Front Page Fatality

by Walker, LynDee

  I shoved the pesky lock of hair that wouldn’t stay in my clip behind my ear again. I didn’t know a lot about guns, but I’d bet a whole shitload of them with unregistered serial numbers would be worth a pretty penny on the black market.

  “The guns.” Joey nodded. “Along with the drugs and cash from your murder cases, were on the boat. That baseball player and his buddies cost someone a lot of money Friday night.”

  “And you really don’t know who? Or you just don’t want to tell me?”

  He smiled again. “I don’t know. Truly. I do think this could work out well for us both if you handle it right, and I’ll help you as much as I can, but I’m not what you would call a quotable source.” He rose smoothly and walked toward me. “So you’ll have to find some things out for yourself. See what you can dig up, and if I come across anything I think might help, I’ll be in touch. I hear you’re a very determined lady, and I have a hunch you’ll get to the bottom of this. You’ll have the story of the decade when you do, I promise you.”

  I held my ground and kept my eyes on his face. His movements were easy. His lips turned up slightly as he slid sideways through the door, brushing closer to me than he needed to. I caught my breath at the unwanted shiver that skated up my spine. He smelled good, too.

  “What if you’re wrong?” I turned and walked with him to the front door, noting it wasn’t damaged. Just like the evidence lock up. “Why would anyone steal evidence from the police and put it on their own boat?”

  “I suggest you think about that, because I am not wrong.” He turned his head so his face was inches from mine, then stepped out onto the porch. “I like you. You’re smart. You’re determined. I’m going to be your friend, Miss Clarke—and I’m a very good friend to have.”

  I waited while he walked to the end of the sidewalk, where a black Town Car idled at the curb. What a day. I couldn’t even come home and go to bed like a normal person. No, I had to have James Bond’s better-looking Italian cousin giving the dog Stockholm Syndrome. I closed the door and turned the deadbolt, slid the chain home, then tugged on the knob to make sure it was secure.

  Moving through the house with Darcy on my heels, I checked every door and window and closet; even peering under my bed. When I was sure I was alone, and likely to stay that way for the rest of the night, I freshened the dog’s water and filled her bowl with kibble before I went to the cafe-style kitchen table with a legal pad and a pen, recording every detail of what was very possibly the strangest conversation of my life. The mental puzzles I’d been juggling all weekend suddenly melted neatly together, a chunk of the picture clear, if I believed Joey. And I did.

  Still mulling it over, I stirred the contents of a can of chicken noodle soup around in a pan on my aging GE stove and then took the pad with me to the couch. I pulled my legs up onto the cushion beneath me while I ate, picking my notes back up when I put the bowl down.

  “What’d you think?” I asked Darcy, who had retreated to her pink bed in the corner after her own dinner, curled up so she resembled a furry russet pom-pom. “He’s telling the truth, or at least, he thinks he is. But before I get in too deep, I need to find out who our visitor was and why he doesn’t want me to know.”

  Remembering Joey’s comment about not being a quotable source, I flipped back through my notes. An undercover cop couldn’t be quoted or it would blow his case. But he’d thought it was funny when I’d asked about him being a cop.

  He said he was like a politician, but “not the kind you mean.”

  “Oh, shit, Darcy,” I whispered. “What if he’s more Vito Corleone than Monroe Stahr?”

  I flipped faster between the pages, my eyes lighting on certain words. “I have lots of friends. They tell me things… Politics is making people think what you think.” He expected me to be afraid of him. He wore an expensive suit, he left in a chauffeured sedan, the accent…“I’m a good friend to have.”

  Of course. The cherry on top of my crazy Monday sundae. The first sexy guy I’d met in months, and he was probably an honest-to-God mobster. Why the hell not?

  I leaned my head back against the damask-covered sofa cushion. “Stolen evidence. Missing lawyers. And the fucking Mafia in my living room,” I laughed, mostly because it was better than screaming. The dog whimpered. “Well, Tuesday, you have a heck of a lot to live up to. Monday set the bar high this week.”

