The Girl Next Door (13 page)

“And what position was that?”

“That they shouldn’t settle.”

“Settle what?”

“I’m not sure,” Jeanne said. “But she said the union couldn’t afford to give in, because if they did, management would assume it could do anything it wanted to them. She felt if the union wavered at all, it would lose any leverage it had in the future.”

“Okay. So who would have disagreed with her?”

“Maybe people in the union. Or maybe management. She could be very strident, in her own way. And as a shop steward, she would have been seen as … a leader. People were drawn to my sister. She was very smart.”

There was another pause, so I filled it with: “I know she was.”

“So if my sister felt one way, a lot of other people would have felt the same way. She would have convinced them of it. And if the way she felt was … counter to what other people felt…”

She let that statement linger for a second.

“She might have been seen as … getting in the way of what they wanted,” Jeanne finished.

“So,” I said, trying to straighten out all the left turns. “What you’re suggesting is that perhaps Nancy was seen as an impediment in the negotiations, so someone wanted to get rid of her?”

“It seems very stark when you put it that way…”

“So how would you put it?”

She ducked and swayed, the unheard music—her constant soundtrack—quickening by a beat or two. Then she made the effort to hold herself very still.

“My husband was out here on business not long before Nancy was killed,” Jeanne said. “He saw her at my mother’s house. And you know what she told him? She said, ‘If these talks get any rougher, we’re going to have to start bringing guns to the table.’”

As if summoned, we were soon being approached by a man who was apparently Jeanne’s husband, a large, pale doughy guy I recognized as one of the men who helped break up the funeral home fight between Jeanne and Anne. He wore square glasses that reminded me a bit of safety goggles, a bushy mustache, and a checkered button-down short-sleeve shirt that stretched tightly over a belly that had gone paunchy years ago. I had him pegged as an engineer before he even opened his mouth.

“Hon, dontchya thinkya had enough now?” he said with an accent that came from either Wisconsin or Minnesota.

“Mr. Ross, this is my husband, Jerry Nygard,” Jeanne said.

“Nice to meet you,” I said, but didn’t stand up or acknowledge him further, because he wasn’t even looking at me.

“Hon, why dontchya come up to the room and have a Coke with me.”

“I don’t
want
a Coke,” she said testily.

“Jeannie…” he said, raising his voice as much as a guy from Minnesota ever would in front of a stranger like me. She ignored him.

“So, Mr. Ross, do you intend to investigate my sister’s death?”

She was a little too eager. And in keeping with my hard-to-get strategy, I wanted her to stay that way. Besides, she didn’t seem like the type who needed to be told there really
were
monsters under the bed. She imagined enough of them on her own. So I summoned my best nonchalant air.

“I’ll look into it a little,” I said. “I don’t want to make any promises. I can’t charge around tossing out allegations on a hunch.”

“Yes, of course. I can understand your need to be … prudent.”

“Yes, prudent,” I said, even though I was the kind of reporter who usually stayed at least ten highway exits away from prudent.

“Thank you,” she said, and started to rise slowly from her seat.

“I’ll see you at the funeral on Thursday,” I said.

She nodded slightly. She really did look quite spent. Maybe Jerry was right. Maybe she did need a Coke.

Still, she sloughed off any aid from her husband as she made her way toward the elevator. Jerry waited until she had rounded the corner, then suddenly the dorky, mild-mannered husband was standing over me, in an apparent attempt to be intimidating.

“Back off,” he said sharply. “This family has been through enough.”

“Mr. Nygard, I—”

“Just back off,” he hissed again. “This doesn’t concern you.”

I was so surprised by the sudden show of aggression from the mild-mannered engineer, I just sat there as he stalked off. There was suddenly yet another man who didn’t like the newspaper reporter.

*   *   *

As much as I might have enjoyed spending more time in the La Quinta’s lobby—it was newly refurbished, after all—I returned to my car and nudged it back onto Route 3, putting myself on a course to visit IFIW—Local 117 Executive Director Jim McNabb in his downtown Newark office.

