The Girl Next Door (12 page)

“Leave, now,” he said. “Or I call the police and tell them you trespass.”

“Sir, I’m not trespassing. I’m conducting an—”

“It’s time for you to go,” he said again, finding new inspiration for his anger.

As best I could tell, my options were as follows: confront the fuming Greek man and attempt to calm him down, an act that would likely only enrage him further; or make like Alexander the Great and get the heck out of Macedonia, which is the course I chose.

“Nikki, it sounds like I’m not welcome here,” I said, deliberately addressing her rather than Babba. “I think I’ll leave now.”

“I’ll see you out,” Nikki said.

Her father started to protest, but Nikki fixed him with a glare every bit as effective as if she had dropped a piano on his head.

“He is a
customer,
” she spat. “We are
not
rude to our customers.”

The old man could hardly object to that logic. And it was clear an unspoken deal had been struck. She would acquiesce to his demand that the newspaper reporter depart, but he would allow her to coordinate my retreat in a way that preserved her dignity. As if to underscore the fact that she had resumed control of the situation, she slipped her arm in mine—clearly an unpopular move with Babba—and escorted me out of the office and back through the kitchen without so much as another glance at her father.

As we entered the dining area, my mind was already churning. Whenever a reporter gets asked to leave someone’s home, business, school, or place of worship—and I’ve been bounced out of all four on many occasions—it inevitably raises the question: What do they have to hide?

“What was that about?” I asked, when we were finally out of range.

“Oh, that’s just my dad being my dad,” she said, shaking her head like she’d seen it a thousand times before. “He’s old-school.”

“But why wouldn’t he want you talking to a reporter? We’re not discussing state secrets here.”

“When he doesn’t understand a situation, that’s how he reacts. I’ll explain it to him once he calms down, and he’ll be fine.”

I thought back to the debate I had earlier with myself, the one involving how much to tell Nikki. I had decided she was harmless, and I hoped I was still correct in that judgment. As for her father? There was no telling about him. Jeanne Nygard had said Nancy was having “problems at work.” It was dawning on me she never specified which workplace.

Was it possible this man had something to do with Nancy’s death? Was that why he didn’t want me snooping around? It wouldn’t immediately make sense that a diner owner would want to get rid of one of his most popular waitresses, but there was no telling what might have been happening beneath the metal awnings at the State Street Grill.

As we reached the front of the restaurant, where Nikki’s pal Jen was still faithfully staffing the hostesses’ station, I attempted to do some quick damage control.

“Do me a favor and don’t tell him what I told you about Nancy,” I said, then added quickly, “I don’t want to upset him further.”

“Oh, no problem,” she said, holding the front door open for me. “Believe me, I stopped telling my dad everything about my life a long time ago. I mean, I’m twenty-eight years old and he still thinks I’m a virgin.”

I brushed past her just as she said the word “virgin,” and felt a charge rush through me. I walked out into a small anteroom, then to another door, which I held open for her.

“Anyway, sorry he freaked out,” she continued as we reached the front porch.

“No problem.”

I suddenly felt like I was being watched. And, sure enough, Babba was monitoring our interaction from inside the restaurant, his arms crossed, his unicorn horn at the ready. Nikki either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

“And thanks for writing that nice article about Nancy. That was really sweet.”

“I was happy to do it.”

Uncrossing his arms, Babba started making for the door. He had apparently lost his patience for our little farewell scene. This time Nikki noticed.

“You’re a nice guy,” she said quickly, and before I knew what was happening, she stood on her tiptoes, gripped my shoulders to propel herself upward, and kissed me on the cheek. It was one of those innocent-but-not-so-innocent kisses, the kind that involved a little too much body contact to be considered sisterly.

Without another word, she disappeared back into the diner, leaving me standing on the patio, just slightly dazed.

*   *   *

By the time I came to my senses, my empty brain had stopped calling the shots and my empty stomach had taken over. It guided me a block and a half down Bloomfield Avenue and into a hole-in-the-wall pizzeria, where I found myself ordering two slices and a Coke Zero.

