Faces of the Gone: A Mystery

by Brad Parks

  Tina Thompson trailed Szanto out of the meeting. She gave me a thumbs-up. “Great work,” she said.

  “Yeah, you like it?”

  “Well, it’s a bit overwritten, but I would expect nothing less from you,” she teased. “On the whole, it’s a great piece of reporting.”

  “How’d it go over in the meeting?”

  “Well, Brodie made it clear he liked it, so . . .”

  So I knew how that went. When Brodie hadn’t made up his mind about a story, he’d be real quiet, which inevitably gave rise to spirited debate. But when he indicated he liked it, all the other editors would pile on to insist they also liked it—with the possible exception of Szanto, who was a notorious contrarian.

  “Great,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Tina was turning to walk away when something— the way her curls framed her face? the way her sweater hugged her body?—caused me to blurt out, “We should grab a drink tonight to celebrate.”

  “Okay,” she said, like it was nothing.

  “I’ll check in with you later,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said, and gave me a little wave.

  It happened so quickly, almost like my subconscious had been doing the talking for me. What the hell was my problem? The woman was less than twenty-four hours from ovulation. Hell, for all I knew that little watch of hers was off and she was ovulating right now. Once we got to the bar and had a drink or two, nature would take over. I might as well have volunteered to be her sperm donor.

  Deep down, did I want to get Tina pregnant? Or was I just an incurably horny male who—because of hormones or pheromones or whatever—recognized Tina as an easy mark?

  Then again, maybe it could just stay innocent. A drink or two between colleagues. A hearty farewell handshake. A return to the peace and solitude of my Nutley bungalow.

  Uh-huh.

  I did my best to shelve all those thoughts as I sat back down and punched in the phone number Hays had given me.

  “Yes,” a terse voice said on the other end.

  “Irving Wallace, please.”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, this is Irving Wallace?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hi, I’m Carter Ross with the Eagle-Examiner—”

  “No comment.”

  He wasn’t trying to be funny, but I laughed despite myself.

  “I didn’t even ask you a question yet,” I said.

  “No comment.”

  “Look, sir, I’m sorry to trouble you. But I’m working on a story about this quadruple homi cide in Newark and I’ve got some heroin samples I need tested. Buster Hays tells me you can help.”

  A pause.

  “Heroin samples, huh?” he said, sounding intrigued.

  “Yes.”

  “And it relates to the Newark murders?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you know Buster Hays?”

  “Yeah, I work with him.”

  Another pause.

  “I’ll call you back,” he said, and abruptly hung up. “Sounds great,” I said to the empty phone line.

  Feds. They were always so paranoid. I placed the phone back in its cradle and checked my e-mail, where there was more of the usual spam from Human Resources. I was just beginning to learn about an important discussion group on peanut allergies when my phone rang.

  “Carter Ross.”

  “Hi, Carter. Irving Wallace,” he said, sounding like he had undergone a robotectomy and was now human. “Sorry for the runaround. I just wanted to check you out.”

  “Do people often call you up and impersonate newspaper reporters?”

  “Can’t be too careful these days,” he said. “Buster says you’re okay. Actually, Buster says you’re a smart-ass Ivy League type. But he also said you’re a fine young reporter and I should help you. So what can I do for you?”

  “I’m hoping you can tell me the purity and origin of some heroin samples I got off the street.”

  “You want just standard GC/MS?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Because I can do that, LC, FTIR/ATR, IRMS, ICP/MS, Raman, whatever you need. We’re a full- service shop.”

  “You’re talking to a newspaper reporter, remember?”

  “Oh, right, sorry. GC/MS stands for gas chromatography/ mass spectrometry. LC is liquid chromatography. FTIR/ATR is Fourier transform infrared . . . I’ve lost you, haven’t I?”

  “Thoroughly.”

