by Jason Pinter
“For your sake, I hope your daughter doesn’t have to die.
Terrible thing to lose one’s family. But that’s up to you.”
By the time she looked up, the driver was back in his car. Then the engine revved, and he was gone. Paulina sat in the rain, mud staining her dress brown.
She watched him go, waiting to make sure he was gone. Her body was racked with pain, and she could barely stand. Her hands felt like they’d held a battery from both ends, and when she dialed the car service it took three tries to get the number right. When the operator asked where she was, Paulina had to walk ten minutes just to find a street sign.
“What the heck are you doing way out there?” the man asked.
“Just get here, fast,” she said before hanging up.
It was half an hour before the car service arrived.
Paulina huddled under a nearby tarp to stay dry. The driver, a short, thick man with a bushy mustache, got out.
He looked her over, his lip curled up. He was as confused as she was.
“Miss,” he said, “are you okay? Do you need me to take you to the hospital?”
“Just take me home,” she said. “And help me up.”
The driver bent down, put his arm around Paulina and helped the shuddering reporter into the backseat of his car.
As he drove away, the man said, “Don’t worry, miss.
I’m taking you home. Everything’s okay.”
Paulina looked up at him, slimy mascara stinging her eyes. And she thought, No. It’s not.
2
Monday
New York City exists in a perpetual headwind. If you live here or work here, you can either lean into the wind and brace yourself, moving forward a step at a time, keeping pace with the other people who are doing the same. Or you can lose your balance and be blown away like a crumpled newspaper. Some people lean into the wind and try to walk faster. They press ahead, moving at greater speeds than the rest of us. But with greater reward comes greater risk, and the more you lean the faster you can lost your balance and be blown away.
My brother fell. My idol and mentor, Jack O’Donnell, fell. I was still leaning into the wind, sometimes hard enough to lose my balance. I’d lived and worked in this gusty city for several years now, and thought I was used to it. But time and time again, the city showed me just how strong the winds could be.
I got to the office of the New York Gazette at eight o’clock sharp, half an hour before I was supposed to be there, and even fifteen minutes before I’d said I’d be there. To put it mildly, this was the most excited I’d been about the job in a long time.
The last few weeks had been a maelstrom of violence and secrets. I’d recently learned that my father had had an affair thirty years ago, and that affair resulted in the birth of a boy named Stephen Gaines. My brother.
I didn’t learn about Stephen until just a few weeks ago, when he showed up out of nowhere at the offices of the
New York Gazette, where I worked as a reporter. Gaines was stoned and scared out of his mind that night, and for that reason I didn’t give him a chance to tell his story. I didn’t see the man up close until a few hours later. After
I learned he’d been shot to death in his own apartment.
When I saw him next, he was lying on a slab in the morgue.
Not what you’d call the most enjoyable family reunion.
I’d pieced the truth together in a large part spurred on by a book written by Jack O’Donnell called Through the
Darkness. In that book, he discussed the murder of a lowly drug dealer named Butch Willingham who was possibly murdered by an elusive drug kingpin nicknamed the Fury.
Yet the truth wasn’t whole. If the Fury did exist, then something big was on the horizon. Butch Willingham’s murder was one of a spate of drug-related murders, and if history did repeat itself, that meant Stephen’s murder was merely the beginning.
Coming to grips with the life and death of the brother
I’d never known was difficult, if not impossible. It was something I was still struggling with. Eventually we tracked down the man who killed him, a low-level drug dealer who seemed to want Gaines dead to open up the door for his own upward mobility in the New York drug trade.
But something about it still didn’t sit right. It was too neat, too clean. Too many questions still lingered, an open wound that wouldn’t close.
And leave it to Jack O’Donnell to throw a crowbar into the wound.
I was wearing a suit, the same one I’d worn on my very first day in the office several years ago. I remembered the day clearly. Meeting Wallace Langston, the paper’s editor in chief, being led to my desk where I’d write the stories
I was born to write. Seeing the man, Jack O’Donnell, in person for the first time.
The man was a legend of the New York newsroom, as synonymous with this city as any one of its towering monuments. But every monument has cracks, ignored by those who prefer to see their gods as unfailing, monuments pristine in their foundations and men pure in their humanity. Yet while Jack raised the bar for journalism, his cracks had begun to show themselves not just to me, but to millions of people.
We all knew that Jack drank. But when you told people
Jack drank, you raised your eyebrows and enunciated the word drank like it was hepatitis. Jack O’Donnell drank.
Three-martini lunches might have fallen out of fashion, but Jack was trying to keep the tradition going almost singlehandedly. And who else would expose the cracks in the foundation but someone who resided as low to the ground as possible.
Paulina Cole used to work with Jack at the Gazette. A few months ago, she penned a hatchet job to end all hatchet jobs, exposing Jack’s drinking problem on the front page in our rival paper, the NewYork Dispatch. It was a colossal embarrassment to his reputation, personally and professionally.
Then Jack disappeared.
Whether he was in rehab or lying in the gutter some-22
Jason Pinter where, I figured the man needed time to figure out if he was going to be swallowed whole by his demons, or if he still had the strength to fight them off. My answer came, surprisingly, when I needed him the most.
