by Brad Parks
“Don’t worry, little guy,” I cooed. “I got your back.”
Jaquille sucked a few more times, his eyes never leaving my face.
“Oh, look at you, you’re a natural,” Mimi said as she descended the stairs.
“Yeah, don’t let that get out.”
“Here you go,” she said, taking the baby from me. “How’s my little man?”
As soon as I pried my finger from his mouth, Jaquille renewed his protest. I was going to take that as a perfectly good excuse to announce my departure, then the doorbell rang.
“I’m sorry, can you answer that?” she asked. “If this baby doesn’t eat, no one around here is going to be able to think.”
Since when had I become the nanny and the butler? As Mimi disappeared with the baby into the kitchen, I opened the door.
The man standing there was huge, dark-skinned, and cologne-doused. He had on a gray pinstripe suit that, at a quick glance, looked like it was silk and custom-tailored. He wore a hangdog look on his drooping face, gold-wire-framed glasses, and a fedora, which he doffed as he entered. He looked familiar, though I couldn’t say why.
“Good day to you, sir,” he said in a deep, bass voice, walking in like I had already invited him. “Is Noemi here?”
He took care to pronounce Mimi’s full name, doing it so deliberately it sounded more like “No Emmy”—like it was something with which Susan Lucci would have once been familiar. As soon as he was done, I heard her call from the kitchen, “Pastor Al! Come in, come in!”
The man shuffled in and I backed up to give him room. He was at least five inches taller than me, and if I could guess from the size of the body filling his suit, he needed one of those scales that went beyond three hundred pounds. He was dabbing sweat with a handkerchief, even though it wasn’t that hot.
“Have a seat, Pastor Al. I’m just heating a bottle for the baby,” Mimi said.
Finally, my brain clicked in and I realized who Pastor Al was and why he looked familiar. He was one of Newark’s celebrity ministers, a man well represented in the three Bs of local outdoor advertising—billboards, buses, and benches. His church, Redeemer Love Christian, was a nondenominational house of God that used the slogan “Let Jesus Redeem You” and always featured “The Reverend Doctor Alvin LeRioux, an Anointed Man of God” in its advertisements.
We had written a story about the church not long ago. It had something like eight thousand members, many of whom had been talked into tithing by the anointed man of God. The story raised the question of where that money all went—other than the three Bs and the chauffeured SUV that the good Reverend Doctor was known to ride around the city in—but never fully answered it. Unlike other nonprofits, churches are exempt from laws requiring them to expose their finances to public inspection.
Suffice it to say, the piece probably wasn’t Pastor Al’s favorite reading material. I had heard talk that after our story ran, he gave a sermon calling our newspaper an agent of Satan—or something similarly unflattering. I can’t say that kind of talk made me want to like him any more than he liked me. Still, he was a man of some standing in the community, and I was going to treat him with all due respect.
“Reverend LeRioux, I’m Carter Ross with the Eagle-Examiner,” I said, extending a hand. He shook it, though I could tell he didn’t want to. I could also tell I was going to smell like his cologne for the rest of the day, no matter how many times I washed myself.
“I’ll be out in a second,” Mimi called.
Pastor Al hobbled in arthritic fashion over to one of the couches, where he landed heavily. He stared straight ahead, dabbed his forehead, and seemed to be making a point of not talking to me. The baby was still caterwauling, then abruptly quieted—the bottle, at long last, had been delivered.
Mimi came into the room a moment later with a happily suckling Jaquille cradled in one arm.
“Pastor Al!” she said.
“Noemi, my child,” he said, without getting up.
“It’s so good of you to come.”
“I came as soon as I heard.”
I thought, at that point, he would offer a prayer, read some Scripture, or do something appropriately nonsecular. Instead, he gestured at me.
“Noemi, I was hoping we could share some words in confidence,” he said. “I am troubled by the presence of a reporter here.”
And I am troubled by ministers who wear two-thousand-dollar silk suits. But at least I’m polite enough to keep it to myself.
