Ronald Malfi - Floating Staircase

“Oh, I guess if he promised.” Had Strohman not sighed and run his hands through his hair at that moment, his sarcasm might have struck me a bit harder. Addressing me, he said, “Before you go in there, I need to lay down the ground rules. For starters, we’ve made no promises to him. If he talks, it’s of his own accord. I don’t want to give this fool immunity only to have him confess to chopping the kid into kindling and burying him out in the woods.”

“Then don’t,” I said. “Only promise him immunity for the charges he’s currently facing—conspiracy, obstruction, whatever.”

“I hate the idea of giving him a reduction while we go balls-to-the-wall with his retarded fucking sister.”

“Do you want his statement or not?” I said. “And besides, she’s not retarded.”

Strohman thumbed the dimple in his chin. “If I sound callous, it’s because this whole thing’s one steaming pile of shit, and I got it all over my shoes. It doesn’t help that you’ve got your nose in everything.”

“I’m not planning to tell anyone.”

“Yeah, well, you’re just a swell guy, I guess.” Strohman stood up, all six and a half feet of him. “You go in there and listen to what he has to say. You make him no promises. You tell him nothing he doesn’t already confess to knowing.”

“Check,” I said, also standing. “Where is he?”

“In one of the holding cells.”

Slump-shouldered and withdrawn, David Dentman looked like an overgrown child in the single holding cell. As I approached, Adam shutting the door behind me, he didn’t even bother to look up. Wan midday light spilled in from a number of recessed windows high in the wall. The whole place smelled of camphor and gym socks.

I sat down in the folding chair in front of the cell and did not speak.

Sitting on the edge of his cot, Dentman seemed content to stare at his big feet. The shoelaces had been removed from his boots, and his hands, clasped between his legs, looked about the size of hubcaps. With his head bowed, I noticed the whirl of hair that faded to baldness at the topmost portion of his scalp. When he finally looked at me, his face was hard as stone and almost expressionless. This surprised me; I had thought he’d been crying.

“What else do you know?” he said, his voice just barely above a whisper.

I spread my hands out on my knees, palms up. “Nothing.”

“Don’t lie to me. It’s over now.”

“What makes you think I know something more?”

“You’ve figured everything else out, haven’t you?”

“I don’t know anything else. This is where we are.”

“Goddamn you.”

“Tell me what happened.”

He hung his head again.

“They need a statement from you.”

“Why? So they can put my sister in prison?”

“Veronica won’t go to prison. But if you cooperate, you might be able to avoid going yourself.”

“What good does that do me?”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter to you,” I said. “But maybe it matters to Veronica. Maybe if you cooperate and get your sentence reduced—if you tell them all you know about what actually happened that day—then you’ll still be free to help her. If she goes away to a hospital someplace, she’s going to need you to check in on her and take care of her. You can’t do that from prison.”

David lifted his head and stared at me. Despite the distance between us, I could count the fine blond hairs that made up his eyebrows. “I don’t trust the police,” he said. “I won’t say nothing to them unless I know they don’t got nothing else up under their sleeve.”

“There’s nothing else. Just the evidence that you lied for your sister.”

“Where is she?”

“They’re holding her here, too.”

“What has she told them?”

We were treading dangerously close to the territory Strohman warned me to stay away from. “She hasn’t said anything yet,” I told him anyway. Fuck Paul Strohman, I thought.

“And she won’t,” Dentman said. Astoundingly, I thought I saw the stirrings of a smile. It never materialized, however, and I was somewhat grateful for that, for I feared that smile would have haunted my dreams for decades.

“Tell me what you know,” I said again, leaning closer to the bars of his cell.

He said nothing for a long time. As he rubbed his face, I once again expected to see his eyes grow muddy with tears, but that didn’t happen. When he looked at me, I felt a twinge in my spine, as if he’d speared me with an iron lance. “Tell the chief I’m ready to talk to him,” Dentman said and turned away.

“Come with me,” said Adam.

I followed him down the hall to the same darkened viewing room McMullen had taken me to yesterday. This time, all the folding chairs facing the two-way mirror were occupied, and the room was warm and smelled strongly of bad breath. I clung to the wall beside Adam as the lights in the interrogation room fizzed on.

Through the intercom system, the sound of the door opening was like something from a 1930s radio show about haunted houses. Escorted by two uniformed policemen, David Dentman entered the interrogation room. His hands cuffed in front of him, his enormous size dwarfing the two officers at his sides, he was ushered over to the seat his sister had occupied yesterday.

Strohman came in next and shut the door behind him. He was wearing the same unbuttoned shirt and slacks from our previous meeting, only now he’d thrown a suit jacket over his shirt. He looked like someone recently roused from a fitful sleep. “Okay, David,” Strohman said, sitting in a chair at the opposite end of the table. He placed a large folder on the table in front of him as the two uniformed officers faded against the far wall.

I had been anticipating a certain formality to the interrogation, something direct and witty and straight out of an Elmore Leonard novel, but instead I found myself quickly disappointed with Strohman’s unceremonious approach.

Sleepy-eyed and looking terminally bored, Strohman sat half-slouched in his chair like someone at an AA meeting. Casually, he flipped open the folder and asked Dentman if he understood his rights.

“Yeah,” Dentman muttered. Even in low tones, his voice vibrated the intercom speakers.

Someone from the audience got up and adjusted a volume control knob on the wall.

“Are you ready to give your statement?” Strohman asked.

“Not yet.”

Strohman looked nonplussed. The expression was out of place on his face. “Oh yeah?”

“I want to make something clear first,” said Dentman.

“What’s that?”

“My sister. She isn’t well. She hasn’t been well in a long time. I think you already know that”—his gaze shifted almost imperceptibly toward the two-way mirror, as if he knew we were all behind it, watching him—”but I want it stated for the record anyway.”

“Okay.”

“I love my sister. Now that Elijah’s dead, she’s all the family I got.”

“Understood. Are you ready now?”

Dentman nodded.

Strohman patted his shirt pockets. An arm emerged from the shadows as one of the officers handed him a pen. “Tell us what happened the day your nephew disappeared,” Strohman said.

“I was at work all day. I’m not exactly sure what time I got home, but the sun was starting to go down. I remember that. Veronica was home alone with the boy, just like she was every other day. She was a good mother. She tried to be, even when she was having one of her moments.”

“What do you mean? What moments?”

“Sometimes she draws a blank. Sometimes she just stares and doesn’t answer, and some part of her mind retreats far back inside her, I think. It’s important you understand that part, too.”