Floating Staircase

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

A slight and indistinct form crept beside me without making a sound. Weightless, it climbed onto my chest. Hot breath fell across my forehead. I felt its tongue lap up the tears that were searing hot ruts down the sides of my face.

—Kyle, I said.

No answer.

When I finally came to, the sun was just beginning to crest through the cemetery trees. It hit my eyes in that perfect way only the sun knows how to do, and I winced and turned my head, suddenly unsure of my surroundings. Sunlight caused the trees to bleed and the snow-covered hills to radiate like a thousand Octobers. I could make out a distant church, its spire like the twist of a conch shell against the pale sky.

Struggling to sit up, a nauseating wave of dizziness filtered into my brain. I tried to bring my right arm up but couldn’t—I was still handcuffed to the fence. Tenderly, I touched the side of my head with my free hand. Winced again. The bump there felt like a softball pushing its way through the side of my skull.

The events of last night rushed back to me in a suffocating whirlwind. I glanced at my left hand and found it was sticky with blood. A sizeable gash bisected my palm. Somehow, in the jumble of events, I’d sliced it open pretty nicely. The fingertips were blue.

Then I realized how badly I was shaking. I couldn’t calm myself, couldn’t get warm, and figured I must have been out here lying in the snow for at least five or six hours.

My head was woozy, and I probably had a slight concussion. The blood from my injured hand had dried in the night, running in bright red parade streamers from my wrist down the length of my arm to the crease of my elbow and into the snow. I looked like I’d just gutted a pig.

“Fuck . . .”

The sound of my own voice sent shards of broken glass into the soft gray matter of my brain.

Voices: I heard voices then, coming from afar. I caught movement through the trees and watched three people advancing toward me. As they drew nearer, I realized two of them were police officers in uniform. The third person I assumed to be the cemetery groundskeeper.

The three men paused a few feet in front of me. I spied my notebook in the snow next to one of their shiny black shoes.

“Hey,” said the taller officer. “What the hell happened to you?”

“I’m fucking freezing,” I chattered.

The groundskeeper pointed in my direction. He was a fat little shrew with atrocious teeth, a character in a Dickens novel. “See that? See his hand? I said he was chained up, didn’t I?”

“My n-n-name’s T-T-Trav—”

“I know who you are.” The taller cop, it turned out, was Douglas Cordova, my brother’s partner whom I’d met at the Christmas party. In his unblemished uniform and with his square jaw and jade-green eyes, he could have marched straight out of a recruiting poster. To the other officer, Cordova said, “Unhook him.”

The second officer dropped to one knee in the snow while fumbling around on his belt for his handcuff key. Less intimidating than Cordova, this guy had a slack, sleepy-dog face, and his chin was minimal and abbreviated, giving his profile an overall unfinished look. His nameplate said Freers.

“You need an ambulance or anything?” Freers said too close to my face. His breath smelled of onions.

“No.”

“You’re bleeding, you know.”

I glanced at my lacerated palm.

“I meant your face,” said Freers, standing.

On shaky knees, I climbed to my feet and steadied myself against the large oak tree. My jeans cracked audibly, frozen stiff to my legs. Had I not been wearing my coat, I surely wouldn’t have made it through the night.

“Who did this to you?” Cordova said. He had one hand on the groundskeeper’s shoulder, and they looked like mismatched football players about to form a huddle to discuss the next play.

“David D-D-Dentman,” I said.

Cordova did not alter his expression. “Okay,” he said, turning to his partner, “let’s get him in the car before he turns into a Popsicle.”

Freers took me by the forearm and led me around the tombstones.

“Wait.” I paused to pick up my notebook from the ground. Glancing around, I tried to see if I could spot any of Earl’s crime scene photos, but they were gone.

“That there’s littering,” barked the groundskeeper. Pointing at the notebook in my hand, he said, “There’s a fine to pay for littering.”

“No one’s littering,” Cordova assured him, his hand still on the smaller man’s shoulder.

“There’s a fine,” he repeated, though his tone was much less stern.

“Come on,” Cordova said, saddling up beside me and placing a couple of fingers at the base of my spine.

“I think I can manage, thanks,” I said.

“This is trespassing, too,” said the groundskeeper as we trailed out of the cemetery and down the gravel drive toward the road. The police car sat there waiting. “Trespassing!”

“Don’t mind him,” Cordova said close to my ear.

“Watch the skull bone,” murmured Freers as he unlocked the back door of the cruiser and helped me inside. Across the roof of the car he called out to Cordova, “Pump the heat up for this guy, will ya?”

Doors slammed. Cordova negotiated his big bulk behind the steering wheel while Freers reclined in the passenger seat. Cordova cranked the heat, and despite my frozen state, I began to sweat into my shoes.

