The Fraud

by Brad Parks

  An electrician sought them out because that’s where a circuit was completed, allowing the current to flow. For a reporter, contact points—or intersections, or crossroads, or whatever you wanted to call the place where two things connected—were often where stories came together and found their flow.

  That was true whether you were talking literally or metaphorically; whether you were referring to differing ideologies, policies, problems—or, in this case, people.

  Joseph Okeke and Kevin Tiemeyer had come into contact on a golf course. Some kind of circuit had been completed that day. I didn’t yet know what the circuit was, or what purpose it was supposed to serve, or what larger system it was part of. But less than a month later, both men were dead, victims of carjackings gone wrong.

  And that did not seem like happenstance. A carjacking was supposed to be a random event, a wrong-place-wrong-time-wrong-car, sorry-you-got-hit-by-lightning kind of thing. It did not seek you out because of your relationships, and certainly not because of your golf pairings. It should have been no more predictable than winning the lottery.

  Except, of course, this being New Jersey, there was always the possibility someone had rigged the drawing.

  But who? And how? And when? And to what exact end?

  Did Earl Karlinsky have something to do with it? Or was his hostility toward me—and his peculiar edginess toward the subject of Kevin Tiemeyer—unrelated to a round of golf that had taken place at his club a month earlier?

  I wasn’t at a point where I could even dream up the answers, but I was going to have to find some, and quickly. My article was supposed to run in Sunday’s paper, which meant I needed to have it done by a reasonable hour on Saturday. And I couldn’t exactly turn in some gee-whiz thumb-sucker of a story about two guys from different background who were killed in unrelated carjackings if the carjackings were not, in fact, unrelated.

  After returning to the bar, where my slightly extended absence had not been noticed, I made some casual inquiries as to whether anyone had seen or interacted with Joseph Okeke during his visit to Fanwood. It made sense a tall, ebony-skinned African man would have been noticed in a place where the membership was not noted for its abundance of melanin. But no one claimed to have seen him.

  Eventually, I felt like I had wrung out all the moisture I was going to get from this particular washcloth. I offered my thank-yous to Doc Fierro, whose remarkable liver seemed to be having little trouble keeping up with its workload.

  Mine was feeling taxed and I had stopped at two beers, which I had consumed over the course of two and a half hours. This, according to a chart I recalled from a long-ago high school health class, meant I was sober enough to drive.

  On my way out, I was momentarily blinded by a bank of lights that had been set up next to the clubhouse, where one of the local television stations was doing a stand-up. Karlinsky must have been outvoted on that one. Either that or he didn’t have the same objection to cameras as he did to notebooks.

  I can’t say my reaction to them was quite as charitable. In my ranking of Things I Like, local TV news has a slot somewhere between infectious diseases and bedbugs. Except, of course, you can’t inoculate yourself against them and no amount of fumigating seems to get rid of them.

  It’s nothing personal. On an individual level, most of them are quite acceptable. But when you put them all together and made them chase the same dwindling ratings, it became a race to reach the lowest common denominator.

  There were times when I worried the newspaper business might be heading that way. One newspaper I knew had slashed all of its reporters’ salaries but offered a deal wherein they could make up what they had lost via incentive pay tied to the number of clicks their stories received online. So, basically, the only way the reporters could pay their mortgages was if they wrote stories that popped up when teenage boys googled things like “Taylor Swift naked.”

  The fallacy, of course, is that all clicks are created equal. Let the record be clear that they’re not. Quality matters. It mattered when all news was printed on dead trees. It continues to matter now that it’s all binary code sliding through the well-oiled tubes of the Interwebs.

  I tried to give this particular TV news crew a little credit and not make assumptions about them. Maybe they were attempting to elevate the discourse.

  And then, as I walked past, I overheard a frosty-haired blonde report, with all due earnestness, “and the members here at Fanwood Country Club say he never said a bad word about anyone. Back to you, Andy.”

