by Brad Parks
“No. Never. I actually wanted to be one of his investors. I thought McAlister Arms had a lot of promise and I know he might have needed some financing help. But we hadn’t solidified anything. So why would I want to kill him when I stood to make a lot of money off him?”
“I don’t know, actually,” I said. “I’m told you two had some … meetings? And that maybe you did some favors for each other?”
“We did.”
“So maybe that arrangement stopped working out as well as had perhaps been promised. And maybe you decided he didn’t need to be around any longer because of it.”
He was shaking his head. “Not true.”
“Are you sure?” I said.
He chortled again. “You got a lot of balls. This kid has got a lot of balls, huh?”
Goon One and Goon Two followed suit and laughed. So did I. Though maybe mine was a little more nervous than theirs.
“Look, kid, I tell you I didn’t kill the guy, I didn’t kill the guy,” he said. “We had a business relationship, yeah. That’s it.”
“Did this business relationship involve Scott Colston?”
This time the chortle was more of a chuckle. “Ah, Scott Colston.”
“Does he … does he even exist?”
“Well, I’m sure I don’t know,” DeNunzio said, fairly winking at me with a tone that had gone appropriately sarcastic. “Because, of course, I have no association with Mr. Colston and know nothing about him. But let’s just say it’s possible that Mr. Colston is not very good at his job. And therefore he may have signed off on Vaughn’s remediation job a little prematurely. And if that’s the case, well, the state of New Jersey ought to take away Mr. Colston’s license.”
“Yeah, if it can find him.”
“I wish them all the luck in the world,” he said.
“Okay, so you may have introduced Vaughn to Scott Colston’s services. What did Vaughn do for you?”
“Nothing. He was one of my customers, actually.”
“Your customers?”
“Yeah. I own a security company. We have contracts all over New Jersey. One of them is with McAlister Properties. We offered Vaughn some highly competitive rates and he took advantage of them.”
My mind flashed to the last guy I had seen sitting at the front desk at McAlister Place—a guy who offered about as much security as a guard dog. A dead one.
Then I got it: Tommy had mentioned there had been a rash of break-ins at McAlister Properties buildings. Of course there had been. DeNunzio had probably been giving his goons free rein to steal anything they wanted in those buildings—which Vaughn allowed, as a way of payment for those so-called competitive rates, and as compensation for the so-called services of Scott Colston.
Mitch DeNunzio wasn’t going to confirm any of this for me. But he didn’t have to. I already knew. I also knew it meant it really was unlikely DeNunzio had ordered Vaughn or Barry killed. Why slaughter a golden goose like that?
“Okay, okay, I get it,” I said. “So if you didn’t kill Vaughn, who did?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t. I give you my word on that. All I can tell you is it wasn’t me.”
“Okay. Well. Thanks for … setting me straight, I guess.”
We had circled back around so that we were nearing my Malibu again. The Escalade was slowing down. My ride with the boss was coming to a far more gentle end than I had ever thought it would.
“No problem, kid,” he said. “And, hey, just so you know, I think that girl Vicki likes you. Cute girl. She kept talking about how maybe you’d go on a cruise with her. You want, maybe I could send you two on a cruise. Would you like that?”
“With all due respect, Mr. DeNunzio, no, thank you,” I said, then added, “Trust me when I say I have enough girl trouble right now.”
They had two more jobs to do. This was the second-to-last. And, in truth, they were a little disappointed. This employer had been awfully good to them, paying promptly, generously, and, of course, in cash. The employer seemed to be rolling in it.
The only real difficulty in the job is that they’d probably have to do it during the daytime, because it had to happen when the homeowner wasn’t there. And time was getting tight. That’s what their employer had told them.
So the three of them—two thick guys and a thin guy—rented a silver Honda Odyssey. “The silver bullet,” one of them called it, jokingly. A soccer-mom car. Suburban camouflage. Perfect for a place like Florham Park. Perfect for this job, in particular.
