Faces of the Gone: A Mystery (13 page)

In most aspects of my life, I have little use for the concept of karma, the universal cycle of cause and effect, or anything that might help me achieve total consciousness. Total
un
consciousness just suits me better.

Yet when it comes to reporting, I am a deep believer in karma. It is the only way to explain the following phenomenon:
There are days as a reporter when you can do no right, when no one will return your phone calls, when all the elbow grease you put into a story gives you little more than tendonitis. Then there are times when you’re the King Midas of the newsroom, when you can get the Holy Trinity on a conference call for quotes, when everything with your story falls into place so perfectly, you start to convince yourself maybe you
really are
that good.
But, no, it’s just the karma. Eventually you start to accept that for every time you subject your hindquarters to four hours of deep freeze in some nasty project—and end up with nothing to show for it—there will be a time when some strung-out homeless lady named Queen Mary tells you exactly what you need to hear.
So all I could do as I drove back toward the world headquarters of the
Eagle-Examiner
was thank the karma. It was a pleasant feeling: the success of a hard day’s reporting, the warmth of my Malibu, the buzz in my left thigh . . .
No, wait, that was my cell phone. It was Tommy.
“You won’t believe the luck I had.” His voice came bounding out of the earpiece.
“You finally had a threesome with the Hardy Boys?”
“Who are the Hardy Boys? You have gay friends you didn’t tell me about?”
“They’re . . . never mind. What’s going on?”
“Well,” Tommy said. “I was hanging around Shareef’s neighborhood, just hanging around, looking for people to talk to, and this white kid pulls up in his daddy’s Pathfinder and asks if I know where I can find Eef.”
Huh? I pressed my ear harder against the phone. “Eef?”
“No, you idiot. RRRRReef. As in ‘Shareef.’ Try to keep up.”
“Sorry.”
“So anyway,” Tommy continued, “I play it all coy and I’m like, ‘Who’s asking.’ And this guy is like, ‘I hear he’s got The Stuff.’ And I’m like, ‘By The Stuff do you mean stuff? Or THE Stuff?’ And the guy is like, ‘Yeah, THE Stuff.’ ”
Apparently I wasn’t the only one with good reporting karma.
“Anyway, this idiot kid thought I worked for Shareef or something, so he practically starts telling me his whole life story. He came from some high school in the suburbs—Livingston, I think—because word is out that this dealer named Reef was selling the best heroin ever and it was called ‘The Stuff.’ How’s that for confirmation?” Tommy asked.
“Pretty good,” I replied. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. But I got more,” Tommy said. “I asked around the neighborhood a little more and apparently Shareef pretty much made a living selling to suburban kids. He would just hang out all day in that pimp-daddy Chrysler of his and wait for the SUVs to drive up.”
It made sense. Shareef’s neighborhood was right near the intersection of the Garden State Parkway and Route 280. Both roads led rather rapidly to a nearly infinite supply of rich suburban kids.
“I was thinking,” Tommy said. “This probably means we can rule out Shareef being killed in some kind of turf battle, don’t you think?”
“How so?”
“Well, it seems like Shareef didn’t even have a turf. His turf was his car. Wherever he went, those idiot kids were going to find him. I mean, the kid I talked to was driving around looking for him.”
I pulled into the company parking garage, letting the new information rattle around in my head for a bit. Sometimes when you’re working on a story, it can be difficult to parse data as it comes, to see both the trees and the forest simultaneously.
But this time the big picture was becoming pretty clear to me. None of the Ludlow Four were killed because of turf. The cause of death, proximate or otherwise, had to be the one thing they shared: selling The Stuff.
“Good work, Tommy,” I said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go tell Sal Szanto his bar story is deader than disco.”

t was past seven by the time I strolled into the newsroom. The reporters were starting to thin out, but the copy desk was humming through the process of assembling Thursday’s newspaper, doing what copy desks have always done: think up misleading headlines, add mistakes into stories, and devise new ways to muddle clean writing.

No, actually, I’m a big fan of our desk. There were some odd ducks—as is often the case among people who think 4
P.M.
is early in the day—but by and large they were solid, dependable folks who could spot a typo at twenty paces and delight in having won the New Jersey State spelling bee six years running. Collectively, they edited the equivalent of a novel every night.

I paused briefly at my desk-turned- drug-shrine—someone had left me a copy of
High Times,
the stoner magazine—then continued on toward Szanto’s office. I might as well let him scream at me when there were fewer people around to hear it.