  I’m fairly certain, out of courtesy to my fellow media professionals, that I kept my response muted. But if someone were to take the initiative to put that footage into a audio enhancer and crank up the background noise, the last thing they would hear was a newspaper reporter making a scoffing noise.

  * * *

  My first order of business, after I got in my car, was to find a roadside pizzeria. Some people drink coffee to sober up. Not being a fan of that concoction, I have found grease and crust to be an adequate substitute.

  Luckily, in the Garden State, such establishments offering these salves are never far. Once there, I ordered and then consumed two slices of sausage. Back in the car, and feeling more level-headed, I checked in with Chillax, whose voice mail informed me I had selected the worst way to reach him, and that he much preferred texts or e-mails. Being as I much preferred to actually talk to a human being, that left us at a standoff that would have to be resolved at a later time.

  It was now a little after eight o’clock, an acceptable hour for a reporter not on deadline to call it a night. But I felt like I had one more phone call in me, and I knew who I wanted to be the recipient of that call: Zabrina Coleman-Webster.

  I am a member of the One Great Source school of reporting. In most stories—or on most beats—there is one source who will become your go-to, the sage voice who helps you assemble all the pieces into a more cogent whole.

  The trick, of course, is knowing when you’ve found that person, and cultivating them properly once you do. I was hoping, as I dialed her number, that Zabrina might be it for this story.

  “Hello?” she answered. I could hear the television on in the background.

  “Hey, Zabrina, Carter Ross with the Eagle-Examiner.”

  “Oh, hey.”

  “Sorry to bother you again. Am I catching you at an okay time for a quick question or two?”

  “Yeah, sure. Shoot.”

  “I was wondering if Joseph ever mentioned the name Kevin Tiemeyer.”

  There was no immediate response. “Hang on,” she said, muting the volume on the TV. Finally, she said, “Did you say Kevin Tiemeyer?”

  “That’s right.”

  Another pause was followed by: “No. Not that I remember. Is that a name I should know?”

  “Well, if you’ve been listening to the news today, he’s the banker who was killed in a carjacking last night.”

  “Oh, yeah, I knew it sounded familiar. But what does that have to do with Joseph?”

  “Almost a month ago, a week and a day before Joseph was killed to be exact, they golfed together at Fanwood Country Club.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s strange.”

  “Yeah, I know. That’s why I’m trying to figure out what happened that day. Did Joseph mention anything about it?”

  “I remember him saying he was going to play Fanwood. He was excited about it. I don’t think I asked who he was playing with. Joseph had a lot of business contacts. If he found out one of them was a golfer, he usually played with them at one point or another. He was always looking for an excuse to go out.”

  “Was Tiemeyer a business contact?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Did he say anything about how he and Tiemeyer knew each other?”

  “No. I never heard that name before today,” Zabrina said. “Joseph and I didn’t talk a lot about work. Well, actually, that’s not true: I talked about work all the time. I probably talked the poor man’
s ear off. But he didn’t say much. He’d mention stuff now and then, but it’s not like he told me about every minute of every day, you know?”

  Which meant Zabrina’s chances of becoming my One Great Source were looking dim. But I took a stab with another question anyway: “Did he ever mention the name Earl Karlinsky?”

  “Karlinsky,” she repeated. “Now, I do know that name. But help me out: who is Earl Karlinsky?”

  “He’s the general manager at Fanwood Country Club.”

  “Oh, yeah, now wait a second,” she said. “That definitely rings a bell. Yes, yes. You know, I had forgotten about this until just now, but Joseph said that a Mr. Karlinsky approached him after his round and asked him if he wanted to sell his car.”

  “That’s … kind of odd.”

  “I know.”

  “What did Joseph say about it?”

