The Girl Next Door (36 page)

“Oh, come on, you’re not really going to deny sexually harassing her, are you?” I said. “Your union probably represents a couple hundred employees a year in sexual harassment cases. You know the rules.”

“Damn straight I do,” he said. “There’s two kinds of sexual harassment. One is quid pro quo, where your boss asks for sexual favors in return for a raise or a promotion. The other is creating a hostile work environment. Well, guess what? I’m not her boss—I’m just an employee of the union to which she belongs. Hell, if anything, she’s my boss, because she votes for the board that hires or fires me. So there could be no quid pro quo. And I couldn’t have created a hostile work environment for her when she doesn’t work for the union.”

There were at least a hundred holes in his argument, not the least of which was that union negotiations easily fit under the umbrella of a “work environment” as the courts had defined it. Besides which, you’re not allowed to grope a woman’s thigh without her permission
outside
the work environment, either. But I wasn’t arguing legal technicalities with a man so obviously deranged. Or so armed.

“So why did Nancy take all that to the NLRB anyway? Shouldn’t she have gone to the EEOC?”

“Because her complaint to the NLRB didn’t have to do with the harassment,” he said. “She was saying her harassment complaint had not been properly heard by the union.”

“Was it?”

He chuckled, like he was enjoying this. “Hey, it’s not my fault our human resources people didn’t see things her way,” he said. “She got a thorough exercising of due process.”

More likely, she got the runaround when McNabb cajoled and threatened his horsewhipped employees into ignoring her complaint. This was all becoming clear to me.

“So, if you were so much in the right,” I said, “why kill her?”

He actually laughed. “You ask good questions, you know that? In some ways, it’s a shame I have to kill you, too. You were one of the best reporters in my Rolodex.”

“Yeah, and I’m a good enough reporter to know when someone is dodging my question. So, again, why kill her?”

“Because I was tired of dealing with her,” he said. “She had gotten to be too much of a headache, and I realized she was never going to shut up. I just tried to give the bitch a few compliments and she went and made some big thing out of it.”

*   *   *

The line of storms I had been watching in the distance hit Newark just as we got off Route 78, while I was on the ramp for Exit 56. It reduced visibility to the few feet in front of my windshield, but that bothered me less now that we were back in Newark. I may be the whitest man alive, but Newark is still my hood. I could find my way to 81 Summit Avenue in a blizzard if need be.

So I hydroplaned my way into the Weequahic neighborhood that Philip Roth once called home. The Jewish population that dominated this area fled in the fifties and early sixties, not long after Roth himself left for college and never came back. The street names and some of the old houses might still look familiar to Roth or any of the other aging Jews who still had a memory of the place. But it had changed in just about every other way. The Weequahic they knew was long gone.

We kept hitting red lights all along Elizabeth Avenue and on Chancellor Avenue. It occurred to me the storm had significantly improved my chances of being able to make a break for it at a stoplight. I just couldn’t figure a way to get out of the car. The Malibu kept the doors locked as long as it was in Drive, so I couldn’t just roll out. There was too much my hands had to do: unclick the seat belt, unlock the door, pull the handle. It was impossible to even attempt such a move while white-knuckling the steering wheel at ten and two. Not even Houdini could have pulled that sleight of hand.

We passed Weequahic High School and I glanced at the Malibu’s clock. What should have been a fifteen-minute drive had taken us closer to thirty. I just hoped it was enough time for Lunky to do something other than prepare a lengthy reply message about how Roth really intended for suicide to be used as an allegory.

But as I turned onto Summit Avenue, I didn’t see any kind of welcome party, just a long, wet, empty street teeming with raindrops. Up until that moment, my faith in Lunky had been total, perhaps inexplicably so. I thought for sure he’d still be hanging around the newsroom, like he was every other night, see my message, get the reference to Roth’s home and call in the reinforcements.

Instead, my life was going to end because Lunky either wasn’t reading his e-mail or didn’t understand it. He was a kid who couldn’t find his way out to South Orange Avenue without me holding his hand and who thought he could wait until the next morning to write a story for a daily newspaper. Just because he was well read and knew how to translate a Caesar cipher didn’t mean he had been handed enough street smarts to be of any real use.

