The Fraud

by Brad Parks

  Mr. Haughty studied us for a moment, then decided to let us be someone else’s problem. “Very well, sir. The putting green is that way.”

  I tucked that day’s paper under my arm and made for the clubhouse. As we walked, Chillax whispered, “You know my name isn’t Noonan.”

  “I just claimed to have telekinetic powers and you’re worried that I made up your name?” I asked.

  He didn’t reply. We walked up an impressive set of brick steps into the clubhouse, where I soon ascertained the location of general manager Earl Karlinsky. It was beneath the main floor of the clubhouse. In the basement. Where the help belonged.

  Karlinsky was sitting behind a desk. He had a full head of bristly gray hair. He wore a jacket with the club emblem, a matching tie, wire-rim glasses, and altogether too much of a musky scented cologne. I surmised he had been dousing himself with it so long that his nose had been desensitized to the smell. Either that, or he took baths in it.

  I was aiming for polite-but-firm in my approach, so I didn’t mince words.

  “Hi, Mr. Karlinsky, my name is Carter Ross. I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner. I understand you told my colleague here he wasn’t welcome at your club.”

  Shooing away a shaggy-haired kid probably came quite naturally to Earl Karlinsky, who spent half his summer bossing around caddies who looked just like Chillax. I was a more formidable presence, if only because I had long practice handling obstinate bureaucrats like this guy.

  “Hello, Mr. Ross,” Karlinsky said. “Yes, this young man was in the parking lot without announcing himself.”

  “Well, his name is Sloan Chesterfield, so now he’s announced. We’re here working on a story about Kevin Tiemeyer, who was tragically kil—”

  “Kevin Tiemeyer! What makes you think we have anything to do with that?”

  Karlinsky was suddenly sitting up a lot straighter in his chair, as if it had just been plugged into a wall socket.

  “I never said you did,” I said. “We’re just looking to interview people who knew Mr. Tiemeyer so what we write in the paper about him isn’t callow and uninformed. All we’re trying to do is honor the memory of one of your members, so I would greatly appreciate it if you could let Sloan spend a few hours here. I assure you he’ll be quite courteous and only talk to those who don’t mind talking back.”

  It was, I felt, a reasonable request, respectfully submitted. Karlinsky quickly folded, then unfolded his hands. Even that small amount of movement sent another wave of musk wafting my way.

  “I can appreciate what you’re doing, but I’m afraid this is just not a good time,” he said. “This has been very upsetting to our membership and I can’t have—”

  That’s when I pulled my newspaper out from under my arm and slapped it on his desk. Again, politely but firmly.

  “Open the sports section. Page D-Eight, please.”

  “O-okay,” he said. “I’m not sure what this has to do with—”

  “Third column. Midway down. The results of the Fanwood Country Club member-guest, A flight and B flight, low gross and low net, men, women, and mixed.”

  “Yes. And?”

  “And that little strip of agate type is at least a hundred dollars’ worth of free advertising for your club. We’ve given you the same courtesy for every tournament you’ve contested for at least the last fifty years, if not longer. We’re talking about probably a hundred thousand dollars in publicity.”

  “Yes, I see,” is all he said.

  Sensing my advantage, I pressed: “So what do you say we both play nice and you treat Sloan like a guest for the next few hours? As I said, we’re just looking to be able to say a few nice words about Mr. Tiemeyer.”

  Karlinsky adjusted his glasses again. Then he did something I absolutely did not expect.

  “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” he said.

  For a moment, I could barely believe what I had heard. Was the guy really kicking us out? Seriously?

  I pretended to be unruffled. But, really, I was pissed.

  “Got it,” I said. “So what you’re saying is, you’d like me to call our sports editor and tell him exactly how welcoming Fanwood Country Club is to Eagle-Examiner reporters. I’m sure he’d be interested to know so he can treat your next club championship results with roughly the same amount of hospitality. And I’m sure you’ll enjoy explaining to your members why those results are no longer appearing in the paper.”

