The Fraud

by Brad Parks

  CHAPTER 35

  For a second or two, my eyes flitted between Dave Gilbert and the shotgun. Both were quite serious, in their respective fashions.

  “Sweet Thang knows I’m in here,” I said quickly. “If something happens to me, she’ll know it was you.”

  He readjusted the gun, getting a more comfortable grip. He was about twenty feet away. It is a common misconception that it is impossible to miss with a shotgun when firing at close range, because of the spreading action of the pellets. This is not entirely true, inasmuch as a typical buckshot load expands no more than a couple of inches when fired from thirty feet or less.

  Yet while it was theoretically possible for him to miss from this distance, I was not especially keen to offer up my own thin flesh for testing.

  “Who the hell is Sweet Thang?” he asked.

  “Sorry. Lauren McMillan.”

  “Then why isn’t she here?” he demanded. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  By this point, I had made a more thorough accounting of the garage—mostly to look for something I could dive behind. During that examination, I had seen that over in the corner, near where the TV was droning on, there was an inflatable mat with a sleeping bag on it. There was also a duffel bag, stuffed with clothes; a small heating element perched on a milk carton; and a carton of ramen noodles.

  None of it had been there in the morning. I was quite sure I would have noticed. Which told me Gilbert packed it away during the day. Which told me he was hiding it. Which told me Dave Gilbert was more than like squatting here.

  What had Sweet Thang said when she introduced Gilbert to me? I swear, it’s like he lives here. Once again, Sweet Thang’s reporter’s instincts were even better than she realized.

  “Maybe I’m not supposed to be here,” I said. “But neither are you, I’m guessing. Does the Greater Newark Children’s Council know you’re living here?”

  I’m not sure if a mustache can twitch. But I think his did.

  “I’m guessing the Greater Newark Children’s Council also doesn’t know you’re a felon,” I said.

  “They never asked,” he said. “I applied for the job, and there was nothing on the application about it. It never came up during the interview, so I never told them.”

  He shifted the shotgun from one side of his body to the other, keeping his finger close enough to the trigger that I didn’t get any ideas it had provided me with some kind of opportunity for escape.

  “And the Greater Newark Children’s Council probably doesn’t know you’re supplementing your income by running a chop shop out of here,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Come on, Dave. I’m on to you. That Cadillac over there was reported stolen in a carjacking last night.”

  “No, it wasn’t. It was donated to us on Monday by a family who just lost Grandpa and didn’t need it anymore. They gave us the title and everything. It’s legit.”

  “Just stop,” I said. “You’ve basically got two choices right now. You can run away, knowing I’m not going to come after you and hoping the authorities won’t be able to catch you, either. Or you can name names and cooperate with the investigation that—”

  “What investigation? I seriously have no idea what you’re talking about. That car is not stolen.”

  “Yeah? Prove it,” I said. “I’ve got the VIN number of the stolen car in my pocket. Let me take a look at that one over there.”

  And then Dave Gilbert did something I absolutely did not expect. He set the shotgun down on the concrete floor, with the nasty end pointed away from us, and walked over to two red buttons against one of the walls.

  The next thing I knew, the Cadillac was being lowered to floor level.

  “This is ridiculous,” he was fuming as the car came down. “This is part of the reason I left Massachusetts. Once people know about your past, it’s like everything is your fault. If something goes wrong, blame the ex-con. If something goes missing, blame the ex-con.”

  He turned to look at me as the Cadillac neared the end of its descent. “Look, I spent time in prison, okay? You got me. But I didn’t do what the government said I did. They made it out like I was tricking old people out of their retirement money and stealing money from Medicare. All I did was get sloppy with how I did the accounting and screw up some of the Medicare billing. But, seriously, have you ever seen the Medicare regulations? They’re incomprehensible. I bet ninety percent of the assisted living facilities in the country are committing fraud in at least one way, not because they mean to, but because the whole system is so damn confusing it takes a Ph.D. in bureaucratic bullcrap to figure it out.”

