Suburban Dicks

by Fabian Nicieza

  “FBI?” Beckham’s eyebrows rose, impressed with the caliber of attention.

  “My associate is Andrea Stern,” he continued. “She is a forensic psychologist who has been investigating the murder of a gas station attendant in West Windsor.”

  “Where’s that?” asked Aaron.

  “Between Trenton and Princeton,” she replied.

  He hissed breath between pursed lips. “There’s a whole lotta distance between Trenton and Princeton that got nothing to do with the mileage.”

  “There is,” she agreed. “During the course of my investigation, we uncovered the remains of someone who was murdered decades ago. We think the killing of the gas station attendant was done to continue the cover-up of that older murder.”

  “Okay, sounds like a good episode so far,” he said. “What’s it got to do with me?”

  Ramon explained the remains had generated a familial DNA match. “Because you’re in the system, we were able to make a quick connection.”

  “Do you have a male relative who disappeared years ago, Mr. Beckham?” Andrea asked.

  Beckham thought about it for a moment, gaining the measure of them and likely running through the possibilities for how this could benefit him.

  “I got a story I heard,” he said. “I got a name. What I don’t got is time served.”

  “You’ll never get time served,” said Ramon. “It’s a mandatory minimum. Even the Bureau can’t juice that.”

  “Maybe better accommodations?” Andrea asked. “Spend the last two years of your sentence in Southern State? Open dorm rooms, chance to get your GED?”

  “I graduated high school, lady,” he said sharply. “I got my associate’s degree from Essex County community college.”

  “Maybe if you’d gone for your bachelor’s you wouldn’t have gotten caught jacking a car,” snapped Ramon in response.

  Beckham locked eyes with him, then he smiled, nodding. “Probably.”

  “I can get you Southern State, Aaron,” said Ramon, dropping the photographs of the interred remains in front of him. “If you give me a name and it pans out.”

  “Story goes that my great-uncle got a girl pregnant and didn’t want to deal, so he ran away,” said Aaron.

  “When was this?” Andrea asked.

  “In the sixties, I think.”

  Ramon and Andrea exchanged glances. That would be right. Ramon took a pen and a pad of paper and slid them across the table to Aaron. “I want his name. Your great-uncle and every relative you can think of. Give me a family tree.

  Andrea watched with excitement as Aaron wrote at the top of the page:

  CLEON SINGLETON

  She had a name.

  He drew a line and wrote:

  DOLORES WEST (sister)

  He continued scribbling. When he was done, he spun the pad around and they looked at the family tree. Andrea absorbed it. Cleon had a sister and cousins, aunts and uncles, people who suffered over a loved one’s disappearance. She was romanticizing it, but she didn’t care. She needed that emotion to fuel her anger, and she needed that anger to fuel her desire for justice.

  “We need to verify this,” said Ramon. “I need to know who on this list is still alive, lives in the area, all of that.”

  Aaron circled the name at the top of the chart: Dolores West. “She was Cleon’s younger sister. Her husband died about five years ago. She lives in Irvington.”

  Ramon nodded.

  Andrea said, “Thank you, Mr. Beckham.”

  “Southern State,” he said—a statement, not a question.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  TEN MINUTES LATER, they were in Ramon’s office on separate terminals at the Newark FBI HQ. Ramon was backtracking any information they might have in their system on Cleon Singleton, while Andrea researched the family connections.

  Ramon said, “Cleon Singleton reported missing on August fourth, nineteen sixty-five, by his mother, Anthya Singleton, deceased February fifteenth, nineteen eighty-nine. IRS records show Singleton filed taxes for nineteen sixty-four including income for unsalaried freelance work on a construction job in Irvington, warehouse inventory loading in Newark, and picking and bundling at farms in Flemington, Hopewell, and . . . West Windsor.”

  “No work records for sixty-five?” asked Andrea.

  “He never filed for that year.”

