Suburban Dicks

by Fabian Nicieza

  He thanked Rosemary and went out to his car.

  He cranked up the air-conditioning. It was humid like an NBA locker room after an overtime game. He had to drive into Trenton for a state records request on the missing African American males from their list and get back up to Plainsboro for lunch with his mother and Steve Appelhans.

  He called Andrea to tell her he was on his way to Trenton.

  “Well, you have a wonderful time doing that,” she replied. “I’m sitting here watching my two-year-old take swimming lessons—which is a blatant misrepresentation, considering she’s wearing floats on her arms—while my seven-year-old is at soccer camp and my nine-year-old is at dance class. Then I have to pick up my seven-year-old and bring him to his friend’s house for lunch and pick up my nine-year-old on the way back and bring her to her friend’s house for lunch, then take my two-year-old to pottery class, and yes, I said fucking pottery class for fucking two-year-olds.”

  Kenny paused for a second, then said, “Don’t you have four kids?”

  “Oh shit, where’s Sarah?” was the last thing Kenny heard before Andrea ended the call. Sarah was the one who climbed everything. How much trouble could she get herself into? He shrugged and continued on his way toward Trenton.

  Fifteen minutes later, he found a parking spot a block from the state archives office on West State Street that had twenty-five minutes left on the meter.

  Kenny went to the second floor, where the archives office was located. The woman behind the counter was also African American, but she didn’t greet him with a big smile like Rosemary had. She had a state government scowl that attested to long experience in chewing up tepid flesh offerings like Kenny and using their spindly bones for toothpicks.

  “I’m press. I have a public records request on twenty-two residents,” he said, showing his Princeton Post press badge.

  “You couldn’t access this online?” she asked with an exhausted tone.

  “Um . . . I don’t have a password,” he muttered.

  “You got a press badge, a password comes with it,” she said.

  “Long story,” he replied, figuring he’d rather not dig himself any deeper. In order for the Princeton Post to be able to issue him a press badge, which had been rescinded after the Pfizer fiasco, he’d agreed to certain conditions. Well, not conditions as much as purposeful professional slights. One of them was that the state, still touchy about the fact Kenny had destroyed an administration and hurt the Democratic Party for a full election cycle, wasn’t going to make anything easy for him.

  They couldn’t deny him a press badge, but they could keep assigning passwords that wouldn’t work on the dot-gov sites. They did that for months. Eventually he gave up trying and let them have their measure of revenge. If it meant being stranded on the shoulder of the information highway, Kenny could take it.

  She flipped through the paperwork to make sure it had all been properly filled out. “That’s a lot of names,” she said. “How come there’s no date of death on any of them?”

  “Because I have no idea if any of them are dead, though I have my suspicions about one of them for sure.” Off her confused look, he continued, “Everyone on this list is an open missing-persons case. I filled in what information I could gather on them but a lot of it is really incomplete, which explains why I’m here seeing you.”

  She looked at the list again.

  “Every one of these a brother?” she asked.

  “And if one of those names is attached to a body I’m trying to identify, then several old white people are going to pay for his murder,” Kenny said.

  She stared at him for several seconds, then said, “You’re not doing it ’cause you’re a good person.”

  “No, I absolutely am not,” he freely admitted. “But good will come of it. I promise you that.”

  She took the paperwork and stamped it, jotting notes on a yellow sticky, which she slapped on the top sheet. Kenny knew that meant she was expediting the request. It could be a matter of days instead of months.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Solve it and I’ll say you’re welcome,” she said.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  DRIVING UP ROUTE 1 North toward Princeton, he dictated a text message to Andrea to update her. After he’d sent it, he wondered why he’d bothered. He was pretty sure she didn’t care what he was doing. She thought little of him outside of being a means to access public records.

  Kenny entered Windrows. He had asked his mother to invite Appelhans because he needed to ply the man for details about the past. He needed to drive a wedge between the conspirators, and his instincts told him Bradley Dobeck wouldn’t crack. He made his way to the Nassau Dining Room, where lunch was served daily.

  He saw his mother and Appelhans seated at a table by the terrace window. They had gotten small plates from the salad bar. Kenny greeted his mother with a kiss and shook hands with Appelhans before sitting down.

  “Thank you for inviting me to lunch,” he said.

  “Get yourself something to eat,” Huiquing said. “You’re a rail.”

  “I’m not a—” he cut himself off, preferring not to get baited by her or be diminished in Appelhans’s eyes. He stood up and said, “Be right back.”

  When Kenny returned to the table with his tray, Appelhans asked, “What the hell is that?”

  “Lunch,” said Kenny, sitting down. He took a large enough bite of his tuna and egg salad wrap to make his disregard obvious. He chewed for a few seconds, through his mother’s eye roll, and then continued, “My mom told you I wanted to talk?”

  “Yes,” Appelhans said through his own slobbering mouthful of food. “You’re doing an article on what the town used to be like before the garage door openers showed up?”

  “Well, that’s an uncomfortably great start, Steve, but I wanted to go back a bit further,” Kenny said, smiling. “Were there any Hispanics or African Americans in town while you were growing up?”

