The Fraud (16 page)

Once I established a correlation between Newark carjackings and Fanwood Country Club’s parking lot, I would then have to prove that Karlinsky was the causative element. I didn’t know exactly how I’d do that.

But, again, it was only Tuesday. There was time.

*   *   *

Having driven home and gotten myself more comfortably attired, I was just winding down toward sleep when my phone blurped with a text message. I had been on the couch of my tidy, two-bedroom Bloomfield abode, reading Sue Grafton’s latest (I had finally made it to
W,
and it made me hope the letter Z would never come). Deadline, my black-and-white domestic short-haired cat, was on my lap, doing his best to imitate a puddle of goo.

The text was from Tina. And, like most things coming from Tina, it surprised me: “Can I come over?” it read.

I wrote back: “Of course. I’ll be up.”

Setting my phone down on the coffee table, I asked Deadline, “I wonder what that’s about?”

He indicated his intense interest in this conversation by keeping his eyes screwed shut and holding the remainder of his body perfectly still. I ran my thumb along the path between his eyes and up to the top of his head until his purrs began making his whole body vibrate. Make no mistake: Deadline is the most easily contented roommate, male or female, I’ve ever had.

I returned to my book for another thirty minutes or so until I heard Tina’s footsteps on the front porch. She didn’t need me to open the front door—I had given her a key to my place, without much fanfare or commentary, a few months earlier—but I still poured Deadline off my lap so I could get to my feet and greet her.

The woman who entered my house sort of looked like Tina. She had Tina’s protruding midsection and Tina’s pregnancy-thickened curly brown hair. It’s just her face that had turned into a reddened, blotchy mess. You didn’t have to be the
Eagle-Examiner’s
ace investigative reporter to know she had been crying.

“Hey, what’s the matter?” I asked.

She rushed toward me, another unexpected development, and buried her nose in my neck, wrapping her arms around my shoulders. Her body was heaving in a distinctly nonrhythmic fashion and I could feel her tears against my skin.

As a keen interpreter of nonverbal cues, I sensed that she was upset. I still had no idea what was going on. But being that I have long experience playing the part of the Confused Male—sadly, it doesn’t involve much acting most of the time—I just held on to her and let her shake for a while. I ran my hand along her head and rubbed the spots on her back that had been sore from the second trimester on.

“Can we sit down?” she asked finally.

“Of course,” I said, and led her over to the couch, where I assisted in lowering her onto its surface. She depressed the cushions enough that Deadline sort of just rolled against her side, like he was being drawn by her gravitational pull.

“Can I get you a tissue?” I asked.

She nodded. I went into my bathroom and retrieved the whole box. Back when this was strictly a bachelor pad, I never kept tissues in the house—they are, to my mind, completely redundant with toilet paper and/or paper towels. But I had been made to understand this viewpoint was less than fully civilized.

“What’s going on?” I asked after I handed the tissues to her and settled into the couch next to her.

She blew her nose several times, leaving the spent wads resting on the shelf created by the top of her belly.

“Brodie had a heart attack,” she said at last.

“Aw, Jesus,” I said, because I was momentarily incapable of saying anything more cogent.

“He was just out near the copy desk, jingling the change in his pocket, looking over people’s shoulders, creeping them out a bit—the usual things he’s done ten thousand times. I was out there helping Gary with a headline and the next thing I knew someone was saying, ‘Brodie, are you okay?’

“I looked over and he had his hand on his chest and the weirdest expression on his face. I’ve never seen anything like it. He was totally bewildered about what was happening. And then he just collapsed. It’s like someone shot him or something. His eyes were rolled back in his head. It was so scary and horrible. He was practically right next to me.”

As Tina spoke, I was just staring at a spot on the floor, thinking about Brodie. He had been with the paper for nearly fifty years. For the last quarter century or more, he had commanded it as executive editor. He was our unquestioned leader.

But he was more than that. He was our heart, our soul, our conscience. We all looked to him—for his guidance, his experience, and his wisdom, yes; but also for the joy that he brought to newspapering, day in, day out.

