Suburban Dicks

by Fabian Nicieza

  Lt. Wilson poked her head through and said, “Chief Dobeck would like to see you.”

  Had he annoyed Dobeck enough to trip him up, or just enough to make him mad? And would he be mad enough that Kenny would pee his pants?

  Wilson led him to a small security office where the audio-editing equipment was kept for the town council meetings. Chief Dobeck sat in a chair by the control board. A row of five monitors showed live camera feeds from two external parking lot security cameras, a lobby camera, and the empty briefing room.

  “The little stunt you pulled this morning was bad enough, but this here was just being an asshole for the sake of being an asshole,” Dobeck said casually. “Where did you get your information?”

  “I can’t reveal my sources,” said Kenny.

  “Was it my idiot son?”

  “I can’t reveal my sources,” said Kenny again.

  “Moving forward, I recommend you ignore anything my idiot son has to say, okay?”

  “I can’t reveal my sources,” Kenny said, hoping to annoy Dobeck.

  It worked. Dobeck stood up, all six feet two inches of him staring down at Kenny’s five ten in a good pair of heels. He looked hard into Kenny’s eyes. “Let the drug angle lie. Let us do our jobs.”

  “Chief, the question has been asked and gone unanswered,” said Kenny. “Until it is answered, I can’t let it lie.”

  With that, Dobeck turned to leave.

  “Oh, Chief,” called Kenny as the chief reached the hallway. Dobeck turned around. “Your son isn’t an idiot, sir. For the record.”

  Dobeck snorted.

  Kenny took out his phone and called up his favorites, even though she wasn’t one. “Janelle, the conference just ended. They’re hiding something. I don’t know what, but I’m going to find out, whether you want me to or not.”

  5

  ANDREA sat in the Odyssey, brooding as her children yammered over an iPad blasting Minions. God, she hated Minions. She diligently ignored car horns as the rear end of her minivan jutted beyond the entrance to the train station drop-off, partially blocking the flow of traffic on Station Drive. The arterial clot of cars that came to pick up commuters between six and seven each night was full of dozens of bad drivers who blindly wedged their vehicles into the U-shaped pickup/drop-off lane, even as commuter shuttle vans tried to squeeze past. Rarely if ever did the Imbecile of the Day at the front of the line advance to the far side of the U to allow more people to get in.

  As usual, the 6:01 from Penn Station to Princeton Junction was running ten minutes late—and as usual, Andrea felt like she was drowning in a sea of Indian and Chinese women who didn’t know how to drive. She chastised herself for her overt stereotyping—or did this qualify as bigotry?—even though, she insisted in her own mind, empirical evidence had proven her right on a daily basis.

  Minions had now gotten to the part where “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks played. The music made things almost bearable. The kids sang the song, which was adorable and probably exactly what Ray Davies had envisioned when he wrote it. She thought of Jeff coming home, feeling tired and guilty. You really got him! Andrea tried not to blame her husband for her unhappiness, but it was hard not to, since he was responsible for her unhappiness.

  The sound of the train’s whistle meant it was pulling into the station.

  She texted her husband: Waaay in the back.

  A surge of commuters trudged up the double set of concrete steps that led from the tunnel under the tracks. Looking for their rides, everyone had the same haunted, wary gaze. They slogged into the city, minimum seventy-five minutes each way, twice a day, every day. Jeff had worked in the city for the first three years of their marriage before opening his own investment group in Princeton. Having found himself back in the commuting grind, he’d recognized many of the same people, all looking ten years older than he did, which made the math odd, since Jeff looked ten years older than he was.

  Train face, her husband called it.

  Andrea wished with all her heart she could have been one of them. Even a worn leather face and a Sisyphean exhaustion were more aspirational than being the one sitting in the car dutifully waiting for the spouse to come home.

  Sarah shouted, “Daddy! I see Daddy!”