  “If I must,” Karlinsky said. “Now, you can either show yourself out or I can call the Fanwood Police. It’s up to you.”

  I just stood there, pondering my options from a list that only included lousy choices. If I chose a confrontation, I wasn’t going to win. This was a private club. We had no right to be here if we weren’t wanted. I didn’t need to waste time waiting for a cop to tell me as much.

  “Very well,” I said, then turned to Chillax. “Let’s go.”

  I had other means of getting into Fanwood Country Club, whether Earl Karlinsky wanted me there or not. Chillax trailed me out into the parking lot.

  “Brah, that was awesome. Are you really going to call the sports editor?”

  “I wish I could,” I said. “Unfortunately, we’re the good guys. We don’t get to be small-minded and vindictive, even when it seems like fun.”

  “But you said—”

  “It was a bluff. He called it. I lost.”

  Chillax accepted this defeat philosophically—they taught that at Gettysburg, right?—and I soon sent him on his way back to Scotch Plains. I, meanwhile, began my drive toward Newark and, hopefully, a rendezvous with Maryam Okeke. I knew I should have been looking ahead to that, not behind at the fiasco at Fanwood Country Club. But the whole episode just bothered me.

  I was making a reasonable request of a man who ought to have been happy to do a favor for a reporter at the state’s largest newspaper. Nothing I was asking for would cast the club or its membership in an unfavorable light. And yet Earl Karlinsky had run us off like we were there to take pickaxes to the eighteenth green.

  Then there was his curious outburst when I first mentioned the name Kevin Tiemeyer. What makes you think we have anything to do with that?

  It was difficult to imagine what a country club in the Jersey hinterlands had to do with a carjacking in Newark. But, as I neared the city, I couldn’t chase the suspicion that Earl Karlinsky was hiding something.

  CHAPTER 14

  In a school system that, sadly, still has too many lumps of coal, Arts High School is a real diamond. It requires an application and an audition, and only the more motivated students will put themselves through that process. That small bit of self-selection does marvels. The ones that make it through feel like they’ve accomplished something special by being there.

  The school’s gothic facade decorated the south side of Martin Luther King Boulevard—the former High Street, to those who knew the city long ago—and that’s where I planted myself as the school bell rang.

  If I had gone on school property, I would have had to inform the school administration that I was there and tell them why, a time-sucking headache. As a result, I was careful to stay on the sidewalk.

  As students began pouring out, I flagged down three kids, none of whom knew Maryam Okeke. It was the fourth, a chubby girl of perhaps sixteen or seventeen, who brightened at the mention of the name.

  “Oh, she’s my friend, hang on.”

  She didn’t ask who I was or what I wanted. Unlike my experience in the bodega, this was one of the times when being a well-dressed, officious-looking white man was very much to my advantage. She had simply assumed I was legit and had pulled out her phone. Her fingers flew across her keypad at the speed of teenager. Few things could make a thirtysomething feel decrepit faster.

  “I told her there was a white guy out in front of the entrance looking for her,” the girl said. “I think her last class is up on the third floor. She’ll probably be down in a minute or two.”

  “Thanks. Bu
t how do you know she got your—”

  Then I heard her phone chime. Someday, perhaps, we will all have chips implanted that will allow us to exchange brain waves with each other, and that will become the fastest method of human communication. But until that happens, nothing is going to beat high school girls texting each other.

  “She’ll be right down,” the girl said. “See ya!”

  Sure enough, I waited no more than two minutes before I was being approached by a young woman of African heritage. She was medium height and curvy, with a wide face and long braids. She had a light smattering of adolescent acne on her cheeks.

  “Hi, I’m Maryam,” she said, with no trace of Nigerian accent. “You were looking for me?”

  I introduced myself and asked her a few perfunctory questions—how to spell her name, how old she was, and so on. As my luck had it, she had just turned eighteen, so I wouldn’t have to worry about getting permission to use her quotes. The age of consent was a marvelous thing.

