The Girl Next Door (15 page)

It got so she was in his head, distracting him from his other work. And that simply wouldn’t stand. He had more important matters to deal with than her petty concerns.

He was respected in the community, a man who pushed the buttons of the machine. He didn’t have time for this little cog jamming things up.

It was the visit from the regional director of the National Labor Relations Board that really threw him over the top. The NLRB wanted a sworn affidavit. It was taking Nancy Marino—Nancy Marino!—as seriously as it was taking him, treating the two parties as if they were on the same level. He could stall the NLRB, but only for so long. It could subpoena him. And, ultimately, there was no arguing with a subpoena.

Yes, once the NLRB was involved, it changed everything. It meant he wasn’t really in control of the game and he certainly couldn’t make up the rules anymore. With the NLRB, things would be by the book. It would put everything out in public, because any document generated by the NLRB became part of the public record. There would be some kind of settlement negotiated or some kind of mediation. There was no way he could tolerate all that.

Something had to be done. He wasn’t going to risk losing everything he worked for because of the girl next door.

CHAPTER 4

There are places where a reporter can enter into the rather delicate discussion of whether his publisher is, in fact, a murderer. But the middle of the newsroom is not noted for being one of them. I had colleagues on every side of me, and while reporters are accustomed to hearing one side of some strange interviews—most of which they knew to ignore—I might attract a little too much attention if I started hollering questions like, “You really think Gary Jackman killed someone?”

So I started making for the first unoccupied glass office I saw while trying to ignore the pounding in my chest.

“Hang on a second, I got too many ears around,” I said, walking in and closing the door behind me. “Okay, I’m in a spot where no one is listening. You’re going to have to give this to me again.”

“I know, I know, it’s crazy,” Jim said, talking faster than I had ever heard him before. “But I was with him the night before Nancy was killed.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, you may not know it, but Gary likes to tie one on now and then, and I don’t mind knocking back a few myself. So we went to a bar to do a little away-from-the-table negotiating. Sometimes you get a lot more done with a drink in your hand than you do sitting in a conference room, you know?”

“Right, of course.”

Outside the door, Lester Palenski—our bikini-obsessed photo editor—stopped and looked at me curiously, sitting in an office that wasn’t my own. He seemed perturbed, mouthed the words “I need to talk to you” and held up a printout of a picture. I flashed him a thumbs-up, then pointed to my phone. He frowned and moved on.

“And … look, you can’t tell
anyone
about this,” Jim continued. “I could get in deep water with the membership, negotiating on my own like this. They’d skin me alive. I’m just telling you this because you’re a good enough reporter, you’d probably figure out it was Jackman sooner or later. I’m just helping you along, you know?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, okay,” he said, inhaling and exhaling loudly. “So, anyway, I had suggested we meet at this bar for a friendly get-to-know-you drink. But he and I both knew what I really meant was I wanted to be able to talk without all the lawyers around. You can make more headway in thirty minutes without the lawyers around than you can in thirty days with ’em, you know?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So it’s just him and me at this bar, and we’re kind of getting into it. We’d both had a few—more than a few, maybe—and he was getting kind of pissed off. Some guys are like that when they drink.”

And, I wanted to add, some guys throw up on the gentleman next to them at the symphony. But I just said, “Yeah, sure.”

“So Jackman keeps pushing and pushing, saying we should just give in. And I … I feel really awful about this, given what happened … but I kept using Nancy as, like, I don’t know, a block or something, like I was good cop and she was bad cop. Because he knew she had been a hardliner. So he’d say, ‘We could maybe go for a thirty percent cut.’ And I’d think about it and say, ‘I don’t think
Nancy
would go for that.’ And he’d say, ‘Well, what about a rolling cut, ten percent this year, ten percent next, ease people into it?’ And I’d think about it some more, pretend to really be wanting to do it, and then say, ‘I’m not sure
Nancy
would like that.’”

“Had Nancy told you she wouldn’t cave, no matter what?”

Jim hefted another sigh.