He continued: “I know the media enjoys publicizing tragedy for its own purposes. But these are private moments to be shared by family and loved ones.”
Mimi looked over at me, obviously torn. I had earned her trust, and I could tell she liked me. But, at the same time, Pastor Al trumped Reporter Carter in her world.
I saved her the trouble of having to kick me out.
“Actually, I was just leaving,” I said. “I’ll call you later.”
Pastor Al was still mopping his forehead as I left.
* * *
Relieved to be no longer serving as a human pacifier, I returned to my car, having already decided on my next course of action. With apologies to Mike Fusco, I had to figure out if Darius Kipps had been a straight-up cop.
If he wasn’t, it meant he probably did kill himself, in which case I was just wasting my time. It’s not that crooked cops don’t make for great copy—they do—it was Brodie’s suicide policy. There would just be no getting around it. Besides, I’d never get anything on-the-record. No one was going to piss on a dead cop’s grave, even if he was bent.
Then again, if Darius Kipps wasn’t dirty, it opened the possibility the suicide wasn’t what it seemed, in which case I had a load of dynamite on my hands. Either way, I wasn’t going to find my answer in the phone book or on the Internet. I was going to find it on the streets.
I started driving through the heart of the hood, down a series of avenues I have come to know as well as any place I’ve ever lived. During my years at the Eagle-Examiner, the milieu had become familiar, even comfortable: the vacant lots and abandoned buildings, the aging Victorians and ancient storefronts, the new construction and glistening chain stores. It’s the hodgepodge that is present-day Newark, a city forever striving to renew itself, with mixed results.
I love it when some visiting journalist parachutes into town for three days to write the Definitive Newark Story. Because the fact is, if they’re looking to write “Newark: City on the Rise,” they’ll find that. And if they’re looking to write “Newark: Still the Same Hellhole Despite What the Mayor Keeps Telling People,” they’ll find that, too. To me, the city is like its own kind of Rorschach test. What you choose to see—whether you want to be optimistic or pessimistic in your view—says as much about you as it does about the place.
My destination was the Clinton Hill section of Newark and my man, Reginald “Tee” Jamison. The nickname came from the thriving T-shirt shop he ran—no one, other than perhaps his wife, called him by his real name. I had written a story about him a few years back, and we had since become unlikely friends. I say “unlikely” only in a statistical sense, inasmuch as there are roughly two hundred million white people living in America, and Tee is friends with only two of them.
Still, I was glad to be one of the two. Despite the superficial differences between us—he has more hair in two of his dreadlocks than I have on my entire head, not to mention more muscle in one of his pectorals than I have in my entire body—we were kindred spirits in more ways than not, and we enjoyed deciphering our respective worlds for each other.
Plus, he grew up in Newark, shuffling between a variety of foster care placements in all parts of the city, so he has a network of contacts that would make any reporter envious. If Darius Kipps was dirty, Tee might or might not know it. But he sure would know someone who knew.
I arrived at his store to find a half-dozen knuckleheads hanging around his front door. They were generally good kids—if you could ignore the pot smell that cl
ings to their clothing—though their presence on Tee’s sidewalk led people to make certain assumptions about what was going on inside. Tee, who was a legitimate businessman, finally got fed up one day and posted a sign in his front window, NO, WE DO NOT SELL WEED HERE.
As I got out of my car, six heads immediately swung my way—well-dressed Caucasian men tend to have this effect on Clinton Avenue in Newark—but then they saw it was me. I’m a frequent enough visitor to Tee’s store that they know I’m not there to arrest them, harass them, or otherwise disrupt their mojo. With their alarm level back down, they returned to what appeared to be a dice game. And not Dungeons & Dragons.
I hit the buzzer by Tee’s front door and waited for the lock to release. When I walked in, Tee was designing a T-shirt for a pair of customers, who were seated in front of his desk.
“Uh-oh, it’s the IRS!” he hollered from behind his desk.
