Suburban Dicks

by Fabian Nicieza

The sentencing date for all the West Windsor–Plainsboro conspirators was set for the nineteenth. Every one of them had pled guilty on various charges. The independently corroborated testimony from Dobeck, Halloway, and Appelhans that Franklin Wright had killed Cleon Singleton had prevented the Mercer County prosecutor from being able to charge any of them individually with the original murder.

  And, of course, none of them had said a word about Satkunananthan Sasmal.

  Andrea sighed and sipped her tea. She felt exhausted. Her due date was the twenty-first, but she wished she could splash the damned thing out on the kitchen floor right now. Her belly, which had been staggeringly large in the summer, had now reached a historic circumference. If NASA trained the Hubble telescope on Earth, they’d identify her as a new moon.

  The kids were upstairs. They had begun something new this year, with Ruth and Eli being responsible for helping Sadie and Sarah get dressed for school while Andrea drove Jeff to the fucking train station.

  For the most part, it had worked out well. She was proud of her two eldest for stepping up, but sorry that even more would be expected of them soon. As Jeff came downstairs, she handed him a bagel with cream cheese and his travel coffee cup. “Ready?”

  “Yeah,” he said, digging into his bagel as they walked to the garage.

  “Taking Dad now,” she called out. “Be dressed and ready by the time I get back.”

  “Bagels!” she heard Sadie shout from upstairs.

  “If you’re ready,” said Andrea, worrying that her youngest was going to turn into a gelatinous blob of gluten.

  She hauled herself into the Odyssey. It had become nearly impossible over the past two weeks. The seat belt extension she’d originally purchased on Amazon had ordered another seat belt extension for itself. She was embarrassed to be seen in public.

  “What’s on the agenda today?” Jeff asked. Since the arrests were made and school had started, he’d regularly inquired about her work to solve Satku’s murder. She knew his interest was feigned, but at least it showed a modicum of respect—or at least a justifiable fear of her.

  “Meeting with Rossi at ten,” she said. “We have to figure something out before Bradley Dobeck’s sentencing hearing so that we can extract a confession.”

  “You still think it was him?”

  “I do,” she said. “But I have absolutely no way to prove it.”

  She didn’t notice she’d absently moved up far enough for Jeff to get out. He pulled his usual maneuver of awkward uncertainty over whether she was in a good-enough mood to kiss. She threw him a life preserver and said, “Have a good day,” turning to face him, her large lips already pursed.

  He kissed her and said, “You, too.”

  He got out and she watched him mount the recently refinished concrete steps to the train platform. It would never be the same between them again, she thought. Not just because of the investigation, the fifth pregnancy, his financial mismanagement, or the fact they’d lost over four million dollars. What angered her the most was that Jeff had broken the law and fleeced his clients for three years and she had never known.

  She was mad because she hadn’t figured it out on her own. Which meant every day of their marriage since then, Andrea had been mad at herself.

  There, the truth was out.

  They could be friendly, they could even be friends, but she’d never really love him again, until she found a way to love herself.

  She drove back home, got the kids breakfast, and packed their lunches. Ruth went out for her bus to Millstone River School. Twenty minutes later, Andrea walked Eli and Sarah out for the Maurice Hawk Elementary School bus pickup. She’d argued with Sarah for the umpteenth time—and lost again—about her stubborn refusal to wear anything but a T-shirt and shorts to school. Then she packed Sadie up in the van and drove her to the Montessori preschool she attended.

  In two weeks, she’d be doing all this with a newborn baby.

  Andrea pulled into the Montessori lot, focusing on not running over any runaway children. She didn’t engage any of the stares she perpetually got: curious distaste or outright scorn from the Caucasians, recriminations and disappointment from the Asians. For so long, she had regretted hiding who she was; now she regretted that everyone knew.

