Free Fall

by Chris Grabenstein

  Christine looks down at her hands.

  “Michael saved Dr. Rosen’s life.”

  My mind drifts off to the boardwalk and that scary new ride where Mr. Ceepak works.

  The Free Fall.

  David and Judith got theirs; the fall that should have set them free, financially, for life. Unfortunately, brother Michael snatched away their windfall with his clever little pendant.

  So maybe Judith and David decided to make Dr. Rosen take another tumble. And this time, maybe they made sure he couldn’t get back up.

  Maybe this time they used cyanide.

  47

  “WE UNDERSTAND YOU SAVED YOUR FATHER’S LIFE,” CEEPAK says to Michael Rosen.

  We’re in his suite at the Sea Spray, the highest-priced hotel in Sea Haven. It even has bellhops and somebody to carve an S-S logo into the sand in all the outdoor ashtrays.

  “You mean the pendant?” says Michael, offering us each a chilled bottle of Pellegrino water from his mini-fridge. I see one of those Toblerone candy bars sitting in a wicker basket on top of the fridge snuggled between a tiny bag of Famous Amos cookies, a jar of cashews, and a Pringles-style can of M&M’s. I’m guessing every item in the basket costs at least ten bucks.

  Ceepak raises his hand to say no-thanks to the bubbly water. I do the same. But I’m seriously eyeballing those M&M’s.

  “Dad, of course, thought the monthly fee for the monitoring service was too high. So I put it on one of my credit cards.”

  Michael holds a drinking glass up to the afternoon sun streaming through his twelfth-floor windows and must see a spot, because he curdles his nose.

  “Filthy. Can you believe this is actually considered the ‘nicest’ hotel on the island?”

  He shakes his head to further convey his “what a world, what a world” disdain.

  After chatting with Christine and her lawyer, Ceepak decided it would be best if we spent the rest of the day talking to the Rosens: Michael, David, and Judith. He is convinced that our suspect pool is similar to a kiddies’ wading pool: “very, very shallow.”

  “And probably full of crap,” I added.

  According to Ceepak, we need to look at the nurses and the family. Every single one of them, at some point in the days prior to Dr. Rosen’s fatal pill pop, could’ve had the means and opportunity to slip a cyanide-laced capsule into the Saturday-morning meds slot.

  “The key, I suspect,” Ceepak told me on the drive over to Michael’s hotel, “will be determining who had the strongest motivation.”

  And so we probe the richest son first. The one who dropped by Dr. Rosen’s house on the Friday before he died hoping to take “a walk on the beach” with his father.

  “Over the years, you purchased many items for your father,” says Ceepak. “Is that correct?”

  “Well, somebody had to,” Michael answers. “He was too cheap to buy what he needed himself. And my brother was bleeding him dry. That’s why I never gave my father money. If I wrote my father a check, he’d just deposit it in his bank account so he could write another check for David and Judith and Little Arnie. That reminds me. I need to hire somebody to take that 3-D TV out of Dad’s house. I didn’t give it to him so he could leave it to them.”

  “So you were angry with your father about his preferential treatment of your brother and his family?”

  “I could not care less about the money. Honestly. As you gentlemen have undoubtedly heard, I have done pretty well for myself since leaving home thirty years ago.”

  “You’re being modest,” says Ceepak.

  “You made fifty-two million last year alone,” I chime in. “They put you on that list in Forbes magazine.”

  Michael feigns a modest blush. “Guilty as charged. But dear boy, you forgot to mention my Emmy awards.”

  “Sorry,” I say.

  He brushes it off. “That’s okay. If my father were still alive, he’d tell you about each and every one of them, over and over and over again. In his eyes, that’s who I was. The very wealthy, very important, award-winning son. Trust me, with Arnold Rosen, there was no such thing as ‘unconditional love,’ not like I finally found with my partner Andrew. With Dad-ums, you had to earn it every day. I found that wildly successful television shows, Emmy awards, and millions of dollars in the bank helped.”

  “When did you leave Sea Haven?”

