He straightens a stack of eggshell-white gallon cans. “To cut to the chase: Steevers thought we were a bunch of freaks. Before we knew it, Al was transferred to ladders, Passionara to aluminum, Danielle to power tools, Yossef and Ahmed to lumber, and yours truly in Mr. Asshole’s face saying, Take this paint and shove it. Not really, but I wanted to. Hey, I mean no disrespect; once a cop, always a cop.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Ronald was a cop before he came to Home Depot. You didn’t know that?”
It is a question whose answer I am supposed to pretend to know. I prefer honest ignorance.
“No, I didn’t. What do you mean, ‘once a cop’?”
“Look, it’s a question of authority, isn’t it? Ronald was the boss. Okay, we all got it, but we’re not the Marine Corps—we’re selling paint; we all work together to make the customer happy. Ronald saw it as we all work together to make him happy. He used to say that about his wife. It was her job to make him happy. He talked about her dedication, how she had her duties, how she went out of her way to please him. She knew her place, and he used the s word.”
I was thinking suck.
“Serve.”
“No.” I’m shocked.
“It was clear he expected all of us to do the same, especially the women in the department. He never came out and said those words—hello, HR—but he conveyed it, and we got it. We decided the best policy was to just keep our distance. You learned not to argue with Ronald. You know, once a cop . . .”
Chapter 5
At headquarters, Mr. McDermott is waiting for me outside my cubicle. I show him the photograph of the people at the crime scene in Lefrak City. He adjusts his glasses, studies the picture until he picks himself out of the crowd.
“You probably want to know what I’m doing there.”
“Yes, I do.”
“I live across the street. I was coming home and saw the commotion. I stopped to look.”
“Anything else?”
“No.”
“Do you have travel plans?”
“No.”
I ask Mr. McDermott if he would mind giving us his fingerprints and a swab of DNA, and telling me where he was on the night of the murder. He is so eager to help and find out if he did kill Ms. Hwang that he offers to throw in a sperm sample. A week later, I give him the bad news; all the tests indicate he’s not the killer. His alibi of dining at Orso in Manhattan followed by a performance of The Book of Mormon also checked out.
“Frankly, I’m glad I didn’t kill Ms. Hwang, but it does look like something I could have done.”
“Mr. McDermott, you will need more evidence in hand if you want to confess to murder. Anyway, I’m very busy looking for a missing cat.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Sometimes it is better to sound crazy when talking to the crazy. It puts us on a level playing field. McDermott promises not to bother me unless he has better evidence with which to incriminate himself. He leaves. Something he could have done? The hell with Lieutenant Hagen, I’m staying with McDermott.
Finding out where Ronald worked in law enforcement involved a phone call to Home Depot human resources asking them to send a fax of his employment application. Answer: Farmingdale, New York. It is an interesting question as to why his parents didn’t mention that Ronald did a four-year stint with the Farmingdale police force. Finding out why he wasn’t working there anymore presented problems. Four years in, Ronald had to have been making more than he could at Home Depot. It didn’t make sense as a career move, so it was a good bet that the Farmingdale Police Department asked Ronald to leave. There was nothing in Ronald’s personnel file that explained why he’d left; it was just noted on his work history, along with graduation from Flushing High School, one semester at Queens Community College (you were correct, Brian Robbins of Sunny Gardens Apartments), then four years in the Farmingdale Police, two years at Home Depot in Scarsdale, a town next to New Rochelle, then a transfer to Home Depot in Long Island City, where he was put in charge of the paint department and made Owen Kunkle’s life miserable. I knew the Farmingdale Police Department would be reluctant to release personnel files. Getting dirt on a cop these days is tricky. On the other hand, I might get lucky. Ronald may have made an enemy who hated him enough to tell me. I ask around the station, but no one knows anybody at Farmingdale, so it will be a cold call. On my way back, I can drop in on Ronald’s parents.
Farmingdale’s station house is suburban, freshly painted. Inside, at the desk, I show my badge to a bored clerk who sighs on every third exhale. I tell him I am on a missing persons assignment regarding a former police officer, Ronald Steevers. He doesn’t react to the name, makes a call upstairs, repeats what I told him. He listens, then gestures to a volunteer cadet, a high school boy in an ill-fitting uniform playing Fortnite on his phone. The cadet springs to attention, suppressing the urge to salute. He reminds me of my brother, Sammy.
“Take her up to Sergeant Dickens,” the clerk says.
I follow the cadet up the stairs, into an interrogation room. Metal desk, two chairs facing each other, one bolted to the floor. The cadet tells me someone will be with me in a minute and closes the door behind him. Like waiting for a doctor in an examining room, it’s an excellent time to check emails, send texts, and steal bandages and Q-tips. In this interrogation room, there is nothing to steal or read. I take out my phone and pass the time with Jane Gardam’s Old Filth, my novel of the moment, a memory of a life in Colonial Hong Kong. It is far away and exotic enough to disconnect me from any of my memories. I’ve managed two pages when Sergeant Dickens enters. She’s a big redhead in her forties, taller than me when I stand, which makes her almost six feet. I get a firm handshake, a wide smile.
“I’m sorry we have to talk here. I’ll take the perp chair.”
This is generous of her. She slips into the chair bolted to the floor. “At least we can smoke.”
I know this. An interrogator can get a lot of information from a suspect with the offer of a cigarette, or by withholding one. She offers me one. I accept; it is the polite thing to do.
“I try to quit, but every time I do, I gain ten pounds,” she says as she lights me up.
I pass her my ID. Sergeant Dickens glances at it, shakes her head.
“You said Ronald Steevers. What did that asshole do now?”
This is turning out to be better than I expected.
“He’s missing. As in didn’t show up for his parents’ Sunday dinner or for work. I’m mostly interested because his wife isn’t around, either. Three scenarios: he killed her, she killed him, or they won the lottery and went to Miami.”
Sergeant Dickens takes a long drag on her cigarette.
“I really can’t tell you anything except good riddance. To Ronald, I mean.”
She shrugs.
“One last thing,” I say.
“Sure.”
“How’s your retirement package?”
“Terrific. If Ronald hadn’t been fired for beating up his wife, he might have been around to collect it.”
Chapter 6
A phone call comes out of the blue from Ernie Saldana in Maui, and it brings back memories of blue skies, ocean, and towels from the Kapalua Beach Motel where we spent family Christmas vacations. There is the first memory of my brother and me getting out of the rental car, staring in horror at the one-story wooden 1950s U-shaped building peeking out from tumbling red bougainvillea. We begged our parents to leave this icky resort and take us to a shining white hotel on Kapalua Beach—one with waterslides, shopping malls, movie theaters, and beach towels. As we walked to the front office on an AstroTurf path lined with drooping birds of paradise and blue ginger plants, my father said, “We chose this motel because it’s inexpensive.”