  Sadie took two steps from her mom, then spun and gave her a big hug and kiss. “Love you,” she said before turning and skipping through the security check into the school. That sweet parting with her youngest was the only moment of the day when Andrea didn’t feel the wrenching torque of anger from her failure.

  She drove home and showered. It took her forever to get dressed now, so she had to plan that into her schedule. She gathered her folder of notes and went to the West Windsor Police Department to meet with Acting Chief Rossi.

  A tea was waiting for her on the small round table in his office. He had a large metallic travel mug filled with black coffee. An array of paperwork was spread on the table. Though he had occupied Dobeck’s old office for several weeks, he hadn’t brought in any personal touches of his own. He knew he was going to serve as the chief on a temporary basis only. Mayor Wu intended to hire an Indian police chief and had asked Andrea to be on the vetting committee. They had already interviewed two potential candidates.

  Sticky notes clung to the whiteboard on the small corner of the wall behind the table like tongues sticking out at them, each of them with unanswered questions.

  Murder weapon?

  Witnesses?

  Windrows security cam?

  Attached to the last sticky was a second note that read:

  Time code?

  She looked at frame-by-frame printouts from the Windrows security camera accounting for the night of Satku’s death. Windrows deleted their files every sixty days. Kenny and Andrea had no leverage to extricate them, but the WWPD had subpoenaed the hard drive from the security company Windrows was contracted with.

  Those digital archives showed that Bradley Dobeck had left Windrows on the night of the murder at 11:48 p.m., and the security system scanned his ID card return at 12:36 a.m. The security system cameras did not cover the parking lot, just the door entrances.

  The fact that Dobeck confessed to sleep disorder and left the facility late at night several times a month gave any decent lawyer ammunition against such circumstantial evidence of guilt.

  As a result, Andrea had absolutely no way to prove he had planned the murder for weeks and expertly executed it on the night in question.

  Rossi slowly sipped his coffee. He was measured and deliberate. She appreciated that about him, since she tended to bring seething anger and sarcasm to everything she did. He returned to things they had already reviewed several times in the two weeks since they’d obtained the footage.

  “Coroner places time of death between one and two a.m.,” recited Rossi. “What if it was earlier than that?”

  “We have a credit card sale at the Valero for twelve forty-four a.m.,” said Andrea. “The customer confirmed it. Satku was still alive when Dobeck was already back at Windrows.”

  Since acquiring the security footage, their meetings had been painfully short because they couldn’t get around the truth: Bradley Dobeck hadn’t done it, or if he had somehow managed to do it, they couldn’t prove the crime.

  The bastard was going to prison, but he was going to get away with murder.

  The office door swung open without a knock. Detective Garmin slid an iPad on the desk. “Asshole Lee posted another YouTube video,” he said. Asshole had become Kenny’s new first name around the station.

  The video was linked to the West Windsor and Plainsboro Facebook pages and had already garnered over five hundred comments. Kenny had been posting them daily, muckraking more than providing any pertinent new insight. He had stoked racial animus in a few of them. He had questioned the police, the mayor’s office, and even the local papers, includ
ing his own. His YouTube channel included his appearances on CNN, MSNBC, all the local Philly and New York stations, and just last week an obviously staged confrontation on Fox & Friends with a New Jersey white nationalist group.

  “The West Windsor Police Department say they have no suspect in the murder of Satkunananthan Sasmal,” Kenny began. He paused, then smiled, that cynical, smug grin that was somehow still endearing. “How about a jailhouse full of suspects? How about having had weeks to draw a confession from one of the conspirators? The WWPD have accomplished nothing. Acting Chief Rossi isn’t going to win any awards for his acting, I assure you. The Indian community has every right to be furious about the incompetence of the police. The FBI has checked out. Benjamin Bratt—oh, I mean Ramon Mercado—has his conspiracy conviction assured, so he doesn’t care about one poor kid who was killed because his family happened to buy a house where human remains had been buried.”

