Rolling Thunder

5

I’m figuring young Sean O’Malley has major mommy issues.

He and his date stroll across the boardwalk, hand on butt cheek instead of the more traditional hand in hand. They’re heading for a Fried Everything stand. Fried Twinkies, Fried Snickers, Fried Oreos. I think they’ll even batter and fry your flip-flops if you ask ’em to.

To my surprise, Ceepak is following the sashaying couple-and it’s not because he enjoys watching bikini bottom grip-and-gropes.

“Excuse me? Mr. O’Malley? Miss?”

Sean and his hot date turn around. He’s wearing a Donegal Tweed flat cap that he must think makes him look cool. I think it makes him look like a cab driver. Maybe a newspaper boy from 1932.

“Yo, po-po. What up?” says Sean.

“My name is Ceepak. Officer John Ceepak.”

“I remember you, dude. From up on the roller coaster of death!”

“I’d like to have a word with you and your lady friend.”

“’Bout what?”

“Disrespecting the dead.”

“Huh?”

I jump in and help out: “Ding dong, the witch is dead?”

“Whoa. You dudes have us under surveillance or sumptin’?

“Mr. O’Malley,” says Ceepak, “your mother just died.”

He shrugs. Stuffs a cigarette in his mug. “So?”

His girlfriend shifts her weight to her left hip. “Yo-I’m the one who said it. You got some kind of issue with it, talk to me. Fo real. I’m serious.”

Now she pouts. She has the lips for it: glossy, puffy ones.

Meanwhile, Ceepak’s jaw joint is popping in and out under his ear. It does this from time to time, usually whenever he’d like to rip someone’s head off. You see people die like Ceepak did over in Iraq, or like I’ve seen on the job, it does something to you. They aren’t just bonus points on a game screen anymore.

“Ma’am,” says Ceepak, “it might be best for all concerned if you were to refrain from making any more derogatory comments regarding Mrs. O’Malley in public.”

Sean blows cigarette smoke out his nose holes like a cartoon bull.

“Why? Why can’t she say that? Hell, I’ll say it too. Ding dong, the witch is dead. How’s that?”

“Great,” I say. “Makes you sound like a total a-hole, Sean.”

Ceepak cocks an eyebrow.

He does not, however, chastise me for my poor word choice while in uniform. If the a-hole fits …

“Aw-ite, Danny Boy, ease up, foo. Is it against the law for us to speak true?”

“Of course not,” says Ceepak. “You are both well within your First Amendment rights to say anything, no matter how offensive I and others might find it. I am simply suggesting that, as a matter of respect, you both should exert some semblance of self-control.”

“Then, let me school ya, Officer John Ceepak: My moms was one fat, cold-hearted witch. Hell, I’m surprised she could even have a heart attack because that would mean she had a heart instead of a chunk of black ice rattlin’ around underneath all that whale blubber.”

Sean, thinking he was just pretty damn clever, gives his cigarette a self-satisfied smack.

“She never did like me,” says the girl with a head toss. “Didn’t think I was the right kind of people for her boy, you know?”

“It’s true,” says Sean. “My mom did not dig Daisy-because she’s from Puerto Rico and smokin’ hot.”

“Mrs. O’Malley?” says Daisy. “She was a racist. A bigot.”

“Homophobic, too,” adds Sean. Just ask my brother Peter, who was officially disinvited from this morning’s festivities. How twisted is that?”

Daisy zips her manicured hand back and forth in a flying Z formation. “You think about that, officers, aw-ite? We done here. I’m hungry, Sean. You said you were gonna buy me a Snickers bar, baby.”

“Yeah.” Sean winks at us. “Laters, po-po. Laters.”

They saunter up to the food stand.

I can hear a rush of bubbles popping around a candy bar recently dunked into a vat of boiling oil.

Or maybe that’s Ceepak.

I know he tries to keep a lid on his rage at all times but sometimes he’s a lot like that Springsteen song “The Promised Land”: He just wants to explode.

We head back to the house, which is what we call police headquarters over in the municipal complex on Cherry Street.

All the east-west streets in Sea Haven are named after trees, even though, with all the sun and sand and salt water, we don’t really have that many trees-just a few scrubby evergreens and rows of telephone poles that used to be trees in their youth.

“You think Sean had anything to do with his mother’s death?” I ask Ceepak as our Crown Vic Police Interceptor cruises south on Ocean Avenue.

We just passed Pizza My Heart, one of at least three dozen Italian restaurants in Sea Haven. The parmigiana, manicotti, and fried calamari on their menus probably cause more heart attacks than all our boardwalk rides combined, but the menus don’t come with any warning signs and there’s no minimum height requirement; they’ll even give the kids a booster seat.

“Is there some way Sean could’ve killed her and made her death look like a heart attack?”

“It’s a possibility,” says Ceepak. “However, we’ll soon know if foul play is indicated. By New Jersey state law, the medical examiner is required to investigate all cases of human death that occur under suspicious or unusual circumstances.”

I guess death by roller coaster is pretty unusual.

“If memory serves,” Ceepak continues, “only four Americans die each year in roller coaster-related incidents.”

“Heart attacks?”

“Often. The rides are designed to send heart rates soaring. In a recent study …”

Did I mention that Ceepak reads recent studies on just about everything? Last week, it was oysters and water pollution.

“… German researchers noted that the heart rates of test participants climbed from ninety-one to one-fifty-three while riding a coaster with a maximum speed of seventy-five mph.”

I nod and hope none of this is on the final.

“However, it wasn’t the speed that caused irregular heart beats; it was the fear and stress of the ride.”

“So Mrs. O’Malley scared herself to death?”

“She may have had a preexisting, undiagnosed heart condition. Perhaps high blood pressure. Or she may have been under some form of stress brought on by a life-altering event.”

“Huh,” I say. I guess Mrs. O’Malley could’ve been stressed about her daughter, Mary (who almost gave me a heart attack this morning), and her sons Sean and Peter. I think sons Kevin and Skip are pretty stress-free: hard-working, level-headed boys who don’t drink Bacardi for breakfast, date San Juan hotties or, you know, other boys.

“Interestingly,” says Professor Ceepak, “the 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles resulted in a four-fold increase in sudden deaths due to heart attacks. In 1991, when Iraq launched scud missiles at Israel, heart attacks doubled. A widow grieving the loss of her husband will see a fifty percent increase in her chances of sudden death due to a heart attack.”

Stress. It’s why I still surf, boogie board, and drink beer on a regular basis. It’s all part of my heart-healthy lifestyle.

But I remember what Skippy said: His mother didn’t want to ride the Rolling Thunder. She was afraid of roller coasters.

But Kevin probably convinced her she needed to be there for PR purposes, the same way political wives have to be there when their husbands call a press conference to confess that they’ve just had an affair with a hooker they met on the Appalachian Trail.

But what if Kevin O’Malley, for whatever reason, wanted to scare his mother to death?

Pretty easy way to get away with murder.

You don’t need a gun or knife or poison or any kind of weapon at all.

You just need to build a big, honking roller coaster.