Eyes of the Innocent: A Mystery (23 page)

I had barely sat down at my desk when Sweet Thang slid up to me and sat in an empty chair across from me, smiling. Somehow, despite a long day, she still smelled fresh and soapy.

“Oh, my goodness, I had the most amazing afternoon,” she gushed. “And I’m actually talking about the part after I left you. I mean, the part before that was great, too. But then it got better. Well, I mean, not better better, but really good, you know? You won’t believe what I learned.”

This was the first time I had seen her since I read her Twitter post, with all its CR consumption and floorboard grinding. I wondered if she put it there in the hope I’d trip across it, because it would embolden me to make a move. Or maybe she just figured it was one little tweet, and since I wasn’t following her, I’d never see it.

Or maybe I should get this silly girl out of my head, especially when she was right in front of me, still babbling in my direction at speeds faster than the human ear was trained to perceive. I was already four or five paragraphs behind.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t paying attention. Could you start over again?”

She shook her head and rolled her eyes—like, what was my problem?—then went back to full speed ahead.

“I was SAY-ing, I couldn’t get a hold of Akilah’s sister. So I didn’t know what else to do and I didn’t want to bother you, because I bother you enough already, you know? So I tracked down the guy who sent us that e-mail instead.”

“Uh, what e-mail?”

“The concerned citizen e-mail. Didn’t you get a copy?”

“Oh, right,” I said. With everything else going on, I had just forgotten about it. “How’d you track him down? It was anonymous.”

“I thought it was pretty obvious,” she said.

“Sorry. Still not with you.”

“Chuck—sorry, concerned citizen—said something in his message like, ‘I know why you couldn’t find the mortgage.’ And I’m like, hel-LOOO! We never mentioned that we couldn’t find the mortgage in the story. There are only two people who knew that. There was that title searcher, but I’m sure he was too busy getting stoned to read the paper. And then there was that clerk guy. So I went and found him.”

“Oh,” I said, impressed. “I thought he was worried about losing his job. How did you get him to talk to you?”

“I just flirted with him,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing this side of making toast.

“Oh, right,” I said. “Flirting.”

“You don’t think that’s bad, do you?”

“No. Flirting is good.”

She flashed me a knowing smile.

“Anyhow, Chuck—his name is Chuck—was all nervous at first. He was like, ‘I can’t talk to you.’ And then I flirted with him a little more and he was like, ‘I meant I can’t talk to you
here
.’ ”

“Well done,” I said.

She smiled quickly. “Hold off on your compliments until the end. It gets better.”

“Sorry,” I said, but she was already going.

“So we agreed to meet outside the courthouse at four—I accept your apology, by the way—and take a walk. At first he was like, ‘I can’t tell you, it’s too deep, you can’t handle the truth, blah, blah, blah.’ So he was like, ‘You have to guess, and if you guess right I’ll tell you.’ I couldn’t guess it, but he told me anyway.”

“Why, more flirting?”

“No, actually we were sitting on a bench at that point so I kept crossing and uncrossing my legs.”

“You realize you’re pure evil,” I said, but couldn’t stop myself from grinning.

“Well, I thought about what my journalism professors would say about it. And they would probably tell me all the reasons I shouldn’t do it. And then I thought about what
you
would say about it. And I knew you would tell me all the reasons I should. So I thought about what would ultimately have the greatest public benefit and I decided you were right.”

“I am,” I assured her. “Just remember to use your powers for good.”

“I will, don’t worry. Anyhow, Chuck said that his boss came up to him this one time and told him to erase this mortgage from the computer. Chuck said he didn’t want to do it, but the boss told him if he didn’t do it, he’d just find someone else who would, so it was like he didn’t have a choice. Chuck thought the orders were coming from somewhere up high—someone with a lot of pull.”

I nodded.

“Anyhow,” she continued. “Chuck said he had sort of forgotten about it, but when I came along and couldn’t find a mortgage, he thought I was just being a ditz at first”—imagine that—“but then he looked into it and he realized it was the mortgage he had been told to erase. Ex-CEPT he didn’t totally erase it. He wiped it from the computer but kept a hard copy and put it in a folder in his house.”