Once I had gotten myself up to the speed of the surrounding traffic—only slightly slower than the Daytona 500 and just as likely to use a turn signal—I put in a call to Buster Hays, the one reporter at the paper who would likely know about the
Eagle-Examiner’
s ongoing labor negotiations with Local 117.

Buster was the kind of reporter who knew stuff about things like that, in the way that he knew stuff about more or less everything. He had been at our paper so long, I’m pretty sure he started when Johannes Gutenberg was the press foreman. Through his many, many, many years of employment, Buster had developed the kind of institutional knowledge that made him a go-to guy on all happenings at the nest.

I certainly don’t like him, inasmuch as I consider him an archaic, cantankerous, condescending pain in the ass. He also doesn’t like me, inasmuch as he considers me a snot-nosed, spoiled, overeducated pretty boy. Other than that, we get along great.

Still, I think if you strapped us down, dosed us with all the surplus truth serum left over from every Cold War–era spy movie ever made, and asked us what we thought about the other, we might—after several hours of interrogation, water-boarding, and forced viewings of
America’s Next Top Model
—actually admit to having respect for each other.

He answered the phone by saying “Hays.”

“Buster, it’s Carter.”

“What do you want?” he said. Buster grew up in da Bronx—and had the accent and attitude to prove it—so it came out sounding like “whaddauwant?”

“How much do you know about our negotiations with the International Federation of Information Workers?”

“Why do you care, Ivy?”

I had repeatedly tried to convince Hays that my alma mater, Amherst, was not part of the Ivy League. Those efforts had been a failure.

“Let’s just call it idle curiosity for right now,” I said.

“Fine. How much does an Ivy boy like you know about labor law?”

“Umm…”

“Right, okay, here goes,” he said, inhaling. Hays pretended otherwise, but nothing gave him more pleasure than lecturing me on one of the (many) areas where his knowledge outstripped my own. “There’s a key distinction in labor law between independent contractors and employees. If you’re an independent contractor, an employer doesn’t have to do squat for you, because you don’t technically work for them. So there’s no benefits, no worker’s comp, no paid holidays, no stuff like that. And independent contractors can’t unionize. That’s why a lot of newspapers use independent contractors to deliver their papers. It saves a lot of headaches.”

“Okay,” I said, merging onto Route 21 and following the highway as it snaked alongside the Passaic River.

“Now, a long time ago, there were two papers in this town, and the
Eagle-Examiner
was locked in a battle for survival with the
Newark Express
,” Hays continued. “We were using independent contractors to deliver our paper, which meant the contractors could actually deliver both papers—the
Eagle-Examiner
and the
Express
. Well, the
Eagle-Examiner
had gained a small advantage in market share and was really trying to turn the screws on the
Express
, so it told its carriers, ‘We don’t want you doing both, you’ve got to pick,’ thinking that most carriers would pick the
Eagle-Examiner
. And they did. Hang on, I got another call.”

Hays put me on hold. I had accelerated to sixty-five miles an hour, which meant I was puttering in the right lane, being passed as if I were motionless by traffic doing eighty.

“Where was I?” Hays asked.

“The independent contractors were only delivering the
Eagle-Examiner,
” I prompted him.

“Oh, right. Well, it all seemed to be working out pretty well for the
Eagle-Examiner,
but then the IRS stepped in and said, ‘Wait a second, if you’ve told them what they can and can’t deliver, they aren’t independent contractors anymore. They’re employees and you’ve got to start treating them that way.’ Well, once they became employees, they were no dummies. They organized lickety-split. You still with me?”

“Got it. So they formed a union,” I said, having hit the Newark border and the first of a series of traffic lights.

“Yep, and the
Eagle-Examiner
hasn’t been happy about it since, because once a union gets formed in this state, good luck getting rid of it,” Hays said. “It’s become a real problem for Mother Eagle, a huge problem. When you look at some of our other unions, we’ve got maybe fifty guys running the presses that print this paper, and maybe a hundred guys driving the trucks that distribute this paper. I’m making these numbers up, but you get the point—if push really came to shove and they went on strike, we could replace them.

