Eyes of the Innocent: A Mystery (12 page)

“You want to tell me what’s more important than a kidnapped city councilman?”

This was not going to be easy.

“Sweet Thang’s charm bracelet,” I answered. I was glad Szanto couldn’t see me, because I was grinning like an idiot and it would have driven him berserk.

“Come again?”

“You know the story Sweet Thang and I wrote yesterday?”

“Yeah. It got bumped off A1 by the Byers story and buried on the county news page—not that you would know because you didn’t read the paper. Anyway, what about it?”

“Well, you may or may not be aware, but Sweet Thang is a rather kindhearted young woman and she, uhhh…” I paused, groping for the right words. I had hoped to have this little mess cleaned up before anyone needed to learn about it. Sweet Thang was going to have a hard time living this down. And I was going to have a hard time explaining it in a way that wouldn’t have Szanto shotgunning Tums.

“Have I not made it clear I’m in a hurry this morning?” Szanto barked.

“Sweet Thang let Akilah Harris stay at her place,” I blurted. “And sometime in the middle of the night, Akilah stole Sweet Thang’s jewelry and took off. I’ve been trying to get it back.”

I could practically hear the new hole being torn in Szanto’s stomach.

“Are you serious?” he asked.

“I am.”

“And this is what you’ve been doing with your morning?”

“I have.”

What followed was a rant spiked with language you are unlikely to hear from your local librarian. He strongly suggested that I, as his investigative reporter, ought to stop worrying about the missing jewelry and start worrying about the missing councilman.

Then he hung up.

“Nice chatting with you,” I said to the empty phone line.

I sighed. I knew exactly how this was going to play out. I would be assigned to put together some kind of Sunday piece that Told the Real Story—or however much of the Real Story we could assemble between now and then. In the meantime, it was Tuesday and we, as a newspaper, would spill countless barrels of ink during the coming days, covering every detail of the life and perhaps-death of Windy Byers, all the while pretending he was something other than a hack local politician who had ridden his father’s half-good name to a long and undistinguished career in service to the /files/04/17/95/f041795/public/himself.

I wasn’t keen on canonizing him like that. On the bright side, at least I wouldn’t have to get a space heater reference high up in whatever I wrote.

My first step in this whole process was, of course, to do what I should have done first thing this morning: read the paper. I hopped in my Malibu and started looking for one, which was harder than you might think. This being Newark, we couldn’t keep newspaper boxes on the street. Otherwise, for seventy-five cents, some homeless guy—sorry, Housing Challenged American—was going to break in just as soon as we filled the box, swipe all thirty copies, and sell them on the street for reduced rates, netting himself the fifteen dollars he would need to keep his belly full of Wild Irish Rose until the next morning. What we did, instead, was cut the petty larceny out of the equation: we hired the homeless guys directly and put them to work selling the paper for us.

On the street, the
Eagle-Examiner
was known as “The Bird.” People who delivered or sold it were known as “Bird Flippers.” I think all involved enjoyed the double entendre.

Still, after the morning rush hour, most of the Bird Flippers had already made enough money to be happily inebriated the rest of the day, so it took a little while before I found one still manning his post.

I tossed him a buck, told him to keep the change—the last of the big spenders, that’s me—and settled in to have a look.

*   *   *

As Szanto said, the disappearance of Wendell A. Byers Jr. was stripped across the top of A1. It was obviously late-breaking, and the layout person—who was either too rushed or too lazy to redesign the entire front page—had simply swapped out the Akilah Harris piece in favor of the Byers news.

The story appeared under the byline of Carl Peterson, our night rewrite guy. When Peterson first came to the paper, his approach may have charitably been called “new journalism.” Now it was just called overwriting. He stuffed his copy with adverbs and adjectives, filling the small spaces left in between with clichés. He wrote how the disappearance of the “beloved Central Ward councilman” and “scion of a Newark political dynasty” was being treated as “a deeply suspicious event” by police who “strongly suspect foul play.” The councilman’s wife, described as “thoroughly overwrought with anxiety,” reported her husband’s absence Monday evening, setting off a “city-wide manhunt” in which “concerned constituents” were being enlisted.