It was a trait we desperately needed. In a world where deadlines are measured by the minute and never stop coming, there is an incredible burnout factor. But even more insidious than that is complacency. After enough years, there’s this tendency to forget the importance of what you’re doing. After all, what’s one more murder? One more plane crash? One more scandal?

Brodie never lost his enthusiasm for the big story. It’s like it was new for him every time. He understood that we had a sacred trust with readers: they paid attention to us and bought our paper because we worked our asses off to get things right, with every issue we put out, and he wanted to make damn sure we followed through on our end of the promise. There was something about seeing a seventysomething-year-old man charging around like his ass was burning that lit a fire under the rest of us.

I thought back to one of the first run-ins I ever had with him. I had to earn the trust of some gang members I needed to interview, so I smoked pot with them. I was still stoned as I walked into the building, where I bumped into Brodie smelling like I had just come from a Cheech and Chong marathon. Far from being upset with me, he was delighted—absolutely delighted—that one of his reporters had gone to such lengths to get a story.

That was Brodie. He was, above all else, a
newspaperman
. At a time when the breed is becoming extinct, maybe that made him unfashionable. But if that was the case, I aspired to be just as out of style as he was.

It was at that moment that I understood, with a renewed sense of appreciation, how much I looked up to the man.

Tina broke the silence with: “I feel like I watched him die.”

“Is he…?” I started, but couldn’t finish the sentence.

“We don’t know,” she said. “We called an ambulance, of course. Some of the copy editors started doing chest compressions immediately. But it didn’t … I mean, I just don’t know. He’s at the hospital now. We called his wife to let her know. She was on her way.”

A sob tried to overtake her. She swallowed it, turning the whole thing into an audible gasp.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I kept it together the whole time in the newsroom because I felt like everyone needed me to stay strong. I mean, we had a paper to get out, you know? If nothing else, Brodie wouldn’t want anything to mess with that. That’s everything he stood for and I wanted to … to honor that. So I made sure we hit the mark with the first edition and that everything was fine. And then on the way here, it just hit me like crazy. I mean, I already feel like I’m out of control with these pregnancy hormones and—”

“You don’t have to keep it together for me,” I said.

“Thanks,” she whispered.

We stayed like that for a good long while, leaning against each other. Every once in a while, we’d say whatever happened to be on our minds. Thoughts about Brodie. Thoughts about the fragility of existence and the gift that it was. Thoughts about the new life stirring inside her.

But mostly we just sat. By the time we got up to go to bed several hours later, the box of tissues was spent.

CHAPTER 20

When he was a kid, playing Little League baseball in Newark, Blue Mask had been like this with his uniform.

Everything just so. Checked in the mirror. Tucked and retucked.

He would put it on at six thirty in the morning for a two o’clock game. The excitement consumed him. He couldn’t wait to get on the field. The anticipation was almost better than the game itself. Almost.

Blue Mask realized he felt the same way about jacking cars. Another sign that this was what he was meant to be doing with his life.

And maybe he looked ridiculous, walking around the house with his blue ski mask pulled down and his gun tucked in his waistband, four hours before he was going out. He didn’t care. It’s not like Birdie was going to say anything.

He enjoyed feeling like a kid again. Pacing around. Looking at himself in the mirror. Playing out things in his mind. Scripting what he’d say to the driver. Imagining the look on the driver’s face.

Maybe he’d shoot the guy. Maybe he wouldn’t. Depends if he felt like he was getting the respect he deserved.

He made himself wait until ten o’clock, then charged out into the street and then …

Well, what? Black Mask had always been the one to say where they went and when. Black Mask said which car to hit—almost like he knew the thing was coming.

Blue Mask’s only job was to wait for the whistle and then go.

For a few minutes, Blue Mask felt like an idiot. He had spent so much time thinking about the actual act, he hadn’t thought out any of the other stuff that led up to it. The planning. The strategy.

No big deal. This was just a small setback. He rolled the ski mask off his face, wearing it like a hat instead. He pulled his hoodie over his head, mostly to hide the mask. Then he left the house and started walking.

