Faces of the Gone: A Mystery

by Brad Parks

  “You know anyone who might have bought from him?”

  “ ’Round here? Shoot. Jus’ bout everyone.”

  He gestured as if we were at a crowded cocktail party. I looked around at the still-empty courtyard. “Know where I could find them?”

  The man thought for a moment. “S’pose I do,” he said.

  “By the way, my name is Carter Ross,” I said. Normally I would have stuck out my hand for him to shake. But having been subjected to such a graphic demonstration of where his hand had just been, I kept my fingers anchored in my pocket.

  “Folks call me ‘Red’, jus’ like Red Sanford, ’cept my family name is Coles,” he said. He was about 150 pounds shy of passing for Red Sanford. And he was so jaundiced, folks should have called him “Yellow Sanford.”

  “I’ll follow you,” I said. “You’re my tour guide.”

  “Okay, now I know a woman, she like the mayor of this place. I’m goin’ to see her now,” he said, then elbowed me in a conspiratorial fashion. “I kind of mess aroun’ with her a little bit.”

  God bless the male spirit: here was a man who had no home, no job, no money, a raging case of cirrhosis and Lord knows what other maladies. But he still wanted me to know he was getting some ass now and then.

  I tailed Red toward Building Five and watched as he scampered up a Dumpster, onto a fire escape, up a flight of stairs, and through a vacant spot in a plywood window. I was impressed at how smoothly he moved, given his condition. Obviously, he had been doing this for a while. With all my youth and relative health, I was struggling to keep up. When I reached the window, Red was inside gesturing for me. There was no sign of light or life.

  “C’mon,” he said.

  “How can you see a damn thing in there?”

  “I cain’t.”

  “So how do you walk?”

  “Jus’ trust your feet. They know how to do it.”

  I scooted through the small opening, then did my best to navigate the dark, trash-strewn room. Maybe Red’s feet knew. Mine were tripping over everything.

  I followed Red’s voice into the hallway, where there was an array of candles casting a dim light. There were also two old mattresses and assorted flotsam and jetsam—a box of Ritz crackers, one woman’s high-heeled pump, a brass lamp that looked like it once belonged to Aladdin, bloodstained rags, and trash. Lots of trash. There was so much trash it was hard for my eyes to focus on what exactly it was. I was suddenly glad it was cold. I didn’t want to imagine what this place smelled like in summertime.

  A human form was lying on one of the mattresses. “Mary,” Red said. “Hey, Mary, wake up.”

  Mary rolled over, slow and drowsy. Her eyes got huge the moment she saw me.

  “What you bring a cop in here for!” she shouted.

  “He ain’t no cop,” Red said. “Mary, this here a reporter. He doin’ a story on that nasty sum’bitch that jus’ got hisself killed. And then he said he gonna get us something to eat.”

  Red turned to me. “This here Mary Moss. Folks call her Queen Mary, ’cause she been ’round here so long she like the Queen.”

  Queen Mary, Ruler of Refuse, Regent of Building Five.

  “Hi, Mary, it’s a real pleasure to meet you,” I said. “I’m Carter Ross from the Eagle-Examiner.”

  “Oh,” she said. She propped herself up on her elbow. There wasn’t much to Queen Mary, maybe a hundred pounds of loose skin and brittle bones. Her hair was a tangled, matted mess— easily one of the worst bed heads in human history.

  “Did you know a drug dealer named Tyrone Scott?” I asked. “He went by the name Hundred Year.”

  “Yeah, I knew him. Bastard.”

  “I hear he sold a particu lar brand of heroin. Do you know what his brand was?”

  Queen Mary peered at me blankly. Her face was so skeletal it made her eyeballs bulge halfway out of her head.

  “You know how there’s a stamp on the bag?” I continued, making large gestures as if I were playing charades. “What did the stamp look like?”

  “Oh!” she said. “Yeah, yeah! It was . . . You know . . . umm . . . Oh, damn! I just . . .”

  Mary kept mumbling to herself until I remembered; I had a product sample in my pocket. I pulled it out, then picked up one of the candles so Queen Mary could see it.