  Then I got down to my purpose, and I went straight at it. I told her I found it sad and wrong that the death of white Kevin Tiemeyer had attracted so much more attention than the death of black Joseph Okeke, and that I wanted to make that right—albeit a few weeks too late.

  At the mention of her father, there was no change in her expression. He was dead and buried and so, apparently, were her emotions about him. Or maybe it was just that a crowded sidewalk outside her high school—surrounded by her peers—was not a place she was going to choose to show them.

  “So, really, I just wanted to learn a little more about him,” I finished. “You know, be able to tell people about who he really was.”

  I don’t know if my speech about racial justice had moved her or if she was just a guileless teenager who didn’t mind helping a reporter. Either way, she replied, “Okay. What do you want to know?”

  “Let’s start with what he did for a living?”

  “He was a businessman.”

  “What kind of businessman?”

  “So he did stuff with, like, cell phone towers and cell phone equipment? He was kind of a go-between for U.S. companies that wanted to sell and install their stuff in Nigeria. But I don’t really know.”

  “So we could say he was in the telecommunications business,” I said, trying to be helpful.

  “Yeah, that would be good.”

  I had my pad out by this point and made a show of jotting that down. Sometimes I did this not because I particularly needed to stop to write anything—I had long ago mastered the skill of taking notes while talking—but because I wanted a pause in the conversation. Silences were a powerful tool during interviews. Sources often felt compelled to fill them, often with words that otherwise might not be said.

  But Maryam just waited patiently for me to finish.

  “I take it he was born in Nigeria?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “When did he come over here?”

  She told me it was 1997, shortly before she was born. Maryam’s older siblings, a sister and a brother, were born in Nigeria. But Joseph wanted at least one of his children to be born in the U.S.A. And since his business involved selling U.S. technology overseas—thus creating jobs here in America—it made it easy for him to get a green card.

  “Obviously your mom came over at the same time if you were born here?”

  Maryam nodded. I shifted into what I knew was a potentially touchy subject. But I have learned potentially touchy subjects are easier to finesse if they feel like they’re in the flow of conversation.

  “So when did your parents split up?”

  “When I was twelve,” she said. “He still lived with us for, like, a year or two, but that wasn’t working, so he got his own place when I was, I don’t know, thirteen or fourteen?”

  “Did you still see him a lot?”

  “Oh, yeah, pretty much every day. Unless he was traveling or something. He’d come over and help me with my math homework or whatever. He had dinner with us a lot.”

  I liked that detail and the image it produced: Joseph Okeke and his daughter, their heads bent over some algebraic equation.

  “Your parents got along okay, then?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “Well, they’d … I wouldn’t call it fight. But I’d overhear them having some serious conversations about tuition. My brother is at Duke and he gets financial aid and scholarships, but it’s still expensive. And then next year, with me, they’ll have two tuitions to worry about. They talked about it a lot. Education is really important to them.”

  My mind briefly wandered to the day when I might have the same worries. The saving grace was that, as a fairly high-ranking editor, Tina made a lot more money than I did. Also, she was a saver. She had probably set up a 529 Plan shortly after her first positive pregnancy test.

  “But in general they got along a lot better after he moved out than before,” she continued. “They’re just one of those couples who is happier when they each have some space.” She said this with a world-weariness beyond her eighteen years.

  “I talked to your mom earlier today and she seemed pretty pissed at him about something,” I said, again just trying to keep things in the natural flow. “I asked her about what happened and she said something like, ‘He got what he deserved.’ Do you know what that’s about?”

  Maryam shook her head. “That’s just my mom. Sometimes she’d get really pissed at him for, like, no reason.”

  Somehow, I doubted it was no reason. It was just a reason I had yet to uncover and Maryam was ignorant of. Had Joseph Okeke taken a girlfriend? Had he fallen behind on child support? Whatever it was, Tujuka Okeke probably didn’t want to bad-mouth her children’s father in their presence. It showed commendable maturity.

