The Player

by Brad Parks

  “Among other things it will unbalance.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to make the best of it,” she said, as if she had just been informed the daffodils in one of the flower arrangements were being replaced by tulips.

  “No, Mom, you’ll just have to call Tina and tell her there’s been a terrible mistake and you have to trim the guest list.”

  I could hear Mom recoiling. “Oh, honey, no! Absolutely not. That would be tacky beyond tacky. I just couldn’t…”—she was interrupted by the click of her call-waiting—“Oh, that’s the caterer! I have to go.”

  Then she hung up. I stuffed my phone into my pocket, then buried my face in my hands, sure that things couldn’t get much worse. Then I looked up and realized I wasn’t alone.

  Buster Hays was sucking down the remains of a cigarette, a malicious grin on his face.

  “You heard all of that, didn’t you,” I said.

  The grin spread a little wider. “Lucky for you, my silence can be bought.”

  “What’s the price?” I said, trying to be cagey, but knowing I was basically at his mercy.

  “I got an All-Slop shift tomorrow night that could have your name on it,” Buster said.

  All-Slop was our cute name for what was formally known as the NonStop News Desk—the division within the newsroom whose job it was to feed the Web site, twenty-four hours a day. We called it the All-Slop because that’s roughly what we shoveled into it. There were a few reporters dedicated exclusively to the All-Slop, but the rest of us were forced to pick up the slack on a rotating basis. It amounted to about one shift a month. I am still waiting to hear where I can apply to get that time back at the end of my life.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll take your All-Slop.”

  He grinned. I suspect if he had one, he would have lit a victory cigar.

  * * *

  Waiting for me upon arrival back at my desk was an e-mail from wimperiale@imperialeandtrautwig.com. The subject was “Civil suit.” The message read:

  MR. ROSS,

  PER OUR DISCUSSION, THE ENCLOSED WAS BEEN FILED TO ESSEX COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT AT 4:56 P.M. TODAY.

  SINCERELY,

  WILLARD R. IMPERIALE, ESQ.

  IMPERIALE & TRAUTWIG

  ONE NEWARK CENTER

  NEWARK, NJ 07102

  I opened the document to find one of the most crowded captions I had ever seen. There were a total of twenty-eight plaintiffs, plus “John and Jane Does, 1-100.” The defendants included McAlister Properties, the city of Newark, the state of New Jersey, the New Jersey State Department of Environmental Protection, the federal Environmental Protection Agency, a few corporations I had never heard of, and, strangely enough, K&J Manufacturing, good old Quint’s family business. I had thought it was defunct. Maybe Will Imperiale had discovered it still had assets that could be attacked.

  The document was 156 pages long, and there was no way I’d be able to read the entire thing and have my story filed by seven. So I skimmed to the end. It did not leave me terribly impressed with Imperiale’s lawyerly skills. As a reporter, I had read a lot of civil complaints, enough that I had a decent sense of which ones were well-grounded in law and fact and which were long shots.

  This one fell more to the Hail Mary side of things. Imperiale obviously still had a lot of work to do. Nevertheless, I grabbed some pull quotes about the gross negligence of the defendants that had led directly to the illnesses of the plaintiffs, and started cobbling together a story.

  I was just getting into the flow of it when I heard a sound behind me that made my butt muscles clench. It was a pocket full of spare change being rattled around.

  Which meant it could only be one person: Harold Brodie. The Eagle-Examiner’s executive editor almost never left his office, but when he did, he was a notorious change jangler. He always seemed to have a pocket full of the stuff—quarters and nickels to make the lower sounds, pennies and dimes for the higher registers—and it was a favorite strategy of his to walk up behind you and give it good shake so you knew he was there. Brodie had made many a tuchus tighten that way through the years.

  “Hello, Carter, my boy,” he said in a voice that was thin and high and belied the extent to which I feared the man behind it. I don’t know why a stooped, slender seventy-year-old with overgrown eyebrows and a weak bladder intimidated me so much, but to me Brodie was the equivalent of a beefy, three-hundred-pound biker with a temper. I just didn’t want to provoke him.

