Suburban Dicks

by Fabian Nicieza

  “Kenny?” she said. “Holy shit!”

  “Andie,” he said, failing to summon a genuine smile and hoping she hadn’t noticed.

  “What are you doing here?” they both said at the same time. She laughed. He didn’t.

  “I came to check on municipal records, but I went to the wrong office,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah, township records are in the old building over there,” he replied, pointing to the municipal building fifty yards behind him on the other side of the parking lot.

  “You’re doing a story on the murder?” she asked, knowing the answer.

  “You know,” he asked, “where I work?”

  “Yes,” she said without an ounce of judgment. She rubbed her belly. “You know where I work?”

  “How have you been?” he asked. “How is your husband, um . . .”

  “Jeff.”

  “Yeah.” And after a pause as Kenny considered the human response: “How is he?”

  She pointed to her stomach. He nodded.

  Kenny pointed to the police headquarters entrance. “I was hoping the chief of police would crumble to the ground and confess to murder.”

  “You think the chief of police killed a gas station attendant?” she asked.

  “No,” he answered.

  “Good,” she said, “because that would throw off my entire theory.”

  “What theory?” he asked.

  11

  KENNY met Andie Abelman when he was in fourth grade and she was in seventh. He fell in love within five minutes. Then she met his brother, Cary, and she fell in love within five seconds. Their relationship lasted until the middle of high school. For Kenny, those years were equal parts heaven and hell. He got to see Andie several times a week and marvel at the completely different way she saw the world. On the night they met, he got to watch her solve the case of the key to Melissa Haber’s mom’s alcohol cabinet. The case of Karla’s missing cell phone when she was in eighth grade. And the case of Jackson’s stolen wallet a few months later. And the case of the Nazi graffiti when she was a freshman in high school. And the other case of the missing cell phone. And the other one. And that other one.

  And when Cary Lee and Andrea Abelman were sophomores, she solved the case of Emily Browning, a South Brunswick girl who had been missing since 1990 and turned out to be dead. Four weeks after Andie had found the skeleton in the woods between Plainsboro and South Brunswick, she found Emily’s killer.

  One week after that, Cary broke up with Andie.

  Which made that day the most tragic of Kenny’s life.

  Seeing her again made today a close second.

  He knew that she’d married young and had a kid or four. And he knew about Morana, of course. But he’d pointedly avoided looking her up. Closed himself off to how he’d felt as a boy. Convinced himself it had been a childish crush, because that’s exactly what it had been.

  And now they sat together at Aljon’s pizzeria with a dingy faux-marble table between them. Her eyes were different. Still flaring with intelligence, but there was also a melancholy sadness now. He’d seen the same look in the mirror every day.

  She was a lot heavier than he’d remembered, and at her height it didn’t wear well. She had also picked up her brood of savages before meeting him, and he now suffered them running around the restaurant like rabid chipmunks. She raised her tired voice to tell them to stop and he watched her beach ball of a stomach, almost matched in size by her enormous rear end, as she struggled to turn in the booth.

  Kenny Lee wanted nothing more in life than to be somewhere—anywhere—else at that moment.

  But he couldn’t wait to solve Satkunananthan’s murder with her.

  The pizza arrived. She set the kids up in another booth. It was the first time they’d sat down and shut up since they’d entered the restaurant. Andrea returned to the booth and wedged herself back in. “Did you want a slice?”

  Kenny shook his head.

  “Sorry about them,” she said.

  “Yeah, no, they’re adorable,” he said. “Really.”

  She laughed.

  “So? Morana . . .” he said as the ultimate poor segue.

  “A lifetime ago,” she said, then asked, “Governor O’Malley?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Usually people ask me about Pfizer.”

  “Really? That surprises me,” she said. “Do you think that’s because the fall is fresher in their minds or because people prefer the fall?”

  “I never thought about it,” he lied. People were jealous and selfish creatures. Everyone relished the fall of someone who had risen, especially when it happened to an asshole.

  She waited.

  He relented. “I got credited for being this great kid reporter, but most of it was just dumb luck.”

  “It usually is,” she said.

  “Morana wasn’t.”

  “No,” she agreed. “It wasn’t.”

  “O’Malley got caught because he got a blow job from the wrong guy and I happened to meet the wrong guy after he’d given the blow job.”

  “Deep Throat had nothing on him,” she said without a trace of irony.

  Kenny smiled, thankful for the reminder of why Andie Abelman had been one of the coolest people on the planet.

  “It was an incredible piece of reporting, Ken,” she finally said.

  “Thanks,” he mumbled. “All things considered.”

  “All things should always be considered,” she said. “We’re the sum total of all the choices we make, good and bad.”

  “Yeah . . . well, maybe this thing now will make for a good book,” he said bitterly. “Or even better, one of those Netflix documentary series. That’s where the money is now.”

  “That would feel like redemption to you?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he replied.

