by Brad Parks
“Yeah, I see that.”
“They’re fresh, though. This is just a guess, but this looks like something that happened shortly before death. Within six hours, for sure.”
Paul/Powell was on the move, heading down to the end of the tray. There was a sheet around the body’s lower half—someone thought the dead cop should have some modesty—but Paul/Powell was lifting it out of the way and studying Kipps’s feet.
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Check out the ankles. He was tied to a chair for a while. And he didn’t like it much.”
I went down and inspected. There were bruises just above the ankle bone that looked like they could have come from a rope. These didn’t break the skin. Maybe Kipps had been wearing pants or socks that cushioned the abrasiveness of the rope.
Whatever it was, something very strange had obviously happened to Darius Kipps in the hours before death, and it was now officially beyond making sense to me. As a reporter, I’m always telling stories. And I could tell a story where the detective, having decided to permanently lower his body temperature, got plastered on bourbon and then blew his head off. I had a harder time telling a version of the story where he also spent some time tied to a chair, struggling against his bonds so hard they made him bleed.
It introduced another actor—or, rather, several of them—into the equation. There had to be one person to do the tying and at least one other person to convince Kipps not to move while the tying was being done, presumably by aiming a weapon at him.
And in any reasonable person’s mind, it had to throw the Newark Police Department’s press release about a self-inflicted gun-shot wound into doubt. Serious doubt.
What’s more, it opened up another gaping, open question in my mind: If Darius Kipps didn’t kill himself, who did? And why?
* * *
I could tell Paul/Powell was of a mind to linger for a while, maybe visit with some of his other perished pals, but I have very strict rules about how many human remains I want to disturb in a day, and one is my limit.
Plus, Kira—now most assuredly out of the mood for love—was off in a corner by herself, taking occasional glances at a big biohazard container like maybe she wanted to make a deposit. I didn’t know if she was squeamish around the dead or around the 120-proof spirits we had just been imbibing. Either way, it was time to start bringing the illegal portion of my day to a close.
“You see anything else interesting?” I asked.
Paul/Powell spent a little more time looking under the sheet (better him than me), then went back up to inspect the head wound some more (definitely better him than me), before finally announcing, “That’s all I got for you.”
“Would you have any way of knowing whether this guy was drunk when he was killed?”
“Well, they’ll test for that as part of the tox screen.”
“No, I mean right now.”
Paul/Powell rested his hand on Kipps’s shoulder—no, it hadn’t gotten any less creepy—and pondered this for a moment. “Well, maybe if we compressed his chest and forced some air out of him, you could smell his breath.”
“Ah, that’s okay. I’ll pass. It would be reported in the autopsy, right? The booze. The marks on the wrists and ankles. That would all be in there?”
“Yeah, definitely. Any kind of wound or scar, premortal, postmortal, it’s all in there. And of course the toxicology reports would be there, too.”
I knew that, of course. I was already thinking about ways to get what I had just learned on the record and in the newspaper. In this case, merely having observed it wasn’t good enough—it would raise the question of how the reporter had been in a position to see it. Journalism Ethics 101: you can’t commit a crime to get information.
The autopsy report was no good to me, either. Autopsies were not automatically public record. You could get them unsealed, but that involved making an argument to a judge that there was a compelling public need to view the information—a need that outweighed an individual family’s right to privacy. And you could bet Essex County, the Newark Police Department, and probably even the Fraternal Order of Police would have lawyers fighting like mad to keep it sealed. It would take forever, cost a fortune, and we might not even win in the end.
No, I had to find another way.
I looked at Paul/Powell, who was drumming his “D-E-A-T-H” hand on the metal tray.
“Your phone have a camera by any chance?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Mind doing me a favor and taking a picture of his wrists and ankles and then texting them to me?”
“They’ll take pictures as part of the autopsy. They’ll be better quality than my cell phone.”
“Yeah, but the nosy reporter won’t be able to access them,” I said.
“Ohhhh,” he said, grinning.
As he set about his task, I congratulated myself on my small stroke of genius. My phone had a camera, too, but again that would have bumped into the problem of how I had gotten to the body in the first place. But that wasn’t an issue if Paul/Powell, a sort-of employee of the county, sent me the photos as a kind of whistleblower. With Brodie’s blessing, I could use them to anchor an explosive story about a police cover-up, with my angry family—and publicity-hungry minister—providing me all the needed outrage.
He sent the pictures one at a time, which meant the first was buzzing into my phone even as he was still taking the subsequent ones. They weren’t great quality, but they didn’t need to be. It’s not like we were going to run photos of a dead cop’s wrists in a family newspaper. We just needed to have them for verification.
Much to Paul/Powell’s dismay and Kira’s relief, I announced it was time to close up this little shop of horrors and head on home. We followed the same path out as we had going in, making a quick—and, hopefully, unobserved—dash across the parking lot toward the Malibu.
We rode back in silence, each of us with his own thoughts, and by the time I dropped off Paul/Powell at his loft/lair, Kira had fallen asleep in the front seat. Waking her and making her drive—still somewhat tipsy—back to Jersey City, where she lived, was out of the question. Then again, driving her there myself didn’t seem like much of an option, either.