This, of course, is one of the great pleasures of living in New Jersey, as compared to other parts of this vast, pizza-starved nation of ours. Walk into nearly any pizza place in my part of the state, and you will find better pie than you will in, say, the whole of the American South. People offer all kinds of theories for why this is so, citing the quality of the water (something in the aquifer that supposedly makes for good dough), the pollution (something in the air makes the sauce taste better), or the density of Italian-Americans (something about having a last name ending in a vowel just brings it all together).

I think it’s a kind of natural selection. A pizzeria in, say, rural Virginia merely has to outperform Pizza Hut, which is about as tough as besting a week-old baby at arm wrestling. A pizzeria in New Jersey has to take on some of the toughest competitors in the pizza world. Offering anything less than outstanding pie puts them out of business within six months. Only the strong survive.

I was into my second slice when my phone rang. I recognized both the number and the inflectionless voice on the other end:

“Mr. Ross, this is Jeanne Nygard, Nancy Marino’s sister. We met yesterday at the funeral home,” she said, as if she feared I suffered advanced amnesia.

“Of course, Jeanne, I remember.”

She wasted little time getting to the point: “Have you decided whether you’re going to investigate my sister’s murder?”

The word choice—“murder”—was an obvious attempt to be provocative. And even though I agreed with it, I didn’t let on. I wanted to see if she could convince me.

“What makes you think it’s a murder?” I asked.

I watched a bead of sweat drip down the side of my soda cup as I waited for her answer.

“Mr. Ross, I need to know if I can trust you.”

“You’ve mentioned that before. And I have to be honest, if you’re of the mind not to trust me, it’s going to be difficult for us to get past it. It will probably work better if you decide to give me a little trust and see how it works.”

“But I need to know whose side you’re on.”

People are always asking me variations of this question. Sad to say, but in a world overstuffed with pundits, bloggers, and first-person essayists, the true reporter—objective, open-minded, and willing to let go of his ideological slant—is getting pushed closer to extinction every day.

“Ms. Nygard, I don’t even know what the sides are yet,” I said. “All I can tell you is that I have no agenda other than to find the truth. And if it turns out there are two sides to that truth—or three sides, or more—I will treat them equally.”

My soda cup had created a small circle of moisture on the pizzeria’s Formica tabletop. This time, as I waited for her reply, I lifted the cup and started making patterns with the rings.

“What if the truth … doesn’t reflect well on
your
newspaper?” she said at last.

“Then my newspaper ought to be the first to report it. I don’t know what experiences you’ve had with other newspapers or other newspaper reporters. But at my place, we insist on transparency from the people we cover, so we hold ourselves to an even higher standard of self-disclosure.”

“So you’re not …
with
management?”

“I’m neither with nor against it. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on and we’ll worry about who looks bad later.”

This seemed to satisfy her.

“I don’t like having long conversations on the phone,” she said. “Can we meet in person?”

“Sure. Where can I find you?”

“I’m staying at the La Quinta,” she said, as if there were only one La Quinta and it turned its nose up at shoddier establishments like the Ritz-Carlton.

“Which La Quinta?”

“Hang on,” she said, lowering the phone for a moment, then returning to rattle off an address on Route 3 in Clifton.

“I can be there in fifteen minutes,” I said. “I’ll meet you in the lobby?”

“That would be fine,” she said, and we hung up.

I finished my pizza in two large bites, then drank what remained of the Coke Zero on my way out, tossing it in the trash by the door. Before long, the Malibu was pointed north on the Garden State Parkway, then east on Route 3, a thoroughly obsolete divided highway with short exit ramps and nonexistent merge lanes. To drive it is to invite early death to do the merengue with you. Yet, judging from the traffic that was always on it, roughly four billion people somehow survive the dance every day.

The La Quinta was just beyond a Shell station and a merging panel truck that nearly relieved my Malibu of its bumper. The hotel, which shared a parking lot with an egregious theme restaurant, looked like it had gotten a much-needed face-lift sometime in its recent past, and I’m sure somewhere there was a manager using the phrase “newly refurbished” whenever he got the chance.

