Floating Staircase(90)

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.”

“They’re already gunning for insanity,” one of the officers in the viewer’s room commented.

There were a few assenting murmurs.

“All right,” Strohman told Dentman. “Go on.”

“When I came in the door, Veronica was sitting on the stairs, staring straight ahead at the wall. I thought she was, you know, having a spell again. I called her name a couple times, but she didn’t answer. So I went over to her and sort of lifted her up by the shoulders.” Dentman mimed the motion, awkward with his hands chained together. “That seemed to wake her out of it. She blinked and her eyes came back to normal again. That’s when I noticed she was covered in mud and that her housedress was wet.”

Strohman raised one eyebrow. “Wet?”

“Real wet. From top to bottom. There was water and mud on the step where she’d been sitting, too.” Lowering his voice, he added, “There was blood on her. That’s what scared me right away.”