by Brad Parks
The second man was slump-shouldered and appropriately pale for the season. He wore light gray pants and a blue cardigan sweater over a white oxford shirt, which was buttoned all the way to the top. He had no jewelry. His hair was its natural gray. He walked like a man who had lost every bet he ever placed.
The man in yellow said, “I’m Bernie. Everyone calls me Uncle Bernie. This is my brother Gene. Which one of us do you think is older?”
Both guys were at least seventy, though it was hard to tell beyond that. Either one of them could have been 138 for all I knew. If he had asked me who was older, him or Methuselah, I still wouldn’t have been able to answer.
“I have … I have no idea,” I said.
“Come on, guess.”
“He’s older,” I said, pointing at Gene, if only because I could tell that was what Uncle Bernie wanted to hear.
“See? That’s what everyone thinks, Gene! You look like a shlamazel. You’re not gonna get any tail at the bar dressing like that.”
I suspected both of these guys were a bit beyond their bar-cruising years—unless you were talking about the salad bar at an assisted living facility—but I at least appreciated his spirit.
“Anyhow, I know you didn’t come here to admire my good looks,” he said. “C’mon. Let’s go.”
* * *
Uncle Bernie led me through some racks of clothing toward a footwear section that would challenge a Nine West.
“You sure you don’t need some pots and pans?” Uncle Bernie asked me on the way back. “I just got some new All-Clad. That’s top of the line, All-Clad. The best. The best.”
“No thanks.”
“What about a TV? Samsung. Sony. Those Japs make a good TV now. Fella like you, I bet you like sports, right? Me? I like the ponies. I go to the track. I place a bet. I take a little nap in the sun. It’s very relaxing. But you young guys? You all like the football and the basketball. Need a good TV for that, am I right? How about a new high-def?”
“That’s okay.”
“Boots,” Gene reminded Bernie. “He came for the boots, remember?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m just talking here. What, you think I’m some kind of goyishe kop?”
“That’s Yiddish for ‘stupid,’” Gene translated.
“Okay, here we are,” Bernie said as we arrived at a series of wire racks, filled from top to bottom with shoe boxes. “What size are you? Ten? Eleven? You’re so tall, I bet you’re eleven.”
“Yeah, eleven works,” I said.
“Okay, okay, where are we … boots, boots,” Bernie said, pawing through some boxes. “Here we go. Timberlands. Excellent company, Timberland. They make a fine product and they stand behind it a hundred percent, a thousand percent. Now these? These are the top of the line.”
He pulled out a pair of work boots and continued: “These are from their premium collection. Steel toe. Waterproof. Eight-inch upper—that’s two inches more than their usual. You wear these boots, people say, ‘Hey, look at that feinshmecker!’”
“That’s Yiddish for someone who has good taste,” Gene interjected.
“Now, you get these boots retail for one fifty, one sixty, even on sale. You? You’re a friend of Tee’s—as far as I’m concerned, you’re mishpokhe. I give ’em to you for a hundred even. We good?”
I was so stunned by everything I was seeing—much less by what a mishpokhe was—I had to slow down and make sense out of it. “I’m sorry, Uncle Bernie, I just have to know, what is all this? Where did this come from?”
“What do you mean, where did this come from? You think I’m back here tanning leather all day? It came from the manufacturer.”
“No, I’m just asking … I’m sorry, are you guys some kind of fence or something?”
Bernie recoiled, looking genuinely offended. “Fence? Fence! A broch! My mother would rise from the grave and cuff me behind the ear if I stole so much as a lump of sugar! A fence! Shame on you.”
“So how did you guys … get all this stuff?”
“Warranties,” Bernie said. “It’s all about the warranties.”
“Huh?”
“We’re a warrantied product reseller,” Gene explained.
“What’s … what’s that?”
“Well, take those boots you got there. Timberland,” Uncle Bernie said. “Now, Timberland is a popular boot around here. And these young black guys, they all want their boots to be crisp and new, all the time. The moment a boot gets a speck of dirt on it? Feh! They’re done with it.”
