The Nightgown (3 page)

That was how I left the Carteret Rescue Squad a short time later armed with the name Jessica Martin. I knew I couldn’t use it in the newspaper yet – not without better sourcing – but I could at least use it to find her.

And the first place to look was Robert Wood Johnson Hospital. It was true that hospitals couldn’t tell you squat anymore, but there was no gag order on their family or friends, the kind of people who just might be hanging around the emergency waiting room.

I started my search outside, where a few nicotine addicts were sating their cravings, asking each person, “Excuse me, are you here for Jessica Martin?”

Then I moved inside, working slowly around the large, crowded room. If a hospital PR person got wind I was working the waiting room, fits would be thrown, security would be called and a reporter would be expelled. So I kept it quiet.

I was three-quarters of the way through when a dark-skinned Hispanic woman, who was maybe a little younger than me, said, “Yes, I’m her roommate.”

“I’m Carter Ross. I’m working on a story for
The Eagle-Examiner
. What’s your name?”

“Alison Coutinho,” she said, seemingly accepting that the newspaper must do stories on all car accidents and that it wasn’t at all unusual to be approached by a reporter in an emergency room.

“Is Jessica okay?” I asked.

She let her shoulders slump. “Someone from the hospital called and told me Jessie asked for me. But now that I’m here, the nurses won’t tell me anything because I’m not related.”

I somehow resisted the smartass question about how they figured that out. Alison continued: “But they did say I should stick around and give her a ride home, so that must mean she’s going to be released soon.”

I looked at Alison Coutinho, trying to figure her out. She had on jeans and a T-shirt, hardly what you would call stripper attire. And, without being unkind, I wouldn’t exactly say her figure it was suited to exotic dancing. It was what my very polite mother would call “full.”

“So how do you and Jessica know each other?”

“We go to Kean,” she said.

I’ll be damned. A stripper who really
was
working her way through college. And a good college, too. Kean University was a small, well-regarded liberal arts school in Union.

“And Jessie, uh…” my voice trailed off, as I tried to be delicate. “She, uh…dances…on the side?”

“I don’t blame her. She makes a lot more money than I do working at the library, that’s for sure,” Alison said. “If I had a body like she does, I’d probably dance, too.”

“Right,” I said. “And how long have she and Senator Ryan been an item?”

Alison slid back in her chair and sat more upright. “You
know
about that?”

I gave her a lopsided smile. “I’m a newspaper reporter, ma’am, it’s what we do.”

“Well, I’ll let Jessie tell you about that, if she wants to. That’s none of my business.”

“Fair enough. You mind if I slip out and make a quick phone call? I’ll be right back.”

I could feel my hands shaking as I dialed Tina. This was big. Huge.

Tina was, as expected, a little peeved about being hung up on. But she got over it quickly enough when I told her what I had, to the point where she was nearly as excited as I was. Still, her final edict was firm:

“We can’t skewer a prominent man’s reputation on the say-so of three unnamed sources and someone’s roommate,” she said. “You need Jessica Martin on the record, or we’ve got nothing.”

By the time I returned to the waiting room, Alison was in the midst of being joined by a tall, finely boned women with long, straight blond hair. She looked far too high class to be working at a go-go bar in Carteret, which is probably why Lenny liked her in the first place. She had a few superficial cuts on her cheeks and forehead and the beginnings of a nasty black eye, presumably from where her face had mashed into an airbag. She also had her left arm in a sling.

None of which hid the fact that she was stunning.

I’m not saying Jessica Martin’s beauty made it okay for Lenny Ryan to cheat on his wife. I’m just saying she would have made a lot of men question their marriages.

I could feel my heart pounding as I introduced myself, partly because gorgeous women had that effect on me but more because Jessica held my future as a newspaper reporter in her long, delicate fingers.

“Hi Jessie, I’m Carter Ross,” I said. “I’m really sorry about your accident. I’m doing a story about it for
The Eagle-Examiner
.”

Between her red eyes and runny nose, it was clear Jessie had been crying a lot already this day, and I feared my pronouncement would prompt more sniffling. Or she was getting ready to bury her purse in the side of my head. She was tough to read.

Either way, I knew this was my moment to win her over. It was brief. And there could be no mistake in what I said next. So I went for the kill:

“Lenny Ryan tells me he was trying to find a constituent a job when he lost control of his car and ran it into a building,” I said. “He told me this as he was getting ready to take his wife out for an anniversary dinner. Do you maybe want to tell me a different version of the events?”

A long-dead playwright once warned about the dangers of a woman scorned. Much has changed about the world since he made that observation, but thankfully for this reporter, the fundamentals of it have not.

“Lenny Ryan,” Jessica Martin said, “is a miserably lying worm.”

“Noted,” I said, as I pulled out my pad.