  He paused for several seconds, seemingly trying to rein in his rising anger, but she knew it was part of the con. Stoke, then simmer. Kenny could give any of the cable talking heads a run for their money.

  “Satku deserved better. The Indian community deserves better. Ultimately, we all deserve better,” he said somberly. “And you should all demand it. The Lee Report won’t stop putting pressure on our public officials to be accountable to the people of West Windsor and Plainsboro. If you have any information about the callous murder of Satku Sasmal, please post on this page or DM me anonymously to my social media feed appearing on your screen right now. This is Kenny Lee, saying today is the day that you can make a difference.”

  The video ended.

  “Wow,” muttered Andrea.

  “Fucking asshole!” snarled Garmin.

  “Did he say anything that wasn’t accurate?” asked Rossi.

  They all knew he had not.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  THAT AFTERNOON, AFTER picking up Sadie from preschool and taking her to the Little Gym for her all-important tumbling development, Andrea went food shopping at Wegmans. On the way home, she took Quakerbridge Road, hoping the traffic would be lighter than on Route 1. The road had been around since Washington’s march on Trenton and marked the border between West Windsor Township and Lawrenceville. Sadie saw police lights ahead. Traffic slowed to a crawl as it merged into one lane. There was a fender bender at the left turn from Quaker Bridge Mall onto Clarksville Road.

  “Two police cars!” exclaimed Sadie.

  As they crawled past the accident, Sadie asked why the two cars looked different. Andrea explained that one was from West Windsor and the other from Lawrenceville, and that they’d probably both been called since the accident took place on the border between the two towns.

  They got home just as the buses dropped off Eli and Sarah. Getting them snacks and enjoying their giggling as they watched YouTube videos, Andrea stopped for a second. She thought she felt a contraction, but realized it was just gas. She wasn’t in the mood to have the baby today, though she couldn’t wait not to be pregnant anymore. Or ever again.

  “Why would he need to get his gym bag?” she asked out loud.

  Sadie looked up, confused. She shrugged her shoulders and got back to her video.

  She called Rossi. Garmin answered his phone. “He’s in the can. I’m in his office.”

  “I need to know who was on patrol at the time we have Dobeck leaving Windrows,” she said.

  “Give me a minute,” he said. He navigated the Excel files with, she assumed, all the dexterity that fingers as thick as bratwurst could muster. Garmin muttered, “Son of a bitch. Asshole Lee is right, I should be fired.”

  “Benjamin Dobeck was on patrol shift, right?”

  “Six p.m. until two a.m.,” he said.

  “Did he log any incident reports for that night?” she asked.

  “Clean sheet,” he said.

  She hung up and called the Plainsboro Police. As she waited to be transferred to Chief Ambrose, Sadie complained about her snack. Ambrose came on the line with Sadie in mid-wail. Andrea covered the phone and told her daughter to shut up. Sadie didn’t.

  “Chief, who was on duty for the overnight shift the night of the Sasmal murder?”

  As Ambrose looked up the information, Andrea finished getting the kids their snacks. Her mind raced. Two police cars from two different towns. A child barely past the toddler stage had solved the crime.

  “It was Patrolman Luke Olsen,” she said.

  “Did he register any incident reports?”

  “A traffic stop, at eleven fifty-six, but called it off at twelve fifteen,” Ambrose said.

  “Why?”

  “Incident report says officer’s discretion,” the chief replied. “Why?”

  “Because I know who killed Satkunananthan Sasmal,” Andrea said.

  She made one more call.

  49

  LEAVING Eli at home, Andrea brought Sarah and Sadie with her to meet Kenny at Van Nest Park. He was waiting by his car. She noted his minor irritation upon seeing she’d brought the girls. They hadn’t talked much in weeks. His petulance over having been iced out of the investigation had been channeled into his deluge of media appearances. Sadie and Sarah ran up to greet him. She noted he got both their names right.

  “I take it from the look on your face that you’ve seen me on TV,” he muttered.

