The Fraud (17 page)

There were no sirens approaching, no other drivers or pedestrians around to sound any alarm. After a mile or so, Blue Mask pulled over, stole the license plates of an old Saturn, and tossed the Caddy’s plates in a Dumpster.

He cursed when he surveyed the damage to the Cadillac. But maybe it wouldn’t hurt the resale value too much. The bumper could be pulled out. The window could be replaced.

It certainly was drivable. And it would get him down to the Pine Barrens and back. He could have Birdie buried by dawn. That was what mattered.

CHAPTER 21

I woke up the next morning with this feeling of dread, like the awful aftertaste of the night before had yet to leave my tongue.

Tina was still in bed when I dragged myself out of it. She had slept fitfully, like usual. It is the horrible irony of the final trimester that a woman who wants nothing more than to sleep can’t seem to do it. People like to say it’s the body’s way of preparing itself for the marathon of sleep deprivation that is to come. I think it’s just one more cruelty nature visits on pregnant women.

Naturally, Tina’s struggles meant I had slept poorly, too. Though I was just smart enough not to complain. I like my face unslapped.

The encouraging news, which Tina received via an early-morning e-mail that she drowsily checked while in bed, was that Brodie had made it through the night. He was far from out of the woods—they were just starting to assess the damage—but he had survived those crucial first twelve hours. Apparently, it took a lot more than just a heart attack to take down our executive editor.

I was stepping out of the shower as Tina entered the bathroom.

“Can I pee?” she asked.

We were not at the point of our cohabitation that we were comfortable urinating in front of each other. And, come to think of it, that was a point I hoped we would not reach for a while—like, a hundred and fifty years or so. I realize not all couples in this great, urinating nation of ours feel the same way. I say: keep some of the mystery intact, America.

I vacated the bathroom for a moment. When I heard the toilet flush and the shower turn on, I thought it safe to reenter.

“I can’t believe I’m going to have to put the same underwear back on when I get out of here,” she said.

I decided this was not the moment to badger her about her failure to have moved any of her stuff into my house. (See previous reference to: face, unslapped.)

“I’d offer you some of mine, but somehow I don’t think they’d fit.”

“No, the sad thing is, they probably would,” she said. “The only problem is this will end up being the day I go into labor, and the nurses will ask me if my wife is planning to attend the delivery.”

“You could always go commando.”

“No,
you
could go commando. Trust me when I say a woman in my condition cannot. You don’t want to even know what’s oozing out of—”

“You know, why don’t I just let you enjoy your shower?” I said.

She laughed and let the water run for a while. As I shaved, my thoughts meandered back to Earl Karlinsky. I knew I needed to catch him in the act, whatever that act happened to be.

A friend of mine tells a great, perhaps apocryphal, story about Jimmy Breslin, the famed New York
Daily News
and
Newsday
columnist. This dates back to the early eighties. Breslin was already a legend—his piece about the ditchdigger at John F. Kennedy’s funeral is perhaps the most venerated newspaper column of all time—but he was not the type to rest on his Pulitzer.

As the story goes, there was a rumor about a school superintendent in the Bronx who had misappropriated a baby grand piano from a school and given it to a pastor-community activist. This caused quite an uproar, and there was considerable speculation as to whether this had occurred. Breslin wasn’t one for rumors. He marched up to the Bronx, knocked on the pastor’s door, and said, “Show me the piano.”

It speaks to Breslin’s ability to get to the heart of the matter. But it also makes the point that there is no substitute for seeing something with your own eyes. If I wanted to know whether Earl Karlinsky was cruising the parking lot, slapping tracking devices on cars, I’d have to find a way to set up there and check it out.

I couldn’t very well use my car. My Malibu was too conspicuous.

The water in the shower shut off. That’s when an idea came to me.

“Hey, can I borrow your car today?” I asked.

“That depends,” Tina said. “Can I borrow a towel?”

“That can be arranged,” I said, exiting the bathroom for a moment to fish a towel out of my linen closet.

I returned as she slid the shower curtain back. I took a few seconds to leer at Tina’s naked body.

“You know you’re gorgeous, right?” I asked.

“Towel,” she said.

I handed it to her.