  I debated whether I should ask Maryam about the insurance issue. There was a chance she knew all about it and could enlighten me as to what was happening. Then again, Tujuka might have been keeping it from her daughter, knowing a teenager who just lost her father already had enough stress in her life and didn’t need more. And, no, as a reporter I wasn’t strictly bound to honor that. But just because she was eighteen—and, legally, an adult—didn’t mean I had to treat her like an adult in every way.

  More questions from me elicited a similar amount of nothing, or at least nothing compelling. She said he traveled a lot for business, but I knew that already. She said he liked to read, everything from crime fiction to military histories. She said again that education was important to him, so important that after moving here he had earned an MBA online from Strayer University, even though he really didn’t need one.

  I inserted occasional pauses into the conversation, pouring my attention into my notebook, scribbling nonsense in the hopes Maryam would say more about a given subject. But, just like she had the previous times, she was content to stand there as what remained of the Arts High School student body filed past her on their way home.

  Nothing else in our conversation really grabbed me until the end of a discourse about how much her father liked golf. Joseph’s father—Maryam’s grandfather—had been a greenskeeper at a course outside Lagos, one that catered to British colonists before Nigeria was granted independence in 1960. Joseph had grown up playing the game and still mashed a mean five iron. He made his children learn how to play, because it was the game of American business.

  “He was so excited a few weeks ago,” she said. “He got this invitation to play at this fancy place.”

  “Oh, yeah? What place?”

  “Fanwood Country Club,” she said.

  “Fanwood,” I repeated, feeling that little tilt in my head that happens when someone has given me a piece of information whose import goes beyond the obvious. “Small world. I was actually just out there earlier today.”

  “He just raved about it,” Maryam said.

  “You don’t know, by any chance, who invited him there?”

  She shook her head.

  “Has he ev
er mentioned the name Earl Karlinsky?”

  She wasn’t sure. But as we wrapped up our conversation and swapped cell phone numbers, I couldn’t chase the possibility from my mind: what if Joseph Okeke had also known the inhospitable and perhaps mendacious Earl Karlinsky?

  I didn’t know what, exactly, it would mean if he did—except that I had more to learn. I had already planned to interview some Fanwood Country Club members about Kevin Tiemeyer, if only to rub it in Karlinsky’s face.

  This newest revelation had just moved that agenda item to the top of my list.

  * * *

  I am not, by nature or by preference, the most organized person in the world. My desk in the newsroom is covered with irregularly shaped stacks of papers and notebooks, the contents of which may or may not be related to the same subject. My books at home are neither alphabetized nor indexed. I eschew most forms of collating, classifying, or categorizing.

  But I am absolutely fastidious when it comes to keeping track of my sources. If someone gives me their phone number or e-mail, I save it in my phone’s contact list, even if I think there is only a one in a million chance I’ll ever need it again. I then store every other relevant piece of information I know about them—their employer and job title, their professional affiliations, their educational background, the names of their spouse and children, whatever may be relevant in the future.

  I will also record a quick log line about the article for which I interviewed them (“Ludlow Street murders,” or “Windy Byers story,” or what have you). It all goes into the notes file for each contact and I have rolled up somewhere in the neighborhood of two thousand names during my time at the Eagle-Examiner.

  Hence, as soon as Maryam left me to attend to her duties as yearbook editor, I whipped out my phone and pulled up my contacts. I searched the phrase “Fanwood Country Club,” knowing that I would have listed such membership in my notes.

  Three names popped up. By far the most promising was Armando “Doc” Fierro. I actually smiled when I saw it.

  He was perfect. He was, in Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point parlance, a connector. He would know Kevin Tiemeyer if only because Doc was the kind of guy who made it his business to know everyone. He had been a campaign manager, cabinet member, close advisor, and all-around whiz kid for a long-ago governor. He had since served on a stunning number of official commissions, blue-ribbon panels, and boards of directors, all of which were based on his extensive latticework of personal relationships. He was now the owner-operator of a small firm that did a mix of lobbying and consulting, with a little public relations on the side—which is why he cultivated a relationship with me.