David took the stairs up to the third floor. He liked the sound his feet made on the marble steps and thought about installing similar stone in the primed, ready stairwell of his own home. Franny would find the stairs extravagant. She might not even recognize the place when she returned to it. She might leave the house, keep walking down the street, and lose herself in the woods.
The stone and the sound it made gave the room a feeling of permanence, as was the purpose of its design. He imagined how similar the old police station would remain after the end times came to pass, for example. He had been taught as a child that the end times could come to pass at any moment. A strong structure would stand even a spiritual test. The horsemen might knock down some file cabinets and vaporize all the nonbelievers, but the marble flooring would survive.
The third floor was a hallway of doors leading off the rotunda. Behind the doors, individuals sat behind desks, determining when to investigate private citizens. David saw a pair of uniformed officers and followed them into the detective unit. At the front desk, a boy was using the side of his hand to organize a pile of staples on the desk, brushing them off the surface and into one of the watercooler’s paper cones. “Do you have an appointment?” the boy asked.
“I don’t. I’m here to see Detective Chico,” said David. “He might be expecting me. My name is David, young man.”
“You don’t have an appointment?”
“Sorry, is the receptionist here?” David was bad at guessing the ages of children but estimated this one to be between six and fourteen years old.
“You’ll have to wait,” said the child, dropping the paper cone into the trash and taking up the stapler again, ejecting staples individually onto the desk. He pointed at an empty seat on a bench, next to a woman hunched over a clipboard.
“It’ll just take a second,” David said.
The child switched the stapler to his nondominant hand and jabbed toward the bench with his stronger pointer. “I’ll let the detective know you’re here,” he said.
David sat. The boy frowned and resumed his stapler task, ejecting spent staples one by one until the stapler was empty. He took a new paper cup from the watercooler and filled it again, bringing his face close to the desk to focus on his task. When the cup was full, the boy dropped it into the trash, slid off his chair, and walked into the back room.
“Your best bet is the awning behind the trash compactor in the alley on Fifth Street,” the woman said. She was wearing a purple tracksuit. The map on her notepad was dotted with stars and skulls. “Sometimes you can score in the hallway in front of the ATM in the city center, but that’s rare because there’s all this light going right into your face, right into your eyes.” She smelled like a bucket of peaches in an advanced state of decomposition. “You’d think there on the corner of Fifth where those kids hang out by the grocery would be a good spot, but cops are always watching there. They got cameras, and inside each camera is at least two eyes. I saw a camera with three eyes once, but the third eye was busted and kept rolling around at the top of the lens. I was trying to fix it but the two other eyes called for help. You ever ask a stranger to look at your tongue?”
The boy was back at the desk. He was taking a pair of safety scissors to a piece of construction paper. “That’s enough,” he said.
“I’m worried,” she said, tearing off a sliver of paper on the edge of her notebook and packing it into the side of her mouth.
“I’ll look at your tongue later,” the boy said.
“Are your parents around?” David asked him.
“Depends on how you define ‘around,’ and how you define ‘parents,’” the woman said. She turned in her seat, shifting from hip to hip, chewing. “Depends how you define ‘missing,’ depends how you define ‘dead,’” she said.
The boy began searching for something in the recesses of his desk. “Quite enough,” he said.
The woman was scratching her face with her pencil; then she threw the pencil into her lap and clawed at herself with her fingernails. “I’ll get you started,” she said. “Christ, scratching is the resurrection.”
Chico emerged from the back room. “David,” he said. “What a pleasant surprise. My executive secretary said you were here, but I didn’t believe it until now.”
The boy slumped. “Why didn’t you believe me?”
The detective gestured for David to follow. “Only a joke,” he said to the child. “We’ll talk about it later.”
Chico’s office was dark and dominated by newspapers and pieces of books and maps and photocopied stacks of paper, all of which encroached on his keyboard and side cabinets. The paper mounted an offense against his coffee, jutting over it, spare pages drooping over the steaming mug. The room smelled of ink and paper clips. Chico picked a stack off of one of the chairs and balanced it on a smaller stack on the edge of his desk. “Doing some catch-up this morning,” he said. “I’m glad you came by. What can I do for you?”
“I want to know what you know about my wife.” David nudged folders on the floor until he had enough space for his feet.
“The autopsy came back,” Chico said, still standing, flipping open a file. “She was found with multiple lacerations on her arms and legs. Massive laceration on the right-side femoral artery, which killed her.” He tapped the top of his right thigh. “Something caused by a dull blade, sad to say. No drugs in her system. Some vegetable matter in her stomach, also objects like thin cloth or paper, about the size of a berry.” He tapped his pencil on his desk. “A small berry.”
“Cloth or paper?”
The detective shrugged and flipped the page. “Matter like what gets eaten by stomach acid for five to seven hours. We couldn’t get anything out of it. The rest is stuff you already knew. She was barefoot, hypothermic. She would have lost her toes had she survived the event.” He looked up. “We can slow down if this is bothering you.”
“The woman in the lobby was eating paper.”
“I doubt the two events are related. It’s important to think about potential meaning.” Chico leaned back in his leather chair and scanned a bookshelf that had been bolted to the wall between them above the desk. He stood and pulled out a thick book, holding the shelf with the other hand for leverage, hefting it down. “Here we go.” He flashed the cover of the book at David, who saw only the gold-trimmed stars and half-moons before Chico turned it back. The book itself was thicker than the old-fashioned dictionary he remembered open on a podium in the library at college.
The detective hefted the book from one hand to the other and cleared a space on the desk. “The interpretation of dreams,” he said, thumping the book down. “It always has some truth.” He examined the tabs on the side of the book and opened it, flipping pages and running one finger down the columns of text. “Here we are. Paper. The oracles say that dreaming of blank paper means grief. That could mean worrying about grief, anticipating grief, progressing through grief. Dreaming of paper with words on it means great joy concerning a love affair.”
“That’s it? Either grief or an affair?”
“That’s what it says.”
“Those two options seem to be kind of in opposition.”
Chico shrugged.
“Does all printed paper suggest one or the other?”
“You’re thinking of that letter you found in the sugar. ‘I will strip the bark from a tree and make you new clothes,’ right? Did you find any more of those?”
“You have it memorized.”
“It was memorable.”
“That’s the only one I found.”
The detective leaned back in his chair without breaking eye contact. He slipped his finger under the right-hand page in the dream book and turned it. The scent of old ink rose up and mixed with the paper clips. He was watching David. Chico’s closed mouth moved slightly with the mandibular workings behind his lips, which were thin and colorless in the low light. They parted into a smile, front teeth tucked. “I want us to be friends, David.”