Eyes of the Innocent: A Mystery (16 page)

Tee, who seemed to be reading my mind, muttered, “Man, some nice insurance policies here.”

“Reginald!” Mrs. Jamison said sharply. “We didn’t come here to shop.”

“I was just lookin’,” Tee said, chastened.

Pedro returned and mumbled, “He’s no here.”

I was about to call balderdash on Pedro—how could you say he’s not here when you spent three minutes talking to him?—but as soon as I drew the breath to speak, Mrs. Jamison put her hand on my arm. She was in control of this situation.

“Pedro, you and I have just met, but I fear we’re off to a bad start,” she said in a voice that perfectly straddled the line between calm and scary. “Surely, a man of your intelligence understands all men must build relationships based on mutual trust. When you betray that trust so early in a relationship, it really makes me question your decency as a man. Is that really how you want to be known, Pedro? Is that what you want put out into the universe?”

Pedro’s eyes were starting to grow wide. I wasn’t sure how much of the actual language he was absorbing. But, as linguists have repeatedly proven, nonverbal cues are every bit as important as verbal ones in conveying meaning. And Mrs. Jamison’s nonverbals were nearly as loud as her verbals.

“Now,” she continued, “you have a mama, don’t you, Pedro?”

Pedro nodded.

“Did your mama raise you to lie to another woman like that?”

Pedro shook his head.

“Okay, Pedro, then let’s try this again. I’m here to see Maury, and I ain’t going nowhere until I do. So why don’t you run back to that little room and tell him that.”

She made a shooing motion with her hand. Pedro’s feet stayed rooted, but the uncertainty was all over his face. Did he defy his boss? Or piss off this crazy lady who was babbling in that scary voice about who-the-hell-knows-what?

Mrs. Jamison gave him some gentle nudging.

“Pedro, I don’t want to have to raise my voice. Believe me, you do
not
want me to raise my voice,” she said. “So let me make this clear to you: you’re in that little box right now. But you’re going to have to come out eventually. And when you do, I’m going to rip you in half with my bare hands.”

Without pausing, Pedro slid off his chair and walked quickly toward the back room.

*   *   *

The man who emerged from the office moments later was not Pedro. It had to be Maury. He was a tall, gangly middle-aged black man who appeared to have stepped straight out of 1981, with a head full of Jheri curls—in all their greasy, ringletted glory—and a smile that included at least three gold-capped teeth. I wondered, amid all this pawned merchandise, if the caps were previously owned, too. I also wondered where he kept his Rick James albums.

He opened the Plexiglas.

“I’m told by my assistant there are some unruly customers out front?” he said, but he had a fairly prominent lisp, so it came out as, “I’m told by my athithtant there are thome unruly cuthtomerth out front.”

“You must be Maury,” Mrs. Jamison said.

“That’th what people call me.”

“I’m Mrs. Jamison.”

“Yeah? Tho?”

Maury peered at us over the top of his dark glasses, Jheri curls just barely brushing against the jacket of his purple—yes, purple—three-piece suit. Underneath was a pressed white shirt with a banded collar, a perfect accent for an outfit that might be described as priest-meets-pimp. I couldn’t see what he was wearing on his feet, but I was guessing there were some two-toned shoes down there. Maury was clearly a man with that kind of style.

“You have a piece of jewelry that belongs to this gentleman’s fiancée,” Mrs. Jamison said. So now Sweet Thang was my fiancée? Tina was going to love that.

“Who thaid that?”

“I’m saying that.”

“And who are you again?”

“I’m Mrs. Jamison.”

Maury pondered that for a moment, pointed at me, and asked, “Who’th he?”

“This is Mr. Carter Ross. And his fiancée is very unhappy her jewelry was stolen from her.”

“Thtolen!” Maury said, as if the mere concept repulsed him.

“Allegedly stolen,” Tee interjected.

Mrs. Jamison glared daggers at him.

“What?” he said. “Until something is proven in a court of law, it’s just an allegation.”

Mrs. Jamison’s glare had upgraded to machetes.

“A’ight,” Tee said. “I’ll shut up now.”

Maury wasn’t focusing on either of them but rather on the oddity in the room. The white man.

“You a cop or thomething?” he asked.

