Faces of the Gone: A Mystery

by Brad Parks

  “This is usually the point in the conversation when you should say something like, ‘apology accepted,’ ” Tina prompted.

  “Oh, yeah, yeah. Definitely. Apology accepted. It’s been a long day.”

  “So we’re okay now?”

  “We’re great.”

  She sat down in an empty seat at the desk across from mine. My reward—the superspecial toe-curl smile—was followed by a more serious countenance.

  “Are we good enough that I can give you a lecture?” she asked.

  “I suppose I have one coming.”

  “It’s real simple. Just be careful, okay? I care about you.”

  “I thought you only cared about my reproductive capacity,” I said, fixing her with what I hoped was an endearing grin.

  “Well, that, too. But I don’t want to have to tell my future child that his father got killed three days after conception.”

  “Conception? Who says I’m going to sleep with you? Since when am I that easy?”

  “Since puberty, I’m guessing.”

  Couldn’t exactly counter that point, so I decided to lecture back for a moment.

  “Okay, I know you’re just looking out for me. And it’s sweet, it really is. It shows your maternal side.”

  She blushed a bit.

  “But,” I continued, “this thing is, I don’t know, it’s like my responsibility now. I mean, there are four people in the morgue whose chances for justice are slipping away by the hour and it doesn’t look like anyone in an official capacity cares much whether they get it. Then there’s the matter of the woman in the hospital struggling for her life because of something I wrote.”

  Tina reached out across the desk and grabbed my hand.

  “That’s not true. You didn’t send that woman to the hospital. Some monster with a gasoline can and a lighter did that.”

  “And the monster never would have known about Brenda Bass if it weren’t for me. It’s not like we have a Hippocratic oath in this business. But if we did, I think it’s pretty clear I violated it.”

  “You’re being way too hard on yourself,” she said firmly.

  “Look, I don’t kid myself into thinking I can fix this mess— it’s already too broken for that. But maybe I can make it a little better.

  “Besides,” I said, with the requisite dramatic pause, “I think I may know who the bastard is.”

  “Yeah?” she said, releasing my hand and sitting back, like she wanted to get a wide- angle look at me.

  “Yeah. I was just about to visit him. Want to go for a ride?”

  She drew back even farther.

  “I’m not talking about a guns- blazing visit,” I continued. “Just an arm’s-length visit.”

  She looked around at the copy desk, where the most pressing business seemed to be parceling out a group dinner order that had just come in.

  “I don’t know if I can leave,” she said. “After I decided I wasn’t sleeping with you to night I agreed to fill in as night assignment editor. Technically the paper is under my command right now.”

  “Well, then I guess I just won’t tell you—”

  “Oh, dammit, you’re impossible. Fine. First edition is pretty much done, anyway. It’s just a drive- by, right?”

  Within five minutes, having bundled up against the cold, we were in my car, speeding toward the suburbs. I told Tina about the latest, ending with my brilliant deduction that Irving Wallace was “the Director” from the memo. Tina mostly just listened.

  “So, basically, it’s that he’s tall, his title has ‘director’ in it, and he heard you make an offhand comment about your piggy bank,” she said when I finished.

  “Yeah,” I said. “ And the murder weapon was a forty-caliber gun like a fed would use. And he seems to have an overdeveloped curiosity for our coverage of the Ludlow Street murders. And he just seems like the kind of uptight guy who would write memos about things.”

  “Uh-huh,” Tina said, but I could hear her uncertainty. “And he’s got a fully paid-off house in Summit worth $1.4

  million,” I added. “How does a government lab director swing that?” “He could have inherited it,” she pointed out. “You said he grew up in town. Maybe that was the family manse?”

  “He’s not old enough to have lost both his parents.”

  “Mmm-hmm. And how did Irving Wallace find Hector Alvarez?”

  “I haven’t figured that out yet,” I said. “But it stands to reason someone who does drug testing would have connections in the drug treatment community. The world isn’t that big.”

