Suburban Dicks

by Fabian Nicieza

  “And whether it’s three minutes or thirty, why wasn’t her presence indicated on the report you filed?” pushed Kenny. “Did Dobeck tell you guys to remove the witness from your report?”

  “No! No!” Patel said. “Michelle—Officer Wu—decided not to include it in the report.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was embarrassing!” he replied. “We couldn’t even prevent some crazy pregnant woman from letting her kid piss all over a crime scene!”

  The self-loathing written all over the young officer’s face almost made Kenny feel guilty that he’d outed him to the detectives earlier. Niket’s life was going to get chafed in the coming days.

  “Michelle had me securing the scene, so I was by the road.”

  “You never saw the station booth?”

  “I didn’t even get a good look at the body,” he said.

  “You don’t know if there were drugs present?” Kenny asked.

  “No.”

  “What did Officer Wu say?”

  “She didn’t say anything about drugs,” said Niket. “I mean, when Lt. Wilson mentioned that at the press thing, we just figured they knew something we didn’t.”

  Which didn’t require too far a stretch of the imagination, Kenny thought.

  “So, neither one of you questioned what Wilson said?”

  “I’ve been on the job eight months,” said Niket. “I don’t even ask if they have soy milk for the coffee. Are you going to print this in a story? I mean, was this on the record?”

  “Yes, it was,” said Kenny. “But don’t worry, I have bigger fish to fry.”

  Namely, the mayor of West Windsor.

  17

  AS Kenny turned off Rabbit Hill Road onto Abbington Lane, his anxiety grew to the point of paralysis. He was going to Andrea’s house. She didn’t have time to meet anywhere else and couldn’t get anyone to wrangle the herd, so her house was the only place for them to compare notes.

  As he pulled into the driveway, the Prius bottomed out on the severely tilted apron. He put the car in park and sat for several minutes. When he finally got out, it felt like walking the Green Mile just to reach the porch.

  He rang the bell and heard a stampede on the other side. With the kids crowding around her, Andrea looked more frazzled than he expected. But what did he expect, exactly? Kenny realized that since they’d reconnected, his lifelong picture of her, seared in his mind as a child, didn’t match the reality of her life.

  “Come in. I’m trying to get dinner in the oven before I have to pick Jeff up.”

  He entered the foyer and was immediately impressed and horrified by how a grown-up’s life was supposed to look. The house was nice. An early 1990s McMansion, smaller than the house he had grown up in, but well beyond what he could hope to afford now. It had an open two-story foyer with a gold and crystal chandelier dangling above his head. The walls were painted in two colors, with some kind of scratchy swirl effect, which Kenny guessed cost extra but looked to him like someone had done a poor job of trying to clean the old paint off the wall. There was art on the walls. Real art, like you would buy at Pottery Barn.

  The two smallest ones—Sarah and Sadie? Who knew?—ran circles around him, shouting, “Kenny, Kenny, bo-benny, banana-fanna, fo-fenny, me-mi, mo-menny, Kenny.”

  Andrea shooed them away. “Come sit in the kitchen.”

  They all flocked to the kitchen.

  He looked at the furniture in the living room to his right and the dining room to his left. Top-level stuff. Ethan Allen, West Elm, Thomasville. Brands he could barely afford even when he could afford it. Other than the kids, adult life looked sweet.

  “House is nice,” he said, figuring it was what you were supposed to say.

  “Don’t say that to Jeff,” she replied. “He still cries himself to sleep every night since we moved here.”

  “The other house was nicer?”

  “The other house was an F-ing mansion.”

  “F-ing?”

  She hitched a thumb toward the children, then pointed at the swear jar. “I’m trying to curb my inclinations.”

  “I’m sure that will work,” he said, nodding as he sat down. He tried not to pinch his nose at the aroma oozing from the stovetop. “Smells great, what is it?”

  “Shit,” she said.