  “Did it look like this?” I asked.

  Suddenly, from somewhere deep within the parts of her brain that still functioned, you could see about ten thousand neurons fire off at once.

  “Yeah!” she said. “Yeah, that’s it! Hang on.”

  She crawled off her pad and started sifting through the trash, then produced a torn dime bag, which she handed to me. Sure enough, I could see the familiar eagle with the syringe clutched in its talons. It was The Stuff.

  “You mind if I keep this?” I asked.

  “Depends. You really gonna buy us some food?” she asked hopefully.

  “You bet.” I smiled and pocketed the empty packet.

  With that, Red Coles, Queen Mary, and I collected ourselves, climbed back out the window into the night, and made our way to the corner bodega, where I bought them all the fruit juice, crackers, and cookies they could carry.

  It was the best $37.12 the Eagle-Examiner could have spent.

  The Director knew how crucial it was to maintain his brand’s quality. He understood it far better than any of those business-magazine cover boys.

  The car company that once boasted “quality is job one” should have tried out the heroin trade for a few weeks. If automakers were as accountable to their customers as the Director was, they never would have needed a bailout. Fact was, an automobile manufacturer could skimp on the kind of head gasket it used, and it would take years for the buyers to notice—if they ever did. Likewise, soft drink companies freely switched between sugar and corn syrup based on what ever was cheaper at the moment. Consumers were never the wiser.

  The Director’s customers noticed everything, immediately. A hard- core junkie may not know what day, week, or year it is, but he knows the instant someone is messing with his heroin. He knows from the way it makes him feel, from how high he gets, from how long the high lasts. He knows the instant it starts coursing through his veins. He knows because the drug has essentially turned his body into a finely tuned device for measuring heroin quality.

  That was the entire principle behind The Stuff: that junkies knew. That’s why the Director had to guarantee The Stuff was the best, purest heroin they could find. If—and only if—he could establish and maintain his brand in that lofty spot, he knew he could eventually control the entire Newark market.

  It was an ambitious goal, one others had tried—but failed—to achieve. Their mistake was attempting to control the supply side, thinking that if they simply crushed every other source of heroin coming into the city, they could own it. But the Director understood that the job couldn’t be accomplished with simple muscle.

  The Director took a different tack, one that focused on the demand side of the equation. If the customers came to want The Stuff and only The Stuff, refusing to buy from any dealer who didn’t carry it, they would give the Director a monopoly all by themselves.

  And once he had Newark, there was no telling what the Director could accomplish. Newark was the conduit between New York and Philadelphia, the linchpin of the entire East Coast. He could make countless millions.

  Yet it all hung on the quality of The Stuff. The moment anyone started diluting it, the junkies would stop associating it with high quality and it would get lost amid all the other brands.

  The Director had put Monty in charge of quality control, but was constantly checking on him. Was he sending enough straw buyers into the street for samples? Was he having the samples tested and retested for purity? Were the samples coming back as close to 100 percent as they had gone out?

  Monty seemed to be doing fine. He had, after all, managed to catch the four dealers who had been cutting. He had told the Director about it immediately and the Director
had acted accordingly.

  It was unfortunate to lose four productive dealers. But the Director would kill many more if he had to—as many as it took until the rest got the message:

  The brand was sacrosanct. And it would be protected at all costs.

  CHAPTER 5

  In most aspects of my life, I have little use for the concept of karma, the universal cycle of cause and effect, or anything that might help me achieve total consciousness. Total unconsciousness just suits me better.

  Yet when it comes to reporting, I am a deep believer in karma. It is the only way to explain the following phenomenon:

  There are days as a reporter when you can do no right, when no one will return your phone calls, when all the elbow grease you put into a story gives you little more than tendonitis. Then there are times when you’re the King Midas of the newsroom, when you can get the Holy Trinity on a conference call for quotes, when everything with your story falls into place so perfectly, you start to convince yourself maybe you really are that good.

