Suburban Dicks

by Fabian Nicieza

  “Mrs. Simpson, thank you for letting us use your offices,” Andrea said.

  Janelle smiled.

  Clueless doormat, Kenny thought.

  “As long as the Princeton Post gets the exclusive,” she said as she waggled her fingers and returned to her office.

  Andrea waited as Kenny kept his back to her and absently tapped his fingers on his closed laptop.

  “Taylor Swift?” she asked.

  “Fuck you,” he said. “I’m sorry, that was rude. You are with child.”

  He paused and she knew it was coming.

  “Fuck you and your baby,” he said.

  She smiled. “I never said we were on the same team, Ken, I just said we needed to work together. We have different priorities.”

  “No, we don’t,” he said. “We want these bastards caught.”

  “But you want it for you and I want it for them,” she said. “For Cleon and Dolores and for Satku and for the Sasmals.”

  That’s all she said, all she had to say. She waddled her fat ass out the door. He watched her leave, wondering why he had ever loved her more than the stars and the skies and Jessica Alba and, for some odd reason that confused him to this day, George Stephanopoulos.

  42

  ANDREA returned home to find her house empty. No note, nothing. She called Jeff. He answered and said he had taken the kids to Five Guys. “Can you bring me something back?” she asked.

  “Sorry, too late,” he replied. “We’re on our way home now.”

  It was amazing how so many words between them could translate to “Fuck you.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  She looked around for what she could eat and decided a half gallon of Edy’s chocolate chip ice cream sounded nutritious enough. She took three spoonfuls before her self-loathing won out. Out of respect for her unhappiness, she took a fourth and put the ice cream away. She reheated some leftover chicken and brussels sprouts.

  They came through the door as she was finishing up. The kids ran up to greet her. Sarah and Sadie excitedly told her about the huuuuuuge amount of french fries they got at Five Guys. She asked if the kids could go downstairs to the playroom and let Mommy and Daddy talk.

  Ruth eyed them. “Talk” was code for “argue.”

  After a moment, Jeff sat down at the kitchen table. He looked tired, physically and emotionally. “This has been really fucked up, Andie,” he said.

  “For you, yes,” she said. “Like the last few years have been for me.”

  “Yeah,” he said in a soft whisper. “So, I expect to hear something I won’t like?”

  She told him what would be happening on Monday and what that meant for them. She told him the detective who would become acting chief of the department wanted her at his side when he spoke to the mayor. She told him that Ramon wanted her alongside his agents as the FBI executed the warrants to seize township documents in the morning. And then she quickly added that she thought it would be best if the kids slept over at friends’ houses tomorrow night and probably on Monday night as well. And that the two of them should probably check into a hotel.

  “All just as a precaution,” she finished with a meek smile.

  Jeff was furious and scared. He went into the garage and grabbed the first weapon he could find, which happened to be a tennis racket. He went around the house with it, poised to repel an attack with a killer backhand. When he felt assured the house was assassin-free, he put the racket down.

  While he’d been performing his search, she’d made herself a cup of tea. She looked out the back window across the pond. How easily could someone be perched at the gun club across the pond with a rifle, a target scope, and a desire to silence her?

  It wouldn’t make a difference if she were killed now, she thought. The body had been identified, the conspirators had been identified, and they had as much as confessed on tape, which Jennifer Guilfoyle’s testimony corroborated. The only person who might still benefit from eliminating her from the investigation was the one who had actually pulled the trigger to kill Satkunananthan Sasmal.

  She sipped her tea. “It wouldn’t make a difference if I were killed now,” she repeated out loud for some reason.

  Jeff said, “I’m going to set the alarm on the house.”

  “I thought the tennis racket would be enough,” she replied.

  He didn’t laugh.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  JEFF HAD FALLEN into a deep slumber with the Mets game still on. Andrea glanced at the clock. She went into the walk-in closet and removed the untraceable gun she’d hidden in a shoebox. It was a silly notion to think they would attack her in her own home, but having it within arm’s reach made her feel safer.

  She was pure adrenaline coursing through a gelatinous mass of flab. A part of her was almost angry that nearly everything had unraveled the way she’d expected from the moment she’d heard about the pool permit rejections. It was absurd how her mind worked, and how her least charitable thoughts about humankind had been proven right once again.

  Grabbing her phone from the nightstand, she went into the bathroom. She closed the door and sat on the toilet lid. It groaned under her weight.

  Andrea closed her eyes and visualized the crime scene again. Blood spiraled in a swirl as Satku’s body twisted and fell to the ground. A clean, perfect shot. By someone who also knew enough to spray random gunfire around the station afterward to try and make it look undisciplined.

  The killer knew how to shoot.

  A police officer.

  Or a member in good standing at the Patriots Rifle Range?

  Bradley Dobeck. Bennett Dobeck. Her two main suspects still remained nothing more than suspects.

  43

  KENNY looked at his dashboard clock: 10:05 p.m. Five minutes had elapsed since the last time he’d looked. Perhaps, he thought too late, he should have gotten coffee before his stakeout. Maybe he should have remembered his phone charger, too.

