Eyes of the Innocent cr-2

by Brad Parks

  “Tho what’th thith jewelry I’m thuppothed to have?” Maury asked

  “It’s a charm bracelet.”

  I thought I saw some recognition wander briefly across Maury’s face.

  “I’m not thaying I have anything like that,” Maury said. “But if I did, when would I have acquired it?”

  “This morning,” Mrs. Jamison said.

  Maury turned toward the back room and shouted, “Manuel! Manuel, get me that thtuff from earlier today.”

  Pedro appeared from the back room and said something in Spanish.

  “Yeah, yeah, that thtuff,” Maury said, and Pedro disappeared again.

  “Manuel?” Mrs. Jamison spat. “He told me his name was Pedro.”

  “It ain’t neither,” Maury said. “Jutht like my name ain’t Maury. You got to keep your ammo-nimity in thith line of work.”

  I grinned at the apparent mispronunciation and wanted to ask if he also had to keep his “anonymity,” but it wasn’t my place to intercede.

  “Pedro, you have a truthfulness problem,” Mrs. Jamison shouted after him. “We’re going to have to talk about that.”

  Maury again focused his attention on me.

  “I mutht thtate for the record, Mr. Roth, thith ethtablithment doeth not traffic in thtolen merchandithe. But there are thome unthcrupulouth people in thith world who may mithreprethent the originth of thome itemth and take advantage of my generouth nature.”

  Mrs. Jamison arched her right eyebrow, crossed her arms, and let out a perfectly skeptical, “Uh-huh.”

  “Now, how would you dethcribe thith thtolen merchandithe?”

  Again, a question for me. But this time I was going to have to come up with an answer. I had meant to get more specifics about the bracelet, but Sweet Thang wasn’t returning my phone calls for some odd reason-where was that girl, anyhow?

  So I was on my own. What did Sweet Thang’s charm bracelet look like? I knew somewhere in my brain, in the part charged with important tasks like quoting movie passages and song lyrics, there was an excruciatingly detailed description of the charm bracelet-albeit one that was provided between 6:14 and 6:19 earlier that morning, when I was not yet functioning.

  I rewound through my day, through my bouncing around Newark, my breakfast with Sweet Thang, my lecherous thoughts while she was in the shower, my hasty nonnewspaper-glancing departure from my own house, my jarring wake-up call, and …

  There! Just after the jarring wake-up call. I was hearing Sweet Thang’s voice in my head now, saying something I wasn’t comprehending in the moment. But somehow it had stuck in there, in a small crevice next to the John Cusack Say Anything monologue. And I found myself pulling it up with near-perfect recall.

  “Well, it’s a charm bracelet,” I said. “I’ve never seen it, but she told me about it. Some of the pieces include a sombrero she got in a trip to Puerto Vallarta. There’s also a darling little gondola her father brought her back from Venice.”

  “Excuse me, did you just say ‘darling’?” Tee asked.

  “Reginald!” Mrs. Jamison scolded. “At least someone listens to his woman.”

  She drew her hand back but did not let it fly. Tee cringed anyway. Maury placed his chin in his hand, giving himself a moment to think about it.

  “Thombrero, huh?” he said. “I may have theen thomething like that.”

  He walked to the back room, Jheri curls bouncing, and returned moments later with a gold charm bracelet suspended between his fingers.

  “Thith it?” he asked.

  He held it up. It had to be Sweet Thang’s. It just looked like something a Vanderbilt coed would own.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s it.”

  “Well, now, thith ith a very rare piethe of fine jewelry we’re talking about here,” Maury said. “I don’t think it’th pothible for me to part with thith piethe for leth than a thouthand dollarth.”

  “How about you part with that piece and we won’t press charges for receiving stolen merchandise,” Mrs. Jamison countered. “This gentleman’s fiancee is a white girl and she could go to police headquarters and fill out a report and everything. You know how cops like to help white girls.”

  Maury considered this a moment.

  “Hundred buckth.”

  “Twenty.”

  “Done,” Maury replied, and started hitting numbers on his cash register.

