The Girl Next Door (29 page)

“I think so.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about any of this earlier?” he asked, shoving his hair back again.

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“What’s complicated?”

I took a deep breath, then said, “Because one of the suspects is that girl’s father. He owns the State Street Grill.” I jerked my thumb in the direction of Nikki’s hospital room. “And the other is Gary Jackman.”

“Who’s Gary Jackman?”

“He’s the
Newark Eagle-Examiner’
s publisher.”

“When you say publisher, you mean, like,
the
publisher?”

I nodded.

“Ah,” he said. “Well, I can see how that would make your life complicated. But it doesn’t affect mine one bit. Suspects are suspects. How do these guys know each other?”

“Well, I haven’t quite figured that out yet. But I saw them chatting at Nancy’s wake. Then I saw them sharing a table at the diner, talking about something pretty intensely. And they were sitting near each other again at the funeral this morning.”

He frowned. “That’s a start, I guess. Maybe when we pull phone records, bank accounts, and e-mails, we’ll start to see more. How soon do you think you can get these hypothetical witnesses in line?”

“Hopefully within the next six hours,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. Then before departing, he added: “Give me a call if you need any help. And keep your eyes open when you’re on the sidewalk.”

*   *   *

In my younger, dumber days, I might have just puttered over to the Alfaros’ house, knocked on the door, and relied on a well-considered logical argument—make that: logical
to me
argument—to carry the day, as if I were trying to win a Lincoln-Douglass-style debate at Millburn High School. I blame my WASP upbringing for the overreliance on things like logic and my underappreciation for, well, everything else.

But one of the things I had (finally) learned is the importance of having friends whose worldview was substantially different from my own. For all the politically correct halfwits who defined “diversity” in terms of skin color or ethnicity—things that might just be window dressing, depending on the individual—the real value in diversity is having people around who think differently from you, friends who can tell you when your logical is someone else’s crazy.

In this case, I needed a friend who could tell me how to overcome a natural suspicion of the police. And that friend was Reginald “Tee” Jamison.

I had written a story about Tee—a burgeoning T-shirt entrepreneur, hence the nickname “Tee”—a few years back. And we had become buddies, for however unlikely we looked together. Tee is about five foot ten, 250 pounds, with lots of braids, tattoos, and muscles. If you put him in tony downtown Millburn, he’d be the kind of black guy who would make white people subtly reach for the car door lock button.

What they didn’t know is that while he came packaged as a thug—in dress, speech, and manner—he had the soul of an artist and the emotional sensitivity of a woman in her third trimester. I once caught him in the back of his shop with a tissue in one hand and a Nicholas Sparks book in the other.

Having lost his cell number, which was stored in my other phone, I Googled the number for his T-shirt shop and dialed it.

“Yeah,” he said, which is how he always answered any phone, home, work, or cell.

“Hey, Tee, it’s Carter.”

“How come your name didn’t pop up on my caller ID? I almost didn’t answer it. You got a different number or something?”

“No, I’ve gone into business as a major dope dealer, so now I use burners.”

“You see that on
The Wire
or something? Because you know it don’t work that way no more.”

Tee is constantly explaining the ways of the hood to me. He sees it as his duty to educate the ignorant. Tee is a strictly legitimate businessman, but he remains familiar with the methodologies of those who aren’t.

“I’ll make a note of it,” I said. “In the meantime, I need your input on something.”

“Go.”

“Okay, where to start. So … in your neighborhood, people don’t like the police that much…”

“Is that so?” Tee said, making himself sound like a white New Englander with a head cold. “This is the first I’m hearing of this. Somebody ought to write a stern letter and put those unruly Negroes in line.”

“Nah, we don’t write letters about You People anymore. We call in the National Guard and tell them you’ve just looted a liquor store.”

I was glad the waiting room was empty. Someone overhearing this conversation might take it just slightly the wrong way.

“Good point,” he said, returning to his usual voice. “Anyway, go on.”

“Okay, now let’s just say there was a circumstance where you needed someone in your neighborhood to cooperate with the police. What would you do?”

