by Brad Parks
“Pray tell.”
“I’m just looking at our investigator’s notes, which are in the file,” she said. The Essex County Prosecutor’s Office had its own detective force that ran things down for attorneys as they prepared their cases. “It says, ‘Insurance disbursement not made.’”
“Anything in there about why not?”
“Nothing I can see. But sometimes insurance companies like to play games, denying a claim for a silly reason or just delaying it enough that the people making the claim eventually get frustrated and go away.”
“Can I ask your investigator what he meant?”
“It doesn’t sound like he’d know anything. We don’t really have anything to do with insurance companies. That’s a civil matter. You might have a better chance with the surviving family. These insurance companies, you wouldn’t believe some of the stuff they pull, denying and delaying legitimate claims. If I was a young, crusading newspaper reporter with a lot of vinegar in me, I’d definitely do a story about it. Start with the family and see what they say.”
“What kind of family did Mr. Okeke leave behind?”
I heard papers shuffling. “Uh, let’s see … wife and three kids.”
“Oh, man,” I said, cringing even as I wrote it.
“Sounds to me like that’s your best bet,” Kathy said. “If there’s an insurance company giving a widow a tough time, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind giving them a little bad press.”
Kathy was thinking like a reporter. I’m told by dearly departed colleagues it’s a hard habit to break. Just because you took the girl out of the newspaper didn’t mean you could take the newspaper out of the girl.
She continued: “Let’s see … what else … police are looking for two suspects, both black males in their teens or twenties.”
“Really? So there was actually a witness? Tell me more, tell me more.”
The police hadn’t mentioned that to us, naturally. Nor should they have. Being a known witness to a violent crime in a place like Newark put you on the short list to be the next man down. But Kathy knew that better than anyone. Witness intimidation was one of the biggest ongoing headaches at the prosecutor’s office.
Kathy sputtered, now clearly remembering that the demands of her current vocation sometimes conflicted with the inclinations of her previous one.
“Come on, you know I won’t put the guy’s name in the newspaper,” I urged. “I’m a head man, not a headless man.”
She groaned. “I know, I know. I just can’t have that come back at me. You know I love you, Carter, but I signed over my buyout check to cover college tuition. I need this job.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “What kind of car did Mr. Okeke drive?”
She told me it was a 2015 BMW 328i, a sleek little sedan. Not that my reporter’s paycheck has me window-shopping Beemers, but I could guess it was roughly a $35,000 vehicle.
It allowed me to make a few assumptions about this victim. As I said, Newark has a large and growing population of Nigerians. As a group, they were doing well for themselves. Their children, in particular, were knocking it out of the park. I’d love to know what portion of college scholarships that had been reserved for African American kids from Newark were being won by the children of Nigerian immigrants.
It was one more indication that while you couldn’t ignore skin color, skin color alone did not explain the full extent of the struggles faced by African Americans whose families had been here since the days of slavery. To watch these first- and second-generation Nigerians—they sometimes called themselves “non-American blacks,” though that term is controversial—come here and establish such a different trajectory for themselves suggested to me that whatever was going on was a lot more complicated than complexion.
“All right,” I said. “Anything else?”
“Uh, let’s see,” she said, and I listened to her shuffle papers some more. Eventually, she said, “Not really. I’ll tell you—and I don’t mean to sound like I’m making excuses for anyone—but these carjackings, they’re tough. We’ve had a task force working on this for a few years now and they’ve got some good people on there. But it’s like a game of whack-a-mole. You shut it down one place and it just pops up somewhere else. And it’s virtually impossible to guess where it’ll happen next.”
“Noted,” I said. “And depending on which way this story goes, it might be good to get your boss on the record saying something like that. Much as it’s fun to play rope-a-dope with you guys, that’d be a good perspective to have in whatever we write.”
“Okay. Let me know if you want me to get him on the phone with you.”
“Will do.”
Kathy and I said our goodbyes and I leaned back in my chair. I let my eyes focus on nothing for a second or two.
In my line of work, we are around violence and its aftermath so frequently it’s easy to become inured to its horrors. A certain thickening of the skin is inevitable, even healthy from a psychological standpoint. But I always promised myself I would never allow myself to become completely calloused.
So I spent a moment or two thinking about the terrifying last moments of Joseph Okeke: a life, fifty-four years in the making, destroyed in mere seconds; a family of five, shattered by its reduction to four; a sacrificing of human life for two thousand pounds of metal and plastic.
I’ve always believed my job as a reporter was to help make sense of the world, to explain its workings, to lend understanding to its complexities. I knew I was perhaps doomed to failure in this instance. There was no making sense of the senseless.
But I owed it to myself, to our readers, and even to the ghost of Joseph Okeke to at least try.
I sighed. Then I went back to work.
I had a witness to find.
CHAPTER 5
The four-hundred block of 15th Avenue turned out to be a short stretch of worn asphalt bounded by cracked sidewalks that glistened with shards of broken glass.