  Darcy looked downright indignant when I ordered her through the runt-sized doggie door on my way to bed, but I didn’t want to unlock the door to let her go pee, never mind step out for her customary game of fetch. She took less than a minute to do her business and bounce back in, turning her head away from me as she trotted to the bedroom. I double-checked the locks and turned off the lights, peering out the window into the still darkness, not even really sure what I was looking for.

  As a peace offering, I lifted Darcy out of her bed and onto mine when I crawled under the covers. Drifting off to sleep with Goodfellas and Donnie Brasco playing in my head, I felt her snuggle behind the crook of my knees and knew I’d been forgiven.

  By the time I got out of the shower the next morning, I had convinced myself the Mafia was the only logical explanation for “call me Joey,” altogether dismissing the idea that the guy was a cop. My inner Lois was sure of it, and going with my gut had never failed me. I also couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d seen him somewhere before.

  I brushed my teeth and tried to place Joey’s angular features in a courtroom, focusing on the handful of times I had heard rumors of Mafia activity along the Atlantic coast and trying to remember things I’d once made a concerted effort to forget.

  My initiation into the courthouse fraternity had been a formidable one, and among the first trials I’d covered was a particularly grisly murder case that sanity and sound sleep had demanded I repress in the nearly two years since. I tried to call up the details. The guy was an accountant, and he had been beheaded. His girlfriend found his head on his desk atop a stack of files that detailed a little side action. He’d been skimming cash from several local business owners who trusted him with their books, and he’d built an offshore nest egg that would’ve supported a family of four comfortably for at least a decade. The crime scene photos fueled my nightmares for weeks.

  The prosecutor walked into the trial almost cocky. He had a gruesome murder that was pulling huge ratings for the TV news, and consequently getting him a lot of face time with the cameras, and he had a confession from the defendant. The accountant had stolen money from the guy’s construction company. A slam dunk. The prosecutor didn’t mind that he didn’t have a murder weapon or DNA or any witnesses putting the accused at the scene of the crime. He had it sewn up, he’d told us at his self-organized ego-fest of a pretrial press conference on the courthouse steps. I hadn’t seen that lawyer in court since, but it wouldn’t occur to me to miss him.

  Ultimately, the New York legal celebrity who’d argued for the defense got the charges dismissed. It had been quite a show. No fancy loopholes or backroom deals, just outright dismissal by the judge on the most ridiculous of technicalities. The defense attorney, in his shiny wingtips and Hugo Boss, reminded me of a hunter stalking his prey as he’d led the arresting cop into admitting on the stand that he hadn’t read the guy his rights when he picked him up. Simple as that: no Miranda rights, no conviction. But thanks for playing.

  Before that little revelation swept the courtroom into chaos, however, I’d been eavesdropping on two prosecutors who were sitting in the cheap seats with the rest of us between court appointments of their own.

  “You don’t tend to live long when the Mafia catches you skimming money off the top,” one of them had said, chuckling. The other lawyer had agreed, and I’d rolled my eyes, tuning out their conversation and thinking they had seen too many movies.

  Suddenly sure I’d been mistaken, I shook off the memory of Joey’s eyes moving over me on his way out. It didn’t matter if he liked what he’d seen, because I didn’t find organized crime at
tractive, shivers or no. I gave myself a stern glare in the mirror to punctuate that thought.

  “I’m going to be your friend, Miss Clarke, and I am a very good friend to have.”

  I spit out the toothpaste and grabbed my hair dryer.

  So I just had to figure out if he was the kind of friend I wanted. I threw on a five-minute face and decided to skip body combat in favor of learning exactly what I was dealing with. Filling a travel mug with Green Mountain Colombian Fair Trade, I added a shot of white chocolate syrup and headed out.

  Halfway to the office, I thought about Bob.

  The worry of Monday afternoon eclipsed the evening’s interview with the young Godfather, and I laughed at the absurdity of such a convergence of drama.

  “Was there some kind of planetary alignment?” I asked out loud, raising my face to the heavens. “Have I angered somebody up there? How the hell does that much happen to one person on one day?”

