Suburban Dicks

by Fabian Nicieza

  “All good, E.?” she asked.

  He looked up from his book and said, “Today was fun. The kids at the park were really cool.”

  “I’m glad,” she said.

  “I mean, I was really nervous at first.”

  “Kids you don’t know can be really intimidating.”

  “And they were black.”

  “There’s that,” she said. “But you have Indian friends, and Pakistani and Chinese.”

  “But not many black kids,” he said. “And Newark is, like, a gang city, right?”

  “It’s a city,” she agreed patiently. “And there are gangs in some cities. That doesn’t make it a ‘gang city,’ Eli.”

  He nodded. A simple explanation, easily understood. She assumed, with resignation, that time would change that.

  “Don’t read too late,” she said. “Good night.”

  She closed the door as he muttered, “Night,” in return.

  She went across the hall and knocked on Ruth’s door. Ruth was watching something on her iPad with her headphones on. Andrea stood in the door for a moment, knowing that barging into her oldest daughter’s room without explicit permission would turn the moment into an argument. Ruth looked up and reluctantly nodded. Not an invitation in gold leaf, but enough for Andrea to advance.

  “What’re you watching?” she asked.

  Ruth paused the video. She flipped the iPad around. She was watching a video on YouTube about animal poaching in Tanzania. Was she too young for that kind of thing? Could you be too young to be informed about such a topic?

  “I was hoping it would have been an episode of Fuller House or something,” muttered Andrea.

  “Were you really?” asked Ruth.

  Andrea smiled. “No.”

  She started to step out of the room and close the door when Ruth said, “Mom?” After an uncomfortable pause, her oldest daughter continued, “What’s going on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She gave her mother the duck face, which signaled exasperation and disapproval. “Whaaaaat I meeeeean, Mommmmm”—she dragged every word out for effect—“is that you’re digging up bones in backyards and putting them in bags and meeting with strangers in cities to give them those bones in those bags. And whaaaaat I meeeeean, Mommmmm, is that I saw you look at that man today the same way I looked at Brad Geary every day at school last year.”

  Andrea considered her options. She could come clean, but as clever as Ruth was, she wasn’t sure her daughter could handle the complete truth. By the time she was Ruth’s age, Andrea had already learned how to pick locks, worked as a roper for three different con men in the neighborhood, worked the competition by planting evidence the cops could use, worked the cops to eliminate her competition, run fifteen different restaurant scams to score free food, and lost a brother to violence.

  Last year, for the fourth-grade science fair, Ruth had made a volcano.

  Andrea sighed. “Ruth, you know about the man that was killed at the gas station?”

  Ruth nodded.

  “Well, I’m trying to find out who killed him.”

  “Why?” her daughter asked.

  It almost caught Andrea off guard. Because justice had to be done? Because the family deserved to know the truth? “Because . . .” She hesitated, then caught up to her uncertainty and replied in a way that was more truthful than anything she had said or done for a decade. “Because it’s who I am.”

  Ruth paused for a moment and then nodded her head.

  “Okay?” asked Andrea with a hint of uncertainty.

  Ruth nodded again. She put her earbuds in and went back to her video.

  Andrea wanted to do cartwheels but was afraid her water might break. She slipped out of the room and closed the door behind her.

  She checked on Sarah and Sadie, who were now asleep. She went to her bedroom, but Jeff wasn’t there. She went downstairs and opened the door to the basement. Jeff was in his office. Duh.

  “Kids are down,” she said. “I have to run out for a minute.”

  “It’s almost ten. On a Tuesday night. For what?” he called out.

  “Do you want to know the truth or do you want me to say we ran out of milk?” she asked.

  He said nothing.

  She left.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  KENNY DROVE DOWN Parker Road. As he came around the sweeping curve onto the inexplicably renamed Parker Road South, his headlights caught Andrea’s Odyssey and Jimmy’s Camaro parked several houses ahead. They were parked four houses down from the address she’d given for Brianne’s house.

  He stopped behind the Odyssey and killed the lights. Andrea and Jimmy weren’t in their cars. Would they have gone to Simpei’s backyard without him? Simpei’s driveway was empty. Save for the porch light, the house was relatively dark. Simpei and her husband participated in a monthly Chinese retailer association dinner, so Kenny, Andrea, and Jimmy had only until eleven to do what they needed to do.

  He saw some movement in the shadows by the fence gate to Simpei’s backyard, then saw that Jimmy was getting his equipment calibrated. Kenny’s phone hummed with a text: don’t walk in front of bri’s driveway

  He finished reading the text just as . . . he walked in front of Brianne’s driveway.

  A motion sensor in the top corner of the garage activated, washing the driveway in a bright spotlight. Kenny froze in place. He stutter-stepped to his right, then to his left, then he dashed toward Andrea and Jimmy.

  Jimmy was laughing as Kenny reached them by the fence gate.

  “Some warning would have been nice,” Kenny said.

  “We didn’t see you until it was too late,” Andrea said.