  “A few, sure,” said Steve. “Not a lot. Day workers, but they didn’t live in town.”

  “Where did they live?”

  “East Windsor, Trenton, Ewing,” said Steve. “But there were so many farms back then, we had to compete for workers. They started to come in—the blacks did—from New Brunswick and Newark. They came down on the train. We would pick them up at the station and pile them onto the back of a flatbed truck.”

  “Then they’d go home at the end of the day?”

  “Sure, yeah,” he said. “Sometimes we let ’em sleep in the barn. I mean, if they were picking late. Easier to do that than have ’em go home. We’d feed ’em dinner.”

  Kenny nodded. “But as far as living here, in town?”

  Steve gave it great thought.

  “There was Alfred Bester,” he said. “He played football. I remember the Alvaro family. They worked for the Erenreich Dairy. The lot of ’em.”

  “I think they still live here,” Huiquing said. “Alvaro Landscaping.”

  From Kenny’s look, she got the hint and shut up. Turning his attention back to Appelhans, he said, “You mentioned competition before. What farmers tended to hire the most day workers from out of town?”

  “Jeez, we all had to, especially during picking season,” he said. “We preferred to work the land ourselves. Most of us had been doing it for generations.”

  “But just from the way you talk, it must have made some of you uncomfortable to have so many . . . well, those people around,” said Kenny. “Were there problems?”

  “Yeah, sometimes,” he stammered. “Sometimes they got drunk at night. Some of them broke into a house one time and stole some stuff. We had to worry a bit maybe if they tried to shine on the girls.”

  “The girls?”

  “We had sisters and daughters,” said Appelhans. “They love their white girls.”

&
nbsp; “They do,” said Kenny, making it sound more like a statement than a question.

  “Sure, and y’know, sometimes the girls liked them, too,” he laughed. “I mean, big bucks like that, all muscles and sweat.”

  “Dear God, Steven, you sound like an idiot,” said Huiquing.

  “No, let’s explore that a bit,” Kenny quickly interjected. “You’re talking about kids that didn’t have that much exposure to other cultures, so what if the girls were curious about the young workers at their house? Any good stories?” Kenny finished with a sly smile, prodding, poking, and leading him on at the same time.

  “Nah, not many,” Appelhans said. “The Wright sisters were always hot to trot. They got into some trouble. The Ferris girls I heard went skinny-dipping in the creek.”

  “Which farm was owned by the Wrights?” asked Kenny, not remembering them from the original list.

  “Oh, the Bear Brook Farm,” Steve said. “Jenny and Jackie were the only kids the Wrights had. So, they had to get more help than the rest of us. Those girls . . .” he trailed off, whistling and smiling.

  Kenny laughed. “Farm girls, right?”

  “You have no clue about any girls, Kenneth,” Huiquing chimed in.

  “Mom . . .”

  “You a fagala?” asked Appelhans.

  “A what? No,” said Kenny.

  “I don’t care,” said Appelhans, turning to Huiquing. “I don’t care, Blaire. You are what you are is what I think.”

  “That’s very progressive thinking, Steve,” said Kenny.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Bradley’s grandkid is a fagala, so what?”

  “I’m sorry, we got off track just a little bit,” said Kenny. “The day laborers we were talking about. What did you guys do if you found out any of them were fooling around with the farm girls?”

  Steve Appelhans looked left, then right, either in pretense of conspiratorial secrecy or because he was actually worried someone was listening in. “All I can say is, when we found out, it didn’t happen again.”

  “When?” asked Kenny.

  “Excuse me?” said Appelhans.

  “You said when you found out about something, not if.”

  Appelhans smiled. All he said was, “Yeah, I did.”

  32

  WHEN Kenny returned to his condo, he was surprised to find Chief Bennett Dobeck parked in front of his building, casually leaning against his Jeep Wrangler. He wore a Patriots Rifle Range T-shirt and jeans. He was in better shape in his fifties than Kenny would ever be in his entire life.

  Broad daylight. Public setting. It was doubtful Dobeck was there to kill him.

  With a smile, Kenny said, “Chief, are you on an undercover assignment?”

  “You’re pushing awfully hard on this, son,” he said. “Do you really think you’ll earn your reputation back by smearing good people?”

  Kenny wondered how far he should goad the chief. That Dobeck had come to see him would annoy Andrea, but it was also proof that by poking the way he had, Kenny was on the right track. Now he just had to make sure he didn’t crash.

  Or, fuck it, if you’re going to crash, make it a spectacular one.

  “I don’t consider conspirators to be good people,” he said.

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Kenny.

  “I learned this morning that one of my officers wasn’t totally forthcoming on her Sasmal murder report and you knew about it.”

  Kenny didn’t know if he’d just dodged a bullet or shot himself in the foot.

  “Wu and Patel are good kids,” Dobeck continued. “Her mother notwithstanding, I don’t hold that against my officer. They screwed up.”

