The Fraud

by Brad Parks

  The paper’s corporate owner had recently announced plans to “downsize our footprint”—read: cram us somewhere cheap and sterile—and sell the building that had served as the Eagle-Examiner’s home for more than half a century. It had yet to find a buyer. Apparently, there is little call for time-battered office space.

  If and when we have to move, I will do so with sadness. But, in truth, only a little. The things I love about this business—the adrenaline rush of deadline, the feeling that the stories I wrote mattered, the privilege of putting out a newspaper alongside my lovably malcontented colleagues—will survive no matter where we happen to be plying our craft.

  For the time being, my personal empire was still a desk in the far corner against the wall, where no one could sneak up on me. I annexed it a few years back when the veteran reporter who owned it took a buyout. Staff reductions do have their benefits.

  Tossing my bag next to my chair, I stuffed a fresh reporter’s pad in my pocket—TOPS is my preferred brand—and presented myself at the glass-walled office of Tina Thompson.

  At the relatively young age of forty-one, Tina’s sharp news instincts, intelligence, and drive had allowed her to rise to the lofty title of managing editor for local news. It was a big job, inasmuch as local news dominated the Eagle-Examiner. Among her responsibilities were the city desk, the suburban bureaus, and me.

  She was also nine months pregnant with my child. If you think a man with my fancy vocabulary and expensive education ought to have been smart enough to avoid such a tricky arrangement, you’ve clearly never been introduced to Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. It’s the idea that one can be gifted in one area while deficient in another.

  On the bell curve of managing romantic relationships, I am several standard deviations below the mean.

  I started talking as soon as I entered her room.

  “Just to make sure I’ve got this right, we have basically been turning a blind eye toward the rising tide of carjackings that have been terrorizing this city for, oh, call it four years now,” I said, selecting the chair closest to the door. “But the second a rich white guy from the suburbs gets killed, we’re going to start hopping around like a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest?”

  Tina set down her midmorning beverage snack—some kind of gruesome-looking wheatgrass concoction—as she replied. “Not to answer your question with a question, but let me ask you something: how many poor black guys get murdered in this city every year?”

  “About a hundred, give or take.”

  “Very good. Now, how many rich white guys suffer the same fate?”

  “I see your point,” I conceded. “I just get tired of being so predictable.”

  “Okay, so come up with something different.”

  I had been thinking about this on the way in. “Let’s broaden our reporting a little.”

  “Broaden it how?”

  “Look, of course our hearts go out to the Tiemeyer family. What happened to him is awful and unconscionable and I can’t even imagine what they’re going through right now. But somewhere out there, there’s another family who also recently lost a loved one in a carjacking. And they’re going through the same thing. Yet because that loved one checked a different box on his census form, his death was more or less ignored. That family is probably waking up this morning, looking at all the fuss over someone else, and saying to themselves, ‘What the hell?’ Let’s actually make them feel like our hearts go out to them, too. We’ll give readers what they want about Kevin Tiemeyer, but we’ll show them what carjacking normally looks like, too.”

  Tina shifted her weight. After a brief delay, her belly shifted with her. For a borderline exercise addict who welcomed refined sugars like Gandhi welcomed knife fights, it had been quite an adjustment to have a stomach that moved on its own. The benefits—the extra body in her curly brown hair, the glow to her skin, the prime parking at chichi grocery stores and so on—had not come close to compensating for the discomfort.

  “Okay,” she said after a brief pause. “Just don’t get too frothy with whole black-white thing. Let’s just let people draw their own conclusions—or not, if they chose to. As long as you play that part down the middle, I think Brodie will go for it.”

  By Brodie, she meant Executive-Editor-for-Life Harold Brodie. He was well into his seventies but showed no signs of relinquishing control of the paper. It was starting to occur to folks that perhaps his retirement party and his funeral would be simultaneous events.

  “Okay,” I said. “Who else is working this?”

  “Investigative reporter Carter Ross, I’d like you to meet our carjacking beat writer, Carter Ross.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Which one of our forty-seven layoffs did you not get the memo on? I’ve got Buster Hays going to the press conference later this morning and working the cops for a daily story. After that, it’s all you, big guy.”

  “You can’t even toss me an intern or two?”

  Tina went to her computer and consulted the spreadsheet that told her what her reporters were allegedly doing. My species, which is to say experienced journalists who were above the age of thirty and made a living wage, was teetering on the brink of extinction. Most of the names on her screen were eager twentysomething interns whose paychecks barely covered the payments on their student loans.

  “I could give you Chillax,” she said.

  Ah, Chillax. Some months ago, at the beginning of his time with us, this particular intern—actual name: Sloan Chesterfield—was being harassed to file a story by one of our famously overstressed managing editors. The young man looked up and, invoking that noxious combination of the words “chill” and “relax,” said, “Dude, just chillax, okay?”

  He would never again be referred to by another name within the confines of the Eagle-Examiner newsroom.

  “Yeah, I guess he’ll do,” I said.

  “Good. By the way, did you get the crib assembled?”

