The Fraud (22 page)

“Okay,” I said. “What about?”

She lowered her voice. “I don’t really want to talk about it here, if that’s okay.”

Recalling that she was forced to share an office, I said, “That’s fine. I need some lunch anyway. How about we both grab a sandwich and meet in Military Park in twenty minutes.”

“That’d be great,” she said.

“Talk to you soon,” I said, then hit the
END
button on my phone. Wasting no time, I picked up my desk phone and dialed the number for Saint Michael’s.

Mind you, not the number for the public relations staff. Thanks to an irritating piece of legislation know as HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, hospitals couldn’t release any information about a patient—or even say whether a patient was a patient—unless they were expressly permitted to do so. I’m sure it was a great advance for the privacy rights of those under medical care. For a newspaper reporter, it was like persistent bedsores.

Thankfully, there was nothing in HIPAA that said I couldn’t just call up a patient and hope for the best. I hit the buttons needed to reach an operator, then asked for Justin Waters’s room.

Two rings later, I heard, “Hello.”

“Hi, Justin,” I said, assuming I had reached the man himself. “My name is Carter Ross. I’m a reporter with the
Eagle-Examiner
.”

“Oh, hi,” he said, as if this was just another part of being in the hospital, not that different from an impromptu visit by the chaplain.

“I wanted to talk with you about your carjacking last night for an investigative piece I’m writing about the subject. Are you up for it?”

“Yeah, sure, I guess,” he said, good-naturedly.

I asked how he was feeling—sore, he said—then ran quickly through his background. He was a lawyer who worked at a firm in Basking Ridge. He liked to go into Newark for the nightlife. It wasn’t hard for me to deduce why. From his voice, I could tell he was a young black man. Yet the town where he lived, lovely Chatham, tended to be populated by older white folks who like to roll up the sidewalks at 9:30
P.M.

Then I got around to the incident itself. He walked me through the most terrifying five minutes of his life: how he left the bar after “one or two” drinks around 12:30
A.M.
; how he stopped at a light along Washington Street, not really thinking about much of anything; how a kid wearing a blue ski mask ran up to him, gun first; how that sight made him react instinctively, and his instincts told him to stomp on the gas.

“It was totally, totally stupid,” he said. “I know I should have just given him the car. It’s not even my car. It belongs to my firm. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

He remembered the sound of the gun going off but blacked out after that. His next memory involved staggering into the Saint Michael’s emergency room. He was dazed and bleeding from wounds to his face and neck. Luckily, all were relatively superficial. The bullet had only really grazed his neck, just barely missing his carotid artery.

“One inch over and you’d be writing my obituary,” he cheerfully informed me.

Instead, he was patched up and awaiting his release from Saint Michael’s at any moment. We shared our relief over that fact, and over the vicissitudes of life, which can leave one feeling enormously grateful over something as horrible as a carjacking. The gift of life is never fully appreciated until it’s nearly taken away.

We were getting along so famously, I just kept rolling with the questions.

“So don’t ask me why I’m asking this,” I said. “But have you played golf recently at Fanwood Country Club?”

He hadn’t. Likewise, he had never met a man named Earl Karlinsky. But he also wasn’t the only driver of the car. His firm was located within walking distance from a train station and had made a deal with its lawyers: take the train to work, bill hours while you ride, and the firm would maintain a small fleet of cars for their personal use during or after work. Any one of five partners and eleven other associates could have used the vehicle.

I would have to check the law firm’s Web site for the names of the other attorneys to see if any of them were Fanwood members. If one of them had played as a guest or just visited there, it was going to be beyond my investigative grasp. I didn’t have the time or desire to track down sixteen lawyers and ask them about their recent golf outings.

“Okay, so strange question number two: do you have the VIN number for the Cadillac, by any chance?”

He didn’t. But before I hung up, he promised he would check in with the office assistant who farmed out the cars and get it from her, then e-mail it to me later.