  “Good afternoon,” I said. I deliberately never address Brodie by name, because while I didn’t want to call him “Mr. Brodie”—it seemed too obsequious—I also didn’t have the testicular presence to call him “Harold” or “Hal.”

  “You did a fine job on the McAlister story,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “And I understand we have a follow cooking?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said and didn’t elaborate. Long experience had taught me that the less I said around Brodie, the better.

  “Have you spoken with Barry McAlister yet?”

  “I did this morning, as a matter of fact.”

  “How was he?”

  “Pretty broken up, as you might imagine. I didn’t get much out of him. He was also a little drunk, to be honest.”

  “Ah, yes, Barry always did like the bottle,” Brodie said.

  “You know him?”

  “He’s an old friend. I was a young reporter assigned to Newark cops when I met him. Or maybe I should say he met me. I was working a story in the ghetto when a group of punks tried to mug me in front of one of his buildings,” Brodie said; then, oddly, he started chuckling. “Barry McAlister came charging out of that building with a double-barrel shotgun, fired one shot in the air, and told them he’d put the other shot in one of their asses if they didn’t clear off.”

  Brodie chuckled again and said, “He told them they could mug all the people they wanted, but they damn sure weren’t going to do it in front of his building. I’ll tell you, boy, he sure got me out of the soup.”

  “Sounds like it,” I said, now understanding Brodie’s interest in this story. McAlister had mentioned he had “some history” with people at the Eagle-Examiner. I hadn’t realized the history was with our top guy.

  “After that, I’d see him from time to time. He was one of those sources who you might not be able to quote, but who always knew the score. I’d buy him a drink or two, just to listen to him talk. A lot of the landlords remaining in the neighborhood were shysters, there to wring whatever money they could from their crumbling buildings without giving anything back. Barry McAlister wasn’t like that. He cared for his buildings and the people inside them.” Brodie shook his head. “It’s a shame what happened with him and Elizabeth. He was never really the same after that. She took something from him and I’m not sure he ever got it back.”

  Brodie was on memory lane now, a side of him I had never really seen before. He had been the top editor at the Eagle-Examiner for a quarter century, and it was easy to think he had come out of the womb that way. But Brodie had a past like everyone else.

  “I remember Vaughn when he was just a little boy,” Brodie continued. “He was a smart little fella, just like his father. This whole thing is terrible. Terrible. Any ideas who would do such a thing?”

  I paused, because I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to say, under the theory of The Less Your Editor Knows, The Better. But he seemed to have a personal interest, so …

  “Well, he seems to have a girlfriend who might not be terribly pleased with him,” I said. “And I talked to a not-for-attribution source who said he saw two white guys get out of a dark sedan and dump Vaughn’s body on the McAlister Arms construction site. They made it sound like a professional hit.”

  “Were you planning on putting that in the newspaper?”

  “Not with the level of sourcing I have right now,” I said. “But it’s definitely something to keep in mind.”

  Brodie closed his eyes. It was something he always did when he was thin
king deeply, never minding that it was, frankly, a bit unsettling. He stayed in this contemplative pose for a long moment, then opened his eyes.

  “Well, keep on it, my boy,” Brodie said, giving his change one last jingle before he departed.

  Will Imperiale knew how other lawyers scoffed at him. He heard their catty little comments at bar association events—cheap shots about his ads in the Yellow Pages or his billboards. He knew the disdain they had for him.

  He also knew most of them couldn’t have hacked it in his line of work. Say what you will about personal injury lawyers, but they worked for a living. And hard. They didn’t have regular clients with recurring legal work. They couldn’t bill by the hour, knowing they’d get paid no matter what the result. They couldn’t pad accounts to help make up for a lean month.

  All a personal injury lawyer had was his current caseload. If it was heavy with winners, he was going to prosper. If it was light or had too many losers in it, his overhead—all those paralegals and assistants on the payroll, all the money for office space and advertising—would eat him alive.

