“Junkies don’t make those distinctions,” Post said.
“Exactly.”
“Still, we’ve had a lot of these break-ins lately, especially around campus. The meth heads and even just your garden-variety burglar think college kids have a lot of money and are careless with their things. They tend to leave doors and windows open and their toys just lying around. And a lot of that is true.”
“I’m a grad student,” I said. “I’m poor.”
“They also don’t understand that distinction,” she said.
She scribbled in her book. I waited. She kept scribbling, so I said, “Don’t you think it’s odd that my mother is murdered and then all of a sudden someone is breaking into my apartment? Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”
“But why your apartment?” Post asked. “Why not your mother’s house?”
“Maybe they did break in there,” I said. “I haven’t been back in days.”
Post looked at me, the wheels in her head turning. Without saying anything else, she stood up and left the room, taking the notebook and folder with her.
I waited. I stared at the bookshelves filled with law enforcement manuals and textbooks. Quite possibly the world’s most boring collection of books. Post came back a minute later and closed the door again. She sat down.
“I sent a car to check your mother’s house,” she said. “Just as a precaution.”
“So you agree with me. This break-in at my house isn’t just a random crime.”
“Was anything missing?” she asked.
“Nothing that I could see.”
“Any important papers? Photos? Anything relating to your mother?”
“I didn’t check that carefully,” I said. “To be honest, I was too freaked out to stay. I haven’t been back yet. They’re putting in a new lock.”
“Make sure it’s a dead bolt. And get a chain.” Post tapped her pen against the notebook a few times. “I still think it’s a long shot this would have anything to do with your mother’s death. Like I said, we get a lot of this kind of crime. If they just ransacked the place, it’s not significant.”
“It’s significant to me,” I said.
“I understand. It’s a violation. It’s unnerving.”
“If I hadn’t stopped to have dinner with my uncle, I might have been home when that man came into the apartment.”
Post watched me for a moment. She made a little noise in the back of her throat. It sounded like “Hmm.”
Someone knocked on the door. Post rose and opened it. She stuck her head out, nodded, thanked the person, and came back into the room.
“Well,” she said. “Your mother’s house is fine. Our patrol car checked it out. No sign of any break-in or vandalism.”
I felt a little deflated hearing that news. It was almost as if I wanted there to have been a break-in at Mom’s house—then the one at my apartment would have made more sense. It would have all been part of a whole, something that started to form a coherent picture.
“Detective, if this break-in at my apartment is related to my mother’s death, then doesn’t that prove that Ronnie didn’t do it? How could he be locked up in Dover Community and break into my place?”
“I wanted to talk to you about your mother a little,” she said.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “How could my brother be in the hospital and involved with that break-in?”
Post smiled without showing her teeth. “I think you’re probably letting the emotion of these two events cloud your judgment. It’s very likely you were just the victim of a random break-in. I can show you the charts we have to track these things. Break-ins in that area are up about twenty percent this year. Someone—or a group of people—is doing it. We’ll find out eventually, but it won’t be connected to your mother’s death. As for your brother, I can tell you that it’s moving slowly because your brother hasn’t been as cooperative as we need him to be.”
“Cooperative?”
“I know,” she said, holding up her hand to fend off my objections. “I’m not unsympathetic to all the issues associated with him being in the hospital.”
“You can’t just dismiss them as ‘issues.’”
“What I’m saying is, if you have any ability to talk to him, to get him to open up a little to the doctors who want to speak to him, then maybe things will move along more quickly. I don’t like the idea of a guy like your brother being cooped up in a hospital either. But we need to find out more from him. We all have the same goal here: to solve your mother’s murder.”
Her words took the slightest edge off my anger and frustration. Not all of it—just a bit. It was remarkable what treating me as a human being could do.
“I’ll try to talk to him,” I said. “He doesn’t listen to me. He’s all doped up. They medicated him yesterday because someone upset him.”
“I heard about that,” Post said.
“Do you know who that woman was?” I asked.
“No. Do you?”
“No. That’s just it. What’s going on here? A strange woman shows up at my brother’s hospital room and sends him into a fit of hysterics. My apartment gets broken into. And then—” I stopped myself. I realized my voice was getting louder. Post looked at me with the calm condescension usually reserved for mental patients. “I’m going to get some of that coffee,” I said, getting up and walking over to the other side of the room.
The act of pouring it into the cup and adding sugar, then stirring and watching the dark liquid swirl around in the cup soothed my nerves just enough. I came back to the table and sat down. Post gave me a moment. I sipped the hot liquid. Despite the generous amount of sugar I added, it still tasted bitter.
Post said, “It’s been a few days, and we were just wondering if anything else had come to mind about your mother. Any problems she might have been having. Any relationships that might have been a source of trouble for her.”
“I’ve thought about this a lot,” I said. “I don’t know who would hurt my mother.”
“Anything at all? Money problems? Something else?”
“If there’s been a rash of break-ins around town, what’s to say Mom’s death wasn’t the result of one of those?”
“You said your lock was splintered and your apartment ransacked?” Post asked. “You saw your mother’s house the other night. There’s a difference there, right?”
I didn’t answer, but I understood. My attempt to make a connection between the two events, to stretch a link so far between two dissimilar events, made me seem amateurish and desperate. I wanted Mom’s death to make more sense than it did, but I couldn’t. And neither could Detective Post.
“What about your father?” she asked. “He’s deceased, right?”
“He died almost five years ago.”
“Was there anything about him that might be relevant to your mom’s case?” Post asked. “Any unresolved problems? Any issues?”
“My father?” I said. “That man didn’t have any issues. He was peaceful and easygoing.” I felt myself smiling just thinking about him. “I got along with him much better than with Mom. I guess Mom and I were too much alike in a lot of ways.”
“Did your mother date anyone since your father died?” Post asked.
The question—no, the idea of the question—almost made me fall out of my chair. “Date someone? My mother?” I laughed, and the expression on Post’s face didn’t change. “No, she didn’t date anyone. You wouldn’t ask that question if you knew my mother at all.”
“But you didn’t know everything about your mother,” Post said. Her voice was flat. She didn’t add any “gotcha” inflection. She didn’t need to. She had, indeed, made her point and proven my argument to be vulnerable.