  Tina and I were still living apart. I had attempted to propose to her at least five times in the last nine months. I say “attempted to” because even though I bought the ring, cleared it with her parents, felt it with all my heart, and fell to one knee, she pulled me back to my feet each time. She said I wasn’t allowed to ask the question yet.

  This didn’t hurt me. No. Don’t be silly. Because I’m a guy and I don’t have feelings. Or at least that’s what I read in a magazine once.

  Besides, she had promised to move in with me once the baby came. In this results-oriented world of ours, I figured that would constitute a happy ending. We had decided my two-bedroom house in Bloomfield was a better fit for our new family than her one-bedroom condo in Hoboken. Hence, I was in the final stages of turning my former junk room into a nursery.

  “Yep,” I said cheerfully. “Crib is all put together. Only ended up with five extra parts.”

  Tina looked stricken.

  “Kidding,” I assured her.

  “And your phone is charged?”

  I patted my pocket and nodded. Tina was now in her thirty-eighth week. Lately, the moment my battery dipped one bar below maximum, I went scrambling for a plug.

  “How is C-3PO today?” I asked.

  Like many couples, we had given our fetus a cute-to-us nickname. Tina had originally called him “Carter Jr.” When I exercised veto rights over that one, she started calling him “Carter the third” instead. The shorthand for that became C-3, which soon morphed into C-3PO. At Tina’s thirty-six-week checkup, our obstetrician, Carly Marston, told us the baby was upside down, so I briefly lobbied to change it to “Breach Baby.” But by that point C-3PO had already stuck.

  We did not have indisputable video evidence that he was a boy—we decided not to find out—but Tina was convinced she was carrying my male heir.

  “He woke me up with a kick to the spleen this morning and I think he’s broken about three of my ribs since then. We’re going to have to sign him up for Ultimate Fighting lessons. Bet
ween that and having to pee every twelve minutes … speaking of which—”

  She lifted herself from her chair. Tina was about five foot nine and still lithe everywhere except for her bulging midsection. She was starting to resemble a python who swallowed a pig, not that I planned to share this particular observation with her.

  Instead, I went with: “So I’m not allowed to propose to you, but I am allowed to tell you how gorgeous you are, right?”

  “You’re the sweetest man alive even when you’re full of crap,” she said as she swept past me. “I read the other day where a pregnant woman was described as being ‘great with child.’ Let me tell you, there’s nothing great about any of this.”

  CHAPTER 4

  After watching Tina waddle out—and, no, I do not utter the word “waddle” in her presence—I turned my attention back to the newsroom, where I located the intern who would soon become my charge.

  Chillax was long-limbed, probably about six foot three, two inches taller than me. His hair was longer, too. And whereas mine was neatly parted on the left side in a way that was pleasing in a Kiwanis Club kind of way, his light brown mop sort of flopped down his forehead until it half-covered his eyes and then curled in back. He had a good set of shoulders on him and when he wore short-sleeve polo shirts he made me feel like I really needed to spend more time at the gym. I’m quite sure he did not have trouble attracting the interest of the fairer sex.

  “Hey, Chillax, what’s going on?” I said as I walked up to him.

  “Hey, what’s up, brah?”

  I am unsure what youthful genius decided that the word “bro”—which is already an effective truncation of the word “brother”—needed to be further morphed so it was pronounced like a woman’s undergarment. But it was my hope this linguistic pioneer developed some affliction that was similarly annoying. Like a permanent hangnail.

  “We’ve been assigned to work on a story together,” I said. “There was a man killed in Newark last night during a carjacking.”

  “Yeah, dude, I just saw it on the Web site and I was like, ‘No way, brah, that sucks.’”

  “Like a Hoover,” I assured him. “And our friends on the other side of the river have taken note, so it’s pretty much you and me against every media outlet in New York on this story. Think you can handle that?”

  “Tchya,” he said, sitting up a little straighter and getting, uh, stoked.

  “All right. There’s a police presser in a little while that Buster Hays is covering. Why don’t you work the human interest angle. Get us some background on who this guy was, get a sense of what the family is going through, get friends and neighbors saying nice things about him, that sort of thing. I want people to feel like they know this guy when they’re done reading what we write.”

  There is no understating the importance of a good victim in any newspaper crime story. The fact is, violent crime is an abstraction to much of our readership. It is often written about using statistics—what’s on the rise, what’s dropping, what might be causing the fluctuation, and so on. I suppose such reporting has its uses, though in my observation, not many readers tear up over data points.

  You need to shake them a little bit to make them realize crime was something that could and did happen to people just like them. You had to turn the victim from a faceless casualty into an actual human being.

  “I don’t have an address yet, but they live in Scotch Plains,” I said. “You know how to use LexisNexis, yes?”

  LexisNexis is one of those inventions that proves God loves reporters, a database that captures nearly every shred of public information available on private citizens.

  “Yeah, dude, I’ll LexisNexis the hell out of that,” he said. “It’s going to be you and me against everyone. It’ll be like this time, back in college, I played lacrosse at Gettysburg—”

  How surprising.

  “—and we were going against Washington College for the Centennial Conference championship. We were down, like, thirteen to six and it looked like we were totally out of it. It was like, you know, unsurmountable odds.”