  As such, good new cases were like air for Will Imperiale. He needed them to survive.

  Yeah, sometimes they came at him easy. Someone saw one of the ads and walked in with a good case. Former clients referred their cousins, girlfriends, or neighbors.

  But he had learned there were other ways to get them, too.

  He had emergency-room nurses on retainer at several of the local hospitals and offered them a bounty for each case they tipped him off about. He had a network of ambulance drivers with the same kind of arrangement. He was a major supporter of several of the largest police charities and he made it clear to them what would earn future donations.

  Sleazy? Perhaps. Expensive? Sure. Worth it? Absolutely.

  That’s what made the McAlister case such a pleasure. It came at him unsolicited. One day, a man he didn’t know simply made an appointment. And he refused to meet with one of the paralegals who normally did the intake work. Ordinarily, Will Imperiale wouldn’t waste his time with those initial meetings. Too many of them were sob stories without a decent claim. But the guy insisted he meet with The Man himself, and Imperiale was intrigued enough to humor him.

  He was glad he did. The case was an opportunistic lawyer’s dream: lots of sick people with heavy medical bills; lots of significant injuries, with very legitimate pain and suffering attached to them; and a defendant with deep pockets. Plus, the victims were poor. That always helped if it went to a jury.

  Plus, poor people asked fewer questions.

  The man wanted a kickback, of course. They all wanted kickbacks. And this guy was looking for a big one, much larger than Imperiale would normally even consider.

  But this man was promising to serve up McAlister Properties on a silver platter. It would be guaranteed money. Plus, the guy was going to provide Imperiale enough dirt on McAlister—quite literally—that Imperiale stood a good chance of being able to go after some of the other defendants.

  After all, the city of Newark had its fingers in this thing. So did the state of New Jersey. The company that had once owned the land—K&J Manufacturing—was surely still good for something. Even the Environmental Protection Agency could be liable.

  It was a can’t-miss case. The kickback would be worth it. There would still be lots left over for Willard Imperiale, Esq.

  CHAPTER 5

  There is a certain joy to being a newspaper reporter on deadline that almost makes me sorry for other types of writers. I always chuckle when novelists say they’re “on deadline” and you ask them what the deadline is and they say, “October.” In my world, October is not a deadline. It’s a month.

  In the magazine business, it’s no better. They’ll say they’re “on deadline” because they’ve been told they must deliver copy in “mid-October” or “ideally by October 15, if at all possible.” And, again, that’s not a deadline. That’s a suggestion.

  No, a real deadline is something that cannot be measured in months or days. It can be measured only in hours or, better yet, minutes.

  And missing it comes with consequences. The word “deadline” originally came to us from the penal system. Once upon a time, a deadline referred to an actual line on prison grounds that an inmate could not cross, or else he’d be shot dead. The newspaper business long ago took this concept and ran with it, with only slightly less drastic penalties for offenders.

  When you have a deadline like that—a real deadline, a deadline with fangs—it takes on its own necessary momentum. There’s no time for writer’s block, to grope around for that perfect phrase or to wait for some mythical muse to inspire you. You just have to write. What comes out isn’t necessarily going to be poetry. It might be downright awful. But it comes out all the same—because the alternative is to get fired. As a writer, knowing that can be very freeing.

  Hence, my Vaughn McAlister follow-up story was not something I had planned on submitting to the annual New Jersey Press Association Awards. But I filed it at 6:58—with a whole two minutes to spare—so I marked it in the win column and moved on.

  I was just starting to think about Kira and Tina and the baby—and the mess my imprudence had created—when my phone rang.

  The caller ID told me it was Pigeon, whom I had neither seen nor heard from in several hours. The last I knew, she had been hard at work with Tee’s list of names and phone numbers of construction workers. But it suddenly occurred to me she hadn’t reported back with anything. I answered with a casual, “Hey, where ya been?”