  “You crack me up, man,” said Jimmy as he futzed with a couple of dials on his line monitor. An electronic whine rose from the device until it beeped. “Okay, ready.”

  They entered Simpei’s backyard. With heavy woods behind them and no lights coming from the house, it was as dark as it could get in West Windsor. They heard crickets chirp and cicadas hiss. God, Kenny hated nature.

  “Start as close to the waterline as you can,” Andrea said. “That’s where it seems they buried the body parts.”

  “Ixnay on the body parts,” said Kenny.

  “She told me everything,” said Jimmy. “Figured it wouldn’t be buried treasure, but getting some justice for a brother works fine for me.”

  He completed two horizontal rows along the back-fence line and had just started his third when they were surprised by a voice behind them. “Andie?”

  They turned to see Brianne in her backyard, several feet from her back-porch steps, wearing a robe over plaid pajama bottoms and a T-shirt.

  “Yes,” Andrea replied even as Kenny said, “No.”

  Bri came closer to the fence.

  “Andie, what are you doing?” she asked. “Who are these guys?”

  “What should I do?” Jimmy called out.

  “Keep going,” snapped Kenny.

  “Andie?” asked Brianne.

  “Bri, there’s no other way to say this, so I’m just going to say it.”

  “Please don’t,” muttered Kenny.

  “We’re looking for a dismembered body part that was buried somewhere back here over fifty years ago,” she blurted out.

  The silence between them felt heavier than a full stomach.

  Then a sharp ping beeped from Jimmy’s line monitor.

  “Found something,” he said.

  29

  WHEN Andrea walked into the Grind Coffee House N Café at the Plainsboro Village Center, Brianne’s look said it all. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her hair unkempt. She was still dressed in last night’s T-shirt.

  Andrea directed all four of her kids to join Brianne’s triplets at another table. She sat with her friend and said, �
��You googled me last night.”

  “Andie, what the fuck?” Brianne whispered.

  “Bri, it was a long time ago,” she replied by way of deflection.

  “Andie, what the fuck?”

  “I know it’s probably a bit of a surprise, but it was a long time ago.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Brianne asked.

  “Never seemed like the right topic of conversation on the sidelines of soccer practice,” she said with a dismissive wave. “And it was a long time ago.”

  “If you say that one more time I’m going to hit you,” Bri snapped. Andrea knew that Bri was going to push. She knew it wasn’t going to be brushed aside by a nervous giggle and a cranberry scone.

  “Listen, I know what it sounds like, but, I don’t know, think of it this way,” Andrea said. “You were a child-psych major at Rutgers, right? And you got a job at Robert Wood Johnson as a family caseworker for kids in the pediatric care facility, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you worked there for, what, two years before you met Martin?”

  “Three.”

  “Okay, then you got married, you got pregnant, found out they were triplets, and Martin made enough money, so you stopped working, right?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “What’s so different about me, then?” Andrea asked, knowing full well everything that was different about her. “Hell, I never even got a job doing what I went to school for because I was pregnant with Ruth.”

  “But what you did,” stammered Brianne. “I mean, while you were still in college . . .”

  “Isn’t me anymore, Bri,” Andrea said, noticing with wistful bemusement that she could tell the truth and abjectly lie at the same time.

  “No . . . I don’t believe you,” said Brianne. “I think about my job every single day. The kids who were suffering, the ones I helped, the ones I didn’t. I mean, I love the girls, you know that, but not a day has passed that I haven’t thought about what my life would have been like if I’d kept working. I can’t even imagine what it must be like for you.”

  Andrea looked away and out the window, fighting back actual tears. The fact that it had almost made her cry only made her want to cry more. Finally, she said, “I really need a cup of tea. And a scone. And probably a bagel. And I guess I should get something for my kids. We good for a minute?”

  Brianne nodded, so Andrea lifted herself up and waddled to the counter. She got the kids what they wanted and returned moments later with her items. She settled herself back into the plastic chair that was way too small for her enormous ass and took a slow sip of her tea. She took a massive bite from the cranberry scone and allowed herself a moment to savor it, knowing it wouldn’t last. And, three, two, one—

  “So, you think there’s part of a body in Simpei’s backyard?” Brianne asked.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  KENNY SAT ON a small rolling stepstool in a cramped aisle of the claustrophobic morgue of the Princeton Post. The morgue was a glorified storage closet with three narrow rows of metal shelves purchased at Home Depot packed to the millimeter with bank boxes. The boxes were tabbed by year. God forbid they should ever digitize anything, but the paper was lucky it had the budget even to buy bank boxes.

  In front of him was a box labeled “1946,” with fifty-two editions of the weekly paper stacked in equal piles of twenty-six folded papers inside. He’d already checked through 1940 to 1945. Andrea didn’t think the bones were over fifty years old, but to be thorough, he’d gone back to 1940 as his starting point.

  In January 1946, the paper had started a Police Blotter section, which allowed him to skip all the other articles on farmers and farming and farming farmers and farmers farming and farming farmers who farm, and just focus on the police reports. Since the paper was an eight-page pamphlet back then, he got through the weeks at a brisk pace.

