Floating Staircase(76)

“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.”