  Just like that, I happily parted with a portrait of Andrew Jackson, and Maury slipped Sweet Thang’s charm bracelet through the revolving box in the bulletproof glass.

  Maury pointed a finger at me.

  “Don’t try coming back for the retht of it,” he warned. “I thtill have to be able to make a living, you know.”

  Some living. The sheer sleaziness of the place finally overwhelmed me, so I just waved at him as we walked out the shattered front door. He didn’t have to worry about me coming back.

  * * *

  I bid the Jamisons farewell, thanking Tee for his assistance and promising his wife one last time I would make an honest woman out of Sweet Thang just as soon as I could find her an engagement ring that would shame the Hope diamond.

  As I drove back toward the office, I turned on my radio, tuning it to an all-news station to see if any of my colleagues in the media had learned anything useful about Windy Byers. I didn’t have to wait long for the story, which led the top of the hour. The announcer referred to Byers as the “beloved Newark councilman” who hailed from a “Newark political dynasty” and so on. I love it when the radio guys just read from the newspaper. Sometimes you can practically hear the newsprint crinkling under the microphone. The station cut to a clip of the Matos press conference, going for the sound bite about how the Byers family was doing a lot of praying.

  I flipped the radio to FM and felt myself frowning. Having successfully retrieved Sweet Thang’s charm bracelet-great journalistic triumph that it was-I now presumed I would return to real, actual reporting on the Byers story.

  And I didn’t know where to start. Reporting can be a bit like exploratory surgery, except you perform it wearing oven mitts and a blindfold. Sometimes you’re not even sure what part of the body to cut open. As a general rule, you never know where you’re going until you’ve already been there. I often wished I could start at the end, having already acquired all the necessary hindsight. It would save so much time.

  When I arrived in the newsroom, it had that big-story buzz about it. Editors who normally sauntered around like they had no place to go were walking with alacrity. Reporters who might ordinarily be leaning back as they gabbed with sources on the phone were hunched over, hard at work. Buster Hays, resident dinosaur, had three Rolodexes open at the same time, pulling out business cards that were probably older than I was. The forever-silly Tommy Hernandez was staring at his computer screen with a fold between his neatly trimmed eyebrows, perhaps the first time I had seen so much as the slightest crease in his otherwise unworried countenance.

  And the beauty of our newsroom was that, like most newsrooms, you could see it all unfolding before you. There were no walls, no partitions, no cubicles to wreck your view-just tightly clustered islands of desks stretching over a sea of open space.

  I marched over to mine, which was against a far wall, an auspicious spot whose principal advantage was that it allowed me to see the enemy (editors) approaching from a good distance. My desk had once been used by an old-time city reporter who chain-smoked like Chairman Mao and, as legend had it, quit his job because he refused to comply with the new policy when the newsroom finally went smoke-free in the mid-nineties. The desk sat empty for years after that-to aerate, I assume-but when I moved in, there was still an ashtray sitting atop. I don’t smoke, but I kept it there, in memory of my predecessor and as a monument to a bygone time in the history of our industry.

  Sadly, the computer sitting on my desk was roughly as old as the ashtray. No one knew the exact age of our terminals: they already qualified as antique when I started at the paper; by now, the only way a
nyone could figure out how long they had been there was through carbon dating. We were assured they would be replaced just as soon as advertising revenues rebounded. In other words, we had a long wait.

  As my machine clicked and rattled to life, I began playing around with various Windy Byers theories, seeing if I could find one that fit. The police chief said they thought it was “politically motivated,” but I was having a hard time digesting that one. Byers was a hack who had been in the game long enough that he knew how to play by the rules and avoid pissing off important people. He had no policy initiatives that could have engendered anyone’s ire. It wasn’t like he had unpopular or dangerous ideas inasmuch as I’m not sure he had ideas, period.

  I could much more easily believe this was the result of some romantic entanglement. But if the spilled blood was to be believed, Byers’s disappearance was not a peaceful one-which ruled out the run-off-with-the-girlfriend/boyfriend scenario.