The only problem with Peterson’s prose was disentangling the facts from the compositional exertions. And in this case it was especially difficult because Peterson didn’t seem to have many facts beyond:
(a)
the honorable councilman failed to return home to Mrs. Honorable Councilman;
(b)
she called the cops; and
(c)
the police had at least a half-cocked notion something untoward had happened. There was no mention of what led police to that conclusion, or whether there had been any ransom demands, or whether he had even been kidnapped in the first place.

Not that I blamed Peterson for the lack of information. As night rewrite man, he was hostage to whatever dispatches he got from reporters (usually not much for a deadline story like that) and whatever the Newark police felt like telling him (usually even less).

I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. There were so many ways this thing could go—involvement with the mob, involvement with a girlfriend, involvement with a girlfriend who was herself involved with the mob. Without at least some hint of a direction, I’d be like Fred Flintstone in his boulder-wheeled car: moving my legs a lot but not really going all that fast.

I needed a cop to whisper something in my ear. And the cop that immediately came to mind was Rodney Pritchard, a homicide detective I became friendly with a while back. I had written a blow-by-blow story of how he tracked down and apprehended a fugitive wanted for murdering his wife. Pritch caught the guy so unawares he actually answered the door to his apartment hideout while eating a piece of jerk chicken—allowing Pritch to deliver the once-in-a-career line, “You’re under arrest, now drop the chicken.”

My story made Pritch mildly famous, helping to launch him on a long winter of law enforcement awards banquets. So now we were the kind of buddies who tell each other secrets. Or at least that’s what I hoped as I dialed his number.

“Yo, Pritch, it’s Carter Ross,” I said breezily. “What’s shakin’?”

“Sorry, you got the wrong number,” Pritch said, then hung up.

I was just about to drop Pritch from my Secret-telling Buddies List when he rang me back.

“Sorry about that,” he said in a hushed voice. “It’s
hot
around here.”

“So what’s going on with this Byers thing?”

“I don’t know, man, you tell me,” Pritch said. “I mean, who the hell just takes a councilman? You have to be either very pissed or very dumb.”

“Who’s handling the case”

“Fellow named Raines caught it.”

“He any good?”

“He’s okay.”

“Would he talk to me off the record? Tell him I won’t quote him, but I’ll find lots of ways to make him look like a dogged and heroic investigator in print.”

“I don’t think it would matter,” Pritch said. “Raines isn’t in it for the newspaper clippings. He’s pretty by-the-book. I’ll be honest with you, he’s so straight, I don’t even think I can ask him for you.”

“Fair enough. What about you? You hearing anything? Watercooler talk?”

“What have we told you guys officially?”

“That all of Newark is playing a game of Where’s Windy and your guys seem to believe he didn’t just wander off to Florida for the weekend without telling anyone.”

“Well, we got a good reason for believing that.”

“I’m listening.”

“We found blood in his house,” Pritch said.

“Really,” I said as I grabbed a notebook and started scribbling. “Like, a lot of blood?”

“A little blood, from what I hear.”

“How little? Are we talking ‘oops, I cut myself shaving’ or ‘oops, a samurai left his sword in my head.’ ”

“Probably closer to the shaving accident,” Pritch said. “But I don’t know a lot of people who shave in the foyer of their house, and that’s where we found it.”

“Is it definitely his?”

“We don’t know. Labs aren’t back yet. But who else’s could it be?”

Anyone’s. Cops were so short on imagination sometimes.

“By the way,” Pritch said. “You didn’t get this from me, right?”

“Of course not. I don’t even know you,” I assured him. “What is the current thinking on why anyone would feel like stealing Windy Byers?”

“It’s too early. Our guys either don’t know or ain’t sayin’. Between you and me, I don’t think they have a clue.”

“But it doesn’t sound like some botched robbery or something?” I said. “I mean, you take a councilman, it’s because you meant to take a councilman, right?”

“Well, I’ve heard his laptop was missing. But it was just the laptop. I’ve had too many cases where people report one thing ‘stolen’ and then it turns up somewhere later.”

“Sure,” I said. “So we’re told the wife reported him missing. What’s her deal?”