His first move was to get out of the neighborhood. He noticed Black Mask never did jobs near where he lived. That was smart. The cops in Newark did this community policing thing, which meant they all stuck with a certain area of the city. The idea was that they got to know the thugs in their own sector. If there was a crime, they always started with the known suspects. Blue Mask wanted to go to a part of town where he’d be unknown.

That meant downtown. It was where there were more likely to be expensive cars anyway. Plus, there were more traffic lights there.

He stalked around for a time, spending some time on Washington Street, then on University, then on Halsey. Nothing felt right. Either the light was green or the car was wrong or he wasn’t in position in time.

Eventually, he settled on Washington Street and set up on one corner. There was a shuttered storefront with a small vestibule that gave him both concealment and visibility: he could see the intersection but not be seen by any passing cars.

It was now after midnight. Traffic had gotten noticeably lighter over the previous hour. Most of the cars out were beaters that would probably break down before he could get Birdie’s body out of town.

Finally, he caught the gleam of a new car just as the light turned yellow. It slowed to a stop rather than risk running the light. But it was Chevy. He wasn’t here to jack no damn Chevy.

Another fifteen minutes passed before there was another half-decent opportunity. He thought, at first glance, that it was a Lexus. But, no, it was a Toyota that just sort of looked like a Lexus.

He was starting to think about giving up and just grabbing whatever came along. He sure didn’t want to have to sleep with Birdie’s body getting all stiff in the kitchen.

Then. Finally. Cadillac. White. The car was a few years old. Still, it was a Cadillac. There had to be some value there. He didn’t know quite who he’d sell it to. Black Mask had always taken care of that part. But Blue Mask would figure out something. He had contacts of his own.

The ski mask went down. The gun came out. The light was holding red.

Blue Mask sprinted toward the driver’s side door, the gun barrel pointing the way. The other jobs he had done with Black Mask, the drivers had played their part nicely—getting out the car, hands up, letting them just take the vehicle.

This guy wasn’t going as easily. He was a black man. A big fellow, but soft-looking. Blue Mask saw his mouth go wide, then his eyes, just like the others.

But then he stomped on the gas pedal. The others hadn’t done that.

Still, there was this small hesitation, a split second for the fuel injectors to spray fuel into the piston chambers, another split second for the spark plugs to ignite the gas, another split second for the car to transfer the energy from that small contained explosion to the drive shaft.

In that brief time lapse, Blue Mask fired two shots through the window, loosely aimed at the man’s face. The glass did not shatter. It just acquired two shallow craters where the bullets entered. Blue Mask couldn’t tell if he’d hit anything beyond it.

Then the car was gone. Some tragic fraction of a second too late, it had accelerated across the intersection. For perhaps two hundred more yards, Blue Mask watched the Cadillac careen down the street. Then it jumped the curb and hit a light stanchion, coming to a crunching stop.

Blue Mask ran after it, his gun still drawn. The driver must have blacked out and lost control of the vehicle. Or maybe the guy’s head had been blown off and that was just the car driving on its own. Blue Mask figured he’d yank whatever was left of the driver out of the vehicle, maybe put a kill shot in him, and be on his way.

Then the driver’s side door opened. Blue Mask was still a hundred yards away. He was amazed to watch the driver emerge with a hand clamped on his neck. He was a burly fellow, all right. He took one or two halting steps, leaned on the car, then cast a wary glance over his shoulder.

Then he saw Blue Mask and started staggering away, toward a nearby alley, with surprising speed for such a big guy. Maybe he knew he was running for his life.

As Blue Mask closed in, he considered going after the driver. But no. If the gunshots hadn’t attracted enough attention, the sound of the crash would. It was time to get out of there.

Blue Mask reached the wreck. The bumper had a small V in it. The driver’s side window was now mostly gone, with just a few jagged glass edges clinging to its frame.

But there was no time to worry about aesthetics. He hopped in the still-open driver’s side door, sat in a leather seat marred by glass pebbles and blood, and closed the door behind him. He shifted into reverse to get the car away from the light stanchion, then into drive to get away.