The Girl Next Door (30 page)

He didn’t know what happened to the other 31,754 untraceable guns from last year. But he knew one of them had ended up in his possession: a Smith & Wesson M&P Compact .357 Sig, billed by the shady thug who sold it to him as a perfect firearm for personal protection and concealed carry. When he bought it, he hadn’t known what he would even use it for. But he figured it would be nice to have a little insurance, just in case.

Now it was time to cash in the policy. After the funeral, he drove home and clambered up to his attic, back to the medium-sized box in the corner labeled “Dad Sentimental” that he knew neither his wife nor children would ever disturb. He slit open the tape, pulled out some dusty photo frames and nicked award plaques he no longer needed, until he found the wad of old T-shirts he had used as a swaddle for the gun.

His old hunting knife—long and cruel and still sharp—had been wrapped in the same bundle, still in its sheath. He took that out as well, just in case, then continued digging until he found a box of bullets. The same thug who sold him the gun told him these rounds would have “the stopping power” he needed.

That assurance came back to him now, and he hoped it was true. He needed Carter Ross stopped.

CHAPTER 8

The call from Peter Davidson of the National Labor Relations Board came in just as I was arriving at the Alfaro residence. I slid my notebook out of one pocket and a pen out of the other as we went through the necessary exchange of hellos and gee-it’s-hots.

“So what can the National Labor Relations Board do for you today?” he asked in a friendly tone.

“Well, I understand you guys are investigating a case involving Nancy Marino.”

“What makes you think that?”

Oh great. It was going to be one of
those
interviews.

“Because you recently paid a visit to one of her employers, Gus Papadopolous at the State Street Grill in Bloomfield.”

“I see. Can I ask what your interest is?”

“I’m a … freelance journalist,” I said, which sounded strange coming out of my mouth after years of identifying myself as being a proud representative of the
Eagle-Examiner
. “I’m working on a story about Ms. Marino.”

“Okay,” he replied, without adding more

“What can you tell me about the case?”

“Not much at this point. We’re still waiting for certain elements.”

“What elements?”

“At this point, I’d really rather not say.”

“Does it involve Mr. Papadopolous or a fellow by the name of Gary Jackman, by any chance? Or someone else from the
Newark Eagle-Examiner
?”

“Again, I’d rather not say.”

“Why not?”

He paused. I watched the weeds outside the Alfaro household waving as a slight wind stirred. It was the first thing resembling a breeze in at least two days.

“Have you ever dealt with the National Labor Relations Board before?” he asked.

“Nope. This is my first dance with you guys.”

“Well, some background: the NLRB was created by Congress to uphold the National Labor Relations Act and see that it’s being properly enforced. We also enforce existing collective bargaining agreements. We’ve really got a fairly narrow mandate and this … this may be something that falls outside our purview.”

“Why is that?”

“I’m not sure I can say.”

“Oh. Can you at least give me some clue here? I don’t want to have to waste your time playing twenty questions.”

As I waited for Davidson to formulate his answer, I watched the white-haired busybody—the one who had warned me about the eee-legal ale-eee-ans living in the red house—walking along with a skittish white poodle, clearly a case of a dog resembling its owner. I wondered if the poodle was wary of nonpapered Chihuahuas.

“This may be something that ultimately involves another agency,” Davidson said at last. “And if that’s the case, I want to be respectful of that agency’s rules and procedures. And, frankly, without looking them up, I don’t even know what they are. But I don’t want to hand them a case that’s been damaged by media attention in some way.”

Another agency? Why, that must mean … Actually, I didn’t have the slightest idea what that meant. I was getting a whole lot of nothing and taking it exactly nowhere.

“Can you tell me what other agency?”

“Not … not without giving you too much of a tip about what’s going on.”

“Can you at least tell me why you threatened to subpoena Gus Papadopolous?”

“Who said I threatened to subpoena Mr. Papadopolous?”

“He did,” I said, leaving out the part that I only knew this because he told his daughter.

“Well … I won’t speak to any specific conversation I did or didn’t have with Mr. Papadopolous or any other witness. But I will say in general that when an employee makes a complaint, I try to investigate all aspects of the employee’s history. I like to get a sense of what kind of person I’m dealing with. It helps me understand where the complaint might be coming from.”

