The Girl Next Door cr-3

by Brad Parks

  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.

  By the time I barged through the front entrance to the Eagle-Examiner, I looked like I had just run the Borneo High Noon 10K. The rain forest in my pants had become positively Amazonian, with a complex network of streams and rivers feeding into the big, mushy bog that was my ass. Even my knees felt sweaty.

  But there was no time to towel off. Brodie was on the warpath and needed to be talked off it. I ducked into the elevator just as the door was closing, next to a woman from the classified department who discreetly took two steps to her left so she wouldn’t get wet. I disembarked on the floor for the newsroom to find Tina waiting for me.

  “What the hell happened to you?” she demanded. “What took so long?”

  “My car got towed.”

  “Okay, but why did you swim here?”

  “I walked. It just happens to be a hundred and fifty-seven degrees outside.”

  “Well, you aren’t seeing Brodie like that. He already thinks you’ve lost your mind. You can’t come into his office looking like you’ve spent the morning practicing drowning. Come on.”

  Tina charged toward her office with single-minded focus, and I did my best to keep up, cutting my way through a thick underbrush of curious stares from my (former) colleagues. Everyone, I’m sure, knew I had been suspended and they had probably been gossiping about it ceaselessly. The only consolation was that they didn’t know about my escapade at Jackman’s house.

  Or so I thought. Then I went past Buster Hays’s desk. He looked up and with a sly grin let out a “meeeeeeooooow!”

  Some of his enablers cackled.

  “How you doin’, ‘Peeping Tomcat’?” he asked.

  “What the … How do you know about that?”

  “I read the paper, Ivy. You should try it sometime.”

  He slid a folded copy of that day’s paper toward me. Sure enough, the third item down in the Morris County crime roundup read, “Bloomfield man arrested for peering.” I scanned it quickly-it was just a four-paragraph brief-and while I saw my name and the particulars of my crime, I didn’t see Jackman’s name. It ended with, “Borough Police, who say this is the first known case of cat door infiltration in Morris County, are calling the alleged perpetrator the ‘Peeping Tomcat.’ Ross could not be reached for comment.”

  I sighed. Of course I couldn’t be reached. I was in jail.

  “You got some kind of feline fetish, Ivy?” Buster asked, prompting some barely muffled tittering from the peanut gallery. I grinned-better to laugh it off than show weakness when it comes to newsroom ball-busting-but before I could come up with a retort, Tina charged toward me, grabbed my arm, and pulled me into her office. She snatched her gym bag from behind her desk, then pushed through me on her way back out.

  “Follow me,” she said.

  Tina was wearing a sleeveless navy blue tank top that nicely showed off her arms and a short tan skirt that did even better for her legs. I would have followed her anywhere.

  She cut down the back stairwell, past a fire exit whose alarm had long ago been disabled by the newsroom smokers who sneak out for a quick cigarette. We descended into the basement, where she led me to the old pressmen’s locker room. There hadn’t been presses in the building for at least thirty years-they
had been moved out of the city, to suburban facilities close to interstates-but we still had the locker room where the pressmen long ago retreated to wash off the day’s ink. It looked like it could have belonged in any high school gymnasium, right down to the communal shower.

  Tina locked the door behind us.

  “Strip,” she commanded.

  “What?”

  “Strip,” she repeated. “Now.”

  * * *

  Tina didn’t pause to see if I was complying, just went into the shower room and turned on the water. When she returned, she bent down into her gym bag and emerged with a towel, which she placed on one of the benches, then dove back in and came up with a hair dryer. I just stood there, watching her quick and determined movements, still fully dressed in my sopping clothes.

  “Come on, we don’t have time for you to be modest,” she said, pointing the hair dryer at me like it was a gun. “Hop in the shower and I’ll do what I can to dry off your clothes while you’re in there. Now strip.”

  “Tina, I, uhh…” I stopped, feeling myself flush a little bit.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing, I just…”

  “You want me to strip, too? Fine.”

  The next thing I knew, Tina had pulled off her top and was wriggling out of her skirt. Underneath she had on a plain black bra and matching panties-no lacy underthings for Tina.

  I pulled off my tie, then started fumbling with the buttons on my shirt, which had been cemented into place by sweat and were noticeably unyielding.

  “Hurry up,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, I’ve got more clothing on than you.”

  “Yeah, you sure do,” Tina said, stepping quickly out of her underwear, then unhooking her bra and laying it neatly on top of where she had piled her other clothes. She shuffled off her shoes, then stood before me, hands on her hips, perfectly naked and, well, perfect.

  “There,” she said. “That’s how it’s done.”

  I was trying to maintain a professional demeanor about the whole thing-this was professional, right? — and resist the urge to attack any one of several very vulnerable, very delicious parts on her suddenly available body.

  “You’re going too slow,” Tina said, exasperated. She hurried over to me and started fumbling with my belt. I felt a muscle somewhere deep in my abdomen, one I didn’t use all that often, tighten involuntarily. This was too much.

  “Tina!”

  But my objection-if you could really call it that-had no effect on her. She had unhooked my belt, unbuttoned my pants, and lowered my zipper. She yanked off my pants with one move, then took my boxers with the next. I had, by this point, stopped moving, having been mentally incapacitated by the flow of blood out of my brain and into other regions of my body. So Tina took over with my shirt buttons, finishing that job quickly enough. Then she shoved my arms in the air and started pulling my sodden T-shirt over my head.

  But, my height being what it is, she had to narrow the distance between us and go up on her tiptoes to be able to reach that high. And somewhere during that process, she leaned into me a little bit too closely, causing parts of us to sort of, well, brush. By accident. And then suddenly it wasn’t so much of an accident.