  Ruth and Eli chimed in, “Swear jar!”

  Kenny turned to the older kids. “I don’t know if that should be a swear word,” he said. “I mean, technically it just means crap or poopy or doody, which aren’t curse words, right?”

  Sarah or Sadie, whichever was which, squealed, “Poopy!” and “Doody!”

  Andrea had fished a quarter out of her purse and dropped it into the swear jar. “I’ll probably be able to afford all of their college tuitions just from this jar alone.”

  Kenny felt a headache coming on. He wished the screaming ferrets would shut up or leave the room. Or better yet, shut up and leave the room.

  “Kids,” Andrea shouted, “out now or I’ll force you to eat whatever this doody is that I’m making for dinner!”

  And off they went.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It must be a bit much for you.”

  It sounded like an accusation to Kenny’s ear. “Not what I’m used to,” he admitted. He looked out the window to the yard and the tree-lined pond behind it. Though he was indifferent to nature, it was nice property.

  Then he heard a gunshot.

  “What the hell?” he exclaimed.

  “The rifle range,” she responded casually.

  “The one on 571?” he asked. “The Patriots Rifle Range?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “You can hear it that loud?”

  “Nice, huh?” she said. “Came to see the house twice but we didn’t hear it until we’d already put a deposit down.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, until it was broken by the burst of more gunfire.

  “So . . .” He measured his next words far more carefully than he usually did. “All this? You’re okay with it?”

  “The gun club? No, I hate their fucking guts.”

  “I meant—”

  “You meant my home and my family?” she asked. “Yes, Kenny, I’m okay with it.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “No buts,” she said. “Unless you count the enormous pile of flesh that my ass has turned into.”

  “I didn’t want to say.”

  “And you never will.”

  “Five kids in ten years seems . . .”

  “Stupid?”

  “No, I was actually going to say hard. It seems like a really, incredibly hard thing to do.”

  She kept her back to him as she mixed the foul-smelling chicken-and-mushroom combination in the pan. Finally, she said, “It has been.”

  “I don’t mean to be rude, but you’re pretty much a genius and Jeff sounds like a . . . well, not an idiot. So have either of you considered, I don’t know . . . birth control?”

  She laughed. “Ruth was an accident. Eli was, too. I mean, it was so soon after Ruth was born that neither one of us thought I was ovulating. Sarah was actually planned, but Sadie wasn’t.”

  “And the bun in the oven.”

  She shook her head, still not turning to face him. “Jeff’s family is really religious. He pretends to be, too.” After a slight pause, she added, “When it suits him.”

  Kenny didn’t say anything. She opened a cabinet and took out some spices, shaking them into the saucepan. He waited for her. He wasn’t sure if he should apologize for bringing up the perpetual pregnancies or change the subject. Finally, she spared him by asking, “How is Cary?”

  He actually thought about it for a second before answering. He needed to consider if he even knew the answer. “Okay, I think. I haven’t talked to him in months,” he said.<
br />
  “Where is he?”

  “Up in Millburn. He’s got a house. A proper Caucasian wife who hates my guts and a daughter who is . . . three? Yeah, three,” he replied.

  Andrea smiled slightly, wistfully, maybe. “Do you even know your niece’s name?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do. Of course I do,” he said, biding his time as he tried to recall it. “Lani. Allana is actually her name. She’s kind of cute as far as those things go.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Sales,” he replied. “Remortgages for seniors. Little tacky, I always thought, but Cary has always been . . .”

  “Smooth?”

  “I was going to say a con man, but sure, go with smooth if your loins still get excited at the thought of his high school eyes glancing your way.”

  “My loins?” she laughed. “Yeah, my loins don’t do much but push watermelon-headed creatures through them anymore. Wow, you’re still jealous of him?”

  “I was never jealous of him,” he replied. “I was bitter that he skated by while everyone else—okay, I—had to bust their ass just to trip over every obstacle in their way.”