  Andrea opened the automatic sliding passenger door so he could put his briefcase at Sarah’s feet. He kissed his daughter quickly on the forehead, as much to shut her up as out of affection.

  “Minions again?” he asked as he sat in the front seat. Not, Hi, honey! or Hey, kids!

  “Minions forever,” Andrea said, trying to coerce a smile out of him.

  “The team lost two hundred grand because Joshua shorted when we all told him not to short it and then he tried to blame everyone else but himself,” he said by way of excuse for his mood.

  Car horns blared. People who’d already found their rides impatiently waited for those at the front of the line who were blocking the flow. Same thing. Every single day.

  “Back up,” said Jeff.

  “I can’t back up,” she replied. “There’s traffic.”

  “They’ll stop. Just back up,” he said, his voice getting agitated.

  “I can’t back up!”

  “Back up!” he shouted.

  She backed up. More cars honked at her.

  Except for the mocking tone of the Minions playing on the iPad, they rode the rest of the way home in silence. Entering the house, the kids scrambled toward the family room. Andrea dropped the keys on the island in front of Jeff.

  “What’s for dinner?” he asked.

  “Chicken tenders and french fries,” she said. “Kids ate already. Me, too.”

  She heated a plate in the microwave for him, then sat down at the table.

  “Sorry about earlier,” he said. “It really was a bad day.”

  “I might be able to top you,” she said.

  “Please, not about the kids fighting or having a meltdown at Wegmans,” he said.

  “I pulled into the gas station this morning after dropping you off and Sadie peed all over a murder scene.”

  “What?”

  “The Valero on 571,” she said.

  “The one by Alexander?”

  “No, the one by Southfield.”

  “The guy with the shifty eye?” he asked.

  “Not him.”

  “The one with the turban that makes his cheeks all puffy?”

  “No, the young kid that was a little . . . slow.”

  “Oh, seriously? That sucks.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you see the body?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did the kids see it?”

  “They were in the car. Except Sadie.”

  “She saw it?”

  “She didn’t see anything; she was crying. Well, then she stopped to pee. She saw her pee, I guess. She must’ve, it went really far.”

  “Her pee did?”

  “All over the place.”

  “On the dead kid?”

  “No. No, I don’t think . . .” She paused. “God, I hope not. But definitely all over the crime scene. Well, technically the entire gas station was a crime scene. First on the scene had no clue what they were doing. Contaminated everything, walked over tire treads, didn’t realize the victim had urinated on himself—”

  “What?”

  “Big wet stain on his pants, no spilled liquid, cups, or bottles in plain sight,” she said by rote. “That means he likely urinated himself.”

  “So?”

  “Implies that some time passed between the shooter’s arrival and the shooter firing their gun,” said Andrea.

  “Oh,” he said, seemingly done with the conversation.

  She wasn’t, so she continued, “And that implies the possibility that the victim recognized the shooter and even had
a conversation with him. He had time to be scared.”

  “So?”

  “That would mean the shooter had time to line up his shot, which would make the spray of bullets inexplicable . . . or purposeful.”

  “You know, microwaving french fries that have already been cooked is a bit of a crime against humanity.”

  “Jeff, the bullet that killed that poor kid struck him dead center in the forehead.”

  He folded his hands in resignation. “Once again . . . so?”

  “The statistical odds of a random spray of bullets whose trajectories go in multiple angles around the victim resulting in one clean direct strike to the center of the forehead are—well, unlikely.”

  Jeff wiped his mouth with his napkin, took his plate to the garbage drawer, and dumped whatever he hadn’t eaten. He put the plate in the sink and said, “I’m glad the kids didn’t see any of that. I’m sorry you did.” He kissed her on the forehead. “I want to change and I have work to do.”

  “I have work to do” was Jeff’s Navajo-level, unbreakable code for “I won’t see you again until eleven; good luck putting the kids to bed.” She knew that half the time he went to his office it was to check their private portfolio, fund dividends, and international returns to see how their day had gone. He was obsessed with trying to make back what they had lost. What he had lost. She also knew that the other half of the time he was bingeing something on Netflix or watching porn.

