The Fraud (12 page)

“It’s a pretty long way from single teenaged mom in Newark to the conference room of Lacks and Ragland,” I said. “How’d you swing that?”

“Eventually I grew up. It just took a while. I think my boy was about eight when he said, ‘But, Mama, why do I have to go to school? You didn’t and you’re doing fine.’ We were living in Section Eight housing. I was working two jobs that both paid minimum wage. And I was like, ‘Baby, I am
not
doing fine.’ That’s when I decided to get my GED. Then I just kept going. I got my associate, then my bachelor’s, then my accounting degree. I realized I was his biggest role model, so I wanted to show him what his mama could do. I passed my CPA exam the same month my son graduated high school.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s quite a slog.”

“Yeah,” she said, leaning back in her conference chair and crossing her legs.

“How long have you been working here?”

“Six years,” she said.

At that point, I felt like she was properly warmed up. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say I realized she was a natural and unabashed sharer: someone who freely laid out the details of her life to a stranger. She had walked a certain path, one filled with both mistakes and triumphs. But she owned every single step and misstep. It was hard not to like someone like that. And I say that not just because it made the job of the journalist easier.

I pulled out my notepad, opened to a blank page, and said, “So tell me about you and Joseph.”

*   *   *

They had met shortly after she joined Rotary, at a time when they were both embarking on major life transitions.

She had just taken a job at Lacks & Ragland, the beginning of her ascension to the bourgeoisie. He was in the throes of a divorce that would finally free him from a marriage that hadn’t really survived its trip to America.

He was kind, thoughtful, and well-read, and she liked him immediately. But dating wasn’t really in the picture for either of them.

Then, slowly, the picture changed. Over the course of a few years, they fell into a pattern where they often sat at the same table during Rotary meetings. She was rising through the ranks, first becoming the chapter treasurer, then its vice president. He was an active member who had spearheaded their most recent scholarship drive. He never missed a meeting unless he was out of the country on business.

Soon she recognized she missed him when he was gone. And that when he was there, she would seek out his table. He seemed to be doing the same. Finally, he asked her if she wanted to have coffee sometime.

“At first I didn’t even get that he was asking me on a date. It had been so long since a guy had even tried to date me. In the ’hood, the guys are mostly like, ‘Hey, baby, you want to git wit dis?’”—she affected a cocky head shake while pointing to her crotch, then interrupted herself with laughter—“It’s like I didn’t even know dating existed.”

Coffee led to lunch. Lunch led to dinner. They eventually introduced the other to their kids. I mentioned I had met Maryam, which caused Zabrina to take on a briefly maternal glow.

“She’s such a good kid,” Zabrina said. “And so smart. Did you know she was a National Merit Scholar? That kid is going someplace. I wish my son had his act half as together as that girl.”

Not wanting to get into an examination of Zabrina’s offspring, I steered the conversation back to Joseph. It sounded like each escalation of the relationship only happened after the appropriate measure of time. They were two grown-ups with busy lives and enough scars that no one was sprinting into anything. But there was an inevitability to it, at least in the version Zabrina was giving me.

About eight months ago, they had started spending the night at each other’s place. It was understood that maybe, someday, they would move in together. They talked about having a Newark pad and then going in on a place down at the shore once Zabrina saved a little more and Joseph got out from under tuition payments.

And maybe, at some point in the future, they would make it legal. There was no hurry on either end.

She was just telling me about how they were planning their first vacation together when a constipated-looking white man with a bad suit and a worse haircut opened the door without knocking.

“You have the Sawyer audit done yet?” he demanded. Then he registered my presence, and, as an afterthought, added, “Sorry to interrupt.” He said it in that sorry-not-sorry way.

“Hello, Benn, good afternoon,” she said, which only emphasized his brusqueness. “Yes, it’ll be done before I leave today.”

“Good. We need it,” he said, then departed without another word.

As soon as the door closed behind him, Zabrina said, “That’s Benn, with two n’s, because it’s short for Bennington,” she said. Then, after a beat, she interjected, “Yeah, I work for a jerk.”

I laughed. “Lots of people do.”