  But, no, it’s just the karma. Eventually you start to accept that for every time you subject your hindquarters to four hours of deep freeze in some nasty project—and end up with nothing to show for it—there will be a time when some strung-out homeless lady named Queen Mary tells you exactly what you need to hear.

  So all I could do as I drove back toward the world headquarters of the Eagle-Examiner was thank the karma. It was a pleasant feeling: the success of a hard day’s reporting, the warmth of my Malibu, the buzz in my left thigh . . .

  No, wait, that was my cell phone. It was Tommy.

  “You won’t believe the luck I had.” His voice came bounding out of the earpiece.

  “You finally had a threesome with the Hardy Boys?”

  “Who are the Hardy Boys? You have gay friends you didn’t tell me about?”

  “They’re . . . never mind. What’s going on?”

  “Well,” Tommy said. “I was hanging around Shareef’s neighborhood, just hanging around, looking for people to talk to, and this white kid pulls up in his daddy’s Pathfinder and asks if I know where I can find Eef.”

  Huh? I pressed my ear harder against the phone. “Eef?”

  “No, you idiot. RRRRReef. As in ‘Shareef.’ Try to keep up.”

  “Sorry.”

  “So anyway,” Tommy continued, “I play it all coy and I’m like, ‘Who’s asking.’ And this guy is like, ‘I hear he’s got The Stuff.’ And I’m like, ‘By The Stuff do you mean stuff? Or THE Stuff?’ And the guy is like, ‘Yeah, THE Stuff.’ ”

  Apparently I wasn’t the only one with good reporting karma.

  “Anyway, this idiot kid thought I worked for Shareef or something, so he practically starts telling me his whole life story. He came from some high school in the suburbs—Livingston, I think—because word is out that this dealer named Reef was selling the best heroin ever and it was called ‘The Stuff.’ How’s that for confirmation?” Tommy asked.

  “Pretty good,” I replied. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. But I got more,” Tommy said. “I asked around the neighborhood a little more and apparently Shareef pretty much made a living selling to suburban kids. He would just hang out all day in that pimp-daddy Chrysler of his and wait for the SUVs to drive up.”

  It made sense. Shareef’s neighborhood was right near the intersection of the Garden State Parkway and Route 280. Both roads led rather rapidly to a nearly infinite supply of rich suburban kids.

  “I was thinking,” Tommy said. “This probably means we can rule out Shareef being killed in some kind of turf battle, don’t you think?”

  “How so?”

  “Well, it seems like Shareef didn’t even have a turf. His turf was his car. Wherever he went, those idiot kids were going to find him. I mean, the kid I talked to was driving around looking for him.”

  I pulled into the company parking garage, letting the new information rattle around in my head for a bit. Sometimes when you’re working on a story, it can be difficult to parse data as it comes, to see both the trees and the forest simultaneously.

  But this time the big picture was becoming pretty clear to me. None of the Ludlow Four were killed because of turf. The cause of death, proximate or otherwise, had to be the one thing they shared: selling The Stuff.

  “Good work, Tommy,” I said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go tell Sal Szanto his bar story is deader than disco.”

  It was past seven by the time I strolled into the newsroom. The reporters were starting to thin out, but the copy desk was humming through the process of assembling Thursday’s newspaper, doing what copy desks have always done: think up misleading headlines, add mistakes into stories, and devise new ways to muddle clean writing.

  No, actually, I’m a big fan of our desk. There were some odd ducks—as is often the case among people who think 4 P.M. is early in the day—but by and large they were solid, dependable folks who could spot a typo at twenty paces and delight in having won the New Jersey State spelling bee six years running. Collectively, they edited the equivalent of a novel every night.

  I paused briefly at my desk-turned- drug-shrine—someone had left me a copy of High Times, the stoner magazine—then continued on toward Szanto’s office. I might as well let him scream at me when there were fewer people around to hear it.

  “Got a second, boss?” I asked, tapping gently on the frame to his open office door.

  Szanto glanced up from his computer screen, aggrieved by the combination of Tums and Maxwell House sloshing around in his stomach.