  The Cadillac was down on the ground now. I walked over to it and pulled out the pad where I had the VIN number recorded.

  Gilbert was still ranting. “I wasn’t making myself rich, okay? The funny thing is, if I really had been stealing money I could have afforded the kind of lawyers I needed to defend myself. Those cases are so complex, one of the firms that specialized in them wanted a hundred-thousand-dollar retainer just to look at it. And they said it would probably be another two hundred grand if it went to trial. The feds offered eighteen months in exchange for a guilty plea. If we went to trial I was looking at a minimum of ten years.”

  I looked at the VIN number on the dashboard. I looked at the VIN number in my notebook.

  “It doesn’t match,” I said.

  “Of course it doesn’t match. Look, I’m doing my penance here, okay? One of the terms of my plea bargain is that I can’t go anywhere near a facility that gets money from Medicare. So I figured, I can’t work with senior citizens anymore, I’ll try to help out kids. That’s all I’m doing here. I’m being paid nine dollars an hour for twenty hours a week, but between cutting up the cars and the administrative stuff I do, I’m working way more than full time. And, yeah, I’m not making enough to afford my own place, so I crash here. I don’t see who’s being hurt by it.”

  Neither did I. I also realized that, of all the problems in Newark, the fact that a part-time worker at one of the city’s nonprofits was keeping a secret from his boss did not quite rise to the level of something our readership needed to know about.

  “Sorry about the car,” I said. “I just … I jumped to conclusions.”

  “Are you going to write a story about me?” he asked. I could hear the pleading in his voice.

  “To be honest, I’ve got better things to do,” I said.

  “Who else knows?”

  “Just Lauren. But I think you probably know she’s got a heart the size of Asia, and it’s got a big place in it for forgiveness. Just tell her what you told me. She’s all about second chances.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I owe you one.”

  He held out his hand. It was still a little grimy from his day’s work. I didn’t care. I grasped it and gave it a good pump.

  I thought about telling him he didn’t owe me anything. But you never know in this world when you’re going to need a favor.

  * * *

  Having retraced my steps across the courtyard and reentered the office, I found Sweet Thang sitting in her desk chair, bouncing her legs.

  “Well,” she asked?

  “No match,” I said.

  Her legs stopped bouncing. “Oh, thank goodness,” she said, bringing her hand to her chest. “So what do you think I should do about Dave?”

  “Just talk to him sometime. Tell him you saw the article but that as a former newspaper reporter, you understand that’s just the government’s side of the story. Ask him for his.”

  I wasn’t going to mention that if she really wanted to, she could ask him right now. There seemed to be no need to complicate matters any further.

  Sweet Thang was looking up at me with eyes that were big and blue and grateful. “Carter Ross, you are so amazing. I could kiss you.”

  I felt a little tremor in my stomach and quickly yanked my phone out of my pocket. “Oh, my goodness, look at the time,” I said.

  Then
I took a second to actually look at the time. I realized Sweet Thang wasn’t really going to kiss me and that it was just a figure of speech. But, you know, just in case.

  My eyes finally registered the numbers: 6:46 P.M. “Quarter of seven,” I added. “I gotta run.”

  “Actually, can I ask a quick favor? Except maybe it’s not so quick?”

  “Sure.”

  “You can totally say no if you want. But if it’s really, truly not a big deal, would you mind giving me a ride to the train station?”

  “Where’s Walter?”

  I wish Walter was her boyfriend, but it was actually her BMW. It had been a graduation gift from her father. Given the neighborhoods she now frequented, it was a minor miracle I wasn’t writing about her carjacking.

  “In the shop,” she said. “I could try to catch a bus to the train station but the last time I did that at this time of night the bus was like a half-hour late and everyone kept stopping at the bus shelter to ask if I was okay. It was nice, but it was also embarrassing. The entire neighborhood watch turned out just trying to make sure the white girl didn’t get mugged. At one point I had five grandmas sitting there with me.”