“What do you need my car for?” she asked as she went through a drying routine made more complicated by her baby bump.

“I just wanted to do a little snooping on a source and I need a change of vehicular appearance.”

“Okay, just try not to get any bullet holes in it,” she said. This, sadly, had happened to my Malibu. If you looked carefully enough, you could still see where the holes had been patched up.

I returned to my bedroom to give my wardrobe its usual 1.3 nanoseconds of consideration. I came away with pleated slacks, a button-down shirt, and a patterned tie—an ensemble that was a completely different fashion paradigm from the day before, because the shirt was pale blue, not white, and the slacks were slightly darker.

If I ever write an erotic novel, its title will be inspired by my closet. I’ll call it
Fifty Shades of Khaki
.

I went downstairs to the kitchen and fed Deadline, who was nervously pacing in front of his bowl, anxious to get on with another busy day of eating and sleeping. I then poured myself a man-sized bowl of a children’s cereal and checked my e-mail.

The one from Buster Hays was the first to catch my eye. Buster still struggles with e-mail etiquette and has yet to master where the salutation belongs. Hence I clicked on an e-mail with “Dear Ivy,” in the subject line.

The good news is he has recently overcome his affinity for Caps Lock, so I could at least peruse the body of the e-mail without feeling like he was screaming at me. It read:

According to task force, another carjacking last night, approx. 12:30
A.M.
in the 100 block of Washington Street. Vehicle was white Cadillac CTS, three years old. Driver was shot in neck but managed to walk to hospital. Assailant ID’d as a young black male wearing blue ski mask.

Buster

P.S. Don’t thank me. Just send scotch.

I absorbed that news for a moment. The man in the blue ski mask—who may or may not have been following me the day before, and who may or may not be working in a crew with Earl Karlinsky—had a busy night. I wondered if the Cadillac belonged to a Fanwood Country Club member. Cops would not usually share the name of a victim who had survived an assault, but if anyone could coax it out of them, it would be Buster. I replied to his message, asking him to do just that, promising a second bottle of scotch as a thank-you.

The other e-mail of interest came from Doc Fierro. It was a list of every member of Fanwood Country Club, along with a pointed suggestion I not misuse the information or say where I had gotten it.

I replied with a quick thank-you, along with an acknowledgment that I owed him a debt of more than just gratitude. Then I redacted his name from the e-mail and forwarded it to Buster Hays with a request that he ask his guy on the carjacking task force to check it against their database of recent victims.

About the time I was done with this, Tina appeared, with damp ringlets of hair brushing against yesterday’s blouse.

“I’m starving,” she said. “Do you have anything resembling berries or citrus in this house?”

“That depends, do Froot Loops count?”

“You realize you’re going to have diabetes by the time you hit forty,” she said.

I grinned. “Yeah, but if you go by my maturity level, that’s still at least twenty-eight years away.”

She just shook her head. We swapped car keys. She leaned in, kissed me on the cheek, then left Deadline and I to our usual breakfast silence.

*   *   *

For as much as I was eager to get on with the business of investigating Earl Karlinsky, I had two promises to keep: one, that I’d visit Sweet Thang in her do-gooder headquarters at ten o’clock; and two, that I’d turn that visit into a readable puff piece by 5:00
P.M.

I knew I could put off the whole thing, being as Brodie wasn’t going to be in much shape to know or care that I hadn’t turned the story in. But that hardly seemed like the honorable thing to do under the circumstances. If the true measure of a person is what he does when no one is watching, I didn’t want to come up short.

Giving Deadline one final pet, I locked up, hopped in Tina’s Volvo, and started toward Newark. There is a certain theory of journalism that says in order for a story to be considered real news, there has to be at least one person who would rather not see it in the paper. And, sadly, the person forced to write it doesn’t count.

By that standard, the story I was about to slap together was not real news. But the crossword puzzle isn’t real news, either, and people would get mighty pissed if we didn’t run that. Besides, a newspaper owes it to its readers to be a reflection of the community it covers. So I resolved to just get this over with, quickly and quietly.

The address Sweet Thang gave me led to a featureless box of a one-story brick building that made it clear to me the Greater Newark Children’s Council was not wasting donor money on posh digs. Or signage. Next to the front door, there was a small plastic plaque with black-and-white lettering. It couldn’t have cost more than ten dollars. It was a grim marker to what was promising to be a grim place.

