by Brad Parks
“I thought she had been shot in the back of the head,” I said.
“She was. And there was an entrance wound in the back of the head. It was pretty small. That was about a ten-minute patch job. It was the exit wound that was the problem. That bullet took a lot of the forehead with it.”
I cringed a little but tried to hide my reaction. There was no room for sentimentality in a discussion like this.
“Any idea what kind of gun it was?” I asked.
“Forty caliber,” she said without hesitation.
“That’s odd,” I said. “Are you sure it wasn’t a .38?”
I’m no gun nut, but it was my understanding .40 caliber was used mostly by law enforcement—local, state, and, primarily, federal. The thug or thugs responsible for this must have somehow gotten their hands on some cop’s gun.
“We serve the neighborhoods,” Mrs. Bricker said. “Trust me when I tell you I’ve seen enough bullet wounds to tell the difference. It was a .40 caliber. A .38 wouldn’t have done nearly as much damage.”
“Well, then explain something to me,” I said. “You said the bullet took out the forehead. I thought it would have come out lower.”
“Why?”
“Well, the cops told us the killing was done execution style. To me, execution style means the victim is kneeling and the perp is standing, meaning the shot goes downward.” I pantomimed a gun, putting a finger to the back of my head, tilting it at the appropriate angle. “Shouldn’t it have blown off the nose or jaw or something?”
“Well, in this case, she was standing, not kneeling,” Mrs. Bricker said definitively.
“Oh?”
“The entrance and exit wounds are parallel. That tells me she and the shooter were at the same level. You’re probably looking for a gunman who is tall, six three to six five.”
“I didn’t realize you doubled as a forensics expert,” I said, smiling despite the subject matter.
She smiled, too. It was her first one. “I’m not,” she said. “But in this case the math is pretty simple. Wanda was tall, right? Let’s say five nine or five ten?”
Tynesha had talked about what long legs Wanda had. “Sounds right,” I said.
“Okay, so we know the perp was holding the gun straight, because the entrance and exit wounds are the same height,” Mrs. Bricker said, now pantomiming her own gun. “Since he’s able to hold the gun straight and still be pointing near the top of her head, the shooter must be roughly a head taller, call it six or seven inches. That’s how you get six three to six five.”
“You’re good,” I said.
She smiled again but stamped it out the moment Miss B and Tynesha emerged from the examining room, sniffling and leaning on each other for support. Miss B’s limp looked even worse than before.
“Thank you for trying to patch her up,” Miss B said. “I think we’ll keep the lid closed for the viewing.”
“Of course,” Mrs. Bricker said, having immediately resumed her former ramrod straightness. “We’ll still want to get some clothes from you to put her in. If you don’t have anything suitable, we work with a charity that provides burial outfits for needy families. And of course we’ll bring someone in to do her hair. That’s part of the package.”
Miss B murmured something indistinct. Seeing her daughter laid out on a metal gurney in that cold room had taken all the starch out of her. It required some effort to get her back up the stairs and out into the street, where I feared even the smallest gust of wind was going to knock her over. Tynesha had her by one arm. I couldn’t grab the other because of Miss B’s cane, but I stayed close in case she toppled.
After a silent car ride back to Miss B’s building, we got her back out of the car and I resumed spotting. The Nextel guys paid us little mind as we slowly hobbled up the steps. We were just a couple of people escorting a crippled old woman home.
Miss B went straight into her bedroom and Tynesha gave me a little wave as she followed. I took one last glance at Wanda’s high school portrait, then departed.
I
returned to the newsroom and to a desk that had been transformed into a veritable legalize-marijuana showcase. Someone had printed out twenty copies of a marijuana-leaf picture and taped them all around my computer. Another creative genius had twisted some used newsprint into a two-foot-long joint and left it next to the keyboard along with half a dozen smaller joints, a lighter, and a homemade bong that had been fashioned from a two-liter soda bottle.
