Floating Staircase

by Ronald Malfi

  “The sound of the boy falling off the staircase,” Adam said, studying the paperwork.

  “Only it wasn’t,” I said. “I think the wail Nancy heard was actually Veronica Dentman down by the water.”

  Dentman stood. “You son of a bitch.”

  “You told me yourself that night in the cemetery that your sister was your sole responsibility and you wouldn’t let anything happen to her. That’s why you lied to the police. You were covering for her.”

  Dentman’s chest was expanding, retracting, expanding, retracting. From across the table I could feel his hot breath in my face. “You don’t know nothing.”

  I turned to my brother. “It’s all there in the paperwork.”

  Very slowly, Adam set the printout down on the table. His face was white. He said nothing.

  “I’m getting the fuck out of here,” Dentman said, turning to leave.

  “Stop,” Adam called after him.

  Amazingly, Dentman froze in midstride. His hands were trembling, and his profile resembled something that might have been on the bow of a pirate ship.

  “Is this true?” Adam asked him.

  “Fuck you. I didn’t have to come out here.”

  “Will you sit down, please?”

  “I don’t have to answer your goddamn questions.”

  Adam stood. “I need you to come to the station with me, Mr. Dentman.”

  “I don’t have time for this.”

  “I’m not asking. We’re going to the station.”

  “I want him in jail,” Dentman said, glaring at me. His eyes were slits cut into the ruddy fabric of his face. “I want the son of a bitch arrested for harassment.”

  Gathering up the paperwork from the table, I stood and said, “Fine. Let’s all go downtown.”

  “You shit!” Dentman lunged at me, knocking the table onto its side with a crack.

  I jumped backward as one of Dentman’s massive fists swung at me like a wrecking ball; the wind from the blow blew the hair off my forehead. I braced myself for a second strike—Dentman already had his arm cocked and ready—but Adam was on him in a heartbeat, pinning one wrist behind his back and throwing his weight against the larger man. Dentman’s second punch went wild as he fell forward on his knees.

  Adam shouted something unintelligible at him and pressed down on Dentman’s shoulder as if he feared the larger man might fly away. “Stay down. Don’t resist.”

  Handcuffs appeared. Their serrated teeth ratcheted at the small of Dentman’s back.

  Tooey charged out from behind the bar. “What the hell’s going on?” He paused when he saw the handcuffs.

  “Get up,” Adam said to the side of Dentman’s face.

  At first, Dentman did not move. With his yellow eyes locked on mine in a death stare and his flushed cheeks visibly quivering, I thought we would all remain frozen where we were until Armageddon turned us into smoldering piles of ash. Then Dentman got one foot on the floor and, with Adam’s assistance, pulled himself up.

  The next one to move was Tooey—he rushed over and righted the overturned table.

  Adam pivoted and shoved Dentman toward the door. “Let’s go, Travis,” he said without facing me. “Let’s go.”

  Bending down, I picked up the copied records from the construction company and crammed them back into the envelope. As Tooey went on setting the chairs back around the table, I noticed something else, too: the letter I had slipped through the Dentmans’ mail slot, the one he’d had clenched in one fist when he first arrived. I picked that up, too.

  It said:

  David—

  Meet me at Tequila Mockingbird in Westlake tomorrow at 5 p.m. sharp, or Veronica goes to jail.

  There had been no need to sign it.

  Stuffing the letter into the rear pocket of my jeans, I followed Adam and Dentman out into the rain.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  As it turned out, Strohman’s office did function as an interrogation room, albeit only when the main interrogation room was occupied. On this night, David Dentman, escorted by two uniformed officers, was led into Strohman’s uninspired little office where he awaited a meeting with Paul Strohman himself.

  The ride from the ‘Bird to the police station had taken only four or five minutes, though it had seemed like half an hour. Adam had shoved Dentman into the backseat, then barked at me to get in the passenger seat. Behind the wheel, Adam cranked the engine and flipped on the flashers and siren. No one spoke until we pulled into the bay at the station when Adam muttered to me under his breath, “Get out.”