  “Oh, he loved talking about that car. I don’t think he minded. It struck me as a strange thing. But Mr. Karlinsky said he had been looking for a late-model BMW and he wanted to know if Joseph would be willing to part with his. He asked Joseph all kinds of questions about the car.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “Oh, like what features did it have, what add-ons had he gotten with it, that sort of thing.”

  Which are the kind of questions you might ask someone whose car you were planning to buy.

  Or whose car you were planning to steal.

  I hustled Zabrina off the phone before I unloaded a whole lot of unsubstantiated babble on her. But it turned out she was a pretty good source, after all—without even knowing it.

  Because my brain was already whirring on this.

  Was that the circuit being completed at Fanwood Country Club? Was Earl Karlinsky somehow marking club members and their guests for carjacking?

  I thought back to my first reaction to strolling through that parking lot: that it was a carjacker’s paradise. Karlinsky must have seen it that way, too, and then eventually decided to profit from it.

  No sane human being would attempt to pull off armed carjackings at the gates of Fanwood Country Club. If you looked at a ratio of dollars budgeted to violent crimes committed, the Scotch Plains–Fanwood Police Department was probably about a hundred times better resourced than its Newark equivalent. And that was a conservative estimate.

  Karlinsky was simply finding good targets in Fanwood. He could walk through the parking lot, casing it for new vehicles with a high resale value. He probably knew which members worked in Newark regularly and which ones didn’t.

  From there, it was just a matter of slapping a tracking device on the vehicles that fit the profile he was looking for. Then, his associates in Newark—and I was assuming Karlinsky was part of a crew that pulled this off—would plug into the data from the tracking device. They could wait until the time was right and then strike.

  It was modern carjacking, a method that took the randomness out of the equation. Why hang around all night on a street corner in Newark and wait for the right vehicle to come along? It was much more efficient to pick the vehicle ahead of time, know where it was at all times, and strike when you were good and ready.

  Or at least that’s how I was imagining it all. My problem now, of course, was that outside of my own wild speculation, I had nothing in the way of hard evidence to prove it. I had a round of golf between two men and a conversation between one of those men and a golf club’s general manager. The rest was conjecture, nothing I would put in the newspaper.

  But it was only Tuesday. There was time to solidify it. The first thing to do was prove this was no coincidence. If there had been a rash of carjackings among Fanwood members, it would go a long way toward supporting my theory.

  I quickly tapped out an e-mail to Doc Fierro, thanking him for his hospitality and asking him if he wouldn’t mind sharing with me a Fanwood membership list—which I would, of course, treat with all due discretion. If he balked, I would tell him why I needed it. Doc would recognize the greater good I was trying to achieve.

  Once I established a correlation between Newark carjackings and Fanwood Country Club’s parking lot, I would then have to prove that Karlinsky was the causative element. I didn’t know exactly how I’d do that.

  But, again, it was only Tuesday. There was time.

  * * *

  Having driven home and gotten myself more comfortably attired, I was just winding down toward sleep when my phone blurped with a text message. I had been on the couch of my tidy, two-bedroom Bloomfield abode, reading Sue Grafton’s latest (I had finally made it to W, and it made me hope the letter Z would never come). Deadline, my black-and-white domestic short-haired cat, was on my lap, doing his best to imitate a puddle of goo.

  The text was from Tina. And, like most things coming from Tina, it surprised me: “Can I come over?” it read.

  I wrote back: “Of course. I’ll be up.”

  Setting my phone down on the coffee table, I asked Deadline, “I wonder what that’s about?”

  He indicated his intense interest in this conversation by keeping his eyes screwed shut and holding the remainder of his body perfectly still. I ran my thumb along the path between his eyes and up to the top of his head until his purrs began making his whole body vibrate. Make no mistake: Deadline is the most easily contented roommate, male or female, I’ve ever had.

  I returned to my book for another thirty minutes or so until I heard Tina’s footsteps on the front porch. She didn’t need me to open the front door—I had given her a key to my place, without much fanfare or commentary, a few months earlier—but I still poured Deadline off my lap so I could get to my feet and greet her.