I slowed as I approached the former Roth family home, which was on the right side. It was a three-family house with brick front steps and little in the way of a yard. Someone had added stone facing to the first floor at some point after the Roths departed. There was also a plaque marking the house’s significance.

“We’re here,” I announced as we approached. “I don’t suppose we could just call this quits, could we? You know, I’ll let you skate on Nancy if you let me walk away? I don’t need to tell the police anything. And I can forget I ever met a guy with the initials J.M. What do you say?”

But McNabb either wasn’t listening or didn’t feel like answering. I turned slowly to face him and saw that his eyes were scanning the street.

“This is good. This is perfect,” he said. “Now do exactly as I say. Park the car.”

“Okay. There’s no parking on this side.”

“Fine. Turn it around. Just pull a U-eey in this intersection.”

I followed his instructions. There were several parking spots available opposite the Roth house, and I stopped in one of them. Just then, a shock of thunder rattled the car with a sound wave so powerful it seemed to alter the air pressure as it passed.

Something about it jolted me out of the numbing sense of calm that had gripped me ever since McNabb pulled the gun on me. It finally occurred to me,
This is it. I’m really going to die.

More than anything, I felt pissed. Joan of Arc was, what, sixteen when she died? Half my age, and she led armies. Jesus? He was thirty-three—only a year older than me—and look at all he managed to get accomplished in that time. I’m not saying I had delusions of grandeur, like anyone ought to be basing an entire religion—or a television miniseries—on my life. But dammit, here I was thirty-two and all I had to show for it was a few decent newspaper clips scattered across the course of a not-even-half-finished career. Now here I was, working my last story, and I’d never even get to write it.

At the very least, I was through with being obsequious. If he was going to kill me, it would be on
my
terms.

“Come on, let’s get this over with,” I said, ripping my hands from the steering wheel, hitting the button on my seat belt, shoving open the door, and swinging my legs onto the street.

“Hey, what are…” McNabb began to protest, but I was out of the car before he could finish.

I heard the back driver’s side door opening up behind me, and McNabb was already in midroar: “… ass back here. Stop right there.”

But I marched across the narrow street to the sidewalk in front of 81 Summit Avenue, and just as I was about to turn around and face my end, it suddenly occurred to me:

What do I mean, die on
my
terms? Why am I waiting around for this guy to kill me? Run, you dumbass. Run for all you’re worth.

“Stop. I haven’t cleaned my prints off the gun yet,” McNabb yelled, as if this was somehow my concern.

No, my concern—my
only
concern—was putting more distance between myself and McNabb. I felt my right thigh muscle flexing, then my left. Strides one and two were a bit of a misadventure, as my dress shoes slipped on the wet pavement. Strides three and four went better, with my feet gaining traction, enough that the sides of my vision began blurring. I was starting to move. Fast. Hey, if I could outrun a bear, I could certainly outrun a fat lump like McNabb.

I looked for something resembling cover, but there was none. Summit Avenue was just this long, straight street with nowhere to hide. So I concentrated on making it to Chancellor Avenue, my best chance to find a cop, a hiding spot, something. My arms were pumping. My legs were churning. I was going to make it.

I heard another thunderclap, only it was even closer than the last one. Then something tripped me and I went sprawling.

Only it wasn’t thunder. And I hadn’t tripped. It was McNabb’s gun firing. And he had shot me in the back of the leg.

For a moment, I saw nothing but wet, time-worn asphalt in front of my face. I was down. I tried to scramble up but couldn’t seem to get my left leg underneath me. It didn’t hurt or anything. I just couldn’t make it move.

All I could do was roll over. The rain was pounding me so hard I was losing track of where it was coming from. Now that I was faceup, there was so much water gushing on me it was almost like I was trying to open my eyes under a running showerhead. I propped myself on my right elbow and used my left hand as a shield, just so I could see McNabb marching toward me, scowling and red-faced. My mad dash had gotten me all of three doors down from the Roth residence.

“You want to do this the hard way? You want to do this the hard way?” McNabb screamed, keeping the gun aimed at me.

