Quote:I push my hair out of my eyes and look up at the clock on the wall. It shouldn’t be too much longer. Maybe I can just wait him out. I look at the desk in the corner of the cramped office. It’s cluttered with books, stacks of file folders, and a darkened computer screen decorated with a rainbow of Post-it notes because Fat Bald Detective can’t remember anything. There isn’t one inch of clear space anywhere to be seen on his desk. It’s very unprofessional.
That was one of our words from the calendar—I think from last January. It’s still on my wall.
Unprofessional is when someone or something doesn’t look or act right in the workplace.
Good, Button. Now use it in a sentence, Mama would say if she were here.
Then I would say something like, Fat Bald Detective’s office is very unprofessional because there’s crap everywhere and it smells like Fritos.
That would have made Mama laugh. I could always make her laugh when we played the word-of-the-day game. Mama says it’s okay if you don’t always remember the exact dictionary definition of a word as long as you can describe the meaning in your own words and you can use it in a sentence. Now that I think of it, there should be a picture of Fat Bald Detective’s office beside the word unprofessional in the dictionary.
His office is nothing like the ones in the police stations on TV. There aren’t any bright fluorescent lights in here, or cool floor-to-ceiling walls of glass so he can see the whole department and wave someone in at a moment’s notice just to yell at them. There’s only one small window with a view of the parking lot, and Fat Bald Detective seems to prefer table lamps to fluorescent lighting. And although you can’t smell the offices of the police stations on TV, I always imagined they’d smell like leftover pizza and cigarette smoke—not Fritos. I guess it’s better than doing this in one of their interrogation rooms. At least in here there’s a couch for me to sit on before they lock me up and throw away the keys. Then it hits me. It’s the couch. The couch smells like Fritos.
“And what happened after that, Riley?” Fat Bald Detective says—again.
Fat Bald Detective has a name. It’s Frank. He said I could call him Frank the first time he brought me in for questioning. Mama doesn’t normally approve of us calling adults by their first name, but Frank told me to and he’s the law. I figure I should probably cooperate as much as possible so he doesn’t get any more suspicious than he already is.
Frank actually has three names. They’re all printed on his door and on the triangle nameplate on his desk. Grandma says that people who use three names are puttin’ on airs, but I don’t think Frank has any airs to put on. He’s short, and bald, and round, and looks like Mr. Potato Head without the tiny black hat, so I think Fat Bald Detective every time I look at him.
“I don’t remember,” I say.
He keeps asking me what happened that day and I keep telling him I don’t remember. We’ve played this little game for almost four months now. I was ten when we started. I’m a whole different age now. I’ve had a birthday and a summer break since then. I even moved up a grade in school. Detective Chase Cooper on Criminal Investigative Division: Chicago can solve a case in an hour.