Faces of the Gone: A Mystery (15 page)

ifteen minutes later—possibly to the second—a young man with close-cropped blond hair and an inexpensive suit hopped out of a late-model Crown Victoria in front of the
Eagle- Examiner
offices.
Obviously, my fed had arrived.

I had taken my two heroin samples—The Stuff and the blank one, both from Wanda’s bedroom—and tucked them in an envelope, which I handed to the man.

“How did you know I’m the guy Irving Wallace sent?” he asked.
“As a newspaper reporter, I’m a trained observer of the human condition,” I said with a grin, although he seemed to come from The Land Sarcasm Forgot. Probably Iowa.
“Yes, sir,” he replied, got back into his car, and drove off.
It left me, for the moment, with nothing to do. I had figured I would need to spend the afternoon protecting my story from the ravages of editing. But it had apparently garnered enough fans so that wouldn’t be necessary. So I drove back down to Ludlow Street, just to poke around. The shrine was more or less the same size as it had been two days earlier, although it was starting to look a little the worse for wear. Some of the candles had been knocked over and all of them had burned out. The cold nights had done a number on the flowers, which now looked like limp spinach.
I pulled on the door to the church, but it was locked. So I wandered around the neighborhood for an hour or two, halfheartedly interviewing a few more people to see if there was any interesting talk on the street. There wasn’t. And with the sun disappearing and the wind picking up, I was losing my will to canvass any further.
I had just turned over the Malibu’s engine when my cell phone rang. The number came up as “unavailable.”
“Carter Ross.”
“You’re not recording this, are you?”
It was, naturally, Irving Wallace.
“Do they teach you to be this paranoid or does it come naturally?”
“Hey, I got to ask,” he said.
“Fair enough. No, I’m not recording this.”
“Good,” he said. “And my name doesn’t go in your story, right?”
“Right.”
“Good. Question for you. Where did you get the sample that was labeled ‘The Stuff’?”
“From a dealer’s stash box,” I said.
“From an active dealer? Or from one of the victims in the Newark murders?”
“One of the victims—a woman who had been dealing out of a go-go bar in Irvington. The box was hidden in a closet in her apartment.”
“I see,” he said, like he was trying to make sense of something. “So you’re sure this is what she was selling on the street?”
“Yeah. Why do you sound so surprised?”
“Because it’s more than ninety-nine percent pure.”
“I take it that’s a lot?”
“The only time I’ve seen it that pure is when it’s been seized at the airport,” he said. “Once it gets to the street, it’s always cut at least a little bit. Now and then you get low nineties, but even the best heroin is usually 70 or 80. I tested this one three times and each time it came back above 99 percent. You can safely call it the purest heroin ever sold on the streets in America in your article and no one would call the paper to correct you.”
“What about the other sample?”
“The blank one? That was more like fifty. Run-of- the-mill.”
“Anything else you can tell me?” I asked.
“Without making your eyes glaze over with the details, I can tell you the chemical signature is consistent with South American heroin. I didn’t run the full workup, but I’d be willing to bet this came from the central highlands of Colombia, not far from Bogotá.”
“Both of them came from the same place?”
“Yes.”
“And the purity is that extraordinary, huh?”
“Put it this way,” Wallace said. “The government takes thousands of kilos of heroin off the street every year, and most of it comes through my lab in one way or another. Yet in ten years of testing those thousands of kilos, I’ve never seen anything this pure. Junkies must have gone nuts for this stuff.”
Maybe a little too nuts, I thought.
“Well, I really appreciate the help with this,” I said, revving my engine a few times just to get the heater going a little more.
“Not at all. Those Newark killings are a heck of a thing, huh?”
“Everyone seems pretty rattled by them,” I confirmed.
“Yeah. Well, they should be. That’s a terrible thing, four people killed like that,” he said. “Is what you gave me the only samples you have?”
“I have one more of each—The Stuff and the generic.”
“And you’re keeping them in a safe place?”
“I’m going to tuck them away in my piggy bank at home.”
“Good,” he said. “Wouldn’t want them getting out.”
I assured him I didn’t, either, and with one more reminder to leave his name out of the story, he hung up.
It was nearing six o’clock—time for him to get home and for me to return to the office and make sure no one had spent the afternoon rearranging letters in my story. The editing process often reminds me of my favorite joke: a writer and an editor are stranded together in the desert. They’ve been slogging over the dunes for days and are about to die of thirst when, miraculously, they come across an oasis. The writer dives in and begins happily drinking the water. Yet when he looks up, he finds the editor pissing in the oasis.
Aghast, the writer screams, “What the hell are you doing?”
The editor replies, “I’m making it better.”
Still, once I returned to the office, I was relieved to find no one with a spastic bladder had been near my story. Szanto had made a few judicious nips and tucks, put a few train-wreck sentences back on track. I added one paragraph about the lab test results and shipped it over to the copy editors, thankful no one had made it “better.”

