The Good Cop

by Brad Parks

  Pastor Al actually squirmed in his seat. He did the face-wiping routine again. “You ask very challenging questions, young man,” he said. “I can see why your editors would consider you a good reporter.”

  And I can see you’re stalling me, Pastor Al, I thought. But, mindful I had to keep my inner wiseass on a leash, I just sat there with my notebook open and my mouth shut.

  “Have you ever heard of the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican?”

  “You’ll have to refresh my memory, Reverend. It’s been a long time since Sunday school.”

  “This comes to us from the Gospel of Saint Luke. Now, the Pharisees were very pious men, and they were much admired for their righteousness. The Publicans were the tax collectors, and I think we all know, no one likes the tax collector”—he threw in a pause because I guess this is where his congregation would usually share a chuckle. “Now, as the parable is told to us by Luke, these men enter the temple to pray. The Pharisee stands up and prays to God about his own virtue, telling God that he fasts and tithes, thanking God that he is not like the lowly tax collector. The Publican, now, the Publican, he stands at a distance. He dares not raise his head to God. And when it is his time to pray, he beats his breast and humbly asks God to have mercy on him, for he is a sinner.”

  Pastor Al paused to let his words have their impact. For all his flaws, he was a mesmerizing preacher.

  “Now, who do you think Jesus tells us is justified in the eyes of the Lord? Who is more favored by the Father?”

  “Uh,” I said, because I felt like it was a trick question.

  “The Publican!” he boomed. “The Publican is justified because he recognizes his unworthiness before God! Jesus teaches that ‘everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.’ So I am mindful of the Pharisee and the Publican as I admit to you I made a mistake in my handling of this matter.”

  “Mistake?” I said.

  “Yes. I believe they call it looking before you leap.”

  What, I wanted to say, because you didn’t know your parishioner was two-timing with the deceased’s best friend? But mindful of my plan to act somewhat dumb, I said, “How so?”

  “I’m afraid I fell back on some of my old instincts. In my days as a young pastor, I felt there was only one way to accomplish a goal, and that was to pursue it with straightforward tenacity and intensity—to make a lot of noise, in essence. It is only in my more senior years that I have come to realize there are many different ways to accomplish a goal, and sometimes they are quieter. The Lord hears a whispered prayer just as well as He hears one that is shouted.”

  And in my days as a young reporter, I might have fallen for a line of fiddle-faddle like that. But in my more senior years, I recognized the reverend was talking out his ass. And while in polite conversation we allow people to obfuscate like this all the time, I wasn’t going to let Pastor Al get away with it here.

  “I’m sorry, Reverend, but I don’t have a doctorate in religion”—and chances are neither do you, you fraud—“so you’re losing me a little bit. Let me keep it simple for a second: Did you call the attorney general this morning?”

  I thought maybe Pastor Al wasn’t going to give in so easily—that I was going to have to wade through more a few more miles of Confusion Creek to get to where I needed to go—but he just squirmed a little more and then, finally, said, “Yes, I did.”

  “And did you inform him you were dropping your call for an independent investigation into the death of Darius Kipps?”

  “Yes, I did,” he said, without squirming this time.

  “And why did you do that?”

  “I received information at the highest level that made me think differently about the matter.”

  It was the first semi-useful thing he said, and I was scribbling it in my notebook as I asked, “Did the attorney general give you that information?”

  “No.”

  “Then who, at the highest level, did?”

  “That is something I would rather not say,” Pastor Al replied. “I have to respect certain confidences in this matter. But what I heard satisfied my … curiosity in this matter, enough that I considered it closed.”

  “So what did you hear?”

  “I was asked not to divulge the details publicly, and I will honor that request.”

  “Okay. So you … you now trust in the conclusions reached by the Newark Police Department?”

  “I do.”

  “Because, you know, my paper has come across evidence that Detective Kipps’s death may not have been a suicide.”

  I told him about the photos. He paid careful attention but asked no questions. When I was done, he said, “Well, that sounds like something to leave to the authorities. I’m sure they will handle that according to their policies and procedures.”

  “Right,” I said, mostly just to stall so I could consider how to word my next question. It was time to start playing a little less dumb about the Mimi-Fusco affair. I doubted Pastor Al would get too explicit in his answer—it didn’t seem like his style—but I wanted to know if he knew. Maybe he could whip a biblical passage on me, something fearsome from the Old Testament about torturing fornicators.

  The question came out as: “Was there anything in Mimi’s actions or in the actions of Detective Fusco that might have … influenced how you felt about this matter?”

  “Detective Fusco?” LeRioux boomed. “What would Detective Fusco have to do with this?”

  “Oh, you know him?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, he just seems to have taken a lot of interest in Mimi,” I said, hoping Pastor Al would catch my drift.

  He didn’t. “Are you saying Detective Fusco is continuing to investigate this matter on his own?”

  Oh, he’s investigating a lot more than that, I thought.

  “I’m not sure what Detective Fusco is or isn’t doing,” I answered honestly. “But he sure seems to be providing Mimi with a great deal of … comfort.”