“But the carriers? Fuhgeddaboutit. You’re talking about more than a thousand people—men and women, boys and girls—all over the state delivering this paper. Each of them knows their route and their neighborhood like the back of their hand. And if they decided to go on strike, it would literally shut the paper down because there’s no way we could find enough people and be able to train them to do those routes. The subscribers would be getting their morning papers at five in the afternoon.”

“So they got us by the short hairs,” I said.

“Yeah, and they know it. In the early days, they threatened to strike pretty much every time their contract came up. So sometime in the late nineties, the publisher got tired of dealing with it. He signed them to a twenty-year contract.”

“
Twenty years?
I’ve never heard of that. I thought most collective bargaining agreements were three or, at most, five years.”

“Yeah, no one else had heard of anything like that, either. But, remember, this was the late nineties. Owning a big paper like the
Eagle-Examiner
was still a license to print money. So the publisher figured it was no big thing giving a few paperboys a sweetheart deal. But as the years went on and those guaranteed raises kept kicking in, suddenly we were grossly overpaying our carriers. At other places, carriers are independent contractors, driving their own cars, paying for their own gas, not making much more than minimum wage. Here they’re employees making I-don’t-know-how-much, plus we reimburse them for miles. It’s killing us, and every publisher since has wanted to strangle the publisher who signed that deal. It’s gotten to be a real albatross.”

“So what’s going on with the negotiations right now?”

“Well, they don’t exactly give me a seat at the table, Ivy,” Buster said. “But from what I’m told, they’re stuck.”

“Stuck?”

“Yeah, stuck. Normally management coerces concessions by promising not to furlough people or lay them off. But you can’t furlough people you need 365 days a year, and you can’t lay them off, either. So management has been going with their hat in their hand, saying they won’t survive unless they get givebacks on their contract—basically, pay cuts instead of pay raises. And the union has been telling ’em where to shove it.”

“You heard anything about a shop steward at Local 117 being particularly difficult?” I asked. “Maybe she was getting in the way of progress at the table?”

“Oh, I don’t get that deep with it. But if you really want to know, call Jim McNabb. He’s always looking to get cuddly with another
Eagle-Examiner
reporter.”

“That’s actually where I’m heading right now,” I said.

“Good,” Hays said. “He’ll try to spin you a little. But his information is reliable. Once you take off the spin, what you’re left with is usually pretty good.”

*   *   *

The headquarters of the International Federation of Information Workers–Local 117 were housed at 744 Broad Street, also known as the National Newark Building. Of the two skyscrapers that dominate the Newark skyline—744 Broad and the Prudential Building—744 is the one that
doesn’t
look like an architecturally bereft marshmallow.

I found parking in a garage and made my way inside. Having seen on the directory that the IFIW’s offices were located on the twentieth floor, I announced myself at security in the lobby. By the time I made the elevator ride up and walked through a pair of smoked-glass doors with the IFIW logo stenciled on them, Jim McNabb was waiting to greet me at the front desk. He was wearing tan slacks, a golf shirt, and a wide smile.

“Carter Ross!” He practically shouted, like I was there to shower him with winning lottery tickets.

“Hiya, Jim,” I said, knowing his overly chummy welcome was merely the first part of his act. I actually have no problem with sources who try to spin me. For a guy like McNabb, it’s part of the job—just like it’s my job to have done enough homework to see through it.

“Let’s go back to my office,” he said, then turned to the receptionist and added, “Janet, hold my calls. Mr. Ross is a very important reporter for the
Eagle-Examiner
and I don’t want any interruptions.”

He led Mr. Ross the Very Important Reporter through a maze of cubicles and hallways. I could only imagine that the IFIW’s hundred thousand members generated no small amount of paperwork, all of which funneled to these desks. McNabb was overweight, but he was more thick than fat. So he was still able to walk fast, and at times all I could see was his bushy silver head peeking above one of the partition walls.

“We call this the nerve center,” Jim said. “We’re protecting the rights of hardworking New Jerseyans all across the state, right here in this office.”