The Fraud (25 page)

He soon fired back. “I hope so! You realize they’re all a bunch of closet cases, right? Get them in the men’s room and it’s like a Turkish bathhouse.”

All I could do was snort, glad that no one knew why. It was around five thirty when I completed the story. I shipped it over to Brodie’s folder, where it would molder for some time before being discovered. Then I turned my attention to my e-mail.

Justin Waters had come through for me, forwarding a message from his firm’s secretary with the VIN number for the Cadillac, which I copied into my notebook.

Then there was one from Tina: “Pop your head in when you have a second?”

Ever the dutiful almost-fianc
é
, I stood up and followed her instruction to the letter.

“Do you want just my head or do you want the rest of me, too?” I asked when I reached her door.

She looked up from whatever she had been staring at on her screen, momentarily bewildered, having evidently forgotten the exact language of her e-mail.

I helped her: “You said to pop my head in and—”

“Yeah, yeah, sorry,” she said. “Come on in.”

I sat in my usual chair. “My mother was just asking about you,” I said, neglecting to add which part she was asking about.

“Oh, really? That’s sweet of her.”

Tina stared off into the distance for a moment, almost like she was looking at a piece of her window that was somewhere above my right shoulder. Her hand was resting on her belly. Tina’s focus was typically sharp enough to cut glass. It was unusual to see her so distracted.

I decided to prompt some words from her. “Did you want to talk to me or did you just want me to soak in your aura?”

“Yeah, yeah, sorry,” she said again. “I’m … a little out of it.”

“You’re not having a contraction, are you?”

“No,” she said quickly. “Why would you ask that?”

“My mother was having a premonition you had gone into labor.”

I thought that would earn me a laugh. Instead she said, “No, no.”

“You would tell me though, right?”

“Of course.”

“Because, you know, all those lectures from Dr. Marston about ‘negative outcomes’ and all that…”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. I just … I wanted to ask you if you were busy tonight.”

“I have to pick up some documents at a source’s house at eight, but after that I’m free. Why?”

“There’s something I want to talk to you about. But it has to be total cone of silence.”

“Uh, all right. Is it work-related cone of silence or home-related cone of silence?” I asked.

“A bit of both. How about we do Indian take-out like you wanted last night? I should be able to clear out of here by eight. I’ll see you at your place at eight thirty.”

“You’re being kind of mysterious,” I said.

“When you hear what it is, you’ll understand why I have to be,” she said.

“Now you’re being even more mysterious.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said.

I stopped myself from asking more. As I may have mentioned, Tina was a challenging woman. Lately, as she slowly—very slowly—let me into her life, I felt like she had been giving me a series of tests. She probably didn’t realize she was doing it. And I’m not sure I fully understood how the tests worked. But they seemed to involve trust: whether I had it in her, whether she could have it in me.

It was important to let her tell me whatever she felt like sharing in her own due time. So I just said, “Okay. Indian take-out at eighty thirty it is.”

“Thanks,” she said.

“And now, let me guess, you want me to pop my head back out of your office.”

“That would be great,” she said. “Do me a favor and close the door behind you.”

I did as she asked, never realizing such a simple act could feel like a metaphor.

*   *   *

As I returned my body to my desk, I similarly returned my brain to work. Now that I was armed with the VIN number from Justin Waters, it was time to figure out what was happening behind the happy facade of the Greater Newark Children’s Fund.

This made me realize I had never heard back from Sweet Thang, which was odd. I had sent her the story about Dave Gilbert hours earlier. I knew her duties at the nonprofit, varied as they were, kept her busy. But one of the reasons Sweet Thang could kill the batteries on two smartphones in a day is that she was never out of touch for very long.

I pulled up “Thang, Sweet” in my contact list and hit the send button. It rang, then rang some more, then sent me to voice mail. I shifted over to “Thang, Sweet 2,” but got the same result. So I texted her: “Hey, what’s up? Did you see the Gilbert thing? Call me.”

Less than a minute later, “Thang, Sweet” came up on my phone.

“Hey,” I said.

