The Girl Next Door

by Brad Parks

  So I started making for the first unoccupied glass office I saw while trying to ignore the pounding in my chest.

  “Hang on a second, I got too many ears around,” I said, walking in and closing the door behind me. “Okay, I’m in a spot where no one is listening. You’re going to have to give this to me again.”

  “I know, I know, it’s crazy,” Jim said, talking faster than I had ever heard him before. “But I was with him the night before Nancy was killed.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, you may not know it, but Gary likes to tie one on now and then, and I don’t mind knocking back a few myself. So we went to a bar to do a little away-from-the-table negotiating. Sometimes you get a lot more done with a drink in your hand than you do sitting in a conference room, you know?”

  “Right, of course.”

  Outside the door, Lester Palenski—our bikini-obsessed photo editor—stopped and looked at me curiously, sitting in an office that wasn’t my own. He seemed perturbed, mouthed the words “I need to talk to you” and held up a printout of a picture. I flashed him a thumbs-up, then pointed to my phone. He frowned and moved on.

  “And … look, you can’t tell anyone about this,” Jim continued. “I could get in deep water with the membership, negotiating on my own like this. They’d skin me alive. I’m just telling you this because you’re a good enough reporter, you’d probably figure out it was Jackman sooner or later. I’m just helping you along, you know?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, inhaling and exhaling loudly. “So, anyway, I had suggested we meet at this bar for a friendly get-to-know-you drink. But he and I both knew what I really meant was I wanted to be able to talk without all the lawyers around. You can make more headway in thirty minutes without the lawyers around than you can in thirty days with ’em, you know?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So it’s just him and me at this bar, and we’re kind of getting into it. We’d both had a few—more than a few, maybe—and he was getting kind of pissed off. Some guys are like that when they drink.”

  And, I wanted to add, some guys throw up on the gentleman next to them at the symphony. But I just said, “Yeah, sure.”

  “So Jackman keeps pushing and pushing, saying we should just give in. And I … I feel really awful about this, given what happened … but I kept using Nancy as, like, I don’t know, a block or something, like I was good cop and she was bad cop. Because he knew she had been a hardliner. So he’d say, ‘We could maybe go for a thirty percent cut.’ And I’d think about it and say, ‘I don’t think Nancy would go for that.’ And he’d say, ‘Well, what about a rolling cut, ten percent this year, ten percent next, ease people into it?’ And I’d think about it some more, pretend to really be wanting to do it, and then say, ‘I’m not sure Nancy would like that.’”

  “Had Nancy told you she wouldn’t cave, no matter what?”

  Jim hefted another sigh.

  “Well, she had and she hadn’t,” he said. “I was really just winging it, trying to tweak him. Sometimes negotiations are like that. You got to get under a guy’s skin. In the end, we probably had to give in a little. I just didn’t want to have to give in a lot. I feel so bad about what happened. I never knew he really meant it when he was making all those threats.”

  “Threats?”

  “Oh, well, I kept telling him Nancy wouldn’t go for this, Nancy wouldn’t go for that, and it really got him going. Suddenly he was saying things like, ‘I can handle Nancy Marino. I’m not going to let Nancy Marino get in my way.’ I thought he was just blowing off some steam. I had no idea.”

  “So it got personal,” I said.

  “Oh yeah. Big-time. Real personal. There was this vibe to it like he was big Gary Jackman and she was just little Nancy Marino and how dare she get in his way. You can imagine a guy like Jackman is making, what, five hundred, six hundred grand a year? Maybe more. And here some papergirl making eighteen bucks an hour is telling him where he can get off? He just wasn’t having it.”

  Lester wandered past again and squared to look at me, emphasizing his impatience by waving the photo at me. I gave him a palms-up, nothing-I-can-do gesture. He shot me a dirty look and stalked off.

  “So how did you guys leave it?” I asked.

  “We didn’t. He just stormed out.”

  “What bar were you at?” I asked. I was thinking about how I was going to get this on the record in some way. If they were having that loud an argument, there would have been a bartender who heard it.