  As I sat in the hallway just outside Strohman’s office, I heard one of the officers inside issuing Dentman his rights. Each time Adam went by me in the hall, I made a half-assed effort to stand up and not look so incongruous. Each time, he told me to remain seated. So I sat.

  When one of the two uniformed officers exited Strohman’s office, he seemed perplexed to see me—it was just that obvious I didn’t belong here—that his eyes bugged out comically. Someone else came by and wordlessly gave me a cup of coffee.

  Two more uniformed officers appeared at the end of the hall, standing on either side of the walking skeleton that was Veronica Dentman. In a tattered cotton nightgown of faded pink and nothing but a pair of dirty socks on her feet, they led her down the hallway like nurses ushering a patient through a psych ward. Her scraggly hair hung in tangled ropes over her gaunt face, and her eyes were sunken pits in the center of her skull. As they passed, her socks made whooshing sounds on the fire retardant carpet. I caught the acrid scent of unwashed skin.

  Nearly spilling my coffee, I shot up like a bolt out of my chair. In their passing wake, I felt a whole other presence brush by me—almost tangible, almost visible. Frigid as the basement of 111 Waterview Court. I thought of dead autumn leaves and creaking hinges on the doors of haunted houses.

  Strohman’s office door opened. I caught a glimpse of a number of people inside—David Dentman among them—before Strohman quickly closed the door behind him. He held the time and attendance records in one hand, bound down the margin with brass pins. When he saw me standing there, he did a double take, the rubber soles of his shoes skidding on the linoleum. “I thought I told you to keep your fingers out of my soup,” he said, proffering the bound galley of paper out before him like a gift.

  Before I could think of a retort, he pivoted on his heels and clomped down the hallway. As he turned into another room, I heard him bark at someone to get him coffee.

  When Adam returned, he was with another officer who was wearing a ski cap and a Redskins jacket over his uniform. “This is Officer McMullen,” my brother said. “He’s going to ask you a few questions.”

  “I think your chief wants to punch me in the throat,” I told him.

  “Call me Rob,” said McMullen, ignoring my comment. He was lantern jawed, with eyes like chips of gray ice. He looked young enough to still reek of the womb. “You need more coffee? No? So, uh, let’s go chat by the vending machines, yeah?”

  There was a circular Formica table with immovable chairs affixed to steel poles in the floor at the other end of the hall. The table sat in front of a wall of vending machines that looked like they hadn’t been serviced since the Vietnam War.

  We sat and McMullen fumbled a small spiral notepad from the breast pocket of his shirt. He seemed to put too much thought in every question he asked me, which dealt primarily with how I’d gotten a hold of the time and attendance records from the construction company. I answered the questions as truthfully as possible, though I refused to give Earl Parsons’s name. McMullen did not seem interested in Earl’s name, however, and appeared mostly concerned with the rapidly dulling point of his pencil.

  “You write books, don’t you?” was his final question.

  “What’s that got to do with any of this?”

  McMullen shrugged and looked bored. “Just what I heard is all. Never met a writer up close and in person before.” Examining his notes, he added, “Except for one time I we
nt into Philadelphia to one of Pamela Anderson’s book signings. She’s amazing in person. You ever run into her at writing conventions or whatever it is you guys go to?”

  I told him I had not.

  “Yeah. Too bad. She’s hot shit in person. Really something. I mean, sometimes, you know, in person, well . . .” He seesawed one hand to illustrate his disappointment in meeting other celebrities in the past. “Huge fuckin’ tits.”

  “Are the Dentmans under arrest?”

  “They’re being questioned.”

  “But they’re not under arrest?”

  “You ever see an interrogation?”

  “No,” I said.

  With a grin like the front grille of a tractor trailer, McMullen said, “Come with me.”

  Winding through a maze of sawdust-colored corridors, we eventually stopped outside a closed metal door with a glass porthole of smoked glass in it. It looked like a door on a submarine. Humming what sounded like the theme song to The Muppet Show, Officer McMullen punched a code into the cipher lock, then opened the door. Without offering any direction, he stood there with the door partially open and examining his cuticles until I stepped inside. McMullen followed me in, shutting the door and continuing to hum.