  “Yeah, let’s spare them that trouble. Only thing is, I need to do an interview, like, right now. Mind tagging along?”

  “Oh my goodness, that would be so much fun! It’ll be just like old times.”

  Sweet Thang was beaming. So was I, just on the inside. This may have started out as me doing her a favor. Very likely it would end the other way around. One of Sweet Thang’s talents that made me wish she had stayed at the Eagle-Examiner was her ability not just to listen to people, but to make them feel heard. The result was that they opened up to her, telling her things they never planned to tell anyone.

  It was a gift. And in this case I would be the beneficiary. Having Sweet Thang by my side when I interview Tujuka Okeke could only help.

  “Great. I hereby deputize you as Eagle-Examiner intern for the evening,” I said, ignoring the fact that I wasn’t technically an Eagle-Examiner employee myself at the moment. “Hang on a sec. Let me just take care of one thing.”

  I pulled out my phone. Having to drop Sweet Thang at the train station fouled up my time line a little bit. But it was worth it, and I could still keep on schedule, if Tina would be willing to stop at Zabrina’s place and pick up those insurance documents for me. I tapped out a quick e-mail to Tina, asking her to do just that, giving her Zabrina’s address.

  It wouldn’t be a big deal. I mean, yes, I was foisting an errand on a woman who was in her thirty-eighth week of gestation. But it’s not like I was asking her to dig ditches for me. Zabrina’s place was on the way out to Bloomfield. It would involve only the shortest of detours. Tina wouldn’t even have to get out of the car, because Zabrina said she’d run it out. Tina would even be driving the car Zabrina expected to see in her driveway, because it was the one I had taken to our lunch date earlier in the day.

  I sent the message with the necessary details, then saw that Tommy and Chillax had e-mailed me their notes from their interviews with Kevin Tiemeyer’s colleagues.

  “Here,” I said to Sweet Thang, handing her my phone. “Read these on the way. You might as well get up to speed on everything. Now let’s get out of here.”

  Sweet Thang followed me out and hopped into the Malibu. Once she was done silently digesting Tommy and Chillax’s contributions, I gave her the CliffsNotes version of everything else I knew, finishing as we reached our destination.

  The only parking spot outside Tujuka’s place was perhaps three whiskers longer than my Malibu. But being a veteran of bumper car parallel parking, I made it work, finishing with a whisker and a half on each side of my car.

  I had just shifted into park and shut off the engine when I saw that a man was walking at an odd angle toward our car. It took a moment for my eyes to focus on him, another moment for my brain to make sense of the information it was receiving. Then, in one terrifying moment, it all clicked in.

  It was Scarface Sammy. His jacket was flapping open to reveal a shoulder holster, with the butt of a handgun peeking out. And the Malibu was too hemmed in to even consider escape.

  CHAPTER 36

  After the incident outside Fanwood Country Club—where he had come so close to the white man in the Volvo but came up empty again—Scarface Sammy had decided he was done playing around.

  He was going to get his man. Because that’s what he did, what he was paid to do.

  Sammy returned to Tujuka Okeke’s house, to continue his stakeout there. He was still convinced she had something to do with what was going on, even if he didn’t know quite how.

  Once he was in place, he went to work figuring out who the man in the Volvo/Malibu was. Sammy did not have access to the kind of databases that law enforcement people did, of course. But he knew someone who knew someone, as tended to be the case with these sorts of things. And, for a price—too high a price, in Sammy’s mind—that someone could tell him who owned a car connected to a certain license plate.

  The first plate Sammy asked that someone to run was the one on the Volvo. Sammy was operating under the belief that was more than likely the white man’s primary vehicle.

  After a delay of a few hours, he got back the result. It was registered to Christina J. Thompson.

  Clearly, that was not the person who he had seen driving the car. So who was she?

  Sammy was able to narrow down three possible addresses in New Jersey. But the name was too common for any of the databases that Sammy had access to. So he resorted to googling random variations of the name, along with geographic identifiers to help narrow it down.

