The Fraud (21 page)

He glared at me through the closed window. I waited a beat before lowering it.

“Mr. Ross,” he said, his face pinched and firm behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “You are currently on Fanwood Country Club property without an invitation and are therefore trespassing. If you do not leave immediately, I will call the police.”

I would have yawned—to signify how worried I was about his threats—except his musk had crawled into my car. I feared that if I inhaled too deeply it would make me gag.

Instead, I realized this might be my best opportunity to interview Karlinsky before my story ran. Unlike cops, who can get search warrants and ask questions later, reporters had to ask questions first. We don’t get to surprise anyone with what we put in the newspaper if it’s a story that accuses them of wrongdoing. If I was going to intimate that Earl Karlinsky was involved in a carjacking ring, I was going to have to ask him about it. That’s another way in which journalists are unlike law enforcement: we have to give the criminals equal time.

With this in mind, I said, “Hang on, Mr. Karlinsky. I want to make sure I get this on tape.”

I reached into my briefcase and pulled out my digital recorder, which I kept well-charged for occasions like this.

“This is … this is outrageous!” he sputtered. “This is harassment!”

I thumbed the record button before I spoke.

“No, trust me, I know harassment laws very well, Mr. Karlinsky, and this doesn’t even come close. If anything, you’re harassing me. I had a perfectly legitimate reasons for being at your club twice yesterday, including once when I was explicitly invited by one of your members. Yet you tried to chase me away both times. The second time, you grabbed my wrist, which I did not want you to do and which made me frightened. That’s assault and battery right there, and I have a bar full of witnesses. So if you want to get into a legal pissing match with me, by all means, let’s do it.”

Since he wasn’t a cartoon with a thought bubble over his head, I didn’t know for sure; but I was reasonably certain he was thinking, “Oops.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Haughty was still near the back of my car. It was a strange place to be. And I couldn’t very well pay attention to whatever he was doing while simultaneously fighting a verbal battle with Karlinsky.

“Now,” I continued, “the reason I’m watching your country club is because I believe you are part of a criminal enterprise that is identifying high-worth vehicles and planting tracking devices on them so that your Newark-based associates can then carjack them. Would you care to comment on that?”

His face pinched some more. “That’s … that absurd. That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. And if you print that—”

“Then you’re denying it.”

“Damn right I’m denying it. Are you out of your mind?”

“So it’s just a coincidence that Kevin Tiemeyer and Joseph Okeke played a round of golf together at your club about a month ago, and both of them are now dead after carjackings that turned violent.”

He stomped his foot—to what end, I’m not sure—and pointed at me as he spoke. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. And I don’t know what would possibly make you think I have anything to do with that. That’s the most absurd and unbelievable and outrageous and—” He stopped there, apparently out of words to express his incredulity.

“If it’s so unbelievable, then when I check your club roster against recent carjackings in and around Newark, I’m not going to find an inordinate number of your members having recently been victimized by that crime?”

“Are you insane? You’re absolutely out of your mind. This is outr”—he stopped himself, perhaps aware he had already used the word “outrageous” twice already—“I have no idea what you’re talking about. And I’m not going to listen to any more of this. You have to leave. Now.”

He removed his phone from his pocket. His hand was shaking as he jabbed at it with his finger.

“So, again, you deny any knowledge of or involvement in a carjacking ring operating out of your club?”

By that point, he was either pretending not to hear me or actually not hearing me. Mr. Haughty was still behind me somewhere, though I couldn’t see him unless I looked in my rearview mirror.

“Yes, this is Earl Karlinsky, the general manager at Fanwood Country Club. There is a man named Carter Ross who is sitting alongside Fanwood Road on the edge of club property in a gray Volvo. I have asked him to leave and he has refused. Could you please send a car out here and—”

I had already seen what I needed to see. I had also heard enough of Earl Karlinsky’s blather for the time being. I rolled my window up and drove off, leaving Karlinsky and his cabana boy behind.

Frankly, Karlinsky’s presence had vexed me a lot less than Haughty’s. Why had he come? To provide his boss some backup? To intimidate me?