The neighborhood was the usual hodgepodge of new town houses, old multifamily homes, and vacant lots. Always vacant lots. During the early and mid-twentieth century, when it was a center of manufacturing, Newark’s population peaked just above 440,000. Its current population was around 277,000. Sometimes I thought every one of those 163,000 lost residents was represented by a vacant lot.
If I have, so far, made Newark sound like some kind of desolate malefactor’s playground, with thieves lurking around every darkened corner, I don’t mean to. Any balanced presentation of the city must report that the majority of Newark citizens are nice folks, just trying to get along. And there has been a lot of hard work by some tireless heroes—teachers, preachers, cops, street activists, nonprofit workers, civic-minded businesspeople, philanthropists, and the like—who together have brought the city a long way from its nadir in the late seventies and early eighties.
During the daytime, when those people are enjoined in the task of making Newark a better place, when there are grandmas on the front stoops and schoolchildren in the streets, when the ordinary people are going about their regular business, I maintain you’re as safe in Newark as you are in any city.
The problem is, the daylight hours eventually come to an end. That’s when a certain subspecies comes out to run roughshod over the social contract. The stereotypes are, unfortunately, quite accurate: most of them are young men from single-parent or no-parent families that gave them very poor starts in this world; they have been failed by schools, churches, and the other institutions that might have saved them; and, let’s not neglect personal responsibility here, they have also failed themselves with their attitudes and general outlook on life.
They lack respect for the statutes of a country they don’t feel has given them a fair shake. They experience their first brushes with the law under the auspices of a juvenile justice system that they quickly come to view as a joke, one that gives them baby taps on the wrist for the very adult violence they inflict. They live in a culture where spending a stint in prison is so commo
n it comes with virtually no social stigma and is, if anything, seen as a rite of passage into manhood. Therefore, they have little regard for the penalties that might deter them from wrongdoing.
As long as this subspecies is allowed to rule the night, Newark’s recovery will only get so far.
There was a brief glimmer of hope a few years back when the city went more than a month without a murder—forty-three days, to be exact. It proved to be a mirage. That murder-free month was followed by a bloody summer. Then a looming structural budget deficit finally caught up with Newark, the city had to lay off 13 percent of its police force, and it was right back to the bad old days.
I go back and forth between having pity for the young men who cause this mayhem—because so many of the factors that have contributed to their circumstances are not their fault—and being really, really pissed off at them for all the damage they’re doing to themselves, the people around them, and the city I love.
Naturally, being nocturnal creatures, they were all in hibernation as I cruised to a stop along 15th Avenue. I disembarked from my trusty-but-battered, six-year-old Chevy Malibu—so chosen because its value to carjackers only exceeded forty dollars when it had a full tank of gas—and looked around.
The north side of the street mixed vacant lots with new town houses in a way that reminded me of a gap-toothed grin. On the corner of the south side was a brick building that contained a storefront gospel mission and a bodega that would need renovation before it could even be considered shabby.
At the end of the block, hanging over the intersection at Tenth Street, was the traffic light that likely cost Joseph Okeke his life.
On the far side of the intersection there was a three-family house and yet another vacant lot. Given the sightlines involved, the witness I was looking for could have been a resident of the house. Or it could have been someone who happened to be walking along.
But more likely it was someone working in the bodega. It was called Goncalves Grocery No. 4 and its state of disrepair did not exactly fill me with the urge to visit Goncalves Grocery Nos. 1-3.
I pushed through a glass front door that had been scratched to the point of opacity and found the lone clerk sitting on a stool in a bulletproof box whose door he had left open.
The man was young and Hispanic, with a stocky build and a wide, dark brown face. He did not seem to note my entry, despite the clanging of some bells that had been tied to the door. His focus was on a glossy magazine with bold Spanish headlines.
“Hey there,” I said and smiled.
He glanced up, then did a double take, because I wasn’t what he was expecting. Then I saw the look, that suspicion mixed with wariness that I, as a well-dressed, officious-looking white man, often prompted in neighborhoods like this.
He mumbled something I didn’t quite catch, but I decided to launch into my spiel anyway.
“Hi, I’m Carter Ross. I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner. I’m working on a story about a carjacking that happened outside your store on a Sunday night two weeks ago. Were you working that night, by any chance?”
He just smiled at me thinly. And that’s when I realized he had no clue what I was saying. I once again found myself cursing that I hadn’t taken Spanish in school.
Being a reporter often calls on you to call upon hidden talents that you had never thought you’d have to bring to bear in your professional life. In this instance, it was a gift for improvisation that made me a formidable force in Ross family charades competitions.
If this kid had seen something, I could attempt to cajole a Spanish-speaking reporter out here to interview him. But I first had to figure out if it was even worth the trouble.
I walked across a linoleum floor that was worn through to the plywood in spots and grabbed that day’s Eagle-Examiner from a rack of newspapers.
“I work,” I said, then waved the newspaper in the air, “for this. Comprende?”
He nodded.
“I write articles,” I said, pointing to one of the columns of text and then pantomiming writing motion.