Sitting on my chair was a brochure with a picture of a morose- looking guy and the headline “Seeking Help for Your Marijuana Problem?”
I had been hoping to surreptitiously slip the four pilfered heroin bags out of my pocket and into an envelope, which I would then hide in my desk for safekeeping. But that suddenly seemed like a very bad idea, what with half the newsroom wondering if I was developing a drug habit.
“Nice going, Ivy,” Buster Hays hollered at me. “Let me guess: you didn’t inhale, right?”
It was a tired joke, but some of Hays’s cronies laughed. I began clearing away enough drug paraphernalia so I had some workspace.
“Ha ha,” I said, with intentionally flat inflection. As usual, Hays had caught me completely without comeback.
Tommy sauntered over from his desk to snicker up close.
“So I guess I have you to thank for this lovely display?” I asked.
“Don’t look at me,” Tommy said. “Brodie made an announcement at the morning editor’s meeting and then sent out an e-mail to everyone at the paper, saying you were an example for all of us to follow. What you see before you is a collaborative effort.”
“I’m never going to live this down, am I?”
“By the time the night copy desk makes it in, you’ll be the most famous stoner this side of Cheech and Chong,” Tommy confirmed.
“Just what I always wanted.”
“C’mon, you’re a hero,” Tommy said. “The hippies over in the features department are thrilled because now they think they’re allowed to get high at work. I think they’re out behind the building getting stoned as we speak.”
“They do that all the time anyway.”
“True, but now they feel justified. You might want to negotiate with the vending machine guy about getting a cut. Newsroom snack food sales are going to skyrocket.”
I was just starting to enjoy our banter when the abominable Vowelless Monster became aware of my presence.
“Crrrrttrrrss!” Sal Szanto hollered, taking the trouble to lift his hairy girth from behind his desk so I could see him gesturing for me.
I immediately began formulating escape strategies. Would fake appendicitis be over-the-top?
“Hey, Sal,” I said, strolling into his office and pulling up a chair as if nothing were awry.
“I know you’re Brodie’s new cuddle-buddy and all, but would you mind telling me what smoking dope with a bunch of gangbangers has to do with our bar story?”
“Why, yes, of course,” I said.
“Well?”
“Glad you asked,” I said, then started squirming as if something were gnawing on my leg.
“Hang on,” I said, fishing my cell phone out of my pocket. “I gotta take this.”
“It didn’t even ring!” Szanto protested.
“It’s on vibrate,” I said as I flipped open the phone and gave my most officious, “Carter Ross!”
“Like hell it is,” Szanto said, raising his voice. “There’s no one on the other end. I’m not falling for that again!”
“Huh,” I said, taking the phone away from my ear and looking puzzled at it. “I lost him. This must be a dead reception area. Let me try it from the other side of the newsroom.”
I lifted myself from the chair, but Szanto was having none of it.
“Sit your ass down. Give me a quick update on the bar story and you can go call from Botswana for all I care.”
“I thought Tina gave you the update on the bar story,” I said.
“If you’re
checking to see whether your accomplice covered for you, the answer is yes. She tells me you’re making excellent progress. But when I asked her details she faked an intense menstrual cramp and ran out of my office.”
Menstrual cramps. Why hadn’t I thought of that?
“So stop dicking around,” Szanto ordered. “Brodie is talking about this being a page one story on Sunday and he keeps asking me every eight minutes what it’s going to say. I’d like to have an answer for him.”
“Right,” I said. “The bar story. It’s this . . . bar . . . where everyone in the neighborhood went to, you know, drink. Except there was something, something”—what was the word Szanto had used the other day?—“something sinister going on inside.”
“Fine. I like where we’re heading on this,” Szanto said. “Who have we talked to?”
“Oh, lots of people.”
“Like who?”
“People in the, uh, neighborhood. You know . . . customers.”
“Have we talked to the bar’s owner yet? What does he say? When did these people rob him? Is he a suspect?”
“I’m sure he’s a person of interest,” I said, employing that wonderfully vague bit of cop talk.