After I learned the truth about Stephen’s killer, Jack found me at my home just as my girlfriend, Amanda, and
I were packing up. He told me he’d needed a “dialysis of the soul.” He looked good. Healthy. And raring to go to answer the questions that Stephen’s murder just touched upon.
Anyway, that’s what I was doing here early in the morning. I wanted to get here before him. Though we’d worked in the same offices for several years, I’d never had the chance to work side by side with Jack. I was eager to prove what I’d learned, eager to prove that there was someone waiting in the wings to carry on the traditions he’d started. And what better way to show I was ready than by beating the man to his desk on his first day back in the office?
So when I got off on the ninth floor, pushed through the glass doors to the newsroom, rounded the corner to the sea of news desks, I was shocked to see Jack O’Donnell surrounded by our colleagues, looking like a kid at his own birthday party.
He was sitting on his desk, feet on his desk chair, speaking loudly and buoyantly while the other reporters and editors laughed and slapped him on the back. I hadn’t seen Jack with this much energy since, well, ever. And any frustration I felt in getting here late disappeared when
I saw the smile on the old man’s face.
It was like a returning war hero being embraced by his countrymen. While Jack was gone, one of the things I wished I understood better was the newsroom’s opinion of him. While I always held his professional career in the highest regard, there were no doubt others who looked at his departure as something of an embarrassment. Any time a paper’s reporter ends up in the headlines instead of below them, it was considered an affront to the integrity of the establishment. The New York Times went through it with Jayson Blair, and the Gazette had gone through it twice in the last
several years: the exposure of
Jack’s alcoholism by Paulina Cole at the Dispatch, and when I was accused of murder. And while the truth about my situation eventually came to light, the harsh reality was that every word in Paulina’s story was true. Granted she handled it with the class and dignity of a five-dollar hooker, but her words touched a nerve because they cut deep.
The stain on my reputation had begun to disappear over time. I didn’t know if Jack’s ever would.
“Henry!” Jack’s voice boomed over the newsroom.
He was waving me over, the reporters around his desk looking in my direction expectantly. I smiled, big and wide, and walked over.
“Jack,” I said, “how’s the first day back?”
“Coffee still sucks, elevator’s still slow, and the receptionist still doesn’t know my name. Just another day at the office, and I’m loving it.”
He was wearing a suit and tie that both looked new.
His beard, usually shaggy, was neat, the gray more evenly spread. The bags beneath his eyes looked to have dissolved, and his movements were sharper, livelier. It was great to see him like this, and though my smile was wide on the outside, it was nothing compared to how I felt inside.
Jonas Levinson, the paper’s science editor, said, “We didn’t know when we’d see you again, old boy. No note, no forwarding address. Who are you, my ex-wife?”
“I guess when you have enough of them,” Jack said,
“you start to inherit their best qualities.” The group laughed.
“Coffee tastes a whole lot better with a sprinkle of
Beam in there,” Frank Rourke said. “I got a bottle at my desk, Jack. Stop by if you need a taste.”
The smile disappeared from Jack’s face. “Hey, Frank?”
“Hey, Jack-O?”
“Why don’t you go back to your desk and slam a drawer on your head a few times.”
Rourke seemed taken aback. “Christ, it was just a joke,
O’Donnell.”
“Just leave. Amazingly you’ve got less tact than brains, and that’s not an easy feat. Go on, git. ”
Rourke walked away, fuming. Jack’s face warmed again, then he turned to me. Speaking to the rest of the crew, he said, “Fellas, would you give me and Henry a minute?”
They all gave Jack a firm handshake, a pat on the back, a hug or two. I could tell Jack hadn’t been hugged a whole lot. He wasn’t sure where to place his hands. Once the crowd had thinned, he motioned for me to pull up a chair. I grabbed one from an empty desk a few rows away and pulled it into his cube. “Sit down,” he said. I obliged.
“It’s great to have you back,” I said. “I wasn’t sure-”
“You’re late,” Jack said. I checked my watch.
“It’s not even ten past eight. You told me to be here at eight-thirty.”
“If a press conference is called for four and you show up at three-thirty, you’ll be sitting in the back row with the reporters from the high school newspapers.”
“I get your point,” I said.
Jack continued. “So far, you’ve made it by on talent and luck. You want to be great at this job, you need to add a spoonful of brains. With the story we’re going to be chasing, there’s no half an hour early. Murderers don’t want for you to be on time. Drug dealers don’t use personal data organizers. When you catch people off guard, that’s when the truth comes out. Never give someone the time to make up a lie.”
“I know how important this is,” I said. “I know that what my brother was killed for goes higher than the assholes who pulled the trigger.”
Jack stared at me. “You don’t know anything, Henry.
You never go into a story ‘knowing’ anything. A good reporter is open to every possibility. If you have on blinders, you miss the bigger picture. You might think there’s a massive conspiracy, but then you look for facts to support your thesis. You may be right about Gaines.
But you don’t know anything yet. So let the picture paint itself for you.”
