The Fraud (3 page)

“He woke me up with a kick to the spleen this morning and I think he’s broken about three of my ribs since then. We’re going to have to sign him up for Ultimate Fighting lessons. Between that and having to pee every twelve minutes … speaking of which—”

She lifted herself from her chair. Tina was about five foot nine and still lithe everywhere except for her bulging midsection. She was starting to resemble a python who swallowed a pig, not that I planned to share this particular observation with her.

Instead, I went with: “So I’m not allowed to propose to you, but I am allowed to tell you how gorgeous you are, right?”

“You’re the sweetest man alive even when you’re full of crap,” she said as she swept past me. “I read the other day where a pregnant woman was described as being ‘great with child.’ Let me tell you, there’s nothing great about any of this.”

CHAPTER 4

After watching Tina waddle out—and, no, I do
not
utter the word “waddle” in her presence—I turned my attention back to the newsroom, where I located the intern who would soon become my charge.

Chillax was long-limbed, probably about six foot three, two inches taller than me. His hair was longer, too. And whereas mine was neatly parted on the left side in a way that was pleasing in a Kiwanis Club kind of way, his light brown mop sort of flopped down his forehead until it half-covered his eyes and then curled in back. He had a good set of shoulders on him and when he wore short-sleeve polo shirts he made me feel like I really needed to spend more time at the gym. I’m quite sure he did not have trouble attracting the interest of the fairer sex.

“Hey, Chillax, what’s going on?” I said as I walked up to him.

“Hey, what’s up, brah?”

I am unsure what youthful genius decided that the word “bro”—which is already an effective truncation of the word “brother”—needed to be further morphed so it was pronounced like a woman’s undergarment. But it was my hope this linguistic pioneer developed some affliction that was similarly annoying. Like a permanent hangnail.

“We’ve been assigned to work on a story together,” I said. “There was a man killed in Newark last night during a carjacking.”

“Yeah, dude, I just saw it on the Web site and I was like, ‘No way, brah, that sucks.’”

“Like a Hoover,” I assured him. “And our friends on the other side of the river have taken note, so it’s pretty much you and me against every media outlet in New York on this story. Think you can handle that?”

“Tchya,” he said, sitting up a little straighter and getting, uh, stoked.

“All right. There’s a police presser in a little while that Buster Hays is covering. Why don’t you work the human interest angle. Get us some background on who this guy was, get a sense of what the family is going through, get friends and neighbors saying nice things about him, that sort of thing. I want people to feel like they know this guy when they’re done reading what we write.”

There is no understating the importance of a good victim in any newspaper crime story. The fact is, violent crime is an abstraction to much of our readership. It is often written about using statistics—what’s on the rise, what’s dropping, what might be causing the fluctuation, and so on. I suppose such reporting has its uses, though in my observation, not many readers tear up over data points.

You need to shake them a little bit to make them realize crime was something that could and did happen to people just like them. You had to turn the victim from a faceless casualty into an actual human being.

“I don’t have an address yet, but they live in Scotch Plains,” I said. “You know how to use LexisNexis, yes?”

LexisNexis is one of those inventions that proves God loves reporters, a database that captures nearly every shred of public information available on private citizens.

“Yeah, dude, I’ll LexisNexis the hell out of that,” he said. “It’s going to be you and me against everyone. It’ll be like this time, back in college, I played lacrosse at Gettysburg—”

How surprising.

“—and we were going against Washington College for the Centennial Conference championship. We were down, like, thirteen to six and it looked like we were totally out of it. It was like, you know, unsurmountable odds.”

It would have been even more impressive if the odds had been insurmountable, but I didn’t want to interrupt his story.

“Anyway, Coach gave us this talk before the start of the third period that was, like, you know, all
Braveheart
and stuff. And then we went out and totally kicked their asses around the field and ended up winning fifteen-fourteen. Dude, we can do the same thing now. It’s going to be totally sickety.”

As a practiced reader of context, I was able to infer that “sickety” was a word with a generally positive connotation. My suspicion was confirmed when he held out a fist for me to bump. I tentatively knocked my knuckles against his.