So I made the executive decision to take her back to my tidy two-bedroom home in scenic Bloomfield. If you’ve seen The Sopranos, then you’ve seen a certain depiction of Bloomfield—or at least what is represented as being Bloomfield—on your television screen. And there are certainly parts of town that are like that: a little urban, a little gritty, very Italian.
But there are also nice, leafy little neighborhoods, and my house—nestled in one of those neighborhoods—was a welcome sight when I pulled into the driveway. Kira didn’t move when I turned off the car, so I went around to her side, unbuckled her belt, and lifted up all ninety-eight pounds of her. Having a girlfriend who is roughly half my weight has its advantages, especially when my beer muscles, courtesy of the absinthe, hadn’t quite worn off.
She began stirring as I brought her into the house, smiling and pulling herself closer to me, enough that I could tell she at least knew where she was and who she was with. I brought her upstairs to my room and lowered her gently on top of my bed. Deadline, who was in his usual spot—sprawled in the precise, geometric middle of my comforter—hopped down and meowed indignantly at being disturbed, finishing his protest by walking out of the room.
I was enough of a gentleman that I was going to leave Kira there and spend the night on the couch when she murmured, “Aren’t you going to help me get out of my clothes?”
I decided that would be gentlemanly, too.
* * *
The next morning, the Kipps story was stripped across the top of A1. We didn’t have a picture of the press conference—because we hadn’t been invited—so the only photo that ran was a canned headshot of Reverend Alvin LeRioux on an inside page. But that did little to diminish the impact of the story. We had gone big with it, which—along with the television news t
reatment of it the night before—would mean all the radio stations would continue to stoke it this morning.
Which meant, because media tended to feed on itself, Brodie would be hungry for a follow-up. And while ordinarily that might cause me some angst as I worked through my Frosted Flakes, Tony the Tiger and I were feeling pretty relaxed. If all went well, I had all the follow-up I needed stored on my cell phone.
Kira had woken up with me and was walking around my kitchen in one of my T-shirts—and nothing else—which soon led to a demonstration of the sturdiness of my couch. But, eventually, the fun and games had to end. I showered, did my blind closet grab, and came out with charcoal pants/blue shirt/yellow tie. See? Works every time.
After making sure Deadline had enough food to sustain a rigorous day of napping, I drove us to the office. Kira, who didn’t have to be at work until one o’clock, had plenty of time to head home and replenish herself for the day, maybe even take a nap.
But there was no rest for the wicked reporter. If the day was to end successfully—with me as the heroic journalist who had just delivered the big scoop—a number of things had to go my way. The first, and perhaps most important, was convincing the higher powers to let me use my (slightly ill-gotten) photos.
It is perhaps assumed, thanks to some of the less scrupulous practitioners out there, that newspapers simply run anything they can get their hands on. That is far from the case. Readers would be stunned if they knew the stuff we had that never made it into print—bombshells that we leave unexploded simply because we don’t think it’s responsible to detonate them. We’re especially cautious when it comes to unnamed sources. Anytime I use one, I need to have it okayed by multiple editors. And they’re cautious when it comes to giving that permission. Anyone who’d like to understand why can Google “Janet Cooke Washington Post.”
As such, I knew having these pictures and being able to base a story on them were two separate issues. Paul/Powell hadn’t been savvy enough—or sober enough—to tell me not to use his name. But I knew the kid would get fired faster than a bullet if I put his name in the paper. Hence, I needed clearance to use him unnamed.
I went straight upstairs to the newsroom, got the pictures off my cell phone, blew them up the best I could and made printouts. Satisfied they would do the job, I took them into Tina Thompson’s office. I tapped on the frame to her door but hadn’t yet settled my butt into one of the two chairs in front of her desk when I was greeted with: “Uh-oh, Mickey and Minnie got busy last night!”
I thought about telling her we had actually gotten busy this morning, too, but instead took the high road: “I do not feel it necessary to dignify these spurious accusations with a response.”
“You don’t need to. I saw Minnie driving out of the parking garage wearing yesterday’s clothes, singing, ‘It’s a small world after all.’”
“Funny, last night she was singing the Hallelujah Chorus,” I said. “But I didn’t come to talk music with you. Check these out.”
I slid the photos at her. She spread them out, flinched when she saw the subject matter, then drew in for a closer look.
“What … what are these exactly?”
“Those are postmortem photos of Darius Kipps’s arms and legs, taken late last night in the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office. I know the quality isn’t superior, but let me help you out: they’re rope burns. Someone tied Detective Kipps to a chair shortly before he made his exit from this world.”
“Tied him to a chair? Holy crap. Do the police know about this?”
“I don’t know how they couldn’t know. Presumably, they saw the same dead Darius Kipps that I did.”
“But if that’s the case, how could they say he—” Tina began, then it dawned on her. “Holy crap.”
“Yeah, that about sums things up.”
“And if Kipps didn’t kill himself, then—”
“Who did?” I completed her sentence. “I really don’t have a clue. I figured I’d get this story in the paper before I worried about the rest of it.”
