The Fraud (26 page)

As I descended, I went past the fire door that had not sounded its alarm in at least twenty years, since the building went smoke-free in the midnineties. The newsroom’s smokers, who realized the door represented the shortest route between them and a nicotine fix, had disabled it, then thwarted all efforts to repair it.

Reaching the basement, I passed some half-empty rolls of newsprint that had been left behind in the late seventies. That was when the owners realized that since their subscribers had moved to the suburbs it made sense to move the presses there as well.

It was a real heyday for a paper like ours. The
Newark Evening News
had gone out of business, leaving only us, the morning paper, without any real competition. From what I’m told our profit margins were 30 percent and all our business staff had to do to keep them there was pick up the phone when advertisers called. The newsroom didn’t even have a budget. It just spent what it wanted.

I was lost in that fantasy as I strolled past the pressmen’s locker room. Then my daydreams were interrupted by the sound of … giggling?

Clearly, it wasn’t any of the pressmen. There hadn’t been any of those in the building in a long time. And, besides, pressmen weren’t the giggling type.

Tommy Hernandez, on the other hand, certainly was. And that was who I saw as I opened the door. But it was who he was kissing that really shocked me:

A certain tall, broad-shouldered, former college lacrosse player.

“No way!” I blurted.

Two heads whipped toward me.

“Chillax, you’re … you’re…” I was so surprised it took me a moment before I could finish with: “You’re gay?”

“Yeah, brah,” he said, smiling. “Surprised my parents, too. They used to think I read
Men’s Health
for the articles.”

Tommy leaned his head into Chillax’s chest. “At least you weren’t one of those poor repressed souls who thought he just hadn’t found the right girl yet.”

“Naw, I pretty much knew from the time I was, like, five and I played doctor with the Petrocelli twins. Justina Petrocelli getting naked wasn’t that interesting to me, but her brother Justin sure was.”

“Did your teammates know?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Chillax said, like it was no big deal. “I came out sophomore year. They were, like, whatever, dude. As long as I played my ass off, they wouldn’t have cared if I wanted to hump the school mascot.”

“Huh,” I said, then looked at Tommy. “I guess when you texted me and said you got some good stuff, you weren’t lying.”

“Yeah. Sorry for the little detour here,” Tommy said. “We were going to do a notebook dump with you when we got back but you were doing that thing with your computer screen where you’re like Superman with the X-ray vision and you can stare right through it.”

“No big deal,” I said. Tina and I had once nearly consummated our relationship in the pressmen’s locker room. It would be hypocritical of me to fault Tommy and Chillax for choosing it as the place to begin theirs. “But before you guys get too busy here”—I made a circular motion with my hand—“would you mind doing that notebook dump now?”

Tommy looked at Chillax, who looked back at Tommy. There was a wistfulness in their glances that made me feel rotten for playing the spoiler. But on the off chance I needed to write this thing quickly, I needed to have those notes.

“I guess not,” Tommy said, at last.

“Thanks.”

Tommy said, “Let’s just go upstairs and type up the notes and then we can—”

“Word,” Chillax said, not needing Tommy to complete the sentence.

“Mind giving me the quick headline right now?” I asked as we started walking together back toward the stairway that led up to the newsroom.

“Yeah. Kevin Tiemeyer was about to lose his job,” Tommy said.

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. I’m guessing that’s why he was mowing his own lawn, not going out to dinner, and ditching the country club,” Tommy said. “One of USKB’s mergers had basically made his department redundant. I guess there was a question about which one they were going to keep. Kevin’s lost. They were letting him stay on for the quote-unquote ‘transition’ and then he was going to be shown the door.”

“Did he find a new job yet?”

“If he did, he hadn’t told anyone he worked with. I talked to a few other people in the department. It sounds like they were pretty specialized—don’t ask me to explain what they did, because I can’t—and that made it harder to find something. You’ve heard that saying that to find a new job it takes a month for every ten thousand dollars you make? They were all hunkering down for a bit of unemployment.”

“I wonder if that’s what he and Joseph Okeke were talking about when they played golf,” I said. “What I can’t figure out is how the two of them knew each other. Banking and Nigerian telecommunications aren’t exactly related.”