  It would have been even more impressive if the odds had been insurmountable, but I didn’t want to interrupt his story.

  “Anyway, Coach gave us this talk before the start of the third period that was, like, you know, all Braveheart and stuff. And then we went out and totally kicked their asses around the field and ended up winning fifteen-fourteen. Dude, we can do the same thing now. It’s going to be totally sickety.”

  As a practiced reader of context, I was able to infer that “sickety” was a word with a generally positive connotation. My suspicion was confirmed when he held out a fist for me to bump. I tentatively knocked my knuckles against his.

  “Pwsssh!” he said, spreading his hand like it had just exploded.

  “All right, just go out there and get us some good color.”

  “Yeah, color,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “Like … his house was brown, his yard was green?”

  I just laughed. “Sorry. Color is newspaper jargon. It means details that make a person or a scene come alive. So if someone you’re writing about is, I don’t know, a hoarder or something. You don’t come out and say they’re a hoarder. You say their living room is filled with stacks of ten-year-old newspapers. Get it?”

  “Oh, yeah, brah. Scoopsies.”

  “Scoopsies?”

  “Yeah, you know, like when you scoop up the pill with your spoon and you’re like, ‘Raaaah, dude!’ Scoopsies.”

  I stared at him for a moment. “Do you come with a Berlitz book?”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind,” I said.

  “All right. Let’s shred this mother.”

  We swapped cell phone numbers and made more noises about the mothers, fathers, and grandmothers we would crush, scoop, and shred. At some point, perhaps far in the future, Chillax would figure out that life was a bit more complex than a lacrosse game where someone was keeping score. But there was still time for him to come to that epiphany.

  * * *

  With Chillax on his way, I returned to my desk and set about working the other half of the story I had in mind. Which meant I needed a second carjacking victim.

  The majority of these crimes do not end violently. I didn’t know how far back in our archives I would need to go to find one that did. Unfortunately, my search didn’t take long.

  We had written a story two weeks earlier about a man named Joseph Okeke, a fifty-four-year-old Central Ward resident who was shot and killed during a carjacking on 15th Avenue. The make and model of his car were not mentioned. The story offered no other details, saying only that police were seeking more information about the crime.

  The piece appeared on Page B3, which is where we put crime briefs. It totaled 117 words and appeared only in our Essex edition. There was no follow-up, nothing more in our pages to memorialize the life or death of Joseph Okeke.

  This meant, more than likely, the crime was still unsolved, the perpetrators still on the loose. Law enforcement agencies were not in the habit of issuing press releases to notify the public they had made no progress on an investigation and likely never would.

  But, just to make sure, I picked up the phone. Ringing the Newark Police would be a waste of my time, especially when it was being besieged by calls about Kevin Tiemeyer. So I dialed the number for the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office instead.

  Another unexpected advantage of working for the Incredible Shrinking Newspaper is that our large-and-growing diaspora of former employees has not, for the most part, vanished. It has simply gone into PR. A not-insubstantial number of the spokespeople at the agencies we regularly cover are former colleagues, and the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office was no exception.

  They were, in general, a pleasant lot to deal with, because they knew what we were after and how to help quickly. Also, we had logged enough hours together in the newsroom to enjoy a comfortable rapport.

  Hence I started my call to the Es
sex County Prosecutor’s Office spokeswoman with: “Hey, Kathy, it’s your bed man.”

  Kathy Carter and I had a running joke about how a woman needed two men in her life: a “head man,” who could listen to her and make her feel understood, and a “bed man,” who could fulfill her more primal needs.

  “Oh, baby, you know you couldn’t handle this even if you could have it,” she crowed. “How many times do I have to tell you, you’re head man material, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “Don’t underestimate me just because I’m a skinny white guy. I’m a double threat. Give me a chance.”

  She just laughed. Kathy was an attractive African American woman, but she was twenty years older than me and very happily married. Besides, I had all I could handle in that department at the moment.

  “So what can I do for you today, my head man?”

  “I’m calling about a carjacking in Newark from two weeks ago. Vic’s name was Joseph Okeke.”

  I pronounced it in the proper Nigerian way, which I only knew because Newark had a large ex-pat Nigerian population. For the record, it was: O-KAY-kay. I then spelled it for her.

  “You sure you shouldn’t be asking about a different carjacking?” she said.

  “Oh, we’ve got someone working Kevin Tiemeyer. I just get tired of crime only mattering when it happens to someone of European ancestry.”

  “Well, look at you, Brother Carter. I always said you had some color in you.”

  “Yeah, so why is it I still can’t dance?”

  “Oh, honey, I said some color. You need a lot more color if you want to do that.”

  Now it was my turn to laugh.

  “Okay, Joseph Okeke,” she said, and I heard her keyboard clattering. “It happened in the four hundred block of Fifteenth Avenue at eleven fifteen P.M. Police and EMTs went to the scene and found Mr. Okeke unresponsive and bleeding from a head wound. Uh, let’s see here, what else … no charges filed, obviously.… Huh, that’s strange.”