  My phone’s earpiece broadcast a cacophony of background noise. It sounded human, but it was all indistinct.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Hey. You Carter?”

  The person asking this question was not Pigeon. His voice was about two octaves too low. It also lacked the elocution and precise diction I had come to expect of the J. P. Stevens High valedictorian.

  “Yes, this is Carter. Who’s this?”

  He didn’t answer that question, just said, “You got to come get your girl.”

  “My girl?”

  “Yeah, I told her she had a bit much and was there someone I could call. She handed me her phone and said, ‘Call Carter.’ She says her name is, I don’t know, Mischa or something.”

  “Neesha?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “Uh, okay, where is she?”

  “She at Pop’s. You know where Pop’s is at?”

  I did know Pop’s. It was on Springfield Avenue and it was one of the seediest dive bars in Newark—a distinction that was not easily earned in a city where many of the drinking establishments had attained quite a low position. It was the kind of place where the proprietor had long ago resorted to serving drinks in plastic cups and beer in plastic bottles, because it made the bar fights safer and easier to clean up after.

  What I didn’t know was how Pigeon had gotten there.

  “Yeah, I know where Pop’s is,” I said, already standing up and heading to the elevator.

  “Good. You might want to come fast,” he said.

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  There was no answer. Nor was there any more noise coming from the phone. Mr. Deep Voice had ended the call. So I scrambled out to the parking garage, fired up the Malibu, and made good time out to Pop’s, which was only three turns and five minutes from the office. I parked a block down—there were no spots immediately outside the bar—and as I approached, I heard a lot of loud, excited, male voices. There was obviously some kind of disturbance going on inside.

  Then I walked through the front door and saw why: Pigeon was dancing on top of the bar.

  Someone had found “Brick House” on Pop’s ancient jukebox, and Pigeon was thrusting her body in near-rhythm to the Commodores’ classic. That Pigeon’s booty was perhaps not as generous as was often preferred in that ZIP code bothered none of the patrons, because she had removed her bra and was waving it over her head like a lasso.

  This, natu
rally, was very popular with the twenty-or-so men who had gathered around the bar to encourage her. They were all black, most of them on the beefy side, and their sturdy boots and dirty jeans told me they were all employed in one blue-collar industry or another. They had finished a hard day’s work and now they were blowing off steam.

  One of them yelled, “Show your tits!”—most likely not for the first time—and Pigeon started playing with the hem of her sweater, lifting it just enough to show a flash of bare midriff, then lowering it.

  This brought a boisterous roar from her audience, which seemed only to embolden her. She pulled up the sweater a little farther, about halfway up her torso, then kept it there for a few beats of the music before letting it drop.

  The one guy who had said, “Show your tits!” kept repeating it, until soon the whole pack of them was chanting that bawdy instruction. Pigeon seemed to be of the mind to oblige them, because she brought up the edge of the sweater until it was just under her breasts and started dancing with it in that position, gyrating her hips clumsily, like some kind of intoxicated belly dancer.

  And that’s when I decided everyone had enjoyed enough of the show. I started shoving my way through the throng until I reached the front row, then called “Pigeon!” in a voice filled with rebuke.

  But she didn’t hear me. She just kept right on dancing and I feared we were mere seconds away from an entire bar full of men seeing more of Pigeon than her future arranged-marriage husband might appreciate. So I reached up, delicately grabbed the hem of her sweater, and pulled it down.

  This brought a chorus of angry boos from the mob. It momentarily occurred to me that interrupting the peep show, while good for Pigeon’s reputation, might end up being bad for my face. I wasn’t sure I could take on one of these guys, much less twenty of them, and they were making their unhappiness with me known.

  Then Pigeon solved the problem for me. She been already been knocked slightly off-balance by my grabbing her sweater. And she was probably not very steady to begin with, given the amount of liquid courage it had likely taken to get her up on that bar in the first place. So she began teetering to the left, then tottering to the right; then, in a desperate attempt at overcorrection, she ended up falling, lying full out on the bar.