They stole plates off a car at a local Kings supermarket and swapped them out, just in case, then parked outside the target home shortly after sunrise.
Then they waited.
All around them, the neighborhood came to life. The commuters left first. The high school kids went next. The men kept their eyes on the target house. Their employer told them there would be a woman and a kid inside—and maybe an old lady. Or maybe not.
They watched. They saw the woman. They saw the kid. There was no old lady. That was good. One less person to worry about.
A little before eight o’clock, the kid walked down the driveway and to the end of the block, where he caught a bus to school. He never once glanced at the Honda.
The three men kept waiting. An hour passed. Two. Their employer had said the lady probably wouldn’t go to work, but she would definitely leave at some point.
Finally, after a few more hours, the automatic garage door opened and a minivan—noncoincidentally, a Honda Odyssey with tinted windows—backed out. It turned around at the top of the driveway and went out front-first. The woman was driving. She didn’t look at them.
They waited until the minivan disappeared around the corner, then made their move. There was no time to waste. They pulled into the driveway and the thin guy hopped out. He went around to a back door and quickly jimmied the lock.
There was a security system—they had been warned about that—but it was an inexpensive model that was easily defeated. The door had two pressure-activated sensors, one on top and one on bottom. The thin guy carefully stuck Silly Putty over them so they remained depressed the entire time. He slipped inside the house and disabled it, using a device designed to trick the central monitoring computer into thinking the system was still on.
Then he hustled down to the garage and pressed the opener. The Odyssey slid inside. The thin guy closed the door behind it. From the perspective of anyone passing outside, there was absolutely nothing unusual going on at Marcia Fenstermacher’s house that morning.
Once inside, they worked quickly. They were there to steal only one thing, but, of course, they knew they were going to have to turn the place inside out to find it. So they had to make it look like they were there to steal everything.
They took the kind of things a gang of home invaders—or a couple of fiending hopheads who needed money for drugs—might take, quickly throwing it all into the Honda Odyssey. All the way, they kept an eye out for the one thing they had come for.
After about five minutes, one of the thick guys found it. It was in a drawer in the office.
“Got it,” he announced, loudly enough his partners could hear it.
“Great,” said the thin guy. “Let’s spend three more minutes trashing the place, then get the hell out of here.”
CHAPTER 8
During my new-employee orientation many years earlier, I had been taken on a tour of the plant where the Newark Eagle-Examiner was printed. For a young reporter who had just come from a much smaller daily in Pennsylvania, the Eagle-Examiner’s operation was awe-inspiring, from the soaring towers used to print the color sections, to the rolls of newsprint so massive they required a forklift to move them, to the stacks of ink barrels, each one a latent source of literally millions of printed words. Newspaper economics were better back then, and the plant was cranking out something like 450,000 copies a day, employing hundreds of pressmen and a fleet trucks to carry it all.
Seeing all the work it took to put my stories into prin
t was both powerful and sobering, and I have long endeavored to compose articles equal to that effort. I’ll never forget the chill I felt as I was ceremoniously handed a fresh, slightly damp copy of that day’s edition.
Then, at the end of the tour, I was taken back outside through the employee break room, where I met Inky the Parrot, the pressmen’s mascot. And when I looked down, I got a different kind of reminder of the newspaper’s place in many people’s lives: there, lining Inky’s cage, catching his compositions, was the preceding day’s edition.
It was more with Inky in mind that I wrote my story on the protest. I finished by two o’clock, at which point my lousy night’s sleep was beginning to wear on me. After finessing a fresh Coke Zero from the vending machine, I returned to my desk, feeling like a new man. I was still curious about this alleged settlement that Vaughn had agreed to before his untimely demise. And, of course, I couldn’t exactly ask him about it.
