The Girl Next Door (21 page)

“Now, you tell me: Does that sound like a man desperate enough to commit murder?” McNabb asked. “He’s not only going to lose his job, he’d go down as the guy who couldn’t save a ‘great American newspaper.’ He’d never get another job near that pay grade. That’s a pretty powerful motive, to me.”

I thought about the $2.27 million McMansion, the $35,000 property tax bill, the his-and-hers matching manicures, the pocket squares, all the elitist trappings of a well-financed life that would instantly evaporate if Jackman found himself on the unemployment line next to the rest of his former employees.

“Can I have a printout of that?” I asked.

“I figured you were gonna ask that,” he said, sliding a piece of paper across the desk at me. I grabbed what I could tell was a photocopy of the e-mail, albeit with a few identifying characteristics strategically blacked out. “I figured it was cc’d to enough people that any one of us could have leaked it to you.”

“Great,” I said. “Just curious: Is your e-mail backed up somewhere?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I just want to make sure that e-mail exists somewhere on a server, so if I got a prosecutor to subpoena you, they would definitely find it somewhere.”

“Oh. Oh yeah. Well, we do backups, for sure. But I’m not planning on erasing this. And if I got a subpoena, yeah, that’d be great. That would let me off the hook with my board and everyone else, because I could just say, ‘Hey, I had no choice.’ Why, you thinking about taking this to the cops?”

“Not yet,” I said. “At this point, I’d just be a disgruntled employee with a wild theory. I’m still a few facts short.”

“Yeah, I guess this could still all be one big coincidence, right?”

He looked at me with a frank, open face. And I once again found myself wondering whether I could trust McNabb with more information. He was a born blabbermouth, the last guy who could be relied on to keep a secret. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn’t actually
want
him to keep it secret. Having McNabb working back channels for me might just flush out more Jackman adversaries with heretofore unknown evidence.

Besides, there was that whole thing about no longer having the luxury of caution.

“Actually,” I said, “it’s no coincidence.”

*   *   *

Over the next ten minutes, I recounted for McNabb a distilled version of the story Mrs. Alfaro told me. Naturally, I was careful not to disclose her name, say where she lived, or give identifying characteristics—I wanted to respect the pledge of confidentiality I had given her—but I didn’t spare the details. As I spoke, McNabb’s mouth set into an ugly pout. I got the sense it was hard for him to hear. He had obviously been fond of Nancy Marino.

When I finished, he stood up and walked over toward the window. He put his hands on his hips and made a loud shushing sound as he emptied his lungs. His eyes appeared to be focused on something far beyond Manhattan. He shook his head a few times, like he still didn’t want to believe it, then went back to staring.

“That son of a bitch,” he said at last, without turning away from the window. “I know I told you I thought it was Jackman, but I was always thinking maybe I had it wrong. You assume people are basically good, you know? Nancy, she … that kid was … she didn’t deserve anything like this. He killed her because of, what, a few bucks an hour in a stinking contract?”

Except—and I had already done this math—it was more than just a few bucks. Say we had one thousand carriers, as Buster Hays suggested. Say they each worked three hours a day delivering the newspaper and did it seven days a week, 365 days a year. If Nancy was any guide, they were getting paid $18 an hour to do it. But a fifty percent pay cut meant a $9-an-hour savings for the paper. That rounded to about $7 million a year. In a budget where years of ritualized fasting had created negligible fat, $7 million could certainly make the difference between red and black—which would make the difference between Jackman getting to remain as the publisher of a fully operating major metropolitan newspaper and being put out of work.

“It’s like you said, Jackman was getting desperate,” I said.

“A powerful man facing the loss of his power will do just about anything to protect it,” McNabb said thoughtfully.

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess he will.”

“So do the cops know about this yet?”

“My source doesn’t trust the cops. I think I’ll eventually be able to talk her into working with them, when it comes to that, but for right now that’s not a priority.”

McNabb walked back from the window and sat down, flopping his weight heavily on the chair.