  Then again, there was nothing yet to say the blood belonged to Byers. For all we knew at this point, it had another owner. Perhaps Byers was not the kidnapped but the kidnapper, having belted someone over the head, dragged his victim out of the house, and gone on the lam until he could concoct a cover story.

  In other words, the blindfold and oven mitts were firmly in place. So I did what any good reporter does when facing such uncertainty: I procrastinated by checking my e-mail.

  It was, by and large, the usual mix of urgent messages from our hyperactive HR department (send in your vacation pictures for the company newsletter!); press releases I would never read (the office of a congressman from New Orleans sent me three or four a day because I once wrote a story that contained the word “Louisiana”); and come-ons from that seemingly massive group of African princes who needed but a small loan to claim their long-lost fortunes (doesn’t it always take $50,000 to become a multimillionaire?).

  I nearly turned away without reading any of them. Except there was one message, which claimed to be sent by “Concerned Citizen,” that stood out. It had the subject line “keep digging.” Curious, I clicked twice and read:

  ms. mcmillan and mr. ross,

  i saw your story today in the eagle-examiner on that woman with the two kids. theres a reason you couldnt find the mortgage. there are things going on at the courthouse which if i told you you wouldnt believe. keep digging and youll find it.

  im sorry i cant give you my name. but i could get fired for talking to you and i have kids to feed and i need this job.

  signed,

  a concerned citizen.

  I leaned back and reread it. As a reporter, you get anonymous mail all the time. Much of it is nonsensical, rambling, Unabomber-style stuff good for a laugh-and not much else. But every now and then you get something like this that sticks to your ribs. You learn to separate the credible from the crazies, primarily by judging grammar and spelling. Other than the aversion to apostrophes and the e. e. cummings approach to capitalization, this one wasn’t bad.

  Mostly, it brought back the things that had been gnawing at me since Sweet Thang first called me from the courthouse. Where was that silly mortgage? Who made it disappear? And, perhaps most important, why?

  * * *

  I lifted my eyes from the screen and realized I had allowed myself to get a little too engrossed, which meant I didn’t notice Sal Szanto huffing toward me. And now it was too late: 245 pounds of pear-shaped, middle-aged Italian-American editor was already standing over me, close enough I could smell the stale coffee on his breath. So much for being able to see the enemy coming.

  Szanto was one of those editors who didn’t believe in leaving his office, except in cases of emergency or lunch. As it was now past lunchtime, it could only mean he was in crisis.

  “Did you get it?” he asked, without prelude, with an urgency that just made it impossible not to mess with him a little.

  “Hi, Sal, nice to see you,” I said. “There’s something different about you. Did you switch antacid brands?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m wearing a different deodorant, too. It’s called Garbage Guard. They tell me it works great, so why don’t you cut the garbage and tell me whether you got the bracelet or not.”

  “Yeah, I got it.”

  “Did you give it to her?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Why the hell not?” he demanded.

  “Here,” I said, fishing the bracelet out of my pocket and dangling it in front of him. “Why don’t you give it to her? Go ahead. Be the hero.”

  Szanto turned to look in the direction of the intern desk pod, a place from which Sweet Thang was, of course, still absent.

  “Where is she?”

  “I think you’re beginning to realize why I haven’t given it to her yet,” I said.

  Szanto swung back toward me, annoyed, what little patience he had long since spent. I don’t know what it was, but the more frustrated he got, the more I enjoyed screwing with him.

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “I assume she’s off somewhere looking for her bracelet.”

  “Did you call her cell?”

  “No, Sal, I sent smoke signals which were then relayed by drummer-messengers perched on a series of hilltops,” I said. “It’s the newest, most sophisticated method of communication yet devised. I don’t think humankind will ever come up with anything better.”

  Szanto drew breath as if he was going to let me have it, then stopped himself.

  “Look,” he said, sinking into a chair next to me, releasing a huge cloud of java-tinged exhaust. “I just need you to help me out here. You know how fixated Brodie gets about certain things, right?”

  “I do.”

