The Girl Next Door (28 page)

“Thanks.”

I closed the door to the basement, pivoted, and started making toward the bathroom. I was almost home free when she finally recovered enough of her senses to ask, “Were you outside the kitchen just now?”

I turned back toward her. She was wearing a denim apron over her sensible suit, but it didn’t diminish the feeling that I was suddenly on the witness stand under cross-examination. Which meant it was in my best interest to play as stone-dumb as possible.

Luckily, I’m good at that.

“Uh, that depends, which room is the kitchen?” I said, looking around like it might be hiding in the crawl space above me.

“It’s … never mind, forget it,” she said. “Look, I know this may sound rude, and maybe it is. But can I ask you to leave when you’re done? I’m just … I’m not comfortable with having you here right now.”

“I’m sorry, did I do something wrong?” I said, as if I was still quite perplexed.

“No, it’s just that … It would really just be better if you came back later.”

“Later? I’m not sure I understand…”

“I have a document I’d like to show you,” she explained. “But it’s not appropriate for right now, with all these guests here.”

So the aforementioned “it” was a document. That was good. Documents are
always
good where a reporter is concerned.

“Sure,” I said. “Later. Later is fine.”

“Could you come back at five today? I think my sister, Jeanne, wants to be with me when I show it to you.”

“Uh, yeah, five is fine.”

“Good,” she said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

“Definitely. Go, go,” I said, waving her away. “I’ll see you back here at five.”

I did what I had come inside to do, then showed myself out. I cut across the lawn, past a tent full of people eating potato salad.

*   *   *

In a way, Anne had done me a favor in kicking me out. I didn’t really have the time to be hanging around, trading empty bromides about death with Nancy’s friends.

I got in my car and started driving, mostly to get the air-conditioning going. I thought about the to-do list rattling in my head and decided the first item was to place a call to Peter Davidson of the National Labor Relations Board and learn what his business had been with Nancy. I got his voice mail, and just as I was leaving the end of my message, another call came through on my phone. I switched to the new call.

“Carter Ross.”

“Smiley here,” I heard back.

“Hello, Detective. I thought I might be hearing from you. I nearly wore out your name with a couple of your colleagues last night.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m told,” he said. “I just started my shift and I got this note from two guys on patrol saying you threw a woman into a concrete wall and then made up some story you were really saving her from a hit and run? Please tell me that’s not how you roll with the ladies.”

“It’s not, it’s not,” I assured him. “And, unfortunately, the story about the hit and run is true.”

“Oh yeah? For real?”

“Yeah, and the damsel in distress could have told your officers as much last night—she just happened to be unconscious. She’s awake now, so she could give you a statement if you need it.”

“Oh. Wow. That, uh, changes things.”

“How so?”

“Well, there’s someone out there who should have some pretty heavy charges against him.”

I don’t know why, but I hadn’t considered that attempting to run someone over with your car was probably frowned on by the law.

“At minimum, he could be charged with aggravated assault,” Owen continued. “We could also hit him with possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose—in this case, the car. Depending on how good our evidence is and whether we could prove he was actually trying to hit you, we could even go at the guy for attempted murder. Trying to hit someone with your car and missing is the same thing as firing a gun at someone and missing. Just because you’re a bad shot—or, in this case, a bad driver—doesn’t make you any less culpable.”

“Right, of course.”

“Did you see anything?”

“Nothing other than a big set of headlights trying to run my ass down.”

“No plates? No description of the vehicle?”

“Sorry.”

“Too bad,” he said. “Well, in any event, I need to get that statement from your lady friend. Those patrol officers were ready to charge you, and they wrote you up in their report. My bosses are going to think I’m playing favorites with a friend if I don’t give them something.”

“I hear you. Can you meet me at Mountainside Hospital in fifteen minutes? I should pay her a visit anyway.”

“Yeah? You, uh, getting a little some?” he asked.

“Why, Officer, I do believe kissing and telling is unlawful under New Jersey Criminal Code.”

“So that means you haven’t sealed the deal?”

