The Good Byline

by Jill Orr

  Between Ryan and the news about Ajay, I wanted to stay in my pajamas, eat junk food, and listen to Kelly Clarkson songs all day, but I had an obituary to write. And it actually made for a decent distraction, going through my notes on Jordan, sketching out a draft, and trying to piece together the woman she had become. I created a virtual whiteboard with the various aspects of Jordan’s life and personality that I wanted to include in the final version. I had a section on early life, school years, college, and working life. I divided it further into interests/passions, friends, love life, family life, and professional goals. I also created a completely separate page entitled Death, on which I listed some of the working theories Holman and I had hypothesized. That page had two sections: secret boyfriend and taco trucks.

  By the time I went to meet Holman, I actually felt like I’d made some progress. He met me at the front doors and led me back to his tiny office. On the way, I noticed that Jordan’s cubicle had been cleaned out, all traces of her removed as if she’d never worked there.

  Holman sat on a large silver exercise ball behind his desk. “It’s ergonomic. Supports correct spinal alignment,” he said when he noticed my quizzical expression. I wondered if he realized he bobbed up and down slightly when he spoke. The movement made me think of the game Whac-A-Mole. Whac-A-Holman. I giggled.

  He laughed too. “It’s fun. Want to try?”

  “No, that’s okay.” I looked around his tiny, cramped office. It was barely bigger than a cubicle and filled with Dr. Who paraphernalia, but at least it had a door. “What’d you find out about Romero?”

  “I’ll get to that. First, I found out some interesting information about your boyfriend,” Holman said.

  “He is not my boyfriend.”

  “He is as long as we need more information from him,” Holman said, his face as serious as a heart attack. I didn’t argue. “Did you know he does independent consulting in addition to teaching at Cardwell?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “You knew?”

  “Yeah, I guess. I think he said he works with the Tuttle County sheriff’s department or something like that, to keep current in the field.”

  “Did he tell you he was working as a consultant for one Mr. Juan Pablo Romero?” Holman said in very dramatic fashion.

  “What?” I felt like the air had been squeezed out of my chest.

  “Yeah, Ajay Badal is listed on the roster of consultants for Little Juan Park.”

  “He never mentioned that.” My brain felt like it was buzzing. I shouldn’t have been surprised, given all the information I’d learned about Ajay in the past couple of days, but I think I was still clinging to the hope that all of this was just some misunderstanding. Obviously, it wasn’t.

  “This proves a three-way connection between Jordan, Ajay, and Romero. I have a feeling the mystery of how she died lies inside that triangle.”

  “But how?”

  “Glad you asked.” Holman reached into a file folder and pulled out a piece of paper. It was the anonymous letter Jordan had opened. “I think we start here.”

  Just then, there was a knock on his half-open door. “Come in,” Holman said as he placed the note under the manila file folder on his desk.

  “You’re back.” It was Hal Flick.

  I sat up straighter, struggling to quell the butterflies in my stomach that appeared the moment I heard his voice. “I see your superior powers of observation are still intact.”

  “What can I do for you, Flick?” Holman said, his voice neither overly friendly nor antagonistic.

  Flick wrenched his gaze from me and looked at Holman. “I was just wondering what business you had with Riley.”

  “None-of-your-business business,” I spit out before I realized I sounded like a three-year-old with a stutter.

  “We’re running a paper here, and last I heard you weren’t a reporter.” Flick’s gruff voice made the accusation seem even harsher.

  “You don’t know anything about me. You gave up your right to know me five years ago when you gave up on my granddad.” I hated myself for the way my voice cracked.

  Flick’s eyes softened, and for a moment I thought I might get the apology or, better yet, the explanation I’d waited for all these years. But after a second, the hard expression was back. He ignored me and looked to Holman. “She shouldn’t be involved in our investigations.”

  “Actually, she has quite a knack for—”

  “She’s not qualified,” Flick said through gritted teeth.