“I know, I just … the way they treat me is like I’m half a person. I’ve got my degrees, just like them. But because I got my degrees online when I was in my thirties, it’s like they don’t count around here. Like, I’m sorry I’m a single mom who didn’t go to college straight out of high school and kill my brain cells in a fraternity basement like you did. I’m sorry I can’t talk about whether my school’s football team is playing in a bowl game. But, you know what? My degree is just as good as yours. And I passed the CPA exam just like you did.”

“Yeah,” I said, just to say something.

“They’re glad they have Zabrina From The ’Hood, because they can be like, ‘Look, we’re all diverse. We got a black woman working here. We got a true Newarker working here.’ But when it comes time to talk about who’s going to get a promotion or make partner next, Zabrina From The ’Hood doesn’t exist anymore.”

“You could go to another firm,” I suggested.

“I know, I just … my mother is here. My brother is here. My grandmother is still alive. I’ve got aunts and uncles. Newark is home, you know?”

I nodded. There were places that really did embrace diversity, not just tokenism. A firm like that would love to have Zabrina Coleman-Webster. But, ultimately, I wasn’t here to offer career advice. She’d either punch through the glass ceiling here or not.

“Going back to Joseph,” I said. “When was the last time you saw him?”

“The night it happened. He had actually just left my place. He was going to spend the night, but then he remembered he had left some papers at his place and he had a meeting first thing, so he decided—”

She got quiet for a moment. Zabrina From The ’Hood was a tough specimen, one who jumped over barriers of a magnitude that a suburban-bred, Amherst-educated WASP like me could only imagine. That’s not some version of white guilt talking. That’s just the truth. The only people who couldn’t recognize that growing up poor and black in Newark was a fundamentally different version of the American experience were … well, they were constipated-looking jerks named Benn.

She pulled herself together and resumed: “He decided he wanted to get them that night. He was on his way home when he … when it happened. I didn’t even know about it until the next night. The police notify next of kin. They don’t notify girlfriends.”

“How’d you find out?”

“I knew something was wrong. We would normally text each other during the day and when I didn’t hear from him I started calling him. And then when I didn’t hear from him I finally called Tujuka.”

“Wow, you must have been pretty desperate to do that.”

“Why?”

“Well, calling your boyfriend’s ex … I mean, I can’t imagine you and Tujuka get along all that famously.”

“Oh, we’re fine,” Zabrina said. “I think it helps that we’re both single moms. We sort of understand where the other is coming from. I told her right off the bat that Joseph’s commitment to his kids came first. From that point on, we’ve been good.”

I wasn’t so sure they were as good as she thought they were, given the way Tujuka slammed the door at the mention of her dead husband’s name. But I asked, “When you called, what did she tell you?”

“I was like, ‘I’m sorry to bother you, but have you heard from Joseph? I can’t get a hold of him and I’m starting to worry.’ And that’s when she told me that Joseph had been shot during a carjacking. The police didn’t know any more than that. And from what they’re telling Tujuka, they probably won’t ever know. Unless they recover the car. But I’m sure they won’t.”

“Did the police talk to you at all?”

“I don’t even think they know about me. Like I said, Joseph and I kept things pretty quiet.”

I let that breathe for a moment, to see if she would add anything else. But nothing came out.

“Have you been out to the intersection where it happened?” I asked.

“No. I’m not sure I … I just haven’t been all that interested.”

“I talked to a witness out there who said it looked like Joseph stopped for a green light. Can you make any sense of that?”

Her face went blank for a second, then she said, “Not … not really. Except, maybe, well … he was terrible when it came to distracted driving. He was always sending texts and e-mails while he drove. I got on him about it constantly. Maybe he just didn’t know it was green? But—”

She forced out a sizable exhale. “Wouldn’t that be something? I’ve been trying to get my head around the idea that he died simply because he forgot some papers at his town house. To think that he died because he was stopping to send an e-mail?”

There was no more to add to that thought. I saw Benn The Jerk, walk past the conference room, peering his head in as he did so. Zabrina saw it, too. Our time was running short.