Or to put a tracking device on my car?

Just in case, I went about a mile down and then pulled over to the side of the road to give the Volvo’s back bumper and rear tire well a thorough inspection. I hunched under the car and looked for something that didn’t seem right. Then I used my hands to feel for it.

I found nothing. I was probably just being paranoid, sure. But there were at least two recent visitors to Fanwood who would have been well-served by a little more paranoia in their lives.

*   *   *

My first priority, as I finally got heading back toward Newark, was Buster Hays and his apparently ferocious thirst. He had information I now needed more than ever and, knowing Buster as I did, he was not going to give it up until I paid my ransom.

Not being much of a scotch man, I wasn’t sure if Ballantine’s—Buster’s scotch of choice—was a common brand or if it was considered more exotic. But, again, I knew Buster. He took pride in his Bronx roots, public school education, and common man’s sensibilities. When he called me “Ivy,” he didn’t mean it as a compliment. I suspected that just about any dispenser of intoxicating liquids would carry it.

My trip to the newsroom involved passing at least one such store along Broad Street. Or, maybe, more like three of them. I opted for the second.

If you are seeking a cure for depression—or want to feel uplifted about your fellow man—stopping at a Newark liquor store is not something I’d recommend. The one I chose was an excellent example of its type. It was housed in a building that exuded ugliness from a chipped, sooty, tile exterior that may have once been yellow but had since faded into something less than that.

Its defensive structures were depressingly impressive. The top of the walls were protected by sharp, outward-curling metal ramparts whose purpose was to prevent would-be thieves from scaling up to the roof. The windows—or the portals where there perhaps had once been windows—were covered over in concrete. All other conceivable points of access, everything from the door to the heating and cooling vents, had bars on them. There were fifteenth-century Moorish fortresses that were easier to penetrate.

Populating the sidewalk were three professional drunks who looked like they had scraped up just enough money to buy their poison of choice, then hadn’t bothered to stumble more than a few feet outside the door before they began administering it.

The insides were dim and musty, and most of the decoration—if you could call it that—had been provided by the producers of the beverages being sold. The motif, if it could be summed up in two words, was garish neon. The floor had a pervasive sag to it; as if it, too, had simply given up.

I am no one to lecture on the evils of alcohol. I have certainly been known to enjoy its pleasures from time to time. But I’m also mindful of not becoming one of those journalists who regularly chases his sorrows with booze. I’ve heard stories about how that method of self-soothing eventually turns out. Most of the time, it’s not with the protagonist turning into one of the skid row professionals I had just passed outside. Instead, they end up as guys who somehow hold on to their jobs and houses, but who can’t get out of bed in the morning without a shot of vodka. Frankly, I’m not entirely sure which is worse.

After a diligent, two-minute search, I eventually found the Ballantine’s. (For the record: it’s near the rotgut, one aisle over from the firewater, and one shelf up from the hooch.) I grabbed two bottles of it, and took them up to the register.

There, I found a charming, linguistically fractured sign that read:
WE DONT EXCEPT CREDIT CARDS. THERE HAVE BEEN TO MANY FRAUDULANT CHARGES. CASH ONLY
.

I dug into my wallet and managed to find two twenties, which I passed under a small slit in the bulletproof glass to a man who accepted—yes, accepted—the bills, which were not, in fact, fraudulent. He handed me my change without comment, then slipped me two brown paper bags with the unspoken understanding that I would likely be joining his other patrons outside.

My WASPish instincts compelled me to disabuse him of this notion, so I lobbed up a lame, “I sure hope my friend likes this scotch.”

The man behind the counter looked at me like he neither believed me nor cared. I left the store, withstood some halfhearted panhandling from the men outside—who couldn’t exactly claim they weren’t going to use the money for booze—and completed my journey back to the office.

Once inside the building, I quickly checked in on Tina, who informed me she was fine and her morning was fine and the baby was fine and everything else was fine. But she was saying it in a way that led me to believe that if I didn’t leave her alone, I would very quickly not be fine.