  “When I was eighteen. I went to college in California. U.S.C. Fought and scraped for everything I have. And all that time, even when I was working as a waiter in some sketchy dive to make ends meet, I never once thought about coming ‘home’ to sunny, funderful Sea Haven.”

  “Why do you think your brother stayed in Sea Haven?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe he likes playing miniature golf or eating pancakes the size of manhole covers. Maybe he’s really Peter Pan and refuses to grow up. Of course, Dad made staying here super easy for David. All he had to do was let Daddy run his life and produce an heir to the Rosen throne.”

  Michael plops down into a chair. I can tell venting all this bottled-up anger is exhausting him.

  “Here’s another reason why David did not kick the sand of this crummy little town off his shoes and run as far away as he possibly could and still be in the continental United States: David, gentlemen, is not gay. And newsflash, thirty-some years ago, Sea Haven was not, shall we say, a safe haven for boys like me.”

  “And your father?” asks Ceepak. “How did he react to your sexual orientation?”

  “Horribly. We’re Jewish, but I think he seriously considered becoming a Born Again Christian just so he could find one of those preachers to pray my gay away. Mom was better. In fact, she’s the one who told me to ‘move as far away from Arnold Rosen’ as I could and make my own life. She said she should’ve done it herself.”

  “When did your mother pass away?”

  “Seventeen years ago. January 18th.”

  “She and your father weren’t close?”

  “Who knows? They were never very kissy or huggy, not in front of us. Dad didn’t come home from the office most nights till nine. We only saw him on weekends when he’d take us fishing or to a football game up in New York or on some other god-awful manly adventure.”

  “But your mother and father never divorced?”

  “Nope. She just did a lot of retail therapy to compensate. In the end, I think Dad just wore her out.”

  “How so?”

  “My father—sweet and charming as he may seem when you first meet him—was a very demanding, very manipulative, very controlling, and extremely cheap, almost miserly man. Did you know, he always bought his socks and underwear at Sears because ‘nobody saw the labels on your socks and underwear.’ To do otherwise would be a waste of money, he’d say. So, you can imagine how disappointed he was when he heard I was spending a fortune on skivvies from Fred Segal.”

  “And who is this Fred Segal?”

  “High-end fashion boutique in Beverly Hills.”

  “I see.”

  “My father had a set way of doing everything. And woe betide anyone who strayed off his very rigid, straight and narrow road. Drove my mother crazy. Me, too. One time, maybe twenty, twenty-five years ago, I made the mistake of going with him to the airport. We were both flying off in different directions. Anyway, we get out of the cab at Newark airport and, being a good little son, I grab Dad’s bags and haul them over to the skycap.

  “Well, my father pitched a fit. ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded. ‘Checking your bags.’ ‘That’s not how it’s done!’ he says, thinking I’m like David and have never flown anywhere on my own. So I say, ‘Uh, yes, Dad, it is. You give this nice young fellow your suitcase and he takes care of everything for you.’ My dad stomped his feet like a little boy. ‘No, Michael. That is not how I do it.’

  “And that, gentlemen, is the key. My father could not abide anyone doing anything in a manner that didn’t conform to his well-scripted perceptions of perfection.”

  Now Michael pauses.


  “I suppose I should’ve thanked him for that.”

  “How so?”

  “Why do you think I’m such a highly paid television producer? I’m a perfectionist and a control freak. I am, gentlemen, my father’s son.”

  48

  CEEPAK FLIPS BACKWARD TO A PAGE HE’S ALREADY SCRIBBLED on in his notebook.

  “We spent some time today with Revae Dunn,” Ceepak tells Michael. “At the Garden State Reproductive Science Center over in Avondale.”

  “And?”

  “Why were you so generous to Ms. Dunn and her sister Monae?”

  “I helped Monae because Revae was helping me.”

  “How?”

  Michael reaches into the mini bar and grabs the little blue bottle of Bombay sapphire gin. He twists open the cap and takes a bracing chug.

  “You’ve met Judith’s sister, Shona, correct?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Do you remember the color of her hair?”

  I think for a second. “Black?”

  “Correct. Black as a raven’s belly. And Judith?”