“But these look brand-new…”
“I’m not finished. Am I finished? Geez, this guy. It’s like he’s sitting on shpilkes.”
“That means that you’re impatient,” Gene said.
“Anyhow,” Bernie plowed forward, “Timberland, they guarantee their product for life. For life, you hear me! So we have people all over, people who know us, people who know what we’re looking for. And they recover these kind of things for us—for a small fee, naturally. So say we get a pair of slightly used boots. We send them back to Timberland and, whammo, new boots.”
“They just … send you boots?”
“Well, there’s work involved. You have to write a letter—the letter is important, make ’em know you’re serious. And then sometimes we might have to, what’s the best way to put it, massage ’em a little. This is an art we’re talking about here.”
“Timberland guarantees its product against material or manufacturing defect,” Gene said. “So we—”
“Tut, tut,” Bernie interrupted. “What are you, making a megillah? He gets the point. Geez, Gene, someone asks you what time it is, you build ’em a clock.”
“So all this stuff,” I said, making a sweeping gesture with my arm. “The pots, the pans, the power tools. All of it is—”
“Straight from the manufacturer, never been used, good as new,” Bernie said. “Same as you get in the store. But for the right customer, Uncle Bernie gives you a discount.”
“But can you … do that?” I asked. “Is it legal?”
“Legal?” Bernie spat. “Was it legal what the Pharaoh did to my people? Was Auschwitz legal? Don’t talk to me about legal!”
“But don’t these companies, I don’t know, protect against this somehow? You must have twenty pairs of Timberlands there. Doesn’t Timberland eventually figure out it’s shipping all these new boots to the same place?”
Bernie just smiled and said, “We in the tribe have a saying for that: ‘Mensch tracht, Gott lacht.’”
“Man plans, God laughs,” Gene said.
I felt like laughing, too. Newark: there are a million scams in the naked city.
“So, I’m not here to dance with you, I’m here to sell stuff,” Bernie said. “You want the boots or not?”
“Yeah, I’ll take the boots. But I need a quick favor,” I said, extracting the picture of Darius Kipps from my pocket. “My guy Tee tells me you know all the cops around here.”
“The cops, the pawnbrokers, the shopkeepers, the machers, the kurves, the bubbas,” Bernie assured me. “We know everyone. In this line of work, someone farts, you gotta be able to smell it, kid.”
“Okay. Well, I’m trying to figure out if this one detective is dirty or not.”
“Dirty? What, you mean is he on the take?”
“Yeah, something like that. I just want to know if he’s involved in anything he shouldn’t be involved in.”
“Time was, they were all on the take,” Bernie said, chuckling. “You remember that, Gene? They paid those poor shmendricks a hundred fifty bucks a week and then they wondered why they were all in the mob’s pocket.”
“Tell him about Addonizio,” Gene said.
“Addonizio! Remember him? He was a real Moyshe Kapoyer. He was the mayor. He used to be a congressman, but you know what he said? He said ‘You can’t make any money as a congressman, but as mayor of Newark you can make a million bucks.’”
“Said it right into a wire,” Gene added. “To the FBI.”
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“Ah, but that was the old days,” Bernie continued. “Now? Not so much. The pay. The benefits. It’s all too good. These guys don’t want to risk their pensions. A few of them get involved in some funny business here and there, but nothing like it used to be. Let me have a look at this fella.”
I handed Bernie the photo, which he held out at arm’s length for perhaps a half a second.
“Him? Oh, he’s all right. He’s fine.”
“Are you sure? You want to look—”
“Sure? Yeah I’m sure! Listen to this guy, thinking I don’t know what I’m talking about. I got stains in my shorts older than you, kid. You gonna tell me my business? I say this guy’s okay, he’s okay.”
“Gotcha. Thanks for taking a look.”
“No problem. Now, hey, you need a briefcase by any chance?”