The question, while clearly tossed in my direction, was handled by my self-appointed spokeswoman, Mrs. Jamison. “He’s a newspaper journalist,” she said. “He is a top, top editor at the
Eagle-Examiner
.”

Sure I was. Why not? If I was engaged to Sweet Thang, I might as well be a top, top editor. Whatever that was.

“Yeah?” Maury said, sounding impressed.

“Yes and, sugar, believe me, if he don’t like you, he’ll write an exposé blowing your whole operation out of the water,” Mrs. Jamison said. “They’d put your picture in the paper and everything.”

I tried to look serious, like I was already planning out how the front page would look. It was, of course, patently unethical to abuse my position as a newspaper reporter to threaten someone like this. But Maury didn’t seem like the kind of guy who was going to write a letter of complaint to
Columbia Journalism Review.
And, besides, technically it was Mrs. Jamison abusing my position. That subtlety, I rationalized, absolved me of any wrongdoing.

“Tho what’th thith jewelry I’m thuppothed to have?” Maury asked

“It’s a charm bracelet.”

I thought I saw some recognition wander briefly across Maury’s face.

“I’m not thaying I have anything like that,” Maury said. “But if I did, when would I have acquired it?”

“This morning,” Mrs. Jamison said.

Maury turned toward the back room and shouted, “Manuel! Manuel, get me that thtuff from earlier today.”

Pedro appeared from the back room and said something in Spanish.

“Yeah, yeah, that thtuff,” Maury said, and Pedro disappeared again.

“Manuel?” Mrs. Jamison spat. “He told me his name was Pedro.”

“It ain’t neither,” Maury said. “Jutht like my name ain’t Maury. You got to keep your ammo-nimity in thith line of work.”

I grinned at the apparent mispronunciation and wanted to ask if he also had to keep his “anonymity,” but it wasn’t my place to intercede.

“Pedro, you have a truthfulness problem,” Mrs. Jamison shouted after him. “We’re going to have to talk about that.”

Maury again focused his attention on me.

“I mutht thtate for the record, Mr. Roth, thith ethtablithment doeth not traffic in thtolen merchandithe. But there are thome unthcrupulouth people in thith world who may mithreprethent the originth of thome itemth and take advantage of my generouth nature.”

Mrs. Jamison arched her right eyebrow, crossed her arms, and let out a perfectly skeptical, “Uh-huh.”

“Now, how would you dethcribe thith thtolen merchandithe?”

Again, a question for me. But this time I was going to have to come up with an answer. I had meant to get more specifics about the bracelet, but Sweet Thang wasn’t returning my phone calls for some odd reason—where was that girl, anyhow?

So I was on my own. What did Sweet Thang’s charm bracelet look like? I knew somewhere in my brain, in the part charged with important tasks like quoting movie passages and song lyrics, there was an excruciatingly detailed description of the charm bracelet—albeit one that was provided between 6:14 and 6:19 earlier that morning, when I was not yet functioning.

I rewound through my day, through my bouncing around Newark, my breakfast with Sweet Thang, my lecherous thoughts while she was in the shower, my hasty nonnewspaper-glancing departure from my own house, my jarring wake-up call, and …

There! Just after the jarring wake-up call. I was hearing Sweet Thang’s voice in my head now, saying something I wasn’t comprehending in the moment. But somehow it had stuck in there, in a small crevice next to the John Cusack
Say Anything
monologue. And I found myself pulling it up with near-perfect recall.

“Well, it’s a charm bracelet,” I said. “I’ve never seen it, but she told me about it. Some of the pieces include a sombrero she got in a trip to Puerto Vallarta. There’s also a darling little gondola her father brought her back from Venice.”

“Excuse me, did you just say ‘darling’?” Tee asked.

“Reginald!” Mrs. Jamison scolded. “At least someone
listens
to his woman.”

She drew her hand back but did not let it fly. Tee cringed anyway. Maury placed his chin in his hand, giving himself a moment to think about it.

“Thombrero, huh?” he said. “I may have theen thomething like that.”

He walked to the back room, Jheri curls bouncing, and returned moments later with a gold charm bracelet suspended between his fingers.

“Thith it?” he asked.

He held it up. It had to be Sweet Thang’s. It just looked like something a Vanderbilt coed would own.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s it.”