“Well, she had and she hadn’t,” he said. “I was really just winging it, trying to tweak him. Sometimes negotiations are like that. You got to get under a guy’s skin. In the end, we probably had to give in a little. I just didn’t want to have to give in a lot. I feel so bad about what happened. I never knew he really meant it when he was making all those threats.”

“Threats?”

“Oh, well, I kept telling him
Nancy
wouldn’t go for this,
Nancy
wouldn’t go for that, and it really got him going. Suddenly he was saying things like, ‘I can handle
Nancy Marino
. I’m not going to let
Nancy Marino
get in my way.’ I thought he was just blowing off some steam. I had no idea.”

“So it got personal,” I said.

“Oh yeah. Big-time. Real personal. There was this vibe to it like he was big Gary Jackman and she was just little Nancy Marino and how dare
she
get in his way. You can imagine a guy like Jackman is making, what, five hundred, six hundred grand a year? Maybe more. And here some papergirl making eighteen bucks an hour is telling him where he can get off? He just wasn’t having it.”

Lester wandered past again and squared to look at me, emphasizing his impatience by waving the photo at me. I gave him a palms-up, nothing-I-can-do gesture. He shot me a dirty look and stalked off.

“So how did you guys leave it?” I asked.

“We didn’t. He just stormed out.”

“What bar were you at?” I asked. I was thinking about how I was going to get this on the record in some way. If they were having that loud an argument, there would have been a bartender who heard it.

“I … Look, I can’t say,” Jim said, having already guessed my intentions. “I can’t have you charging in there and asking questions. I’m known there. I go there a lot and so do some of my members. Word’ll get out.”

“Okay, so think like a journalist for a second, Jim. You know I can’t just run with a single off-the-record source on something like this. This is my smoking gun, but I need more than just one person seeing the smoke. How am I supposed to prove this without a little help?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he admitted. “I just sort of hoped if I put you on the right track, you’d be able to figure it out.”

I plunked my elbow on the desk in front of me and rested my chin in my palm. It was a lot to absorb, and I had a thousand questions, the first of which was:

“Why not take this to the police, Jim?”

“Look, I’d like to, and I thought about it. But I just can’t. Think about it from my angle. I’m locked in a tense negotiation with this guy right now. Just say it turns out Jackman didn’t have anything to do with it, that he just happened to get ticked at Nancy the night before she had an accident. The cops might decide I was out to frame the guy and hit me with charges of making a false statement or something. Or Jackman could sue me personally, say I was slandering him to get some leverage. It could wreck our whole negotiation, one; and, two, the union board would fire me for screwing it up. I can’t risk getting involved when the whole thing could just be one big coincidence.”

It wasn’t a coincidence, of course. Nancy Marino really was murdered. I knew that for certain. Jim McNabb didn’t, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell him. Not yet.

The fact was, McNabb had reasons to want Jackman to be the killer. And a source with an agenda like that had to be handled carefully. If all these circumstantial pieces pointing toward Jackman turned out to be true, it would be an epic scandal. Jackman would be fired immediately, of course, and the paper’s owners would appoint an interim publisher while they tried to find a replacement, which could take months. Then the new publisher would come in and take a few more months to figure out which way was up. In the meantime, IFIW–Local 117 would skate along with its current contract in place and no one would be bothering to press for pay cuts.

Plus, I’m pretty sure killing a shop steward qualified as an unfair labor practice. There might be ramifications there that would further help the union. So I would definitely be aiding Jim’s cause.

But I’d also be bringing a murderer to justice and breaking a career story, both of which felt like fairly noble goals. Was Jackman really the guy? Was a man who once went after someone with a seven-iron capable of something even more brutal?

I took a deep breath and said:

“Okay, Jim. I’ll do some digging.”

*   *   *

Emerging from my borrowed office, I shot a quick glance in the direction of Lunky, who seemed to be concentrating on his story and not, I hoped, daydreaming about the fishing on Walden Pond. Judging him momentarily innocuous—not a harm to either himself or others—I decided I had a few spare moments to start some of the aforementioned digging. Not enough to require a backhoe or anything. Just a little garden trowel would do fine.