* * *
Somehow, I made it out of Gene and Bernie’s Warranty Emporium without acquiring any more merchandise, though not for lack of effort on Bernie’s part.
I tossed the Timberlands in my backseat, wondering when I’d ever have a chance to use them—I’m not exactly a steel-toe kind of guy—then turned my gaze to the Fourth Precinct headquarters, a hulking, fortresslike edifice whose windows had all been bricked over. The building had a famous—or, rather, notorious—history as the place where the Newark riots began in 1967.
Most folks thought the riots began when some cops beat up a cab driver (named John Smith, of all things) and then dragged his broken body back to the Fourth Precinct, resulting in the rumor the cabbie had been killed—and prompting a spasm of violence and looting from the outraged citizenry. That’s true, but it’s only part of the story. The city actually calmed down the night of Smith’s arrest, to the point where the local National Guard Armory, which had been put on alert, was told to stand down. Violence didn’t flare up again until the next night, when a protest outside the Fourth Precinct got out of hand, leading to four days of sustained unrest.
Either way, the Fourth played a central role in a cataclysm that left twenty-six people dead and caused ten million dollars in physical damage, to say nothing of what it did to Newark’s reputation. On the fortieth anniversary of the riots, a group of citizens and community leaders led an effort to have a small plaque mounted on the front of the building to commemorate what happened there. Otherwise, the Fourth Precinct was more or less the same place it had been in 1967. There had been talk about tearing it down, but no one had quite gotten around to it.
Now here it was, harboring secrets once again, playing an oblique role in another tragedy—even if I couldn’t quite measure the angle.
Lacking any kind of real plan, I locked my car and wandered in the direction of the precinct. I wanted to get a read on the place, imprint an image of it in my brain. I kept my eyes fixed on it as I walked up the sidewalk, then stood there for a while, like if I stared at it long enough its walls would start spilling what they knew.
I was still rooted there when a voice interrupted me.
“Can I help you?”
It was a patrol cop in uniform, taking a smoke break by the side of the building. I’m not sure how I missed him—he had to be at least six foot eight, with the arms of a seven footer—but somehow he startled me a little.
“I was just … I heard a cop killed himself in there last night, and I guess I wanted to have a look. Is that a problem?”
“No law against looking,” he said, taking a drag on his cigarette.
I did my best to study the guy out of the corner of my eye while I pretended to examine the building some more. Maybe I had watched a few too many bad eighties movies, but he was tall, black, and wearing a policeman’s hat that made him appear even taller, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of Hightower from Police Academy.
So. How to handle him? If I told him I was a reporter, the guy’s mouth would cinch up tighter than Uncle Scrooge’s change purse. But there’s a rule about identifying yourself to sources: you only have to do it if you planned to quote them. And since there’s no way a beat cop would ever be cleared by his superiors to be quoted on something like this, I wasn’t exactly risking anything by posing as a nosy bystander.
“Did you know him?” I asked.
“We all did.”
“What happened?”
“Seems like you already know,” Hightower said, stubbing out his cigarette on the wall of the building, then dropping the butt.
“Was he a good guy?”
“You must be a reporter.”
Busted. Another rule: you don’t necessarily have to identify yourself, but if you’re asked whether you are in fact a reporter, you can’t go lying about it.
“Yeah, how’d you know?”
“White guy in this neighborhood? If it’s nighttime, you’re here to buy drugs. If it’s daytime, you’re either a reporter or a social worker. Social workers don’t wear ties.”
I nodded my head. “You got me,” I said.
I figured those would be among the last words Hightower and I ever exchanged. But, to my surprise, he pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit another one. He was going to get as much nicotine in as he could while he was still on break. And that suited my purposes fine.
“So I’m hearing a bunch of patrol guys found him drunk on bourbon, covered in puke,” I said. “They tossed him in the shower to sober him up. And then he did himself in in the shower.”
“You hearing all that, huh?”
“We got sources.”
“What else you hear?”