  “On account of being dead,” she said. Looking at her screen, “Dolores Singleton, born September eighteenth, nineteen fifty-one, youngest child of Anthya and Darrell Singleton. Her father died in a car accident March third, nineteen fifty-nine. Dolores graduated high school in nineteen sixty-eight, stenography school in nineteen sixty-nine. Married Carmichael West on May fourteenth, nineteen seventy-five. Husband deceased in twenty fifteen, complications due to diabetes. Her current address is . . . Maple Gardens Apartments in Irvington. Close enough to drive right now.”

  They looked at each other for a moment.

  “No time like the present,” she said.

  “You’re okay with the kids?” he asked.

  “Kenny is watching them,” she replied. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  KENNY LEE SAT in a booth at the Princetonian Diner as Andrea’s brood shouted, screamed, threw food at each other, and put straws in their noses. Ruth, who was mortified by all of it, stared at him with abject disdain.

  “I don’t understand why my mother would work with you,” she said, picking through her hash browns to remove the onions.

  “What?” he asked. “I bring a lot to the table, kid.”

  She snorted.

  “Okay, I don’t have to explain myself to an eight-year-old—”

  “I’m almost ten,” she interrupted.

  “And you eat like a baby, look at you, separating your onions from your potatoes.”

  “All I know is that when I’m an old man like you, I won’t need someone to give forty dollars to a baby to pay for breakfast,” she said.

  Match point.

  Sarah had climbed to the top of the booth bench. She said, “Uncle Kenny, look at me!”

  Before he could even open his mouth, she vaulted herself from her perch like a professional wrestler, twisting in midair to execute a full diving head throttle to Kenny’s face.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  RAMON AND ANDREA pulled up to the Maple Gardens apartment complex on Marshall Street in Irvington a little after eleven in the morning. The complex had the same hardscrabble survival instincts that other neighborhoods in the downtrodden city had: affected by years of gang activity, but not defeated by it.

  Ramon flashed his badge to the private security guard. “I need to speak to a resident named Dolores West,” he said. “We tried calling but there was no answer.”

  “Do you have a warrant, sir?” asked the guard.

  “Not necessary,” said Ramon. “Mrs. West is in no trouble. We need to talk to her about her brother who disappeared fifty years ago.”

  “Fifty? No shit?” said the guard. “You found him?”

  “We need to confirm it,” Andrea said.

  The guard picked up his desk phone and called Dolores. He was friendly and polite. Speaking slowly and loudly, he patiently explained who they were. Andrea noted that Dolores was hard of hearing, and might not have heard the phone when it rang. Husband died a few years ago. She’s sheltered, Andrea thought.

  In the elevator, she said, “We have to offer her hope.”

  That confused Ramon. “We know he’s dead.”

  “She’s lonely,” Andrea replied. “She’s withdrawn. We’re not telling her the brother she hasn’t seen since she was fifteen years old is lost, we’re telling her he’s been found. We’re bringing family back to her, not taking it away.”

>   Ramon nodded.

  They knocked on her door. Then rapped harder. A few seconds later, it opened. Dolores West was nearly seventy years old, a frail African American woman with wisps of white in her short, cropped hair. She wore glasses but no hearing aid, which Andrea suspected she owned but refused to wear. Ramon introduced them. She marveled at Andrea’s belly and invited them to sit down.

  “A woman five minutes away from giving birth doing this kind of work?” she said as they sat. “Why would the FBI need to talk to me?”

  Ramon deferred to Andrea, because he saw Dolores was clearly drawn to the short, frazzled, and enormously pregnant woman. “We wanted to help you bring closure to your family,” Andrea said.

  Dolores looked at them for a moment, confused, and then her eyes went wide. She audibly gasped at the stunning, sudden realization. “Cleon?” she asked.

  “We found him,” said Andrea.

  Tears stained Dolores’s eyes and she blinked them back; memories, gray and frayed at the edges, skipped across her mind. “Surely not alive, he’s not alive,” she said.

