The Girl Next Door (11 page)

Of course, the details only mattered so much. The main point was that it was now undeniable: Nancy Marino’s death was no accident.

Unwitting hit-and-run drivers don’t stalk their prey for days on end, wait patiently down the block and then accelerate when someone gets out of her car. This was a homicide, as cold and simple as if someone had brought a gun to her ear and pulled the trigger. This weapon just happened to take unleaded gasoline.

Eventually, Tommy started asking Mrs. Alfaro some follow-up questions, providing me the short version of the answers. No, she never got much of a look at the driver. No, she didn’t catch the license plate. No, she couldn’t say for sure the make and model of the SUV. No, she had nothing else to add to her story. She had told us everything she remembered.

When we were done, I thanked the Alfaros for their hospitality and for their willingness to talk, reiterating my promise not to go to the police or print their names in the newspaper. Soon I was following Tommy back down the front steps to our cars. It was getting toward the middle part of a hot summer afternoon, but it felt like Antarctica in my guts.

“So what now?” Tommy asked as we reached the sidewalk.

“I don’t know exactly. At risk of stating the obvious, someone killed this woman and the Bloomfield police sure won’t be able to figure out who or why.”

“And you can?”

“Well, I certainly have to try. This may sound strange, but I feel like I owe it to Nancy. She was one of the good guys. And who am I as a newspaper reporter if I don’t look out for the good guys? Besides, I’ve gotten to like her. And whether I knew her or not, she was a colleague.”

“It would be a hell of a good story, too,” Tommy added.

“Well, yeah, and there’s that,” I conceded.

“Can I do anything?”

“No, no. I got this,” I said, knowing it would only make Tommy more eager to help. “You have your own reporting to do.”

“Yeah, but it’s just some stupid city council stuff. I can make time for something like this.”

“I don’t know,” I said, setting the hook a little more. “If Tina found out…”

“Tina doesn’t need to know anything about this,” he assured me. “Come on. You know you can’t do this all by yourself.”

“Well, okay,” I said, smiling inwardly as I thought about what task my newly recruited assistant should tackle.

Nancy’s sister obviously knew something. But after a quick glance at my phone—no missed calls from the 510 area code—I decided I could continue playing it cool and let her come to me.

In the meantime, I had to learn more about Nancy Marino. Because while I could fake my way through her obituary, that didn’t mean I really knew her. Sure, she seemed like a reliable newspaper deliverer and could apparently keep a lunch order straight. But it was also entirely possible Nancy Marino was a hopelessly addicted gambler, a hundred grand in debt to a bookie who finally lost his patience.

Was it likely? No. But put in enough years as a journalist, exploring life on the margins of society, and you start to realize how cunning humankind can be. The gentle Little League coach turns out to be a vicious mobster. The humble parish priest is an embezzler. The prim kindergarten teacher has a raunchy Internet site. It happens.

I’m not saying I assume the worst about people. But it also doesn’t make sense to assume the best. That’s what being a reporter teaches you: don’t assume.

“Hello?” Tommy said, pantomiming like he was knocking on a door. “Anyone home?”

“Sorry. How about you head back to the office and see what kind of paper you can find on Nancy Marino,” I said. “Pull her mortgage, search the court filings, look for liens against her house—the usual.”

“Okay.”

“Oh, and if you bump into Tina, remember: you didn’t see me, you aren’t working on this, you don’t even know me. I’m supposed to be off chasing a bear in Newark.”

“Oh,” he said, as if this made perfect sense. “So what’s your plan while I’m doing all the boring work?”

“I’m heading to the restaurant where Nancy worked and asking some questions. Call me if you learn anything interesting.”

“You, too,” he replied and we parted ways.

I climbed into the Malibu, the interior of which was only slightly cooler than the surface of the sun. The Malibu’s air-conditioning may once have worked well, but that was many years and several owners ago. So it was still sputtering lukewarm air when I reached the end of my two-mile-long journey to the State Street Grill.