Then I walked inside and it was like entering a cheer factory. There was framed children’s artwork covering every available wall space: gleeful stick figures with explosions of hair, dots for eyes, and overlarge smiles; bright, bold suns with rays of light that reached practically to the ground; rainbows that took up the whole sky; houses fronted with purple flowers, pink bushes, and lollipop trees.

Some of the scenes depicted were idyllic panoramas these children—with lives bounded by concrete, asphalt, and poverty—probably had never seen themselves. But they dreamed about them all the same. Their optimism fairly burst off the walls.

“They’re wonderful, aren’t they?” I heard a familiar voice say.

I turned around, and there was Sweet Thang, all bouncy blond hair and big blue eyes. I knew, from experience, that she was also probably wearing a dress, one that rather nicely displayed her commendable feminine aspects. But I had established a strict no-look policy when it came to anything below Sweet Thang’s chin.

“When I got here the walls were bare and I was like, ‘This will
not
do,’” she said. “So every time a kid in one of our programs made a drawing and I happened to be there, I asked if they wanted to bring it home or if I could keep it. Most of them were happy anyone even wanted their picture. After I had collected a bunch of them, I found a frame shop that was willing to mount them for us at cost and a donor who was willing to fund it. A year later, this is what you get.”

She smiled and so did I. I’d defy anyone, male or female, to spend more than ten minutes around Sweet Thang without falling in love with her, just a little.

“Anyhow,” she said, “I’d like you to meet Jawan Porter. Jawan, you can come out now, honey.”

From an office door just behind Sweet Thang, a little boy of perhaps six peeked out. He had perfect brown skin and a mop of an Afro atop his little head.

“Come on, Jawan,” Sweet Thang urged. “Jawan, this is Mr. Ross. Shake his hand just like I taught you.”

Jawan walked toward me and held out a waifish arm. I grabbed the small hand at the end of it.

“Don’t forget to look him in the eye,” Sweet Thang instructed.

Jawan and I exchanged meaningful eye contact and then I smiled at him. He smiled back, showing off two gummy gaps where his front teeth should have been.

“Ah, looks like someone has just gotten a visit from the Tooth Fairy,” I said, because it seemed like the thing you should say to a toothless six-year-old.

Then I caught that Sweet Thang was shooting me a cautionary glance, accompanied by a small head shake.

“Jawan lives in a residential home on Avon Avenue,” she said. “He’s got eleven brothers and sisters there.”

And that’s when I got it. Tooth Fairies didn’t necessarily visit group homes in Newark. Jawan probably had some vague conception of who the Tooth Fairy was. He did not necessarily have firsthand knowledge of her magic.

Sweet Thang quickly changed the subject. “You know something I learned about Jawan? He’s a really, really fast runner.”

Jawan’s smile stretched from the bottom of his face right up to the top. “Yeah, some of the big kids are faster. But I’m the fastest of the little kids.”

“Show Mr. Ross how fast you are, Jawan.”

He looked around nervously. He had probably been told—perhaps repeatedly—not to run inside. “It’s okay, Jawan,” Sweet Thang assured him. “You can run to the end of the hallway and back.”

Jawan tore off down the carpeted hall, reached the end, then launched himself back toward us. He stopped in the exact spot where he had started, then looked at me for approval.

“Wow,” I said. “How did you get to be so fast?”

“It’s because my shoes are so fast,” Jawan said, showing off his kicks, which appeared to be brand-new.

“Let me see one more time, Jawan,” I said. “I can’t believe how fast you were.”

Jawan repeated his mad dash to the end of the hallway and back. His chest was heaving just slightly when he was done.

“I can go even faster if I’m outside,” Jawan said. “I can go like a rocket.”

Jawan made rocket noises, to emphasize his point. As he did so, I pulled a camera out of my pocket. Most of our photo staff had been laid off, so for a story like this—where, frankly, the artwork wasn’t absolutely crucial—I was expected to snap a few pictures. There was no question a real photographer could do much more with the subject, but the paper could no longer afford real photographers for such simple jobs.