“I’m only calling to tell you I’m not talking to you,” she said.

With Sweet Thang, not talking was its own lengthy conversation. It would involve explaining how she wasn’t talking to me, why she wasn’t talking to me, and what impact her not talking to me would have on shrimp farming in Micronesia.

“Before you don’t talk to me, let me just first make sure: you heard about Brodie, right?”

“Yeah. My dad told me. But while I’m not talking to you, let’s definitely not talk about that, because I’ll start crying again.”

“Okay, fair enough. Then let’s get onto this whole you-not-talking-to-me thing,” I said. “You realize this makes you a PR person who is trying to dodge me. You remember I like to gently braise stonewalling PR people and eat them as mid-afternoon snacks, right?”

“I know, I know, I just … back when I was at the
Examiner
, this was the sort of thing I used to talk to you about. I always knew that whatever problem I had, you had experienced it sixteen times before. And you could always talk to me about ten different ways to handle it and then talk to me about the best way to handle it and it would make me feel so much better about things. But now it’s, like, I don’t know, I’m not the intern anymore and I ought to be on my own. And, besides, you’re a newspaper reporter and I’m a flak and there’s supposed to be this wall between us. And you can’t go over the wall to get advice and then expect to be able to crawl back over to the other side of the wall. It doesn’t work that way.

“I mean, really, I’m supposed to ask you to tell me how I can make sure this doesn’t turn into a scandal that harms the Greater Newark Children’s Council when you’re the person whose job it is to turn it into a scandal that harms the Greater Newark Children’s Council? I know, I know, it’s not actually your job to make it a scandal. Your job is to report the truth. But in this case it turns out that the truth is a scandal and I can’t let that happen. So whether you’re causing that hurt or are just the messenger is really just semantics. The end result is the same.”

She may have actually surfaced to take a breath at this point, but I can’t swear to that. When Sweet Thang gets going, it’s like she has scuba gear hidden somewhere.

“That’s the first reason I can’t talk to you,” she continued. “The second reason is when I think about Dave … I mean, this will, like, ruin him. He’ll probably lose his job and no one will hire him anywhere else once the word is out. And on the one hand, it’s like, tough luck. You do the crime, you do the time. You make your bed and all that. And if anything, I
should
narc him out, because what credibility do we have—with our donors, with our employees, and most importantly with our kids—if we let someone get away with being untruthful. It’s one thing to not know about it. That’s bad enough, because it makes us look like we’re clueless. But to have it brought to your attention and do nothing that’s, like, total negligence and how can we allow that?

“But then I also just keep thinking, I don’t know, I’ve seen him in action, you know? And shouldn’t you judge someone based on what you’ve seen, not based on some mistake they may have made a long ago in a very different context when they may have been a very different person? You’re not a Christian if you don’t allow for forgiveness. I don’t want to turn into one of those fake Christians who talks about forgiveness but really just wants to get all judgy. If Jesus was alive today—and, really, I believe He lives in all of us—He would be preaching in the prisons, hoping to redeem the worst of all the offenders. And, anyway, I don’t want to make this all religious. The point is, I
know
Dave Gilbert and he really is the nicest, sweetest man and his heart is just in the right place and he does what he does to help kids. I know that on a deep level, in a way that can’t be swayed by some stupid newspaper article. I mean, no offense.”

She stopped there. I waited to see if more came out of her, but she was done for the moment. After all, we weren’t talking.

The funny thing is, Sweet Thang was right about at least one thing: I had experienced this sixteen times before, give or take. And the first time was probably when I was about her age. This was back when I was working at a smaller daily newspaper in Pennsylvania. I was writing a story about a prominent and wealthy businessman who was leading the fund-raising charge for a badly needed children’s center and pledging to kick-start it with a large donation.

During my reporting, I learned he had done some ethically questionable things to amass his fortune and seemingly been sued by everyone he had ever done business with. Still, I didn’t want to hurt the chances of the children’s center being built. So I wrote a glowing article about him, one that neglected to mention his perpetual shadiness. He had the article framed and mounted in his office, like a prize buck.

