Ronald Malfi - Floating Staircase

“I swear it,” I said. “What you tell me stays between us.”

Earl slid the accordion folder in front of him. “It ain’t so much as what I’m gonna tell you as it is how I came across what I’m going to tell you.” He undid the string and opened the folder. A ream of multicolored papers bristled from inside. He took out a slender stack of white paper held together with an industrial-sized paper clip and gave it to me.

I scanned the front page, seeing David Dentman’s name right off the bat, as well as his West Cumberland address and other personal information—social security number, telephone number, date of birth. “What am I looking at?”

“David Dentman’s criminal history.”

I peeled back the pages, skimming them as I went. “How did you get this?”

“I’m not going to say. It’s probably illegal, me just having that stuff, and I ain’t about to rat anyone out.”

“Then I won’t ask again.” I paused to read one of the pages more closely. “He’s had three arrests. If I’m reading this correctly, I mean . . .”

“Oh,” said Earl, “you’re reading it just fine.”

“Two for aggravated assault, another for—what’s ‘A and B’?”

“Assault and battery.”

“Jesus Christ.” I read closer. “What does ‘nol pros’ mean?”

“Latin for nolle prosequi. Means he was arrested but wasn’t prosecuted.”

“So he got off on all three charges?”

“So it says.”

“How come?”

Earl shrugged and rubbed his stubbly chin with one of his big grizzly bear hands. “Could be for a number of reasons. Not enough evidence against him. Or maybe the victims dropped the charges.”

“Who’re the victims?”

“I have no idea.”

I reread the pages. “The most recent arrest was only three years ago. That was the assault and battery. Are we talking bar fights here or . . . ?”

“No way to tell.”

“Is there a way to decipher . . . I mean, who were the arresting officers on these?”

“Can’t tell by reading that gobbledygook,” said Earl.

“So David Dentman has a criminal record,” I said. “Surely the cops looked into this after Elijah disappeared?”

“I’ll bet they knew about it. Sure.”

“So the guy’s nephew allegedly drowns, the body’s never recovered, and his statement’s the only thing they have to go on? Sounds awfully slipshod, doesn’t it?”

“There’s the woman, too,” Earl suggested. “She saw the boy down by the water and later heard a scream. Don’t forget.”

“Right. Nancy Stein. I spoke with her and her husband a few days ago. It was only after being interviewed by the police that she said she’d heard a scream. A wail, she called it.” I frowned, shook my head. “But she had reservations when I spoke with her, as if she’d been thinking about that wail and her subsequent statement to the cops for many nights since that day. I think she thinks that maybe they talked her into saying she heard Elijah scream.”

Earl was dragging a set of fingernails down the bristly side of his neck; he froze upon hearing my words and glared at me from across the dimly lit table. “Are you talking about a police cover-up?”

“No, no, nothing like that. I just think that maybe whoever questioned Nancy might have accidentally put words in her mouth and thoughts in her head. Think about it. You hear a noise like someone crying out but think nothing of it. Later a bunch of cops show up at your doorstep and tell you the neighbor’s kid is missing and that he probably drowned in the lake. They ask you if you heard anything, maybe a shout or a struggle or a scream. And of course your mind returns to that one lone cry you heard—or thought you heard—earlier that day. Then all of a sudden you’re certain you heard it, and that’s what the police write down in their little notepads.”

“Sure,” Earl said. “I’ll buy it.”

“Did you interview David or Veronica for the newspaper articles you wrote?”

“No. Police wouldn’t allow it.”

“So who gave you all the details?”

“The officers at the scene. Later on, Paul Strohman’s office issued an official release that I used to check my facts.”

“Paul Strohman?” I had heard the name but couldn’t remember where.

“He’s the chief of police. Wait . . .” Earl dove back into his folder and thumbed through several more papers before he produced a newspaper clipping.

It was a brief write-up about the Westlake Police Department closing the investigation into Elijah’s disappearance, satisfied that it was an accidental drowning. Alongside the article was a granular black-and-white photo of Chief of Police Strohman. Even in the lousy picture, I could tell Strohman was good-looking and well put together. He was wearing a handsomely cut dark suit as opposed to the police uniform one would have expected him to be wearing, and he sported the Cheshire cat grin of a Washington lobbyist. By all accounts, Paul Strohman looked nothing like the police chief of some backwater mountain village.

David’s face loomed up into my memory like a ship breaching fog, firing questions at me as I stood in his living room: You a cop? Strohman send you here?

“Understand that what we got here is nothing definitive. This is just another door, another avenue.”

Another bit of evidence, I thought.

“In fact,” Earl added, returning once again to his accordion folder, “the entire Dentman family has an equally sordid past. The cheese, in this case, does not stand alone.” He brought out more papers—lined notebook pages cramped with handwriting I recognized to be his—and held them nearly against his nose so he could read them. “David’s sister . . .”

“Veronica,” I said.

“She’s spent her life in and out of mental health facilities. Most recently she spent some time in Crownsville back east before they closed the place down a number of years ago.”

“How much time?”

“Six months, though my sources may not be completely accurate.”

I didn’t bother asking who his sources were.

“And I’ve got no record of who was watching her kid all those times,” Earl continued before I could ask that very question, “though my guess is it had been David.”

“Not the kid’s father?”

“Don’t know who the father was. But I had my source run a background on Veronica. Her record came up clean.” He tapped the printout of David’s criminal record, which I’d laid on the table, and said, “That place in West Cumberland listed as his address? Same as hers. And before that, they were both apparently living together in Dundalk. A brief residency in Pennsylvania—”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Same address.”

He set both his hands down flat on the vinyl table-top and leaned close enough to me so that I could smell the beer on his breath. “Those two have been living together their whole lives. She must have been one unbalanced nutcase in order for her brother to have to take care of her is my guess.”

“Taking care of her and her kid,” I said. “What does David do for a living, anyway?”

“He’s in construction. I found his information with the state carpenters’ union.”

I thought of the makeshift little rooms throughout my basement and the prison-like bedroom hidden behind a wall of Sheetrock. I let this all sink in while Earl got up and retrieved two fresh beers from the refrigerator.

“So you can see why I don’t want some of this stuff getting out beyond these walls,” he said, sitting down and handing me another beer. “I’ve been playing reporter for just over a decade now, and I may not be Woodward and Bernstein as I sometimes like to joke, but I do know how to be a journalist. I’ve cultivated my sources over that time. The last thing I’d want to see is someone close to me lose their job simply for appeasing the whimsy of a nutty old man.”