“So Ms. Marino made a complaint?” I said, latching on to the first bit of decent information he had given me. He forced out a dry laugh.

“I probably need to end this phone call,” he said. “I’m not trying to be evasive. I usually cooperate with the media. But in this case, I really just have to be careful about what I say.”

“Okay, do you have to be as careful with what you write down? Is this anything I can FOIA?”

The Freedom of Information Act—the most wonderful piece of legislation enacted by Congress since the First Amendment—had been a friend to me many times over the years.

“I can’t stop you from filing a request, obviously,” Davidson said. “But I have to warn you I would probably deny the request on the grounds that it might be used in an ongoing criminal investigation.”

“Criminal investigation?” I said. “What crime?”

He laughed again.

“You’re good. I really have to stop talking to you. You’re getting way too much out of me. I’m going to end this call now. If the National Labor Relations Board can be of future assistance, please do call again. But I just can’t help you this time. So I’m hanging up now.”

And, sure enough, he did.

Not long after the line went empty, I saw Tee’s boxy Chevy Tahoe roll up behind me. The first part of my attack team was in place. I got out of my car, feeling the heat envelop me, and went over to Tee’s driver’s side.

“I told you the black man could be on time,” he said, as his window rolled down.

“Yeah, you’re a real credit to your race,” I joked. “Mind hanging loose for another second or two? We need to wait for our translator, and I have another phone call or two to make.”

“Yessuh, Mistah Ross, suh,” he said, doing his Sambo impersonation. “You knows I’s a just happy to do whatever you be tellin’ me to do, boss. Whoooweee!”

“That’s a good boy,” I said, playing along. “Now you sit tight, hear?”

“Can I dance fuh yuh now, boss?” I heard him saying as I walked back toward my car. “I’s just love to dance fuh yuh!”

He rolled up his window, and I got back in my tepid air-conditioning and placed a call to Lunky.

“Hi, Mister Ross!” he said, with proper intern enthusiasm.

“Shh. You’re not supposed to be talking to me, remember?”

“Oh yeah, right,” he said, having hushed himself by at least fifty percent.

“Are you doing anything right now?”

“No,” he said glumly.

“You up for more civil disobedience?”

“Sure!”

“I need you to go over to the National Labor Relations Board office,” I said, giving him the address I had copied off Peter Davidson’s card. “File a Freedom of Information Act request for any documents pertaining to a complaint made by Nancy Marino.”

“I’m not sure that’s what Thoreau had in mind when he advocated—”

“Kev, I gotta run,” I said as another call clicked through on my phone. “Just trust me: all those transcendentalists would have been big FOIA fans. They just didn’t live long enough to know it.”

*   *   *

The new caller was Detective Owen Smiley.

“You said fifteen minutes,” I teased. “It’s been at least twenty-four.”

“Yeah, well, what I got is worth waiting for.”

“That’s not what Mrs. Smiley tells me.”

He snorted. “Yeah, I wish. Just wait until you’re married with three kids under the age of five. Even a lady-killer like you will be striking out.”

I didn’t bother informing him I’d struck out plenty of times already, even without kids to blame it on.

“Anyhow,” I said. “What do you have for me?”

“Good news. We get a grant that gives us a certain amount of reward money each year. The chief tells me we’re well under budget so far, and if we don’t use it, we lose it. So he authorized ten large.”

Ten grand was a nice chunk of change for that family—for any family. I thought about the sparseness of the furnishings, the folding chairs, and the disco-era couch. Ten thousand dollars would make them feel like they had hit the lottery. Maybe they could even buy a lawn mower for all that grass in front of their house.

“I’ll have to send your chief a thank-you note,” I said.

“You’ll have to do more than that. If we take a statement from these people, we’ll have to shift Nancy Marino to a homicide in our UCR numbers. We don’t get many of those in lovely Bloomfield, so each one makes a big difference in our annual clearance rate. If I don’t close this one, it’ll mess with our numbers.”

“You’ll close. Don’t worry.”

“Okay, okay. Now, the deal with the reward is the information has to lead to an arrest and conviction. That’s how it works. You be sure to tell these people that.”

