The Fraud (7 page)

“Carterross,” I said breathlessly.

“Carter, my boy, it’s Harold Brodie. How are you today?”

Hearing our executive editor’s voice, which kept getting higher and breathier as he worked his way deeper into his eighth decade, did little to soothe my nerves. Despite my multitude of journalism awards and a job status that was as close to tenure as a modern newspaper gets, I was still as afraid of Brodie as I had been as a rookie on probation.

Especially because I couldn’t figure out why he was calling. I doubted Tina would ask Brodie, of all people, to inform me she had gone into labor. And he wasn’t really the type to just pick up the phone and call reporters. As a long-ago military veteran—his first combat was at Antietam, I think—he believed in preserving chain of command. He always had the reporter’s frontline editor deliver his wishes. This was the first time in my nine years at the paper he had ever called me directly.

“Hi…” I began, and then I paused. I had never quite summoned the nerve to call him by his first name, but didn’t want to sound like a dork—or, worse, an obsequious kiss ass—greeting him by his last name. So I just added a “there.” It came out: “Hi … there.”

“I had a quick question for you, if you don’t mind,” he said.

“Sure. Shoot.”

“You and Tina Thompson, you are … well, how would you describe your relationship? She is pregnant with your child but you are not married, is that right?”

Oh, lord. Where was he going with
this
? And could I get away with telling the executive editor to mind his own damn business? Then I thought back to that all-important commandment: Thou Shalt Not Piss Off Harold Brodie.

“Well, yes, sir, I’d say you’ve got things right.”

“And you are betrothed?”

“I’m still working on that part, sir.”

“I see. Well, I had a little proposition for you. Madge and I, we like to … well, back in the seventies, they used to call it ‘swinging.’ I’m not sure what the term is these days. But you’re such a good-looking fellow and Madge has always been sweet on you. I was wondering if you’d like to come over and have a ‘go’ with her tonight while I get to know Tina a little better. I have to admit, I’ve always had a bit of a fetish for women at the very end of gestation. There’s just nothing quite like the lactate-swollen bosom of an expectant mother. I bedded my first pregnant woman when I was barely more than a boy myself. Why, in my salad days, they used to call me ‘mommy hopper.’”

I paused to be sure, then said, “Hi, Tommy.”

Tommy Hernandez was our city hall reporter. He was twenty-five-years-old, of Cuban heritage, and as gay as backstage at the Tony Awards. How it was he had developed a spot-on impersonation of our arrow straight, Caucasian, septuagenarian executive editor was something of a marvel. He used it as a weapon whenever it suited him.

“Aw, man! I had been working on that one all morning,” he whined. “Where did I lose you?”

“At ‘swollen.’ I feel like Brodie would have gone with ‘engorged.’”

“The devil is always in the details,” he said.

“No, the devil is you. Though I must say you are delightfully twisted.”

“Thank you!” I could practically hear him beaming through the phone.

“Anyhow, does this call have a purpose beyond putting a seriously disturbing image in my head?”

“Yeah, actually, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t stepping on your toes with something I’m working on.”

“What’s that?”

“There’s a rumor the Nigerian government has decided that there’s a sizable enough Nigerian population in northern New Jersey to establish an embassy here in Newark,” he said. “We’re not sure if it’s a satellite to the main embassy in New York or if they’re going to move their whole operation here. Either one is news.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Anyhow, I was talking to Kathy Carter at the prosecutor’s office about it and she said, ‘What is this, Nigeria day?’ And then she said you had talked to her about something related to Nigeria, but then she wouldn’t say what because it was on background.”

“Yeah, I was just asking about a Nigerian ex-pat who came down with a bad case of carjacking.”

“Oh,” is all he said. “And rumor is you’re working on this with Chillax?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Because he’s the most adorable intern in the history of interns, that’s why. His face has that lost little boy thing going on, but his body is…” Here, Tommy made a noise that suggested he had just bitten into a really good steak, then finished with: “He is sooooo tasty.”

“Yeah, and you’re sooooo dreaming if you think he likes boys.”

“I don’t know about that. You know what position he played for his college lacrosse team, right?” Tommy said, but didn’t wait before delivering the punch line, “Long stick middy.”