  It was, I decided, my last gambit. If he didn’t play into it this time, I was dropping it.

  “Well, that is a very Christian thing of him to do,” Pastor Al said. “I will have to make sure he is lauded for that in some way. Perhaps we can invite him to our Law Enforcement Recognition banquet next fall.”

  I looked at Pastor Al for any sign of falseness. But there was nothing on his drooping face except for loose jowls.

  He didn’t know about the affair. And I sure wasn’t going to be the one to tell him. For the time being, I didn’t want Mimi and Fusco knowing I was onto them. I couldn’t take the chance of informing Pastor Al and having him turn it into an opportunity to lecture Mimi about the seventh commandment.

  Why Pastor Al dropped his call for an independent investigation was once again a mystery to me. Maybe he really did learn something that made him buy into the official version. Or maybe what he learned was that someone “at the highest level” was making him an offer he couldn’t refuse, just to shut him up.

  Somewhere, I suspected, one of Pastor Al’s car washes might have a fleet of Newark City street sweepers in it.

  The myth of gun-running is that given the large numbers of illegal weapons found on city streets, the traffickers must be pushing product in huge quantities. The truth is that Red Dot Enterprises, like other criminal syndicates that dealt in guns, kept their quantities modest. A small number of guns was, quite simply, easier to hide.

  So there was no huge cache of weapons, no warehouse stockpiled with firearms. Their entire inventory, stashed here and there, was contained in a few duffel bags.

  That said, selling them was a nice, lucrative sideline—a great way to supplement other income.

  The economics of gun-running are really no different than any other prohibited product. The prohibition itself helps drive up the perceived value of the item because it means the demand cannot be met through the ordinary mechanisms of legitimate commerce. The prohibition also creates an imperfect ma
rketplace for the item, wherein information—about everything from supply to price—can be easily obscured.

  From there, Red Dot Enterprises relied on the simplest of all business principles: buy low, sell high.

  The guns that Red Dot Enterprises offered to their clients, those brand-name .22s and .38s that were so easily tucked into waistbands, typically retailed for somewhere between $299 and $329. Sure, you could get guns for less—Hi Point made a 9 mm that went for roughly $150—but Red Dot Enterprises didn’t bother with those. The margins were too low.

  Every once in a while, Red Dot Enterprises had a customer ask for something with a little more “stopping power,” as gun people liked to call it. Those requests were honored on an as-needed basis. Requests for automatic weapons were rejected. They were just too hard to find. Besides, they tended to attract a little too much attention.

  Mostly, Red Dot stuck with the low-caliber guns it could acquire easily. A typical shipment involved twenty guns for the standard $8,000—or $400 apiece. The associates at Red Dot Enterprises had a rule that they didn’t sell a new gun for less than $500, which guaranteed they’d made at least $2,000 per shipment. That more than compensated for the time and gas money.

  But, in truth, the new guns were only part of where the money was. New guns were great for luring in customers. They were a kind of status symbol in the hood—every corner punk wanted to be the guy with the new gun—and they had a certain practical value, because the owner could be reasonably assured a gun that came in a new box would function properly when it was absolutely needed.

  A big chunk of the money, though? That was in the used gun market. Old guns littered the hood like so much McDonald’s trash, getting used and reused many times. Red Dot Enterprises had devised a variety of ways to acquire old guns while spending virtually no money to do it. As a result, every used gun Red Dot Enterprises sold was nearly 100 percent profit. And Red Dot had devised a way to get a far better price than most of the other gun runners, who might sell a used gun for as little as $50 or rent one out for even less.

  So, essentially, Red Dot Enterprises had two types of customers. There were high-end buyers, who were looking for—and received—the high-end, new merchandise. And then there were the customers who came to Red Dot Enterprises for a new gun, balked at the price tag, and happily settled for used merchandise. Either way, there was money to be made.

  And for Red Dot Enterprises, the great thing about guns were: the more people have, the more other people feel they need one. It was a business model based on a fear that fed itself.

  CHAPTER 5

  With little more to be learned from Pastor Al—or at least little that didn’t involve a sermon—I soon excused myself, thanking him for the interview. I went back out on the street and, having departed God’s house, decided I could risk powering up my cell phone without incurring any unnecessary wrath.

  My phone told me I had two missed calls and two messages waiting. From looking at the numbers, I knew it was my two spokesmen. Flaks love it when they get a reporter’s voice mail. It allows them to dump their canned, one- or two-sentence statement and get away before you can ask difficult follow-up questions that require them to do more work. But at the same time, it allows them to ignore your return phone call because, hey, they called you back already! You got the statement! What are you griping about? Come on!

  In this case, the flaks were doing a neat little do-si-do. Hakeem Rogers was in full duck-and-cover mode, saying he had no comment because the matter had been referred to the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office.

  The Essex County Prosecutor’s Office spokesman, meanwhile, called to say that for the time being, he had nothing to add beyond what the Newark Police Department had already said; and that I couldn’t interview the medical examiner, on the grounds that it was an ongoing case.