  He had decided that if he was going to be aced out of the story by Andrea, the Incredible Hunk, and the extras from Law & Order: Season 46, then he’d insinuate himself into the story in another way. If the conspirators, police, or administrative personnel were going to cover their tracks, it would be this weekend, when the municipal complex would be empty. So, Kenny decided to make it less empty by one sexy gray Prius.

  He had spent this private time thinking about what an idiot he was. By one a.m., the litany of stupidity had not even reached sophomore year in high school when Kenny saw a car pull into the lot. The car headed toward the rear of the police station, where employees parked.

  He started his car and drove it the hundred yards to the back lot. His headlights washed over the surprised Benjamin Dobeck, who wore khaki shorts, sandals, and a white tank top. His key chain jangled loosely from his hand. He instinctively reached for his hip as if to draw a weapon, but a gun belt would have clashed with his casual summertime ensemble.

  Kenny got out of the car. “Don’t go in there,” he said.

  “What?” asked Benjy. “What are you doing here?”

  “Stopping you from making a huge mistake,” he replied.

  “I left my gym bag in my locker,” Benjy said. “I came to get it so I can work out in the morning.”

  “Benjy, if you go in there now, I have to report it,” he said. “Then you’re automatically a part of a conspiracy that currently has zero evidence implicating you.”

  Benjamin let that sink in.

  “Your dad’s in the shit, your grandfather’s in the shit. But we have nothing on you, man. You go in there, the FBI starts questioning you.”

  Benjamin said nothing.

  “Zero. Evidence,” Kenny repeated for the obvious-impaired.

  Benjamin shuffled his feet, and the toes of his sandals seemed to brush imaginary sand. Kenny knew that a part of Be
njamin had to secretly be hoping for the conviction of his father and grandfather.

  Finally, he waved a dismissive hand toward Ken and said, “Forget it.”

  Benjamin walked back to his car without another word. After he’d left, Kenny returned to the spot he’d been parked in so he could keep an eye on the municipal offices. He thought about the Dobeck family. They’d always been a part of his life, a part of the fabric of the town. They’d served as a reminder that the townies were here first. A burr in the side to remind you that no matter how much change had been accepted within the town, there would always be resentment. He had gone to school with Benjamin. If not for this pesky investigation and the improbability of either one of them ever impregnating a woman, odds were that ten years from now, Kenny’s kid and Benjy’s kid would hate each other in school, too.

  But they’d probably hate the Indian kids more. And all of them would team up against the Latinos. And all the while they’d be saying how wrong it was to think that way and pretend they weren’t thinking that way themselves.

  He cracked open his laptop and started writing down his thoughts.

  Fifty years ago, it was a bunch of farmers angry at the thought of a black teenager and a white teenager being in love. Now most people would shrug their shoulders at that. Time changed our prejudices, but it didn’t change the fact that we were prejudiced.

  At least Kenneth Lee knew that the one thing he could say for himself was that he was self-aware. He had grown up apart from both the Asian community and the American community. To the mostly immigrant Asians, his family was American. To the average white-bread American, he was Asian. Kenny had always been comfortable in the knowledge that his true identification was as an Asshole American.

  And he knew he had opened the town up to months of turmoil and uncertainty. He had set in motion something that would generate deep fissures and resentment in their community, but like most things in suburban America, it would crawl back into the comfortable cobwebs of the soul. It would lie dormant, as it usually did, until something else cropped up and gave it a chance to crawl out and see the sun again for a few minutes.

  Belligerent ignorance for the comfortably ignorant.

  Kenny loved New Jersey.

  He looked at his dashboard clock. It was 1:20 a.m.

  He realized his laptop battery was at 4 percent.

  It was going to be a long fucking night.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  HE STAYED AWAKE through sunrise.

  The parking lot was still empty at 6:05 a.m.

  He really had to pee.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  ANDREA REALLY HAD to pee, but Jeff was in the shower. She should have been helping the kids get ready for their day at the beach, but she was too busy being mad at herself for having had a bad night’s sleep. She was frustrated that they needed to leave their home to feel safe. Angry that she needed Ramon and Garmin and Rossi to sweat the conspirators. She should have solved Satku’s murder by now. She couldn’t abide the thought of someone outwitting her.

  That dated back to her childhood training. Everyone was a mark and anyone who wasn’t a mark was a negative reflection on you. The con man saw everything as a game of wits, and the best grifters were superior in their analytical thinking, their visualization of detail, and their ability to strategize across time and space. Once out of Queens, realizing that the suburban rubes were no challenge for her—and therefore no fun—Andrea had applied all her childhood training toward problem-solving. Ultimately, apprehending Satku’s murderer and breaking the conspiracy was a puzzle to solve.

  An opportunity to prove she was smarter than the marks.

  Jeff emerged from the shower, drying himself off. He looked a bit like a sausage, tall, narrow, and encased in skin the color of an intestine. He used to run, but when his financial troubles went down, he’d lost both the time and the passion to maintain his training. Over the past few years, the pounds he’d added had wrapped around his hips like a child’s inflatable swimmy. She hadn’t seen him naked much in recent months, and she realized now she had little interest in seeing him naked again for the rest of her life.

