Suddenly she became alert and tense. “Brad always kept cash in one of the closets upstairs.”
“How much?”
She said, “A great deal.”
Brad was heedless with cash. Even though he was neat about everything else, he dropped crumpled cash on tables, countertops, shelves, just as many men have places where at the end of every day they drop change, keys, cufflinks, dollar bills-the dumping ground of objects they carry in their pockets.
“How much?”
She said, “He might have had two or three hundred thousand dollars in cash upstairs.”
Even Bo Halsey, with more than twenty years of experience as a homicide detective, was taken aback. He was uncertain that he’d heard correctly.
“Two or three hundred dollars?”
“No, no,” Joan Richardson answered. “Hundred thousand. Two or three hundred thousand dollars.”
Halsey glanced over Joan’s right shoulder into Brad’s office, where at least eight people were videotaping, taking pictures, or placing objects into transparent bags with tags tied to them. “Cerullo,” Halsey called out, loudly.
Joan watched as Dick Cerullo, a tall, awkward man in an inexpensive sport jacket and a red-and-blue striped tie, approached Halsey. Whispering to each other, they walked away from her. During these seconds while she was utterly isolated, she felt terror, wildly imagining that the killer might still be in her house, waiting for her. From a distance, she watched Halsey, appearing almost bored, point at another man standing in Brad’s office. Shorter than Cerullo by a head, the other man joined Halsey and Cerullo. He wore the same style of ill-fitting sport jacket as Cerullo, but at least two sizes smaller. As if in a huddle, the three men whispered, even giving hand signals.
Halsey finally turned to her. “Mrs. Richardson,” he said, “these are Detectives Dick Cerullo and Dave Cohen. They’re veteran homicide detectives. They worked with me for years on the NYPD before coming out here. They’re going to help me find the man who did this.”
Joan’s moment of isolation and terror lifted. She stared at Halsey and the other men, thinking that together they looked like the Three Stooges and had as much chance of finding the man who had killed her husband as Moe, Larry, and Curly. They were not confidence-inspiring. “I hope so,” she said quietly.
“Where is that cash?”
“He kept it in the bedroom at the top of the stairs.” She gestured to the staircase on which she had walked thousands of times over the last eight years and on which, she now thought, Brad would never walk again. “Just to the right.”
Cerullo and Cohen had never seen such an opulent bedroom. They were both basketball fans. “My fucking word,” Cerullo said, “this place has got to be the size of a court.” The bedroom’s floorboards shined in the muted light as if they were waxed and polished in the same way a professional basketball court would be.
Cohen was more efficient than Cerullo. With a video camera hanging on a strap from his left hand, he glanced calmly around the entire room. He learned long ago that it was important and possibly life-saving to first assess everything in a room before focusing on anything specific. He walked toward a finely crafted sliding door in one of the walls. He rolled the door to the right, revealing a row of very orderly drawers and, to the left, the even more orderly rows of hanging suits, jackets, and slacks. He picked up a clean poker from the fireplace next to the closet. Handling the poker like a scalpel, he used its curved point to pull out two drawers.
Cohen called out to Cerullo, “Dick, get over here.”
As Cerullo approached, Cohen handed him the bag in which he carried the clunky, ten-year-old video camera. Cerullo started the camera while Cohen began narrating and describing who they were, where they were, the time, and the date. His hands in plastic gloves, Cohen displayed the first drawer to the camera. It was empty. He repeated the same scene with the other drawers. They too were empty. Cerullo turned the camera off.
Cohen went to the windows that faced the ocean. He opened another sliding closet door. Inside was a dazzling array of women’s clothes. He reached through some of the dresses to look for drawers in the back wall. There were none. He started to turn away. It was in that moment when he was about to slide the door closed that he saw stacks of cash simply lying on the floor. They were tightly bound in red elastic bands. He pulled forward one of the packets. It was the size and shape of a brick. The elastic bands held the bills so tightly that the stack weighed as much as a brick.
At the top of the packet were hundred dollar bills; that meant, Cohen was certain, that the rest of the bills in each packet were hundreds. He quickly counted the number of neatly stacked packets: there were at least thirty. “Holy Mother of Jesus,” Cohen said. “Look at this shit.”
Cerullo, who was at the other side of the bedroom, was startled. He was certain that Cohen had just discovered a body. Despite fifteen years with the New York Police Department and another five as a homicide detective in Suffolk County, he had never passively reacted to the sight of dead or wounded people. He walked warily toward Cohen, who motioned with his head for Cerullo to look into the closet. Cerullo saw the cash immediately. He wasn’t distracted by the elegant clothes.
Cohen whispered, “Check for security cameras in here?”
Most people, they knew, didn’t have security cameras in their bedrooms. Neither of them saw anything like a camera in the places in which they were usually concealed, such as the corners of the ceilings or the tops of picture frames.
Dick Cerullo had noticed in the bathroom a small door in the wall near one of the two showers. He had been in big houses before, so he knew it was likely to be a door to a crawl space in the attic where the machinery was located that controlled the bathroom’s air-conditioning, steam room, and sauna.
Picking up the first brick of cash, Cerullo whispered to Cohen, “Let’s get this shit into the attic.” Since they were homicide detectives, they would have free access to the house for at least three days at any time they wanted, even when no one else was there, and there were bound to be times when no one else was there. After all, they had a license to investigate.
Cohen, the smaller man, slipped into the crawl space, and Cerullo handed the packets to him. When they closed the door, Cohen whispered, “This never happened, right? Oscar doesn’t know, right?”
Cerullo chuckled. “Oscar who?”
“Oscar, like in Felix and Oscar.”
When they came downstairs, Dave Cohen saw Bo Halsey talking to three technicians. When he had Halsey’s attention, Cohen said, “There’s nothing up there, Bo. The money’s gone.”
9.
It was Wednesday. Juan was in the kitchen. He washed by hand the bowls and spoons that Mariana and her kids had used to eat breakfast. The brown dishwasher was broken; it was stuffed with paper and plastic bags. With a small checkered towel he dried the bowls and spoons and carefully put them in the area of the brown cabinets that was reserved for the four of them.
Just as he closed the cabinet door, he heard the siren. From the kitchen window he saw beyond the yellow and orange trees the revolving red lights of the first of three police cruisers. In that instant he had no doubt that they would stop in the cluttered driveway. Juan ran to the broken deck behind the house. The screen door slammed behind him. There were woods nearby-the deep groves of yellowing leaves that finally led, almost a mile away, to the town dump. He heard the first cruiser squeal to a stop, its sirens now emitting a shrill beep-beep sound. He glanced around the edge of the ramshackle house. The cruiser stopped on the driveway’s broken tar. He thought he saw Joan Richardson in the back seat. There were two men in uniforms in the front seat. More cruisers abruptly stopped in front of the house, lights flashing.