The Fraud

by Brad Parks

  After a diligent, two-minute search, I eventually found the Ballantine’s. (For the record: it’s near the rotgut, one aisle over from the firewater, and one shelf up from the hooch.) I grabbed two bottles of it, and took them up to the register.

  There, I found a charming, linguistically fractured sign that read: WE DONT EXCEPT CREDIT CARDS. THERE HAVE BEEN TO MANY FRAUDULANT CHARGES. CASH ONLY.

  I dug into my wallet and managed to find two twenties, which I passed under a small slit in the bulletproof glass to a man who accepted—yes, accepted—the bills, which were not, in fact, fraudulent. He handed me my change without comment, then slipped me two brown paper bags with the unspoken understanding that I would likely be joining his other patrons outside.

  My WASPish instincts compelled me to disabuse him of this notion, so I lobbed up a lame, “I sure hope my friend likes this scotch.”

  The man behind the counter looked at me like he neither believed me nor cared. I left the store, withstood some halfhearted panhandling from the men outside—who couldn’t exactly claim they weren’t going to use the money for booze—and completed my journey back to the office.

  Once inside the building, I quickly checked in on Tina, who informed me she was fine and her morning was fine and the baby was fine and everything else was fine. But she was saying it in a way that led me to believe that if I didn’t leave her alone, I would very quickly not be fine.

  Her stress, I could guess, was Brodie-related. I had only been in the newsroom for a few minutes, but it felt like his heart attack had projected gloom on all who entered.

  Most of it was concern for a revered man’s health, of course, but a small part of it was uncertainty about the future as well. Brodie’s stalwart presence was one of the few givens in the ever-changing multivariable equation that was the newspaper industry. He was our rock.

  I think we all understood there was no guarantee a seventysomething-year-old coming off a major heart attack would return to work. And even if he did, his aura would never be quite the same. There was no pretending the old man was invincible anymore. Our rock had been fractured.

  Then there was the even more pressing question: in the likely event Brodie stepped aside, who would our new boss be? The leading inside candidates would have to be Eberhardt and Looper. They had been around almost as long as Brodie and would be able to carry on his legacy, albeit without his legendary stature.

  An outside hire would be a far more menacing proposition. My fear, of course, is that it would be some Web whiz we lured away from Google, a tablet-toting, pulp-loathing technophile who would be given some odious title like “Director of Content” and lecture us about the importance of search engine optimization.

  The mere idea of it made me want to run back to the liquor store and double my order.

  * * *

  Given where my thoughts had wandered, I found comfort in locating the prehistoric Buster Hays in his usual spot: sitting at his desk, injuring his keyboard.

  He had a pair of granny glasses perched on the end of his nose. I was able to distinguish his paisley tie from the one he had worn the days before because the stains were in different places.

  “Okay, I have traded my shame for these two bottles of devil spirits,” I said. “Talk to me.”

  With great ceremony, I presented him the brown paper bags. He peered inside both. Satisfied, he placed them next to his briefcase on the floor.

  He returned his attention to the keyboard and delivered his findings in typically brusque fashion. “I got a name for you on the driver of the Cadillac CTS.”

  “Really?” I said. “I don’t mean to underestimate you, Buster, but I didn’t think your guy on the task force would give that up.”

  “I told him you’d get the driver’s permission before you put his name in the paper.”

  “Yeah, but, still, aren’t they worried about witness intimidation if we print the vic’s name?”

  “Think about it, Ivy: whoever stole that car already knows the victim’s name and address. It’s printed on his insurance card and registration, which ninety-eight percent of Americans keep in their glove box.”

  “Good point.”

  “Plus, it doesn’t sound like there was much to witness,” Buster said, then tore a sheet from the notepad next to his keyboard. “Here.”

  The paper contained the name Justin Waters and an address in Chatham, a well-to-do town to the west of Newark.

  “Great,” I said. “And did they get anywhere with that country club membership list?”

  “I gave it to my guy. He said he’d run through it and get back to me.”

  “Thanks, Buster,” I said. “Enjoy the scotch.”

  “I will. Now go away.”

  I obliged him, returning to my desk and pulling up my own list of Fanwood members. The name Justin Waters was not on it. Then again, neither was the name Joseph Okeke. Chatham wasn’t very far from Fanwood. Mr. Waters could have been another Fanwood guest who had unwittingly driven his GPS-tracked car into Newark and the waiting arms of a gang of carjackers.

  After a few keystrokes, I had Waters’s home telephone number. I called it and heard a chipper voice telling me he wasn’t home. I left a message.

  Chances were good he was still in the hospital. The fact that he was healthy enough to walk there suggested he wouldn’t be there for too long. Still, he had been shot in the neck. The emergency room doctor wasn’t exactly going to tell him to rub some dirt on it and go home.

  I played a game of what-if that I sincerely hoped I would never have to participate in: if I were shot in the hundred block of Washington Street, what hospital would I stagger to?