“Sir, this is a random audit,” I said, playing along. “I’m going to have to ask for your last five years of returns, including all associated receipts.”
“Receipts? What’s that? You know a brother like me can’t read. My massa won’t let me.”
“Well then, I’m afraid we’re going to have to throw you in jail with all the other darkies. Now excuse me for a second, I have to plant some drugs on you.”
“C’mon now, don’t make me go all Rodney King on your pasty ass.”
I think the customers knew we were kidding because we were both smiling broadly. But they looked like nice folks, and I could tell we were making them feel uncomfortable. So I pulled out of the act and said, “You want me to come back later?”
“No, no, I’m just finishing. Gimme a second.”
Tee took another five minutes wrapping up with his customers, while I perused some of his inventory, including the ever-popular shirt that showed a stick figure lying on the ground under the words, WHY DON’T YOU GO PRACTICE FALLING DOWN?
I was admiring another one—a top-ten list of “Yo Mama’s So Ugly” jokes—when Tee came over and shook my hand.
“So what’s going on?” Tee asked. “You working on something?”
I told him what I knew about Darius Kipps, finishing with, “So, basically, I need to figure out if he’s crooked.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Tee said. “They all crooked.”
I had repeatedly tried to convince Tee of my belief that, in fact, the vast majority of policemen are not corrupt—in the same way the vast majority of newspaper reporters don’t make up stories. But it only takes a few reprobates to skew the reputation of the rest of them. Newark, for example, had roughly 1,200 police officers last time I checked. If even 99 percent of them were law-abiding, that still meant there were a dozen cops rampaging around the city, wreaking havoc.
Alas, it seems like Tee had experience with all twelve of them.
“C’mon, I’m serious,” I said. “I’ve got a picture of him. You think your friends outside are hard-core enough to know if Kipps was involved in something he shouldn’t be?”
“Them? Nah. They just playin’, you know what I mean?”
I did. In Newark, there were pretend gangs and then there were serious gangs, and it was important to know the difference. Kids like Tee’s knuckleheads might call themselves a gang. They might adopt some of the gestures, mannerisms, and clothing of a gang. They might even say they were Bloods or Crips. But, in reality, they were a gang in roughly the same sense as the Little Rascals. They hung together for camaraderie and mutual protection. They were basically harmless.
“Besides,” Tee pointed out, “you said this guy is Fourth Precinct, right? Those kids never get out of the South Ward. The Fourth is up in Central.”
“Oh, yeah, good point. You know anyone up that way who might be able to help me?”
Tee got a far-off look.
“What?” I asked.
“Well, I know these dudes up there. Trust me, if your cop was dirty, they’d know. They got that neighborhood wired. Hell, I think they got the whole city wired.”
“Okay. I’m not going to have to get stoned again, am I?”
Tee had once set me up with sources who felt the only way to ensure I was not a member of a law enforcement agency was for me to smoke pot with them. It was an experience that proved two things to them: one, I’m not a cop; and two, my tolerance for marijuana is not especially impressive.
“No, no, nothing like that this time,” he assured me. “But let me ask you something: You need a new pair of boots by any chance?”
“Huh?”
“Just say yes.”
“Yes?”
“Okay, let me make a call.”
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, I was out the door with an address scribbled on a piece of paper and instructions to stop at an ATM machine to pick up a hundred dollars in cash. I was also instructed not to get too attached to said money.
The address was on Irvine Turner Boulevard, which was one of Newark’s most notorious drug corridors for one reason: it offered a straight shot to Route 78, an east-west interstate that led rather quickly to some of the state’s nicest bedroom communities. All the suburbanites who came to Newark to get their drugs—and make no mistake, that was a big part of the clientele—knew they couldn’t get lost if they just stayed on Irvine Turner.
I relied on my GPS to guide me to the address Tee had written for me, which turned out to be around the corner from the Fourth Precinct headquarters. It was a cream-colored, two-story, warehouselike building that encompassed a good chunk of the block. The only apparent tenant, and it occupied perhaps one-tenth of the building, was a bodega that had a door onto the street. It had dark windows—behind bars, of course—made of one-way glass, the kind that would allow someone inside to see out, but not the other way around.