But I could ask his lawyer. I just had to cajole my computer’s winches and pulleys into letting me search the paper’s archives and figure out who that attorney was. After tripping through a few stories that led nowhere, I found a caption that went with a photo we had run of a ribbon-cutting at McAlister Place a few years earlier. I couldn’t see the photo in our archives—just the text—but it told me all I needed to know. Pictured next to Vaughn McAlister was Kevin Ryan of McWhorter & French.
And that was a break for me. McWhorter & French was Newark’s biggest—and probably best—law firm. And Kevin Ryan, the partner who headed its real estate division, was a guy I knew. Newark was a big city, but like a lot of big cities, its tall buildings were just a mask for the small town that lurked underneath. And in small-town Newark, Kevin Ryan was someone I bumped into all the time, at cocktail parties, at lectures, at charity functions.
As such, when I called his office, his secretary put me through.
“Hey, Carter, how’re you doing, buddy?”
Kevin Ryan was an affable sort of guy who might have overused the word “buddy.” We were more acquaintances than buddies. But I suppose there are worse words to overuse.
“Hey, I’m good,” I said. “How are you?”
“I’ve been better, to be honest. I’m still pretty shaken up about this whole Vaughn thing. Then Barry, too. And to hear the fire was arson. It’s … it’s unbelievable. I just don’t know what’s going on.”
“Me neither,” I said.
“Vaughn was … He was a gem of a guy. He was one of my best friends. This has been … This has been hard.”
“I didn’t realize you guys were that close.”
“We really started out together,” he said. “I was a young associate at McWhorter when Vaughn was getting out from under his old man’s wing and starting to do his own thing. I did all his early deals for him. And it was sort of like as he grew, I grew with him. And you know what it’s like when you’re young. You work together a lot—long hours, that sort of thing. Then you start socializing together. I was there when he met his first wife. I was an usher at his wedding. It was … I mean, we started as a business relationship. But then it became more than that. I’m not sure I realized it until he died, but Vaughn was really one of my best … I’m sorry, I’m rambling. Is this what you’re calling for? You working on some kind of appreciation piece or something?”
“Not … exactly. I am definitely working on a story about Vaughn. But it’s less an appreciation and more an investigation at this point.”
“Okay, right. Sure. Sorry. How can I help?”
“Well, I’m curious about this lawsuit against him. The one I wrote about.”
“The one filed by that sleazebag Imperiale? I haven’t seen it yet. But I’m sure it’s crap. A guy like that would sue his own grandmother for giving him lukewarm chicken soup.”
“Yeah, so why would Vaughn agree to settle it?”
There was no delay in Ryan’s answer: “What? Vaughn wouldn’t have done anything like that.”
“Then why is Will Imperiale is going around signing up plaintiffs by telling them he’s already gotten McAlister Properties to settle? He’s been promising some of them they’ll get fifty, a hundred grand a pop.”
“I don’t know. I mean, with a guy like that, who the hell knows what he says and why? I wouldn’t put it past him to lie, knowing that the bigger his class, the more he can get for their pain and suffering. But I can tell you, unequivocally, there is absolutely no way Vaughn agreed to any settlements.”
“Are you sure? Could Vaughn have settled the thing without telling you? I mean, you do real estate law. Maybe he consulted an attorney who defends personal injury stuff who told him that it was in his best interests to make the thing go away?”
“No,” Ryan said quickly. “I just—I mean, that would be … I wasn’t kidding when I said Vaughn and I were best friends. We talked almost every day. You want to tell me he wouldn’t have at least mentioned that he had been sued? And that he was thinking about negotiating a settlement? Even if he didn’t want me to do the negotiation, which is reasonable given my lack of expertise in that area, I’m sure he would have asked me to recommend an attorney. Or at least he would have told me who he picked—whether it was someone here or at another firm. I just can’t tell you enough: there is no settlement.”
“Okay, I get it,” I said, more confused than ever, particularly when it came to the motives and actions of one Willard R. Imperiale, Esq.