  I turned off the interstate at the Summit exit, and not fifteen minutes after we departed Newark’s gritty streets we were driving along the tree-lined avenues of one of New Jersey’s nicest suburbs. This state could give you socioeconomic whiplash that way.

  “But you think Irving Wallace works for this La Cabra fellow?” Tina said.

  “Well, I’m not a hundred percent sure about that one,” I admitted. “Call that a maybe. I mean, he did seem to go out of his way to try to throw me off that trail, like he was protecting someone. Why would he do that?”

  “But, turn it around for a second, why would La Cabra want to work with Irving Wallace?” Tina asked as we climbed a hill, past rows of houses that got nicer as the elevation rose.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m saying, just imagine you’re a Colombian drug lord. You can probably convince just about any bad guy in America to work with you. Why would you want to collaborate with someone who works for the government?”

  “Well, because . . . because that way the government wouldn’t come after you,” I said. “Irving Wallace would be able to mislead them from the inside, push them in other directions.”

  “No good,” Tina said. “I love conspiracy theories as much as the next girl. But there is just no way some bureaucrat with a chemistry set is going to convince the entire U.S. Department of Justice to call off the dogs on one of the world’s most notorious drug kingpins.”

  “Good point,” I said. I should have thought of that myself. The La Cabra thing may have just been the National Drug Bureau’s ill-conceived way to explain four dead bodies, with no more credibility than the Newark police’s ill-considered barstickup theory. “I suppose it’s possible Irving Wallace is acting alone,” I conceded.

  “Okay, so without the Colombian drug lord, how did Irving Wallace get the product he needed for his operation?” Tina asked.

  “His lab tests thousands of kilos a year,” I said as we passed a sign for a hospital, then neared a train station. “He told me that himself.”

  “And you think he got his drugs by skimming off a portion of whatever his lab got sent for testing.”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “What about chain of custody?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” she said, “any drugs seized by a law enforcement agency is eventually going to be used as evidence in a trial, right?”

  “If all goes well, yeah.”

  “So part of being used in evidence is having a clean chain of custody. Every person who handles it along the way has to sign something attesting that they didn’t tamper with it.”

  “Uh-huh. And?” I asked, as we rolled past a YMCA, a library, a quaint little park, all the trappings of a well-tended, well-to-do town.

  “I’m just saying that it’s not like John Q. Detective is going to fork over ten kilos of heroin to the lab and then not notice when only five kilos come back,” Tina said. “How did he get around that?”

  “I don’t know. He’s a bright guy. He could have figured out something, I’m sure.”

  “Oh, of course,” Tina said. “But then there’s the issue of purity.”

  “What issue?” I asked, feeling increasingly worn down by Tina’s cross-examination. It was like being a rookie reporter again, and the editor was asking me all the questions I had been too feebleminded to think of myself.

  “Well, Wallace told you—what was it
you put in the paper? That it was the purest heroin ever sold?”

  “Right.” I said, Making a turn at a convenience store and passing several majestic Gothic churches.

  “Okay, even assuming he was lying, everyone else has told you The Stuff was the best, that junkies adored it,” she said. “So we can assume it was pretty high purity.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So all Wallace has access to is heroin that has been seized off the street and comes into his lab. How is he possibly going to take that—a lot of which is garbage—and turn it into this product that drove all the junkies wild?”

  “Christ, Tina,” I finally exploded. “He’s a chemist. Don’t you think he knows how to do something like that?”

  “Okay, okay. Don’t get defensive. I’m just saying we have a few blanks to fill in, that’s all.”

  “Editors,” I huffed. And she let me leave it at that.

  Our destination, New England Avenue, was just on the other side of the downtown area, opposite the Grand Summit Hotel. We passed some apartments, then some town houses, then some smaller houses, then some larger ones. Then we came to the Irving Wallace residence. The place was completely dark, but I didn’t so much as tap the brakes as we rolled by.

