The Girl Next Door cr-3

by Brad Parks

“Don’t they? Why? Because they live in fancy houses and wear pocket squares? Don’t let yourself get blinded by a title.”

  “I’m just saying, you know how tight Brodie and Jackman are. I don’t know if Brodie is going to buy this.”

  “We can convince him,” I said.

  “We?”

  “Yeah, we. You do believe me, right?”

  Tina looked down at the floor, to a corner of the landing where a few dust bunnies had accumulated. It was not the first time in the last few days she couldn’t bring herself to make eye contact.

  “Tina, I’ve got to know I have you behind me. For whatever personal history we have and for whatever that was”-I gestured in the direction of the pressmen’s locker room-“we’ve still got a lot of professional history, too. We’re on the brink of a huge story, and I just need you to have a little faith and a little patience and give me time to prove it. I’ve told you that a lot of other times before and I don’t think I’ve ever led you wrong. That’s got to count for something.”

  Her head was still down. The dust bunnies were obviously quite fascinating.

  “I want to believe you, I really do,” she said. “It’s just you’ve been acting so strange. You lied to me about being with the intern. You made a scene at a funeral ho-”

  “That was not a scene. Jackman is twisting everything. He’s obviously trying to get rid of me.”

  “Was he twisting everything when he said you lied to his secretary? Honestly, Larry from accounting?”

  “Ted,” I corrected her. “I was Ted from accounting. I was just trying to get a little information. I wasn’t really representing myself because it’s not like I was going to quote her in the newspaper. I just didn’t want Jackman to know I was on to him.”

  “Well, you sure have a strange way of going about it, showing up at his house and getting yourself arrested like some peeping pervert? Jackman told Brodie his wife had to take two Valium just to settle herself down enough to sleep last night…”

  “Imagine how tough it’d be if she knew she was sleeping next to a killer…”

  “Then Tommy has to come bail you out? Think about that behavior from someone else’s perspective. You’ve always been on the edge as a reporter, but this is so far beyond that. It’s so strange and bizarre. I don’t…”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “Okay, but think about it from the perspective of-” I started, then stopped myself.

  I am, in general, a fairly easygoing guy. I don’t even simmer most of the time, much less reach a boil. But every once in a while, I get hot-and when I do, it’s molten. And then it’s pretty much Mount Saint Helens time. Which is where I suddenly found myself. I was through with this conversation, through with Tina and her ridiculous games, through with having editors who trusted some empty-suited scrooge of a publisher rather than one of their own reporters.

  So I blew up.

  “You know what? Forget it. Just forget it. I’m not crawling up to Brodie’s office to grovel when he’d rather listen to a bunch of lies from some cold-blooded murderer. Here,” I said, handing her my company-issued cell phone, then reaching into my bag for my company-issued laptop and thrusting it into her arms. “Brodie can kiss my ass and you can, too, because I quit. I quit. I don’t want to work at a newspaper where my editors don’t believe in me.”

  I slammed my weight into the fire exit door, barging through it before Tina had a chance to say a word. She just stood there, juggling my computer and phone, looking bewildered. I heard the door slam behind me but didn’t see it. I wasn’t looking back.

  * * *

  Not that I knew quite where I was going. This is the problem with my eruptions: they last all of fifteen minutes, after which I’m left with a bunch of soot and ash and a few gassy belches.

  For a while, all I did was wander around in a daze, trying to figure out just what had happened to me. At the beginning of the week I had a job, a car, a quasi-girlfriend, a clean criminal record, a phone, and a computer. In the span of two breathtaking days, I had managed to lose all of those things. My life had swirled right down the toilet, and I couldn’t figure out when I missed the flushing sound.

  Eventually, when heat and hunger overwhelmed me, I stumbled into an air-conditioned pizzeria and settled into my usual two-slices-and-a-Coke-Zero routine, which allowed me to regain equilibrium. Jersey pizza is noted for its restorative powers in that respect.