  “He’s like one of those little dogs, the little white ones with the black splotches that want to hump your leg all day long,” Szanto said. “What do you call those?”

  “Jack Russell terrier?”

  “Exactly. He’s a Jack Russell terrier. And right now, I’m just a lonely ankle, and I’ve had this dog’s tiny little schlong banging into me all day-bang, bang, bang, bang. I mean, can you imagine what kind of day that is?”

  “Don’t even want to.”

  “No, really, you don’t. Trust me,” Szanto said. “Anyhow, the whole reason Brodie is giving me this undue attention is this bracelet. Apparently, Sweet Thang called her daddy crying, and her daddy called Brodie and asked for a favor, and with everything else going on, Brodie still thinks I have nothing better to do than to make sure he can do a favor for his buddy. So if you could please, please just get this girl her bracelet back, and tell her to call her daddy, who can then call Brodie, you’d really be doing me a favor.”

  “Okay, I’ll do it just as soon as she walks in the door,” I assured him, then turned my attention toward my computer screen, which is International Body Language for “we’re done with this conversation and now you can go away.”

  Except Szanto was acting like he didn’t understand it.

  “Not soon enough,” he said.

  “Huh?” I said, still keeping my head down.

  “You got to go find her.”

  “Excuse me?” I said, and looked up at him, trying to effect my best vacant stare, as if I didn’t know who he was or what he was talking about.

  “Find her. Find Sweet Thang and give her that bracelet.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  He didn’t reply, just grinned-one of his four smiles for the year, so he must have been serious.

  “You’re not kidding me.”

  He shook his head.

  “Sal, I sent Sweet Thang off on what is probably a dead-end reporting errand to Baxter Terrace,” I said. “I called her, at least twice. I don’t know why she’s not answering her phone. Maybe she stopped at the mall and decided to buy the entire Nordstrom shoe department on her way back in. But she’ll be back any second. And when she gets here, I’ll give her the bracelet.”

  Szanto shook his head again.

  “Not good enough,” he replied. �
�Look, the sooner you get that bracelet to that girl, the sooner my half-hourly e-mails, phone calls, and just-checking-in visits from Brodie stop. And I just can’t take him. I can’t take any more of that today.”

  He clasped his clubbed fingers together in a pleading gesture. His eyes were big and wet, and in a moment of weakness-brought on by an awareness of the abuse I piled on him and a small amount of guilt that at least one of his stomach ulcers probably had my name on it-I agreed.

  “Okay.” I sighed. “Fine. I’ll call you the moment I hand her the bracelet.”

  “Thanks,” Szanto said, raising himself with a grunt from the chair next to me. He clapped me affectionately on the shoulder-another quarterly event-then walked away.

  * * *

  Before committing myself to another Baxter Terrace jaunt, I dialed Sweet Thang’s numbers one last time. Both went to voice mail.

  I looked at the time on my phone, which read 2:13. She and I departed Jersey City around nine-thirty. If she drove straight to Baxter Terrace, she would have gotten there no later than ten. That meant Sweet Thang and her buoyant personality had spent more than four hours in one of the nation’s most depressed public housing projects. It sounded like a reality show gone horribly wrong-instead of Dancing with the Stars, it was Prancing in the Projects.

  There was no telling what had kept her there all that time. It was daylight, so I wasn’t concerned about her well-being. Well, okay, I worried about it a little. Mostly, I was just curious: What had she been doing all this time?

  I filled my drive thinking about the possibilities. As I walked through the courtyard toward Bertie Harris’s apartment, I heard a series of birdcalls-a macaw, a chickadee, and an osprey. Okay, I’m making that up. But it sounded like different birds than last time.

  Going through the open portal of Bertie’s building, I hiked the three flights up to the landing where I had been so thoroughly stonewalled the night before. I raised my fist to rap on the door but then paused mid-strike, having heard a noise from inside. What was that? Was it … laughter? I paused, just to make sure. Yes, laughter, the deep, chuckling kind you hear from two longtime friends who know just how to get each other going.