“I wouldn’t do nothing. Didn’t I tell you about the time—”

“Yes, but let’s not get into that,” I interrupted. Police were constantly harassing Tee on account of his fitting a certain profile. Tee kept his friends close and his lawyers closer.

“Let’s just say that despite your past experiences, you really needed someone to cooperate with the cops,” I continued. “How would you convince them?”

“I’m not sure you could. People hear you talk to the police around here, they start calling you a snitch and the word gets out. And you’re pretty much done, you know what I’m saying?”

“Okay, but let’s say you really,
really
needed someone to talk to the cops. Like, your life and livelihood were at stake. What would you do?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” he said.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Money.”

“As in reward money?”

“Yeah. You got to make sure a brother gets paid,” Tee said. “When the police are coming with money, it ain’t just about what you can do for them no more. It’s about what they can do for you. As long as you’re ratting out someone who wasn’t no good anyway? If people hear you got paid, they okay with it. They figure you probably got some bills or you need it for, like, a family situation, you know what I’m saying?”

Reward money. Owen had mentioned it early on, and I had completely forgotten about it.

“What about with Hispanic people who might be concerned about their immigration status?” I asked.

“Money looks just as green to Spanish people as it do to everyone else,” Tee pointed out. “You just need to, you know, position it in the right way.”

“And how’s that?”

“Like it ain’t coming from someone like you. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“I’m not saying black folks and Spanish people get along great or nothing. But they see someone like me, they’re gonna know it ain’t no trick, you know what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, yeah. So, uh, what are you up to this afternoon anyway?”

“I’m already grabbing my car keys,” he said. “Where are we going?”

I gave him the address on Ridge Avenue, then said, “But cool down for just a bit. I may need a little more time to round up all the necessary elements. Can you give me a half hour?”

“This ain’t one of those things where you really mean an hour, but you’re telling the black guy a half hour because you figure I’ll just be late anyway. Is it? Because I’m on to that trick.”

“No. A half hour. I mean it.”

“Okay,” he said. “See you then.”

*   *   *

My iPhone buzzed at me just as I hung up, telling me I had another e-mail from Lunky. But I didn’t have time just now to hear about why Nathan Zuckerman wasn’t
really
Philip Roth’s alter ego.

I had to assemble my team to approach the Alfaros. First, I rang Owen, asking him if he could quickly hustle some reward money from his bosses. He asked for fifteen minutes to get the proper approvals.

Then I called Tommy, giving him a brief rundown of all that had occurred—laying heavy on the part that Jackman would be in handcuffs by the end of the day—and telling him his translation skills were needed. I also told him if he helped me, I’d give him two tickets to a Broadway show of his choosing. I expected griping and moaning about being under orders from Jackman and all that. But he readily agreed. Tommy is a sucker for Broadway.

With my Alfaro Attack Team assembled, I turned my attention to the other critical piece: Jim McNabb. Judging that he had been allowed enough time to eat his share of potato salad and clear out from Nancy’s place, I called his cell phone. We exchanged greetings, and then I got to the point.

“Jim, you in a place where you can talk for a second or two?”

“Yeah, sure. I’m in the car. What’s up?”

“Well, I didn’t want to tell you about this at the funeral, but someone tried to have me run over last night.”

“Oh yeah? No kidding!” he said, sounding more excited than concerned.

I should not have been surprised this would have piqued Big Jimmy’s easily addled curiosity. So I gave him a full accounting of the previous evening, Nikki’s injuries, our trip to the hospital, and the visit from Detective Owen Smiley.

“So the cops are in on it, huh?” McNabb said, when I was through.

“They are now, yeah.”

“And that girl said it was a Cadillac Escalade?”

“Fancy killer, huh?”

“Yeah, real high class, this guy,” he chortled. “So what are the cops going to do?”

“I think they’re getting ready to make some arrests,” I said. “And it’s not just Jackman. There might be another guy involved. It looks like they both might have had a reason to want Nancy eliminated.”