  The map in my brain came up with Saint Michael’s Medical Center. It was definitely the closest facility. If I struck out there, I’d try another nearby hospital.

  I was just about to call it when my cell phone started ringing from a number I didn’t recognize.

  “Carter Ross,” I said.

  “Hey, Carter, it’s Zabrina Coleman-Webster,” I heard.

  “Yeah, hey, Zabrina, how are you?”

  “I’m good. I’ve been thinking about our conversation yesterday and wanted to talk some more.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What about?”

  She lowered her voice. “I don’t really want to talk about it here, if that’s okay.”

  Recalling that she was forced to share an office, I said, “That’s fine. I need some lunch anyway. How about we both grab a sandwich and meet in Military Park in twenty minutes.”

  “That’d be great,” she said.

  “Talk to you soon,” I said, then hit the END button on my phone. Wasting no time, I picked up my desk phone and dialed the number for Saint Michael’s.

  Mind you, not the number for the public relations staff. Thanks to an irritating piece of legislation know as HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, hospitals couldn’t release any information about a patient—or even say whether a patient was a patient—unless they were expressly permitted to do so. I’m sure it was a great advance for the privacy rights of those under medical care. For a newspaper reporter, it was like persistent bedsores.

  Thankfully, there was nothing in HIPAA that said I couldn’t just call up a patient and hope for the best. I hit the buttons needed to reach an operator, then asked for Justin Waters’s room.

  Two rings later, I heard, “Hello.”

  “Hi, Justin,” I said, assuming I had reached the man himself. “My name is Carter Ross. I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner.”

  “Oh, hi,” he said, as if this was just another part of being in the hospital, not that different from an impromptu visit by the chaplain.

  “I wanted to talk with you about your carjacking last night for an investigative piece I’m writing about the subject. Are you up for it?”

  “Yeah, sure, I guess,” he said, good-naturedly.

  I asked how he was feeling—sore, he said—then ran quickly through his background. He was a lawy
er who worked at a firm in Basking Ridge. He liked to go into Newark for the nightlife. It wasn’t hard for me to deduce why. From his voice, I could tell he was a young black man. Yet the town where he lived, lovely Chatham, tended to be populated by older white folks who like to roll up the sidewalks at 9:30 P.M.

  Then I got around to the incident itself. He walked me through the most terrifying five minutes of his life: how he left the bar after “one or two” drinks around 12:30 A.M.; how he stopped at a light along Washington Street, not really thinking about much of anything; how a kid wearing a blue ski mask ran up to him, gun first; how that sight made him react instinctively, and his instincts told him to stomp on the gas.

  “It was totally, totally stupid,” he said. “I know I should have just given him the car. It’s not even my car. It belongs to my firm. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  He remembered the sound of the gun going off but blacked out after that. His next memory involved staggering into the Saint Michael’s emergency room. He was dazed and bleeding from wounds to his face and neck. Luckily, all were relatively superficial. The bullet had only really grazed his neck, just barely missing his carotid artery.

  “One inch over and you’d be writing my obituary,” he cheerfully informed me.

  Instead, he was patched up and awaiting his release from Saint Michael’s at any moment. We shared our relief over that fact, and over the vicissitudes of life, which can leave one feeling enormously grateful over something as horrible as a carjacking. The gift of life is never fully appreciated until it’s nearly taken away.

  We were getting along so famously, I just kept rolling with the questions.

  “So don’t ask me why I’m asking this,” I said. “But have you played golf recently at Fanwood Country Club?”

  He hadn’t. Likewise, he had never met a man named Earl Karlinsky. But he also wasn’t the only driver of the car. His firm was located within walking distance from a train station and had made a deal with its lawyers: take the train to work, bill hours while you ride, and the firm would maintain a small fleet of cars for their personal use during or after work. Any one of five partners and eleven other associates could have used the vehicle.

  I would have to check the law firm’s Web site for the names of the other attorneys to see if any of them were Fanwood members. If one of them had played as a guest or just visited there, it was going to be beyond my investigative grasp. I didn’t have the time or desire to track down sixteen lawyers and ask them about their recent golf outings.

  “Okay, so strange question number two: do you have the VIN number for the Cadillac, by any chance?”

  He didn’t. But before I hung up, he promised he would check in with the office assistant who farmed out the cars and get it from her, then e-mail it to me later.

  I didn’t even have to tell him I wanted it because I may well have located the vehicle in question. Justin Waters did not seem concerned about justice, vengeance, or any of the other petty desires with which human beings sometimes consume themselves.

  He was just happy to be alive.

  CHAPTER 27

  There are people who live or work near Military Park in Newark for their entire lives without knowing one cool fact about it: when viewed from above, it is shaped like a sword.

  I only knew it because it was the kind of tidbit regularly shared with me by the great Clement Price, a legendary, beloved—and, alas, late—professor of history at Rutgers-Newark, who spent the final forty-two years of his life teaching Newark where it came from.