“Unless Tiemeyer had somehow financed a deal for Okeke?” Tommy offered. “All I really understood about Tiemeyer’s department is that it involved lending in some way.”

“Possible,” I said. “I’d love to be able to nail that down. Otherwise my story would just refer to them as two golfing buddies, which sort of begs the question of how they became buddies.”

“I got phone numbers for three of his more chatty colleagues,” Tommy said. “I could call and ask.”

“All right. Thanks. I’ll see you guys later.”

We had reached the newsroom. Tommy went toward his desk. But my eyes followed Chillax.

I remembered talking with one of our sports beat writers, who once covered Jason Collins, back when the Nets played in New Jersey and before Collins came out as the first gay athlete to play in a major American sporting league. Our beat writer told me that of the fifteen guys in the Nets’ locker room, you would have put Collins in about thirteenth place in the Most Likely To Be Gay voting.

On court, he was a plodder whose main role was to set picks that got his teammates open for baskets—which meant he spent a lot of time letting people run into him. Off the court, he was not the least bit effeminate, nor was he flamboyant in speech or action. If anything, he went out of his way to be boring. Especially when it came to how he dressed. He fit none of the gay stereotypes.

Which just goes to prove one of the immutable axioms of human behavior: you never know what happens when the bedroom door closes.

*   *   *

When I returned to my desk, there was a sheet of yellow paper from a legal pad sitting on my chair. I didn’t even need to read it to know: Managing Editor Rich Eberhardt was looking for me.

Eberhardt was a short, kinky-haired, high-strung man whose reading of the paper and retention of that material were famously, if not freakishly, encyclopedic. He devoured the thing cover to cover, right down to the home sale listings, and could often recall the arcane details from stories we had written ten years earlier.

He spent no small part of his day roaming the newsroom with a yellow legal pad. As the keeper of the budget—our tabulation of which stories were slated to appear in the next day’s paper—Eberhardt was constantly hectoring reporters, asking them whether their stories would be ready to run. His insistence increased as deadline approached.

One of his other primary duties was to compile the corrections. If you had a story in that day’s edition, but nothing scheduled for the next one, you dreaded seeing him and his yellow pad coming at you. It meant you had screwed up and would be publicly shamed with a printed item on page two that would likely begin “Due to a reporter’s error…”

If I’ve made him sound like a pain in the ass, it’s because he was. Sometimes. On other occasions, he had an easy smile and was quite likable. With Eberhardt, it was sort of a moment-to-moment thing.

In this case, I didn’t know what he wanted. Just that the yellow piece of paper said, “COME SEE ME ASAP, PLS.—RICH” in hasty scrawl.

Eberhardt’s office was next to Brodie’s in the corner of the newsroom. Like all the other top editors’ offices, it was walled by glass. As I approached, I could see he was not alone.

He was accompanied by Angela Showalter, the paper’s outside counsel from the law firm of McWhorter and French. She was very smart and highly capable and I’m sure if she lived in my neighborhood, I’d enjoy carpooling with her once C-3PO was old enough for swim team.

As things stood right now, however, she was still a lawyer, so I wasn’t happy to see her. In the newsroom, we called her Nowalter, because her basic job was to make sure we didn’t get sued, which involved saying “no” a lot—no, we couldn’t run that story; no, we couldn’t include that saucy detail; no, we couldn’t quote that anonymous source.

I didn’t need to knock on Eberhardt’s door. He saw me coming.

“Oh, there you are,” he said. “Please come in. You know Angela Showalter, of course.”

Nowalter and I exchanged smiles. Mine was perhaps a bit less genuine than hers.

Eberhardt did not waste another moment. “We were hoping you could explain this to us,” he said. He clicked his mouse button twice, then swiveled his monitor toward me.

For the next few minutes, I was treated to video of myself in the Fanwood Country Club pro shop. It began with me walking stealthily across the room. Then I slunk behind the starter’s desk and started toying with the computer there. Then my head whipped to the left and I dropped behind the counter as Earl Karlinsky came in and tried the handle to the front door. Finding it locked, he departed.