I didn’t even have to tell him I wanted it because I may well have located the vehicle in question. Justin Waters did not seem concerned about justice, vengeance, or any of the other petty desires with which human beings sometimes consume themselves.

He was just happy to be alive.

CHAPTER 27

There are people who live or work near Military Park in Newark for their entire lives without knowing one cool fact about it: when viewed from above, it is shaped like a sword.

I only knew it because it was the kind of tidbit regularly shared with me by the great Clement Price, a legendary, beloved—and, alas, late—professor of history at Rutgers-Newark, who spent the final forty-two years of his life teaching Newark where it came from.

By the time I arrived at Military Park—still driving Tina’s Volvo, because I had forgotten to swap keys with her—I could already see Zabrina, who was sitting along the outer edge of the park on a bench.

I parked near her at a metered spot, fed it a half-hour’s worth of quarters, then ambled out. Zabrina had a white wrapper open next to her on the bench and smiled as I approached the bench.

“You forgot your sandwich,” she said.

“Yeah, I had a quick interview to do, so I didn’t have time to grab one.”

“You can have the other half of mine if you’re interested,” she said. “I was just going to bring it home anyway. It’s turkey with Swiss cheese. It’s delish.”

She extended half a sub toward me. It was still wrapped, but I didn’t need to give it much of an inspection. While some people think it’s congenital, it is, in fact, an acquired characteristic: newspaper reporters are incapable of turning down free food.

“Thanks,” I said.

I sat down next to her. We chewed in silence for a moment. Military Park recently received a much-needed face-lift and was now quite the showpiece. Across from the park to the east, there were Newark icons like the New Jersey Performing Arts Center; the New Jersey Historical Society; and WBGO, a public radio station with a small news crew whose work I admired—sometimes grudgingly so, when they beat me to a story. To the west of the park, Prudential Insurance was completing the building that would serve as its new world headquarters.

It made Military Park a part of Newark that felt like a thriving city; a place where you could now sit, enjoy a sandwich, and not have to think about the chronic ills that still wrack other parts of town.

Zabrina broke our brief reverie with, “My mama taught me that when you mess up, you best just say so and apologize for it, so everyone can get on with it.”

“I see. And how did you mess up?”

“Yesterday, when you came by, I said some things I probably shouldn’t have said to the newspaper.”

I didn’t groan out loud. Just internally. The backtracking source is one of the more annoying animals in the newspaper forest. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the more common. People were constantly trying to take things off the record.

She continued: “I just … Joseph really valued his privacy. He was pretty insistent we not be public about our relationship. He always said it wasn’t anyone’s business but ours and I … I pretty much agreed with him. But then you came and somehow you already knew about Joseph and I, and I just started blabbing about it. I think it was because it felt so good to talk to someone about it.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, opting not to tell her I actually hadn’t known a thing about it until she had told me.

“But I really shouldn’t have done that. And I apologize for that. It was wrong. Just because Joseph … isn’t with us anymore doesn’t mean I still shouldn’t honor his wishes.

“Uh,” she groaned. “That was, like, a triple negative. Anyhow, I guess what I’m saying is, it wasn’t anyone’s business back then and it’s no one’s business now. Would it be okay if you just leave that part out?”

There are no set rules about how to respond when someone is trying to retract statements they’ve already made. The hard line is to tell them, essentially, tough luck: you said it; it was on the record at the time; therefore, I own it. The other possibility is, of course, to give them a break.

I usually base my response on the source themselves. If it is, say, a politician—or some other public figure with long experience in dealing with the media—I usually laugh them right out of the room. Because they should know better.

But if it’s a civilian—say the local Rotary Club president who seldom, if ever, dealt with the press—I usually cut them some slack. Especially when, as in this case, it was not information crucial to the story.

Plus, she had given me a sandwich.

“Yeah, I guess I can take that out,” I said, as if I had already written the piece.

“Thank you,” she said, releasing a breath.

“But just so we’re clear, what you told me about Joseph’s involvement in Rotary is still fair game, yes?”