  By the time I arrived at Military Park—still driving Tina’s Volvo, because I had forgotten to swap keys with her—I could already see Zabrina, who was sitting along the outer edge of the park on a bench.

  I parked near her at a metered spot, fed it a half-hour’s worth of quarters, then ambled out. Zabrina had a white wrapper open next to her on the bench and smiled as I approached the bench.

  “You forgot your sandwich,” she said.

  “Yeah, I had a quick interview to do, so I didn’t have time to grab one.”

  “You can have the other half of mine if you’re interested,” she said. “I was just going to bring it home anyway. It’s turkey with Swiss cheese. It’s delish.”

  She extended half a sub toward me. It was still wrapped, but I didn’t need to give it much of an inspection. While some people think it’s congenital, it is, in fact, an acquired characteristic: newspaper reporters are incapable of turning down free food.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I sat down next to her. We chewed in silence for a moment. Military Park recently received a much-needed face-lift and was now quite the showpiece. Across from the park to the east, there were Newark icons like the New Jersey Performing Arts Center; the New Jersey Historical Society; and WBGO, a public radio station with a small news crew whose work I admired—sometimes grudgingly so, when they beat me to a story. To the west of the park, Prudential Insurance was completing the building that would serve as its new world headquarters.

  It made Military Park a part of Newark that felt like a thriving city; a place where you could now sit, enjoy a sandwich, and not have to think about the chronic ills that still wrack other parts of town.

  Zabrina broke our brief reverie with, “My mama taught me that when you mess up, you best just say so and apologize for it, so everyone can get on with it.”

  “I see. And how did you mess up?”

  “Yesterday, when you came by, I said some things I probably shouldn’t have said to the newspaper.”

  I didn’t groan out loud. Just internally. The backtracking source is one of the more annoying animals in the newspaper forest. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the more common. People were constantly trying to take things off the record.

  She continued: “I just … Joseph really valued his privacy. He was pretty insistent we not be public about our relationship. He always said it wasn’t anyone’s business but ours and I … I pretty much agreed with him. But then you came and somehow you already knew about Joseph and I, and I just started blabbing about it. I think it was because it felt so good to talk to someone about it.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, opting not to tell her I actually hadn’t known a thing about it until she had told me.

  “But I really shouldn’t have done that. And I apologize for that. It was wrong. Just because Joseph … isn’t with us anymore doesn’t mean I still shouldn’t honor his wishes.

  “Uh,” she groaned. “That was, like, a triple negative. Anyhow, I guess what I’m saying is, it wasn’t anyone’s business back then and it’s no one’s business now. Would it be okay if you just leave that part out?”

  There are no set rules about how to respond when someone is trying to retract statements they’ve already made. The hard line is to tell them, essentially, tough luck: you said it; it was on the record at the time; therefore, I own it. The other possibility is, of course, to give them a break.

  I usually base my response on the source themselves. If it is, say, a politician—or some other public figure with long experience in dealing with the media—I usually laugh them right out of the room. Because they should know better.

  But if it’s a civilian—say the local Rotary Club president who seldom, if ever, dealt with the press—I usually cut them some slack. Especially when, as in this case, it was not information crucial to the story.

  Plus, she had given me a sandwich.

  “Yeah, I guess I can take that out,” I said, as if I had already written the piece.

  “Thank you,” she said, releasing a breath.

  “But just so we’re clear, what you told me about Joseph’s involvement in Rotary is still fair game, yes?”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s fine.”

  “And the part about how he was heading to his house to get some documents to prepare for a morning meeting. That’s sort of a good detail, because it shows he was just another guy, thinking about work the next day. I can say he had just left a friend’s house. Th
at okay?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Now for the more important part: “And I can still use what you said about Earl Karlinsky asking him about his car.”

  That threw her. “Uh, yeah. Sure. Out of curiosity, why does that matter?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It just shows that it was the kind of car that other people noticed and took interest in and that Joseph was proud of it and liked to talk about it,” I ad-libbed. “It’s like if you asked me about my Volvo over there. I wouldn’t say more than about three words about it. That would tell you something about me, that I’m not really much of a car guy, and maybe that I don’t consider driving a Volvo to be a big part of my personality.”

  Especially since it wasn’t mine. But there didn’t seem any point to adding that. It might involve having to explain my rather complicated relationship with Tina. And I was going to follow Zabrina’s lead and keep that private.

  “Oh, yeah,” Zabrina said. “I never thought about it like that. But I guess that’s why you’re the writer and I’m an accountant.”

  “Trust me, if we switched jobs, I’d be a lot worse at yours than you would be at mine.”

  She laughed. “When is your story going to come out, anyway?”

  Sources were often asking me this question. I had learned, given how little control I had over the process, to be vague about my answer. “Not sure,” I said. “My editors would like it for Sunday. But it could be earlier than that, or later.”

  “Oh. Gotcha,” she said, dabbing a bit of mayonnaise from the corner of her mouth.