  His tone made my blood boil. How dare he come in here and try to tell me what to do? I lifted my chin and said casually, “Actually, Holman says I have Granddaddy’s sensibility—his good instincts and all that.”

  Flick snorted, as if to dismiss any talent I might have. “Be a professional, Holman. She may be cute, but that doesn’t mean she should be your Lois Lane.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement,” Holman said. His tone was still even, but I sensed a trace of annoyance. I wondered what the relationship was between them. Co-workers? Friends? Professional rivals? Flick had been a good reporter in his day but had never gotten a Worth Bingham Prize. I wondered if he was jealous of Holman. The thought filled me with satisfaction.

  “If you’ll excuse us,” I said, beginning to close the door on him. “We have to get back to work.”

  Flick glared at both of us for a good long moment before turning to leave. Once he was gone, I pushed the door shut and took a deep breath.

  “Want to talk about it?” Holman asked.

  “Nope.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yup.”

  “And are you sure you want to work on this story with me? Flick has a point, you’re not a trained investigative reporter.”

  I wasn’t sure if it was sitting in a newspaper office or seeing Flick or something else entirely, but I felt my grandfather’s presence in that moment urging me on. It was as if he was there, driving my resolve to dig in. I took another deep breath and said, “Tell me more about Romero.”

  “He is an interesting guy, actually,” Holman said, bouncing lightly on his ball. “A bit of an enigma. He was born in Mexico City, but his parents moved the family to the States—New Jersey—when he was just six. His father’s older brother, Mateo, was already living there. Uncle Mateo was a small-time kingpin up there, and rumor has it that Juan Pablo ran for him back when he was in high school. But as soon as Juan Pablo Senior got wind that his son was working for his big, bad older brother, he up and moved the whole family down to Tuttle County, where he figured they’d be far enough away from the uncle’s influence.” Holman took a long sip from his water bottle before continuing.

  “So, Juan Pablo Senior moves the family down here and opens up the original Romero’s, the one on Fifth in West Bay. About three years later, video surveillance tapes show him walking to his car from the restaurant after closing one night. He was held up at gunpoint by someone in a horse-head mask. He tried to make a run for it and ended up shot three times in the back. Bled out on the sidewalk about ten yards from his own restaurant.”

  “Geez.”

  “Juan Pablo Junior found him. Went looking for his dad when he didn’t come home that night. The man in the mask was never caught.” Holman flipped to a new page in his file.

  “So next thing you know, Juan Pablo Junior drops out of college. He reconnects with his uncle up in Jersey and gets involved with drugs for a couple of years. He got caught in 1993 with a kilo of cocaine and three unregistered guns in his car on I-95. He was never convicted because the officer who stopped him performed an illegal search. Lawyer got him off, no problem. But according to Romero, that scare was the come-to-Jesus he needed, and after that he cleaned up, moved back to Virginia, and went to work for his mother in the family restaurant.

  “Over the past twenty years, he’s done incredibly well, despite everyone’s low expectations. He opened five Romero’s locations in Virginia and another fourteen between DC, Delaware, and Maryland. Obviously,
the restaurants have been hugely successful. Then about six years ago, he hopped onto the food-truck craze with the Tacos Los Locos trucks, and that business exploded. He has trucks running from Virginia all the way up and down the East Coast.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I had no idea.”

  “It’s an impressive outfit. Romero Junior got out early into the market with his trucks and has serious brand loyalty. But the problem has always been that no matter how successful he gets, he can’t shake the reputation of being a gangster. People who know him say he hates that. They say he has a complex about it.”

  “And what about Little Juan Park? Is this just a way for him to ingratiate himself with the community? To prove he’s not the black sheep of Tuttle County?” I asked, now sitting up and leaning forward.

  “Seems like it,” Holman said. “He’s married now. Has a kid. Juan Pablo the third. And if you talk to his neighbors and friends, which we did in the course of putting the profile together, they all say he’s a great dad and is always at all the games and tournaments and school parties. Then again, if they were scared he was going to have them shot in the head, they would say that, wouldn’t they?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “What? You don’t sound convinced.”