ith my day’s toil complete, I went to round up Tina, only to discover her still chained to her desk, editing copy. She glanced up when she saw me approach, stuck five fingers in the air and mouthed “five minutes.” Then she winked. I nodded and looked around to make sure no one had caught

the wink. Like it mattered. Tina’s love life was an open book, one without the word “discretion” in it. The trade-off for getting to enjoy that slender body of hers would be that everyone was going to know about it.

I returned to my desk, prepared to unclutter my e-mail in- box for at least the next half hour. No journalist’s “five minutes” is ever really “five minutes.”

Except Tina’s was pretty close. After maybe ten she appeared, purse in hand, ready to depart.
“There’s this new wine bar that’s just opened up down the street from my building,” she said. “I’ve been dying to try it.”
“Great. Do they serve beer there?”
“I’m sure they keep something on tap for you and the other Neanderthals,” she said.
“It gives me strength for when I pull you out of the place by your hair.”
“Charming. I need to run home first real quick,” she said. “Why don’t you go and get us a table, order me a nice pinot, and I’ll meet you there?”
“Look for me in the knuckle-dragger section,” I said.
I made my way to Hoboken and easily found parking—a minor miracle—then proceeded to the bar, a cozy little yuppie breeding ground about a half block from Tina’s place. It being a Thursday night, the place wasn’t too full. I selected a booth with a semicircular table along the far wall. It was designed for a couple, and the lighting was just right, the kind of setup that announced to the entire establishment you intended to bonk like bonobos later in the eve ning.
I picked up the wine menu, but it was mostly just to kill time. I’m a total wine ignoramus. Making sense of the Torah in the original Hebrew would be easier for me. Eventually, I ordered Tina her pinot noir, selecting the name Fetzer because it amused me. Then I ordered myself a beer, earning a witheringly snooty look from the waitress.
When Tina arrived, she had ditched her work clothes in favor of a knee-length black cocktail dress with bare shoulders and a keyhole neckline. She looked stunning. It was all I could do to keep my jaw on its hinge.
“I just couldn’t stay in pants for another five minutes,” she explained.
I went to make a lame joke about how I wished all my dates felt that way, but my mouth was dry. It didn’t take much imagination to know that dress would go from body to floor in 2.1 seconds. As she sat down, the dress shimmied halfway up her thigh, making it impossible to decide which part of her to ogle first.
“You look great,” I managed to say.
She gave me an “oh, what, this old thing?” shrug. I couldn’t help but be impressed—not just at how stunning she looked, but at how effortlessly she was working me.
Most guys cling to this archaic notion we are the seducers and women are the seduced. And perhaps, where the less clever of the gender is concerned, that’s true. But in the presence of the truly skilled female, such as Tina, the myth of male domination is just another one of those wrongheaded ideas women allow to be perpetuated so guys never turn around to see the marionette strings coming out our backs.
It’s like lion prides. For years, researchers—sorry,
male
researchers—believed the boy lions duked it out for the right to breed with the girl lions, who were passive spectators in the whole thing. The record only got set straight when some female researchers came along and took a more careful look at the social dynamics in the pride that preceded the fight. It turns out much of the time the lionesses are really calling the shots, selecting the most fit breeding partner. The fights the boy lions have are merely a noisy confirmation of what the girl lions have already decided among themselves.
So there I was, as our drinks arrived, wondering if I had been selected to beat the other lions to the prize. I wanted to skip the flirting and head straight to the making out, because nothing is more fun than engaging in truly obnoxious displays of public affection—if only because it makes the loveless married couples so damn uncomfortable.
But Tina had subtly shifted her weight, crossing her legs in a way that made it impossible for me to move in without getting a knee in the thigh. Obviously, she wanted her puppet to talk for a while first. So she asked me about my story, and I answered.
Another round of drinks arrived, and I was still talking— but without her having to ask questions. By the third round, it really started pouring out of me, all the emotion of the previous few days that I had been suppressing for one reason or another.
I would say I was rambling, but it was worse than that. I was blubbering.
Somewhere along the line, a transformation occurred in Tina. She was no longer wooing me with her black dress and knockout legs. She was reassuring me with this look of tender concern. She had pulled a cardigan over her shoulders—where the hell had
that
come from?—and I could tell she was keeping a tissue at the ready, in case I started bawling.
What a nightmare. I had managed to wreck the surest thing this side of sunrise because I needed to share my
feelings
? What the hell was my problem?
By the time Tina had comforted me and I paid the bill—my one manly act of the evening—I was just sober enough to realize an eighty-dollar bar tab meant I wasn’t going to be driving anywhere. As we departed, there was intimacy between us in that we had just shared an emotional experience. But there was no romance and certainly no lust. Nor should there have been. Don Juan never blubbered on his lover’s shoulder.
Before long I was back in a familiar place: on Tina’s couch, covered in a blanket, very much alone.