Within two years, the guy had disappeared overseas, leaving behind a pile of broken promises and a vacant lot with a sign announcing a children’s center that would never come to be. It left me feeling like a dupe and taught me a lesson I had never forgotten.

“Well, let me start by saying I’m glad we’re not talking,” I said.

“Stop making fun of me.”

“And, look, you’re right: I have experienced things like this before. And what I’ve learned is that you have to let the truth stand for itself. If the truth is Dave has done some bad things in the past but is now trying to do good, that’s one thing. And I think it can be reported in a sensitive way that stays true to facts but doesn’t do harm to the Greater Newark Children’s Council. I don’t think anyone begrudges a Newark nonprofit giving an ex-con a second chance.

“But if the truth is that Dave has done some bad things in the past and is still doing bad things, that’s something that needs to come out, no matter how ugly it gets. And I’ll be honest, what often gets politicians, corporations, or institutions in the most trouble is not that they’ve allowed something bad to happen. As long as they own up to it, the damage usually goes away pretty quickly. It’s when they try to cover it up that heads really roll. That’s the lesson of Watergate, Bridgegate, and every gate in between.”

“I know, I know,” she whimpered. I was glad this conversation was happening over the phone, because Sweet Thang was pretty adorable when she was dejected and I didn’t need that kind of temptation. Even if there was no chance I was going to act on it, it made me feel guilty all the same.

“So here’s what we’re going to do. You’ve got a key to the Greater Newark Children’s Council garage, do you not?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Good. I’ve got the VIN number for the Cadillac that was stolen last night in Newark. Let’s just check it against the one in his garage, assuming it’s still there. If it’s not a match, that’s one thing. If it matches, I think it’s safe to say we have a problem that we have no choice but to act on. But let’s get all the information first.”

She wasn’t saying anything, a rarity. Sweet Thang had many qualities. Reticence was seldom one of them.

Sensing her indecision, I played my trump card: “I’ve got my Chariots for Children story written, but you know it can’t run until I check this out. That’s life at Harold Brodie’s newspaper, whether he’s in the hospital or not.”

Again, she said nothing immediately. But I did hear her sigh.

“Okay, fine,” she said, eventually. “Why don’t you come over in an hour or so? Everyone will have gone home by that point and we can be looking around without having to answer any questions.”

“Deal,” I said.

She sighed again.

“Lauren?” I said.

“Usually, you only call me Lauren when you’re trying to be nice,” she said. “So why doesn’t this feel nice?”

“Because the search for the truth seldom does,” I said. “But, trust me, you’re doing the right thing.”

CHAPTER 32

Having exhausted myself with all that mentoring—and feeling in need of a little alone time—I meandered down the back stairwell.

The
Eagle-Examiner
building is a warren of corridors, half staircases, and mismatched parts, many of which can only be reached via passageways that seem to have been laid out for the implicit purpose of getting people lost.

It’s really something like two or three buildings that have been attached in ungainly fashion and made to appear, from the outside, like one edifice. Its blueprint—if one even existed—would look like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces didn’t line up.

None of the floors of the buildings that have been forced together are the same height. None of the support beams are quite where they need to be. There are load-bearing walls in all kinds of inconvenient places.

Those are some of the root causes of the architectural clumsiness. The other is that the facility has been through so many of the typesetting paradigms that have, at various points, held sway over the newspaper business. Hot type. Cold type. Then, eventually, the shift to desktop publishing.

With each new era, the building received a retrofitting that was necessarily inelegant. After all, a newspaper had to be produced every day during the transition, meaning the two technologies existed side by side for a time.

The result of all this slapdashery is such an idiosyncratic mishmash that it took me at least three years not to feel like I was getting lost every time I left the well-worn path from my desk to the soda machine. Eventually, though, I realized it was a wonderful place to explore. The remnants of some of the old equipment were still lying around in nooks and crannies. If you knew what you were looking at, it was like a stroll through your own personal newspaper museum. I tried to enjoy it while I could, knowing our time in the building was running out.