“And so you accompanied him back to his house to get it?” I prompted.

“Well, he said he just moved, so he wasn’t quite sure where it was. But he said he’d look for it when he got home.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “So why did he think he was erasing it?”

“He said he didn’t know, but he got the sense it was political or something.”

Of course it was. If you’re Windy Byers, you’re probably quite keen to make sure no one discovers you’ve bought a house for your girlfriend. So you yank some strings in the clerk’s office and get the mortgage removed lest it fall into the hands of your political enemies.

Or, worse, into the possession of a nosy newspaper reporter who knows a document like that would allow him to take that juicy little tidbit—something that would otherwise fall into the category of nasty rumor—and put it in print.

*   *   *

Sweet Thang started bouncing up and down in her chair like a third grader who has been told she must wait five minutes before going to the bathroom.

“So what now?” she asked. “What now? What now?”

“Well, first, can I compliment you?”

She pretended to think for a moment. “Yes, you may.”

“Great work tracking down this guy.”

“Thank you,” she said, with a smile that would have graded flawless on the diamond clarity scale.

“Okay, onward. You still have that phone number for Akilah’s sister handy?”

“Yeah, right here,” she said, using it as an excuse to wheel her chair next to mine, allowing our knees to brush. The girl was a master at creating incidental contact.

“Bertie said it’s a home number, which turns out to be a nice break for us,” I said, turning to face my terminal. “It means we can do a reverse lookup and see where she lives.”

My computer screen was dark for some reason, so I pressed the power button. As the monitor warmed up and the image snapped into focus, I suddenly remembered why I turned it off in the first place. But, by that point, it was already too late. There on the screen, in brilliant 256-color, 1024-by-768 pixel resolution, was Sweet Thang’s Twitter page.

I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye to see if she had noticed, hoping I could click it away before she got a good look. But no, she was peering at it curiously, head tilted, like it was something she had seen before but couldn’t quite place.

Then I watched as recognition crashed across her face. And it wasn’t a small, gentle-lapping wave. It was one of those tsunamis that wipes an entire Indonesian fishing village off the map.

“Oh. My. Goodness,” she said.

Her blush started from the jawbone, then progressed upward, going from her cheeks all the way to the top of her forehead, filling every available inch of skin in glowing crimson.

“Yeah,” I said, not knowing what to say. “I, uh, sorry about that. I didn’t mean to, uh, you know, leave it on the screen like that.”

Sweet Thang was, for perhaps the first time in her life, stunned to silence.

“I was just sort of wasting time and one click led to another,” I explained. “I didn’t mean to pry. I just…”

I could tell she was rereading the post to check if it was as bad as she remembered. And, of course, it was probably worse.

“I didn’t realize…” she started, then stopped. “I thought you … I didn’t think … You’re not following me or…”

“It’s Twitter,” I said apologetically. “Anyone can read it, even if they’re not one of your followers. Facebook is the one where people need to have permission to see stuff you’ve written.”

“I know, but … I…”

“If it makes you feel better, I didn’t read any of the other ones,” I said.

She buried her face in her hands and moaned softly. “I’m soooo embarrassed,” she said into her palms.

“It’s not a big deal,” I insisted.

“It’s like one of those bad dreams where the entire school has read your diary,” she said.

I decided to skip the lecture about how you have to assume when you type something that it could be read by anyone—one of the great perils of modern Internet living—and instead just said, “Sorry.”

“I think I might die.”

She whirled around and walked away without saying another word. I sneaked a glance to my left and right to see if anyone might have noticed—an intern turning a shade just short of purple might tend to attract attention. Thankfully, it appeared to have been strictly for my benefit.

I returned my focus to the screen and clicked the
X
on the upper right corner of the window. This time, naturally, it went away immediately.

Then I got back to my reverse lookup. Tamikah’s number was unlisted. But that was hardly a deterrent. Few people are careful enough with their telephone numbers to keep them out of the hands of a reporter who knows what he’s doing. The LexisNexis database has millions of unlisted numbers. Even something as seemingly innocent as voting records is a great place to get numbers—no one thinks about it, but if you fill in the “phone number” blank on the registration form, you’ve just made your digits part of the public record.