  “Okay, let’s start with remedial instruction,” Wallace said patiently. “Heroin is derived from poppy seeds. Poppy seeds come from poppy plants. Poppy plants grown in different parts of the world have unique chemical signatures. My equipment reads the signature.”

  “Gotcha. How soon you can turn it around?”

  “You’re in luck. My gear is calibrated for heroin right now. I can have it in a few hours.”

  “Terrific,” I said. “I’ll drop off the samples right now. Where can I find you?”

  “It’s better I have someone find you. Be outside your building in fifteen minutes.”

  “Great,” I said. “What part of the government do you work for, anyway?”

  “What, didn’t Buster tell you?”

  “No.”

  “That’s because he doesn’t know.”

  The next sound I heard was the line clicking dead.

  Fifteen minutes later—possibly to the second—a young man with close-cropped blond hair and an inexpensive suit hopped out of a late-model Crown Victoria in front of the Eagle- Examiner offices.

  Obviously, my fed had arrived.

  I had taken my two heroin samples—The Stuff and the blank one, both from Wanda’s bedroom—and tucked them in an envelope, which I handed to the man.

  “How did you know I’m the guy Irving Wallace sent?” he asked.

  “As a newspaper reporter, I’m a trained observer of the human condition,” I said with a grin, although he seemed to come from The Land Sarcasm Forgot. Probably Iowa.

  “Yes, sir,” he replied, got back into his car, and drove off.

  It left me, for the moment, with nothing to do. I had figured I would need to spend the afternoon protecting my story from the ravages of editing. But it had apparently garnered enough fans so that wouldn’t be necessary. So I drove back down to Ludlow Street, just to poke around. The shrine was more or less the same size as it had been two days earlier, although it was starting to look a little the worse for wear. Some of the candles had been knocked over and all of them had burned out. The cold nights had done a number on the flowers, which now looked like limp spinach.

  I pulled on the door to the church, but it was locked. So I wandered around the neighborhood for an hour or two, halfheartedly interviewing a few more people to see if there was any interesting talk on the street. There wasn’t. And with the sun disappearing and the wind picking up, I was losing my will to canvass any further.

  I had just turned over the Malibu’s engine when my cell phone rang. The number came up as “unavailable.”

  “Carter Ross.”

  “You’re not recording this, are you?”

  It was, naturally, Irving Wallace.

  “Do they teach you to be this paranoid or does it come naturally?”

  “Hey, I got to ask,” he said.

  “Fair enough. No, I’m not recording this.”

  “Good,” he said. “And my name doesn’t go in your story, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Good. Question for you. Where did you get the sample that was labeled ‘The Stuff’?”

  “From a dealer’s stash box,” I said.

  “From an active dealer? Or from one of the victims in the Newark murders?”

  “One of the victims—a woman who had been dealing out of a go-go bar in Irvington. The box was hidden in a closet in her apartment.”

  “I see,” he said, like he was trying to make sense of something. “So you’re sure this is what she was selling on the street?”

  “Yeah. Why do you sound so surprised?”r />
  “Because it’s more than ninety-nine percent pure.”

  “I take it that’s a lot?”

  “The only time I’ve seen it that pure is when it’s been seized at the airport,” he said. “Once it gets to the street, it’s always cut at least a little bit. Now and then you get low nineties, but even the best heroin is usually 70 or 80. I tested this one three times and each time it came back above 99 percent. You can safely call it the purest heroin ever sold on the streets in America in your article and no one would call the paper to correct you.”

  “What about the other sample?”

  “The blank one? That was more like fifty. Run-of- the-mill.”

  “Anything else you can tell me?” I asked.

  “Without making your eyes glaze over with the details, I can tell you the chemical signature is consistent with South American heroin. I didn’t run the full workup, but I’d be willing to bet this came from the central highlands of Colombia, not far from Bogotá.”

  “Both of them came from the same place?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the purity is that extraordinary, huh?”