  We were the only two people in a room as small and as lightless as a photographer’s darkroom. Folding chairs sat facing a one-way mirror. On the other side of the glass, in a windowless room only slightly bigger than Strohman’s office, Veronica sat at the head of a gouged and splintering wooden table. I recognized the officer scribbling in a notebook at the other end of the table as Officer Freers.

  “Go on,” McMullen said, nodding at the folding chairs. “Take a seat.”

  “Can they hear us?”

  “Naw,” McMullen said, sounding like he had chew in his lip.

  Freers’s questions were of the baseline variety—Veronica’s full name, date of birth, social security number (which she didn’t know), address, telephone number (which she didn’t have), and current occupation (ditto phone number).

  “Is there any way to listen in on David Dentman’s interrogation?” I asked McMullen after a while.

  “He’s in the chief’s office,” McMullen said, which I assumed to mean no one was permitted to view anything that happened in the chief’s office.

  Freers got up and left the interrogation room, returning less than a minute later with a Dixie cup of water. He set the cup in front of Veronica. Turning her head toward the cup, her scraggly hair hung down in her face, some clumps of which dipped into the cup like tea bags.

  The cipher lock popped and the metal door eased open, cracking the darkness of the viewing room with a sliver of fluorescent light from the hallway. Two or three bodies shambled inside, breathing heavily. The room suddenly smelled of bad breath and day-old perspiration. Two big shapes scuttled like crabs in the seats behind me while the third remained standing beside McMullen. The two behind me muttered in tones just above a whisper. I thought I heard one of them blow a fart against the metal seat of the folding chair.

  “We’re gonna ask you about the day your son drowned,” Freers said to Veronica.

  Veronica said nothing.

  “Anything you want to start with?” Freers asked.

  Veronica said nothing.

  “We’re gonna need a statement from—”

  “I was asleep,” she said automatically. Her voice was very quiet through the speakers mounted at either side of the two-way mirror.

  “Can we begin with the last thing you remember about that day? Before you went to sleep?” Freers tried.

  “I had a headache,” she said. “I was asleep.”

  “Fuckin’ creepy,” said one of the shapes behind me. “Like she’s a robot or something.”

  “Possessed,” suggested his partner. “Like that movie about the devil takin’ over the girl.”

  “The Exorcist?”

  “I meant that new one.”

  “Been brainwashed is what I think.”

  Leaning forward in my seat, I attempted to drown out their voices with my own concentration. Behind the glass, Freers was attempting with zero results to approach his questioning from a different angle.

  The third officer who stood over with McMullen made his way to the two-way. He stood close enough to leave breath-blossoms on the glass. “Come on, Freers,” he mumbled under his breath. “Give it up already.”

  One of the baboons behind me started humming the theme to the Twilight Zone.

  As if he’d received messages through the glass from osmosis, Freers eventually set down his pen. He sighed and leaned back in his chair; a series of dry cracks that could have been the chair or his back channeled over the intercom. Freers said one last thing to Veronica, the details of which were muffled by his fat thumb rubbing his lower lip. Then he stood, grabbed his pen and notebook, and left the room.

  Alone, Veronica looked like a wax impression of herself in the colorless lights of the interrogation room.

  “Strohman’s gonna want a shot,” one of the men said behind me. The resentment in his voice was as subtle as a cannon blast.

  “Won’t matter,” said someone else. “Look at her. You’ll sooner get a confession out of a telephone pole.”

  “I’ll bet even she don’t know what happened.” This was McMullen, still standing by the door and edged into conspiracy by his comrades.

  After a few more minutes, they all grew bored. There was some rumor about coffee cake in the lounge, which seemed to light a fire under their asses.

  I watched their dark shapes get up and lumber out into the hall. Before me, Veronica sat motionless and alone at the wooden table in the interrogation room.