  “That’s what I meant about conspiracy,” Kenny said, saving himself. “You know, I thought you were trying to hide something.”

  Dobeck said, “I’m here now, right?”

  “Yeah, but in your press conference, you said robbery was the motive,” Kenny said. “My witness said the cash register was not open.”

  “This is the same witness that improperly entered the crime scene?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this witness, a pregnant woman with children inside her dark blue Honda Odyssey minivan with a child in her hands urinating on the parking lot, is reliably able to tell you she saw detail of that nature?”

  “I believe so,” said Kenny.

  “Then I would like the name of this witness so that I can ask her questions as well,” said Dobeck.

  “I can’t reveal the name of my source,” said Kenny.

  “What kind of a source is she, son, if I just came here and admitted the mistake she was telling you about?” asked Dobeck.

  “The information she’s providing might be more substantial than that,” Kenny said, realizing he had to tread carefully, and doubting that he knew how.

  “I came here to admit my officers made a mistake in the hopes you wouldn’t hurt their careers,” Dobeck said. “A press update will be released this afternoon. We are no longer officially stating robbery was the motive in Sasmal’s murder, but we are also not wholly ruling it out. We will say that updated information provided by the first officers on the scene led us to reconsider our previous position.”

  Kenny nodded. Dobeck did likewise and turned back to his car, fishing his keys out of his front pocket.

  “Chief,” said Kenny as Dobeck opened his door, “I never wanted to get Wu or Patel in trouble and I didn’t want to go to print with anything that would make them look bad. I went to Rossi and Garmin because I knew they would straighten it out.”

  Dobeck offered a half smile in response. Out of appreciation or cynical doubt? He said, “You are so full of shit, Lee, it’s amazing it doesn’t just leak out of your ears.”

  Kenny decided to go with cynical doubt.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  JEFF DIDN’T SPEAK to Andrea from the moment she picked him up at the train station, through dinner, up to putting the kids to bed. It was eleven o’clock and she had shuffled her exhausted bones down to the basement to look at the rug map, which she’d decided to rechristen with the much more professional sounding: map rug.

  She went into Jeff’s office, wondering why she thought of it as his office, and sat down at Jeff’s computer, wondering why she thought of it as his computer. She ran a Google search on Jacqueline and Jennifer Wright, the daughters of the man who owned Bear Brook Farm, which Appelhans had mentioned to Kenny. They were born in August 1945 and January 1947, respectively. Jackie had passed away two years ago in Massachusetts. Jennifer was listed as still alive. She had gotten married in 1967. Divorced in 1992. Never remarried. Retained her married name of Guilfoyle. Her last known address was in Shelburne, Vermont. Andrea tracked a phone number online. It was too late to call. Weighing her options, she called. An automated response said the phone was no longer in service.

  Jeff entered the office. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” she said back, unwilling to commit further.

  “Listen, I wasn’t doing the silent treatment on purpose,” he continued. “I just wanted to think about what happened last night. Think about what I should say. . . .”

  “Should?”

  “Wanted to say,” he corrected himself.

  “And what is that?” she asked.

  “Everything you said was right,” he admitted. She must have cocked an eyebrow in surprise, because he smiled. “I know it’s probably not what you expected to hear. You are smarter than me, of course. We both know that. It never really bothered me. At first, I guess. When we were starting out, I loved it.”

  “Did you?”

  “Total turn-on, yeah,” he said. “Just like you loved how calm I was about everything . . . how confident I was about what I was going to do after college.”

&
nbsp; Jeff’s casual indifference to anything other than his plan to be a billionaire was the first thing that attracted Andrea to him. In hindsight, maybe the only thing.

  “And as we got older,” he continued, “I probably started to resent it, but that was more because of me than you, Andie. That was because I was making mistakes, screwing up the business I had started. I was mad at myself for all the wrong choices I was making.”

  “But none of that has anything to do with this issue, Jeff,” she said. “You really have a hard time understanding that this isn’t about you, it’s about me.”

  “No, I know that,” he stammered. “I mean, I don’t get it, this thing you have for this kind of stuff, but I know. It’s just, Andie, it isn’t about me or about you, it’s about us. All of us. Right? We’re a family.”

  “And?”

  “And just like the wrong choices I made affected all of us as a family, the choices you make could affect us all, too.”

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Solving a murder means you’re trying to find a murderer. Should I call Gary about this?”

  “We don’t need a lawyer and this isn’t a TV show,” she interrupted. “The killer won’t come after me.”

  “No, I know, but it’s more than that,” he said. “It’s about what it does to you.”

  “To me?”

  “You don’t remember what you were like back in school when all that Morana shit was going down?” he asked. “You were a wreck.”

  “I was a kid,” she said. “I’m not a kid anymore.”

  “So, no diving neck-deep into dark waters?”

  She patted her belly. “I would float.”

  He laughed, sincerely and honestly. For such a long time, because of his mistakes and her unhappiness at having become little more than an incubator, there had been a palpable wedge between them. She wasn’t naive enough to think one calm conversation would make that go away, but it was remarkable to feel the weight move even a little.