  “What about bringing a murderer to justice?” she asked. “Bringing closure to the victim and his family?”

  “Well, there’s no Netflix series if we don’t do that,” he said.

  He knew his answer disappointed her, and he felt good about that. And he felt guilty about feeling good about it. After another uncomfortably long silence, he asked, “You said you had a theory?”

  She waved her hand to dismiss it. “No. I don’t know. It’s probably nothing.”

  “Don’t do that,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’m not someone who’s not going to believe you,” Kenny said. He meant, I’m not your husband.

  She hesitated, formulating her thoughts.

  “The person who killed the gas station attendant was an excellent shot,” she said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I was there,” she said.

  He was astounded. “Wait? What?”

  When she told him the events of that morning, Kenny’s mind was blown. No wonder she was so interested. “Okay, so you got a good look at it? At everything?”

  She closed her eyes and she was there again. “Yes.”

  “Were there any drugs on the ground?” he asked. “Or in the cashier stand?”

  Keeping her eyes closed, as if seeing a slide show on the back of her eyelids, Andrea focused on the cashier stand, zooming in on it, calling into greater detail the cash register and the small countertop with the credit card machine. The attendant’s cell phone was facedown on the counter. An open can of Pepsi next to it. The cash register closed. No one had taken any money out of it. There had been no robbery.

  “There were no drugs,” she said.

  “I knew the police were lying!” he exclaimed loudly enough that the kids and two men behind the counter looked up at him. Lowering his voice, he said, “The police think drugs were the motive, but I haven’t found any evidence of that.”

  “And you won’t,” she said. “The gas
station attendant was killed because someone is trying to hide something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You suspect something, though.”

  “I suspect everything,” she replied. “But we need to gather evidence.”

  “We?”

  “Unless you don’t want my help,” she said.

  “No, no, it’s not that,” he said. “I’m just honestly surprised you’d want mine.”

  She looked at the kids. “I don’t have the . . . freedom . . . that I need to mount a real investigation,” she said. “I need your legs. I need your . . .”

  “Unencumbered lifestyle?”

  “Sure,” she said. “You can access places I can’t. I can manage public records, but you’ll have to manage the people trying to hide behind those records.”

  “Hiding? You think this is institutional?”

  “I think the gas station attendant was killed because a lot of people in this town have worked for a long time to hide something,” she said.

  “Hide what?” he asked.

  12

  AFTER the pizzeria, Andrea and the kids waited at the station for Jeff’s train to arrive. Andrea told her husband she’d bumped into an old childhood friend. He was uninterested until she mentioned Kenny was investigating the murder and wanted to bounce things off her as they developed. Jeff hadn’t reacted well.

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she lied. “I guess to get my opinion on things?”

  “Why would he want your opinion?” he asked.

  No other words passed either of their lips for the rest of the ride home.

  Entering the kitchen, she put the keys on the hook as Jeff turned on the oven. She leaned on the counter, but said nothing.

  He finally relented. “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”

  “I know exactly how you meant it, Jeff.”

  “I meant—”

  “That you didn’t want me getting involved in the case,” she interrupted. “You didn’t want me getting obsessed with finding the killer. You didn’t want our children to lose their mother’s undivided attention, and probably most important of all, you didn’t want to lose your ride to the train station.”

  Her cell phone rang. She answered it. “Hey.”

  “Can you meet me at the Sasmals’ tomorrow?” Kenny asked. “Ten o’clock?”

  She looked at Jeff, who tried to appear casual.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Text me the address. I’ll see you there.”

  She hung up. Seconds later, her phone notification chimed. He had sent the text.

  “Was that him?” Jeff asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m meeting him at the victim’s house in the morning.”

  “What about the kids?” he asked.

  “What about the kids?” she snapped. “Jeff, you have no clue what I’m doing with them all day long. For all you know, Thursday at ten a.m. is when I normally zip-tie them and lock them in the closet for an hour while I mount the UPS man.”

  Andrea stormed away to the basement and wrestled the rug from the corner. She untied the cords and rolled it out on the floor. She looked at her text with the Sasmals’ address. She circled 23 Dickens Drive on the map with the red Sharpie. It was on the opposite side of the map from Simpei’s house in Plainsboro.

  Two houses, each near small tributaries of water. Two houses. One Indian. One Chinese. Nothing in common except for the pool permit rejections.

  Andrea ran through the calendar in her head. Thursday, Eli had soccer camp from eight thirty to eleven thirty and Ruth had art camp from ten to noon. Andrea texted Brianne to see if she could watch Sarah and Sadie in the morning.

  She turned her attention again to the map. She’d lived in West Windsor half her life and it still felt alien to her. She was surprised by how many creeks, brooks, and tributaries there were. She wondered about her own house. She’d heard that the pond in their backyard was man-made. That the farmer had dammed a creek and created the pond to water his potato fields. Their real estate agent had even told them the pump that drew from the pond used to be in their backyard, which was why they had so little brush behind their house.