  The woman who entered my house sort of looked like Tina. She had Tina’s protruding midsection and Tina’s pregnancy-thickened curly brown hair. It’s just her face that had turned into a reddened, blotchy mess. You didn’t have to be the Eagle-Examiner’s ace investigative reporter to know she had been crying.

  “Hey, what’s the matter?” I asked.

  She rushed toward me, another unexpected development, and buried her nose in my neck, wrapping her arms around my shoulders. Her body was heaving in a distinctly nonrhythmic fashion and I could feel her tears against my skin.

  As a keen interpreter of nonverbal cues, I sensed that she was upset. I still had no idea what was going on. But being that I have long experience playing the part of the Confused Male—sadly, it doesn’t involve much acting most of the time—I just held on to her and let her shake for a while. I ran my hand along her head and rubbed the spots on her back that had been sore from the second trimester on.

  “Can we sit down?” she asked finally.

  “Of course,” I said, and led her over to the couch, where I assisted in lowering her onto its surface. She depressed the cushions enough that Deadline sort of just rolled against her side, like he was being drawn by her gravitational pull.

  “Can I get you a tissue?” I asked.

  She nodded. I went into my bathroom and retrieved the whole box. Back when this was strictly a bachelor pad, I never kept tissues in the house—they are, to my mind, completely redundant with toilet paper and/or paper towels. But I had been made to understand this viewpoint was less than fully civilized.

  “What’s going on?” I asked after I handed the tissues to her and settled into the couch next to her.

  She blew her nose several times, leaving the spent wads resting on the shelf created by the top of her belly.

  “Brodie had a heart attack,” she said at last.

  “Aw, Jesus,” I said, because I was momentarily incapable of saying anything more cogent.

  “He was just out near the copy desk, jingling the change in his pocket, looking over people’s shoulders, creeping them out a bit—the usual things he’s done ten thousand times. I was out there helping Gary with a headline and the next thing I knew someone was saying, ‘Brodie, are you okay?’

  “I looked over and he had his hand on his chest and the weirdest expression on his face. I’
ve never seen anything like it. He was totally bewildered about what was happening. And then he just collapsed. It’s like someone shot him or something. His eyes were rolled back in his head. It was so scary and horrible. He was practically right next to me.”

  As Tina spoke, I was just staring at a spot on the floor, thinking about Brodie. He had been with the paper for nearly fifty years. For the last quarter century or more, he had commanded it as executive editor. He was our unquestioned leader.

  But he was more than that. He was our heart, our soul, our conscience. We all looked to him—for his guidance, his experience, and his wisdom, yes; but also for the joy that he brought to newspapering, day in, day out.

  It was a trait we desperately needed. In a world where deadlines are measured by the minute and never stop coming, there is an incredible burnout factor. But even more insidious than that is complacency. After enough years, there’s this tendency to forget the importance of what you’re doing. After all, what’s one more murder? One more plane crash? One more scandal?

  Brodie never lost his enthusiasm for the big story. It’s like it was new for him every time. He understood that we had a sacred trust with readers: they paid attention to us and bought our paper because we worked our asses off to get things right, with every issue we put out, and he wanted to make damn sure we followed through on our end of the promise. There was something about seeing a seventysomething-year-old man charging around like his ass was burning that lit a fire under the rest of us.

  I thought back to one of the first run-ins I ever had with him. I had to earn the trust of some gang members I needed to interview, so I smoked pot with them. I was still stoned as I walked into the building, where I bumped into Brodie smelling like I had just come from a Cheech and Chong marathon. Far from being upset with me, he was delighted—absolutely delighted—that one of his reporters had gone to such lengths to get a story.

  That was Brodie. He was, above all else, a newspaperman. At a time when the breed is becoming extinct, maybe that made him unfashionable. But if that was the case, I aspired to be just as out of style as he was.