“Goddammit, are you working on this story or not?” Szanto demanded.
He didn’t wait for my answer. “You know what? I don’t care. I’m going to make this real simple for you. You got this assignment on Monday. It’s now Wednesday afternoon. I expect that bar story to be on my desk by Friday at noon or I’m sending you out to Sussex County to cover bear scat for the rest of your life.”
I grinned despite myself. Sussex County was our farthest- flung bureau, about an hour away in the northeast corner of the state. Szanto threatened to reassign me there roughly every other month.
“Right,” I said. “You’ll have a story by Friday at noon.”
And I meant it. I just didn’t know what story it was going to be.
A
fter my retreat from Szanto’s office, I went straight to Tommy’s desk, hoping he had made some progress in the past twenty-four hours. “You might want to consider a smaller belt,” he said as he saw me approach.
“And why is that?”
“You’re going to need something to hold your pants up with the way Szanto just chewed your ass off,” Tommy finished, pleased with himself.
“I really walked right into that one, didn’t I?”
“Chin first, yeah.”
“Then I need a soda to recover from my wounds. Come on, I’m buying.”
Tommy trailed after me to the break room vending machine, which was in a cranky mood. After surrendering the first bottle with relative ease, there was no way it was giving up the second one without a fight. I gave the machine a slight shove, which did nothing. Neither did leaning into it a little harder. I was rocking the thing violently back and forth when Tommy spoke up.
“You know, ten people a year are . . .”
“Oh, stuff it already,” I said, finally getting enough wobble going to dislodge a fresh Coke Zero.
Tommy sat down with his soda. I went over to another machine to do something about the rumbling in my stomach.
“So how was your return to Shareef Thomas’s neighborhood?” I asked, selecting a sleeve of strawberry Pop-Tarts. Health food.
“Not bad if you like spending a lot of time with people who wear polyester blends,” he said. “Though I did meet a drunk who claimed to be Shareef’s uncle.”
“Was he?”
“He had a Social Security card with the name Marlon Thomas on it.”
“Okay, I guess that’s legit,” I said, tearing into my first Pop-Tart.
“He told me he’d tell me anything I wanted to know if I got him something to drink. So I bought him two bottles of Boone’s Farm’s finest sparkling wine from the corner liquor store.”
“I hope you went with the 2007. Growing conditions were excellent that year.”
“But of course,” he said.
It’s strictly unethical for us to pay a source for information. Tabloids do it all the time, but no serious newspaper would ever think about it. Information that has to be paid for is considered untrustworthy.
That said, what Tommy had done was more or less fine. I’m not saying I’d write in to Columbia Journalism Review to brag about it. But it wasn’t really that much different than, say, picking up the tab when you lunched with the mayor. This was just a less conventional method of building rapport with a source—a liquid lunch, as it were.
“How do you think I expense that?” Tommy asked. “Just put it under ‘Miscellaneous Supplies.’ ”
“Sounds good,” he said, pulling out his notebook and reading from it. “Anyway, here’s what Uncle Booze-Breath had to say about his precious nephew. His daddy—Booze- Breath’s brother— was apparently a pretty decent guy who got shot in some kind of mistaken-identity thing back in the eighties. After that, Shareef’s mom started messing around with a drug dealer, and you know how that story ends.”
“I’m guessing poorly,” I said, moving on to my second PopTart.
“You got it. Once Mama Shareef had enough possession charges, she got put away for ten years and Shareef got put in foster care.”
“I’m guessing that went poorly, too.”
“Very. There was no foster home that could hold him. He hightailed it out of every one they tried to put him in and always ended up back in the neighborhood, crashing with a different relative. The relative would usually put up with him for a few months. Then Shareef would do something to make the relative turn him back over to foster care, then he’d run away again. Somewhere along the line, he started stealing cars, landed in a juvenile lockup, and has pretty much spent the rest of his life in and out of jail. When even your wino uncle describes you as ‘that boy ain’t no good,’ that ought to tell you something.”