The restaurant just in from the corner of Bloomfield Avenue and State Street used to be one of those prototypically scuzzy/wonderful Jersey diners, named after its original proprietor—Willy? Henry? Something ending in a
y
—until the current owners decided the best way to renovate was with a wrecking ball. They tore down the old diner and in its place raised the State Street Grill, an attractive stucco-faced building with Art Deco metal awnings and a hip, retro look.

I had been to the new place a couple of times since moving to Bloomfield two years earlier. So I knew that while it looked the part of the modern eatery—and had gone somewhat upscale as compared to its greasy spoon days—it was still a Jersey diner in its soul, with a twenty-four-page menu, neon signage, and a keepin’-it-real vibe. Visit during a busy lunchtime, and you’ll see an America the Founding Fathers could only have barely imagined, with people of every different hue and ancestry dining next to each other. Old Italian men. Young Hispanic families. Blacks and whites and ambiguously browns.

I entered and was immediately greeted by the hostess, whom I recognized from my previous visits. I’m also pretty sure I had seen her at Nancy’s wake the day before. She was in her late twenties and attractive in that way that hostesses tend to be, with dark hair, green eyes, and nice curves, all put together in a neat, medium-sized package. Her nose announced her Greek heritage, but her accent was all Jersey. So when she asked me if I wanted to sit at the “bar,” it came out sounding like “baw.”

“Actually, I’m not here to eat today,” I said. “My name is Carter Ross. I’m a reporter with the
Eagle-Examiner,
and I’m working on a story about Nancy Marino.”

As soon as I said the name, the hostess went stiff, as if she was reliving the shock of Nancy’s death. She took a moment to collect herself, then motioned to one of her colleagues.

“Jen, could you cover for me? I need to talk to this reporter,” she said, then turned in my direction. “Come with me, please.”

*   *   *

I hurried to keep up as the hostess walked briskly toward the side of the restaurant, through the kitchen and toward a wooden door, which she held open for me. We walked into a small office decorated with sports memorabilia, pictures of the Parthenon, and posters of women eating gyros.

“I’m sorry, this is still so weird, you know?” she said, closing the door behind me. “My family owns this diner, and Nancy had been working here since I was a kid. She was like my older sister. I can’t believe what happened.”

We made eye contact and I found myself momentarily swept into a sea of green iris. In that instant, something clicked between us. And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t merely my overly active male imagination, because she was gazing back at me with unusual intensity. Call it pheromones or whatever, but sometimes you just know you like someone, and it comes with more than an inkling that the sentiment is returned. There were future possibilities between us, even if the current circumstances would not allow it.

After a pause—more pleasant than awkward—she recovered and walked over to the desk, where she began picking through a pile of invoices, order forms, and time schedules.

“Did you see the story about her in the paper today? We got it here somewhere,” she said.

“Yeah, I saw it.” Then added with perhaps false modesty: “I wrote it.”

“You did?”

I had long since reconciled myself to the extent to which readers ignored bylines. Even people who knew me—and knew where I worked—would come up to me and start telling me about my own stories. No one ever bothered to read the first three words: “By Carter Ross.”

She found my story, which had been tucked in the upper-right-hand corner of that day’s obituary page. I walked toward her and pointed to my name at the top of it.

“That’s me,” I said.

She studied it, seemingly in some kind of trance.

“So that’s my name. What’s yours?” I prompted.

“I’m so sorry, I’m just out of it today. I’m Nicola Papadopolous. But call me Nikki.”

“Hi, Nikki, nice to meet you. Do you mind if we sit down and talk?”

“Yeah, sorry, yeah, have a seat,” she said, sitting behind the desk while pointing to the chair on the other side. “This whole thing is just, like, wow. It’s thrown me for a loop, you know?”

“I understand,” I assured her.

She nodded, and I had a brief debate with myself about how much to tell my new friend, Nikki. Past mistakes had taught me to be cautious with information when you don’t know quite who you’re dealing with. Even people who seem benign—or at least neutral—could turn out to be malevolent. And you never want to give those malevolent types too much notice about what you’re up to.

But in this case my gut—and maybe those aforementioned pheromones—told me Nikki was safe. At a certain point, a reporter has to decide to trust someone. It might as well be the pretty Greek girl.

“So, Nikki, this is going to be hard for you to hear, but I think Nancy was murdered.”