“Got it,” I said.

“And I know they don’t want the cops around. But I just might be in the neighborhood should they find ten thousand reasons to have a change of heart. So give me a call if that happens. I want my chief to know he’s not wasting his money.”

Tommy’s car rolled slowly past me and parked two houses down. The final piece of my team was now in place.

“Fair enough,” I said. “Let me go work my magic.”

Except, of course, it wasn’t really my magic I was counting on. I knew it was Tee and Tommy who were going to save this part of the day, if in fact it could be saved.

Tommy was walking up the sidewalk as Tee and I got out of our cars. We congregated in front of the house, and I did the proper introductions. The three of us were, to say the least, ill-matched. There was Tommy, the wispy, nattily dressed Cuban who accessorized his tight-cut shirt and pants with the latest Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses; Tee, the muscle-bound black guy, wearing winter camouflage pants, a black sleeveless shirt that showed off his biceps, and a matching black skullcap, from which his braids sprouted; and me, the tall, well-scrubbed white boy wearing a charcoal gray suit along with the world’s most boring shirt and tie combination.

The Alfaros wouldn’t know what hit them.

“So here’s the deal,” I continued. “The Bloomfield Police have authorized a ten-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the hit-and-run death of Nancy Marino. We need to convince them it’s in their best interest to do what is required to claim this reward.”

“All right. Ten grand. I can work with that,” Tee said, then pointed at me. “Your job is to keep your mouth shut.”

“Agreed,” Tommy said. “Let’s do it.”

We walked up the driveway, three men intent on their mission, ascending the concrete steps with Tommy in the lead. As we were knocking on the door, our attention turned toward the house, we didn’t notice that Felix Alfaro had walked up behind us.

“Hello,” he said.

We turned to see Mr. Alfaro, wearing a T-shirt that said
TICO’S PAINTING
in a script meant to look like brush strokes. Underneath, in a plainer font, it said,
RESIDENTIAL/COMMERCIAL
and
INTERIORS/EXTERIORS.
The entire T-shirt was flecked with paint splatters, and Mr. Alfaro, while smiling at us, looked properly spent from a long day of work. It was around three o’clock. At Tico’s Painting, they probably started at six and quit at two, to spare themselves working during the hottest part of the day.

“Buenos dias,”
Tee said. “My name’s Tee.”

“Buenas tardes,”
Mr. Alfaro replied.

Tee turned to Tommy. “Tell him we just here to talk a little bit about what his missus saw.”

Mr. Alfaro nodded like he understood, but Tommy said the appropriate words in Spanish anyway. Mr. Alfaro said, “Okay.”

Tee began addressing Mr. Alfaro directly: “Look, I’m going to break it down for you real straight. You and me, we ain’t got a lot in common, right?”

Tommy began translating. Tee waited until he stopped, then went on: “But we got one thing we definitely got in common, and that’s that we don’t trust the cops, right? What cops do to my people, I don’t even want to get started. And what cops do to your people ain’t too cool neither, you know what I’m saying?”

Another pause for Tommy to catch up.

“Now, I know he look like a cop”—Tee pointed at me—“and I know he look like he
might
be a cop”—Tee gestured to Tommy—“but I ain’t no cop, you feel me?”

Mr. Alfaro waited for Tommy, then bobbed his head up and down. “Yeah,” he said, grinning. “You no a cop.”

“All right. And I’m telling you they ain’t cops, either,” Tee said. “They newspaper reporters.”

Mr. Alfaro appeared to be growing befuddled about where this was all going. But Tee plowed on.

“So—and here’s where I’m just laying it on the line for you—I want you to know that we don’t care if you got any problems with your green card or nothing, you know what I’m saying? We ain’t here about that, and we ain’t going to let no one near you who cares about that. We’ll protect you and your family. You got my word on that. And this brother’s word is solid.”

Tee pounded his big, meaty chest when he said “solid.” I’m not sure how precisely Tommy was able to put all of what Tee had said into Spanish—a lot of it seemed fairly idiomatic—but Mr. Alfaro was again smiling.

“I show you something,” Mr. Alfaro said, reaching into his back pocket, pulling out a well-worn wallet and producing a small, white piece of paper.