangers would later describe from whatever fragment they had seen.