Jeanne was waiting for me in the glass-enclosed lobby when I arrived, bobbing and weaving involuntarily as she sat in an armchair just inside the entrance. She was wearing a slightly different floral-print dress than the day before, but she still had on the same photochromic glasses. Her brown-and-gray hair, now out of the braid, fell halfway down her back. Any hairdresser would have told her it was far too brittle to be worn so long, but I could guess Jeanne Nygard probably wasn’t one to solicit opinions from the local salon.

“My husband doesn’t want me talking to you,” she began as I sat down, not bothering with preamble. “He thinks the stress is bad for my disease. I have Parkinson’s.”

She stopped dramatically, like I ought to have some kind of reaction—pity, dread, horror—or like I should be shocked and appalled by her condition.

“My sister doesn’t want me talking to you, either,” she resumed. “She thinks I’m just imagining everything. She … she doesn’t believe in negative feelings, so she thinks no one should be allowed to have them.”

Jeanne threw another pause into the conversation, so I filled it with an “uh-huh” because it felt polite.

“But I feel it’s important for me to talk to you, for
Nancy’
s sake,” she said.

Jeanne had obviously rehearsed this little speech and needed me to believe she was speaking to me at great personal peril and only out of considerable devotion to her late sister. The amateur psychologist in me recognized she was most likely a narcissist who was creating a self-serving fantasy in which she, Jeanne Nygard, was the heroine. The reality was that she was probably just using me to get back at her older sister, the disapproving lawyer.

But hey, if it got me the story, I was happy to play along.

“Yes,” I said. “For Nancy’s sake.”

*   *   *

With that matter settled, Jeanne paused—there were a lot of those in a conversation with Jeanne—and drew strength for what she needed to say next.

“I believe my sister was murdered because of her views,” she said.

Murdered for her views. Jeanne was turning her sister into the classic hippie martyr.
She was making the fascists in the military-industrial complex nervous, man, they hadda get rid of her!
And I might have dismissed it as ridiculous paranoia—too much peyote on the commune back in the day—except, of course, I knew someone
did
want to get rid of her, based on what Mrs. Alfaro had seen.

“What views?” I pressed.

“They were … unpopular … with certain people,” Jeanne said, and I didn’t know if she was being evasive on purpose or if this was just how she talked.

“Yes, but what views? Are we talking political views? I’m confused.”

“I suppose you could say they were political.”

“So … Nancy was killed by … Republicans?” I asked. Didn’t hippies blame Republicans for everything?

“No, no, not like that,” Jeanne said. “I mentioned to you she called me the night before she was killed.”

“Right. You said she was having problems at work?”

“Well, not at work, exactly.”

“Then where, exactly?” I asked, feeling my patience easing away. Talking with Jeanne was like being trapped in a car that only made left turns.

“You know my sister was very involved with her union, yes? She was a shop steward.”

“With the IFIW. Right.”

“You know it was in the midst of negotiations with …
your
newspaper.”

“I’m aware, yes,” I said, even though I hadn’t known about any of that until Tina had brought it up the night before. She never mentioned the IFIW specifically, but it stood to reason that if all the paper’s other unions were being asked to renegotiate their deals, the IFIW would as well.

“So my sister called me that night. Thursday night.”

“Right. The night before she was killed.”

“I think maybe there had been a meeting that night, a union meeting.”

“You
think
there was a meeting, or there
was
a meeting?”

She stopped to consider that question. I watched as a vacationing family—ugly dad, pretty mom, two elementary-school-aged kids who looked like they could end up going either way—checked in for a night of thrills and excitement at the Clifton La Quinta.

“My sister didn’t say, specifically,” Jeanne said, eventually. “But I … It stands to reason that she got home late from the meeting and then had trouble getting to sleep.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling like I was in another one of those left turns. “So what was keeping her awake?”

“She was very worried about the negotiations with the paper. She made it sound like they were going poorly. Nancy was … quite steadfast in her position.”