  “Well, it just seems to me that if he were such a bad guy, there’d be someone willing to talk. Someone out there who’d be willing to inform on him.”

  Holman nodded. “Maybe that was the source of Jordan’s anonymous tip?” He handled the letter, rolling it between his long fingers. “We don’t have any hard evidence, but my gut tells me Romero is still in business with Uncle Mateo.”

  “I just remembered something.” A cold chill spread up my back. “Ajay said he left Jersey because he had to.”

  “That seems menacing.”

  “That’s what I said. He was evasive about it but said he found another opportunity down here.”

  Holman’s eyes narrowed. “What if that opportunity was working for Romero?” The question was rhetorical, and I didn’t answer. “Riley, you need to figure out what Ajay is doing for Romero. He’s a professor with expertise in explosives. It doesn’t make sense that he’d consult on a park building project.”

  I remembered how dark Ajay’s face looked when he talked about leaving Jersey. Obviously something bad had happened to make him leave. And he’d seemed so reluctant to talk about it, like he was hiding something.

  “Agreed,” I said, “but how am I supposed to do that?”

  Holman shrugged. “Use your feminine wiles.”

  “My feminine what-now?”

  “Your sexuality. I know you don’t like it when I say that word.”

  I sighed loudly. “How am I supposed to use my…my whatever-you-call-it to get him to tell me about his work?”

  “You’re very symmetrical. You’ll figure something out.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Dr. H did not come into work the next morning. I called him at home, and he said he had some things to figure out and assured me he was fine. I had my doubts about that, but as it happened, I was fairly not-fine myself. I texted Ajay and told him I was feeling better and asked if he wanted to go to dinner that night. He said he’d pick me up at eight. I had no idea how I was going to keep my cool in front of him knowing he was married and working for Romero. The thought of being alone with him—a married man with possible ties to organized crime—made my stomach feel like it was churning cement.

  Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone had been waiting at the doors when I opened and were now standing at the checkout line with their latest book selections.

  “Is everything all right, dear?” Mrs. Gladstone asked as I scanned her books. “You seem a little preoccupied this morning.”

  What an insightful lady! I felt a rush of affection for her. I was touched that she knew me so well after all our seemingly mundane exchanges that she could tell just by looking at me that I was off. Sometimes you never know how much of a connection you are making with another human being just through the course of normal interactions.

  “I am a little bit, actually,” I said and smiled at her. “How could you tell?”

  “Your derrière’s hanging out, that’s how!” Mr. Gladstone said, and then gave me an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

  I looked down. Sure enough, my white skirt with the bold flower print had gotten tucked up into my panties, exposing my left cheek. I must have been so preoccupied when I got dressed that morning that I hadn’t noticed.

  “Ohmygod,” I blurted out. “I am so sorry! I have no idea how that happened.” I grabbed the skirt out and smoothed it down.

  “No need to take the Lord’s name in vain, dear,” Mrs. Gladstone admonished. “Besides, lots of people your age do that kind of thing as a fashion statement. Who is it again—that singer? Wears the skimpy outfits?”

  “Um, Miley Cyrus?”

  “No, you know the one—”

  “Nicki Minaj?”

  “She also wears the cones on her front?”

  “Madonna?”

  “Yes, Madonna! She walks around with her backside hanging out all the time!” She was trying to make me feel better, and it was really very kind of her, though I wondered exactly how old Mrs. Gladstone thought I (or Madonna) was.

  “Well, I liked it,” Mr. Gladstone said definitively. “It’s not every day I get to see a young—”

  “Wright Wesley Gladstone.”

  “What?” he said innocently, then laughed a wheezy, old man’s laugh until Mrs. Gladstone gave him a look that stopped him.

  My blush deepened. I pushed the newly checked-out stack of books back across the checkout desk to them and smoothed my skirt down again. “Thanks for your patronage,” I said, which may have been an oddly formal thing to say to two octogenarians who had just seen my left butt cheek.