“You okay back there, Travis?” Cordova asked.

“Feel the heat?”

Not trusting my lips to form words, I simply nodded repeatedly at his reflection in the rearview mirror.

My head pounding like a calypso drum, I watched the landscape of Westlake shuttle by the windows. The string of shops, the collection of little whitewashed two-story homes, the parade of vehicles filing through the streets. We went by Waterview Court.

“You missed my street,” I said through the holes in the Plexiglas partition.

“We’re not taking you home,” said Cordova.

“Where are we going?”

Freers leaned over to Cordova, peering at me from the corner of one eye. “Maybe we should take him to the hospital first. He’s shaking like a tambourine.”

“We can take him after,” Cordova said.

“I asked where you were taking me.”

Cordova’s eyes blazed in the rearview mirror. “Down to the station. Strohman wants to talk to you.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Should you be?” said Freers, turning around and grinning at me like an imbecile.

Decidedly, I did not like Officer Freers.

Paul Strohman’s office was a square cell of cinder blocks painted the color of bad beer. There were no photographs or awards on the walls, and aside from an oversized coffee mug and a telephone, the top of Strohman’s slouching wooden desk was bare as well. A single inlaid window, roughly the dimensions of a collegiate dictionary, was seated in the wall above the desk, the pane reinforced with wire. Had it not been for the stenciling on the pebbled glass of the office door—Paul J. Strohman, Chief—I would have thought this was one of the interrogation rooms.

Strohman was handsomer in person. Tall and solid, with good hair and well-defined features, the chief of police exuded an indistinct celebrity quality. He wore a white dress shirt with no tie, the sleeves cuffed nearly to his elbows, and charcoal slacks with pleats. He was leaning back in a rickety wooden chair, the telephone to one ear, when Cordova nudged me through the door.

Beforehand, Cordova had suggested I wash up in the men’s room at the end of the hall. He handed me a grubby-looking towel and a sliver of soap flecked with pebbly granules, which told me it needed a good washing of its own. As I washed the dried blood from my palm and my arm, along with the streamer of red ribbon that had trailed from my left nostril and down over my lips and chin, I heard Cordova and Freers murmuring in the hallway outside the door. Their communication was brusque. I made out only bits and pieces, though I was certain I heard Adam’s name mentioned. Leaning closer to the streaked and spotted mirror, I daubed at the shiny new bruise on the edge of my forehead.

Now, as Strohman’s door closed behind me, I wasn’t necessarily a new man, though at least I felt less like some vagrant who’d been picked up for loitering.

“Okay,” Strohman said into the receiver. He motioned toward the only other chair in the office, which faced his desk. “Thanks, Rich . . . Yeah, no problem. Sure . . . Say hello to Maureen for me . . . Right. You, too.”

I sat in the chair as Strohman hung up the phone. Still clutching the notebook to my chest, both my feet placed firmly on the floor, I had a sudden flashback of my interrogation with Detective Wren twenty years ago—how I’d sat shivering on a bench along the river, a towel draped over my scrawny shoulders as I sobbed and explained as best I was able what had happened. Summer crickets popped in the tall grass like popcorn, and clouds of gnats covered my ears. Detective Wren had leaned in close to me, put a hand on my shoulder, and talked very low and very lethargic. I could tell that it was difficult for him to speak quietly, even with ample training in the art, so I was sure it was a taxing exercise for him.

“Travis,” said Strohman, “I’m Paul. I’m the chief down here. I work with your brother.”

“I know who you are.”

He seemed unfazed. “Nice shiner you got there.”

“You should see the other guy.”

“Right.” I felt him take in not only the discolored bit of fruit swelling from my forehead but also the mud-streaked condition of my clothes, the knotted tangles of my hair. Scooping up the telephone, he punched three digits on the keypad. “Hey, Mae, bring us some coffee in here, will ya? Thanks.” Then he hung up. “Looks like you could use some.”

“Why’d you want me brought here? How do you know who I am?”

“Because I spent yesterday morning talking David Dentman out of filing harassment charges against you,” Strohman said evenly.

My laugh sounded like the caw of some strange bird. “You’ve got to be kidding. Me?” Although it hurt to do so, I tapped the shiny knob at my forehead with two fingers. “He hit me so hard I think he left his DNA in my skull.”

Still leaning back in his chair, Strohman looked infernally bored. “He came in all fire and brimstone, saying you went to his house in West Cumberland and taunted his sister with her dead son’s things. Said you wrote her some horrible story in a notebook making them out to be a couple of loons.”

He didn’t ask me if it was true or not, but I felt the need to refute it nonetheless. “This has all been a series of misunderstandings. I wasn’t tormenting that woman. My wife and I moved into their house, and they’d left some stuff behind. I was just taking it back to them.”

