Faces of the Gone

by Brad Parks

  It would pain Szanto to hear it, of course. But in the twisted logic of newspapering, being wrong can be somewhat forgiven as long as you have something to right it with: another big scoop. And this story, if I could nail it down, would certainly qualify as one, especially with all the attention that was starting to surround the Ludlow Four.

  The New York newspapers, which normally treated the other side of the Hudson River as if it were some distant curiosity, had been following the story each day. The grisly details of the crime and the brazen nature with which it was carried out made for good copy. One of the tabloids even put it on its cover, an unusual honor for out-of-state news.

  With the newspapers beating the drums, the TV stations—who only decide how to play ongoing stories after they read the papers—had stayed on the bandwagon, too. Each local nightly news telecast was featuring sound bites from a steady stream of local antiviolence activists, who were eager to jump in front of the cameras and exclaim “this has to stop” or “enough is enough.”

  None of it was actually news, of course, just reaction to the news. Only the newspapers were going to push the story forward. And being able to establish the connection between the victims would definitely keep us out in front of the competition. Szanto would like that. Brodie would love it.

  Now we just had to make sure it was true. Tommy volunteered to head back to Shareef’s neighborhood and do some double-checking with his new friends there.

  That left Devin Whitehead and Tyrone Scott. Devin would be easy enough. I picked up the phone and dialed my man Tee.

  “Yeah,” Tee said. He always answered his cell phone that way. I guess it was part of the tough-guy image.

  “What’s up, Tee?”

  “You tell me, you’re the one calling.”

  “Right. Are those knucklehead kids hanging around outside your store?”

  “Of course.”

  “You mind asking them what brand of heroin Dee-Dub was selling.”

  “You mean what brand he was allegedly selling?” Tee corrected me.

  “Right. Allegedly.”

  “Hang on,” Tee said.

  I heard the electronic bee-baa that went off whenever Tee’s front door opened, then could make out the sounds of the street and some muffled voices. I drummed my fingers for a few moments, checking my e-mail as I waited. Great news: Human Resources had an upcoming series, “Cholesterolapalooza.”

  Tee brought his phone back to his mouth.

  “You gotta do something for me,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m going to put you on speakerphone. Just answer my questions honestly.”

  “No problem.”

  Suddenly the ambient noises were a lot louder.

  “Carter, you there?” Tee asked, half yelling.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Okay, first question, ‘Are you Carter Ross, Bird Man extraordinaire?’ ”

  “Correct.”

  “Are you, in fact, white?” Tee asked, and I heard some snickering.

  “As white as they come.”

  “Just to be sure about this, I need to hear you say something really, really white.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “And can you explain to me what would qualify as really, really white?” I asked.

  “Actually, that’ll do it,” Tee said, and the voices in the background erupted with laughter.

  “Order in the court, order in the court!” Tee howled, though he was laughing, too. “Okay, okay, now that we have established you are a card-carrying member of the Caucasian persuasion”—more snickering—“can you please tell the court, ‘Who you was hanging with last night?’ ”

  “Uh . . . Well, this woman took me back to her place . . .”

  “Oh, now you bragging,” Tee said, and the voices cackled again. “Order! Order, I say! Okay, before you and your lady friend did whatever it is white people do, what did you do then?”

  Where the hell was he going with this?

  “I, uh, spent some quality time with the Brick City Browns,” I said.

  “Aha! And did that ‘quality time’ involve the use of any controlled dangerous substances? Let me remind you, Mr. Ross, you are under oath.”

  “Uh, Tee, you don’t have any cops listening to this, do you?”

  Tee clicked off his speakerphone, bringing the phone to his mouth.

  “C’mon, man!” he said. “What self-respecting black man would be hanging out with the Jake?”

  “The Jake?”

  “Yeah, you remember that TV show, Jake and the Fat Man? Jake was the cop.”

  “Oh, right,” I said, still thoroughly bewildered as to what he was driving at. “Anyway, what was the question?”

  Tee put me back on speakerphone.

  “The question, Mr. Ross, is, ‘What was you and the Browns doing last night?’ ”

  Suddenly, it started to make sense.

  “Well, Judge Tee, I would have to say we were smoking some high-quality hydroponic ganja.”

  The background voices burst out in a chorus of disbelieving expletives.

  “I told you! I told you!” I could hear Tee crowing. “Twenty bucks! Twenty bucks!”

  I was taken off speakerphone again, though I could still hear a lot of indistinct noises punctuated with occasional laughter. It took another minute for Tee to return to the phone.

  “Mind telling me what that was about?” I asked.

  “They didn’t believe the story they’ve been hearing about the white guy who smoked up with the Browns then started falling all over the place.”

  “Oh, so now I’m a story?”

  “You ain’t a story. You like a legend. It’s been all over the hood today. I must have heard about four different versions by now.”

  “I’m never going to live this down, am I,” I said. When I had asked Tommy that earlier, it was a question. It was getting to be more of a statement now.

  “Not a chance. By the way, did you really give them a lecture on how tsunamis are created?”

