The Fraud

by Brad Parks

  He had gotten the nickname “Doc” not because of any medical or advanced degrees, at least not that I knew of. Legend was that long-ago governor was confronting a problem and told someone, “Take it to Doctor Fierro, he’ll get that fixed up right.” People in the administration started calling him Dr. Fierro, which quickly got shortened to Doc.

  He was smart, gregarious, and charming, as guys like that tended to be. I had quoted him at least half a dozen times in the paper, and there were probably twice as many stories where he had helped me by making an important introduction. He was also, as they say in the old country, fond of the drink. He didn’t need much excuse to tilt one back.

  I briefly debated whether to call or e-mail and decided to go electronic. I mostly just wanted to find a legitimate way to get inside the doors at Fanwood Country Club so I could snoop around. If I did it over e-mail he’d ask fewer questions as to my motives. I typed:

  Doc,

  Working on a story and hoping you can help me. Also, I’m developing a terrible thirst and the rumor is your bartender at Fanwood now has one of my favorite beers on tap. In the name of efficiency, can we take care of both these urgent matters simultaneously? 5:30 tonight? Let me know.

  Best,

  Carter

  With that taken care of, I moved to my next item of business, setting my search function to work on the phrase “Newark Rotary.”

  Alas, nothing came up. Somehow, I had been toiling nine years for Newark’s finest and only newspaper, yet never come across a single Rotarian in the city. I guess there does not tend to be much of a need for hard-hitting investigations into misuse of the Rotary Happy Dollars fund.

  I monkeyed around on the Web for a bit and found that the current president of the Newark Rotary Club was named Zabrina Coleman-Webster. The name was unusual enough that I was able to trace her to Lacks & Ragland, an accounting firm that had offices on Academy Street in downtown Newark. She was listed as an associate with the firm.

  In the company directory, I located her direct dial line. I was about to call it when I stopped myself. The address listed was just a short stroll down the hill from Arts High, no more than maybe ten minutes. I started walking instead.

  Conducting cold call interviews was sort of like sex: thanks to modern technology, there was a way to do it over the phone, but it was infinitely better to do it in person.

  CHAPTER 15

  In recent years there have been a proliferation of companies like Lacks & Ragland that have found Newark. They’re midsized firms that don’t want to have to pay Manhattan rents, but still desire access to public transportation—which Newark has in abundance—and close proximity to New York. They tend to be quite happy in Newark, as long as the city’s incessant dysfunction doesn’t scare them off.

  Lacks & Ragland occupied all five floors of a small building on Academy Street that had been attractively renovated sometime in the recent past to include hardwood floors, exposed brick, and other features suitable to young upwardly mobile professionals.

  I announced myself to a grumpy security guard who pulled himself out of that day’s edition of the Eagle-Examiner just long enough to lift up the phone on his desk and mutter into it.

  He listened for a moment, grunted a few words at me—they may have been “she’ll be right down”—then turned his attention back to the paper. His lack of courtesy and attentiveness bothered me not in the least. I was just happy to see someone engrossed in our product.

  As I waited, my phone dinged with an e-mail:

  Carter,

  I, too, feel a thirst coming on. 5:30 it is.

  Cheers,

  Doc

  I had just stowed the phone back in my pocket when the elevator doors slowly eased open to reveal an African American woman in a red skirt suit. She was nicely proportioned, fortyish, and had straightened her hair, which she wore shoulder length.

  “Hi, Zabrina Coleman-Webster,” she said, smiling and walking toward me.

  “Carter Ross.”

  “How can I help you?”

  “I’m working on a story about Joseph Okeke.”

  Saying the name was like flipping a kill switch on her smile.

  “Oh, Joseph,” she said, in a way that was almost like a sigh. She put a hand over her heart, slumped her shoulders, and cast her eyes down. She held that pose for a few seconds, her own small moment of silence.

  Then she straightened up. “Why don’t you come upstairs? We can talk in the conference room.”

  “Thank you. That would be great.”

  I stepped into the elevator and she punched the button for the fifth floor.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’d take you to my office but the associates have to share. Only the partners get their own.”

  “I understand. It’s no problem.”

  The door slid shut just as slowly as it had opened. The elevator had apparently not been renovated along with the rest of the building. It groaned and creaked underneath us as it summoned the momentum to begin its journey.

  As soon as it finally got underway, Zabrina said, “So how did you know Joseph and I were dating?”

  I resisted—barely—the urge to blurt, You were?! I was glad she had her attention focused on the lighted numbers above the door that were tracking our upward progress, because it meant she didn’t see my jaw drop.

  Once I composed myself, I said, “Oh, well, you know how gossipy Rotary people are.”

  “I thought we kept it pretty quiet. You must be a good reporter.”

  “Just lucky, mostly,” I said, which was truer than she knew.

  At least now I understood Tujuka Okeke’s disgust with her ex-husband. Sure, they were divorced. But this might have been the first time he had found comfort in the arms of another woman. Even if Joseph remained devoted to his family, Tujuka would have resented the intrusion and the possible disruption to their well-oiled coparenting routine. Plus, just because she didn’t want him anymore didn’t mean she wanted someone else to have him. Jealousy and reason are only intermittent pen pals.