“Gaines was killed because somebody thought bumping him off was the quickest route to money and power,” I said.
“And they wouldn’t have thought that without a reason.”
“You said there was a connection between Gaines and some company, right?”
“718 Enterprises,” I replied. “I think it’s a shell corporation. I saw a battalion of drug dealers leaving the company’s midtown headquarters, but I didn’t find out what it is or who runs it. Plus my buddy at the NYPD,
Curt Sheffield, told me that five people connected to 718 have been killed over the last few months. 718 is hiding something major, and for some reason its employees have shorter shelf lives than a chicken at KFC. So you think we should start by looking into 718?”
Jack put his thumb to his lip, tapped it as he thought.
Then he shook his head. “You don’t get a story by meeting it head-on. You need to confront the big dogs with facts, not accusations. We need to poke around. Find out who and what exists at the peripherals. We…”
Just then my cell phone rang. I noticed that the red message light was blinking at the voice mail on my desk.
Whoever was calling had tried to reach me at the office and was now calling my cell.
My first thought was Amanda, but she was likely on her way to the office. I took the phone from my pocket; the number on the caller ID made my stomach lurch.
There’s no way he’d be calling this early in the morning unless something had happened. Something bad.
I answered the phone. “Curt?” I said.
“Henry,” Curt Sheffield said. Curt was an officer with the NYPD. A good buddy and dedicated cop. He’d helped me with numerous cases over the last few years, often giving me scoops ahead of other papers because he knew
I’d do the right thing with them. A lot of other news outlets, not that I’d name names, would takes quotes out of context, make officers who stuck their necks out look bad.
The thing you learned in the news business was that the cops needed you almost as badly as you needed them.
If the cops needed to swing public opinion on a certain topic, or if they needed help from the community in catching a perp, they turned to the papers and television anchors. It wasn’t enough for them to come up with a sketch of an alleged rapist-they needed a medium to get the guy’s face in front of millions of people. Curt understood that. He wasn’t looking for fame, or to see his name in the paper. He didn’t have the sense of rebellious pride most sources had. He was just trying to be a good cop.
“You should come down here right away,” the cop said.
“Where are you?” I said. “What’s going on?”
“There’s been a murder. Just dredged the body up from the East River this morning,” he said. And something in Curt’s voice told me this wasn’t just any run-ofthe-mill domestic quarrel or guy jumping off the Triboro
Bridge kind of death. “We’ve identified the body. His name was Ken Tsang. We checked his records, and
Henry…the guy was Hector Guardado’s roommate.”
“Jesus,” I said, my heart pounding. Jack’s eyes were wide open, imploring me to tell him what was going on.
Hector Guardado, I believed, worked as a drug courier for 718 Enterprises. He was a colleague of the men who killed Stephen Gaines, one of the anonymous suits who delivered their drugs to buyers in their homes.
Guardado was killed just a few days ago. And now his roommate was dead as well.
“I’ll be right down there,” I said. “Where are you?”
“Eighty-fourth, by the East River, on the promenade,”
Curt said. “You might want to bring some antinausea medication.”
“Why?” I said. “What happened?”
“Whoever killed Ken Tsang,” Curt said, “wanted his corpse to have more in common with a boneless chicken than a human being. Somebody broke every single one of his joints. Turned his toes, fingers, arms, legs and finally neck in all sorts of ways t
hey ain’t supposed to go.”
3
By the time Jack and I arrived at the East River, the smell of vomit was choking the air. The view from the promenade was breathtaking early in the morning. The sun glistened off the river, as New Yorkers jogged, walked their dogs, sat in silence admiring the beauty. Normally you would see fishing poles out. Today’s catch must have driven them away.
The scene on this day, though, had the promenade at a standstill. There were no bystanders going about their business; they were all being held back by the same yellow police tape that would soon cordon off my colleagues and competition.
I could see three cops who, by the look of them, were a breakfast short and still green around the gills. They’d roped off about fifty feet along the red brick walkway, and from just beyond that I could make out a white sheet covering the outline of a body. An ambulance waited twenty feet away. Its lights weren’t on. They didn’t need to be. There was no rush here.
“You never like to see cops this quiet,” Jack said.
“Most of the guys on the force, they’ve seen everything.
Drive-by victims, people burned to death, children, everything. One thing we have in common with them, you need to learn to desensitize yourself from the horrors you see sometimes. Without that, you won’t last a year on either job. It takes a lot to send a shock wave through those nervous systems.”
I saw Curt Sheffield among the crowd of cops. He saw me and began to walk over. I didn’t see any other reporters just yet. Curt must have given me first shot at this.
“Hey, Henry,” he said, nodding. He didn’t offer his hand, and I didn’t expect it. Even though we were friends, cops were expected to keep their distance from reporters.
They were naturally distrustful of us, and as much as I hated to admit it, sometimes rightfully so. I’d seen what the media could brew without all the facts. News, like a bell, could not be unrung. Once you were accused of something, once information was given to the public, it was nearly gospel. And for cops, once your uniform was stained, fair or unfair, it never washed off.