“Two weeks ago,” I said, holding up two fingers and then making them hop backward, like a time-traveling bunny. “On Sunday night. There was a man who was driving his car up to the traffic light outside your store.”
I was gripping my imaginary steering wheel with two hands and making engine revving sounds. Then I applied my pretend car’s brakes with a high-pitched, “Vvvvvvv…”
“When he stopped, two men with guns came at him,” I said, forming my thumb and forefinger into the universal symbol for a firearm.
“They were carjackers,” I continued. “They stole his car. Then they shot him. Bang bang bang. And he died. Did you see it happen?”
I emphasized the “you” by pointing to him and the “see” by gesturing to my own eyes. I had spoken slowly enough that I was sure he’d follow me, but he was still giving me this blank stare, like I might as well have been speaking an invented language that was a mix of Bahasa Indonesian and Vulcan.
Which wasn’t right. I may look like a clueless white guy, but this wasn’t my first bodega. No matter what their native tongue, the clerks had to know enough English to assist their customers, many of whom were monolingual African Americans. Older immigrants sometimes never learned any English beyond that, but the young brain is a sponge for language. Even if this fellow had just left Guatemala or Ecuador or wherever it was he had come from, he would have picked up some English by the time he made it this far north.
I thought back to a story one of the paper’s sportswriters once told me. It was about a rookie from the Dominican Republic who had just been called up to the Yankees. All the reporters wanted to interview him, but he shyly explained that he no habla inglés. Then, a week later, the reporter happened to walk past the same player outside the team hotel. There was a flock of comely women gathered to flirt with famous ballplayers. Suddenly, the young man spoke near-flawless English.
This kid was playing me the same way. I just needed to give him the right inducement.
I sighed and said, “Look, we really need this story. What if I told you I’d give you a thousand dollars if you talked to me?”
He brightened immediately. “Yeah? You serious? Okay, Papi, what you want to know?”
“No, I’m not serious,” I said. “I’m not even allowed to pay for information. It’s unethical. I just wanted to get you to admit you actually speak English.”
“I never said I didn’t, Papi. You’re the one who started all that ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane’ stuff.”
* * *
It took ten minutes of negotiation to determine he was, in fact, working during the night in question. And, while he wouldn’t admit it at first, I was getting the sense he might very well have been the witness I sought.
But I wasn’t going to press him for it immediately. Young Carter Ross might have done that. The Carter Ross who faced impending fatherhood with crow’s-feet developing next to his eyes knew better.
This kid’s first impulse when presented with an unfamiliar circumstance was to elude it. You don’t back a sidestepper like that into a corner and force a confrontation. You dance him around the room first.
So I set a pleasant, meandering waltz going in my head and, slowly, got his story out of him. His parents had come from Ecuador during the early nineties, part of the first wave of immigrants from that country to settle in the North Ward.
A year after they arrived, they gave birth to their first child, the young man who now stood in front of me. He wouldn’t give me his name, so as the conversation progressed, I started calling him Johnny. I told him it was in honor of Johnny Weissmuller, the guy who played Tarzan.
Johnny seemed to like his new name and it helped forge a little bond between us.
I learned after a few minutes that his English was actually better than his Spanish. The glossy magazine I had seen him reading was an effort to improve his faculty with a language that his parents had made every effort not to speak at home.
He said he hoped to learn it well enough that he’d be able to teach his kids someday.
It was interesting he was already thinking about his children. I’m fairly certain I didn’t when I was his age. That had changed—being one phone call away from fatherhood tended to do that to a guy. I subconsciously patted my phone in my pocket as Johnny continued talking.
Johnny didn’t mind admitting his parents were here illegally. Having been born here, he was a full-fledged American citizen. And the day he turned eighteen, his father gave him $20,000 he had painstakingly scrimped and saved, a few bucks a day over the course of many years of day-laboring.
The father couldn’t legally own property. The son could. Johnny used the money to buy Goncalves No. 4. They did not own the other Goncalves locations and it seemed, in any event, the original Mr. Goncalves was out of the picture. They had decided to keep the name for the same reason the previous owners had: it was cheaper than buying new signage.
The store was open from 7:00 A.M. until midnight every day, and between Johnny and his father, they split the 119 hours it was open each week. On Saturday, Johnny’s father worked from opening to close. On Sunday, Johnny returned the favor. That way, each man got to take off one day a week.
They had been doing it that way for three years now. And they had saved up enough money that, when Johnny’s little brother turned eighteen in a few months, they were going to buy a bodega for him, as well.
It was the American dream, thriving amid all the vacant lots and bulletproof glass.
And that’s when I realized I had my angle on Johnny. For all his streetwise skepticism and no habla guardedness, there was optimism to him and his story. Unlike so many of the people around him, he believed tomorrow was going to be better than today.
He and his family were working hard to better themselves. Someday, his children would go to college. His grandchildren would go to medical school. People who think the Ecuadorians are going to be any different from the Italians, Irish, Germans—or any of the other great waves of immigrants who made places like Newark their first stop—simply haven’t been paying attention to their history books.