Confessions of a Murder Suspect

16

The day after my parents were murdered was a Saturday. For the first Saturday morning that I could remember, Malcolm wasn’t in the kitchen whipping up something green and stinking to infuse our brains with oxygen and steep our bodies in trace minerals.

There were also no calisthenics, no foreign-language drills, no pop quizzes on geopolitics or the state of the global economy.

The very atmosphere had changed.

It was as if one of the elements of the planet had disappeared; not water, air, fire, or earth, but something else. Maybe it was the rule of law, as Malcolm would call it.

I opened my computer and did a search for sudden deaths and black tongues and found terrible things that raised my eyebrows as high as they could go. I began a folder of questions with both answers and hypotheses and was still absorbed in my detective work when the police arrived for a surprise visit at 7:30 AM.

Again, I was the one who heard the buzzer and let them in.

We stood in the hallway, under a chandelier shaped like a sci-fi UFO, and the police began to grill me right there under its bright, blinking lights.

Detective Hayes looked as though he hadn’t changed his clothes from the night before. Sergeant Caputo wore a short-sleeved shirt and black slacks that stopped short of his black sneakers. He looked down at me as though I were a bug mounted in a lab.

“You didn’t tell me you had a guest for dinner last night. Why did you withhold information, Toodles?”

Some people might have been embarrassed at being caught in a lie of omission by a crude cop with a tattoo of a goat on his wrist, but it didn’t bother me. My parents had repeatedly told me that I had a “phlegmatic” conscience—which basically means it doesn’t work overtime—and that that was a good thing. Was either part of that true? I had no idea.

I fake-smiled and said, “Are you pretending you don’t know my name, Sergeant Caputo? Or is jabbing a suspect an interview technique of yours? I really want to know. I’m learning your craft, and I’m a fast learner.”

“You cost us valuable time, Candy. If we had known, we would have interviewed Ambassador Panyor last night.”

“I’m not supposed to speak to you without my attorney, but I’ll give you this for free,” I said. “The ambassador didn’t kill my parents. My father prepared all of the food, and I helped him. The meal was served in big bowls, family-style. My brother Harry and I ate everything my parents ate, drank everything they drank. We’re both perfectly fine, and apparently so is the ambassador. You can’t arrest him, anyway. He has immunity.”

“You should have told me, Tidbit. I’m moving you to the top of my list,” Caputo said.

He answered his phone, then opened our front door for a couple of CSIs. The three of them went upstairs to what I still thought of as my parents’ room.

We had truly been invaded by aliens. Rude and very nasty ones. And there was nothing we could do to stop them from infesting our home planet.