  So, in other words, Newark was deferring to Essex County, which was deferring to Newark. It was overlapping governmental bureaucracy at its absolute finest. Each part could claim it was in the right, even while the whole was still very wrong. Meanwhile, someone was getting away with murder. And he was a cop, no less.

  It was enough to make me, at the very least, hungry. And since I still wasn’t keen for fried chicken, I went back to the office, parked, and sought some Pizza Therapy.

  On my way toward the pizzeria, I saw Tommy Hernandez on the opposite side of the street and heading in the same direction. Tommy is twenty-four, second-generation Cuban American, and gay as the day is long. I’m not sure his family knows about the last part—Tommy still lives with his parents, and his bedroom at home might as well be a closet, because he’s still in it—but the rest of the world doesn’t have a very tough time figuring it out. Tommy is trim, neat, slightly below average height, well above average in looks, and, at all times, perfectly accessorized.

  At least technically, Tommy is still an intern. His one-year assignment with us began well over a year ago and has developed into an interesting stalemate: the paper cannot afford to bump him up to full-time status, inasmuch as then he might actually start expecting raises, 401(k) matching, and other wild extravagances; at the same time, the paper couldn’t let him go because he was one of our best natural reporters and he covered Newark City Hall, one of our most important beats.

  So he had earned permanent, temporary status and, barring unforeseen changes—or Tommy coming to his senses and enrolling in business school—he might become the newspaper industry’s first fifty-year-old intern someday. Selfishly, I hoped he stuck around. He’s become one of my closest friends, not to mention a semiregular pizza partner.

  Such being the care, I crossed the street and said, “Hey, what’s a handsome young man like you doing for lunch?”

  “You know, if you really are going to convert to my side, you’re going to have to do something about those pants.”

  “What’s wrong with my pants?”

  “If I had to describe it in one word? Pleats. Pleats are what’s wrong with your pants. Pleats are what’s wrong with your entire world.”

  I grinned, just because that’s Tommy: my own, personal episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

  “So what have you been up to?” I asked.

  “Nothing half as interesting as what you’ve been up to, apparently. You got any kind of follow-up working?”

  As we continued to the pizzeria and ordered our slices, I told Tommy about my trip to the morgue, my time as a Peeping Tom, and all the various denials and contradictions I had heard along the way.

  Tommy listened thoughtfully and, at the end, said, “So why do you think the cops don’t want to take this thing on? Usually when it’s one of their own getting killed, they go all out.”

  “Yeah, except when it’s one of their own doing the killing,” I cracked. “But I don’t think that’s it. My guess is they really think it’s suicide, and they just want it to go away. You know how a lot of cop shops are when it comes to mental health issues. They deal with it like five-year-olds deal with cooties. I don’t think the thing with Fusco and Mimi is in their sights because they’re trying to keep the blinders on.”

  “Are you going to tell them about it?”

  “I hadn’t really thought about it yet. But … yeah, I guess I have to.”

  And I did. I’m a reporter, yes. But I’m also a citizen, which means I have the same civic duty to report information about a crime as anyone else. Depending on how things worked out, it could also result in my being taken off the story, for at least a half dozen reasons—not the least of which is I couldn’t very well cover a trial in which I was also testifying. But I suppose that might be unavoidable. Such is the price of virtue.

  “So is there anything a bored city hall reporter can do to get in on this?” Tommy asked.

  I pondered it for a second, then said, “That depends. Are you still friendly with that secretary in the council clerk’s office?”

  The secretary was a middle-aged Latina who was sweet on Tommy and, apparently, didn’t
have much of a Gaydar. Tommy winked in her direction a lot and cooed at her in Spanish so the other secretaries couldn’t understand what they were saying.

  “Yeah, what do you need?”

  “Keep an eye out for any new city contracts involving Redeemer Love Christian Church or Alvin LeRioux,” I said. “It would sort of help complete a certain picture for me.”

  “Redeemer Love Christian. That’s one of those churches that reads a lot of Leviticus—the whole man shall not lie with man thing, right?”

  “I believe so, yes.”

  “Okay,” Tommy said. “I’ll get right on it.”

  * * *

  Having revived myself through the miraculous combination of thin crust, tomato sauce, and mozzarella, I returned to the office, put my head down, and started doing some serious typing. It was two thirty, and since this story wasn’t going to be winning any awards—news like this required an unadorned, just-the-facts-ma’am approach—I vowed to be done no later than four thirty, so that the story could be posted online by five.

  Once upon a time, sitting on a scoop like this, I would have continued cautiously reporting for another few hours, maybe hectoring some more sources or trying to round it out by having an independent forensics expert comment on the pictures. That was back in the hoary days of the late nineties and early millennium, when a scoop was something you guarded jealously until it could be revealed, in its full glory, in the next day’s paper.

  At most, you would send a version of the story to the Associated Press around midnight—too late for the other papers to catch up but early enough so you could get credit for the scoop on the morning radio and television shows, which would be using that wonderful phrase “according to a story in the Newark Eagle-Examiner.”