  I searched my memory. I couldn’t recall having done so. And I’m not sure, sober, I even knew myself. But the brain on drugs could cook up some interesting things.

  “I suppose it’s possible,” I said.

  “Huh. You’ll have to explain that to me sometime. Because I always wondered.”

  “Right. Anyway, did you get the answer to my question?”

  “What question?”

  “About the brand Dee-Dub sold?

  “Oh, yeah, that. Allegedly his brand was called ‘The Stuff.’ You know, like it was stuff but it was proper stuff so they called it ‘The Stuff.’ But remember, you didn’t get that from me. His mama would whup my ass.”

  “Right,” I said. I would worry about how exactly my story would deal with the sourcing later. A simple “according to people in his neighborhood” would probably suffice.

  “Thanks for your help,” I said.

  “Anytime. Thanks for winning that bet for me,” Tee said. “Talk to you later, you old pothead.”

  I hung up the phone and self-consciously fingered the dime bags of heroin that were burning a hole in my pocket. There were still too many wandering eyeballs around to make a safe transfer to my desk, so I turned to my notebook.

  “Notebook,” I said, using my internal voice because otherwise everyone would think I was still smoking something. “Notebook, please tell me something about Tyrone Scott.”

  I flipped the pages, ever hopeful. I know it seems desperate, asking a four-by-eight-inch pad of paper to be your savior. But there are times when this kind of pleading really does work, when you’ve buried some little treasure of a note that you uncover at just the right time. Maybe it’s some scribbled observation that brings an entire picture into perfect relief. Or a name and a phone number you never followed up on. Or something you forgot having ever written that perfectly synthesizes your story.

  Or you can just end up staring at a bunch of worthless scribbles for twenty m
inutes.

  The only way I was going to discover more about Tyrone Scott was to head back out to that chicken shack and poke around.

  By the time I arrived at the Wyoming Fried Chicken, home of Cowboy Kenny’s secret blend, it was pitch-black. Still, the hooded figures who patrolled the sidewalk in front of the chicken shack became aware of my pale-faced presence the moment I stepped out of my car, and scurried off quickly.

  Leaving behind only one guy. My friend North Face.

  “What, you drew the short straw again?” I asked.

  “Aw, come on, man. I already told you everything I know. Now you going to screw up my business again?”

  “You can tell your customers your product is so good I just can’t stop myself from coming back.”

  “Oh, great. We’ll put it on a billboard: ‘The guy who dresses like a narc only gets his stuff from one place.’ Man, get out of here.”

  “Relax. I just got one question.”

  “And I’m supposed to give you the answer? Do I look like Alex Trebek to you?”

  I laughed.

  “I ain’t trying to be funny, Bird Man,” he said, reaching into his jacket and leaving his hand there, the all-purpose winter-time signal that a gun was being kept nice and cozy underneath.

  The last time we met, North Face had just been giving me a hard time for the sake of giving me a hard time. It had been earlier in the day. I wasn’t really costing him business. This was different. It was after five now—prime time for sales. A lot of Newark drug users are slightly more functional than they are stereotypically given credit for. They manage to hold down day jobs then go straight to their local dealer and buy enough to keep them high until the following morning. The early evening was rush hour for a guy like North Face.

  “Okay, okay. Take it easy,” I said. “Look, I just want to know what brand of heroin Tyrone sold and then I’ll get out of your way.”

  “I ain’t in that market.”

  “Can you point me toward someone who is?”

  “I ain’t the Yellow Pages, either. Now get the hell out of here.”

  “Do we really have to go through this again?” I asked. “You know I’m going to hang out here until I get the information I need. So why not just help me out?”

  “You know what? I ain’t helping you with nothin’. I ain’t telling you nothin’. I’m gonna ask you to leave and if you don’t I’m gonna stop asking nicely.”

  His hand dug a little farther into his jacket. A good 98 percent of me was certain it was an idle threat. The other 2 percent of me was sure my bowels were about to loosen.

  “Look, pal, I’m just a reporter here doing a job, that’s all,” I said, trying hard to project an image of everymanness.

  “Well, then, let me ask you, when my cousin got killed out here two months ago, where were you then, huh? Where was his story?”

  North Face glared at me. The cold fact was, in our business, some deaths mattered more than others. But I don’t think North Face needed to hear that. When I didn’t immediately open my mouth to answer, he continued his tirade.

  “Oh, so my cousin is just another dead nigga, but Tyrone Scott is some kind of cause for you people? Tyrone is better than my cousin, is that it? Because he got killed with three other people and my cousin got killed on his way to the store for some milk? That makes Tyrone better than my cousin?”

  He glared some more, which I took as my invitation to speak.

  “I’m sorry about your cousin,” I said, keeping my voice as even as possible in an effort to deescalate the emotion of the moment.

  I thought about adding more: that in a city where ninety or a hundred people are killed every year, no newspaper could write at length about every one; that we had to pick our spots or risk being tuned out altogether; that treating every single murder like it was a big deal, while it would honor the memory of the victim, could actually make the problem of urban violence worse by lending undue attention to it.