  Her phone pinged. Brianne could watch the girls.

  Jeff called from upstairs. “Do the kids need a bath or anything?”

  “I got it,” she said.

  “No,” he replied, “I can do it.”

  It was his attempt at apologizing.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m coming up.”

  She bent over with a grunt and rolled up the rug. Not bothering to tie it, she pushed it to the corner with her feet. She felt a twinge in her lower back. She mounted the steps slowly, thinking about what she needed to look for at the Sasmals’ house. At the top of the steps, the aches in both her knees matched the muscle spasm in her lower back.

  At least the misery was balanced.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  AT HIS CONDO, Kenny sat on the couch, notepad open as he scribbled down questions to ask the Sasmals. Spurred by a thought, he got up and went to the shelving unit to the right of the wall-mounted television. He flipped through some of the Blu-ray disks. It wasn’t there. He knelt down to a lower shelf, where a small plastic case was mostly being used as a bookend. He opened the case and found several loose silver DVDs. On one he had written “Dateline: O’Malley 3/16/13.”

  He put the disk in, then fought the remote as he changed the cable output settings. The segment started with a grainy black-and-white shot of a rest area on the Garden State Parkway in Cape May County. The gravity of Lester Holt’s voice joined the image.

  “It was eleven thirty at night when a casually dressed, silver-haired man in his late fifties entered the men’s room of a rest area in southern New Jersey,” said Lester. “The man encountered a male prostitute and paid for sex. He left, thinking, like the dozens of other times he had done the same thing over the previous thirty years, that no one had recognized him. He thought that his secret was safe.”

  Then came the pause. Kenny loved that pause.

  “The governor of the state of New Jersey had no idea how wrong he was.”

  And then came the haunting theme song that had been nominated for an Emmy. Kenny smiled despite himself. Though the segment reminded him of how far he had fallen, it also served to remind him how high he had climbed.

  He could do it again. Factual, smartly written, and meticulously prepared. Once Netflix came calling, he’d demand to be an executive producer. Andrea’s involvement would help, too, he thought. A pregnant profiler? She could be the quirky breakout star, but he’d be the cool cucumber who bucked the system. And he’d also demand Lester Holt be the narrator.

  “Stern and Lee, the Suburban Dicks,” he said out loud, rolling it slowly around his tongue like a shot of bourbon. It would hit every single sweet spot a story like this could hope for. A small American town rife with racial and cultural prejudice, now dealing with a murder.

  Would most people get the dated reference to “dicks” being private investigators?

  Didn’t matter. It sounded really good.

  “Kenny Lee, the Suburban Dick,” he said.

  That sounded even better.

  13

  KENNY glanced at his open notebook for what seemed like the fiftieth time. Andrea was ten minutes late. Each minute was another level of disrespect they were showing the Sasmals.

  He finally got out of the car. He knocked on the door. Tharani answered. Kenny apologized for his coworker running late. He was led into a living room that looked like a National Geographic photo spread of the Taj Mahal. He’d forgotten how much they loved their marble. All the house lacked was an elephant. Then again, the murder of their nephew was already an elephant in the room, wasn�
�t it?

  He sat down in a chair, then had to stand up just as quickly when Sharda Sasmal came in bearing a tray with tea. Kenny took a cup and thanked her. He sat back down. Before he could even get to his opening preamble, the doorbell rang.

  “That must be my associate,” Kenny said, getting up and almost spilling his tea.

  Sharda answered the door and returned with an apologetic Andrea. She took the second throne chair and they all faced one another. She was offered tea but declined.

  “Okay, thank you for seeing us,” Kenny started awkwardly. “And I’m—we’re—sorry for your loss. I’ve been assigned by my paper to cover your nephew’s death. I apologize for having intruded on your privacy the morning of his death, but I—”

  “Wanted to use our tragedy to compromise Chief Dobeck?” asked Sharda.

  Kenny hesitated, unsure of what to say. She was right. He looked at Andrea for some kind of guidance. She nodded. He hated the judgment in that simple nod.

  “I did,” admitted Kenny. “I thought I could exploit it to coerce the police into giving me information the other reporters didn’t have. I was not respectful of your situation.”

  “You have a . . . reputation, Mr. Lee,” said Tharani cautiously.

  The people Kenny now dealt with rarely knew who he was. Most had never heard of the Princeton Post, even though it had been dropped on their driveways once a week for the past forty years.

  “That’s probably as nice a way to put it as I could have imagined,” said Andrea. “We both have reputations. But I think mine helps offset aspects of his. Kenny is good at what he does. Between the two of us, we will find out what happened to your nephew.”

  “I am sorry, Mrs. Stern, but how are you associated with Mr. Lee?” asked Sharda.

  It was Kenny’s turn to take over. “Andrea is a profiler.”

  “I’m not a—” she began to say.