  “No, Mrs. West, he’s not,” said Ramon, bluntly but kindly. “He has been deceased for decades. We presume since he was originally missing.”

  “Where?” she asked.

  Ramon and Andrea exchanged a quick glance, both of them intimately understanding that now was not the time to provide too many details. “In the West Windsor region, Mrs. West. That’s where his body had been buried. We suspect that is also where he was killed.”

  “The farmers,” Dolores whispered.

  “Excuse me?” asked Ramon.

  “My momma thought he’d run away,” she said, lost in her memories for a moment. “She’d had problems with Cleon. She wanted him to go to the army, get away from here. She knew Newark was getting closer and closer to burning.”

  Andrea stated as much as asked, “But he was worried about going to Vietnam?”

  “We was worried about everything back then. Cleon, he just kept working,” Dolores said. “To his credit, he worked any which way he could. But the farmwork was hard and they treated their day workers—their field niggers, Cleon called himself—they treated them poorly. After he disappeared, we heard a girl he was sweet on was pregnant; easy to believe he just up and ran away, but I never thought he did.”

  “I know it’s been a long time, Mrs. West, but do you recall who he might have worked for? Any names?” asked Ramon.

  “They were paid in cash,” said Dolores. “Cleon did it in sixty-four and he went back again in sixty-five. Took the train down from Newark.”

  “But you don’t recall any specific farms?”

  She shook her head, losing focus. “Cleon didn’t have a mouth on him; he knew when to talk and what to say. It was the women. The women were always his problem.”

  Dolores stood and slowly walked toward a bureau in the small living room. She opened a drawer and removed some folded linens, carefully laying them atop the bureau. Then she took out an old, worn leather case and brought it to them. She laid it on the coffee table and opened a ribbon bow that tied the case together. She lifted the cover to reveal an old photo album.

  Photos of Anthya and Darrell, her mother and father. A wedding picture. A frayed photo of Anthya holding baby Cleon on the day he was born in the hospital. Another from 1951 of both parents with newborn Dolores.

  She talked a little about each picture, smiling sadly, remembering things she likely hadn’t thought of in a while. Ramon was poised to interrupt or ask her a question, but Andrea gently placed a hand on his thigh to stop him.

  Dolores showed pictures of her playing with Cleon. The age difference, she said, made him more her babysitter than her brother. “He was kind,” she said. “He wasn’t a punk. Got good grades. Did his chores.”

  Andrea knew that was her entry. “But the women?” she asked.

  Dolores cackled with a hitch that made it sound like she was trying to catch her breath while retching a duck. “The girls loooooved Cleon,” she said. “Look at him.”

  “But any incidents on the farms he worked on?” asked Ramon.

  “He didn’t talk about his days much,” she said. “He got home late, got up early. He said something about two sisters flirtin’ with him. He got hollered at and he hoped he wouldn’t have to work there again.”

  She ran her fingers over a picture of Cleon and her.

  “I stopped thinking about him a while ago. I’m ashamed to admit it, but it’s true. It’s been so long.”

  Ramon said, “We need to confirm it’s him, Mrs. West. Can we take a DNA sample from you, ma’am?”

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “A dab of saliva from inside your cheek is all we need,” he said, opening his case to remove a swabbing kit. He took out the tip.

  “He just runs it along the inside of your cheek and that’s it,” Andrea assured her.

  Dolores relented. Ramon dabbed the interior of her mouth. He sealed the swab tip in a plastic cap, then sealed that in a plastic bag. He labeled it. They thanked her and apologized they couldn’t offer more detail on when the remains could be released to her for proper interment. “It likely won’t be done until our investigation is concluded,” said Ramon. “That could be several weeks.”

  She said, “It’s been fifty years. A few more months is not a lot of time to wait.”

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  IN THE PARKING lot, Ramon asked Andrea, “Do you ever think about Morana?”