  Midway through the first slice, I had the impulse to call Tina, beg her to take me back, and offer to do the necessary groveling with Brodie. Then, toward the end of the second slice, I talked myself out of it. Tina was right: I sounded like a nut, trying to push some wild theory about a murdering publisher without being able to prove it. Once I had the Jackman story nailed, the old man would beg me to come back-mostly because if he didn’t, I’d take it to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. The last thing any newspaper wanted was to be scooped on its own news.

  But until such time as I had the goods on Jackman, I was on my own.

  Over the next few hours, I got myself back on my feet as a fully functioning mobile journalist. My first stop, after another sweaty trudge through downtown Newark, was an electronics store. There, I got myself outfitted with the latest iPhone, one of those do-everything models that could take phone calls, surf the Web, and dispatch the nuclear arsenals of several small former Soviet Republics.

  After setting up a new e-mail account, I used my iPhone to determine which towing extortion racket had stolen my car. I briefly debated unleashing some of my newfound warheads-Chechnya’s maybe-on the guilty party. In the end, I decided to call a cab, ride out to the far swampy reaches by the turnpike, and repurchase my car. All told, the transaction took a shade over four hours.

  By which point I was hungry again. And while I needed to get on with the work of saving my career, I knew I could serve both needs with a trip to the State Street Grill. I hadn’t yet followed up with Nikki Papadopolous, who had left that message that had gotten me in trouble with Tina. Since I had never been given the number Nikki left for me-and wasn’t exactly in a position to call Tina up and ask for it-I’d have to make a visit in person. And I might as well select an item or two from State Street’s twenty-four-page menu while I was there.

  I fired up the Malibu, put the air-conditioning on high, and started trying to find my way out of the maze that was industrial Newark, all the while luxuriating in the fact that I once again had a V6 engine to do the hard work of transporting my tired carcass from point to point.

  As I got under way, I decided to continue exercising my new iPhone and call Tommy. I needed someone on the inside to do snooping outside Jackman’s office, and being that it was now after six, it was late enough for him to do it undetected.

  “This is Tommy,” he answered.

  “Hey, it’s your favorite jailbird.”

  “Shhh … I’m not allowed to talk to you.”

  “Says who?”

  “Tina.”

  “What?”

  “She said you were probably going to call me, looking for help on this Jackman thing, and that I shouldn’t take your call.”

  “But you’re going to ignore her, right? I just need one quick favor.”

  Tommy didn’t reply.

  “You wouldn’t leave a fellow reporter in the lurch, right?” I asked.

  “Well, technically, you’re not a fellow reporter anymore…”

  “Ouch. Oh, wow, major ouch.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just, well, I guess Jackman called Brodie and got him pretty stoked up. And you know how that goes. Brodie gets a fever and the rest of the newsroom catches cold. So you’ve sort of been, uhh, banned.”

  “Banned?”

  “Or banished. Or something like that.”

  “According to whom?”

  “Jackman, I guess,” Tommy said. “I don’t know. It’s not like there was a formal memo or anything. Tina just told me it was in my best interests to ke
ep my distance.”

  “Oh. That’s nice of her.”

  “She also said you were on a self-destructive path and that I shouldn’t enable you. She said if I was a real friend, I’d try to talk you out of going down this path. She’s really worried about you.”

  “She has a strange way of showing it. She fired me this morning.”

  “She what? She didn’t mention that.”

  “Yeah, well … Needless to say, I could really use your help.”

  He groaned.

  “Again,” I added.

  “Okay, but if you get me fired, too, you’re the one who’s selling his body into male prostitution to support us.”

  “What, you can’t find us a sugar daddy?”

  “Oh, I totally can. I just think you should sell your body as punishment.”

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  “Okay, can you hang out for a second?”

  “Yeah, I’m just driving.”

  “Good. I can’t risk getting caught aiding and abetting a known scoundrel like you. But I’ve got an idea of someone who might be able to get away with it.”