I paused, not sure how much further to push things. Mike Fusco damn near strangled me when I asked him about Kipps being corrupt. But at least I had a little bit of a size advantage on Fusco. Hightower? If he wanted to, he could fold me in quarters and stuff me in his pocket.
Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained. So I took a deep breath and said: “There’s talk that Detective Kipps might have gotten himself tangled up in something inappropriate, that he might have gotten caught, and that maybe that’s why he pulled the trigger. But then I’ve had other people telling me he was legit. So I guess I’m trying to figure out which it was.”
I braced myself, and Hightower’s face twitched a little. But all he did was take a drag on his cigarette. “What do you care?” he asked.
“Well, the way my bosses think, a crooked cop who shoots himself is probably getting what he deserves, and therefore we don’t have much of a story,” I ventured. “Then again, maybe the cop is straight. Maybe he didn’t even kill himself in the first place, in which case there’s a lot more going on than we might realize. You follow me?”
I had set him up to tell me all kinds of wonderful things about Darius Kipps. And mindful of what Pritch said about black officers in the Fourth being tight with each other, I figured that’s what I was going to hear.
But he flicked his cigarette on the ground and exhaled a long line of smoke. Without any expression, he said, “Sounds to me like you don’t got a story.”
“What makes you say that?”
But he didn’t reply, just brushed past me and up the front steps, disappearing into that long-infamous building.
* * *
It was starting to feel like I needed a scorecard just to keep track of who was in the “Darius Dirty” column and who belonged in “Darius Clean.” Pritch and Officer Hightower seemed to be in the former, while Mike Fusco and Uncle Bernie were in the latter. Me? I was right in the middle, in a third column that might as well have been labeled “Carter Clueless.”
I was trudging back to my car when my phone chirped with a text message. It was from Tommy Hernandez, our city hall beat writer and a coconspirator in what had turned out to be some of my finer capers. Tommy and I did our best to look out for each other in the newsroom. So I took it seriously when his text read: “TT on warpath. Watch ur back.”
TT was, of course, Tina Thompson. And I didn’t know what he was talking about until moments later, when my phone rang. It was coming from a number with
a 315 area code, which I knew was Syracuse, N.Y. Over the years, we had enough interns from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications to know those three digits cold.
“Carter Ross.”
“Hey, Carter, it’s Geoff Ginsburg.”
Geoff was another Syracuse intern. In the modern newsroom—which has more demand for work than money to pay for it—interns have two of the things editors prize most: enthusiasm and affordability. Like some invasive species, interns started in relatively small numbers, but with no natural prey—beyond their own inability to survive on the near-poverty-level wages we pay them—they have been allowed to proliferate to the point where I think the interns now outnumber the full-time staff members.
Talent-wise, they were a mixed lot, though Geoff was better than most. He was a smart kid, an excellent writer, and a keen reporter. Because of his surname, some wiseacre on the copy desk had taken to calling him Ruth Bader. That turned rather quickly into Ruthie, the name that stuck. Mind you, unlike the Supreme Court justice, our Ruthie looked like he was about thirteen years old. He had an enthusiastic demeanor that made you wonder if he was getting his Journalism Merit Badge and a round, boyish face that I’m fairly certain didn’t require regular shaving.
That youthful appearance made his obvious crush on Tina Thompson all the more funny. It was unclear whether the crush was professional or personal. Ruthie struck me as the kind of kid who might go for an older chick, especially a hot one like Tina; but he also struck me as a total suck-up, so it could go either way. All I knew is he spent an awful lot of time hanging around her office, following her on trips across the newsroom, yapping around her heels like the lap dog he wanted to be.
“Hey, uh, Geoff,” I said, barely resisting the urge to call him Ruthie. You never knew whether the interns were aware of the clever nicknames we had awarded them. “What’s up?”
I started my engine, just to get the heat going. It had been a mild day for March, but it was starting to get chillier now that the sun was going down.
“Well, I remembered you were working on that project about public housing,” he said. “I happen to be really interested in public housing, so I was seeing if you wouldn’t mind me tagging along.”