I just shook my head. “How are things with Glenn, anyway?”

Tommy had been dating my cousin Glenn for the last eight months. My family had long suspected Glenn was gay—inasmuch as he looks like Brad Pitt yet had remained without a serious girlfriend for many years—but it wasn’t confirmed until he and Tommy ended up hooking up at my sister’s wedding. They had been together ever since.

“He asked over the weekend if we could take a break,” Tommy said.

“Ouch. Sorry.”

“I couldn’t even take it that personally. I just don’t think he’s ever going to settle down,” Tommy said. “But I’m not sure I can talk to you about it. You’re not an impartial party.”

“Okay,” I said. “Well, switching back to Nigeria, why were you calling the prosecutor’s office about the embassy thing anyway? What would they have to do with it?”

“Oh, this is the good part,” Tommy said. “The only reason the whole thing came to our attention was that the land in question had a little problem with it. They were doing some site preparation but they had to stop work because they came across skeletal remains.”

“Cool,” I said. Macabre as it may be, there are just certain phrases that tweak a newspaper reporter’s antenna. “Skeletal remains” is one of them.

“Yeah, well, we’ll see. All Kathy would tell me is that the remains had been taken to the medical examiner and it was under investigation.”

“Still. Could be good. Let me know, okay?”

“You got it,” and then Tommy switched to his Harold Brodie voice, “and I’ll try to remember that Tina’s breasts are engorged, not swollen.”

“Yeah, you better keep your voice down,” I said. “If she hears you talking about her like that, it’s your face that’s going to end up swollen.”

*   *   *

Despite my better judgment, I completed my drive to the newsroom, parked in our garage, and walked back into the office.

The reason for my visit as noontime neared was Buster Hays, our resident rumpled crank. Buster was our cops reporter. Except calling him a cops reporter was like calling Pavarotti a shower singer. Much as Buster annoyed me with his general grumpiness, he was an unparalleled virtuoso at working law enforcement sources. He understood how to speak their language, how to get them to talk to him, and how to wheedle things out of them they wouldn’t say to anyone else. He had a series of well-stuffed Rolodexes that contained roughly forty years’ worth of contacts, all of whom seemed indebted to Buster for one reason or another.

When Buster went to a press conference, he usually came back with at least a half-dozen tidbits that he had gotten on the side, stuff no other civilians knew. He seldom shared this information with readers, which was part of the reason the cops didn’t mind giving it to him.

That might seem to be counterintuitive—what would a reporter possibly gain by withholding something from the paper?—but the real art came in leveraging off-the-record information from one source to get on-the-record stuff from another. Buster was a magician at it.

Alas, the only way to get Buster to share these extra crumbs of information he had gathered was to go into the newsroom, genuflect a bit, and then grovel. What kind of mood he was in dictated just how much you’d have to prostrate yourself.

I walked up his desk humbly, head down, eyes averted, as a harijan might approach the maharajah.

He was slumped in his chair, wearing one of his stain-splattered paisley ties, beating on the keyboard with savage ferocity. Buster’s manual-typewriter-tuned fingers never had quite mastered the relatively light touch required by computer keyboards.

Before I could even open my mouth, he looked up and, in his hundred-and-toidy-toid-street Bronx accent, declared, “Beat it, Ivy, I’m busy.”

I am actually not a product of the Ivy Leagues. But I had stopped correcting Buster on this misconception. At my alma mater, Amherst, we pity those graduates of the Ancient Eight and try to be quietly unassuming about the superiority of the undergraduate education we received.

“I didn’t even ask you for anything yet,” I protested.

“Yeah, but you’re about to. I can tell by the way you’re slinking.”

I sat on his desk—which I knew he didn’t like—and fired my first salvo. “If you don’t help me, I’m going to tell Tina you called her fat.”

“Go ahead. Your head will be rolling down the hallway before she even thinks about taking off mine.”

Thwarted, I attempted the attract-the-flies-with-sugar approach. “Okay, okay. If you help me, I’ll get you a sandwich from the deli down the street. Whatever you want.”

“You trying to kill me? The pastrami in that place is older than I am.”