  “Like I said, he was smooth,” she said, smiling. “And you were jealous.”

  “And that food smells like entrails that have been sitting inside an elk’s ass for a month,” he said.

  “You wouldn’t even know what an elk looked like.”

  “Oh, and I’m sure you solved some crime involving a berserk, libidinous, murderous elk when you spent a weekend in Saskatoon, so that made you an expert on elks?”

  They eyed each other, then laughed.

  “Thank you for that,” she said. “I haven’t heard so many multisyllabic words in goddamn forever.”

  “Quarter in the swear jar,” he said.

  “Fuck the swear jar,” she said, smelling her chicken-and-mushroom concoction. She strained to lift the heavy pan with two hands and stepped on the garbage can to raise the lid. To his surprise, she casually dumped the entire entrée into the garbage. “Kids,” she shouted to the open basement door. “In honor of Uncle Kenny being here, we’re going to get Chinese for dinner!”

  Kenny heard a cheer rise up from the basement.

  “You don’t remember that I hate Chinese food?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I remembered.”

  “I braced the detectives and Patel today,” he said. “I plan to talk to the mayor next.”

  “She’ll get involved?” asked Andrea.

  “If the department’s corrupt? Yeah,” he replied. “She hates Dobeck. Dobeck hates her. If she can nail him and save her daughter, she’ll get involved.”

  Andrea turned off the faucet and dried her hands with a towel hanging from the dishwasher handle. “We want them off-balance. If they’re fractured, you can get them to start looking to protect themselves.”

  “If there really is something to hide,” Kenny reminded her.

  “I expect that by this time tomorrow, I’ll have enough information to corroborate my theory,” she said.

  “Can you please tell me what the hell you’re thinking?”

  “After tomorrow,” she said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “The library,” she replied.

  “The what? Like, the Library of Congress? The Library of the FBI or something?”

  “West Windsor library,” she said. “And depending on whether the kids can stay quiet for more than a couple hours, maybe the Plainsboro library, too.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked. “I mean, I’m driving all over New Jersey, meeting with gang members and risking getting my face punched in by cops, and you’re hanging around the township offices and library? Will you give me some hint about what’s going on?”

  “This town has a secret that it thought it had buried away a long time ago,” she said. “And I think in order to keep it buried, Satkunananthan Sasmal was killed.”

  “Okay, then,” Kenny agreed. “If they buried something, we keep digging.”

  18

  AT ten thirty on Saturday morning, with Jeff golfing, Andrea met the Cellulitists at the community pool. Running her usual half hour late, she saw her friends had snagged a table and spread blankets along the grass. Ruth and Eli immediately asked if they could go in the water. Once Andrea said yes, Sarah and Sadie started whining that they wanted to go, too. Then Ruth and Eli whined that they wanted to go to the deep end but they couldn’t if they had to watch their sisters.

  Andrea had no patience for any of it. “Figure it out,” she said as they reached the table. The kids shucked their sandals and T-shirts, grabbed their pool toys, and rushed toward the water.

  Sadie and Sarah tried to run after them and Andrea snapped, “Stop!”

  Impatiently, they let her slide their arms through their floats.

  “The more you wriggle, the longer it’ll take,” she said. They continued to wriggle and they whined, but then she was done and they scooted off.

  “They’re so adorable,” lied Crystal Burns with white-toothed insincerity.

  “They’re assholes,” said Andrea, to their laughter. She swung her stubby leg over the table bench and squeezed her huge stomach into place.

  “No bathing suit?” asked Brianne Singer.

  “Waiting to find out if the doctor can fit me in,” Andrea said.

  “Everything okay?” asked Molly Goode.

  “Blood pressure is up,” Andrea lied. “I feel even more swollen, if that’s possible. I just want to avoid preeclampsia again.”

  “Oh, I know, that sucked,” said Crystal. “I was laid up in bed for the last three weeks with Brittany.”