“What
is
a priority is that last conversation you had with Jackman,” I continued.

“Huh?”

“The talk you had with him in the bar the night before Nancy was killed.”

“Oh yeah. Oh geez, I wasn’t even thinking about that. But you don’t even need that anymore, right? Your source saw him do it.”

“My source saw a large black SUV do it,” I reminded him. “She never laid eyes on the driver, and even if she had, it would be a stretch to say she could make a positive ID that would hold up. Jackman had to be going fifty, sixty miles an hour at a minimum by the time he hit Nancy. My source was way too far away, and being on the second floor, the angle was all wrong for her to be able to see the driver’s face anyway.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“I’m beginning to think Jackman wasn’t actually the driver. He strikes me as the kind of guy who might hire someone to do his dirty work. I’m fairly certain he doesn’t own a black SUV himself. I think he either rented himself a killer or rented himself a car.”

“Oh yeah? What makes you think that?”

“I, uh, had his garage investigated late last night,” I said, throwing in a wink.

“What do you mean?”

“I broke into Jackman’s garage and had a look around,” I said, leaving out the small detail that Tommy had been the one doing the breaking and looking. “There’s a Lexus and a Ford in there, but neither are SUVs.”

“You got to be careful doing something like that. You could get yourself in trouble, someone sees you sneaking into garages.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t say I got away with it. I spent last night as a guest of the Mendham Borough Police Department.”

“No kiddin’! You going to be okay? I know some good lawyers…”

“Thanks, I’ll figure that out later,” I said. “In any event, it’s going to make proving his guilt a little more difficult. The case might be more circumstantial than I or anyone else likes. But it also makes that bar conversation absolutely pivotal. Think about it from a jury’s perspective. You hear the suspect was drunk and tossing out threats, and then hours later the person they were threatening got killed? Even if we never did find that black SUV, your testimony might be enough to get a conviction.”

“I told you, I can’t get involved like that,” McNabb said quickly, defensively. “What I was doing with Jackman could get me in real trouble with my board. When I told you about that conversation, you promised me off the record. Off. The. Record. Don’t you go back on your word.”

His big belly had shoved the keyboard back under the desk, and he was leaning toward me, pointing a finger at me with his face flushed.

“I’m not. I’m not,” I assured him. “But, at this point, you’ve got to agree that a murder is bigger than you getting a little jammed up with your board. Be reasonable here.”

“So nothing with you is really off the record, huh? You’re going to run to the cops and rat me out?”

“Just relax. I’m not running anywhere or ratting anyone, Jim. All I’m saying is, I need your help. There’s got to be something you can do for me or give me that will help establish Jackman was drunk and raving that night. Surely some bartender or patron overheard you guys? Then if the cops approach you and ask you, you can just say it was a friendly get-to-know-you drink that went bad, and you can leave out the part about contract negotiations—”

“Yeah, but eventually I’ll have to testify.”

“That’s a long, long way down the road,” I said. “Let’s worry about getting Jackman arrested first. The fact is, Jackman will eventually realize we got him, but he’ll have just enough leverage—because there will inevitably be holes in the case—that he’ll get a decent plea deal. You’ll never have to testify about anything.”

McNabb leaned back and exhaled, closing his eyes and rubbing his temples in a circular motion with two fat middle fingers. Finally he opened his eyes.

“Let me think about it for a day or two,” he said.

For now, it was the best I was going to get. I just had to give him that space. He led me out of his office, past candypants, past the reception desk, and out the etched-glass doors.

I was back down in the lobby when my phone rang. It was Tina.

“Hey, how’s my favorite ex-editor?” I asked.

“Carter, you need to come in immediately,” she said, her voice terse and low.

“What, you can’t live one day without me? I’m flattered.”

“Stop joking around. Brodie just heard about the incident at Jackman’s house last night, and he’s absolutely fuming. I’ve never seen him this mad. If you’ve got anything to say for yourself before he makes your suspension permanent, I suggest you come here damn fast and say it.”

