Which is where I’m heading right now. A couple of days ago, I rolled the dice and ran up to my town house and grabbed my mail. The entire sixty-second event took a lot out of me, as I felt sure someone was going to open fire on me, and I decided after that to have my mail forwarded to my office.
Still, I feel the need to check on the place. It makes me feel borderline normal. Normal people have homes. Normal people spend a lot of time in them. I have to concede the irony here, though—as Liz Larkin correctly pointed out, I spent most of my childhood locked up in my house, inside looking out, and now I’m forced to stay outside looking in. Maybe life has a way of evening things out, like that Seinfeld episode where everything always evened out for Jerry—
Stop. There he is, not ten yards away from me. Oscar the giant schnauzer, with that long gray beard and stump tail, on a long leash held by my neighbor, Mrs. Tooley. I can’t prove this, but my theory is that when Satan returns to earth, he’ll return in the form of a giant schnauzer. And maybe he already has.
Maybe Father sent him. Maybe Father took a break from his poker game with Hitler, Stalin, Jeffrey Dahmer, and whoever invented disco to advise Lucifer on the best way to torment me.
I move east of the sidewalk, trying to keep heading toward my town house but away from Oscar. To me, the best Seinfeld episode was the one with the library cop, Bookman, who was also the single best supporting character among many good ones. I’d put him slightly above Jacopo Peterman, but it’s a close call, admittedly. Am I the only person who thinks the Soup Nazi wasn’t as funny as some of the other characters? I mean, there’s no bad Seinfeld episode, but—
Wait. What’s this?
As I approach F Street, I see a few people congregating in the park, looking across the street in the direction of my town house.
Then I see an MPD squad car.
Then the door to my town house opens.
And bounding down the stairs of my walkway, looking like the cat who ate the canary, is none other than Detective Liz Larkin.
Chapter 53
I duck behind a tree, as if I have something to hide, as if it’s a crime to stand across the street and watch the police search your house.
I open my cell phone and dial Ashley Brook’s number.
“Two quick questions,” I say to her when she answers. “What’s your favorite Seinfeld episode, and what does it mean when you say someone looks like the cat who ate the canary?”
“I have a question for you, too,” she answers.
“Mine first.”
“Okay, well—if you look like the cat who ate the canary, it means you look guilty.”
“Isn’t that being caught with your hand in the cookie jar?”
“Oh. But the cat isn’t supposed to eat the canary, so it feels guilty. Right?”
On the sidewalk just outside my house, Detective Larkin is conferring with two men in sport coats and blue jeans and two uniformed officers.
“I thought it meant you look smug,” I say. “Self-satisfied. The cat’s happy because it just had a nice meal. It finally caught the canary.”
“Hmm. Well, okay, my favorite Seinfeld episode? It’s a tie.”
“You can’t have ties.”
“I have a tie, Ben. Deal with it. The first is the one with the contest over who was ‘master’ of their domain; the second is the one where Elaine thought her boyfriend was black and he thought she was Hispanic, but they were both afraid to talk about it; and the third is the one about being gay, where they kept saying ‘not that there’s anything wrong with that.’”
Fair enough. All of those would make my top ten. She left out the one where Kramer takes the furniture from The Merv Griffin Show and starts his own talk show in his apartment. Or the one about “shrinkage,” where George emphasized the point by wearing a T-shirt three sizes too small.
Detective Larkin pulls out her cell phone and makes a call. The other four cops head inside my house.
“Now, what’s your question?” I ask.
“When was the last time you got any sleep?”
“A week ago.”
“You need sleep, Ben. You’re acting goofy. I mean, is this why you called me? To ask about Seinfeld and some stupid idiom?”
“Is that an idiom or an expression?” I ask.
“Is there a difference?”
“Why are you answering a question with a question?”
“Why are you?”
One of the uniforms comes out of my house carrying my desktop computer. A second one emerges with a banker’s box, contents unknown.
“There was another reason I called,” I say. “Text me the number for Fast Eddie.”
“Eddie Volker?”