  “Hey, you passed it,” Tina said.

  “I know,” I said, and drove two blocks farther down before turning around. On the way back, I turned off the headlights and we coasted to a stop. I didn’t know if the subterfuge was necessary, but it couldn’t hurt. Besides, with the lights off, it was less likely for a neighbor to notice a strange car and decide to call the cops. In Newark, my four-year-old Chevy Malibu was well camouflaged. In Summit, amid all the fancy imports and high-end domestics, it might as well have come with a neon sign that said JUST VISITING.

  We took some time to stare at the house, looking for, I don’t know, signs of evil aura or something. But it was just your basic Tudor, slightly on the large side but not a mansion by any stretch. I was guessing five bedrooms, three baths, no more. Don’t get me wrong, it looked like it could keep the rain off your head. But it didn’t entirely fit what I was envisioning.

  “I guess $1.4 million doesn’t buy that much anymore,” I said.

  “Not in Summit, New Jersey, it doesn’t. Not even after a real estate slump.”

  “Where do you think he buries his money?”

  “Isn’t it always beneath the trapdoor that Scooby and Shaggy accidentally fall into?” Tina asked.

  “Yeah, and he would have gotten away with it if not for us meddling kids,” I said.

  I turned my attention back toward the house. There was a basketball hoop in the driveway. The hedges were neatly trimmed. There were two large trees in the front lawn, each of which looked to be a minimum of a hundred years old. There were no cars in the driveway, no sign of white vans anywhere— though I’m sure he would have been smart enough to stash his dirty-work vehicle elsewhere.

  “I think I’ll go ring the doorbell,” I said.

  Tina whirled to face me and voice her objections.

  “Kidding,” I said, before she could get them out.

  I shifted the Malibu out of park, turning the headlights back on when we had gotten under way. There was nothing to be gained by confronting Irving Wallace at this point. Fact was, as Tina had so effectively pointed out, I hadn’t even begun to figure out how his operation worked. And until I had a better idea, it was best that he not know I was closing in on him.

  The newsroom was peaceful when we returned. By ten o’clock on a typical Friday night, there are usually more people working on the Sunday paper than are still fretting over Saturday’s edition, so no one is in too big a hurry. It’s not that we didn’t take Saturday seriously, but . . . oh, hell, who am I kidding? We didn’t take Saturday seriously. It was our smallest paper of the week and the one day a week that didn’t count toward the numbers we gave to the Audit Bureau of Circulation. It was the closest a daily paper could come to taking a day off.

  Tina had another two hours before she could abandon ship and focus her energies on entertaining me. I thought about borrowing her house key, crashing on her couch for a while, maybe rifling through her underwear drawer for fun. But—and maybe I just watch too many horror movies—I didn’t want to be the male equivalent of the dumb blonde at home alone when the axe murderer was on the loose.

  Besides, if I went back to Tina’s place by myself, there would be nothing to do but mull things over, and there was no sense in letting my brain do too much catching up. I was afraid it would put me on the next flight to the Bahamas if it did.

  So I ambled over to chat up Peterson, night rewrite man nonextraordinaire, to see what mayhem he was chronicling. Peterson started at the Eagle-Examiner as a clerk, when he was seventeen. As best I could tell, that had been 150 years ago—give or take. He moved into night work early in his career and had been doing it ever since.

  Peterson’s job essentially consisted of waiting for people to die. If they died of natural causes, he wrote an obit. If the cause was unnatural, he wrote a news story. It would be impossible to put an exact number on how many thousands of New Jerseyans had their demises chronicled by Peterson. But when you figure he averaged two hundred bylines a year, the numbers added up.

  Yet it never seemed to grow old to him. He attacked each death with relish, eagerly ferreting out the details that would allow him to write that the deceased was beloved by all (if it was an obit) or that a death had shocked an otherwise quiet community (if it was a murder) or that the deceased met his end amid the squeal of skidding tires and the shriek of breaking glass (if it was a car crash). His penchant for cliché was legendary.