I took the elevator to the third floor. It was not normally a place in the building I had any need to go, and I didn’t know anyone up there—the whole separation of church and state thing—but I knew that was where Jackass wasted space alongside his harem of secretaries. It being nearly six o’clock, I thought they would all be gone for the day, allowing me to pry into his stuff without interference.

Instead, when I rounded the last corner, I was startled to discover one of the three desks in the secretarial pool still occupied. They must have staggered their shifts so one was on duty both before and after regular business hours.

I almost turned away, thinking I would come back later when all three of them would be gone. Then I noticed Jackman’s door was closed and his office was dark. He had gone home. It was just the third secretary, a cute-if-somewhat-chunky brunette who probably spent a few too many Saturday nights at home with her Netflix account. There was always the chance she might be chatty.

“Hi,” I said, then spied her nameplate and added, “Courtney,” before it sounded like too much of a stretch.

Courtney’s attention had been fixed on a piece of paper on her desk, and she looked up at me with utter bewilderment, like I had walked down the hallway with a giant bird of prey perched on my head. Seeking to set her at ease and perhaps build some rapport, I rewarded her with a winsome smile (because my mother tells me it’s quite charming), fixed my blue eyes on hers (because my mother tells me I have nice eyes), and tried to look cute (because my mother thinks I’m cute).

And maybe it would have worked if Courtney really was my mother. Instead, she struck a businesslike tone and said, “Hi, can I help you?”

I laughed for no reason.

“That’s so funny,” I said. “
I
was just about to ask
you
if
you
could help
me
. And then
you
asked
me
the same question. That’s wild! Do you have ESP or something?”

Courtney looked at me like the bird on top of my head was now talking to her. And she still wasn’t buying … well, anything.

“No,” she said.

“No? No psychics in the family?”

“No.”

“Palm readers? Fortune tellers? Tarot card specialists?”

“No,” she said again, more firmly this time.

“Oh well, I just thought that maybe…”

My voice trailed off. I was the comedian whose act was totally dying. Courtney was getting even less amused by the second.

“Did you need something?” she asked.

Time to take a stab.

“Yeah, I … uhh … I’m told Mr. Jackman gave a very important speech last Thursday night and I’ve been asked to get a … a video of it. You know, put it on YouTube, tweet it, Facebook it, hope it goes viral, that kind of thing. So I just need to know where he was last Thursday night. I think it might have been the, uh, Morristown Rotary Club, but the person who told me wasn’t sure. Would you mind checking his schedule to see where he was that night?”

I said I’d take a stab. I didn’t say it would be a good one. I was uncertain whether Morristown even had a Rotary Club. And even if it did, I wasn’t sure if Rotarians met at night. Courtney was eyeing me like the bird on my head was now warbling Queen’s classic rock anthem “Bicycle Race.”

“Ah, okay.” Courtney glanced down at her desk. “Mr. Jackman has us keep his appointment book by hand—he doesn’t like using the computer. Let me just look for you.”

“Thanks,” I said, beginning to understand why he needed three secretaries.

“I was just about to leave, so I locked the drawer, hang on,” she said, standing up and crossing the secretarial pod toward a small metal lockbox atop a filing cabinet. She worked the dials to the proper position, pulled out a round desk key, returned to her chair and started opening the drawer. I was almost at pay dirt when, as an afterthought, she said, “And, I’m sorry … who needs this video again?”

I didn’t want Jackman to have any way of knowing I was snooping around his office, so I said, “Ted from accounting.”

“Who’s Ted from accounting?”

“I am.”

She jerked her head up from her desk drawer. “No you’re not,” she said. “You’re Carter Ross. I saw you on TV that one time.”

I had made an unscheduled and unfortunate appearance on all the local networks a few years back. It had so thoroughly haunted me the first time around it didn’t seem fair it was now haunting me in reruns.

“Ha ha,” I said. “Yeah, that was … hoo … you remember that, huh?”