Pop-Tart No. 2 was now gone and I peered into the empty plastic wrapper, hoping that a third had somehow miraculously materialized. Alas, it was empty.
“That was your lunch, wasn’t it?” he asked.
“No. I also had a slice of apple pie earlier.”
“I’ll remind you of this moment when you have to go to the Ugly Pants Store to buy a larger size.”
I shrugged. My secret to weight loss: get busy enough at work and you end up skipping meals without realizing it.
“So did the uncle know anything about Shareef’s most recent mode of employment?” I asked.
“The uncle didn’t know much or didn’t say much. But I talked to some other people. Shareef was a drug dealer, obviously. He was a solo operation. He didn’t have any kind of crew or anything.
“Let’s see, what else,” Tommy said, continuing to scan his notes. “A couple of months ago he paid for a bunch of neighborhood kids to go to Great Adventure.”
“Ah, a real Robin Hood, this one,” I interjected.
“Yeah, it seems like business had been good lately. People said he bought himself a new Chrysler 300—you know, those Bentley knockoffs. Everyone in the neighborhood assumed he was getting too big for his britches so someone decided to permanently remove him from his turf. I guess he was starting to take customers away from other dealers.”
“Sounds a lot like our other three victims.”
“Uh-huh,” Tommy said.
“He sold heroin, I assume?”
“Yep,” Tommy said, still flipping pages. “Oh, this was kind of cute. Apparently the brand he sold was called ‘The Stuff.’ ”
I felt a jolt, like the wind had been knocked out of me.
“The Stuff? Are you sure about that?”
Tommy turned some more pages. “Well, I wouldn’t exactly stake my shoe collection on it,” he said. “I got that from a junkie who kept asking if she could borrow twenty bucks. So I don’t know if I could consider my sourcing beyond reproach. But, yeah, she said his brand was called ‘The Stuff.’ Pretty funny, huh?”
“In more ways than you know. That’s the same brand Wanda Bass was
selling. I saw it myself in her bedroom when I visited her mother’s house.”
“Really? Huh. Think it’s a coincidence?”
“I don’t know. I mean, how many brands of heroin are sold in this city?”
“Beats me. A hundred?”
“At least. What are the chances two dealers from completely different parts of the city would end up selling the same brand?”
Lights were going on in Tommy’s attic.
“About the same as the chances two dealers from different parts of the city would end up dead together in a vacant lot at the far end of the South Ward,” he said.
I allowed myself to bask in the moment and savor the buzz I was feeling. There was nothing like the moment when a story started coming together.
“Tommy,” I said. “I do believe we’ve just found the missing link between the Ludlow Four.”
Of course, believing it and proving it were two different matters. And in the proof department, we still had some work to do. I knew I would only be able to talk Szanto out of that stupid bar story if I could definitively tell him that each of the Ludlow Four sold the same brand of heroin.
It would pain Szanto to hear it, of course. But in the twisted logic of newspapering, being wrong can be somewhat forgiven as long as you have something to right it with: another big scoop. And this story, if I could nail it down, would certainly qualify as one, especially with all the attention that was starting to surround the Ludlow Four.
The New York newspapers, which normally treated the other side of the Hudson River as if it were some distant curiosity, had been following the story each day. The grisly details of the crime and the brazen nature with which it was carried out made for good copy. One of the tabloids even put it on its cover, an unusual honor for out-of-state news.
With the newspapers beating the drums, the TV stations— who only decide how to play ongoing stories after they read the papers—had stayed on the bandwagon, too. Each local nightly news telecast was featuring sound bites from a steady stream of local antiviolence activists, who were eager to jump in front of the cameras and exclaim “this has to stop” or “enough is enough.”
None of it was actually news, of course, just reaction to the news. Only the newspapers were going to push the story forward. And being able to establish the connection between the victims would definitely keep us out in front of the competition. Szanto would like that. Brodie would love it.