  “Put it this way,” Wallace said. “The government takes thousands of kilos of heroin off the street every year, and most of it comes through my lab in one way or another. Yet in ten years of testing those thousands of kilos, I’ve never seen anything this pure. Junkies must have gone nuts for this stuff.”

  Maybe a little too nuts, I thought.

  “Well, I really appreciate the help with this,” I said, revving my engine a few times just to get the heater going a little more.

  “Not at all. Those Newark killings are a heck of a thing, huh?”

  “Everyone seems pretty rattled by them,” I confirmed.

  “Yeah. Well, they should be. That’s a terrible thing, four people killed like that,” he said. “Is what you gave me the only samples you have?”

  “I have one more of each—The Stuff and the generic.”

  “And you’re keeping them in a safe place?”

  “I’m going to tuck them away in my piggy bank at home.”

  “Good,” he said. “Wouldn’t want them getting out.”

  I assured him I didn’t, either, and with one more reminder to leave his name out of the story, he hung up.

  It was nearing six o’clock—time for him to get home and for me to return to the office and make sure no one had spent the afternoon rearranging letters in my story. The editing process often reminds me of my favorite joke: a writer and an editor are stranded together in the desert. They’ve been slogging over the dunes for days and are about to die of thirst when, miraculously, they come across an oasis. The writer dives in and begins happily drinking the water. Yet when he looks up, he finds the editor pissing in the oasis.

  Aghast, the writer screams, “What the hell are you doing?”

  The editor replies, “I’m making it better.”

  Still, once I returned to the office, I was relieved to find no one with a spastic bladder had been near my story. Szanto had made a few judicious nips and tucks, put a few train-wreck sentences back on track. I added one paragraph about the lab test results and shipped it over to the copy editors, thankful no one had made it “better.”

  With my day’s toil complete, I went to round up Tina, only to discover her still chained to her desk, editing copy. She glanced up when she saw me approach, stuck five fingers in the air and mouthed “five minutes.” Then she winked. I nodded and looked around to make sure no one had caught

  the wink. Like it mattered. Tina’s love life was an open book, one without the word “discretion” in it. The trade-off for getting to enjoy that slender body of hers would be that everyone was going to know about it.

  I returned to my desk, prepared to unclutter my e-mail in- box for at least the next half hour. No journalist’s “five minutes” is ever really “five minutes.”

  Except Tina’s was pretty close. After maybe ten she appeared, purse in hand, ready to depart.

  “There’s this new wine bar that’s just opened up down the street from my building,” she said. “I’ve been dying to try it.”

  “Great. Do they serve beer there?”

  “I’m sure they keep something on tap for you and the other Neanderthals,” she said.

  “It gives me strength for when I pull you out of the place by your hair.”

  “Charming. I need to run home first real quick,” she said. “Why don’t you go and get us a table, order me a nice pinot, and I’ll meet you there?”

  “Look for me in the knuckle-dragger section,” I said.

  I made my way to Hoboken and easily found parking—a minor miracle—then proceeded to the bar, a cozy little yuppie breeding ground about a half block from Tina’s place. It being a Thursday night, the place wasn’t too full. I selected a booth with a semicircular table along the far wall. It was designed for a couple, and the lighting was just right, the kind of setup that announced to the entire establishment you intended to bonk like bonobos later in the eve ning.

  I picked up the wine menu, but it was mostly just to kill time. I’m a total wine ignoramus. Making sense of the Torah in the original Hebrew would be easier for me. Eventually, I ordered Tina her pinot noir, selecting the name Fetzer because it amused me. Then I ordered myself a beer, earning a witheringly snooty look from the waitress.

  When Tina arrived, she had ditched her work clothes in favor of a knee-length black cocktail dress with bare shoulders and a keyhole neckline. She looked stunning. It was all I could do to keep my jaw on its hinge.

  “I just couldn’t stay in pants for another five minutes,” she explained.