  As exhausting as tending to the kids all day and all night long usually was, she preferred that to their painfully empty interactions. She had just felt so alive when talking to him about the crime scene and he’d expressed no interest. Or had he expressed no interest because he had seen how excited it made her?

  The great unspoken tragedy of their marriage was that it was built on a foundation of Andrea having given up the thing that mattered to her more than anything in the world: her intellect. Jeff was good with finances, if not with ethics, but he knew in his heart, completely and unequivocally, how much smarter she was.

  At first, he’d loved that about her. It had impressed him. But getting pregnant with Ruth had changed all that. It had forced her to make a choice, which he thought was no choice at all: get married and abandon her shot at Quantico, or don’t have the baby. And as impossible as the choice had been, the most delicious irony of Andrea’s life was that in making it, she had lost the respect of her husband. How smart could she really be if she’d gotten pregnant to begin with?

  A sudden, piercing scream ended her reverie. Ruth and Elijah had picked up Sarah by her feet and were trying to wedge her between the wooden rails separating the kitchen from the family room. Sadie was crying for them to stop.

  Andrea asked, “Who wants dessert before getting ready for bed?”

  Ruth and Eli dropped Sarah and scurried to the kitchen. Sadie followed them, suddenly indifferent to her sister’s safety. Sarah was crying for attention but wasn’t getting any.

  “You get sprinkles and no one else does, Sarah,” Andrea said as she opened the fridge.

  Sarah stopped crying and shouted, “Yay!”

  The kids devoured their scoops of Neapolitan. Andrea ate some herself straight from the carton. The moment of bliss was shattered when Sadie knocked her bowl over. It bounced on the floor. The ice cream splashed on the cabinets and refrigerator.

  Andrea watched the ice cream drip down the front of the cabinets. She thought about the blood spatter on the price sign above the gas pump. Only one bullet had hit the boy. Perfect strike. Dead center of the forehead.

  She’d gotten gas from him before. She estimated he was five feet nine. The pump was on an elevated island; the curb was about four inches high. He had just gotten the nozzle. Had turned around and stared right into the barrel of a gun. The price sign would have been directly behind him. The bullet had blown out the back of his head.

  She closed her eyes.

  “Mom, aren’t you going to clean that up?” asked Ruth.

  “Mom?” Eli said with a hint of worry in his voice. She’d had her eyes closed for at least thirty seconds as the ice cream began to dry on the cabinet doors.

  “Shit!” Andrea growled, smacking the top of the kitchen table.

  “Mommy cursed!” said Sarah. “Quarter in the swear jar!”

  The other kids picked up on it, starting in unison, “Quarter in the swear jar!”

  Andrea got up and fished through her purse to find a quarter, putting it in the fucking swear jar.

  She cleaned up the ice cream. “Okay, Sarah and Sadie, time to get ready for bed. Ruth and Elijah, you get one more hour.”

  “That’s not fair,” said Sarah.

  “Got that right,” said Andrea.

  Later, she lay in bed with the lights out. She closed her eyes. She surveyed the crime scene in slow motion. There had been no blood spatters behind the island. She doubted they’d perform a trajectory study.

  At 11:01 the bedroom door opened. Jeff walked in, trying to be quiet, thinking she was asleep. She said nothing. He slid into bed, turning his back to her.

  “The shooter sat in the car when he shot the attendant, but then got out of the car to spray the building,” she said to the darkness. “Why would he have done that?”

  Jeff said nothing.

  “To make it look like it wasn’t cold-blooded murder,” she answered her own question. “To make it look like a random robbery and a panicked shooting.”

  “I’m just glad the kids didn’t see anything,” he said.

  She didn’t respond.

  After a few minutes of silence, he said, “Just let the police do their jobs.”

  Let the police do my job, she thought.

