Faces of the Gone: A Mystery (26 page)

We went to an I-HOP across the street, continuing the global theme to our dates, and were soon seated in a corner booth with formidable stacks of pancakes in front of us. This was, technically, my second breakfast of the day. But I found room.

“The cops get any further with Wanda?” Tynesha asked as she forked a bite of omelet into her mouth.
“Well, technically, it’s not the cops’ case anymore,” I said. “They handed it over to a federal agency called the National Drug Bureau, which claimed jurisdiction over it.”
“So have the National Drug Bureau cops figured it out?”
I thought about L. Pete and the toe fungus I hoped he was developing.
“Probably not,” I said. “They think it has something to do with this guy, José de Jesús Encarcerón. Ever heard of him?”
Tynesha shook her head.
“Well, neither had I,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure the NDB is just grasping at straws. They don’t know the real answer so they pretend they know.”
“Just like those doctors in there,” Tynesha said, and I chuckled.
“Sometimes doctors are too smart for their own good,” I said. “They get so used to being smart, they have a hard time admitting that they don’t have the answers.”
It was a cautionary tale for any profession, especially mine. The reporter who assumes he has all the answers is usually a reporter who finds his stories being mentioned in the correction column with considerable frequency. It’s an easy trap to fall into when your job is to find the truth. The trick is never assuming your information is absolute or infallible. You have to stay flexible enough to still be able to recognize when your premise is all wrong. You also have to remember to keep going back to your sources with new knowledge and seeing what else they know.
With that in mind, I stopped chewing for a second and asked, “Did Wanda ever mention the name Irving Wallace?”
“Naw. That’s a pretty unusual name. I think I would have remembered it. Who’s he?”
“He’s a chemist for the federal government.”
Tynesha thought for a moment.
“Well, I don’t know if this guy was a chemist or nothing,” Tynesha said. “But I remember this one time a couple months ago Wanda brought me this guy who I thought was another client of hers. But then she said, no, he wasn’t a client, he was like her boss or something.”
“Her boss?” I said, sitting up in my seat a little and feeling a hankering for a notepad, like I should be writing this down. “How come you never mentioned this before?”
“I don’t know. I just didn’t think about it until you said it was a government guy. Don’t get all uptight.”
“Sorry, sorry. Anyway, go on. You thought he was Wanda’s boss . . .”
“Yeah. I guess he was some kind of grand poobah or something. They wasn’t even supposed to be looking at each other, but he broke the rules with Wanda. I guess he got sweet on Wanda—a lot of guys got sweet on Wanda, you know? But she wouldn’t turn no tricks. So she sent him to me so he could get his rocks off. But she said because he was like her boss, she asked if I could, you know, do him for free. As, like, a favor.”
“So you, uh . . .”
“Yeah, I sucked him off.”
“What did he look like?”
“I don’t know,” Tynesha said. “It’s not like I spent a lot of time looking at his face, you know?”
“Was he a big guy?”
“Naw, he was a little guy.” She paused, then snickered. “And I mean little in
every
way.”
I realized my shoulders had gotten tensed up and I relaxed them. Certainly, if Tynesha had given Irving Wallace a hummer, it would have been stop-the-presses time. I’m not sure how I would have attributed it in an article—“according to a hooker who gave Wallace a blow job” just wasn’t going to fly in our family newspaper—but it would have been a pleasant enough problem to worry about as I was plotting how to plaster Irving Wallace’s name and picture all over the Sunday paper.
Alas, Tynesha describing her John as a “little guy” meant he couldn’t have been the six-foot-five, three-hundred-pound van- driving menace I now surmised was Irving Wallace. But maybe he was an associate of Wallace’s.
“So what made you think this guy worked for the government?”
“Well, he wore a suit. And he had one them badges on his belt,” Tynesha said. “He just looked like one of them guys that plays the government agent in the TV shows, like he was CIA or FBI. Well, not CIA, because they always have glasses and look all cool. So maybe he was FBI or something.”
“You get his name by any chance?”
“Oh, yeah. I get all my customers’ names. I get their names, their home addresses, their wives’ and kids’ names, and then we exchange Christmas cards.”
“Okay, dumb question,” I said.
“The only thing I remember about him is that when he was done he gave me all the usual, ‘Oh, baby, that was great . . . Oh, baby, you’re the best.’ And then he didn’t give me a tip or nothing. You know what he did?”
I spread my hands in an I-got-no-clue gesture.
“He told me maybe if I sucked him off again sometime he would take me to a game at Giants Stadium,” Tynesha continued. “I didn’t say nothing, because he was Wanda’s boss. But I was thinking, ‘A
game
? Are you for real?!?’ Sometimes, guys are just too stupid for words.”

ynesha refused my offer of a quick trip to the Jersey Gardens Mall for a clothing run, saying she felt like she didn’t want to spend that much time away from Miss B. We parted with promises to keep in touch and I went back to the office to regroup.