The Director awoke early, a habit he picked up in the military and had been unable to shake, even fifteen years after his last salute. It pleased him to know he started his day while most of the world slept. He noticed it was a trait common among the high-powered CEOs profiled on the cover of those business magazines. They were all early risers.

The Director considered himself their peer, even if he never got his due for it. So he set his alarm clock for 4
A.M.
He tiptoed down to the gym he had built in the basement of his suburban New Jersey home. His wife and three children complained about the noise of iron slapping iron interrupting their sleep, so he had soundproofed it like a recording studio. Only the softest ping escaped, not nearly enough noise to wake them.
The Director had been working out six days a week since he left the military. He once swore he would never allow himself to get soft—he would keep the same iron-hard stomach as when he had been the fittest col o nel in the army.
Alas, civilian food agreed with him too much. And as his metabolism slowed with age, he made a new vow: he would never allow himself to get weak. He took pride in still being able to bench-press over three hundred pounds. At an age, fifty-five, when some men were thinking about whether or not they would be able to pick up their grandchildren, the Director was still putting up personal bests in his basement weight room.
He completed his workout and shower and was midway through a breakfast of bran cereal and yogurt when he heard the thudding of the newspaper against the door. The Director glanced at his watch, annoyed. It was 5:33. He liked to have his paper earlier.
All those high-powered executives the Director read about started their days by reading two or three newspapers. The Director felt one was sufficient, and his paper of choice was the
Eagle-Examiner.
He retrieved it from the front porch and took it to the breakfast table, but lost his appetite when he read the first headline: “Heroin links victims in quadru plemurder.”
The Director felt sweat pop on his brow. He wanted to break something. But no. His wife would ask what had him so upset. He had to control his rage.
How was this even possible? Had the police figured it out? It couldn’t be. He had informants inside police headquarters. They’d mentioned nothing about this.
The Director started reading and realized this was just some reporter who had stumbled across some things and had managed to make a few lucky guesses. The Director relaxed. The situation could still be controlled if he acted quickly. He picked up the phone and called Monty, waking him from a sound sleep.
“What is it, Director?” Monty said groggily.
“Wake up, Monty,” the Director told him. “We have some damage control to do.”

The next morning, I at least had one small consolation prize. The paper Tina thoughtfully left on the coffee table for me had my story stripped across the top of A1 with the headline “Heroin links victims in quadruple murder.”

I don’t mind admitting that, even after a couple thousand bylines, I still enjoyed seeing my name in the newspaper. I was just settling in to read the latest one when my phone rang. It was from the 973 area code, but it was a number I hadn’t seen before.

“Carter Ross.”
“Sir, this is the Nutley Police Department calling.” “Hi,” I said, bewildered.
“Sir, I have some bad news about your house,” he said.

Before hanging up the phone, the cop told me “the incident” occurred at 7:29
A.M.
, when several 911 calls were received. The Nutley Fire Department arrived at “the residence” by 7:34. EMS arrived at 7:35 but there were no known injuries. I tried to stick the details in my mostly numb brain and agreed to meet the police at my house. I hung up before I had the presence of mind to ask any meaningful questions, such as, “Explosion? What the hell do you mean by explosion?”

I staggered into Tina’s kitchen, where I found a sticky note: “Seven forty-five. Went jogging. Bagels in the cabinet next to the fridge. Back by 8:30. Tina.”

I considered waiting for her to return, because it might be nice to have some company, then decided against it. She had already seen enough of me blubbering for one lifetime.