“Pwsssh!” he said, spreading his hand like it had just exploded.

“All right, just go out there and get us some good color.”

“Yeah, color,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “Like … his house was brown, his yard was green?”

I just laughed. “Sorry. Color is newspaper jargon. It means details that make a person or a scene come alive. So if someone you’re writing about is, I don’t know, a hoarder or something. You don’t come out and say they’re a hoarder. You say their living room is filled with stacks of ten-year-old newspapers. Get it?”

“Oh, yeah, brah. Scoopsies.”

“Scoopsies?”

“Yeah, you know, like when you scoop up the pill with your spoon and you’re like, ‘Raaaah, dude!’ Scoopsies.”

I stared at him for a moment. “Do you come with a Berlitz book?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind,” I said.

“All right. Let’s shred this mother.”

We swapped cell phone numbers and made more noises about the mothers, fathers, and grandmothers we would crush, scoop, and shred. At some point, perhaps far in the future, Chillax would figure out that life was a bit more complex than a lacrosse game where someone was keeping score. But there was still time for him to come to that epiphany.

*   *   *

With Chillax on his way, I returned to my desk and set about working the other half of the story I had in mind. Which meant I needed a second carjacking victim.

The majority of these crimes do not end violently. I didn’t know how far back in our archives I would need to go to find one that did. Unfortunately, my search didn’t take long.

We had written a story two weeks earlier about a man named Joseph Okeke, a fifty-four-year-old Central Ward resident who was shot and killed during a carjacking on 15th Avenue. The make and model of his car were not mentioned. The story offered no other details, saying only that police were seeking more information about the crime.

The piece appeared on Page B3, which is where we put crime briefs. It totaled 117 words and appeared only in our Essex edition. There was no follow-up, nothing more in our pages to memorialize the life or death of Joseph Okeke.

This meant, more than likely, the crime was still unsolved, the perpetrators still on the loose. Law enforcement agencies were not in the habit of issuing press releases to notify the public they had made no progress on an investigation and likely never would.

But, just to make sure, I picked up the phone. Ringing the Newark Police would be a waste of my time, especially when it was being besieged by calls about Kevin Tiemeyer. So I dialed the number for the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office instead.

Another unexpected advantage of working for the Incredible Shrinking Newspaper is that our large-and-growing diaspora of former employees has not, for the most part, vanished. It has simply gone into PR. A not-insubstantial number of the spokespeople at the agencies we regularly cover are former colleagues, and the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office was no exception.

They were, in general, a pleasant lot to deal with, because they knew what we were after and how to help quickly. Also, we had logged enough hours together in the newsroom to enjoy a comfortable rapport.

Hence I started my call to the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office spokeswoman with: “Hey, Kathy, it’s your bed man.”

Kathy Carter and I had a running joke about how a woman needed two men in her life: a “head man,” who could listen to her and make her feel understood, and a “bed man,” who could fulfill her more primal needs.

“Oh, baby, you know you couldn’t handle this even if you could have it,” she crowed. “How many times do I have to tell you, you’re head man material, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Don’t underestimate me just because I’m a skinny white guy. I’m a double threat. Give me a chance.”

She just laughed. Kathy was an attractive African American woman, but she was twenty years older than me and very happily married. Besides, I had all I could handle in that department at the moment.

“So what can I do for you today, my head man?”

“I’m calling about a carjacking in Newark from two weeks ago. Vic’s name was Joseph Okeke.”

I pronounced it in the proper Nigerian way, which I only knew because Newark had a large ex-pat Nigerian population. For the record, it was: O-KAY-kay. I then spelled it for her.

“You sure you shouldn’t be asking about a different carjacking?” she said.

“Oh, we’ve got someone working Kevin Tiemeyer. I just get tired of crime only mattering when it happens to someone of European ancestry.”

“Well, look at you, Brother Carter. I always said you had some color in you.”

“Yeah, so why is it I still can’t dance?”