  “Thanks for the peep show, sweetie,” Mr. Gladstone said, like he was thanking me for a nice roast chicken. Mrs. Gladstone whacked him with her sack of books, and they walked out of the library at exactly 9:20 a.m.

  I had a feeling it was going to be a long day.

  I was right. Tabitha finally left for the day at 4 p.m., and Dr. H hadn’t come in, so by closing time I was alone. I shut down the computers and was walking toward the back to the children’s area to turn off the lights when I heard the doorbell chime. It was 7:57 p.m. Ajay was supposed to pick me up at my house just after eight, so I needed to leave right on time. I walked back up toward the front of the library intending to ask whomever it was if they could please come back in the morning. But when I got to the front of the library, there wasn’t anyone there. Our chime doesn’t go off unless someone crosses the threshold of the doorway, so I knew someone had walked in. I wondered if they’d come in and perhaps realized what time it was and left again? But then the chime would have gone off twice. One chime meant there was someone here. There had to be.

  I got a whooshy feeling in my stomach, the one you get when your body is telling you something isn’t right.

  “Hello?” I called out. “Anyone there?” My voice echoed against the large, empty cavern of the entry hall, and the hollow sound only made me feel more freaked out.

  “Dr. H?” I said. Again, no response. “Tab?”

  I stood stock-still for at least thirty seconds, listening hard to the silence. Nothing. Surely if someone was in here they would make some kind of noise—a rustle, a breath, a creak in the floor. But I didn’t hear anything, so I figured I was safe enough to go into the backroom, get my purse, and get the hell out of there.

  With my heart pounding into my throat, I set the alarm, locked the doors, and jogged toward my car in the parking lot. I was in such a rush that I didn’t even see the man standing right in front of me until I ran directly into his chest.

  “Hey there!” It was Ajay. He put his hands on my shoulders and said, “Excited to see me?”

  My blood pressure, already at warp-speed, sped up, and I felt dizzy with panic. I started breathing fast—too fast—in and out, and in an
d out, but I wasn’t getting any air.

  “Are you okay, Riley?” His smile changed to a look of concern.

  “Yeah!” I said. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. “I’m fine!”

  “You sure? You look a little…” I could tell he wanted to say like you did on that roller coaster, but instead he said, “tense.”

  I tried to slow my breathing down to normal speed and forced myself to laugh, which came out more like a cough. “I’m fine! Really! I’m just surprised to see you here, that’s all.”

  Riley Ellison, “librarian,” died in the parking lot of the Tuttle Corner Library at the age of twenty-four from complications of a panic attack brought on by a phantom doorbell chime and the buff chest of the man she was pretending to date. The stress of trying to elicit information from said date proved too much for Ms. Ellison. She is survived by her reputation for being a complete spaz.

  “I finished up with work a little early and thought I’d come pick you up here,” Ajay said. His face broke into a half-smile that would have been incredibly cute were he not a married lying scoundrel. “I couldn’t wait to see you.”

  He leaned in for a kiss. I jerked my head to the side at the last second in a reflexive moment of panic, and his lips landed inside my ear. He pulled back and looked surprised, then embarrassed. “Oh, sorry.”

  “My boss doesn’t like me to, um, fraternize with the patrons on library property.”

  I could tell I’d hurt his feelings, but he played it cool. “Yeah, totally. I understand.”

  We stood there awkwardly for another few moments until I remembered the phantom chime from before. “Did you just get here?”

  “Yeah, I came from the sheriff’s office.”

  “Did you come inside just now?”

  “No, why?”

  “No reason.” I tried to laugh but again ended up sounding like I had bronchitis.

  “If you’re still not feeling well, we can resched—”

  “No!” I practically shouted. “I’m fine. Let’s just go to dinner! Are you hungry? I’m hungry. I’m starved actually.” I was talking way faster than normal, and my voice sounded stilted and weird. I was the worst undercover reporter of all time.