Roxy

3Roxy

“So I’ve got an old man,” Roxy said.

I had her at the bowl. You get about four minutes at the bowl before the chair and it’s the most productive four minutes in the building. Something about being horizontal.

“Uh oh.”

“Not like that. He’s a witness. Hit and run out by the Costco, guy on a moped, broke his pelvis in three places and he’s twenty-six years old and he’s going to walk funny for the rest of his life.”

“That’s bad.”

“That’s real bad. And I’ve got one witness, and it’s a seventy-one-year-old man who was standing about forty feet away with a clear line, and he’s lying to me.”

“About the car?”

“He hasn’t gotten to the car. He can’t get to the car because he can’t get past where he was standing.” Water off. Towel. “I’ve asked him four times. Four separate times, three of them at his kitchen table with his wife bringing me a Diet Coke I didn’t want. And every time he changes it. First time he was walking. Second time he was going to his truck. Third time he’d just come out of the Ross.”

“There’s no Ross.”

“There’s no Ross. There’s a Ross eleven minutes away.”

Roxy books eight weeks and keeps about five of them.

She’s the only standing appointment I’ve got where I don’t hold the slot. I used to. First couple of years I held it, and she’d cancel at ten of, and I’d have an hour of nothing in the middle of a Tuesday, and eventually I told her I was going to double-book her and she said good, and that was the whole negotiation. Now if she makes it she makes it. Twice she’s shown up and sat in the waiting chairs for forty minutes reading a magazine about boats, perfectly content, because forty minutes in a chair where nobody can reach her is not a cost to Roxy Pang. It’s the product.

Nine years. She was a sergeant when she started coming to me and she is not a sergeant now, and I found that out from somebody else.

What she wants is this: dark, all the way through, no red in it, blunt at the collarbone, four minutes in the morning with a towel.

That has been it for nine years. I stopped suggesting things in about year three, not because she got annoyed — she never got annoyed — but because I watched what happened when she said no. She’d say no, and then she’d think about it, and then she’d say no again more thoroughly, and I realized I was making a woman who spends her whole day litigating things litigate one more thing on her hour off.

So now I do exactly what she asks and I do it perfectly, and once a year I put a half-inch of something at the front and don’t mention it, and she has never noticed, and it looks good.

She puts her phone face down on the counter when she sits. It buzzes the whole hour. She does not touch it.

“So he’s involved,” she said, once I had her upright and sectioned. “Which is stupid, because if he’s involved why is he talking to me at all, he called it in himself, but people are stupid, so.”

“He’s not involved.”

She looked at me in the mirror.

“He’s not involved,” I said. “He’s just somewhere he can’t say he was.”

Here’s the thing about lying that took me about eleven years to learn, and I only learned it because women lie to me constantly and it costs them nothing and it costs me an hour.

Somebody comes in and I ask when she last colored at home. And she says never. And I’m looking at a two-inch band of box color I could identify from the parking lot.

She is not lying about the box. She does not care about the box. She’s lying because six weeks ago she sat in this chair and told me she was going to be patient, and I said good, and she meant it when she said it, and then on a Thursday she wasn’t patient, and now the person she was six weeks ago is in the room with us.

She’s not protecting the crime. She’s protecting the story.

And if you say there’s box color in here, she’ll double down, because now you’ve made her say the sentence again, out loud, with a witness. But if you say this looks like it might’ve had something on it around March, that’s about when the humidity turns — you’ve given her a door. Something happened around March. Things happen around March. And she says yeah, actually, maybe March, and now we’re both looking at the hair instead of at her.

You don’t catch people. Catching people is a hobby. You give them a version of events they can live in, and then you go do the work.

“He’s not lying about the crash,” I said. “You said he called it in himself.”

“From his own phone.”

“So he wants you to have it. He wants the kid to get his money. He’s just got a wife in the kitchen bringing you Diet Cokes, and every time you ask him where he was standing, he’s answering the question in front of her.”

Roxy didn’t say anything for a second. In the mirror she had the look she gets, which is not the look of somebody being told something. It’s the look of somebody moving furniture.

“So what,” she said. “Get him alone?”

“No. That’s worse. Alone is where he decides you’ve caught him.”

“Then what.”

“Stop asking him where he was.”

“He’s a witness, Jonathan, where he was is the whole—“

“You already have where he was. Forty feet, clear line, you said so. You don’t need it from him, you just want him to say it.” I took the first section down. “So ask him what he saw. Just that. Not where, not why, not what he was doing out there. Ask him what color the car was and what he did with his hands.”

“What he did with his hands.”

“People remember their hands. They don’t know they do.”

She thought about it.

“And when I write it up he still has to be somewhere.”

“He will be. That’s the part you don’t do. You let him put himself somewhere at the end, on his own, after he’s already told you the whole thing. And whatever he says, you write it down and you don’t look up.” I turned her a quarter to get the back. “He’s going to say he was walking. He’s going to go back to the first one. It’s the first one because it’s the closest to true.”

“That’s —“ She stopped. “Huh.”

“Mm.”

“Where do you get this.”

“Everybody sits in this chair.”

“Yeah, but they sit in mine too, and they lie to me.”

“They lie to you because you can do something about it.”

She laughed, one syllable, out her nose, and her phone buzzed on the counter, and she did not look at it.

Thirty-five minutes of processing, during which she read four pages of the boat magazine and fell asleep for six minutes and woke up like nothing had happened. She does it most times and has never once acknowledged it.

“You ever think about doing something else?” she said, later, at the blow-dry. Not pointed. Just talking.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. You’ve got a building. People with buildings usually want two buildings.”

“I don’t want two buildings.”

“See, that’s what I mean. Everybody I know wants the next thing.” She watched me in the mirror for a second. “Nineteen years and I’ve wanted the next thing every single day of it, and I got it twice, and both times it was worse.”

“That’s why you’re not a sergeant.”

“That’s why I’m not a sergeant,” she said, pleasantly. “You still out in Waialua?”

“Still out there.”

“That’s the one with the gate.” She came out to the house once, years ago, for a thing that isn’t a story. “Did Nāinoa ever get that gate to shut?”

“He got it to shut.”

“Good.”

“Now it won’t open.”

“Well,” Roxy said, and left it there, and I got the dryer down and checked the back and it wasn’t ready.

At the desk, with her card already out, she said the thing.

“I pulled some old ones this week.”

“Old what?”

“Files. I’ve got a drawer.” She was looking at the card reader, doing the tip screen. “There’s a couple I keep going back to. Nobody’s asking me to. It’s a thing I do when it’s slow.”

“Are they connected?”

“That’s what I can’t tell.” Receipt. She folded it in half and put it in her back pocket, which she does with every receipt of any kind and which I assume is a whole other thing. “Some of them aren’t even mine. Two are Kāneʻohe. One’s so old the guy who worked it is dead.”

“How many?”

“Six,” she said. “Six that bug me. And any four of them, you’d say I was seeing things.”

“What do the other two do?”

She stood there with her hand on the door.

“They keep it from being nothing,” she said. “That’s the problem. If it was six of nothing I’d let it go.”

“Or one of them’s real and the rest are riding on it.”

Roxy pointed at me.

“That,” she said. “That’s what I keep — yes. Thank you. That’s what I’ve been trying to say to Sergeant Kaʻiulani for a month and a half, and he keeps hearing serial and going out of the room.”

“Nobody wants six.”

“Nobody wants six. Everybody wants one.” She got the door open with her shoulder, phone finally in her hand, already buzzing. “Eight weeks?”

“Eight weeks.”

“I’ll cancel.”

“You’ll cancel,” I said, and she did.