  “Blonde,” says Ceepak.

  “From a bottle,” says Michael, taking another swig on his Bombay. “Little Arnie, of course, also has blonde hair, but, unlike his pudgy mother, his roots are not jet black. And the lazy sow always forgets to do her eyebrows. They’re darker than her roots.”

  Ceepak closes up his notebook. Leans in.

  “Go on.”

  “Item two. Athletics. Little Arnie is very good at sports. Football, basketball, baseball—making him the first Rosen in recorded history who has ever excelled at athletic endeavors. Item three. Intelligence. Little Arnie is very smart. Straight A’s. Honor roll. His poppa? Not so much. In fact, ages ago, Dad-ums had grand visions of David going to dental school. U Penn, just like he did.”

  “And?”

  “And you don’t get into U Penn or any top tier college with SAT scores in the low 400’s. You go to a Community College outside Atlantic City and pick up a two-year associate degree in Hospitality Management.” Michael shakes his head. “Hospitality Management. What on earth did David study? ‘Reservation Taking 101’? ‘Comparative Buffets’? Item four: Little Arnie has perfect teeth.”

  Okay. I think that’s the gin talking. He’s totally lost me.

  “Gentlemen,” says Michael, “there hasn’t been a Rosen who didn’t need extensive orthodontia for generations. Item five: Little Arnie’s cute button nose.”

  Ceepak has heard enough. “Exactly what are you suggesting, Mr. Rosen?”

  “Well, detective, with Revae’s able assistance, I have, over the past year, been doing a little detective work of my own.”

  “And?”

  “There is no doubt in my mind that Judith is the young Aryan lad’s mother because, as she often says to Little Arnie, giving birth to him is what ruined her bikini body. That and her fondness for Mallomars, noodle kugel, and mayonnaise.”

  “But,” says Ceepak, “you doubt the boy’s paternity? You suspect that David is not Little Arnie’s father?”

  “All that crap about my father’s ‘living legacy,’ the heir to the royal ‘Rosen bloodline’? What if, gentlemen, at the fertility clinic, one of Judith’s treatments—which of course Dad-ums paid for because he wanted a grandson so desperately—what if it was what they call Therapeutic Donor Insemination?”

  “Ms. Dunn mentioned that as an option her clinic offers.”

  “And I suspect it’s the option Judith chose.”

  “What is it?” I ask, because my SAT’s weren’t so great either.

  “Artificial insemination,” says David. “Using the sperm of an anonymous donor.”

  “And Revae has been helping you prove your hypothesis?” asks Ceepak.

  “Diligently and tirelessly.”

  “She has been searching through confidential records, violating her patients’ right to privacy?”

  “Perhaps. But you’d have a very hard time proving it. The girl is good. Takes her time. Covers her tracks. She has earned every penny I have ever spent on her or her sister. You boys would get nowhere if you attempt to punish Revae Dunn for violating the sacred trust of a fat cow like Judith and some boy who jerked off in a cup fifteen years ago for seventy-five bucks a pop. The county prosecutor would laugh in your face.”

  “But you just told us that Ms. Dunn has been violating her fertility clinic’s ethics for a fee.”

  “Ask me again in court and I’ll deny everything.”

  “You’d perjure yourself to protect Ms. Dunn?”

  “Yes, because you couldn’t prove perjury either. It’d just be your word against mine, and I have very excellent lawyers who know how to waste time with motions and procedural maneuvering. You’d never even get me on the stand.”

  Ceepak is busy seething.

  So I jump in.

  “Did you and Revae find Little Arnie’s real father?”

  “As I told my brother Friday night after that god-awful family dinner: We are close. Very, very close.”

  “Why didn’t you just run one of those Maury Povich show paternity tests?” I ask.

  Michael shakes his head. “David would never consent to the DNA cheek swab. Besides, it’s not dramatic enough. I wanted Dad-ums to meet his grandson’s real father. Live and in person.”

  “And how did David react when you told him that you were close to identifying the sperm donor?” asks Ceepak, who’s back in the game.