Back to lemons. “Fine. You’re forcing me to pull out the big guns. If you don’t talk to me, I’m going to tell Chillax that for all your crustiness, you actually love nothing more than to mentor young people; and that therefore he ought to hang around you and tell you college lacrosse stories because you looooove college lacrosse stories.”

Buster grimaced. He tolerated the interns even less than he tolerated me. And the fact was, with most of the reporters in their forties and fifties having been chased away, I was closer to his age than most anyone else around.

“Jesus, Ivy, you’re like a bunion. Fine. The only thing I got that wasn’t part of the presser is that they actually caught the demise of Kevin Tiemeyer on camera. For whatever good it did them.”

“Why isn’t that good?”

“The shooter was wearing a mask. Good luck putting that on a poster. ‘Wanted: a black guy wearing a blue ski mask.’”

“A
blue
ski mask,” I said.

“Yeah, what does that matter?”

I told him about the man who pulled the trigger on Joseph Okeke, who was also wearing a blue ski mask. It was, possibly, a coincidence. But it didn’t feel that way. It felt more like there was a carjacker who was escalating his level of violence. The longer he went without being caught, the worse it was going to get.

“So what’s your deal, Ivy, you’re trying to be the Hunter Thompson of carjacking?” Buster cracked. Even though he reached maturity at a time when the so-called “New Journalism” was invented, Buster was a strict proponent of the old kind: everything was straight news, double-sourced, and written in inverted pyramid style with a minimum of imagination or creativity. He scoffed at anything narrative, experiential, or longer form.

“You know we’ve been ignoring this problem too long,” I countered. “And if there really is a lunatic on the loose who gets his jollies shooting people while stealing their cars, that’s something our readers ought to know.”

Not even Buster could dispute that one.

“All right,” he huffed. “I got a guy on the carjacking task force who said he’d notify me whenever there was a new hit. I think they want to turn up the heat on the county to give them more resources. I’ll cut you in the loop.”

“Thanks, Buster,” I said. “Damn decent of you.”

“A fifth of Ballantine’s,” he said, summoning the name of his go-to scotch brand. “My desk. Tomorrow morning.”

CHAPTER 9

Blue Mask didn’t know the guy’s real name. No one, besides perhaps his momma, knew that. To everyone who dealt with him—which included no small part of Newark’s criminal underworld—he was the Fence. Or just Fence, for short.

His place of business was alongside Chancellor Avenue in the South Ward, in an ancient concrete block warehouse that didn’t have a front entrance. With that Rolex-shaped lump secure in his pocket, Blue Mask went around to the back and pressed the doorbell.

Five grand. Blue Mask needed to get his nut to five grand. Then he could get the hell out of his great-aunt Birdie’s place and put down the deposit on his own. No more church. No more cat.

He was, as of his current accounting, at $4,217. That was the amount hidden in the brown paper sack he had stuffed in a high shelf in Birdie’s kitchen, behind the cornstarch, in a place where a little bit of a thing like Birdie couldn’t reach. It wasn’t an ideal stashing place. But he couldn’t figure any place better, and he didn’t want to be walking the street with so much cash. Yet another reason he needed his own crib.

He had earned more than five G’s in his three carjackings, of course. But a man had expenses. And needs. Especially a man who had spent his last fifteen months in prison.

But that was taken care of now. So he was focused on getting the most he could for the watch. A new Rolex went for, what, twenty? Twenty-five? Blue Mask didn’t know. But he figured a used one would go for ten. Which meant he might be able to work Fence for three grand. Maybe five.

The door buzzed. Blue Mask entered. Halfway down the hallway, there was a window—probably bulletproof—with a small slot. Blue Mask stood in front of it. The slot opened. From inside, he could see the Fence, a black guy so obese that he even had fat rolls on the back of his neck.

“Yo, ’sup, Fence?”

“Ain’t got time for small talk, young ’un. What you want?”

“Got a Rolex, yo.”

Blue Mask went into his pocket, pulled out the watch, dangled it where Fence could see it.

“Yeah. So?”

“It’s a real one,” Blue Mask said.

“What do I care?”

“Wanna buy it?”

“Lemme see it.”

Blue Mask held it closer. Fence’s first response was to belch. His second was to say, “I can’t sell that.”

“What you mean? It’s a
Rolex
.”