  “No,” she said. “But I never stop thinking about the next Morana that hasn’t been caught yet. That maybe . . . I should be catching them.”

  He didn’t respond. She thanked him for everything he’d done and they hugged.

  He got into his car.

  She got into hers.

  He went back to his life.

  And she went back to hers.

  35

  AFTER getting the kids at Kenny’s and updating him on everything that had happened, Andrea barely had time to get dinner started before she’d have to pick Jeff up. As they rounded the curve on Abbington Lane, from his seat behind her, Eli shouted, “A police car!”

  Andrea pulled the Odyssey into her driveway, seeing a single person inside the West Windsor patrol car. She knew it was Chief Dobeck. The kids yammered in excitement. She pulled into the garage and told them to go inside. Eli protested and she snapped at him to listen to her. Ruth led them up the garage steps to the house. She turned to her mother and asked, “Are you going to be okay?”

  The thought of Ruth being worried about her seemed incongruous and adorable. “I haven’t done anything wrong, Ruth,” Andrea said. “If anyone should be worried, it’s him.”

  Ruth smiled at that, displaying a confident attitude and casual arrogance that was an eerie match to Andrea’s. As her oldest child went into the house, Andrea turned her attention to Dobeck. She was tired and her back throbbed. Her left hip hurt, too, which made her wobble worse than usual. The discomfort only fueled her desire to nail Dobeck to the floor if he pushed her.

  He tipped the brim of his hat and nodded. He was handsome, with gray hair, piercing blue eyes, and a lean, weathered face that made him look like an old Marlboro Man billboard. He walked to greet her, thinking he was being subtle by slowly lowering his hand to his holster and gun while approaching her. As if she’d be intimidated at this point.

  “Mrs. Andrea Stern?” he asked.

  “Police Chief Bennett Dobeck,” she responded.

  “I have to admit, I was surprised to learn that you lived in West Windsor,” he said, shaking her hand. “But I guess if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like the spotlight, the Morana investigation was a bright enough light to last a lifetime.”

  “I don’t mind the spotlight, sir,” she said. “I just don’t seek it.”

  “Is t
hat why you didn’t come to us after your visit to the crime scene?”

  “I didn’t visit a crime scene. I visited a gas station so that my toddler could use the bathroom,” she said. “I saw no reason to come to you because I wasn’t engaged or involved in anything going on.”

  “But you went to a reporter?” he asked. “And he went to the mayor. And he went to my detectives.”

  “You lied on your official police report,” Andrea said bluntly. “You lied in your initial press conference.”

  “We misrepresented,” he said. “And we made a retraction.”

  “Yes, you did,” she said, casually leaning against the side of his police car and using one hand for support to brace herself. “Sorry, hips are killing me.”

  “You acknowledge we corrected our mistake, so why this persistence?”

  “Because I haven’t seen a single word out of you asking the obvious question.”

  “And what’s that?” Dobeck asked, a trace of irritation in his voice over her arrogance.

  She smiled inside. He hadn’t seen anything yet. “If the motive wasn’t robbery, then what was it?” she asked.

  “We’re working to discern that now—”

  She interrupted him with a wave of her hand. “You’re not working to discern that, sir, you’re working to cover it up.”

  “Cover it up?”

  “Satkunananthan Sasmal was murdered in a misguided attempt to silence his family from fighting with the township about their pool permit,” she said.

  “These are some pretty wild allegations, Mrs. Stern,” he said.

  “They get wilder, Chief,” she said. Then, looking him cold and hard in the eye, she continued, “But you know that, don’t you?”

  He returned her hard stare, then he stepped back and smiled. “What I don’t know is what you do know, Mrs. Stern. And I’d bet good money that you don’t know nearly as much as you pretend to.”

  That elicited a snort from her that was as derisive as it was unexpected. “You would lose that bet, Chief.”

  She started to walk back to her open garage, noting that the kids were upstairs looking down from Ruth’s bedroom window.