  “What will happen to her?” I asked McMullen, who was the last to head for the door.

  “Don’t know,” he said. “Come on. Follow me.”

  Out in the hallway, it was like New Year’s Eve. This was probably the most action the department had seen in a very long time. Possibly the most action they’d ever seen. In the milieu, I thumped a shoulder with Adam as he passed me in the hallway.

  “I called Beth and told her to call Jodie,” he said over his shoulder, continuing to walk by me with two other policemen. “Told her you were over at the station helping me with something. Said you’d give her a call.” He mimed holding a phone to one ear before disappearing into another room.

  “Is there a telephone I can use?” I asked McMullen before he followed his coworkers into the lounge.

  “Christ.” He paused with his hands on his hips, lapping the sweat off his upper lip with his tongue like a dog. He looked maybe eighteen years old. “All the offices are occupied.” Then his eyes lit up. “Let’s take you to Mae.”

  Mae was the stout little woman who’d brought Strohman and me our coffee the day I was picked up in the cemetery. She sat at a computer in what served as a combination dispatch and secretarial office. A bank of telephones sat on an overturned bench, a numeral painted in Liquid Paper on each handset.

  McMullen waved a hand over the phones, suggested any of them would be more than happy to oblige. “Dial nine to get out,” he said before he vanished.

  “Hey,” I said as Jodie picked up at the house. “It’s getting late. I wanted to give you a call. You spoke to Beth?”

  “She said you’re down at the station with Adam. She said they’ve made an arrest in a murder investigation?”

  “I don’t know. They’re questioning some people.”

  “What are you helping him with?”

  “I guess I’m sort of a witness.”

  “Is this about the drowned boy?”

  I closed my eyes and said, “Yes.”

  There was a lengthy hesitation on her end. I couldn’t imagine her expression. Was she fearful I was falling back into it again?

  “Are you okay?” she said finally.

  “Yes. Are you?”

  “I’m okay if you’re okay.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “When will you be home?�
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  “I don’t know. I rode here with Adam. The car’s still down at the ‘Bird. I guess I’ll be home whenever Adam gets off.”

  “You want Beth and me to come get you?”

  “No,” I said. “Sit tight. I can’t imagine I’ll be too late.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I love you.”

  “Love you, too.” And I hung up.

  “So nice,” Mae said, beaming at me. She had lipstick on her teeth, and her silvery hair was pulled back into a bun. “Your wife?”

  “Yes. Is there a place where I can smoke around here?”

  “Outside on the front steps.”

  Freezing and wet, I chain-smoked cigarettes on the front steps of the Westlake Police Department like someone about to be executed. When the wind blew, it caused a whirring in the nearby trees that sounded like the ocean. The sky was a black web speckled with stars.

  It was closing on eleven o’clock when Adam pushed through the front door and stood behind me. His shadow fell over me as I sat on the concrete steps, shivering in my coat and working down to the bottom of my cigarette pack. The parking lot’s lights cast an unnatural orange glow along the flagstone sidewalk that ran the length of the building.

  “Can I bum one of those?”

  “You don’t smoke menthols,” I said, handing him my last cigarette anyway.

  He lit it and coughed as he inhaled. Leaning against the railing, he said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about that summer.”

  There was no need for him to explain what he meant.

  “Maybe it’s you coming to live out here or maybe it’s everything that’s been going on lately. I don’t know.”

  I watched him suck hard on his smoke. His head was enveloped in an aura of cold orange light.

  “Christ,” Adam uttered, crushing the half-smoked cigarette beneath his boot. “Let’s get out of here.”

  On the car ride to Waterview Court, I asked him what was going to happen next.

  “We’re gonna hold them both overnight. The DA will want statements before he takes a step.”

  “How’s that looking?”

  “The statements?” There was a disheartening resignation in my brother’s voice. “David won’t say a word, and Veronica’s completely out of it. Even if she admitted to anything, it won’t hold water unless her brother gives a statement that’s pretty much on the same level. Also, we’ll need to subpoena those time and attendance records from the construction company. That’ll take a while.”