As usual, the sex-deprived, married father of three—or four, or however many kids he had now—was in search of titillation. I felt bad disappointing him, but I said, “Afraid not.”

He clucked his tongue. “Too bad. I’ll see you at the hospital,” he said, and we hung up.

So, despite my previous intentions not to take this to law enforcement, the police were now involved. I asked myself how I felt about that, and I realized pretty quickly that I felt relieved. I needed some allies, especially ones who were trained in the use of firearms.

Detective Smiley and I pulled into the Mountainside Hospital parking deck at the same time and found spots next to each other—me in my Malibu, him in a brown Ford. If the stereotypical cop is a big, lumbering, doughnut-munching guy with a flattop, Owen is pretty much the opposite. He’s small, quick, and hard-bellied, with dirty blond hair that’s long enough to get in his eyes on occasion. I guess police grooming standards were relaxed for detectives.

“So,” he said as soon as he got out, “this victim. Would you describe her as … attractive?”

“You’re asking strictly as an investigator, I assume?”

“Oh, of course.”

“Actually, you might know her: Nikki Papadopolous. She’s a hostess at the State Street Grill.”

“The one with the sweet bod?”

“Yeah, that’s her.”

“Go, lady-killer!”

He stuck out his fist for a bump, and I reciprocated, all the while feeling like I was back in high school gym class, talking about who “put out” and who didn’t.

“Yeah, you might want to be careful about how you use the phrase ‘lady-killer’ if you end up writing a report about this.”

“Fair point,” he said, and we entered the hospital, taking the elevator up to see the patient.

I stopped outside her door and said, “Let me just make sure she’s up for receiving visitors right now. Give me a second.”

Owen nodded, and I knocked lightly on the door, entering when I heard Nikki say, “Come in.”

She was sitting up in bed and smiled when she saw me. But there was something reserved about it. And I soon understood why. I was about to be dumped by a woman in a hospital bed—a first, even for me.

She gave me a variation of the old “it’s not you, it’s me,” line. Except it wasn’t me
or
her. It was Gus. Her father, she explained, “totally flipped” when he learned his daughter had been in my company the previous evening.

That’s because I’m on to him
, I wanted to say but didn’t. Instead, I allowed her to explain that while she knew she needed to live her own life, she didn’t want to aggrieve her father too greatly. And if being with me was
that
difficult for dear Babba, it probably meant our relationship was doomed because her family would always be important to her.

Given that our one and only date ended with her unconscious and upside down in my shrubbery with her underwear showing, I couldn’t exactly launch a compelling argument as to why she was making a bad decision. Plus, there was the small complicating factor that I was very possibly in the midst of an investigation that would get her old man thrown in jail.

So I let her off easy and we agreed, if nothing else, it had been a memorable first (and only) date. I gave her a kiss on the cheek before I left—her perfume had finally worn off, so I was able to do it without getting dizzy—and told her Detective Owen Smiley of the Bloomfield Police Department was waiting to take her statement.

Then I bid her farewell and slid back out into the hallway, where I waved Owen in.

“She’s all yours,” I said. “I’ll be down the hall in the lobby. Let’s chat when you’re done.”

*   *   *

I camped myself on a couch, whittling away the next half hour or so fiddling with my iPhone. Like most new technology, it was simultaneously a great productivity enhancer and a total time waster. Then again, I suppose most of the microchipped gizmos and digital doodads we’ve developed in the last thirty years or so pretty much fall into that category.

So it was I ended up in an extended e-mail conversation with Lunky. I had configured the e-mail settings so that instead of appearing as “Lungford, Kevin,” his messages came in as being from, simply, “Lunky.” Oh, I do amuse myself so.

Lunky was trying to convince me that Philip Roth really should have won the Pulitzer Prize for
Sabbath’s Theater
(“his true masterpiece”) and not
American Pastoral
(“a brilliant but slightly lesser work”). If anything, he informed me,
American Pastoral
and
Sabbath’s Theater
were opposites of one another—in one the protagonist is too optimistic to live, and in the other he’s too cynical to die. In Lunky’s opinion, the Pulitzer committee rewarded the former rather than the latter simply as an acknowledgment it had goofed.