“Oh, honey, I said
some
color. You need a lot more color if you want to do that.”

Now it was my turn to laugh.

“Okay, Joseph Okeke,” she said, and I heard her keyboard clattering. “It happened in the four hundred block of Fifteenth Avenue at eleven fifteen
P.M.
Police and EMTs went to the scene and found Mr. Okeke unresponsive and bleeding from a head wound. Uh, let’s see here, what else … no charges filed, obviously.… Huh, that’s strange.”

“Pray tell.”

“I’m just looking at our investigator’s notes, which are in the file,” she said. The Essex County Prosecutor’s Office had its own detective force that ran things down for attorneys as they prepared their cases. “It says, ‘Insurance disbursement not made.’”

“Anything in there about why not?”

“Nothing I can see. But sometimes insurance companies like to play games, denying a claim for a silly reason or just delaying it enough that the people making the claim eventually get frustrated and go away.”

“Can I ask your investigator what he meant?”

“It doesn’t sound like he’d know anything. We don’t really have anything to do with insurance companies. That’s a civil matter. You might have a better chance with the surviving family. These insurance companies, you wouldn’t believe some of the stuff they pull, denying and delaying legitimate claims. If I was a young, crusading newspaper reporter with a lot of vinegar in me, I’d definitely do a story about it. Start with the family and see what they say.”

“What kind of family did Mr. Okeke leave behind?”

I heard papers shuffling. “Uh, let’s see … wife and three kids.”

“Oh, man,” I said, cringing even as I wrote it.

“Sounds to me like that’s your best bet,” Kathy said. “If there’s an insurance company giving a widow a tough time, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind giving them a little bad press.”

Kathy was thinking like a reporter. I’m told by dearly departed colleagues it’s a hard habit to break. Just because you took the girl out of the newspaper didn’t mean you could take the newspaper out of the girl.

She continued: “Let’s see … what else … police are looking for two suspects, both black males in their teens or twenties.”

“Really? So there was actually a witness? Tell me more, tell me more.”

The police hadn’t mentioned that to us, naturally. Nor should they have. Being a known witness to a violent crime in a place like Newark put you on the short list to be the next man down. But Kathy knew that better than anyone. Witness intimidation was one of the biggest ongoing headaches at the prosecutor’s office.

Kathy sputtered, now clearly remembering that the demands of her current vocation sometimes conflicted with the inclinations of her previous one.

“Come on, you know I won’t put the guy’s name in the newspaper,” I urged. “I’m a head man, not a headless man.”

She groaned. “I know, I know. I just can’t have that come back at me. You know I love you, Carter, but I signed over my buyout check to cover college tuition. I need this job.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “What kind of car did Mr. Okeke drive?”

She told me it was a 2015 BMW 328i, a sleek little sedan. Not that my reporter’s paycheck has me window-shopping Beemers, but I could guess it was roughly a $35,000 vehicle.

It allowed me to make a few assumptions about this victim. As I said, Newark has a large and growing population of Nigerians. As a group, they were doing well for themselves. Their children, in particular, were knocking it out of the park. I’d love to know what portion of college scholarships that had been reserved for African American kids from Newark were being won by the children of Nigerian immigrants.

It was one more indication that while you couldn’t ignore skin color, skin color alone did not explain the full extent of the struggles faced by African Americans whose families had been here since the days of slavery. To watch these first- and second-generation Nigerians—they sometimes called themselves “non-American blacks,” though that term is controversial—come here and establish such a different trajectory for themselves suggested to me that whatever was going on was a lot more complicated than complexion.

“All right,” I said. “Anything else?”

“Uh, let’s see,” she said, and I listened to her shuffle papers some more. Eventually, she said, “Not really. I’ll tell you—and I don’t mean to sound like I’m making excuses for anyone—but these carjackings, they’re tough. We’ve had a task force working on this for a few years now and they’ve got some good people on there. But it’s like a game of whack-a-mole. You shut it down one place and it just pops up somewhere else. And it’s virtually impossible to guess where it’ll happen next.”