“Oh, yeah, that’s fine.”

“And the part about how he was heading to his house to get some documents to prepare for a morning meeting. That’s sort of a good detail, because it shows he was just another guy, thinking about work the next day. I can say he had just left a friend’s house. That okay?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Now for the more important part: “And I can still use what you said about Earl Karlinsky asking him about his car.”

That threw her. “Uh, yeah. Sure. Out of curiosity, why does that matter?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It just shows that it was the kind of car that other people noticed and took interest in and that Joseph was proud of it and liked to talk about it,” I ad-libbed. “It’s like if you asked me about my Volvo over there. I wouldn’t say more than about three words about it. That would tell you something about me, that I’m not really much of a car guy, and maybe that I don’t consider driving a Volvo to be a big part of my personality.”

Especially since it wasn’t mine. But there didn’t seem any point to adding that. It might involve having to explain my rather complicated relationship with Tina. And I was going to follow Zabrina’s lead and keep that private.

“Oh, yeah,” Zabrina said. “I never thought about it like that. But I guess that’s why you’re the writer and I’m an accountant.”

“Trust me, if we switched jobs, I’d be a lot worse at yours than you would be at mine.”

She laughed. “When is your story going to come out, anyway?”

Sources were often asking me this question. I had learned, given how little control I had over the process, to be vague about my answer. “Not sure,” I said. “My editors would like it for Sunday. But it could be earlier than that, or later.”

“Oh. Gotcha,” she said, dabbing a bit of mayonnaise from the corner of her mouth.

“I’ll try to let you know before it runs. I may have to call with any other questions I have about Joseph. His widow hasn’t exactly been very forthcoming with me.”

“Really? Why not?”

“I don’t know, since the two times I’ve been on her front porch she’s slammed the door in my face,” I said. “Actually, if you happen to chat with her, could you tell her I’m a decent fellow who doesn’t have horns coming out of his head?”

“I guess I could but we don’t really … now that Joseph is gone, we don’t really have a reason to talk anymore. I had thought about trying to continue a relationship with Maryam. She really is a lovely girl and I enjoyed the time I spent with her. But the only thing we had in common was her father, and…”

She didn’t finish the thought. “Okay, I understand,” I said. “No big deal.”

“What do you need from her, anyway?”

“I’m still trying to track down that insurance thing,” I said. “It’s that reporter’s instinct toward protecting the little guy. If there’s an insurance company trying to screw a widow out of money, it’s the kind of thing I want to be able to put in the paper.”

I emphasized my hunger for this subject by taking a wolfish bite from my sandwich.

“Would it help if I could give you a copy of Joseph’s auto policy?” she said.

This was the equivalent of asking a boxer,
Would it help if I pinned the other guy’s arms down?

“Sure would,” I said. “How’d you end up with that?”

“He left an accordion file with some papers at my house. I was going through it the other night. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to do with it. It’s yours if you want it. How about you drop by my house tonight and pick it up?”

With a copy of Joseph Okeke’s policy in hand by the end of the day, I’d be able to dedicate some time tomorrow to attacking his insurance company with merry abandon.

“Sure,” I said. “What time?”

“I’m probably going to be working a little late. Then I wanted to stop by the gym on the way home. Could you come by at eight?”

She furnished me her address. I wrote it down. “I’m not going to have time to clean,” she said. “Just park in the driveway and I’ll run it out to you.”

I could have told her that, as a newspaper reporter who had trekked through his share of tenements and interviewed his share of people who were conscientious vacuuming objectors, I would be very nearly impossible to offend. But I understood a little about certain women and cleaning. Tina had once refused to answer the door for the UPS man because the living room wasn’t tidied. So I just said, “Okay. No problem.”

We lapsed back into silence for a moment. She had finished her sandwich. We had, for all practical purposes, finished our conversation. Yet there was clearly more on her mind.

Just to get on with it, I said, “What is it?”