  He hung up before I could ask what that meant, and I finally started paying attention to where I was driving. It suddenly dawned on me I had no idea where I was. I had gotten myself tangled somewhere in the endless labyrinth of overlapping exit ramps near Newark Liberty International Airport.

  Lost in Newark. It was starting to feel like the metaphor for my existence.

  * * *

  Eventually, after a few more misguided turns, I found my way out and further assessed my situation. To say nothing of my other issues, my clothing had absorbed well more than the FDA-recommended allowance of sweat, and I was starting to smell a bit like moldering hockey gear. Rather than inflict that odor on the State Street Grill, I made a brief stop at the Bloomfield home of Deadline the Cat for a shower and a new wardrobe.

  The only thing I couldn’t do much about was my notepad. As I transferred it from my old pants to my new ones, I discovered it had retained some dampness. Still, it was backed by sturdy enough cardboard that it would survive to fight another day.

  Was the rest of me as stern? I checked in with my soul for a moment to ponder that question and found that, yeah, it was a little shaken, but it was basically still whole. A reporter without conviction is not much of a reporter at all. My only chance at this point was to stick with my principles and hope they bore me out, just as they had so many times in the past-whether I had Tina’s backing or not.

  I was just returning to my car when my phone rang.

  “Carter Ross,” I said.

  “Hi, Mister Ross, it’s Kevin,” a voice replied.

  Kevin? Did I know anyone named Kevin? Oh, of course: Lunky.

  “Hi, Kevin,” I said. “It’s after six. Shouldn’t you have gone home already?”

  “Yeah, I know. But, well, I just sort of like hanging around the newsroom. No one ever bothers me so I get lots of reading done.”

  Sad but probably quite true.

  “Anyway, what’s up?” I asked.

  “Mister Hernandez said I should give you a call because you needed a favor.”

  I smiled. Good ol’ Tommy. Lunky was the perfect choice. The kid may have been roughly the size of Alaska, but he was invisible as far as the editors, Tina included, were concerned.

  “He said I should go out in the parking lot and call on my cell phone and not tell anyone I was doing it,” Lunky continued. “So now I’m out in the parking lot, which seems a little strange to me. Do you know why Mister Hernandez asked me to do it this way?”

  “Kevin, you said you’re into Thoreau, right?”

  “Oh, definitely.”

  “Then let’s just say Tommy knows I need you to practice a little civil disobedience. Can you do that for me?”

  Lunky responded with enthusiasm. I provided him a brief rundown of how I believed the publisher was a killer, which he accepted without question, comment, or dispute. Then I instructed him how to find the secretarial pool outside Jackman’s office, locate the lockbox atop the filing cabinet, and use the key to break into Courtney’s desk-where he would hopefully discover Jackman’s appointment book and the name of the bar he and Jim McNabb visited the night before Nancy was killed.

  “So, really, the only hard part would be getting into that lockbox,” I concluded. “You might have to smash it open. But it’s pretty flimsy. A big guy like you shouldn’t have a problem with that.”

  “Do I really have to smash it?”

  “Well, it’s a lockbox, so it’s probably … locked.”

  “Oh, that won’t be a problem,” he assured me.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Mister Ross, can you keep a secret?”

  “Of course.”

  “When I was young, just a freshman in high school-before I knew better, really-I … I…” He started to speak but couldn’t seem to bring himself to finish. Was Lunky about to confess to a life of juvenile delinquency? A life that included boosting cars and picking locks?

  “Go ahead, Kevin,” I urged him in my best therapist’s voice. “This is a safe space for sharing.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, taking a deep breath, then blurting out, “When I was a freshman in high school I … I read The Da Vinci Code.”