  “I saw enough to know I didn’t need to see much more,” she said.

  “Look, I had to push a narrative,” he said. “Ends to a means. I’m probably going to sign a book deal with Putnam and my agent is in discussions with Netflix for a documentary on all of this.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “No, to you, too,” he said. “The book and show would be where you would really get your due. Serious, that’s long-form storytelling. You’ll be all over both of those.”

  “Wow, that would be just wonderful,” she said, keeping an eye on her girls.

  “Hey,” he said, “I perfected the art of sarcastic gratitude.”

  As Sadie struggled to get on the swing while Sarah was already perched at the top of the play set, Andrea said, “Think how much more glory you’d have if you’d actually cracked the murder of Satkunananthan.”

  “You know who did it?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Who?”

  Sadie interrupted with a loud squeal. “Sarah push me!”

  “Sarah, get down and push Sadie,” said Andrea.

  “No! I’m king of the mountain!” replied Sarah.

  “Sadie, you’re killing Uncle Kenny,” he shouted.

  “I’m Sarah!” squealed Sarah.

  Sadie giggled. “And I’m Sadie!”

  “I have to be honest, girls,” Kenny snapped. “I don’t give a shit which one of you is which right now!” And turning to Andrea, “No offense.”

  “None taken,” said Andrea, who didn’t care much what their names were at that moment, either.

  “So?” he pleaded.

  “I want the parameters out in the open.”

  “Parameters?” he asked.

  “What you get out of this and what you don’t get out of this,” she said.

  He hesitated, then said, “Okay, I’ll play. What do I get out of this?”

  “The chance to be an integral part of the sting that will lead to the arrest of Satku’s killer,” she said. “And the chance to report on it afterwards.”

  “And what don’t I get?”

  “The chance to report on it before it happens,” she said.

  “Fair enough.”

  “Or the chance to be there when he is arrested,” she continued.

  “Why?”

  “Because it has to be completely by the book. Your presence tends to throw the book out the window.”

  “I don’t see how yours doesn�
��t, too,” he said.

  “How well do you know Plainsboro patrolman Luke Olsen?” she asked.

  His eyes went wide. “You think he’s—”

  “No,” she cut him off.

  “Well, if it’s not Olsen, then who is it?” Kenny asked again.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  AT THE PARK, Kenny had made a couple of calls. He found out where Patrolman Olsen was. He and Andrea went in separate cars, but parked in the Wicoff Elementary School parking lot within seconds of each other. The school was over a hundred years old. Grafted extensions placed on it over the decades robbed it of its original character, but it worked with what it had. Olsen was wrapping up a presentation to the EDP students who stayed after school. A public meeting in the school parking lot would be the perfect location to avoid an escalation.

  They hovered around his parked patrol car.

  Seeing the playground equipment to their right, Sarah and Sadie wanted to go play, but Andrea wouldn’t let them.

  Olsen emerged through the front doors and saw them waiting by his car. Wary, he approached them. “Lee. Mrs. Stern,” he said.

  “We have some questions, Officer,” Kenny said.

  “I’m not authorized to speak to the press on behalf of the department,” said Olsen.

  “Well, despite Kenny’s presence here, we’re not asking the questions on behalf of the press,” Andrea said. “On the night Satkunananthan Sasmal was murdered in West Windsor, you called in a traffic stop on Maple Avenue and Ruedeman Drive, but you didn’t write it up.”

  That caught him off guard. He thought about it for a second. “I mean, we make lots of stops where we don’t write a ticket. I mean, so . . . ?”

  “So, do you remember that one?” asked Kenny.

  “No, I mean, I don’t know,” he stammered.

  “You called in the stop at eleven fifty-six, but called it off at twelve fifteen,” said Andrea.

  “Okay, so I guess I did,” said Olsen. “The fact I can’t even remember it shows you how inconsequential it must have been.”