She winced as she adjusted her sling-covered left arm, then calmly said: “You know what that prick told me? He told me he loved me. He told me he was going to leave his wife for me. For six months he had been telling me that. He said he was just going to wait until after the next election, so he could do it quietly. And I believed him. Then he gave his wife a nightgown for their anniversary. A nightgown!”

“This all…this is about a nightgown?”

“Yeah. He had let me borrow his car to run an errand and I found it in the backseat. It had a note attached and everything: ‘To my darling Priscilla, Thank you for 38 wonderful years. Love, Leonard.’ It was from Victoria’s Secret. What kind of man gives his wife a Victoria’s Secret nightgown and writes a note like that if he knows he’s going to leave her?”

“So you found the nightgown in the backseat and…drove his car into a wall to get back at him?” I asked, already dreaming of the headlines that could result from this. Whether it’s Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress or O.J. Simpson’s bloody glove, a big story often needs a small image to make it pop. Mrs. Ryan’s nightgown would serve nicely in that regard.

“He loved that car. He probably loved that car more than me and his wife combined,” she said, then stopped and smiled wickedly. “The fact that I drove it into a wall was purely an accident, of course. I was just so distraught I must not have been paying attention.”

“Of course,” I concurred. “And that will be noted in whatever I write.”

“Thank you.”

“I am curious, though: Why drive it – accidentally, of course – into the go-go bar?”

“Well, you know he owns that place, right?”

For at least the third time that night, I utterly failed at tamping down a grin. “No,” I said. “I was unaware of that. And I’m pretty sure his constituents are unaware of it, too.”

“I know they are. He told me he had it hidden and that the press could never find it. He had made me a part owner and was going to let me manage it so I could stop dancing. I’ve got the paperwork in my purse. Want to see it?”

Within ten minutes we had left the hospital and found a Kinkos, where I made photocopies of all the incriminating documents I needed. Leonard Ryan was assigning a 10 percent stake in the Roxy’s Go-Go to one Jessica E. Martin.

I got Jessie’s cell phone number and a few more pertinent facts about her relationship with the Senator. It had started when the club manager showed Ryan a picture of their newest dancer, this breathtaking blond. The next thing she knew, she was the object of Lenny Ryan’s rather relentless affections – which included everything from poetry and love letters to cash and jewelry.

And, yeah, she promised to dig up some of the poetry for me in the morning. I figured this story was going to have some serious legs. It would be nice to have fresh fodder for the follow.

We parted with an exchange of cell phone numbers and promises to keep in touch, and I pushed my Nova to the very limits of its dubious engineering to make good time back to the Newark offices of
The Eagle-Examiner
. It was 10 by the time I arrived, and while I had already dictated most of the good stuff to Tina – who had sent it along to her rewrite guy – we had agreed I should do a write-through for the final edition, so I could put it all in my own words.

It was a writing test, all right. But it was a real one. This was my own batter, my own cake. And if I can risk mixing baking metaphors, I was going to turn it into a huge chunk of humble pie for Senator Lenny Ryan.

I was given until 11:30 to write, and I took every second before sending it over to Tina. As she read it, I don’t mind admitting I may have ogled her a little bit. She was sitting in a contorted position, doing some kind of thoroughly impossible stretch that was inspired by either modern Yoga or ancient torture. She had swept her hair up into some kind of clip, allowing me to admire a lovely little cleft where her jaw bone and neckline met. It was the kind of place I decided would require further study someday, if circumstances allowed.

“Not bad for a rookie,” she announced when she was done, shipping it over to the copy desk, which was going to slam it into the three-star edition just before it went to press.

“Thanks for all your help,” I said. “If I may say so, we made a pretty good team.”

She smiled – a broad, full-lipped, lovely smile – but followed it with, “Don’t start liking me. No journalist should want anyone to like them. It makes for bad reporting. You want someone to like you in this business? Buy a cat.”

“I thought it was, ‘If you want someone to like you, buy a dog,’” I said.

“That works for politicians in Washington, but not for reporters at this newspaper. Dogs need people to return home on a regular schedule and walk them. If you get a job here, I guarantee there’d be a lot of nights when you’d come home late to find Rover has peed the rug. Cats are a better fit for reporters.”

“Okay, I’ll get a cat,” I said. “I think I’ll name him Deadline.”

She gave me another alluring smile and we settled into chatting – the where-ya-from, how’d-ya-get-here kind of stuff. Soon, one of the clerks brought up a stack of freshly printed newspapers, making a straight line for me.

“Sal Szanto asked me to give this to you,” she said, then handed me my very own copy of the next day’s edition of
The Eagle-Examiner
.

It was still slightly damp. And, sure enough, it had a story stripped across the front page with my byline on it. It also had a piece of Sal Szanto’s stationery taped to it. Szanto, like most good newspapermen, apparently valued brevity. Because his note consisted of just two words:

“You’re hired.”

From

BRAD PARKS

Award-Winning author of
THE NIGHTGOWN

Read on for a preview of

On Sale March 2012 from Minotaur Books