  “I … Look, I can’t say,” Jim said, having already guessed my intentions. “I can’t have you charging in there and asking questions. I’m known there. I go there a lot and so do some of my members. Word’ll get out.”

  “Okay, so think like a journalist for a second, Jim. You know I can’t just run with a single off-the-record source on something like this. This is my smoking gun, but I need more than just one person seeing the smoke. How am I supposed to prove this without a little help?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he admitted. “I just sort of hoped if I put you on the right track, you’d be able to figure it out.”

  I plunked my elbow on the desk in front of me and rested my chin in my palm. It was a lot to absorb, and I had a thousand questions, the first of which was:

  “Why not take this to the police, Jim?”

  “Look, I’d like to, and I thought about it. But I just can’t. Think about it from my angle. I’m locked in a tense negotiation with this guy right now. Just say it turns out Jackman didn’t have anything to do with it, that he just happened to get ticked at Nancy the night before she had an accident. The cops might decide I was out to frame the guy and hit me with charges of making a false statement or something. Or Jackman could sue me personally, say I was slandering him to get some leverage. It could wreck our whole negotiation, one; and, two, the union board would fire me for screwing it up. I can’t risk getting involved when the whole thing could just be one big coincidence.”

  It wasn’t a coincidence, of course. Nancy Marino really was murdered. I knew that for certain. Jim McNabb didn’t, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell him. Not yet.

  The fact was, McNabb had reasons to want Jackman to be the killer. And a source with an agenda like that had to be handled carefully. If all these circumstantial pieces pointing toward Jackman turned out to be true, it would be an epic scandal. Jackman would be fired immediately, of course, and the paper’s owners would appoint an interim publisher while they tried to find a replacement, which could take months. Then the new publisher would come in and take a few more months to figure out which way was up. In the meantime, IFIW–Local 117 would skate along with its current contract in place and no one would be bothering to press for pay cuts.

  Plus, I’m pretty sure killing a shop steward qualified as an unfair labor practice. There might be ramifications there that would further help the union. So I would definitely be aiding Jim’s cause.

  But I’d also be bringing a murderer to justice and breaking a career story, both of which felt like fairly noble goals. Was Jackman really the guy? Was a man who once went after someone with a seven-iron capable of something even more brutal?

  I took a deep breath and said:

  “Okay, Jim. I’ll do some digging.”

  * * *

  Emerging from my borrowed office, I shot a quick glance in the direction of Lunky, who seemed to be concentrating on his story and not, I hoped, daydreaming about the fishing on Walden Pond. Judging him momentarily innocuous—not a harm to either himself or others—I decided I had a few spare moments to start some of the aforementioned digging. Not enough to require a backhoe or anything. Just a little garden trowel would do fine.

  I took the elevator to the third floor. It was not normally a place in the building I had any need to go, and I didn’t know anyone up there—the whole separation of church and state thing—but I knew that was where Jackass wasted space alongside his
harem of secretaries. It being nearly six o’clock, I thought they would all be gone for the day, allowing me to pry into his stuff without interference.

  Instead, when I rounded the last corner, I was startled to discover one of the three desks in the secretarial pool still occupied. They must have staggered their shifts so one was on duty both before and after regular business hours.

  I almost turned away, thinking I would come back later when all three of them would be gone. Then I noticed Jackman’s door was closed and his office was dark. He had gone home. It was just the third secretary, a cute-if-somewhat-chunky brunette who probably spent a few too many Saturday nights at home with her Netflix account. There was always the chance she might be chatty.

  “Hi,” I said, then spied her nameplate and added, “Courtney,” before it sounded like too much of a stretch.

  Courtney’s attention had been fixed on a piece of paper on her desk, and she looked up at me with utter bewilderment, like I had walked down the hallway with a giant bird of prey perched on my head. Seeking to set her at ease and perhaps build some rapport, I rewarded her with a winsome smile (because my mother tells me it’s quite charming), fixed my blue eyes on hers (because my mother tells me I have nice eyes), and tried to look cute (because my mother thinks I’m cute).