The look on Nikki’s face confirmed her guilelessness. She was registering the kind of authentic surprise—slack jaw, stunned mouth, astonished eyes—no one would have been able to fake.

“That hit and run was no accident,” I continued. “I talked to a reliable eyewitness who told me a black SUV appeared to have been following Nancy for several days. It was that same black SUV that ran her over.”

Nikki was shaking her head.

“But I don’t … Nancy was like … She was like the nicest person in the world. Who would do that to her?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Did she mention being worried about anything? Fearful of anyone? Was she having any problems that she told you about?”

“No,” Nikki said, thought about it for a moment, then added more definitively, “I mean no.”

“What about boyfriends? Was she having trouble with any guys?”

“No. Definitely not. She didn’t … I’m not saying she was a dyke or anything. But I’ve known Nancy—sorry, I knew Nancy—for, like, twenty years, and she never had a serious boyfriend. She never even talked about guys like that. And that’s kind of different, you know? I mean, say a good-looking guy like you walks into the restaurant.”

I tried desperately not to blush as Nikki continued:

“All the other waitresses would be like, ‘Oh, check out Mr. Handsome at Table 17 … I got myself a stud,’ stuff like that. It’s just what we do to pass time, you know?”

“Sure,” I said, as if I had long experience in waitress small talk.

“Well, Nancy wasn’t like that. It’s like she didn’t notice or didn’t care. I mean, she was nice to good-looking guys, but she was nice to ugly old ladies, too, you know?”

“Got it. Okay, not boyfriends. So what about after work? What did she do after work?”

“Nancy? My God, I think all she
did
was work. She got up to deliver papers at, like … I don’t know, but it was early. Then she was here doing the seven-to-three shift. She did the busy part of breakfast
and
lunch. Then she did, I don’t know, church stuff. Family stuff. Sometimes she would go to meetings at night for her other job.”

“What kind of meetings?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess they were like union meetings or something. It was all about the newspaper.”

It made sense a union shop steward would have some nighttime obligations, probably ones that stretched close to midnight. Nancy must have been an expert in sleep deprivation.

“Did you guys ever hang out after work or anything?” I asked.

“No. I mean, we were close, but Nancy kind of—”

Nikki was interrupted by the office door swinging open with enough force that the resulting wind scattered some of the papers on the desk. A round-faced, balding Greek man stormed in behind it, his fists clenching tightly enough that I could see his forearm muscles tensing where his rolled-up shirtsleeves cut off.

And he looked angry enough to shoot fire out his nose.

*   *   *

In my (albeit limited) experience with Greek women, they are masters at manipulating the tempers of their menfolk, stoking them or soothing them as the situation warrants. And that is what Nikki immediately, and perhaps instinctively, began doing with her father: turning on the charm in an effort to pacify him.

“Babba!” she said brightly, putting the accent on the second “ba.” She gave him the kind of heart-melting smile that Daddy’s Little Girls have been using to wrap their fathers around their fingers for eons.

But Babba wasn’t buying it this time.

“What’s going on here?” he asked angrily, in a thick Greek accent slanted with the sound of accusation. He shot glances back and forth between us. I knew I had seen the man before, though I was having a tough time placing where.

Then a small piece of his comb-over broke loose from his bald head and started dancing in the air, and it hit me: he was the lopsided unicorn I had seen chatting up Jackman at Nancy’s wake, the one Jackman had told to get lost. And now he was looking like he wanted to gore me with his hair horn.

“Babba, this is Carter Ross from the—”

I was standing up to introduce myself, but Nikki’s father was having none of it.

“I don’t want you talking to no newspaper reporter,” he interrupted. Nikki had never gotten the chance to say I was a reporter. Somehow, Babba already knew.

“But, Babba, we were—”

“It’s time for you to go,” he said, turning toward me, his fists still balled. I could tell he was considering whether to grab me by the arm and physically throw me out of his restaurant. I’m not the most menacing-looking guy in the world, but I’m just broad-chested enough that most guys think twice about trying to manhandle me. Besides, I was a head taller and at least twenty years younger than Babba. It wouldn’t have been a fair fight.