So it took about thirty seconds to find where Tamikah—last name Dunwood—now resided. It was an address in South Orange, a street I vaguely recognized as being near Seton Hall University, wedged up against the Newark border.

And while perhaps that made it sound like the Newark girl hadn’t made it very far, that wasn’t the case. Now that East and West Berlin are unified, there are few starker borders in the world than the one between the New Jersey municipalities of South Orange and Newark. Literally, you can be driving through the hood, on a litter-strewn street lined with tenements and bodegas; then you blink, and you’re in suburbia, with neatly trimmed landscaping and seasonally appropriate lawn decoration. Drive maybe half a mile farther and you’re in a historic part of town, dotted with million-dollar houses and fancy imported cars.

Yet the two worlds almost never collide. It’s not about race—South Orange is actually thirty-five percent African-American. It’s about caste. The Newark–South Orange line might as well have a sign that says, “Now entering upper middle class.”

So Tamikah was now a long way from Baxter Terrace. I Googled her address, then clicked on the satellite view. I zoomed in as close as it would go and, I swear, I could see a plastic Santa in one of the neighbors’ yards.

Then I typed the address into our property-tax database. The house was owned by Ryan and Tamikah Dunwood. It was 2,250 square feet, four bedrooms, one and a half baths, set on a 50-by-150 lot, and assessed at a very nonprojectslike $549,500.

And it was soon going to be visited by at least one
Eagle-Examiner
reporter. Maybe two, if the other one ever recovered from a potentially terminal case of Twitter-induced mortification.

*   *   *

After a few more minutes of document snooping on Tamikah Dunwood revealed little more of use or interest, I was revisited by Sweet Thang, who returned from her brief sojourn looking refreshed, considerably less flushed, but chastened.

“Let’s not talk about it,” she said quickly.

“Fine with me,” I said, to her visible relief.

I knew, at some point, we would have to deal with the fallout from my accidental discovery. You didn’t just drop a bomb like that into the middle of an acquaintanceship—let’s not call it a relationship—and expect everything to magically reassemble itself as it had been before. There were now bits and pieces of emotional shrapnel all over the place. Cleaning up the mess could take a while.

Still, for the time being, it seemed only pragmatic to ignore the eight-hundred-pound tweet in the room.

“So, moving on,” I said. “It turns out our friend Tamikah lives in South Orange. Would you like to pay her a visit?”

“Does South Orange mean we can take Walter this time?”

“Yes,” I said. “South Orange is definitely a more Walter-friendly kind of atmosphere.”

“I’ll grab my keys.”

“Meet you out front.”

Two minutes later, we were waiting for the elevator, staring at the numbers as they ticked toward our floor, stewing in an uncomfortable conversation lag where neither of us knew what to say. It was awkward, but I discovered there were benefits to having Sweet Thang in sheepish mode: it was much quieter.

We rode down the elevator. In silence. We walked out to the car. In silence. And we made it to South Orange with only the smallest of small talk—a few passing comments about traffic and weather.

We pulled up outside the house, which appeared to be your basic side-hall colonial with yellow clapboard siding and neatly clipped shrubbery. The driveway was short and led to a detached two-car garage. I could see a hint of a swing set in the backyard.

I disembarked from Walter’s passenger door. With Sweet Thang trailing, I walked a few paces on a concrete pathway, then up four steps to a small front porch. I rang the doorbell.

It was answered by, of all things, a white guy. He wore the unofficial business-casual uniform of the greater New York metropolitan area: black shoes, dark charcoal gray pants, light blue button-down shirt.

I instantly wondered how he and Tamikah met. I was even more curious how the rest of the Dunwoods felt the first time Ryan brought her over for dinner.

“Hi! Can I help you?” he asked. He said it to me but wasn’t looking at me—he was too busy giving Sweet Thang a thorough up-and-down.

“Hi, we were hoping to talk to Tamikah Dunwood,” I said.

He turned and shouted, “Tammy, honey, there are some people at the door for you.”