Was it possible he’d had something to do with the early demise of the McAlister boys? Had he forced them into a settlement and killed them before they could change their minds? That hardly made sense. Anyone who felt like challenging that deal later would easily win.
And yet, who else would profit from their death? Especially given that he had weaseled his way into getting 50 percent of the payout. Speaking of which:
“Got another question for you,” I said. “I saw the agreement Imperiale had his clients sign. He’s got them giving up fifty percent of whatever he’s able to recoup. I had never heard of that before. Is that legal?”
“Good grief. That guy is unbelievable,” Ryan said, and I heard what sounded like a hand slamming on a desk. “Okay. Sorry. You asked whether it was legal. The answer is: yes. Obviously, the standard is one-third. And I think it’s pretty unethical to go for half under the circumstances. But the law says attorneys are entitled to ‘reasonable’ fees and the courts have determined that up to fifty percent is reasonable in certain circumstances.”
“So there’s no recourse for his clients when they realize they’ve been screwed?”
“Not really,” Ryan said. “If he went for more than half, you could get him disbarred. But as long as he doesn’t go for more than that, he can make an argument that he was taking a significant risk with a case this complex and that the higher percentage was merited. And unfortunately he could find case law to back him up.”
“Okay, just wondering,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me,” he said. “Just nail the guy who did this to Vaughn, huh, buddy?”
* * *
There wasn’t much more Kevin Ryan was willing to tell me—he couldn’t exactly discuss McAlister Properties’ financial difficulties when he was still the company’s lawyer—so we ended the call.
As I stood up and stretched my legs, I saw Tommy and Pigeon sitting at their desks, looking suspiciously unproductive. It’s never good to give interns idle time, so I decided to huddle them and see what they had been able to learn. I went and collected Pigeon, then presented myself at Tommy’s desk.
“Hey, we’re having a team meeting,” I said.
Tommy looked up at me. “My god, what’s the team name? The Newark Raccoons? Didn’t you sleep last night?”
“Not enough,” I confirmed.
“That will take its toll on your skin, you know. That’s something you need to consider. Especially at your age.”
“At my age? I’m thirty-two.”
“Brittany Murphy died when she was
thirty-two,” Tommy informed me. “Something you should think about.”
“I feel pretty good about my chances of outliving Brittany Murphy.”
He just shook his head. “I’m sure she thought the same thing before, you know…” He made a strangling sound.
“No, I’m pretty confident Brittany Murphy didn’t think she could outlive Brittany Murphy.”
Tommy got a far-off look, then said, “Wow. I never thought of it that way. That’s deep.”
Missing Tommy’s mordant wit, Pigeon was looking at us like she couldn’t believe she was wasting a Yale education hanging out with people like us.
“Anyhow, back to business,” I said. “Either of you learn anything of note or interest yet today?”
“I just got off the phone with Kathy Carter,” Pigeon said. Kathy was the spokeswoman for the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office and a friend. Pigeon continued: “She said the medical examiner’s office determined that Barry McAlister not only had his throat slashed, he had also been shot in the head. It has officially declared the manner of death a homicide.”
“Shot and slashed and burned. Jeez. Someone wasn’t taking any chances. Did the medical examiner’s office also officially declare who did it?”
“No such luck,” she said. “She said the Crime Scene Unit bumped up the case in the queue, so they’ve gotten some stuff back. The blood in the car is definitely Barry’s. I think maybe they were hoping Barry had put up a fight and that maybe some of the blood belonged to the perpetrator. But it was all Barry.”
“My, the prosecutor’s office was awfully forthcoming today, wasn’t it?” I said. “We usually never get results like that this early.”
“I think the Crime Scene Unit’s funding is on the chopping block,” Tommy interjected. “So they’re taking every opportunity they can get to show everyone what a good job they’re doing.”
“I’ll take it,” I said. “What else?”
“The Arson Squad is referring all calls to the prosecutor’s office. They haven’t formally called it arson yet.”