“Yeah? Really? Who’s the other guy?”

“Gus Papadopolous. He owns a diner in Bloomfield. Ever heard of him?”

“No. How did he help Jackman?”

“I don’t know. It just seems like Jackman didn’t act alone, and I think Papadopolous might be the XFactor.”

I had reached my Malibu, still waiting for me faithfully in the parking garage, and started the engine.

“Jim, this thing has gotten … Well, it’s always been serious. But now it’s getting really serious. I know we said ‘off the record,’ and I intend to honor that as far as the newspaper is concerned. But this is a lot bigger than the newspaper, and it’s a lot bigger than you getting some heat with your board. At some point, we stop being a reporter and a source, and we start being responsible citizens with a duty to perform under the law. We’re talking murder charges, here.”

“You really think they’re ready to press charges?”

“Well, yeah … If I can establish that Jackman made those threats. I didn’t tell the cop about you by name, but I’m not going to be able to keep a lid on this forever. The cop told me the threats might be the key to the case.”

I had pulled out of the parking garage into daylight, turning back in the direction of Ridge Avenue.

“Yeah. Yeah, I see that,” he said, and I felt some relief. Logical arguments didn’t work with everyone, but they did work with guys like Jim McNabb.

“Look, I still want to be as sensitive as I can to your needs here. So let’s do it like this: you give me the name of that bar, and I’ll get a bartender who will be willing to tell the cops what he overheard. Then the cops will come looking for you. But in the meantime, you can lawyer up a bit. Your lawyers can insist that the cops only question you on very specific areas—basically, confirming what the bartender has already said. That way, the parts of your conversation with Jackman you’d rather not be known stay unknown. You follow me?”

I pulled onto Broad Street, which was getting sluggish with mid-afternoon traffic. I could hear McNabb breathing through the phone, so I knew I hadn’t lost the call. But I also knew I hadn’t won him over just yet. If I really needed to, I would threaten to give his name to the cops. He would know as well as I did the prosecutor’s office would hit him with a subpoena, and that would be the end of it. But I didn’t want to have to haul out that stick just yet. I wanted to give him a few more nibbles at what was, relatively speaking, a carrot.

“Jim, I need the name of that bar,” I said.

More breathing followed a sigh that had the full force of his gut behind it.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Look, let me take you there. I’d still rather handle this as quietly as possible. I don’t want you mucking around, making a lot of noise. I’m pretty sure the bartender who was there that night is working again tonight. How about you meet me after work and we’ll go there together?”

“Sure. That sounds fair.”

“Five o’clock okay?”

I thought about my date with the Marino sisters and their supersecret document, whatever it was.

“Better make it six,” I said. “I’ve got something else before that.”

“Okay. Six o’clock. You sure about all this? Them charging Jackman and everything? I can’t be sticking my neck out if they’re not charging him.”

“Yeah, Jim, I’m sure. Just relax.”

Soon, I hoped, we would all be able to relax.

The brick-throwing had been pure improvisation. He happened to have a few bricks rumbling around in the back of his SUV, left over from a landscaping project. He always kept twine in his glove compartment. The idea developed from there.

He debated whether to even bother but eventually decided it couldn’t do any harm. It might have been the final piece to convince Carter Ross to back off. What said you were dealing with an old-school tough guy—the kind who wouldn’t be afraid to follow through on his threats—better than a brick through the window?

He should have known better. Ross just didn’t scare that easily. Seeing Ross at the funeral—as apparently resolute as ever—made that altogether too obvious. This was the one reporter who wouldn’t quit until he was in the grave.

It was finally time to make arrangements for that. His first task was to find a place. He had a few spots in mind and the second one he scouted turned out to suit his needs. It was deep in the swampy reaches of the Jersey Meadowlands, the kind of spot where the mob had been stashing bodies for decades.

His next task was to retrieve his weapon. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives once estimated 87 guns a day are “lost” by gun shops—or stolen from them—putting an estimated 31,755 untraceable guns on the street every year.