  “Srrtt,” he grunted.

  I was uncertain whether he was trying to say “sure” or “sit”—I had left my Szanto- English dictionary behind—but I took it as an invitation to come in.

  “Jsss gvvmmm scccdd.”

  Szanto’s attention had turned back to his screen, where he was trying to lay hands on some abysmal piece of copy. We had some very good writers at our paper, people who made words dance on a page. We also had people who wrote as if full sentences hadn’t been discovered yet.

  “Jzzss Krrsst,” Szanto mumbled through a sigh, then coughed, rattling loose the small amphibian that was trying to apply for residence in his throat. “What the hell are they teaching in journalism school these days? You should see this crap.”

  I waited patiently. Szanto grimaced and grumbled for a few more minutes, then finally sent the story over to the copy desk with an emphatic, “Aw, screw it.”

  “It’ll be lining hamster cages by tomorrow afternoon anyway,” I said, trying to be helpful. Szanto grunted again.

  “Okay,” he said, “what can I do for my star investigative reporter? Making good progress with the bar thing?”

  In an effort to keep our discourse on a civil tone, I tried to say my next sentence in as small a voice as possible.

  “Sal, the bar isn’t the story.”

  My efforts failed. Szanto launched a string of obscenities so long and so loud it was difficult to untangle one from the other. All I know is I heard a thorough exercising of the Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television, including one in particu lar he used as a noun, verb, adverb, and adjective—all in the same sentence. He drew a breath and was about to relaunch when I put a halt to it with the Four Words Every Editor Loves to Hear:

  “Boss, I got something.”

  He let the air leak out of his lungs, then tilted his head to listen.

  “I’ve got the link between the Ludlow Four,” I continued, getting up from my seat and walking over to the map of Newark he had on his side wall.

  “It isn’t geography,” I said, then began pointing to different spots on the map. “Wanda Bass sold out of a go-go bar in Irvington. Tyrone Scott worked in and around a chicken shack on South Orange Avenue. Devin Whitehead was a Clinton Hill kid. And Shareef Thomas lived up off Central Avenue near the cemetery.

  “It’s not clientele, either,” I continued as I returned to my seat. “Wanda sold to a hooker friend’s clients an
d whoever else wandered into her go-go bar. Tyrone sold to junkies and beat-up old homeless people at an abandoned housing project. Devin sold to guys in the neighborhood. Shareef sold to suburban white kids.”

  Szanto was listening silently.

  “The link,” I said, drawing it out a little bit, “is the brand of heroin they sold.”

  I fished into my pocket and brought out my samples of The Stuff. I flipped one of the bags across Szanto’s desk.

  “I found this in Wanda Bass’s apartment,” I said. “She had been selling it to clients at the go-go bar where she worked. Notice the stamp on it.”

  As Szanto grabbed it and began examining the signature eagle-clutching-syringe logo, I held up the torn dime bag.

  “I got this from a junkie who said she bought it from Tyrone Scott. It’s got the same stamp.”

  Szanto squinted across his desk and I handed him the torn bag.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  “As for the other two, I’ve got a very good source in Devin Whitehead’s neighborhood who talked to some local miscreants for me, and they all said Devin’s brand was called ‘The Stuff.’ Tommy spent a lot of time around Shareef Thomas’s haunt and found a kid wandering around looking for a guy named ‘Reef’ who sold a brand called ‘The Stuff.’ ”

  Szanto started nodding. “Not bad,” he said.

  “Boss,” I said. “The Stuff is the story.”

  Szanto grabbed his industrial- sized jar of antacid tablets, poured out a few, and started munching on them with a faraway look.

  “Do the police know this?” he said through a mouthful of chalk.

  “I doubt it.”

  He chewed a bit more, swallowed, picked up his phone and punched four numbers on the keypad.

  “Hi, chief,” he said. “You got a second?”

  Szanto only called one person “chief,” and that was our esteemed executive editor, Harold Brodie.

  “Come on,” Szanto said after he replaced the phone in its cradle. “Let’s take a walk.”