Grabbing a pen, I scribbled, “Eight-ten. Had to leave in a hurry. Call you later. Carter.”
I swiped a bagel then went down to my Malibu, wondering if it was now the only thing I owned besides the wrinkled clothes on my back. This thought alone should have freaked me out, but I still felt detached, like this wasn’t really happening. House fires were something I wrote about, not something I experienced firsthand.
As I drove toward Nutley, I forced myself to think rationally. Had I left the stove on? Couldn’t be. My last meal at home was cold cereal. Lightning? No. It was December. Faulty wiring? Gas leak? Had to be something like that. The house is old. Was old.
I tried to become aware of my breathing and remind myself there were worse things. Sure, all my belongings were probably destroyed. But most of it could be replaced. And, sure, there was some irreplaceable stuff—the pictures, the keepsakes, the school yearbooks, every newspaper article I had ever written . . .
But, hell, it could have been
me
in there. Most any other morning, it
would
have been me in there. This was clearly a rare triumph for the power of thinking with the little brain: if I hadn’t been trying to get into Tina’s pants, the Nutley fire chief would be explaining to my parents that his crew was busy picking up my remains with tweezers.
Really, as long as Deadline had managed to find a way out, the insurance would cover everything else, right? I would get a new house, a whole bunch of new stuff. I’d probably even get new golf clubs out of the deal. And how bad would that be?
As I approached my street, I began hearing this awful chorus of car alarms—there had to be fifty of them going off at once. I made the turn on my street but could only get partway down, what with the logjam of emergency vehicles.
Then I saw it, amid the usual neat row of houses along my street: this big, gaping hole, like someone had punched out a tooth. As I got closer, I saw a scrap heap where my bungalow once stood. There were pieces of siding and other various splinters on the lawn and street—even a few pieces stuck in my neighbors’ trees—but nothing that resembled a house remained.
A small clump of my neighbors, most of whom only knew me as the childless bachelor who wasn’t home very much, had formed at a safe distance on the sidewalk. As I got out of my car, my next-door neighbor, Mrs. Scalabrine, rushed up to me. Mrs. Scalabrine was a youngish widow, maybe sixty-five, and I don’t think we had talked about anything more than the weather the entire time I lived there.
But she was suddenly my best friend.
“Oh, Carter, thank goodness,” she said, giving me an awkwardly intense hug. “We thought you were inside.”
I hugged her back, even though I didn’t want to. The rest of my neighbors were just staring at me, ashen-faced, as though they were expecting something dramatic: ranting, raving, collapsing on the sidewalk, flipping out. I got the feeling they were mostly there for the theater of it and now they were expecting a show.
Speaking of which, where were the TV trucks? It was odd they weren’t here. Generally those guys religiously monitored the incident pager, a network of nuts who listen in on fire and police frequency and send out real-time messages about what’s going on. My house blowing up certainly would have been mentioned. A good house explosion usually got the TV trucks swarming from all angles.
Instead, it was just me, the broken remains of my home, a variety of people in uniforms, and my gawking neighbors.
“So what happened?” I said. They all looked at me like,
What do you think happened, you halfwit? Your house blew up.
Then they all started looking at Mrs. Scalabrine, who clearly had something to say.
“I saw a man in a white van,” she said nervously. “I mean, I saw him getting out of a white van. I didn’t see his face—the police asked me if I did, but I really didn’t. All I saw is he was white and he was big, like six five, and real husky, like three hundred pounds at least.”
The other neighbors, who had heard this story already, were nodding in corroboration. I thought about what Rosa Bricker had said about the size of the shooter, and how it was probably someone between six three and six five.
“I saw him run up on your lawn, right over there,” she said, gesturing in the direction of the pile of lumber where my house once stood. “And it looked like he threw something inside. And then he ran back to the van and was gone.”
Another neighbor, whose name was probably Cavanaugh— he was an actuary, I think—took the story from there.
“I heard the wheels squealing as I got out of the shower,” he said. “It was like the guy wanted to get away fast. And all of a sudden there was this huge
BaaBOOOM.
It was just like that: first it went
baa
and then it went
boom.
”
The other neighbors nodded, confirming that the “baa” and the “boom” had been recorded as separate incidents.
“It was like a bomb went off,” said one of my neighbors, who was either Nancy, Pat, or Angela—I could never quite remember.
“All of my windows on this side of the house blew out,” Mrs. Scalabrine said, pointing toward her place.
“Some of my unicorn figurines fell off my mantel,” NancyPatAngela said.
I nodded, as if I shared concern for NancyPatAngela’s unicorns, unable to quite grasp the absurdity that they were talking about their windows and knickknacks when I had lost my entire house and everything inside it.
“Anyone seen my cat?” I asked.
No one answered.