Where was Tee taking me, anyhow? I pushed through the bodega’s door to the sound of little bells chiming—a few had been tied to the door. The store was empty except for a turban-wearing cashier sitting in a bulletproof box.
I approached the man, who I guessed was Sikh, and said, “Tee sent me.”
He tilted his head and peered at me like I was speaking a soon-to-be-extinct Javanese dialect.
“I’m the guy Tee sent,” I said.
More peering.
“Is this one-sixty Irvine Turner Boulevard?” I asked.
“One-sixty A,” the guy said in a thick Indian accent. “You want one-sixty, you go around the corner.”
“Around … which corner?”
The guy pointed out the door and vaguely to the left, so that’s the direction I took. I reached the end of the building without seeing anything obvious, just a narrow alleyway. It was far cleaner than most Newark alleys—spotless, actually—which really got me suspicious. I hoped Tee remembered that I had a cat who depended on me as his sole means of support.
I turned and, midway down the alley, found a meshed steel door, the kind that served as a superstrength screen for another door inside it. I pulled on the screen, but it was bolted solid. A security camera, attached to the side of the building about fifteen feet up, looked down on me.
There was no knocking on a door like this. But I also couldn’t see any other way in. I studied the door frame, the door itself, and saw nothing obvious. Was I supposed to stand there until someone saw me on the camera?
Then I found it, just to the left of the frame: a small, recessed doorbell button, practically camouflaged because it had been painted the same cream color as the concrete around it.
I pressed the button and waited. Nothing happened. I pressed again. Still nothing. I was beginning to think it was broken—and there was no way into this hulk of a building—when I pressed the button a third time.
Then I heard a metallic voice: “Keep your shirt on, keep your shirt on. What are you, dying or something?”
The voice sounded … Jewish? Were there still Jews left in Newark? I thought they all left a half-century ago. I couldn’t even tell where the sound was coming fro
m. My head swiveled in every direction.
“Over here, over here,” the voice said.
This time I was able to place it as coming from the camera, which had a small speaker.
“Oh, hi,” I said, feeling weird because, to anyone who walked by, it looked like I was talking to a wall.
“You just gonna stand there all day, looking like a putz? What do you want?”
“I’m … I’m the guy Tee sent.”
More faintly, like he didn’t know I could still hear him, the voice asked, “What did he say?” Then another guy—who also sounded like an older Jewish man—replied, “He said he was the guy Tee sent. The boots. The boots.”
“Oh, yeah,” the voice said, returning to its previous volume. “You here about the boots?”
“That’s right.”
“Why didn’t you say so? You think I’m a mind reader or something? Hang on, hang on.”
I waited another moment, until the door was opened by a granite block of a black man who, I assumed, was not the owner of the voice I heard on the speaker. I followed him down an unadorned, windowless hallway until we reached another door, where he punched in a numeric code.
The door opened, and suddenly I felt like I was in a chaotic, mismatched Macy’s. It was a large, open space filled with merchandise, loosely organized by category: luggage to the immediate left, cookery and housewares straight on, hardware beyond that, clothing and footwear to the right, electronics in the back left. The only thing missing was the perfume section.
“What … what is all this?” I asked, but my granite-block guide was not a talker.
I heard a pleasant dinging sound and turned to see two men appearing out of a freight elevator. The first had on yellow-tinted glasses, a dark yellow shirt with the top three buttons undone, light yellow slacks, and white slip-on shoes that reminded me of something a nurse would have worn forty years ago. His saggy skin was deeply tanned, even though it was March. His jewelry—a necklace, multiple bracelets, and rings on several digits, including both pinkies—was all yellow gold. His hair, what little of it there was, had been dyed blond and was gelled back. He looked like a wrinkled human banana and walked like the only rooster in a hen house.