  He paused, like I should be gasping in horror. But really I was just trying to stifle my laughter. Lunky plowed on: “And … and … I really liked it. Please, please don’t tell anyone, especially not my professors. It would forever ruin my standing in the academy. You know how those people are. You’re not supposed to read a book like that. And if you do, you’re not supposed to admit it. But if you get caught, you’re supposed to pass it off as, I don’t know, an intellectual lark, like you’re trying to understand some misguided pop culture phenomenon from an almost anthropological view. But the truth is, I liked it, and it really got me into the science of cryptography-you know, finding hidden information, cracking codes, that sort of thing. I sort of made a hobby out of it in high school.”

  “So you’re saying you’ll be able to guess the combination on the lockbox?”

  “It’s not guessing,” he corrected me. “Guessing suggests it’s somehow random. There’s a system to it. How many digits does the box have on it?”

  “Oh, it was tiny. Three, I think.”

  “Oh, that’s child’s play,” he assured me. “It’ll take ten, fifteen minutes tops.”

  “All right. Well, give me a call when you’re done.”

  “Righto,” he said, then disconnected.

  I shook my head. A six-foot-five, 275-pound defensive end who had devoured the entire canon of Western literature, considered himself an amateur cryptologist, dead-lifted bears, and finished conversations with “righto.” Sure, he couldn’t bang out a newspaper article to save his Emerson collection, but it was hard not to like the kid.

  As Lunky made like Professor Langdon, I drove toward the diner. I had just found a parking spot-a legal one this time, I checked-when he called.

  “So you were able to crack the code?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” he said. “I tried opening the desk first. It wasn’t locked.”

  “Oh,” I said. Genius cryptographer, indeed.

  “I went back to last Thursday, like you asked.”

  “And?”

  “The last thing written down is, ‘IFIW Meeting.’”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean nothing? There’s got to be something else,” I said, because it ought to have been easier than this. It was in the Bad Guy Handbook somewhere: Jackman was supposed to leave easy clues for me to follow. Whether he did it before or after he waxed his mustache and donned his black cape was up to him.

  “I’m looking at it right now. All it says is, ‘IFIW Meeting.’”

  “Well, that’s still something,” I said, knowing it at least proved Jackman and Big Jimmy had been together, even if it didn’t tell me where
. “Look, do me a favor and make a photocopy of that page then return the appointment book where you found it.”

  “Sure thing,” Lunky said. “Anyhow, this was fun. Thoreau never mentioned civil disobedience could feel like a scavenger hunt. If you need anything else, just let me know. No one else around here ever asks me to do anything.”

  I assured him I would, and he hung up. I killed the engine on the Malibu and walked toward the State Street Grill, finding myself looking forward to again seeing Nikki and her alluring green eyes.

  What I saw instead momentarily rendered me incapable of putting one foot in front of the other. It was two men sitting at a window booth, bent toward each other in what appeared to be an intense conversation. One was the ill-tempered and combed-over owner of the State Street Grill, Mr. Papadopolous.

  The other was Gary Jackman.

  * * *

  Not knowing what else to do, I positioned myself behind a tree for a moment. I would say I hid behind it, but this particular tree had only recently been planted and was probably fifty years away from being wide enough to offer a guy my size any real concealment, even if I turned sideways. But I at least wanted to get something between myself and the Jackman-Papadopolous conference.

  The questions began pouring into my head. Actually, that’s not right. It was really just one question I kept asking myself in different ways: What were they doing together? What were they doing together? What were they doing together?

  Or perhaps more pressingly: What had they already done?

  I flashed back to when I saw them at the funeral home and replayed it in my mind: Papadopolous waving his arms around frantically, Jackman staying cool and collected-but eventually telling him to bug off, in a way that suggested they would talk again. I had, frankly, forgotten all about the encounter because it didn’t seem significant at the time. Besides, I had become convinced Jackman was my villain.

  But now? Seeing them together again? It seemed to strain the bounds of anything that could be considered happenstance. I couldn’t think of anything that a mighty newspaper publisher and a small-time diner owner would have in common … except for the one employee they shared. And she was a woman who happened to be dead at the present time.