  “You better put on sunscreen,” she said.

  “I’m a little white, huh?” he replied.

  “SPF three thousand.”

  He said, “I don’t like the reason why we’re doing this, but it’s nice for all of us to go to the beach together.”

  She didn’t know whether to take his comment as a jibe or an attempt at positivity. He left to get the kids ready as she went to shower. She reveled in the privacy. But into that space crept the dark thoughts.

  She would have the baby in less than two months. She would do all the things she was expected to do. Nurse the child repeatedly throughout the day until her saucer-sized nipples were chafed and sore. Make a thousand visits to the pediatrician. Get little to no sleep for a year, at which point the toddler activities would begin. Little Gym classes and swimming lessons and all the other useless things they all signed their kids up for. Sadie would start preschool and Sarah would start kindergarten and she’d have to run around for their schedules and then juggle all three of them in the afternoon. Elijah would start third grade and Ruth would start fifth and they’d have after-school activities and late buses and soccer and basketball and volleyball and lacrosse and soccer again.

  Andrea let the hot water pound her. Was it wrong for her to wish that there would be another murder real soon?

  She toweled off and stared at herself in the mirror. Her breasts were practically touching her belly button. She started laughing. She laughed so hard her instinct was to double over in a spasm, but the size of her stomach wouldn’t allow her to.

  Which just made her laugh more.

  She was glad to laugh, since it prevented her from crying.

  44

  ON Monday morning, Andrea drove Jeff to the train station. After their day at the shore on Sunday, they had brought the kids to various houses and then had checked into the Marriott Residence Inn on Route 1 for the night. Against his protests, she demanded he go to work and treat it like a normal day. The kids were taken care of and she’d be busy with the search warrants, so there was little he could do except worry.

  Ramon texted with an ETA of nine thirty.

  She was in the hotel lobby waiting for them at nine fifteen. Surprisingly, she did not feel nervous. She felt like this was the place she should be. Not necessarily physically in a lobby of a Marriott Residence Inn, but metaphorically.

  Six navy blue Ford SUVs marked with the FBI logo in gold on their doors pulled into the hotel lot from Route 1 South. There were three agents in each vehicle, eighteen total to execute the seizure. She didn’t feel much like lugging banker’s boxes in this heat anyway, so she was glad Ramon had brought plenty of manpower. She had reserved a conference room in the hotel so they could finalize their plans and the agents would have a place to wait while Ramon took her to see Mayor Wu.

  One of the agents propped a steel-cased thirteen-inch iPad on the conference room table and pulled up a satellite image of the region. She deftly ran her fingers across the screen, zooming in on the Plainsboro municipal complex. The African American woman was younger than Andrea by a few years, and Andrea felt a pang of jealousy.

  She ran through the odd configuration of the municipal complex in Plainsboro, indicating points of entry or egress. A second agent, a Caucasian man, took the iPad and ran through the procedure for the West Windsor unit. Truthfully, Andrea thought it was all a bit much for a raid on two suburban municipal offices, but she didn’t say anything. At ten after ten, it was time for them to go. She joined Ramon in the backseat of the lead car. Her three-car group went south on Route 1 toward Alexander Road while the other three cars looped around the U-turn at Fisher Place to go north toward the Plainsboro Road exit, where the hospital was.
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  As they approached the municipal building, Ramon called Rossi to say they were pulling in now. He smiled at Andrea and said, “It’s fun, isn’t it?”

  She didn’t smile back, but replied, “Yeah, it is.”

  “Never too late,” he said. She knew he sincerely meant it.

  She rubbed her stomach. “Yeah, it is.”

  As they pulled into the parking lot, Kenny got out of his Prius after having been there all night. He looked like shit. The SUVs stopped in front of the entrance to the administrative office building in a no-parking zone. Rossi and Garmin waited in front of the triangular steps that led to the office entrance. Ramon shook their hands. The men nodded a greeting at Andrea.

  Trailing like a curious puppy behind them, Kenny said, “Guys, can I go with you?”

  Rossi said, “No.”

  “Can I get a quote then before you go in?”

  Rossi sighed.

  Ramon said, “Ask me.”

  “Do you expect any problems from the township in administering these seizures?” he asked.

  “No,” said Ramon as he continued mounting the steps.

  “Oh c’mon, I need a better answer than that!” whined Kenny.

  As they reached the door, Ramon said, “Then ask a better question.”

  Kenny couldn’t argue with that, and he was too tired to try. The group disappeared into the lobby entrance, leaving him standing at the steps like a jilted bride.

  They approached the front counter. Hillary Eversham’s eyes went wide with fear as they came toward her. Ramon flashed his badge. He introduced himself and said, “We need to speak with Mayor Wu immediately.”

  Eversham fumbled with her phone and dialed the mayor’s assistant. Then she buzzed them in.

  Ramon motioned to the other two agents and gestured toward Eversham. “Wait with her. She’s a person of interest.”

  Rossi, Garmin, and Andrea followed him in.