Eyes of the Innocent: A Mystery (26 page)

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you were…”

Don’t say “more experienced.” Don’t say “well traveled.” Don’t say anything.

“It just wouldn’t be right,” I finished.

I half expected her to convince me it was—she probably wouldn’t have to try that hard—but I think she realized it wasn’t right, either. So we began the awkward task of disentangling our mostly naked bodies, collecting the various pieces of clothing strewn about the room, and assigning them to the proper owner.

“I’m going to go,” she said after she was dressed, going up on her tiptoes to kiss me on the cheek. “Thanks for being a gentleman.”

She let herself out. Deadline walked over to me and brushed himself against my leg.

“Come on, cat,” I said. “It looks like there’s going to be plenty of room in the bed tonight.”

*   *   *

At risk of sounding like a spokesman for the Republican Party’s sex education platform, I will say this on the subject of intercourse and the morning after: for all the times I’ve regretted having sex with someone, I’ve never once regretted
not
having it. As I woke up the next morning, I realized the previous evening had been another example to prove the rule. Had I sullied virtuous young Sweet Thang, I’m sure I would have felt like Carter the Conqueror in the moment. But I would have inevitably felt like a scallywag by the next dawn.

Instead, as my eyes fluttered open and I briefly replayed the previous night’s adventure, I felt good. Honorable. Noble, even. As I showered, dressed, and poured myself a bowl of Apple Cinnamon Cheerios, I felt even better. Not even the low cloud cover and the threat of more 34-degree rain could wreck my mood.

No, only one thing could do that. And it came from my cell phone.

“Duh duh duh duuuuuuuuhhh.”

Beethoven’s Fifth. Sal Szanto. I put down my spoon.

“Good morning,” I said.

“For you it is maybe,” Szanto said. “Windy Byers turned up.”

“Really? Is he talking?”

“I doubt it. He’s dead.”

Usually, the news of another human being’s demise elicits some reaction in me, even when I barely know the deceased, as was the case here. But a brief search of my emotional state revealed very little feeling for Windy Byers, one way or another. I never thought he was a particularly good guy, and nothing I’d learned over the past three days improved my estimation of him. His death did not register as any great loss to the city, state, or nation, nor as any great shock.

“Where’d they find him?” I asked.

Szanto rattled off an address on Avenue P in Newark, a place in a vast industrial maze in the East Ward, not far from Newark Airport.

“What was he doing there?”

“Not breathing, apparently.”

“Come on, you know what I mean.”

“At this point, you know everything I know,” Szanto said. “We just got a tip on this. Get your ass out there.”

He didn’t have to tell me time was of the essence. We had tipsters, but so did everyone else. As the home team, we still had a little bit of an advantage on the media horde that was about to descend on Newark. But it wouldn’t last long. I had to move. Now.

I tossed out my Cheerios, grabbed a Pop-Tart, and dashed out the door … only to remember my car was still in the parking lot at the
Eagle-Examiner
.

“Crap,” I said to my empty garage.

I briefly took stock of my situation, which was admittedly dire. I could call a cab, but that could take half an hour or more—Bloomfield was just suburban enough that you couldn’t run out to the street and hail one. I could call a friend, but that wasn’t guaranteed to be any faster. I could steal a car, but … oh, right, I wouldn’t know how to steal a car if my collection of pleated pants depended on it.

Suddenly, the solution came to me in the form of that ancient-but-still-running commercial that ends, “Enterprise, we’ll pick you up.” In my head, I could summon the ridiculous image of a rental car gift-wrapped in brown paper, motoring toward someone’s house. It always made me wonder: with brown paper covering everything but the windshield, how did the driver get into the car in the first place? And wouldn’t it be a little dangerous to drive?

But I didn’t have time to ponder such weighty issues. I dashed inside and quickly entered into negotiations with my local Enterprise franchise. I stressed to the lady on the phone that transaction speed—not make, model, or the presence of an onboard navigation system—was my primary concern. She nicely dispatched a driver who arrived in a car that, much to my relief, came without packaging. Within fifteen minutes, I was on my way to Avenue P.