I watched myself rise from behind the desk, looking flushed and anxious, the very picture of guilt. I worked the computer for a little longer, then made my hasty departure.

Eberhardt turned his screen back to its original position. I took a moment to gather myself. My profession is all about divorcing oneself of personal opinions and calling it like you see it. And there was no other way to call this one: it looked bad. Really bad.

I turned to Nowalter. “I take it you’ve been talking to Doc Fierro,” I said.

“He contacted me earlier today, yes,” she said. “You’re confirming the video is authentic? This is you last night at Fanwood Country Club?”

“I wish I could tell you it wasn’t. But I’m afraid it is.”

Nowalter shot a dark face at Eberhardt. I immediately began arguing my case. “But I want to be very clear, I was invited to the club and I didn’t break into the pro shop. The back door was open. All I did was turn the handle and walk in. What you’re watching isn’t me breaking and entering.”

“I’m sure that’s true, but the back door doesn’t appear on the video,” Eberhardt said. “All we see is the general manager checking the locked front one.”

I nodded.

“Who invited you to the club?” Nowalter asked.

“Doc di—” I began and then I stopped myself. My conundrum was becoming painfully, painfully clear to me. The only person who could clear me of wrongdoing was the very person who was accusing me of it. The only evidence I had in support of my innocence was my own testimony. He, on the other hand, had this damning video.

In short, Doc Fierro had my man parts in a vice. But why had he decided to tighten the crank so quickly? As far as he was concerned, there was no story yet. We had established that I would call him if there was. Why the preemptive strike?

Then the explanation walked up and dislocated my jaw. Doc was protecting Earl Karlinsky. They were in on this thing together.

It all made sense. And part of the proof was something Doc had told me, something I should have had sense to know myself: Earl Karlinsky wasn’t smart enough to come up with a scheme like this himself.

But Doc Fierro sure was.

As all the rows and columns lined up in my head, Nowalter and Eberhardt hadn’t been talking. They were just looking at each other in a meaningful way, as if they were silently rehashing a conversation whose conclusion they had already reached.

Eberhardt cleared his throat. He ran his hand through his wavy hair, which I recognized as one of his nervous tics. I felt like my neck was being lowered on to the chopping block.

“Look, Carter,” he said. “If Brodie were here, maybe there would be some possibility of leniency. You’ve done great work for this paper and that counts for something. And, personally, I believe you when you say you didn’t break in. That’s just … it’s not what it looks like on that video and I can’t … I can’t allow harm to come to Brodie’s newspaper while he’s not here. I’d never forgive myself. You know we can’t allow our reporters to run around breaking the law in the name of gathering news.”

Then he let the ax drop. “I’m afraid I have no choice but to suspend you without pay until further notice.”

CHAPTER 33

Blue Mask was certain—absolutely certain—that he had closed the door to Birdie’s bedroom before he crashed on her bed. He was exhausted, having pulled an all-nighter to drive down to the depths of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, bury her, dispose of the car, then get himself home.

He needed sleep. Uninterrupted sleep.

Yet what woke him up? The damn cat. Jumping on the bed. And the door was open. Did the cat know how to turn handles or something? Blue Mask swore.

He’d teach the thing a lesson. Without moving the rest of his body, Blue Mask brought his foot up, which was still clad in a sneaker. The cat was on the corner of the bed, licking its paw, seemingly not paying attention.

Blue Mask kicked, aiming for the thing’s skull. The sneaker connected with the cat’s belly instead. But without much effect. The cat seemed to wrap itself around the shoe, going from an exclamation point to a parenthesis in an instant. All of the energy from the kick just got absorbed in the middle.

It hopped off the bed, meowed indignantly, and walked off, more irritated than injured. Blue Mask swore again. Maybe he’d just feed the damn thing rat poison and be done with it.

He swung his feet down to the floor, felt a small ache in his shoulder muscles from the shoveling. His left palm had a blister on it.

The hunger hit him right after he stood up. He hadn’t eaten since the day before. He wondered if Birdie had anything in her refrigerator. He didn’t want to spend down what little money he had. It might have to last for a while.