  It was when he finally got around to googling “Tina Thompson Newark” that he learned she was a newspaper editor. But why would a newspaper editor have anything to do with what was happening at Tujuka Okeke’s house? And who was the man driving her car?

  Sammy realized he was still stumped. So he again paid the needed bribe, this time asking his source to run the Malibu’s plates. Sammy worried his employer would balk at the expense if he didn’t produce some significant results. But what choice did he have?

  It took some time again, then the information came back: the Malibu was owned by Carter M. Ross.

  Another common name, but not as common. Sammy was able to find a current address in Bloomfield; a previous address in Nutley; and an address in Millburn that, judging from the dates of birth of the owners, appeared to be Carter Ross’s parents.

  Sammy smiled in a way that pulled at the scars on his face. There was no way this Carter Ross would escape him this time.

  Still, there was the question of who Carter Ross was. This time, Google was quickly forthcoming.

  The answer puzzled Sammy. Carter Ross was a reporter for the Eagle-Examiner, a fairly prominent one. His work had won a host of awards, even been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

  It only gave Sammy more questions. How was Carter Ross hooked in with Tujuka Okeke? Why did he keep coming back to her house?

  Sammy was pondering all of this and more. Then he watched in surreal amazement as the Malibu drove up and parked two cars down from him.

  Carter Ross had once again materialized, as if Sammy thinking about him had resulted in his summoning.

  CHAPTER 37

  Let the following not be mistaken for altruism:

  When I saw Scarface Sammy coming toward my door, my first words—after the perfunctory yelp of panic—were, “Sweet Thang, get out of the car and run. Now.”

  This was not, to be clear, because her well-being was foremost on my mind. It was because, with Sammy closing in on the driver’s side, and with the Malibu a minimum of twelve turns away from being free of its parking spot, my best chance to get away was out the passenger side. And it would be a lot quicker if I didn’t have to climb over Sweet Thang first.

  Alas, I hadn’t told Sweet Thang that I had been followed by a menacing Nigerian man the day before, or that I feared he was the man in
the blue ski mask who had been pulling the trigger during these carjackings. And the alarm in my voice, was not, by itself, enough to compel her rapid movement.

  “What’s going—”

  I didn’t have time to write her an annotated five-year vision statement. I was already unsnapping her seat belt and reaching across her to open the door. “Just move!” I screamed, my voice cracking.

  But by that point, it was too late. Sammy was already next to my car. I turned back just in time to see Sammy reaching into his pocket to begin the rapid chain of events that would seal my fate: reach for gun, remove gun from holster, aim gun, fire gun. I turned away and hunched down. Not that he could miss me from point-blank range, but maybe he wouldn’t be able to shoot me in the head. Sweet Thang still hadn’t budged. Sammy loomed over me.

  “Mr. Ross, please do not be afraid,” he said. “My name is Hakeem Kuti. I am a private investigator licensed by the State of New Jersey, working for the Obatala Insurance Company.”

  When I turned back toward him, I saw what he had produced from his pocket. It was a bronze shield emblazoned with the words AUTHORIZED PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR wrapped around an eagle emblem.

  My thoughts caught up slowly. A private investigator. He was a P.I. And P.I.s, while they sometimes carry concealed weapons—as Sammy, uh, Mr. Kuti was doing—they do not often use those weapons to shoot newspaper reporters.

  Finally, with my senses returned to me, I turned to Sweet Thang. “Never mind. False alarm,” I said. “But we seriously have to work on your reaction times.”

  Sweet Thang was still mystified as to what was going on. I removed myself from the car and stuck out my hand toward Kuti.

  “Sorry about that,” I said. “I thought you were … someone else.”

  “I know my face is sometimes frightening to people,” he said. “I apologize.”

  “No, no,” I said, now feeling like the white guy who was caught being afraid of the black guy with scars. In other words: a racist. “It’s not that. It’s that I just … you were following me yesterday and … never mind. Anyhow, yes, my name is Carter Ross. But you seem to know that already. What can I do for you?”