Despite my ambivalence on the subject, I had been provided with a nav system anyway. So while I was reasonably certain I knew the way to Avenue P—I had done a piece about illegal drag racing there a few years back—I tapped in the address just to see if the computer knew a quicker way.

Soon, an alluring female voice was telling me my destination was, of all things, an Enterprise rental car location. It must have been an off-site facility of some sort, spillover from Newark Airport.

As Nancy—I decided to call my nav system Nancy—guided me ever closer to my destination, I began to suspect our hot tip had not, as Szanto might have hoped, bought us time over the competition. Not when I could hear news helicopters hovering overhead.

On the ground was more bedlam. Avenue P was a long, straight stretch of road with only two outside access points, at the top and bottom—which is why the drag racers loved it. From atop a highway ramp, I could already see an armada of news vans had created a small media city at the south end, where the police had erected a barricade that could stop a tank brigade. Certainly, I could join them … if I felt like spending my entire day in the cold to learn nothing more than what I could have gotten staying in bed and watching local news.

Ignoring Nancy’s advice, which would have led me straight into the gaping maw of that information oblivion, I took an end run around to the north side, snaking through the marshland past an abandoned movie theater and a variety of small warehouses and scrap yards. I was pretty confident the boys from the networks wouldn’t know about this way. Homefield at least had some advantage.

At the top of Avenue P there was a much smaller police presence—just a single patrol car and two officers who looked like they didn’t particularly want to be standing outside on a raw February morning.

“Hey,” I said, rolling down my window as one of them motioned me to halt. “What’s going on?”

“Police investigation,” the officer said.

“Oh,” I said. “I’m just returning my rental car.”

“How’d you end up over here? You get lost or something?”

“Nancy told me to go this way.”

“Who’s Nancy?”

“My nav system,” I said. “From the sound of her voice, she’s pretty hot.”

The guy stared at me like I had been given an extra helping of idiot at birth, which is pretty much the effect I was going for. He stepped away from my car for a moment, turned his back, and got on his radio. As an ethical reporter for a legitimate news-gathering agency, I cannot misrepresent myself in order to gain information or access to something. If the cop asks me whether I’m a reporter, it’s pretty much game over.

But if he doesn’t ask, I don’t exactly have to go volunteering the information.

He turned around and leaned on my window.

“Can I see your rental agreement?” he asked.

“Sure!” I said brightly, and reached for the packet that was still sitting on the passenger seat next to me. He took a cursory glance at the paperwork, handed it back to me, and waved me through without a word.

Primo didn’t wrestle much with the decision to kill Councilman Wendell A. Byers. It was just something that, when a certain set of facts presented themselves, became the only course of action.

It began with an argument about a silly house. Primo knew he never should have sold Byers that house, knew it would complicate a business relationship that was already tricky enough. Byers probably should have known better, too. But, ultimately, each man had his weakness. For Primo, it was greed—one more customer to buy one more house. For Byers, it was lust—he liked the idea of having a house for his latest piece of ass. Primo never understood it, but it somehow made Byers feel important.

So the deal was struck. Then it went bad. And, naturally, Byers couldn’t see it was his own fault. He blamed Primo, who pointed out Byers should have known what he was getting into. That’s when Byers started getting belligerent. And once he started uttering those threats—
“I’ll cut you off … I’ll tell everyone on the council you’re a bad actor … no more land for you … you’re finished in this town”—
Primo knew he had to act. He had worked too hard to get where he was to have this bozo councilman wreck everything.

It would mean finding a new councilman to bribe, yes. But there were nine of them. Surely one of them would be amenable—perhaps even Byers’s replacement.

So, no, the decision wasn’t hard. Killing Byers and getting away with it? That was the difficult part. Primo knew the police would investigate a dead councilman with great vigor. He had to make sure none of the suspicion would land on his doorstep.