  And maybe it would have worked if Courtney really was my mother. Instead, she struck a businesslike tone and said, “Hi, can I help you?”

  I laughed for no reason.

  “That’s so funny,” I said. “I was just about to ask you if you could help me. And then you asked me the same question. That’s wild! Do you have ESP or something?”

  Courtney looked at me like the bird on top of my head was now talking to her. And she still wasn’t buying … well, anything.

  “No,” she said.

  “No? No psychics in the family?”

  “No.”

  “Palm readers? Fortune tellers? Tarot card specialists?”

  “No,” she said again, more firmly this time.

  “Oh well, I just thought that maybe…”

  My voice trailed off. I was the comedian whose act was totally dying. Courtney was getting even less amused by the second.

  “Did you need something?” she asked.

  Time to take a stab.

  “Yeah, I … uhh … I’m told Mr. Jackman gave a very important speech last Thursday night and I’ve been asked to get a … a video of it. You know, put it on YouTube, tweet it, Facebook it, hope it goes viral, that kind of thing. So I just need to know where he was last Thursday night. I think it might have been the, uh, Morristown Rotary Club, but the person who told me wasn’t sure. Would you mind checking his schedule to see where he was that night?”

  I said I’d take a stab. I didn’t say it would be a good one. I was uncertain whether Morristown even had a Rotary Club. And even if it did, I wasn’t sure if Rotarians met at night. Courtney was eyeing me like the bird on my head was now warbling Queen’s classic rock anthem “Bicycle Race.”

  “Ah, okay.” Courtney glanced down at her desk. “Mr. Jackman has us keep his appointment book by hand—he doesn’t like using the computer. Let me just look for you.”

  “Thanks,” I said, beginning to understand why he needed three secretaries.

  “I was just about to leave, so I locked the drawer, hang on,” she said, standing up and crossing the secretarial pod toward a small metal lockbox atop a filing cabinet. She worked the dials to the proper position, pulled out a round desk key, returned to her chair and started opening the drawer. I was almost at pay dirt when, as an afterthought, she said, “And, I’m sorry … who needs this video again?”

  I didn’t want Jackman to have any way of knowing I was snooping around his office, so I said, “Ted from accounting.”

  “Who’s Ted from accounting?”

  “I am.”

  She jerked her head up from her desk drawer. “No you’re not,” she said. “You’re Carter Ross. I saw you on TV that one time.”

  I had made an unscheduled and unfortunate appearance on all the local networks a few years back. It had so thoroughly haunted me the first time around it didn’t seem fair it was now haunting me in reruns.

  “Ha ha,” I said. “Yeah, that was … hoo … you remember that, huh?”

  Courtney was now appraising me as if the bird had stopped singing and simply loosened its bowels on my face. Yet just when I thought things were going quite poorly enough, they got worse: Gary Jackman walked out of his office. He hadn’t gone home, after all. He was just working with the lights off.

  Looking at him as a potential murderer for the first time, I had to admit there was a certain fit to it. Who else would have benefited more from the death of an uncompromising shop steward than the man locked in a stalemate with her union? And who would have had access to the addresses on her paper route and known when she’d be delivering? All signs continued to point to Jackman.

  Meanwhile, he was regarding me with his usual mild disgust.

  “Are you here for that interview about, I’m sorry, what was her name?” he asked.

  So that’s how he was going to play it: like he couldn’t even remember the name of the woman he had killed.

  “Nancy Marino,” I prompted, and watched him carefully to see if the mention of her would change something in him. But he was far too cool for that.

  “Right, right. Nancy Marino,” he said. “I really don’t have time right now. But maybe Courtney can schedule you for first thing tomorrow?”

  “Why, does it make you uncomfortable talking about her?” I challenged him, trying to give him a good stare down, only to be interrupted by Courtney.

  “He told me his name was Ted and he was from accounting,” she said.

  Jackman tilted his head. “Is that true? Why would you do that?” he demanded.