  Somehow, ranting—even if it was just at my sunroof—made me feel better. When I noticed I was parked in the garage at the office, I shut off the engine and crossed the space between the car and the elevator quickly, looking over my shoulder twice in no more than two dozen steps. I figured I’d be paranoid for life because of that one interview.

  It was quiet in the newsroom in the early morning. I didn’t usually arrive before eight a.m. It was eerie for it to be so still with light outside the windows.

  I reached for my headphones and turned on a pulsing dance number before I opened my browser and clicked the Google tab on my favorites bar. I stared at the screen for a long moment before I typed “Mafia” into the box and hit the search button. I got more than forty-seven-million results.

  Scrolling down, I chose a Wikipedia article that turned out to be a complete history of organized crime in Sicily. It was fascinating, even if it wasn’t particularly relevant, and I read through half the page before I saw a link to something more promising. I waited for the article on the American Mafia to load and became engrossed in the information on the screen. It could’ve been lifted from any one of a hundred novels.

  “Yeah, I never would have believed any of this yesterday morning,” I said to the empty room, my eyes getting big as I read the long list of American cities with known Mafia families. Some of them were an easy day’s drive from Richmond. And the fine print said the list was a partial one.

  “Holy shit.” I exhaled forcefully, sat back in the chair, and dropped the headphones to my desk. Looking at a chart of how Mafia families are organized, I surmised Joey must be up there. I didn’t figure foot soldiers wore three-thousand-dollar suits and rode around in chauffeur-driven cars.

  There was a whole section on initiation and how it usually involved murder. I remembered the sardonic smile that played around Joey’s lips for most of the time I had talked to him, and shivered. Had someone, or more than one someone, taken their last breath looking at that smile?

  “A good friend to have,” he’d said.

  I guess if my choice was limited by him being in my living room, I’d certainly rather he like me than not.

  Bob was right. Missing lawyers, stolen evidence, and organized crime. It was a bona-fide investigative story. But I needed to know more about what I was dealing with. I clicked over to the Telegraph archives, searching old courthouse photos for Joey’s face. I found it in a shot from the decapitated accountant trial. Joey was part of a crowd of onlookers, leaning on a column behind the bigheaded prosecutor. I couldn’t zoom in too much without making the image fuzzy, but I’d recognize that little half-grin anywhere.

  “What the hell am I getting myself into?” I wondered aloud. Even as I said the words, I had a feeling it was too late to back out. And I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to.

  10.

  Missing links

  “No telling, where you’re concerned,” Shelby’s voice came from behind my shoulder and I jumped, whacking my knee on the underside of my desk. That would leave a mark. “Anything interesting?”

  Seriously, universe? I searched the memories of my college religion class for the words to the Hail Mary. Not that I was Catholic. I was just trying to cover my penance bases as Shelby stared at me with her ping-pong-ball eyes, making a tsk-tsk sound with her tongue.

  “Nothing you’d be up for,” I stretched my lips into a tight smile and cocked my head to one side. “Though, you know, I’ve read your stuff. It’s not bad.”

  She smiled, her eyes getting impossibly bigger. “I know.”

  I shrugged. “Like I said, not bad. But covering cops and covering garden parties are about as similar as the Oscars red carpet and a kid playing dress up. You wouldn’t last a day in my shoes. Bob’s not giving you my job, so give it up.”

  “Bob’s not here, is he? Les wasn’t happy with you last night. Not to kiss and tell, but I’d watch my step if I were you.”

  “Are you serious? Is there anyone in this building you haven’t boinked trying to get a promotion? Do you have, like, any self-respect?”

  “Sure. I respect my ability to find ways to get what I want,” she smiled. “You’re a good writer, Nichelle. And you’re a good reporter. Bob thinks you’re the next Helen Thomas, and it’s totally obvious to everyone how much you love that. But I’m a good writer, too. I just got hired for a beat that was expendable. Cops is not, and once I get away from the copy desk, I have no intention of going back.”

  I narrowed my eyes and started to say something, but she kept talking.