  A partial truth was better than a whole lie. Andrea’s blood pressure was up and she looked like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon.

  Always thrilled to have the gossip before anyone else, Crystal said, “My neighbor, Rashmi? She’s Indian, but light-skinned Indian. Is that from the north or south? Anyway, she said that her community is talking about protesting the police if they don’t find whoever killed that gas station attendant soon.”

  “They’re putting a timetable on the police finding some random robber or drug dealer?” asked Brianne. “Good luck with that.”

  “I think they just want to see the police show them it’s important to them,” said Andrea. “You can’t tell the police they have to solve a crime by Friday, but you can tell them how much it matters that they try to solve it.”

  “You think they’re not?” asked Crystal. “I mean, it just happened on Monday.”

  “No, I didn’t say that,” said Andrea, chiding herself for getting sucked into this discussion. “I’m just saying sometimes, a fired-up community can also fire up the police.”

  “They probably should prefer it not be solved,” said Molly. “I mean, considering they were probably selling drugs from the gas station.”

  “Probably selling them from all their gas stations,” said Crystal.

  “And every Wawa, QuickChek, 7-Eleven, Subway, and Dunkin’ Donuts in town,” chimed Brianne.

  “That’s a lot of drugs being sold,” said Crystal, and the other two women laughed.

  “You believe that?” asked Andrea. “About the drugs?”

  “It’s what I heard,” said Crystal. “It was in the newspaper.”

  “Do you believe it?” asked Andrea. “You heard the women at soccer practice. I’ve talked to my neighbors. Anyone who knows that family says it’s not true.”

  “Do we ever really know our neighbors?” asked Molly. “I mean, who knows what goes on behind closed doors?”

  “Much less their gas stations,” said Bri.

  “We know they’re using a whole lot of curry,” said Crystal. “That’s no secret.”

  “Garam masala, too,” laughed Brianne. “My entire block smells every
single day.”

  “Their clothes, too,” said Crystal, scrunching her face for effect. “I think even their furniture and curtains smell. A friend of mine is in real estate and she said it’s really hard for them to sell an Indian house to anyone but another Indian family. Can you imagine trying to get that smell out?”

  “Hazmat suits required,” purred Molly.

  “You guys are just trying to be funny, right?” Andrea finally asked, unable to contain herself. “Because one of the few things I’ve ever liked about this suburban nightmare is the diversity we have here.”

  “Suburban nightmare?” asked Crystal with a tone of offended indignation.

  “My suburban nightmare,” Andrea corrected. “Your paradise. But the part of it that always worked for me was that my kids could go to school with Indian kids and Chinese kids and African American kids and Hispanic kids and our PTA lunches had samosas and churros and hot dogs. I mean, that’s pretty cool, right?”

  The women didn’t know what to say. Of course they knew she was right, but the curry smell truly did bother them.

  “Crystal, when was the last time a cop pulled you over because you’re blond and then gave you a ticket for going thirty in a twenty-five zone?” Andrea asked.

  Crystal, for once, had nothing to say in response.

  “Molly, when’s the last time a salesperson at Nordstrom told you that you might be better off shopping at Marshalls?”

  “Oh, never,” said Molly.

  “Bri,” she finished, “when’s the last time you went on vacation and the school nurse demanded your kids be checked for head lice?”

  “Oh, that one’s not fair,” said Crystal. “They come back from India and the kids have lice all the time!”

  The other two women nodded vigorously.

  “Okay, I’ll probably have to give you that one,” said Andrea. “But the other stuff and a thousand other things they have to go through every day that you guys have no clue about, that’s what’s making them mad.”

  “I guess I could understand them getting mad if the killer isn’t found, but not after a few days,” said Brianne.

  Andrea’s phone chimed. It was ten forty-five. She had asked Kenny to send her a rescue text as her pretense for leaving. Kenny’s message said: This is my rescue text that you can use as an excuse to leave and go fight crime.