At least officially, there was no relationship between the two men. Primo had always been careful to ensure there was no paper trail that could tie them together. Any investigator looking for one would only bump into Primo’s seemingly unconnected archipelago of LLCs, none of which led directly to the man himself, and to campaign contributions that would have appeared to come from all over. Primo used aliases for everything. Even Byers didn’t know Primo’s legal name.

The real danger, Primo knew, was Byers’s penchant for blabbery. The man was a human leak, incapable of keeping his mouth shut. What if he told someone about his arrangement with Primo? What if there was something in Byers’s personal files? What if he’d told his little whore everything during their pillow talk? It could get messy.

Primo had to make sure there were no loose ends.

CHAPTER 7

After turning onto Avenue P, I drove slowly past a sprawling auto body shop, an impound lot, a small fabricating plant—the industrial underbelly of America. About midway down, Nancy told me, “Turn right.”

“Anything you say, sweetheart,” I said.

I half expected Nancy to reply “Don’t patronize me, dear,” but she stayed quiet as a gate swung upward and I entered the green and white wonderland that was Enterprise’s off-airport facility.

Inside was a jumbled chaos of official vehicles, marked and unmarked, from Newark police to New Jersey State Police to FBI—a circus of men in dark-colored windbreakers. It was tough to tell if there was a ringmaster for all the madness. From an outsider’s perspective, it just looked like a lot of people with short haircuts running around trying to look important.

I couldn’t imagine what they were all doing there. Properly deployed, it was enough law enforcement manpower to tackle at least two dozen unsolved murders. Instead, they were all focused on one lousy councilman.

Following the lines that told me where to return my car, I pulled to a stop under an awning at the direction of a very distracted man in a puffy jacket that had
CHECK-IN
in block letters on the back. He kept looking at the vast parking lot to his left where, about two football fields away, all the short haircuts were focusing their attention. With his handheld computer, he scanned a bar code on the back driver’s side window. If it seemed odd to him someone would return a car a mere half hour into the rental, he didn’t say anything about it. Of course, that might be because he never actually looked at me.

“Shuttle to the airport is that way,” he said, tearing off a receipt and waving vaguely toward the main building.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the receipt and making a show of walking in the proper direction until I was out of his line of sight, when I began making my way back toward the parking lot.

Dressed in my black peacoat, dark pants, and rubber-soled dress shoes—and with my own short haircut—I looked coplike enough that no one was stopping me. That was the nice thing about so many different agencies being out here: everyone would just assume I belonged to someone else.

Plus, there was something about the news helicopters overhead—there were now three of them—that added to the general sense of mayhem. I could have been leading around a tiger tied to a piece of dental floss and I’m not sure anyone would have given me a second glance.

As I got closer, I saw most of the action was buzzing around a red Ford Taurus. The parking spots around it had been cleared out and an ambulance, lights still flashing, was parked nearby. That meant the councilman’s corpse was still on the premises, perhaps still in the car.

I kept walking toward it and got to within about twenty yards, where a perimeter of yellow crime scene tape had been erected. I thought about ducking under it—inasmuch as no one had stopped me so far—but didn’t want to risk it just yet. So I went over to a huddle of guys, all of them black or Latino, dressed in jackets that said either
CHECK-IN
or
CLEANING
on the back. There seemed to be one guy in the middle who was commanding the floor, so I went over to eavesdrop.

Except as soon as they became aware of my presence, they all turned and looked at me.

“Hey, fellas,” I said.

Several of them nodded, then one of the cleaning guys eyed me and asked, “You a cop or something?”

I could guess the typical car cleaner at the Newark Airport Enterprise facility was probably making about $8.85 an hour and might have had a run-in or two with the law that left him unfond of those sworn to protect it. So I smiled and said, “Not exactly. I’m a reporter with the
Eagle-Examiner
. I’m probably not supposed to be here. So keep it quiet, okay?”

The cleaners grinned, happy to keep my secret and eager to help.

“He’s in the red car over there, the senator or whatever,” one of the check-in guys said. “He’s still in there. They haven’t moved him yet.”