“Do we … how did you … hang on, I’m calling Brodie,” she said, picking up her phone and tapping four numbers. She waited for what sounded like two rings, then said: “Hey, it’s Tina. Carter Ross has something you’re going to want to see,” she began, then told him about the photos. She finished with, “We’ll be right down.”
“I’ll save you having to repeat yourself in explaining how you got this stuff,” she said, and before I could slow her down, she was already out from behind her desk and on the way to see our executive editor.
Harold Brodie had inhabited the corner office in our newsroom so long there weren’t many people around, besides perhaps Buster Hays, who remembered otherwise. He was a legend in the state of New Jersey and in the newspaper industry generally, a much-beloved patriarch.
In some ways, it was hard to take Brodie too seriously. He was now somewhere beyond seventy and he had this pleasant, grandfatherly manner about him, like he was going to offer you the maraschino cherry from his manhattan any moment. His high-pitched voice had gone raspy, as tends to happen to men of that age, and his wispy gray eyebrows were long enough to need braiding. A small man to begin with, he was now entering into the advanced stages of geriatric shrivel, such that I expected him to disappear altogether one of these years.
Still, for all that, something about Brodie scared the crap out of me. Hays had told me stories about him as a young editor that made my toes curl. And I had enough of my own experiences with his non-mellow side to know that he had the capacity to turn himself into a windshield—and me into a bug—at any time.
In truth, I had hoped that I could tell Tina the real story and then let her figure out what to tell Brodie. It wasn’t so much we wanted to lie to the old man. It’s just sometimes things needed to be, well, sanitized. Wasn’t that what direct-line editors were supposed to do for you?
But there would be no time to disinfect anything now. He was going to get the whole, dirty, absinthe-swilling truth.
Brodie was playing classical music, as was often the case, but turned it down when we entered. Tina didn’t even bother sitting down before handing him the photos. As we settled into the chairs in front of him, Brodie took his time studying the pictures, shuffling back and forth between them.
“So,” he said, in his old man falsetto. “How did we come into possession of these?”
* * *
Brodie had directed the question at Tina, not even looking at me. Brodie is big into chain of command, to the point you’d think he had a military background. On most matters, he preferred talking to the editors who reported to him, not the lowly reporters. It wasn’t unusual for Brodie to discuss things with his editor as if the reporter wasn’t even in the room. I think that’s part of the reason Brodie scared me: I almost never talked to the man.
“I actually haven’t heard the story myself yet,” Tina said, turning to me.
Brodie followed her gaze. Showtime. I cleared my throat and said, “They were sent to me by an intern in the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office.”
“Not for attribution, I assume?”
“Correct,” I said.
“And what is this person’s name?”
Another thing reporters owed to the legacy of Janet Cooke: editors insisted on knowing the identity of the unnamed source. They were then bound by the same ethics as reporters not to reveal it. Of course, I didn’t even know my source’s last name. I’m sure Kira did. But it was too late to ask her. So I just said, “Paul Powell.”
Whatever. We could sort it out later.
“And what do we think motivated Mr. Powell in sending this to us?” Brodie asked.
A lot of alcohol, I almost said. But that wasn’t the answer he was looking for. Brodie just wanted to know whether Paul/Powell had some kind of axe to grind, which was always something we had to take into account when using unnamed sources.
“Well, he’s a student, so I don’t think he has any ulterior motive,”
I said. “He struck me as a kid who’s just trying to do the right thing.”
And besides, he had drunk enough absinthe to stone a horse.
“How do you know him?”
“Met him at a party last night. We got to talking. One thing led to another. He’s a little bit of an odd duck—if you met him and saw his tattoos, you’d understand—but all these kids have tattoos these days. There’s nothing he said or did that made me concerned about him. I think he was acting in good conscience.”
“I see,” Brodie said, his eyes again scanning the photos. “And how do we know for sure this is Darius Kipps?”
Here goes: “Because I saw it with my own eyes. I was with Paul late last night when he took these pictures.”
Brodie raised his scraggly eyebrows but kept his mouth closed. It was Tina who blurted out, “You were what?!?”
“I was with him,” I repeated.
“Carter, you can’t go breaking into the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office!” Tina moaned. “Jesus, why are you wasting our time with this? You know we can’t use these. You better hope…”
“Hold on, hold on,” I said. “We didn’t break in. Paul is an employee. He told me he had a key and offered to take me in for a little show and tell. Look, I know it’s a little shady, but we’re not teaching Sunday School here. We’re putting out a newspaper.”
I decided to skip the backstory of how he had acquired the key. Tina and Brodie didn’t need to be bogged down in such petty details. The fact is, while we were strictly concerned that our staff members didn’t break the law in their reporting of a story, we were somewhat less concerned about that where our sources were involved.
“Okay, okay, I know,” Tina said defensively. “I’m just trying to make sure our ass is covered here.”
“There’s no need to mention in print that I was there, obviously,” I said. “We can just say the photos came from a county employee who didn’t want to be named for fear of reprisal and that the photos have been independently verified as being authentic. All of which is true.”