Her stress, I could guess, was Brodie-related. I had only been in the newsroom for a few minutes, but it felt like his heart attack had projected gloom on all who entered.

Most of it was concern for a revered man’s health, of course, but a small part of it was uncertainty about the future as well. Brodie’s stalwart presence was one of the few givens in the ever-changing multivariable equation that was the newspaper industry. He was our rock.

I think we all understood there was no guarantee a seventysomething-year-old coming off a major heart attack would return to work. And even if he did, his aura would never be quite the same. There was no pretending the old man was invincible anymore. Our rock had been fractured.

Then there was the even more pressing question: in the likely event Brodie stepped aside, who would our new boss be? The leading inside candidates would have to be Eberhardt and Looper. They had been around almost as long as Brodie and would be able to carry on his legacy, albeit without his legendary stature.

An outside hire would be a far more menacing proposition. My fear, of course, is that it would be some Web whiz we lured away from Google, a tablet-toting, pulp-loathing technophile who would be given some odious title like “Director of Content” and lecture us about the importance of search engine optimization.

The mere idea of it made me want to run back to the liquor store and double my order.

*   *   *

Given where my thoughts had wandered, I found comfort in locating the prehistoric Buster Hays in his usual spot: sitting at his desk, injuring his keyboard.

He had a pair of granny glasses perched on the end of his nose. I was able to distinguish his paisley tie from the one he had worn the days before because the stains were in different places.

“Okay, I have traded my shame for these two bottles of devil spirits,” I said. “Talk to me.”

With great ceremony, I presented him the brown paper bags. He peered inside both. Satisfied, he placed them next to his briefcase on the floor.

He returned his attention to the keyboard and delivered his findings in typically brusque fashion. “I got a name for you on the driver of the Cadillac CTS.”

“Really?” I said. “I don’t mean to underestimate you, Buster, but I didn’t think your guy on the task force would give that up.”

“I told him you’d get the driver’s permission before you put his name in the paper.”

“Yeah, but, still, aren’t they worried about witness intimidation if we print the vic’s name?”

“Think about it, Ivy: whoever stole that car already knows the victim’s name and address. It’s printed on his insurance card and registration, which ninety-eight percent of Americans keep in their glove box.”

“Good point.”

“Plus, it doesn’t sound like there was much to witness,” Buster said, then tore a sheet from the notepad next to his keyboard. “Here.”

The paper contained the name Justin Waters and an address in Chatham, a well-to-do town to the west of Newark.

“Great,” I said. “And did they get anywhere with that country club membership list?”

“I gave it to my guy. He said he’d run through it and get back to me.”

“Thanks, Buster,” I said. “Enjoy the scotch.”

“I will. Now go away.”

I obliged him, returning to my desk and pulling up my own list of Fanwood members. The name Justin Waters was not on it. Then again, neither was the name Joseph Okeke. Chatham wasn’t very far from Fanwood. Mr. Waters could have been another Fanwood guest who had unwittingly driven his GPS-tracked car into Newark and the waiting arms of a gang of carjackers.

After a few keystrokes, I had Waters’s home telephone number. I called it and heard a chipper voice telling me he wasn’t home. I left a message.

Chances were good he was still in the hospital. The fact that he was healthy enough to walk there suggested he wouldn’t be there for too long. Still, he had been shot in the neck. The emergency room doctor wasn’t exactly going to tell him to rub some dirt on it and go home.

I played a game of what-if that I sincerely hoped I would never have to participate in: if I were shot in the hundred block of Washington Street, what hospital would I stagger to?

The map in my brain came up with Saint Michael’s Medical Center. It was definitely the closest facility. If I struck out there, I’d try another nearby hospital.

I was just about to call it when my cell phone started ringing from a number I didn’t recognize.

“Carter Ross,” I said.

“Hey, Carter, it’s Zabrina Coleman-Webster,” I heard.

“Yeah, hey, Zabrina, how are you?”

“I’m good. I’ve been thinking about our conversation yesterday and wanted to talk some more.”