Floating Staircase (36 page)

“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Slump-shouldered and withdrawn, David Dentman looked like an overgrown child in the single holding cell.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.”

“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.”

“Okay.”

“I asked her what happened and she said, ‘He disappeared.' Just over and over again, that's all she would say. ‘He disappeared; he disappeared.' I mean, I knew she was talking about Elijah—there was no one else in the house—so I started going around the house calling the boy's name. He didn't answer, but that wasn't unusual for Elijah—he was special, like his mom—so I did a real thorough search of the whole house before I again started asking Veronica what had happened.

“But she just kept saying the same thing—that he disappeared. Finally, I sat her down at the kitchen table and told her calmly to tell me what happened. She said Elijah was swimming in the lake that afternoon. She was out in the garden, keeping an eye on him. The boy liked to swim, but it was important to watch him. She said he started to climb on that staircase thingy in the water there, and she yelled at him to come down off it. It was dangerous for a boy like Elijah to be climbing it.”

Again, Strohman's eyebrow arched. “A boy like Elijah?”

“He was special, just like I said,” Dentman reiterated, a bit of irritation in his voice. “He wasn't like other kids.”

“All right. Keep going.”

“She said at one point she saw him standing at the topmost part of the staircase. She got scared and shouted to him. That was when he fell.”

“The blood on the step,” mumbled someone in the back row of the viewing room.

Strohman leaned back in his chair and whapped the pen against his chin. He seemed content to sit in the increasing silence without prompting Dentman to continue.

“Veronica said he hit his head hard on one of the stairs,” Dentman went on eventually, “and then fell backward into the water. She ran down to him and out into the lake. That's how her clothes got messy, with the mud and water and all. Anyway, my sister's pretty small, but she somehow managed to pull Elijah onto land. She said she carried him all the way to the house while he bled from one whole side of his head. She was afraid to look at the wound because it was bleeding so much. That's how she, you know, how the blood got on her dress.”

“Then what happened after Veronica got Elijah to the house?”

“She brought him inside. He started to moan and his eyelids fluttered. She said she laid him on the floor against the wall at the foot of the stairs and ran into the kitchen. She wanted to get something to clean up the blood, to stop the bleeding.”

“Why didn't she call an ambulance?”

“Because Veronica doesn't think that way. All her life she's only looked toward one person to make things better.”

“That person was you,” Strohman said. He wasn't asking it, was simply stating it as fact.

“You'd understand if you grew up in our house.”

“Because your father had been mean. Abusive.” He said it in such an offhandeded way, I thought Dentman was going to spring out of his chair and throttle him, handcuffs and all.

“He'd been something, all right,” Dentman said from the corner of his mouth. He shifted in his seat, and his gaze once again ran the length of the two-way mirror.

I felt a chill ripple through my body.

“Okay,” Strohman said, glancing at his notebook. That pen was still tap-tap-tapping away, this time on the corner of the table. It was a wonder he hadn't driven the entire viewing room mad. “So she didn't call an ambulance. Then what? Is that when you came home?”

“No. She said she went around looking for bandages and antiseptic. She finally found some under the kitchen sink.”

“Naturally,” said Strohman.

“When she came back to where she'd left Elijah, he was gone.”

Strohman's pen tapping ceased just long enough for him to jot down a few notes in his notebook. Then he looked at Dentman. “Gone?”

“He disappeared,” Dentman said.

No,
I thought, shivering against the wall while watching all this unfold on the other side of the glass like someone watching a stage play.
No, that's not right. People don't just disappear. Nature does not know extinction.

Exhaling with great exaggeration, Strohman said, “Disappeared.”

“She came back, and all that was left of him was a wet spot on the carpet. Lake water. And blood.”

“This is what she told you?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say she did next?”

The officer in the folding chair closest to me cursed as his cell phone began chirping with a tune that sounded incriminatingly like Britney Spears. Bolting from his chair and rushing out into the hallway, he caused enough of a ruckus for me to miss the beginning of what Dentman said.

“—his name and then started looking around the house. She said she thought he might have gone down to lie on the sofa, but when she looked, he wasn't there. So then she checked upstairs, the bedrooms and the bathroom, but he wasn't there, either.”

“He wasn't in his room?”

“Elijah's room was in the basement. He would have gone past the kitchen and down the hall to get there. If he'd done that, Veronica would have seen him.”

“But did she check the basement?”

“She looked there last. He wasn't there.”

Strohman checked his notes. “His bedroom was in the basement, you said?”

“It was a room my father built a long time ago. Elijah liked it. He could hide in it, and it was dark and quiet. Veronica hated that he liked it, but she couldn't get him to come out. Eventually we just moved his bed and the rest of his stuff down there.”

Strohman rubbed his forehead and looked like he was ready for a nap.

In the shadows toward the back of the interrogation room, the two uniformed policemen shifted soundlessly.

“Okay, David. So Veronica looks and she can't find him. What did she do next? Did she just sit down on the stairs and wait for you to come home? Because that's how you found her, correct?”

“No. I mean, yes, that's how I found her. But that's not . . . it didn't happen like that.”

“Tell me how it happened.”

“She said she couldn't remember it all. It went black for a while.”

Strohman asked him what that meant.

“One of her spells,” Dentman said. “She must have worked herself up real good and had one of her spells.”

“A blackout,” said Strohman. “Like, uh . . .” He snapped his fingers in rapid succession. “Like, hey, nobody's home. Right?”

Strohman's glibness about the whole situation stirred something inside David Dentman. Even from my vantage, I could see it simmering and kicking off white sparks just beneath the surface of his eyes.