The Saturday newsroom is a relatively relaxed place, consisting mostly of interns who are still groggy from the night before. Feeling a little woozy myself, I settled into my desk. Out of habit, I glanced at my office phone’s voice mail light. It was off, but the caller ID was showing eleven missed calls. They were all from the same number, a 908 area code. Someone, who was apparently desperate to talk to me, didn’t believe in leaving messages.

I was about to begin figuring out who my persis tent caller was when my phone rang: the 908 number flashed on my caller ID for a twelfth time.

“Carter Ross,” I said.
“Irving Wallace,” came the reply.
I could feel my pulse surge and I instinctively drew in my

breath. I didn’t want to talk to Irving Wallace. Not right now. It’s not that I avoid confrontation—hell, I’m a reporter, I
thrive
on confrontation—it’s that I wasn’t ready for this one yet. I liked to have my gun fully loaded before I went into a showdown with someone like Irving Wallace, and I felt like I had barely gotten the first bullet in the chamber.

“Why, hello, Irving. How are you this fine day?” I said through gritted teeth. I had a loathing for this man like I had never felt for another human being, but I had to try not to let my voice betray it.

“Fine, thanks,” he said. “Just running around doing errands with the family, you know, the usual Saturday routine.”
The breeziness in his tone was chilling. But wasn’t that the essence of antisocial personality disorder? He could commit multiple murders and go on with his life as if nothing were happening. Because that’s what killing people felt like to him: nothing.
“Right,” I said. “Errands.”
“We’re off the record, yes?”
“Oh, off the record, sure,” I said, shaking my head at the nerve this guy had.
“Okay, off the record, I’ve been figuring out some things with regard to that heroin you gave me that I think you’d find interesting—
very
interesting,” he said. “Ordinarily I might handle it through my own channels, but I really don’t know who I can trust at this point. So I think if it just spills out in the newspaper, that’ll be best.”
“If
what
spills out?” I said.
The line went silent for a few moments. I tried to keep my breathing steady.
“It’s not something we can discuss over the phone,” he said, finally. “There are some things you’ll have to see with your own eyes. We really need to talk about it in person.”
Sure we did. It’d just be a cozy chat between Irving, me, and his .40-caliber handgun.
“When can we meet?” I asked, because I wanted to appear to be playing along.
“I’d like to do it right now, but I just can’t—a ten-and-under girls’ basketball team needs its coach,” he said. “But let’s do it tomorrow morning. Do you work on Sundays?”
Amazing, the calendar Irving Wallace kept. Let’s see: shopping with the wife and kids on Saturday morning, check; coaching the girls’ basketball team on Saturday afternoon, check; killing the pesky newspaper reporter on Sunday morning, check.
Still, the Summit Squirt Girls’ Basketball League schedule was a break for me. It gave me time—time to do more reporting without looking over my shoulder, time to figure out a plan.
“We’re a daily newspaper,” I said. “I work whenever I have to.”
“Great,” he said. “I can’t have you coming by my office—even on a weekend, someone might see you. So why don’t you come to my house for brunch tomorrow? It’s a Wallace family tradition. We do waffles, eggs, toast, the whole thing. Then after brunch we can go to my study and I’ll lay everything out for you.”
He’d lay me out, is more like it. I would go to the Wallace household to find the wife and kids were gone. He’d offer some flimsy excuse then need to show me something—in the basement, probably, where he could kill me and clean up the mess easily. Then he’d eat his waffles and toast. Then he’d load my body in the white van parked in his garage, find some way to dispose of my corpse and my car, and no one would ever be the wiser. He even thought he had the ideal cover: everyone in our circulation area knew someone was trying to kill me. So when I turned up missing, he could just say I was still alive when I left his house and I must have been grabbed on the way back to the office. The smug bastard figured no one would suspect the gentle government scientist.
It was the perfect trap, except for one thing—it’s not a trap when you know what’s coming.
“Brunch it is,” I said. “Can I bring anything?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“For brunch,” I reminded him. “Can I make something? Bring some juice? Just trying to be a good guest.”
How about that: I was keeping up his pretense better than he was.
“Oh, right,” he said. “No, just a pen and a notepad. I’ll take care of everything else.”
The shopping. The cooking. The killing.
He gave me his address and directions, not that I needed either. He was so easy about the whole thing, almost charming. But isn’t that what people always said about Ted Bundy?
“We go to the early church service, so we’ll be home by ten-thirty,” Wallace said. “Why don’t you plan on being there around eleven?”
“Sounds fine. See you then,” I said, hanging up.
The clock on my computer read 2:14. I had less than twenty- one hours to go.

around inside me, each clamoring for my attention. There was rage and relief and nervousness. There were schemes and gambits and ploys. I couldn’t untangle one thing from the other.

It was time to compartmentalize. If I didn’t start dealing with things one at a time, I wasn’t going to be able to accomplish anything. First order of business: I had a story to write. Irving Wallace had to wake up and find something in his Sunday paper, or he’d get suspicious. Plus, I’d promised the Sunday editor.

A story. No problem. I had written thousands of stories, I told myself. Just treat this one like all the rest. Quotes. I needed quotes. I started with the Newark police, calling their Public Noninformation Officer, Hakeem Rogers.