  I went to make a lame joke about how I wished all my dates felt that way, but my mouth was dry. It didn’t take much imagination to know that dress would go from body to floor in 2.1 seconds. As she sat down, the dress shimmied halfway up her thigh, making it impossible to decide which part of her to ogle first.

  “You look great,” I managed to say.

  She gave me an “oh, what, this old thing?” shrug. I couldn’t help but be impressed—not just at how stunning she looked, but at how effortlessly she was working me.

  Most guys cling to this archaic notion we are the seducers and women are the seduced. And perhaps, where the less clever of the gender is concerned, that’s true. But in the presence of the truly skilled female, such as Tina, the myth of male domination is just another one of those wrongheaded ideas women allow to be perpetuated so guys never turn around to see the marionette strings coming out our backs.

  It’s like lion prides. For years, researchers—sorry, male researchers—believed the boy lions duked it out for the right to breed with the girl lions, who were passive spectators in the whole thing. The record only got set straight when some female researchers came along and took a more careful look at the social dynamics in the pride that preceded the fight. It turns out much of the time the lionesses are really calling the shots, selecting the most fit breeding partner. The fights the boy lions have are merely a noisy confirmation of what the girl lions have already decided among themselves.

  So there I was, as our drinks arrived, wondering if I had been selected to beat the other lions to the prize. I wanted to skip the flirting and head straight to the making out, because nothing is more fun than engaging in truly obnoxious displays of public affection—if only because it makes the loveless married couples so damn uncomfortable.

  But Tina had subtly shifted her weight, crossing her legs in a way that made it impossible for me to move in without getting a knee in the thigh. Obviously, she wanted her puppet to talk for a while first. So she asked me about my story, and I answered.

  Another round of drinks arrived, and I was still talking— but without her having to ask questions. By the third round, it really started pouring out of me, all the emotion of the previous few days that I had been suppressing for one reason or another.

  I would say I was rambling, but it was worse than that. I was b
lubbering.

  Somewhere along the line, a transformation occurred in Tina. She was no longer wooing me with her black dress and knockout legs. She was reassuring me with this look of tender concern. She had pulled a cardigan over her shoulders—where the hell had that come from?—and I could tell she was keeping a tissue at the ready, in case I started bawling.

  What a nightmare. I had managed to wreck the surest thing this side of sunrise because I needed to share my feelings? What the hell was my problem?

  By the time Tina had comforted me and I paid the bill—my one manly act of the evening—I was just sober enough to realize an eighty-dollar bar tab meant I wasn’t going to be driving anywhere. As we departed, there was intimacy between us in that we had just shared an emotional experience. But there was no romance and certainly no lust. Nor should there have been. Don Juan never blubbered on his lover’s shoulder.

  Before long I was back in a familiar place: on Tina’s couch, covered in a blanket, very much alone.

  The Director awoke early, a habit he picked up in the military and had been unable to shake, even fifteen years after his last salute. It pleased him to know he started his day while most of the world slept. He noticed it was a trait common among the high-powered CEOs profiled on the cover of those business magazines. They were all early risers.

  The Director considered himself their peer, even if he never got his due for it. So he set his alarm clock for 4 A.M.

  He tiptoed down to the gym he had built in the basement of his suburban New Jersey home. His wife and three children complained about the noise of iron slapping iron interrupting their sleep, so he had soundproofed it like a recording studio. Only the softest ping escaped, not nearly enough noise to wake them.

  The Director had been working out six days a week since he left the military. He once swore he would never allow himself to get soft—he would keep the same iron-hard stomach as when he had been the fittest col o nel in the army.

  Alas, civilian food agreed with him too much. And as his metabolism slowed with age, he made a new vow: he would never allow himself to get weak. He took pride in still being able to bench-press over three hundred pounds. At an age, fifty-five, when some men were thinking about whether or not they would be able to pick up their grandchildren, the Director was still putting up personal bests in his basement weight room.