  “He said I was just jealous because all I can do is adopt. And as you have heard from my brother and sister-in-law, adopted children, such as Kyle, don’t count. They do not qualify as blood heirs. They can never be considered legitimate grandchildren.”

  49

  “DO YOU THINK MICHAEL KILLED DR. ROSEN BECAUSE THERE was just no way to for him win his father’s love?” I ask Ceepak when we’re back in our car

  I know. I sound like one of those touchy-feely dudes with afternoon talk shows on TV.

  “It’s a possibility,” says Ceepak, which is what he usually says when he can tell I’m jumping to conclusions—especially conclusions you might find inscribed inside a sappy greeting card: “Dear Dad, you never hugged me when I was young; So here’s a poison pill to place upon your tongue!”

  It’s a little after six—eighteen hundred hours in the Ceepak Time Zone. David and Judith Rosen’s apartment will be our next stop.

  “Oh, shoot,” I mumble as we climb into the stealth-mobile. “I forgot to ask Michael about his suit.”

  Ceepak crinkles into the driver’s seat. “His suit?”

  “Yeah. How did he know to pack that black suit he wore to the funeral?”

  “You’re suggesting he anticipated his father’s death prior to his departure from California?”

  “Maybe he packed the cyanide pills, too.”

  “Interesting hypothesis, Danny. And your deductive reasoning is commendable as well.”

  Okay. I know I’m about to get a “but” or a “however.”

  “However …”

  There it is.

  “… as you may have also observed, Michael Rosen is constantly dressed in black. In addition to being a fashion statement popular with those in the entertainment industry, it might also be a reflection of the frugality and parsimony Michael inherited from his father.”

  “You mean Michael is cheap, too?”

  “Perhaps so—on a vastly different scale. Yes, his tailored suit most likely cost more than a similar, if less stylish, suit purchased at Kohl’s …”

  “They sell suits at Kohl’s?”

  “Indeed so.”

  I’m guessing Kohl’s was one of the men’s stores Ceepak and Rita visited back in his short-lived Chief Of Police days.

  “But,” Ceepak continues, “by having one very nice black suit that he can wear to any event—be it a wedding, funeral, or cocktail party—instead of a closet full of suits in various colors and textures, Michael is displaying some of the same miserliness he professed to des
pise in his father. It reminds of what Bruce Springsteen wrote …”

  Hey, what doesn’t? Especially when you’re talking “fathers and sons.”

  “‘Independence Day,’” says Ceepak, citing the song before quoting the lyric: “‘There was just no way this house could hold the two of us. I guess that we were just too much of the same kind.’”

  I remember hanging at Ceepak’s place one weekend, listening to E-Street Radio, the all-Springsteen all-the-time channel on the Sirius satellite radio Rita gave Ceepak for Christmas last year. (Okay, I love Bruce, but does anybody really need a 24/7 Springsteen channel just so they can hear fifty different versions of “Born To Run” every day?) The satellite station played a bootleg recording of “Independence Day” from a 1976 concert in New York City. Before he sang the song, Springsteen told the crowd a long, heart-wrenching story about coming home to his father’s house.

  “I could see the screen door, I could see my pop’s cigarette,” Springsteen said on stage. His dad kept all the lights off in the house and would sit at the kitchen table in that darkness, smoking cigarettes and working on a six-pack of beer until all the cans in the plastic rings were gone. “We’d start talkin’ about nothin’ much. How I was doin’. Pretty soon he’d ask me what I thought I was doin’ with myself, and we’d always end up screamin’ at each other.”

  When the song was finished, Ceepak said something that stuck with me: “Apparently, Bruce Springsteen and I grew up in the same home.”

  At the time, I thought, “That’s impossible,” because Ceepak’s from Ohio, not New Jersey. Then I realized he was being metaphorical. But still—no way are John and Joseph Ceepak “too much of the same kind.”

  That’s when our radio starts squawking.

  It’s Dorian Rence, our dispatcher.

  “Ceepak? Have you got your ears on?”

  Mrs. Rence is still a little new on the job. Thinks she’s supposed to use CB Radio jargon.

  Ceepak grabs the mic.

  “This is Ceepak, go.”