“From what I hear, she was out at some church group thing on Sunday night,” Pritch said. “She comes back home and her husband isn’t there, but she doesn’t think anything of it. She just thinks he’s out at a political event or something. Then the next morning she wakes up to an empty bed and calls us.”

“Our story said she called Monday night.”

“Yeah, we probably just told you guys that so you wouldn’t jump all over us for not calling you about it earlier. The public information office does stuff like that all the time.”

Didn’t we know it.

“Anyone think the wife has something to do with this?” I asked. “You know, she found him cheating, killed him, got rid of the body, then reported him missing?”

“That’s a theory.”

“Is it the official theory?”

“I don’t know,” Pritch said. “Look, I gotta run. I’m crouched in the stairwell talking to you like you’re the girl I keep on the side. And I just don’t like you that much.”

“All right. Do me a favor and keep your ears open. I owe you lunch.”

“You owe me more than one,” Pritch said, then hung up.

*   *   *

My next call was to Tommy Hernandez, our fabulous gay Cuban intern. Since Tommy was now one of our City Hall beat writers, Councilman Byers was one of his responsibilities. General rule of thumb in journalism: if one of your key sources vanishes suspiciously, you’re going to be busier than a paisley top with plaid pants.

He answered after half a ring.

“Hey, I’m in Byers’s neighborhood,” Tommy said, not bothering with salutations. “Come meet me here.”

“Got cross streets for me?”

“It’s on Fairmount, just north of South Orange Avenue,” Tommy said.

It took six minutes to get from Tee’s neighborhood to the scene and only a few seconds to figure out which house belonged to the councilman. If the police tape didn’t clue me in, the TV trucks parked out front did. I parked, got out, and had a look around.

The councilman’s neighborhood had clearly seen better days. Uh, make that better centuries. I’m sure sometime around World War II it had been a great little place to raise a family. Now, after decades of mortgage redlining and highway construction, absentee landlordism and slumping schools, the GI Bill and white flight—and all the other things this country allowed that led its suburbs to prosper at the expense of its cities—there were only faint memories of what had been.

The slate sidewalks, once a smooth runway for baby boomers’ strollers, were now a jagged moonscape of broken rock. The elm trees that once lined the street were down to a few straggling, struggling survivors, creating a more desolate effect than if they had all been chopped down.

The same could be said for the houses. Some had long ago been flattened and turned into vacant lots. Others looked so unkempt, unwanted, or abandoned you only wished they would have a sudden meeting with a wrecking ball. Then there were a few that defied the odds and, with regular painting and maintenance, had aged gracefully. It only made me more wistful, wondering what the street would look like if it had just been cared for a little more through the years.

And you could blame the federal government, whose policies helped create this mess. Or you could blame the whites, who turned and ran when things started getting tough; or the blacks, who let it get even worse; or the schools, which warehoused urban kids instead of educating them; or the churches, which too often had their doors closed when they should have been open; or the economy, which no longer provided the kind of factory jobs that made a city go; or, well, take your pick.

It was everyone’s fault. And no one’s fault. And I wondered if I would ever live to see the day when the sidewalks were smooth, the street was shaded by trees, and the houses all had fresh paint.

None of which was going to get my story written. So I started going up and down the block until I found Tommy, dutifully going door to door, talking to neighbors. I caught him coming down the steps of a sagging old duplex, having just been shooed away by someone’s great-grandmother.

“Do you shop in a catalogue that’s called ‘Old and Boring’ or do you go to normal places and it just turns out that way?” Tommy asked. “I mean, khaki pants, blue shirt, red tie. Was that your boarding school uniform or something?”

Tommy was not a big fan of my fashion sensibilities, which he accused of slipping into a coma sometime around 1997.

“Oh, it takes many long seconds of work each morning to look this dull,” I assured him. “How’s the canvassing?”

“The usual,” Tommy said, waving toward the houses. “It happened at night and these are all old people who wouldn’t dream of going out after dark. They didn’t see anything.”

“And they keep their TVs turned up high to drown out the sound of the sirens,” I said, nodding in the direction of University Hospital. “So they didn’t hear anything, either.”