“Well, now, thith ith a very rare piethe of fine jewelry we’re talking about here,” Maury said. “I don’t think it’th pothible for me to part with thith piethe for leth than a thouthand dollarth.”

“How about you part with that piece and we won’t press charges for receiving stolen merchandise,” Mrs. Jamison countered. “This gentleman’s fiancée is a white girl and she could go to police headquarters and fill out a report and everything. You know how cops like to help white girls.”

Maury considered this a moment.

“Hundred buckth.”

“Twenty.”

“Done,” Maury replied, and started hitting numbers on his cash register.

Just like that, I happily parted with a portrait of Andrew Jackson, and Maury slipped Sweet Thang’s charm bracelet through the revolving box in the bulletproof glass.

Maury pointed a finger at me.

“Don’t try coming back for the retht of it,” he warned. “I thtill have to be able to make a living, you know.”

Some living. The sheer sleaziness of the place finally overwhelmed me, so I just waved at him as we walked out the shattered front door. He didn’t have to worry about me coming back.

*   *   *

I bid the Jamisons farewell, thanking Tee for his assistance and promising his wife one last time I would make an honest woman out of Sweet Thang just as soon as I could find her an engagement ring that would shame the Hope diamond.

As I drove back toward the office, I turned on my radio, tuning it to an all-news station to see if any of my colleagues in the media had learned anything useful about Windy Byers. I didn’t have to wait long for the story, which led the top of the hour. The announcer referred to Byers as the “beloved Newark councilman” who hailed from a “Newark political dynasty” and so on. I love it when the radio guys just read from the newspaper. Sometimes you can practically hear the newsprint crinkling under the microphone. The station cut to a clip of the Matos press conference, going for the sound bite about how the Byers family was doing a lot of praying.

I flipped the radio to FM and felt myself frowning. Having successfully retrieved Sweet Thang’s charm bracelet—great journalistic triumph that it was—I now presumed I would return to real, actual reporting on the Byers story.

And I didn’t know where to start. Reporting can be a bit like exploratory surgery, except you perform it wearing oven mitts and a blindfold. Sometimes you’re not even sure what part of the body to cut open. As a general rule, you never know where you’re going until you’ve already been there. I often wished I could start at the end, having already acquired all the necessary hindsight. It would save so much time.

When I arrived in the newsroom, it had that big-story buzz about it. Editors who normally sauntered around like they had no place to go were walking with alacrity. Reporters who might ordinarily be leaning back as they gabbed with sources on the phone were hunched over, hard at work. Buster Hays, resident dinosaur, had three Rolodexes open at the same time, pulling out business cards that were probably older than I was. The forever-silly Tommy Hernandez was staring at his computer screen with a fold between his neatly trimmed eyebrows, perhaps the first time I had seen so much as the slightest crease in his otherwise unworried countenance.

And the beauty of our newsroom was that, like most newsrooms, you could see it all unfolding before you. There were no walls, no partitions, no cubicles to wreck your view—just tightly clustered islands of desks stretching over a sea of open space.

I marched over to mine, which was against a far wall, an auspicious spot whose principal advantage was that it allowed me to see the enemy (editors) approaching from a good distance. My desk had once been used by an old-time city reporter who chain-smoked like Chairman Mao and, as legend had it, quit his job because he refused to comply with the new policy when the newsroom finally went smoke-free in the mid-nineties. The desk sat empty for years after that—to aerate, I assume—but when I moved in, there was still an ashtray sitting atop. I don’t smoke, but I kept it there, in memory of my predecessor and as a monument to a bygone time in the history of our industry.

Sadly, the computer sitting on my desk was roughly as old as the ashtray. No one knew the exact age of our terminals: they already qualified as antique when I started at the paper; by now, the only way anyone could figure out how long they had been there was through carbon dating. We were assured they would be replaced just as soon as advertising revenues rebounded. In other words, we had a long wait.

As my machine clicked and rattled to life, I began playing around with various Windy Byers theories, seeing if I could find one that fit. The police chief said they thought it was “politically motivated,” but I was having a hard time digesting that one. Byers was a hack who had been in the game long enough that he knew how to play by the rules and avoid pissing off important people. He had no policy initiatives that could have engendered anyone’s ire. It wasn’t like he had unpopular or dangerous ideas inasmuch as I’m not sure he had ideas, period.