Floating Staircase(85)

We sat and McMullen fumbled a small spiral notepad from the breast pocket of his shirt. He seemed to put too much thought in every question he asked me, which dealt primarily with how I’d gotten a hold of the time and attendance records from the construction company. I answered the questions as truthfully as possible, though I refused to give Earl Parsons’s name. McMullen did not seem interested in Earl’s name, however, and appeared mostly concerned with the rapidly dulling point of his pencil.

“You write books, don’t you?” was his final question.

“What’s that got to do with any of this?”

McMullen shrugged and looked bored. “Just what I heard is all. Never met a writer up close and in person before.” Examining his notes, he added, “Except for one time I went into Philadelphia to one of Pamela Anderson’s book signings. She’s amazing in person. You ever run into her at writing conventions or whatever it is you guys go to?”

I told him I had not.

“Yeah. Too bad. She’s hot shit in person. Really something. I mean, sometimes, you know, in person, well . . .” He seesawed one hand to illustrate his disappointment in meeting other celebrities in the past. “Huge f*ckin’ tits.”

“Are the Dentmans under arrest?”

“They’re being questioned.”

“But they’re not under arrest?”

“You ever see an interrogation?”

“No,” I said.

With a grin like the front grille of a tractor trailer, McMullen said, “Come with me.”

Winding through a maze of sawdust-colored corridors, we eventually stopped outside a closed metal door with a glass porthole of smoked glass in it. It looked like a door on a submarine. Humming what sounded like the theme song to The Muppet Show, Officer McMullen punched a code into the cipher lock, then opened the door. Without offering any direction, he stood there with the door partially open and examining his cuticles until I stepped inside. McMullen followed me in, shutting the door and continuing to hum.

We were the only two people in a room as small and as lightless as a photographer’s darkroom. Folding chairs sat facing a one-way mirror. On the other side of the glass, in a windowless room only slightly bigger than Strohman’s office, Veronica sat at the head of a gouged and splintering wooden table. I recognized the officer scribbling in a notebook at the other end of the table as Officer Freers.

“Go on,” McMullen said, nodding at the folding chairs. “Take a seat.”

“Can they hear us?”

“Naw,” McMullen said, sounding like he had chew in his lip.

Freers’s questions were of the baseline variety—Veronica’s full name, date of birth, social security number (which she didn’t know), address, telephone number (which she didn’t have), and current occupation (ditto phone number).

“Is there any way to listen in on David Dentman’s interrogation?” I asked McMullen after a while.

“He’s in the chief’s office,” McMullen said, which I assumed to mean no one was permitted to view anything that happened in the chief’s office.

Freers got up and left the interrogation room, returning less than a minute later with a Dixie cup of water. He set the cup in front of Veronica. Turning her head toward the cup, her scraggly hair hung down in her face, some clumps of which dipped into the cup like tea bags.

The cipher lock popped and the metal door eased open, cracking the darkness of the viewing room with a sliver of fluorescent light from the hallway. Two or three bodies shambled inside, breathing heavily. The room suddenly smelled of bad breath and day-old perspiration. Two big shapes scuttled like crabs in the seats behind me while the third remained standing beside McMullen. The two behind me muttered in tones just above a whisper. I thought I heard one of them blow a fart against the metal seat of the folding chair.

“We’re gonna ask you about the day your son drowned,” Freers said to Veronica.

Veronica said nothing.

“Anything you want to start with?” Freers asked.

Veronica said nothing.

“We’re gonna need a statement from—”

“I was asleep,” she said automatically. Her voice was very quiet through the speakers mounted at either side of the two-way mirror.

“Can we begin with the last thing you remember about that day? Before you went to sleep?” Freers tried.

“I had a headache,” she said. “I was asleep.”

“Fuckin’ creepy,” said one of the shapes behind me. “Like she’s a robot or something.”

“Possessed,” suggested his partner. “Like that movie about the devil takin’ over the girl.”

“The Exorcist?”

“I meant that new one.”

“Been brainwashed is what I think.”

Leaning forward in my seat, I attempted to drown out their voices with my own concentration. Behind the glass, Freers was attempting with zero results to approach his questioning from a different angle.

The third officer who stood over with McMullen made his way to the two-way. He stood close enough to leave breath-blossoms on the glass. “Come on, Freers,” he mumbled under his breath. “Give it up already.”

One of the baboons behind me started humming the theme to the Twilight Zone.

As if he’d received messages through the glass from osmosis, Freers eventually set down his pen. He sighed and leaned back in his chair; a series of dry cracks that could have been the chair or his back channeled over the intercom. Freers said one last thing to Veronica, the details of which were muffled by his fat thumb rubbing his lower lip. Then he stood, grabbed his pen and notebook, and left the room.