  I wondered if Maryam knew about her dad’s squeeze. I suppose it was possible for a father to hide a girlfriend from a daughter he didn’t live with. Maryam obviously hadn’t said anything about her dad dating; but, then again, I hadn’t explicitly asked her, either. It made me ponder what else she had left out.

  “It had really only been going on for a little while,” Zabrina said, filling the silence I had given her in ways Maryam had not. “I mean, the attraction had been there for a while, I guess. He’s a very handsome man. Have you ever seen a picture of him?”

  “No,” I said, as we arrived at the fifth floor.

  She pointed to the conference room, which was directly opposite the elevator. “Wait in there. Let me just grab my phone.”

  I walked into the conference room. It was standard-issue corporate, which meant it gave me a minor case of the creeps. Your typical reporter is a free-range animal who needs large, open spaces in which to graze. It does not thrive in captivity.

  “This is Joseph,” Zabrina said as she returned to the room, closing the door behind her. Holding out her phone, she showed me a photograph of the two of them that appeared to have been taken at a Rotary Club meeting. Joseph had his arm tightly clamped around Zabrina’s shoulder. He was dark-complexioned, with short hair. I recognized the cheekbones and the wide set of the eyes, both of which he had passed to his daughter.

  “Isn’t he gorgeous?” she added.

  As a rule, I tend not to be the greatest judge of the gorgeousness of other dudes. This probably explains why my first date to the Homecoming Dance was named Kara, not Karl. But I felt like it was only polite to summon some enthusiasm. “Oh … yes,” I said. “He’s a … a fine-looking man.”

  “Yeah, and it doesn’t hurt that he had his own job and made his own money,” Zabrina added. “Let me tell you, there are not a lot of single black men in Newark who can say that. Trust me. I grew up here.”

  This was mildly
surprising. There are not, to my knowledge, a profusion of black female accountants. There are even fewer black female accountants who grew up in Newark.

  Sensing an opening to pry into her past—and wanting to get her talking freely before I turned the conversation to her erstwhile boyfriend—I said, “Do you want to sit?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure,” she said. She sat at the head of the table. I selected the corner next to her, the one that faced the door.

  “So obviously you decided to stay close to home,” I said.

  “I don’t know if you could call it a decision. I was the typical dumb ghetto girl. I got pregnant at sixteen, dropped out of high school. I thought my baby daddy was going to support us.”

  She laughed at the absurdity of the idea. “He was gone before the baby was even born.”

  “It’s a pretty long way from single teenaged mom in Newark to the conference room of Lacks and Ragland,” I said. “How’d you swing that?”

  “Eventually I grew up. It just took a while. I think my boy was about eight when he said, ‘But, Mama, why do I have to go to school? You didn’t and you’re doing fine.’ We were living in Section Eight housing. I was working two jobs that both paid minimum wage. And I was like, ‘Baby, I am not doing fine.’ That’s when I decided to get my GED. Then I just kept going. I got my associate, then my bachelor’s, then my accounting degree. I realized I was his biggest role model, so I wanted to show him what his mama could do. I passed my CPA exam the same month my son graduated high school.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s quite a slog.”

  “Yeah,” she said, leaning back in her conference chair and crossing her legs.

  “How long have you been working here?”

  “Six years,” she said.

  At that point, I felt like she was properly warmed up. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say I realized she was a natural and unabashed sharer: someone who freely laid out the details of her life to a stranger. She had walked a certain path, one filled with both mistakes and triumphs. But she owned every single step and misstep. It was hard not to like someone like that. And I say that not just because it made the job of the journalist easier.

  I pulled out my notepad, opened to a blank page, and said, “So tell me about you and Joseph.”

  * * *

  They had met shortly after she joined Rotary, at a time when they were both embarking on major life transitions.

  She had just taken a job at Lacks & Ragland, the beginning of her ascension to the bourgeoisie. He was in the throes of a divorce that would finally free him from a marriage that hadn’t really survived its trip to America.

  He was kind, thoughtful, and well-read, and she liked him immediately. But dating wasn’t really in the picture for either of them.

  Then, slowly, the picture changed. Over the course of a few years, they fell into a pattern where they often sat at the same table during Rotary meetings. She was rising through the ranks, first becoming the chapter treasurer, then its vice president. He was an active member who had spearheaded their most recent scholarship drive. He never missed a meeting unless he was out of the country on business.

  Soon she recognized she missed him when he was gone. And that when he was there, she would seek out his table. He seemed to be doing the same. Finally, he asked her if she wanted to have coffee sometime.

  “At first I didn’t even get that he was asking me on a date. It had been so long since a guy had even tried to date me. In the ’hood, the guys are mostly like, ‘Hey, baby, you want to git wit dis?’”—she affected a cocky head shake while pointing to her crotch, then interrupted herself with laughter—“It’s like I didn’t even know dating existed.”