“Got a second, boss?” I asked, tapping gently on the frame to his open office door.
Szanto glanced up from his computer screen, aggrieved by the combination of Tums and Maxwell House sloshing around in his stomach.
“Srrtt,” he grunted.
I was uncertain whether he was trying to say “sure” or “sit”—I had left my Szanto- English dictionary behind—but I took it as an invitation to come in.
“Jsss gvvmmm scccdd.”
Szanto’s attention had turned back to his screen, where he was trying to lay hands on some abysmal piece of copy. We had some very good writers at our paper, people who made words dance on a page. We also had people who wrote as if full sentences hadn’t been discovered yet.
“Jzzss Krrsst,” Szanto mumbled through a sigh, then coughed, rattling loose the small amphibian that was trying to apply for residence in his throat. “What the hell are they teaching in journalism school these days? You should see this crap.”
I waited patiently. Szanto grimaced and grumbled for a few more minutes, then finally sent the story over to the copy desk with an emphatic, “Aw, screw it.”
“It’ll be lining hamster cages by tomorrow afternoon anyway,” I said, trying to be helpful. Szanto grunted again.
“Okay,” he said, “what can I do for my star investigative reporter? Making good progress with the bar thing?”
In an effort to keep our discourse on a civil tone, I tried to say my next sentence in as small a voice as possible.
“Sal, the bar isn’t the story.”
My efforts failed. Szanto launched a string of obscenities so long and so loud it was difficult to untangle one from the other. All I know is I heard a thorough exercising of the Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television, including one in particu lar he used as a noun, verb, adverb, and adjective—all in the same sentence. He drew a breath and was about to relaunch when I put a halt to it with the Four Words Every Editor Loves to Hear:
“Boss, I got something.”
He let the air leak out of his lungs, then tilted his head to listen.
“I’ve got the link between the Ludlow Four,” I continued, getting up from my seat and walking over to the map of Newark he had on his side wall.
“It isn’t geography,” I said, then began pointing to different spots on the map. “Wanda Bass sold out of a go-go bar in Irvington. Tyrone Scott worked in and around a chicken shack on South Orange Avenue. Devin Whitehead was a Clinton Hill kid. And Shareef Thomas lived up off Central Avenue near the cemetery.
“It’s not clientele, either,” I continued as I returned to my seat. “Wanda sold to a hooker friend’s clients and whoever else wandered into her go-go bar. Tyrone sold to junkies and beat-up old homeless people at an abandoned housing project. Devin sold to guys in the neighborhood. Shareef sold to suburban white kids.”
Szanto was listening silently.
“The link,” I said, drawing it out a little bit, “is the brand of heroin they sold.”
I fished into my pocket and brought out my samples of The Stuff. I flipped one of the bags across Szanto’s desk.
“I found this in Wanda Bass’s apartment,” I said. “She had been selling it to clients at the go-go bar where she worked. Notice the stamp on it.”
As Szanto grabbed it and began examining the signature eagle-clutching-syringe logo, I held up the torn dime bag.
“I got this from a junkie who said she bought it from Tyrone Scott. It’s got the same stamp.”
Szanto squinted across his desk and I handed him the torn bag.
“I’ll be damned,” he said.
“As for the other two, I’ve got a very good source in Devin Whitehead’s neighborhood who talked to some local miscreants for me, and they all said Devin’s brand was called ‘The Stuff.’ Tommy spent a lot of time around Shareef Thomas’s haunt and found a kid wandering around looking for a guy named ‘Reef’ who sold a brand called ‘The Stuff.’ ”
Szanto started nodding. “Not bad,” he said.
“Boss,” I said. “The Stuff is the story.”
Szanto grabbed his industrial- sized jar of antacid tablets, poured out a few, and started munching on them with a faraway look.
“Do the police know this?” he said through a mouthful of chalk.
“I doubt it.”
He chewed a bit more, swallowed, picked up his phone and punched four numbers on the keypad.
“Hi, chief,” he said. “You got a second?”
Szanto only called one person “chief,” and that was our esteemed executive editor, Harold Brodie.
“Come on,” Szanto said after he replaced the phone in its cradle. “Let’s take a walk.”

he corner office of the
Eagle-Examiner
newsroom was a strange and foreign land, one I almost never visited. It’s not that Brodie was unfriendly or unapproachable. Quite the contrary. And with his unkempt eyebrows and womanly voice, he looked and sounded like your aging uncle Mortie—the guy who wasn’t really your uncle but was such a dear family friend everyone called him “uncle” anyway. Yet for whatever reason he still scared the crap out of me.

I suppose it was a bit of a stormtrooper–Darth Vader thing. Because, in my dealings outside the newsroom, I got to be the badass stormtrooper. I had my body armor, my helmet, my blaster. I could do serious damage—to someone’s reputation, anyway—and was treated with corresponding deference. Except when I was around Brodie, I knew all he had to do was wave his hand and I would end up writhing on the floor, gasping for my last breath.