  But on this night, he looked bored.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” I asked.

  “Pretty quiet tonight,” he said glumly. “Only one shooting.” “Is it anything you can turn into a story?”

  “I don’t think so. Just another Newark kid.”

  He yawned out of boredom. I yawned because yawning is

  contagious and because I had been going nonstop for fourteen hours—and was starting to feel it. “Police give you an ID?” I asked, just to keep the conversation going.

  “Nope. He’s John Doe. They’re still looking for next of kin. We’ll be lucky if we get an ID in Monday’s paper.”

  “Where’d it happen?”

  “They won’t say.”

  I cocked my head.

  “What do you mean they won’t say?” I asked. If nothing else, we could always get a location.

  Peterson yawned again. “They were being coy with me. Gave me the old ‘it’s an ongoing investigation’ and told me to call back later.”

  “What time did you have that conversation?”

  “I don’t know, an hour ago?”

  “Well, it’s later now, isn’t it? What do you say you give our good friend Hakeem Rogers a call?”

  “Good point,” he said, grabbing the phone and jabbing at the numbers. Peterson was from the manual-typewriter generation and therefore believed all buttons needed to be depressed with brute force, lest they fail to register.

  “Rogers, it’s Peterson,” he said into the handset. “What’s going on with the kid who ate the bullet?” He waited. “I know you don’t have an ID. But you gotta have a location for me.” More pause. “Well, what gives, Rogers? How am I supposed to write a story that says someone got killed but we don’t know who and we don’t know where and we don’t know how? This is a newspaper, not a game of Clue.” Another pause. “Well, I don’t give a rat’s ass what your captain says. Tell your captain the law says the public has a right to know and I got a deadline.” Briefer pause. “Fine. Put him on.”

  Peterson cupped the phone and looked at me. “I don’t know why they’re always playing these games with me. Every night, it’s like Professor Plum with the wrench in the study.”

  Peterson returned the phone to his mouth. “Hi, Captain, it’s Peterson. Am I going to have to sic our lawyers on you guys or can we get a l
ittle cooperation here?”

  The captain started speaking and Peterson’s hands suddenly came to life. He flipped his notebook to a blank page and began scribbling madly. Peterson was excitable by nature, so it was hard to tell if this was routine or if he was onto something big. I did my best to divine what was happening from Peterson’s half of the conversation:

  “No kidding . . . Unbelievable . . . The exact same place? . . . Against the back fence? . . . How many? . . . Where? . . . Damn. And the call came in when? . . . Any witnesses? . . . You think it’s connected to the thing from before? . . . Yeah, I’ll hang on.”

  Peterson cupped the phone again. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “But they found another body in that vacant lot down on Ludlow Street.”

  I

  didn’t wait for Peterson to finish with the captain. “I’m heading down there,” I told him. “Call me.”

  Peterson nodded, returning his attention to his notepad. It occurred to me I should tell Tina where I was heading, partly as a courtesy and partly because she was in charge of the newspaper at the moment. But she was off in a far corner hovering over some page proofs with the copy desk chief, immersed in conversation. So I pit-stopped at her desk, grabbed a sticky note and scribbled, “Going to Ludlow St. Ask Peterson.—C.” Then I attached it to her computer screen and hurried toward the exact last place I wanted to be: back in the hood.

  But there was no choice, really. I was the only one who could go. I don’t say that out of some overdeveloped hero complex. I mean I was literally the only one who could go. Between the hiring freezes, the layoffs, and the voluntary buyouts—all symptoms of the newspaper’s unceasing economic decline—our staff was half the size it once was. The days of keeping around spare bodies to throw at breaking news were long over. During off hours, we were down to one reporter, who stayed tied to the desk.

  So I went back into the frosty night, barely tapping the Malibu’s brakes at red lights on the way down to Ludlow Street. I was most of the way there when my cell phone buzzed with Peterson’s number flashing on the screen.