Strohman sighed and fingered the dark cleft in his chin. “I really don’t care.”

“Then why am I here?”

“Because I like your brother,” Strohman said. “He’s a good man. I’m trying not to embarrass his family.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You’re causing quite a stir around town. Allegations of murder and police cover-ups—”

“I never said anything about police cover-ups.”

“Whatever.” He prodded the air absently with an index finger to signal just how banal he found this whole conversation. “Westlake’s a small family community. It’s my job to make sure everyone stays happy. You’ve been asking a lot of questions about stuff that doesn’t concern you, bothering people in the process. I figured I’d give you the opportunity to ask them directly to me.”

“I want to know why the investigation into Elijah Dentman’s supposed drowning was quashed.”

Strohman grinned. He was roguishly handsome. “You sound like Columbo.”

“Humor me. How come David Dentman was let off the hook so easily?”

“Why shouldn’t he be?”

“He’s got a criminal record, a history of violence. His statement on the record says he’d been watching Elijah from the house that afternoon, but your officers missed something. I missed it too at first.” I explained about the trees from the crime scene photographs, although I neglected to tell him from whom I’d gotten them. Probably in a town Westlake’s size, there was only one crime scene photographer, and Strohman didn’t need to ask.

“Where are these photos?”

I groaned inwardly. “Probably somewhere over Pennsylvania by now.” Strohman frowned.

“I had them with me at the cemetery. They blew away after Dentman punched me in the face, then handcuffed me to the fence.” Now it was my turn to frown. “How come you haven’t asked me what I was doing out there, anyway?”

“I already know.”

“How?”

“Dentman phoned it in this morning.”

“Son of a bitch. He admitted to it?”

“Phoned it in anonymously,” Strohman said. “From a pay phone in West Cumberland. But I know it was him.”

“Well, shit.”

“I’m going to share something with you.” Strohman got up from behind his desk and went to the door, opened it.

A round little woman with silver hair stood on the other side, two Styrofoam cups of coffee in her hands. I hadn’t even heard her knock. Strohman took the cups and thanked the woman, then closed the door with his shoe. After he handed me one of the cups, he sat in front of me on the edge of his desk. I heard the wood creak in protest.

“This is what you wanted to share with me?” I said, savoring the warmth radiating through the cup. “Coffee?”

Again, Strohman grinned. My mind summoned an image of a young Kirk Douglas. “In situations like the one that happened to the Dentmans, the families are always the prime suspects. We always address the parents first. In this case, I spoke personally with both the boy’s mother as well as his uncle. The mother”—he waved a hand to indicate her mental instability—“she was of limited capacity, let’s say. Of course,” he added, leering at me from over the rim of his cup, “you’ve met her, so you know.”

He slurped his coffee. “I questioned David Dentman extensively. His story never changed.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s innocent.”

“We had no body and no evidence that a homicide had taken place. What I’m saying is there was no probable cause to even make an arrest.”

A glimmer of hope ignited within me. I leaned forward in the chair. “So you believe he killed the boy?”

Strohman set his coffee on his desk, then folded his hands in his lap. “I did seven years in Los Angeles as a uniformed officer and another two in homicide. I love this little town—it’s pretty and peaceful, and I got a wife and a litter of youngsters who’re much better off here than back in L.A.—but I’m aware of its shortcomings. I’ve been here four years, and we’ve only worked two wrongful death cases in all that time. And only one of those was an honest to God homicide. A squabble down at the ‘Bird, fists flying, some guy pulls a knife. That’s hot news around here. Most of my officers have never seen blood let alone worked a homicide investigation.”

That tabloid celebrity smile returned. He had perfect teeth. “But I’ve worked some pretty gruesome cases. I could tell you stuff that would make you spend the rest of your nights sitting up in bed, listening for every little creak in your house. When it comes to doing those sorts of things, well, that’s my bread and butter. And just because I moved my family out here for a better life doesn’t mean I’ve surrendered all my training and instincts. You don’t leave those things at the airport security checkpoint, so to speak. You catch me?”

“What about the fact that the kid’s body was never found?”

“My guess is it’ll show up sometime in the spring when the lake thaws. Point I’m trying to make is I’m not sitting around here with my thumb up my ass. I know how to run an investigation. I don’t need you sniffing around in my shit. Comprende?”

Rising off the desk, Strohman returned to his seat. The chair’s casters squealed. “So tell me what I have to do to put your mind at ease.”

“Aside from reopening the investigation, I assume?”

“This is a good town. The people are better served forgetting about an accidental drowning than to be the center of a homicide investigation that would never go anywhere.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“I’m patient with you because your brother’s a good cop and a good man. Anyone else and I would have let Dentman file those charges. Think about that.” He checked his wristwatch. “Officer Cordova will drive you home now.”