More than anything, I just didn’t know the man all that well. In the seven years I had been working for the
Eagle-Examiner
— ever since being hired from a much smaller daily paper in Pennsylvania—I had spoken with him one-on-one perhaps four times. And one of those I was stoned.

In the management structure of our paper, there was never a need for me to speak to him. I talked exclusively to editors who reported to him, or sometimes editors who reported to other editors who reported to him. It’s like I had been playing telephone with him my entire career.

Szanto, who obviously had no such issues, walked into Brodie’s office without knocking. The old man had been playing classical music on a tiny radio, which he turned down as we entered.

I just smiled. This was my other problem with Brodie. I got so nervous around him I ended up sounding like a moron every time I opened my mouth. So I decided to keep it shut this time. I mean, think about it, do you ever hear a stormtrooper say anything around Darth Vader?

“Carter, my boy, how are you? A little headachy this morning, I guess?”
I kept smiling and nodded. The ganja guy was a man of few words.
“That’s a good lad,” Brodie said, his Mr. Potato Head eyebrows dancing. “So tell me about this new development.”
Szanto did the talking, laying out everything I had just told him in slightly more succinct fashion. Brodie absorbed it, looking more amused than angry that the story his paper had been putting forth the past two days had been flat wrong.
“Sounds like the police were just whistling Dixie with that whole bar angle, eh?” Brodie said when Szanto was done. “I’ll have to give the police director a hard time about that the next time I see him at a benefit.”
Brodie tented his fingers for a moment, resting his lips on them.
“So, Carter, do you feel like you have a story you can put in the paper?” Brodie asked.
The dreaded direct question. Must speak.
“Well, yes and no, sir,” I said.
“Which part is yes, and which part is no?” Brodie asked, managing to sound pleasant despite the rather pointed nature of the question.
“Yes, I feel certain that The Stuff is the connection between the four dead people. Yes, I’m fairly certain they all hooked up with their source in jail. No, I don’t know who that source is. No, I haven’t the slightest idea why it got them killed.”
“Do you have any good leads?”
I gulped.
“Not especially,” I admitted.
More tenting of fingers followed as the executive editor settled into what was known around here as the Brodie Think. The old man was legendary for it. Reporters who found themselves in his office more frequently than I did talked about it all the time. He would just sit there. And think. And think. And think. He would do it until an answer came to him, however long that was. Sometimes—as was the case here—he even closed his eyes. It had all the appearance of advanced narcolepsy.
Brodie didn’t seem the least bit uncomfortable with the silence. Szanto was accustomed to it, as well. For infrequent visitors such as myself, it was agonizing.
Still, it had its benefits. There was nothing worse to a reporter than a lack of direction from the top. Because more often than not, there were at least three different ways you could go with a story, any of which was at least somewhat defensible. You could reach your own conclusion about which way was best and start traveling that path. But if the executive editor decided differently, it meant you had gone the wrong way. Once the great Brodie Think was over, at least I’d know where to head.
Finally, he opened his eyes.
“Let’s take this one step at a time,” he proclaimed. “Eventually, we’re going to need to figure out where The Stuff is coming from. But I think in the meantime, we should write what we know and see what happens when we put it in the paper.”
I nodded.
“Have you heard any footsteps on this story?” he asked.
That was newspaper speak for “are there any other media outlets working on the same angle that might blow our scoop?”
“I don’t think anyone is even near this,” I said.
“TV has been repackaging sound bites,” Szanto added. “The other papers are just going with the usual shock and outrage.”
“Good. Then there’s no need to rush this into tomorrow’s editions. Think you can have it ready for Friday’s paper?”
I nodded again.
“Good boy,” Brodie said. “Now why don’t you go home and get some rest?”
I excused myself from the great man’s office, thankful to have escaped without sounding like an imbecile for once. And then I took the great man’s advice. I owed myself some sack time.
I aimed my trusty Malibu toward Nutley, suddenly realizing how eager I was to get home. I needed to unwind in my tidy bungalow, away from the world. I know that personality test— the Myers-Whateveritscalled—says we’re either extroverts or introverts. I think we’re all a little bit of both. The last million years of evolution have turned us into social animals, but somewhere before that in our family tree, there was a branch that just wanted to be left alone. That’s what my bungalow is: a place where I can be an introvert.
Deadline did not stir upon my entrance—Deadline could sleep through nuclear testing—and I settled into the couch and pondered Brodie’s plan to write what we knew, even though we only had half the story. The more I thought, the more I liked it. There are times when it makes sense to hold back and drop a big bomb on people all at once, when you have the full picture. This didn’t feel like one of them.
Truth was, publishing a story is one of the most underappreciated reporting techniques out there. Sometimes it lets the right person know you’re on the right track and it makes them want to push you a little further along. You just never know what it flushes out.