  But those were all macro justifications for a micro problem. We should treat every murder as if it mattered, because what could be of graver concern to society than the intentional taking of human life?

  So I just said: “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  It’s tough to argue with someone who won’t put up a fight. When he saw I had no more to say, North Face relaxed his shoulders and slowly slid his hand out of his jacket, then pointed up the street.

  “You can go over to Booker T,” he said. “All kinds of junkies there. Half of them used to buy from Tyrone.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll get out of your hair now. And I really am sorry about your cousin.”

  “No one reads the paper anyway,” he grumbled.

  I let him have that parting shot. And as I pulled away, I saw the hooded figures start to emerge from their hiding places and resume their posts.

  The Booker T. Washington Public Housing Project, otherwise known as Booker T, was a few blocks away. Booker T’s story was a sadly familiar one in Newark. Built not long after World War II—when it was hailed as a glistening, modern replacement for nineteenth-century tenement housing—it had once been a vibrant, thriving community where slightly down-on-their-luck families found their bootstraps and pulled themselves up.

  But, in the long run, slack management, shoddy maintenance, and neglectful tenants made it just as bad as the tenements it replaced. And as the city died around it—with the middle class fleeing and the factory jobs disappearing—Booker T settled slowly into a mire from which there was no rescue. By the turn of the twenty-first century, it had gotten so bad the city decided there was only one way to fix Booker T: tear it down.

  But even that wasn’t easy. There were disagreements among city, state, and federal governments about who should pay for the demolition. There were residents who didn’t want to leave. Then there were the illegal residents—the squatters, the drifters, the junkies, an entire underworld of people who hacked their way through the plywood that covered the windows and doors and used the buildings for their own shadowy purposes.

  That was the Booker T I was venturing into, a place that was worse than a ghost town because the souls that haunted it were still alive. If you took a snapshot of Booker T at any one moment, you might not see anything living, besides perhaps one of the stray cats that came to hunt for rats.

  But if you stayed for a while, you’d inevitably see some vagrant shuffling through. Or you might notice a tendril of smoke escaping from a window where someone had lit a fire inside a trash barrel.

  Those were the people I was looking for, people who had slipped through society’s safety net, past the dozens of nonprofits and churches that may have tried to catch them, and hit rock bottom. They were, to say the least, a difficult cohort to interview. Many of them suffered from delusions and paranoias that made their grasp on the real world anywhere from tenuous to nonexistent. Some would be so high they might as well be mentally ill.

  Still, I had to try.

  I parked my car along the street that ran outside Booker T, a collection of six block-long, four-story brick buildings. In the middle was a massive courtyard, around which Booker T’s social life had rotated for fifty years.

  The sense of desolation in the courtyard was overwhelming. This had once been a place where friends gathered, where stories were told, where summer days were passed, where lives were led. And now it had been surrendered to an eerie kind of urban emptiness: not the slightest bit of human activity greeted my arrival.

  After maybe fifteen minutes, a lone woman wandered through, saw me, and turned in the other direction. It was no use trying to catch up to her.

  Next came a man doing the junkie stumble, staggering in a chaotic pattern, unseeing and unknowing. He had a boisterous conversation going with himself, one that consisted of bits of words followed by loud, dry coughing. I considered talking to him but decided I’d be better off trying to interview one of the stray cats.

  In the darkness, and with the cold numbing my senses, t
ime became hard to judge. Had I been there thirty minutes or three hours? It didn’t matter. I would stay as long as needed until . . .

  There. A man. Walking at the far end of the courtyard. The buildings were numbered, one through six, and he was in between numbers one and two. The darkness and lack of moonlight made it difficult to see what he was doing, but, yes, he had momentarily halted. Had he seen me and frozen, hoping to elude detection? Was he going to flee?

  No, he was turning. He was facing Building Two. And he was . . .

  Pissing on it.

  Iwaited for the man to dispense with his business, giving him the kind of time and distance I might appreciate were I urinating on a public building. Once he restored his gear, I moved in, approaching noisily so he knew I was coming. When I was still about forty feet away, I hollered out the biggest, friendliest “Hi, there!” I could summon.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, sir,” I continued, still trying to sound as harmless as I could.

  I had gotten near enough to see the man was looking at me like I was his first extraterrestrial sighting. He was wearing sneakers that appeared several sizes too big and several decades too old. I guessed he was wearing all the clothes he owned, though even with all that padding he seemed gaunt and undernourished. He had one of those patchy-bald heads, the kind older black men get when they don’t have the good sense to just shave it all off. His age, as with most advanced addicts, was difficult to guess—somewhere between forty-five and seventy-five. All you really knew for sure was that life had been hard on him.

  “I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner,” I said, coming closer still.

  “You sellin’ newspapers?” he slurred, even more puzzled.

  I laughed. I was now close enough to see and smell his breath, which could have flunked a Breathalyzer from ten paces away. That was actually a good sign. In my experience, the drunks were slightly more coherent than the druggies.

  “No, sir. I’m a reporter. I don’t sell the newspaper. I write it.”