  The stroll through time generated in him a numbing sense of inertia. The perpetual banality of suburban life felt leaden. Year in and year out, everything exactly the same with only some of the names changed. School sports, PTA reports, science fairs, new road work, old road repairs, and town council squabbling. Week by week, month by month, year by year. He stopped at 1972, knowing he had wasted two hours of his day. He knew the mature thing to do would be to properly stack the boxes back on the shelves.

  He left them on the floor.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  IN THE AFTERNOON, Andrea pulled into Brianne’s driveway. The kids rushed to the backyard to play. Brianne walked over from her patio and met Andrea at the driveway.

  “You want to go now?” asked Andrea.

  “No time like the present,” said Brianne. “Plus, I know she’s home.”

  Simpei answered and they could hear the TV on in the background; a Chinese soap opera blared loudly in Mandarin. Simpei realized how loud it was and shrugged her shoulders. By way of explanation, she said, “My mother-in-law.”

  Brianne and Andrea understood. Exhausted surrender to mothers-in-law: the universal language. Simpei stepped out onto the porch and closed the door behind her.

  “How can I help you?” she asked.

  Brianne gestured toward Andrea, who said, “Remember we talked about your pool permit that was rejected by the township? Well, I think the reason they declined your request is because they didn’t want you to dig up your backyard.”

  “Because of the groundwater,” Simpei said.

  Andrea told her the real reason why.

  Simpei seemed skeptical. Brianne interjected, “I know it sounds crazy, but you have to believe her. Andrea has some . . . experience with this kind of thing.”

  Andrea told her they’d been in her backyard the night before.

  “We left a marker at the spot where we found something.”

  “You are saying you found a body part at another house?” asked Simpei.

  “A human torso,” replied Andrea. “We removed it and bagged it to protect the remains.” She hesitated. Should she identify the Sasmals? She decided against it. She needed to reassure this woman, not concern her further. “I have a friend in the FBI. He is running a DNA analysis to see if we can identify the individual. Finding more of the victim’s remains would really help in identifying him.”

  Simpei took it all in. She was a levelheaded woman. No histrionics, no drama.

  She started to walk away from them.

  “Where are you going?” asked Brianne.

  “To get some shovels,” Simpei replied.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  KENNY HAD TO call in several favors, beg several people, and grovel several times before he was given access to the Princeton University library’s newspaper archives. Now he stood in the cavernous room where the new ReCAP program shared content between Princeton, Columbia University, and the New York Public Library.

  A cute brunette graduate student named Nicole, who feigned abject indifference to him, was assigned to assist his search. She stopped at row Q of twenty-six alphabetical rows. He felt like he was in the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

  “Huh,” he muttered. “So, this has the Star-Ledger archives since nineteen fifty.”

  “Yup,” said Nicole.

  “Every column.”

  “Yup.”

  “Every tier of shelving.”

  “Yup.”

  Nicole was fiddling with a remote control in her hand. An automated hydraulic platform turned the corner of row Q and made a beeline toward them. She explained how to work the remote and left.

  Kenny stepped onto the platform and pushed the button to raise it. It slowly lifted him to the top shelving unit. His fear of heights kicked in and he steadied himself on the railing. When the platform came to a rest, his head nearly touched the rafters.

  He pulled
a box labeled “1940/January” and rested it on the platform brace. The Star-Eagle had been bought in 1939 and merged with the Newark Ledger to begin publication as the Newark Star-Ledger, and he found the January 1, 1940, edition.

  The paper smelled like feet. Its pages were dry but not brittle. He opened the fold and scanned the front page. He could have done this digitally, but this kind of immersion made him feel the story better. Unlike the agony of scrolling through the weekly Princeton Post, flipping through the Star-Ledger gave him deeper perspective on the kind of people who would have perpetrated the crime. He hoped it would also provide greater insight into the victim.

  He whistled at the task ahead of him and started turning pages.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  SIMPEI AND BRIANNE took turns lifting spades of dirt from opposite sides of the hole they had been digging. Seeing them sweat in the humidity exacerbated the guilt Andrea felt over not shoveling.

  “Slow down now,” she said.

  Simpei waved Brianne out of the hole and grabbed a smaller trowel from her gardening kit. She dug carefully until she felt the trowel scrape something hard. She brushed it with her gloved hand. “I think it is a stick,” she said.

  Andrea peered over her shoulder.

  “That’s not a stick,” she said.

  It was the victim’s left hand.

  30

  IT was ten o’clock at night as Kenny mounted the steps of Andrea’s porch. He didn’t know if he should knock or ring the bell. It was late enough that, he hoped, the kids would be asleep. He was also nervous about meeting Jeff and being blamed for dragging Andrea into this, even though he hadn’t. He stood on the porch for a minute, trying to figure out what to do, when the door swung open.

  Andrea smiled. “You could have just texted me to tell me you were here.”