  Coffee led to lunch. Lunch led to dinner. They eventually introduced the other to their kids. I mentioned I had met Maryam, which caused Zabrina to take on a briefly maternal glow.

  “She’s such a good kid,” Zabrina said. “And so smart. Did you know she was a National Merit Scholar? That kid is going someplace. I wish my son had his act half as together as that girl.”

  Not wanting to get into an examination of Zabrina’s offspring, I steered the conversation back to Joseph. It sounded like each escalation of the relationship only happened after the appropriate measure of time. They were two grown-ups with busy lives and enough scars that no one was sprinting into anything. But there was an inevitability to it, at least in the version Zabrina was giving me.

  About eight months ago, they had started spending the night at each other’s place. It was understood that maybe, someday, they would move in together. They talked about having a Newark pad and then going in on a place down at the shore once Zabrina saved a little more and Joseph got out from under tuition payments.

  And maybe, at some point in the future, they would make it legal. There was no hurry on either end.

  She was just telling me about how they were planning their first vacation together when a constipated-looking white man with a bad suit and a worse haircut opened the door without knocking.

  “You have the Sawyer audit done yet?” he demanded. Then he registered my presence, and, as an afterthought, added, “Sorry to interrupt.” He said it in that sorry-not-sorry way.

  “Hello, Benn, good afternoon,” she said, which only emphasized his brusqueness. “Yes, it’ll be done before I leave today.”

  “Good. We need it,” he said, then departed without another word.

  As soon as the door closed behind him, Zabrina said, “That’s Benn, with two n’s, because it’s short for Bennington,” she said. Then, after a beat, she interjected, “Yeah, I work for a jerk.”

  I laughed. “Lots of people do.”

  “I know, I just … the way they treat me is like I’m half a person. I’ve got my degrees, just like them. But because I got my degrees online when I was in my thirties, it’s like they don’t count around here. Like, I’m sorry I’m a single mom who didn’t go to college straight out of high school and kill my brain cells in a fraternity basement like you did. I’m sorry I can’t talk about whether my school’s football team is playing in a bowl game. But, you know what? My degree is just as good as yours. And I passed the CPA exam just like you did.”

  “Yeah,” I said, just to say something.

  “They’re glad they have Zabrina From The ’Hood, because they can be like, ‘Look, we’re all diverse. We got a black woman working here. We got a true Newarker working here.’ But when it comes time to talk about who’s going to get a promotion or make partner next, Zabrina From The ’Hood doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “You could go to another firm,” I suggested.

  “I know, I just … my mother is here. My brother is here. My grandmother is still alive. I’ve got aunts and uncles. Newark is home, you know?”

  I nodded. There were places that really did embrace diversity, not just tokenism. A firm like that would love to have Zabrina Coleman-Webster. But, ultimately, I wasn’t here to offer career advice. She’d either punch through the glass ceiling here or not.

  “Going back to Joseph,” I said. “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “The night it happened. He had actually just left my place. He was going to spend the night, but then he remembered he had left some papers at his place and he had a meeting first thing, so he decided—”

  She got quiet for a moment. Zabrina From The ’Hood was a tough specimen, one who jumped over barriers of a magnitude that a suburban-bred, Amherst-educated WASP like me could only imagine. That’s not some version of white guilt talking. That’s just the truth. The only people who couldn’t recognize that growing up poor and black in Newark was a fundamentally different version of the American experience were … well, they were constipated-looking jerks named Benn.

  She pulled herself together and resumed: “He decided he wanted to get them that night. He was on his way home when he … when it happened. I didn’t even know about it until the next night. The police notify next of kin. They don’t notify girlfriends.”


  “How’d you find out?”

  “I knew something was wrong. We would normally text each other during the day and when I didn’t hear from him I started calling him. And then when I didn’t hear from him I finally called Tujuka.”

  “Wow, you must have been pretty desperate to do that.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, calling your boyfriend’s ex … I mean, I can’t imagine you and Tujuka get along all that famously.”

  “Oh, we’re fine,” Zabrina said. “I think it helps that we’re both single moms. We sort of understand where the other is coming from. I told her right off the bat that Joseph’s commitment to his kids came first. From that point on, we’ve been good.”

  I wasn’t so sure they were as good as she thought they were, given the way Tujuka slammed the door at the mention of her dead husband’s name. But I asked, “When you called, what did she tell you?”

  “I was like, ‘I’m sorry to bother you, but have you heard from Joseph? I can’t get a hold of him and I’m starting to worry.’ And that’s when she told me that Joseph had been shot during a carjacking. The police didn’t know any more than that. And from what they’re telling Tujuka, they probably won’t ever know. Unless they recover the car. But I’m sure they won’t.”

  “Did the police talk to you at all?”

  “I don’t even think they know about me. Like I said, Joseph and I kept things pretty quiet.”

  I let that breathe for a moment, to see if she would add anything else. But nothing came out.

  “Have you been out to the intersection where it happened?” I asked.