I had no answer for him. I just lay back down and started to feel an otherworldly pain emanating from my left hamstring, like a bad cramp, only fifty times worse.

At least I had tried, I told myself, no matter how lame the attempt was.

“I told you to follow the script,” he bellowed, now standing over me. “How are you supposed to commit suicide with a gunshot wound to your leg? How is
that
in the script?”

He steadied himself with his legs spread wide, gripped the gun in both hands, and pointed it down in the direction of my head. I didn’t want to watch anymore. So I looked up at the sky and tried to concentrate on something other than the growing agony coming from my lower half. I found myself tracking individual raindrops as they fell into my eyeball from a seemingly impossible height, watching as they cascaded down through space that seemed curved. And I waited for the lights to go out.

*   *   *

I’ve heard it said the moments before death are slow ones, stretching out far longer for the soon-to-be-deceased than they do for anyone else. This, at least, is what those who have experienced near-death come back to report—life flashing before their eyes, tunnels appearing, that sort of thing.

But I wasn’t experiencing any of that. I just suddenly became aware the lights
hadn’t
gone out and the guy who was trying to kill me suddenly wasn’t upright anymore.

A large, fast-moving shape had barreled into the small of his back, sending his chest thrusting forward in a parabolic shape, his arms flying out at his side and his head tilting back. An explosion of air escaped from his lungs in a barely formed grunt. And then he disappeared.

I propped myself up on both elbows to look for him. But he was gone. All I could see was Lunky—Lunky!—and he had apparently executed an absolutely textbook tackle: head down, arms wrapped, body low for maximum leverage. He finished by landing squarely on top of McNabb, momentarily obscuring the smaller man. It was a quarterback sack that would have made any NFL Films highlight reel. McNabb had been thoroughly blindsided.

He wasn’t done fighting, of course. No, he was struggling against Lunky, wriggling and cursing and wriggling some more, trying to at least get himself turned over to face his assailant. But he couldn’t get any momentum. Lunky was so much bigger and stronger, he easily kept McNabb pinned, long past a ten-count. McNabb would have stood a better chance against a mountain gorilla. Lunky actually seemed to be taking it easy on the guy, like he pitied him.

I began opening my mouth to warn Lunky not to be too blasé, that McNabb was armed. Then I saw the gun had come to rest a good ten yards away. McNabb had no more chance of reaching it than I did of standing up and winning
Dancing with the Stars
on one leg.

Lunky maneuvered into a sitting position atop his quarry, with his powerful legs keeping McNabb’s arms pinned. With one giant paw, Lunky smothered the side and back of McNabb’s head, keeping it pressed down into the street. Lunky could have kept McNabb there all night if need be, and McNabb seemed to resign himself to it. Either that or he had run out of energy for his struggle, because he was finally still.

The pain was starting to make it hard to think, so I lay back down and stared up at the rain some more. Soon, a head of curly brown hair was poking into my frame of vision and a very concerned-looking Tina Thompson was gazing down at me.

“Are you okay, honey?” she asked,

I wish I could report my reply had been something valiant, funny, touching, or memorable. But it was, in fact, a little more candid: “It hurts.”

“You’ve been shot,” she informed me, like I didn’t already know. “It’s okay. Tommy is here. He’s calling an ambulance.”

“Just hang in there,” Tommy said from somewhere in the neighborhood of my feet. “I’m on the line with 911 right now. They’re coming. The other good news is the EMTs will probably cut those ugly pleated pants off you.”

I may have attempted a smile, but I was aware it came out as a grimace. Tina was still looming above me, tucking a piece of hair behind her ears in a way that, even in my agony, I couldn’t help but find adorable. I wanted to be mad at her, really mad, for not believing in me, for bailing out on me in my time of need, for siding with the publisher over her own reporter—even if, as it turned out, she was sort of right about the whole thing.

But I just felt so grateful to be alive. There was not the least scrap of anger in me. Only relief. I let my lungs fill with air, then released it, then repeated the process a few more times. The air was wet but, I swear, it had a flavor to it. And it tasted delicious.