  I was so intent on staring down Jackman it took me a moment to realize I had been totally and completely busted. It was time to sound the retreat. This wasn’t the right moment to confront Jackman anyway, not when I still had so many gaps in my story. So I started backtracking as best I could.

  “Yeah, uh … Ted,” I said, forcing out a laugh. “Just a little reporter’s humor for you.”

  Jackman pursed his thin lips, crossed his arms, and looked at me condescendingly—a well-practiced posture for him.

  “But how would that be funny, a reporter misrepresenting himself?” he asked. “I would call that unethical, not funny.”

  Oh great, the man who wouldn’t know an inverted pyramid lede from an inverted nipple was suddenly a journalism expert.

  “Yeah, I … uhh…” I said, groping for something that felt like an emergency exit. “Look, to be honest, I was just trying to hit on Courtney here, and I thought if I made her laugh, it would help my cause.”

  I turned to Courtney and said, “I’m sorry. I’m such a clod. Please accept my apology.”

  I expected Courtney might send a paperweight flying in the direction of the bird on my head. Instead, her face flushed and she looked down at the translucent floor mat under her chair.

  “Oh, that’s … that’s okay, really,” she stammered. “Maybe we could … grab some coffee sometime.”

  Jackman looked distinctly uncomfortable, like he had come to the television studio to be a guest on Hardball with Chris Matthews and stumbled onto the set of The Dating Game with Chuck Woolery by mistake. My previously wounded male ego experienced a moment of pure triumph—Mom was right after all!—then I decided to make my getaway while the situation was at the peak of confusion.

  “That would be great,” I said. “Anyhow, I’ll just be moving on now.”

  I turned and walked briskly away before either of them had a chance to comprehend the strangeness of it all.

  * * *

  Back on the second floor, I made it off the elevator about five steps when I was accosted by Lester Palenski, who was waving a photo printout above his head. In addition to his fondness for bikinis, Lester was known to run a littl
e hot. If one of his photographers failed to get the shot he needed—and it happens to even the best photographers on occasion—Lester took it personally, as if everyone was conspiring to thwart him.

  “There you are!” he seethed. “You want to explain this to me?”

  Lester handed me the piece of paper he had been brandishing. It was a picture of Lunky, our hulking intern, with his arms wrapped around a bear, which appeared to be dead. It had this vaguely Paleolithic feel about it—Lunky, with his latter-day Neanderthal eyebrow ridge and bushy hair, lugging his kill with him, wearing a goofy grin all the while.

  “Brodie wants this story for A1,” Lester said. “But this is the only picture I have of that damn bear.”

  And, of course, our newspaper couldn’t very well run a picture of its own intern, especially when he was engaged in an act that didn’t look much like journalism.

  “My shooter told me the scene was roped off and the animal control truck was blocking his view. So this was all he could get,” Lester said.

  I looked at the photo some more, because I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. It was our bear, all right, all two hundred pounds of it. Yet Lunky had the thing cradled in his arms like a massive, furry infant, and appeared not to be exerting himself at all as he carried it.

  “I see” is all I could say, still staring at the printout.

  “Your intern ruined my picture,” Lester said, spicing the accusation with a pair of unrepeatable adjectives before the words “intern” and “picture.”

  “I, uh, wow,” I replied.

  The veins on either side of Lester’s neck were starting to bulge. “A bear wanders into Newark for the first time since the dawn of industrialization and your intern ends up carrying it. You want to explain that to me?”

  I couldn’t, of course. When I left, that stupid bear was fifteen feet up a tree, and it looked like it would take a cherry picker to get him out. I couldn’t begin to fathom the circumstances that would have ended with Lunky cradling the thing in his arms. But I would have to figure it out, and fast. Lester had likely lodged his complaint with everyone in the newsroom—everyone who had functioning eardrums, anyway—and as the adult assigned to babysit Lunky this afternoon, I would be expected to account for what happened. I started inching my way around Lester, who was standing between me and any hope I had of mitigating this disaster.