“The only other question I had was actually about Joseph’s insurance policy,” I said. “I don’t really have this nailed down yet, but I’m hearing that his insurance company might be giving Tujuka the runaround about paying out. Do you know anything about that? Did Tujuka mention anything?”

“Sorry. We haven’t really talked since the funeral,” she said.

“All right. I’ll let you get back to work then.”

Zabrina just rolled her eyes. I knew I could—and probably would—talk to her again. For now, she had given me plenty.

“Hey, while I’m thinking about it, would you mind e-mailing me that picture of the two of you together?” I asked.

Going back to the importance of having an acceptable victim, photographs always helped. It made them that much more human.

“Sure,” she said. I gave her my e-mail address and she mailed me the picture on the spot. We swapped cell numbers, then said our goodbyes, and parted ways.

As I rode back down the too-slow elevator, I looked at the image that was now on my phone. One of the things that makes photographs so powerful is that they capture a moment in time; and while the photograph stops, time moves ahead.

It means, oftentimes, the person viewing the photograph knows things that the people in the photograph don’t.

So as I gazed at a photograph of two lovers, I did so with a sense of its tragedy. Neither was a youngster. But they still thought they had at least a half a lifetime in which to enjoy each other. They never knew how short their time really was.

Then again, I suppose none of us do.

CHAPTER 16

The smell of beef stew greeted Blue Mask as he returned to his great-aunt Birdie’s house, wafting its way from the kitchen into the living room.

Blue Mask hated beef stew and hated Birdie for making it. He knew it meant he’d end up having to run out to McDonald’s later. Between that and the Rolex setback, it would put him that much further away from being able to move out.

He closed the door softly behind him. He could hear Birdie in the kitchen, singing an old gospel song to herself: “Jesus has done so much for me. I cannot tell it all. I cannot tell it all!”

He didn’t want to have to talk to her, answer her questions about what he had been up to, or listen to her latest thoughts on what Bible verse applied to a wayward young man such as himself. He wanted to get his three new best friends—Ben Franklin, Ben Franklin, and Ben Franklin—up with the rest of his stash in the highest cabinet and get on with his day.

Birdie stopped singing and called from the kitchen, “That you, baby?”

Blue Mask shuffled into the kitchen, his hands stuffed in his pockets. His right was placed protectively over the bills.

“Hey, Birdie,” he mumbled.

He would have to wait until she went to the bathroom or retired upstairs for a few minutes so he could hide them. Then he’d get with Black Mask. Talk about doing another job. Maybe that night.
That
would get him over five grand.

“I’m making stew,” Birdie said. “Gonna get a good dinner in you. Beef and potatoes and carrots. Gonna get some meat on you. You’re too skinny.”

“Uh-huh.”

Like Birdie was one to talk. She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety-five pounds. Most of it was gristle.

For a moment or two, he just watched her, alternating between stirring beef stock with an old wooden spoon and chopping vegetables with a dull knife. She wasn’t leaving. He wanted her to leave. He gripped his bills a little tighter.

“Oh, honey, the most blessed thing happened today,” she said. “You think Jesus isn’t good, but I keep telling you, Jesus is good all the time. I was just getting all my ingredients in place and I went up into that cabinet over there, and you would never believe what I found. There was a paper sack with over four thousand dollars in it. Can you believe? Four thousand dollars! Just sittin’ there! I never seen anything like it in all my life.”

That’s when Blue Mask saw the cornstarch sitting on the counter. His eyes shot up toward the shelf where his stash was hidden. In front of that cabinet, there was a stool, which Birdie had obviously used to reach it. He had never seen the stool before.

Blue Mask felt his heart pounding. Antisocial personality disorder may have hindered his attachment to fellow human beings. It did nothing to interfere with his attachment to money.

“I couldn’t believe it, just couldn’t believe it!” Birdie continued. “It was like the Lord himself put it there. And so I prayed to Him, I said, ‘Jesus, Lord, you have brought this bounty into my life, now tell me what I’m supposed to do with it.’ And I was prayin’ and prayin’ and then, God as my witness, the phone rang. And it was Pastor. I swear to you it was Pastor. And I said, ‘Pastor, you got to get over here right now, because I think the spirit is working through you real strong today.’