  The next thing I knew, Tina had knocked me over-I still had my pants around my ankles, so I was easily tipped-and was crawling on top of me. Her mouth hungrily attacked mine, and all that sweating I had been doing was suddenly just lubrication as our bodies slid against each other. She seemed to have at least two tongues, because at one point I swore one was in my mouth while the other was in my ear.

  And for as much as I was in the moment-Tina was demanding as much-I was also sort of detached from it all. There had been so many times when the lighting and the music had been just right, when the mood was set and everything seemed preordained for us to consummate our relationship. Yet it had never happened. I just couldn’t believe, after all the near-misses, this was where we would finally collide: in the bowels of the Newark Eagle-Examiner’s basement, in the pressmen’s locker room, under the harshness of the fluorescent lights with the shower running, when I was probably just moments away from getting fired.

  If any of this was going through Tina’s mind, I couldn’t tell. She was moaning too loudly, her throaty voice bouncing off the hard tile, and she seemed intent on grinding me right through the subfloor. Not that I minded. I was beyond feeling anything but pleasure at that point. The world had become one big, slippy-slidey-wonderful funhouse, and Tina was the only person in it. She readjusted herself, and I thought she was getting into one of those positions I’ve only read about in books.

  Then she rolled off me.

  “Oh my God, what am I doing?” she said, giggling and smacking her hand to her forehead like it was just some minor mix-up, like putting ketchup on her burger when she meant to use mustard. “Sorry, I got a little carried away.”

  I groaned.

  “Tina, you can’t just-”

  “Oh, what, a guy could die?” she said, chortling some more and rolling her eyes. “Come on, I haven’t fallen for that line since high school. Go take care of it yourself in the shower if you have to.”

  I lay on my back, breathing hard, feeling the throbbing subside. A woman laughing when you’re naked-no matter what the circumstances-tends to have that effect. Finally, I raised myself to a sitting position and untied my shoes so I was able to slip off my pants.

  Tina, meanwhile, was back to being all business, plugging in her hair dryer and running it over my shirt. She was still naked, still quite stunning, but was pouring her attention into her task, paying me not the slightest bit of mind. So I stumbled into the shower, which had been running for a while and was hot enough to have kicked up a cloud of steam.

  I got in for a second, then realized I was going about things all wrong. A hot shower was the last thing I needed.

  I reached over to the nozzle and twisted it all the way to cold.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, Tina and I emerged from the locker room, doing our best to look respectable. My clothes were still damp, but at least there was no danger of me dripping on anyone. The shower had cooled my core temperature enough that I was practically shivering in the air-conditioning. Tina had reassembled her clothing and, other than some slight extra color to her face, looked composed.

  It felt good to have Tina on my side again. We’d had our ups and downs-among other adventures-but I could tell she was fighting for me now, squarely in my corner. I was whole again.

  “So what’s our plan?” I asked as we marched back up toward the newsroom, a united front once again.

  “That depends. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do.”

  “Mind sharing?”

  We had reached the landing with the fire exit, the one the smokers used, and I stopped there. I had, up until that point, been consumed by the drama with my car, the moisture in my pants, and, well, other happenings in my pants. It had given me no time to think of how, exactly, I was going to explain myself. But Tina could help me with that.

  “You remember Nancy Marino?” I said.

  “The papergirl. The reason you were out at that diner in Bloomfield with Nikki Papawhatever instead of bear-spotting with Lunky.”

  “Right.”

  I paused to gather strength. Here goes:

  “I’m pretty sure Gary Jackman killed her.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “She was killed in a hit-and-run accident, only it was no accident. I interviewed a woman who said someone driving a large black SUV had been stalking Nancy for several days, then intentionally ran her over.

  “So I started asking myself, Who would want to kill Nancy Marino?” I continued. “I interviewed her sister, who told me Nancy had taken a very hard line in our paper’s negotiations with IFIW-Local 117. Then I talked to Jim McNabb, the union’s executive director, who said the night before Nancy was killed, he was having a drink
and/or some unofficial negotiations with Jackman. McNabb kept telling Jackman that Nancy wouldn’t budge, and then suddenly Jackman went nonlinear and started making all kinds of threats about how he would ‘take care’ of Nancy Marino. The next morning Nancy was dead.”

  I stopped to see how Tina was taking all of this. Unfortunately, she was looking at me like she usually did when I was selling her a story that was still half-assed.

  “So to prove all this, you thought you’d get your head stuck in Jackman’s cat door?”

  “I was trying to peek into his garage to see if there was an SUV in there.”

  “And?”

  “No dice. He must have hired someone to do it for him.”

  “And the thing with Jackman’s secretary yesterday … what was that?”

  “I was trying to get confirmation that Jackman had been drinking with McNabb last Thursday, maybe learn where they went so I could interview the bartender.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing,” I admitted. “But McNabb did give me this. It shows how desperate Jackman was to get Local 117 to renegotiate. Pretty much everything was at stake.”

  I went into my pocket and fished out my copy of the Jackman e-mail that McNabb had given me. It was a little damp but had otherwise held up okay. Tina pored over it for a second, then handed it back to me.

  “This … this doesn’t prove anything other than that the paper is in trouble, which anyone knows.”

  “It’s a piece of the puzzle,” I said.

  “Still … let me get this straight. You’ve been harassing the publisher of this paper because you think he killed someone?”

  I nodded.

  “He’s the publisher,” she said.

  “A publisher who once brained a guy with a seven-iron.”

  “Yeah, but … that’s … I mean, someone came after him. Say what you will about the brutality of the act, but he was defending himself.”

  “So say he and his golfing buddies.”

  “Look, publishers of major newspapers don’t just go around killing people.”