Just to prod Lunky, I wrote back that I thought
Portnoy’s Complaint
was Roth’s finest work, prompting a long screed from Lunky that while Portnoy showed glimpses of Roth’s genius, it was essentially “rudimentary”—really just “the crude sketching of a man who was later to become a master artist.” In particular, “having Portnoy masturbate with raw liver is, to say the least, unrefined.”

Naturally, I hadn’t read any of those books—and since I wasn’t fond enough of liver to cook and eat it, much less pleasure myself with it, I can’t say I was planning to put
Portnoy
on my reading list. Lunky was just beginning to uncork his thoughts on why
Human Stain
was the last worthwhile Roth composition—and why everything since only evinced a once-great writer who had slowed a step or two—when Owen came walking down the hallway.

“Well, it turns out you’re the hero after all,” he said.

“I’m so relieved, Officer,” I replied, wiping the nonexistent sweat from my brow.

“But Nikki in there is the star.”

“Oh yeah? Why?”

“While you were playing middle linebacker, she managed to get a description of the vehicle.”

“She … wow,” I said. “I didn’t even think to ask her.”

“That’s why you pay all those taxes to the town of Bloomfield, so the genius detective can pose the pertinent questions.”

I thought about the mechanics of it and realized she had had a much better chance at seeing something. I had turned and faced her as soon as I became aware something was charging up my lawn, whereas she had remained facing it for much longer.

“So let me guess: we were nearly run over by a large black SUV.”

“A Cadillac Escalade, yeah. Nikki said the last thing she saw was that big grille plate with a Cadillac crest on it,” he said. “Wait, how’d you know? You told me you didn’t see anything.”

“I didn’t.”

“So, what, you suddenly recovered a lost memory? You know that won’t play on the witness stand. It’s in the patrol officer’s initial report that you couldn’t ID the vehicle. Defense attorneys shred people for stuff like that.”

“Just call it reporter’s intuition.”

Owen grunted, clearly unconvinced. I gave myself one final chance to churn over the ramifications of allowing the long arm of the law to reach all the way into my story. But I realized it was already in there.

“Okay,” I said, releasing a large breath. “The person who tried to run us over is the same person who killed Nancy Marino, that hit and run I called you about the other day. I spoke to a witness on Ridge Avenue who said she saw a large black SUV intentionally run down Nancy.”

“You … how is that possible? We talked to everyone on that block.”

“You didn’t talk to these folks. Trust me.”

Owen got a faraway look for a moment, then said, “That red house. The one on the high side of the street. I thought it was abandoned. That house was right in front of where the accident happened. The people there would have been able to see everything. I knew I should have tried that house again.”

“No comment. My source spoke to me on the condition that I wouldn’t go to the police.”

“So they’re illegal,” Owen said.

“No comment,” I said again. “My word is my word. All I can tell you is that I’ll go back to my source and try to convince her to cooperate.”

“Well, tell her we don’t care about her family’s immigration status. Not when she’s a witness to a crime. That’s department policy.”

Owen pushed his hair back away from his eyes and was pacing around the waiting room, working hard on all this new information. He was carrying the notebook he had used to take Nikki’s statement and periodically slapped it against his hand.

“Let’s talk hypothetical for a second,” I said. “Just say we got that witness to cooperate and tell you what she saw. Now, let’s say I have another witness—who, again, is not quite in a cooperative mood just yet—who would say he heard a man making threats against Nancy Marino the night before she was killed—”

“This clearly isn’t hypothetical,” he interrupted.

“And let’s say the man who was making threats had an adversarial business relationship with Nancy,” I continued. “And that it’s possible he was conspiring with another man who
also
had a good reason to want to be rid of Nancy. Would that be enough to arrest both guys?”

“Well, I’d have to talk to the prosecutor’s office, obviously, but we’ve arrested people on less than that,” Owen said. “That’s the beginning of a pretty strong circumstantial case, especially if you’ve got the threats. And obviously, we’d be able to get some search warrants and do some more investigation and try to make it less circumstantial. Can you really deliver all those things?”