At first, he was both astonished and impressed by his opponent’s temerity. He had been around reporters plenty of times. Most of them thought daring was to plunge into an especially large box of documents.

This one obviously had different ideas. Snooping around a house in the dark of night? Breaking into a garage? Being willing to do the dirty work with no thought of the danger involved? It was the rare reporter who pushed that far to get a story.

But his surprise at—and grudging respect for—those tactics quickly gave way to other feelings. Like irritation. And anger. And hatred.

The threat was more serious than ever. A few threads of this supposedly perfect crime had already started to unravel. And even if Carter Ross was still far off in certain areas, he was getting close—way too close—in others. He was starting to know about things no one ought to have been able to discover. And if he had learned that much already, while showing no signs of wanting to pull back, he might just discover even more. Depending on how determined he was, he might figure out the whole thing. And Ross seemed pretty determined.

Under most circumstances, it didn’t take much to break a man, especially those soft, white-collar types. A little push here. A little shove there. Men who had worked to achieve a certain standing didn’t want to lose it. Threaten them with the loss of something that mattered to them and they backed off. You just had to figure out what was important to them and make sure it became imperiled.

Ross didn’t seem to work that way. He was far less risk averse. He wasn’t put off by the potential loss of his job, by hits to his reputation, or even the threat of jail. Who knows what else he might put on the line?

Ross had already been through things that would put most men off the case, but it wasn’t enough. Not yet. Clearly, a more active approach would be required.

CHAPTER 6

Hurry. I definitely needed to hurry. I pushed through the revolving doors, feeling the muggy embrace of a heat index that had to be 105 already, with the hottest part of the day yet to come. I started power-walking back toward my car, feeling the sweat popping on my upper lip after about four steps. By the end of the second block, the spot where my briefcase strap rubbed against my shoulder had started to soak through. By block four, the perspiration on my forehead was beading and rolling down the side of my face. By block six, a small rain forest had sprouted in my pants.

And then I got to my Malibu—or, rather, the side of the street where my Malibu should have been. But it was completely clear. I felt a surge of panic, which I tried to suppress. Maybe I had gotten the wrong street? I remembered parking in front of a dry cleaner. And, sure enough, the dry cleaner was still there. My car was not.

I stood there, dumbly gawking at the long stretch of naked curb. Less than an hour earlier it had been haphazardly littered with vehicles—not densely packed, mind you, but that’s why I had been able to find parking there to begin with. And now, it had either been attacked by a large and unusually well-coordinated band of car thieves or …

I looked at the parking sign for the first time:
STREET CLEANING WED
10–12. Then I fished into my pocket for my cell phone: “10:41
A.M.
Wed Jul 13.”

Sure enough, upon closer inspection, there wasn’t a scrap of litter on the street, except for the small, dusty parabola where the driver of a street-cleaning machine had been forced to swerve around my Malibu and then, out of spite, reported me to the parking police.

In some municipalities, being towed is merely a huge annoyance. Then there’s Newark. New Jersey’s largest city is serviced by a variety of companies that have contracts to do police towing, but most of them seem to share a few characteristics: they are headquartered in the swamp by the turnpike, in that smelly industrial crotch pit that unduly odorizes New Jersey’s reputation; they are staffed by men who have all the charm of bridge-dwelling trolls; and they are fully empowered by the law to first steal your car, then extort whatever they want out of you before they give it back.

And I just didn’t have the time to deal with that hassle, not with Brodie arming for hostilities. By the time I repossessed my car, he would have mobilized his troops, declared war, and completely overrun the small island nation that was me and my career at the
Newark Eagle-Examiner
. I had to make a token effort at building defensive structures while there was still the chance it might do some good.

It was a twenty-minute walk back to the newsroom, fifteen if I hustled. So I started hustling, making my legs churn as fast as I could while perspiration squirted out of every pore in my body. Before long, my feet actually started to feel squishy, my tie had become something resembling a drooling baby’s bib, and I was beginning to worry if my white shirt was about to become translucent, turning me into the hairiest wet T-shirt contestant this side of the Atlantic.