  “So do me a favor. Go get your story. I don’t even have to know what it is right now. Les said you were into something big he didn’t think you could handle. I, ever selfless, offered to help, which he thought was very sweet of me.” She smirked. “And as long as we’re talking about what everyone knows, we all know you’ve got your eye on the Post. And we all know if you were really good enough, you’d already be working there. Look, Nichelle, at the end of the day, it makes me no difference how you go. Ride off into the sunset to be a politics superstar, screw up and get yourself fired. All I care is that right now, Les is in charge, and I’m next in line for a byline as the crime reporter. So you have yourself a nice day. Just remember, I’ll be around.”

  She shot me one last smug grin, turned on her heel, and started to walk off.

  “Hey Shelby?” I called.

  She turned back.

  “If you were so great at what you do, Bob wouldn’t have hired me in the first place. You were already here, remember? Too bad you’re not his type. You may be leading Les around by his dick right now, but Bob still makes the staffing decisions. And just because you were a convenient threat on Saturday, doesn’t mean you’re next in line for jack shit.” I sounded way more confident than I felt, and her smile faltered, which made mine widen. “So you have yourself a nice day at the copy desk, okay?”

  Tuesday, mercifully, did not live up to Monday in terms of drama. I didn’t see Shelby again, and my day passed in a blur of phone calls and faxes. I called Gavin Neal’s wife (who had no comment, thank you, Les, but at least I had it in my day-two story), and looked through Neal’s recent cases again. The case I had remembered while I was talking to Joey, with the stolen guns, was the only notable one. A search of public records revealed a bankruptcy filing, mostly for medical collections, that hadn’t been granted, but I couldn’t access more than the final judgment, which held that Neal’s bills must be paid because of tougher standards in the bankruptcy code.

  Money was always good motive.

  But then Joey’s words rang in my head, and no matter how I turned them over, I couldn’t fit Neal into a scenario where the money blew up on the river. First, he went to evidence on Sunday, not Friday. Second, why would he put it on a PD boat if he was stealing it from the PD?

  If Joey was right about the boat, then Neal wasn’t the logical suspect in the evidence theft. Yet Charlie had blasted Neal’s face, superimposed over images of the evidence room, all over Channel Four beginning with the early show. Aaron was right—the
PD cast Neal as the bad guy. Charlie had nothing on his financial troubles, but I knew she would soon, and that only strengthened the case against him.

  After a good deal of back-and-forth, my desire to not lose to Charlie beat out my doubts about Neal and I went with it, bankruptcy and all. I threw in comments from DonnaJo and other prosecutors who proclaimed Neal’s innocence to balance my story, but it still didn’t look too good.

  If he didn’t take it, who did? I wondered about Aaron and his hornet’s nest, but I didn’t hear anything from him and he didn’t answer when I called.

  I went to see Bob on my way home and found him holding court in a hospital room that looked like it had been attacked by a florist on speed. I nodded to the mayor, three guys in suits I didn’t recognize, and the Telegraph’s advertising director, who all rose to leave when the phone rang just after I walked in.

  Bob talked to Les about the next day’s newspaper for a few minutes, picking at a tray of overcooked chicken, limp broccoli, and orange Jell-O. He looked almost like himself. He was even wearing pajamas Parker dropped off that morning instead of the hospital gown.

  Dr. Schaefer stopped in before I left, and she said she planned to send Bob home the next day. I grumbled about insurance companies and told Bob I’d be happy to help with whatever he needed. He said Parker had already volunteered for that job.

  “It sounded like he has some experience.” I smiled. “Something tells me he’ll take good care of you.”

  Bob muttered something about a babysitter and I laughed, wishing him a good night.

  Darcy streaked to the door in a little furry blur, barking her head off like always, when I got home. I scooped her up and kissed her fuzzy head, scratching her chest while I inspected the house. After a third check of all the locks, I relaxed a little.

  I spooned a can of beef and carrots Pedigree into Darcy’s bowl and ate a sandwich at the counter while she snarfed it down, then took her out for the shortest game of fetch in history, checked the locks again, and fell into bed, comforted by the soft feel of the sheets on my skin and the heft of the duvet as I settled back into the pillows.