I waved in the cops: “Come inside the house and see.”
The two climbed the steps, accompanied by the squeaking and shuffling noises of their belts and guns. I stood in the entry to the living room and pointed at the destruction.
“Oh,” said Officer Riordan, and gave a brisk crack of his knuckles. He suddenly looked less bored.
Riordan and Velásquez leaned forward in their seats at the dining room table as they asked me all the initial questions: who, where, how long. Their ears were literally pricked. A call had been made out of my hearing, and Riordan informed me that detectives were being dispatched. I had the grave pride of being taken seriously.
Riordan was asking me for the second time if I’d seen any strangers in the neighborhood lately, was reminding me for the third time about Carthage’s roving bands of homeless men, when the phone rang. I launched myself across the room and grabbed it.
A surly woman’s voice: “Mr. Dunne, this is Comfort Hill Assisted Living.” It was where Go and I boarded our Alzheimer’s-riddled father.
“I can’t talk right now, I’ll call you back,” I snapped, and hung up. I despised the women who staffed Comfort Hill: unsmiling, uncomforting. Underpaid, gruelingly underpaid, which was probably why they never smiled or comforted. I knew my anger toward them was misdirected—it absolutely infuriated me that my father lingered on while my mom was in the ground.
It was Go’s turn to send the check. I was pretty sure it was Go’s turn for July. And I’m sure she was positive it was mine. We’d done this before. Go said we must be mutually subliminally forgetting to mail those checks, that what we really wanted to forget was our dad.
I was telling Riordan about the strange man I’d seen in our neighbor’s vacated house when the doorbell rang. The doorbell rang. It sounded so normal, like I was expecting a pizza.
The two detectives entered with end-of-shift weariness. The man was rangy and thin, with a face that tapered severely into a dribble of a chin. The woman was surprisingly ugly—brazenly, beyond the scope of everyday ugly: tiny round eyes set tight as buttons, a long twist of a nose, skin spackled with tiny bumps, long lank hair the color of a dust bunny. I have an affinity for ugly women. I was raised by a trio of women who were hard on the eyes—my grandmother, my mom, her sister—and they were all smart and kind and funny and sturdy, good, good women. Amy was the first pretty girl I ever dated, really dated.
The ugly woman spoke first, an echo of Miss Officer Velásquez. “Mr. Dunne? I’m Detective Rhonda Boney. This is my partner, Detective Jim Gilpin. We understand there are some concerns about your wife.”
My stomach growled loud enough for us all to hear it, but we pretended we didn’t.
“We take a look around, sir?” Gilpin said. He had fleshy bags under his eyes and scraggly white whiskers in his mustache. His shirt wasn’t wrinkled, but he wore it like it was; he looked like he should stink of cigarettes and sour coffee, even though he didn’t. He smelled like Dial soap.
I led them a few short steps to the living room, pointed once again at the wreckage, where the two younger cops were kneeling carefully, as if waiting to be discovered doing something useful. Boney steered me toward a chair in the dining room, away from but in view of the signs of struggle.
Rhonda Boney walked me through the same basics I’d told Velásquez and Riordan, her attentive sparrow eyes on me. Gilpin squatted down on a knee, assessing the living room.
“Have you phoned friends or family, people your wife might be with?” Rhonda Boney asked.
“I … No. Not yet. I guess I was waiting for you all.”
“Ah.” She smiled. “Let me guess: baby of the family.”
“What?”
“You’re the baby.”
“I have a twin sister.” I sensed some internal judgment being made. “Why?” Amy’s favorite vase was lying on the floor, intact, bumped up against the wall. It was a wedding present, a Japanese masterwork that Amy put away each week when our housecleaner came because she was sure it would get smashed.
“Just a guess of mine, why you’d wait for us: You’re used to someone else always taking the lead,” Boney said. “That’s what my little brother is like. It’s a birth-order thing.” She scribbled something on a notepad.
“Okay.” I gave an angry shrug. “Do you need my sun sign too, or can we get started?”
Boney smiled at me kindly, waiting.
“I waited to do something because, I mean, she’s obviously not with a friend,” I said, pointing at the disarray in the living room.