  6

  BY 11:20 p.m., there were only two people left at the Buffalo Wild Wings bar. The bartender, Cheryl, brought Benjamin Dobeck a fresh draft. He looked up from the four overturned shot glasses in front of him, heavily buzzed, heavily bored, and heavily Monday. “From the cute guy in the booth,” she said.

  Benjamin turned to look over his shoulder and saw a three-hundred-pound trucker devouring a triple order of traditional Blazin’ wings. It bordered on a public obscenity charge. “The other cute guy in the other booth,” Cheryl said.

  Kenny Lee. Reluctantly, Benjamin forced himself off the barstool and shuffled over to the table. Sliding in across from Kenny, he said, “I got nothing to say.”

  “Not even thanks for the beer?”

  “No—sorry, that’s cool, thanks for the beer.”

  They sat in silence for about ten seconds before Kenny said, “So what’s going on with the drugs here, Benjy?”

  Benjamin waved him off, looking around. “I can’t talk to you.”

  “You can be an unnamed source,” said Kenny. “Hell, there’s probably not even a real story here, so what difference does it make? I mean, a murder in West Windsor, probably some Trenton banger robbing the station, right?”

  Benjamin said nothing. He drank his beer.

  “So, if you know what’s what and you know what’s what is no big deal, then what’s the big deal about talking to me?”

  The youngest Dobeck sighed. Kenny Lee could talk two-plus-two-equals-four into a knot. “My father denied it was drugs, right?” Benjamin asked.

  Kenny shrugged. “Didn’t Daddy tell you?”

  “He doesn’t tell me shit.”

  “Tharani Sasmal said his nephew had nothing to do with drugs,” Kenny prodded.

  Benjamin shook his head again. “Of course he’d say that.”

  Kenny said, “So if it’s drug stuff coming in from Trenton, then Rossi and Garmin are involved, right? I mean, as the only detectives in the department?”

  “No, I don’ know. I guess, yeah,” he slurred. “No one tells me shit.”

  “Someone told you something, Benjy,” snapped Kenny, “because you told m
e that there were drugs involved and I confronted Sasmal about it in front of your father.”

  “I got nothing to give you, Kenny,” Benjamin said. “Doesn’t mean there ain’ nothing there, but you’re gonna have to do the digging.”

  Kenny waited, staring Benjamin down in hopes that exhaustion and alcohol would break him. After an extended silence, he relented, getting up from the booth and tossing two twenties on the table. “You want a ride home?”

  “No, I’m good,” the young policeman replied.

  “You sure? I saw the shot glasses on the bar,” said Kenny.

  “I’m okay, Kenny. Thanks.”

  Kenny patted him on the back. “Careful driving.”

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  KENNY PULLED THE Prius into his assigned space on Cromwell Court in the Canal Pointe development. He slogged up the stairs to his condo on the second floor. He tossed his keys on the small kitchen counter. They clattered against unwashed glasses and plates. He never used to let dishes pile up. Or laundry. Or anything.

  He looked at his mail. Bill. Bill. Flyer. Bill. Flyer. Bill. He didn’t like the bill-to-flyer ratio. He only had about four months’ worth of savings left from the book royalties. Even mortgage-free, he couldn’t afford the taxes and monthly expenses on his low salary, which was so low that it was an affront to the word salary.

  He opened the fridge and found little inside. He grabbed the remote and stared at the blank TV screen, his mind racing, as it always did. Racing but never getting anywhere, churning thoughts that had neither a starting point nor a destination. How had he come to this? What was the fundamental flaw in his life that had resulted in the man he was now? Ten years ago, he had reached the summit of Mount Everest, and since then, he had tumbled rock by rock all the way to the bottom.

  At twenty-two years old he had been on 60 Minutes. Brian Williams had interviewed him on Dateline NBC and probably bragged afterward that they’d shared a helicopter ride through a firefight together. For Christ’s sake, he had been an answer on Jeopardy!