Faces of the Gone: A Mystery (16 page)

he neighbors eventually filtered out, wandering off to work or the gym or whatever it was they had planned for their mornings. I had a brief conversation with the Nutley police, who said they were starting an investigation based on Mrs. Scalabrine’s eyewitness account— though, as I already knew, she wasn’t giving them much to go on.

Before long, I was left alone with the realization that someone in this world wanted me dead. It was a surprisingly difficult concept to grasp, especially for a typically healthy thirty-something guy who lumped in dying with hearing aids, estate planning, and regularity in the category of Things I’ll Worry About in Forty Years.

People at cocktail parties who find out what I do for a living somehow think I must receive death threats all the time, because I so frequently find myself writing bad things about scary people. But I had only gotten one death threat in my career— and even that was from a guy who was just blowing off steam. He was a local slumlord I had exposed for keeping his tenants without heat. The day the story ran, he yelled into my cell phone that I had ruined his life and he was going to kill me. He called back later in the day to apologize. I told him he could make it up to me by filling his building’s oil tank.

Fact is, even the scary people recognize the newspaper reporter is merely the messenger. They might not like me writing about them very much. They might hope I stop doing it. They might wish I fall through an empty manhole cover and be devoured by a sewer-dwelling alligator. But ultimately the scary people are smart enough to know killing a newspaper reporter will only add to their problems. It’s an extension of the old Mark Twain saw about not picking a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.

Think about it: how often do you hear about a newspaper reporter in this country being killed for something they wrote? It just doesn’t happen.

Except it came close to happening to me. And when I thought about how close, I started to shake. I’ve heard it said— mostly by blowhard World War II veterans—that a man doesn’t really know what he’s made of until he faces death head-on. Based on this experience, I think I was made of something resembling lime Jell-O.

I was scared out of my quivering, gelatinous mind. Whoever I was dealing with had killed four people already—perhaps more—and obviously didn’t mind adding to the body count. In this case, he had read one article, decided his world would be better off without me in it, and clearly had the means to make that happen.

And he did it in frighteningly short order. I tried to do the math: our distributors were guaranteed to get their daily supply of papers by 4
A.M.
From the distributor it went to the carriers around five. So the story was pretty much everywhere in New Jersey by six, at the latest. That meant it had taken this guy a mere hour and a half to make it look like the Big Bad Wolf had visited my little straw house, huffed, puffed, and blown it down.

He knew where I lived—or used to live, anyway. He knew where I worked. It was possible he knew what I looked like, too: my head shot had been in the paper on occasion. Did he also know what car I drove? Did he have people watching me? Should I worry about rounding some corner and having a gun pointing in my face?

I didn’t know. I guess that was the most terrifying thing of all; someone was trying to kill me and I didn’t know who, what, when, or how.

All I really knew was why. That damn article. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much different it was than so many of the others I had written. This
wasn’t
just a case of shooting the messenger. It’s not like I was merely quoting some prosecutor or digging through documents. This was news I’d uncovered myself. And whoever was trying to kill me wanted to make damn sure I didn’t find anything else.

Having nowhere else to go, I started driving toward Newark. I was midway through my journey when my cell phone rang. It was Tina.

“Hi,” I said.
“Well, someone disappeared pretty quickly this morning,” she said, her voice full of flirtatious energy. “Were you afraid I was going to make you eat eggs or something?”

“No,” I said.
There was a pause on the end.
“Don’t play that game with me,” she said.
“Huh?” I mustered.
“The ‘I’m embarrassed I got emotional and now I’m going

to shut you out’ game,” she said. “Look, I know last night took a different turn from where we thought it was going and you ended up crying on my shoulder a little bit. It doesn’t make you less of a man. I thought you were more evolved than that. It’s no big—”

Her response was confusion, then alarm, then concern. Over the next several minutes, I took her through what I had seen and heard. “So, basically,” I concluded, “someone doesn’t like me very much.”

“Do you think it’s the same someone who killed those people on Ludlow Street?”
“I can’t think of anyone else who’d want me dead that badly.”
“Wait a second,” Tina said. “Oh, Jesus. Oh, no.”
“What?”
“The incident pager has been going nuts all morning and I didn’t figure it out until just now. Oh, my God.”
“Figure what out?”
She started reading like she was ticking off a list: “House explosion in Nutley. Fire on Eighteenth Street in Newark. Fire at Go-Go Bar in Irvington. Carter, those are all places you wrote about in your story!”
I was speechless. The man in the white van wasn’t merely going after me. He was covering his tracks. He was destroying the places where I had found evidence or might have kept evidence, making sure no one else—like, say, the police—could retrace my steps.
“Tina, I gotta go,” I said.
“Wait, why?”
“I’m heading to that fire on Eighteenth Street.”
“Carter, you’re in no shape to be chasing fire trucks. You’re out of your mind.”
“Probably, but I’m hanging up now.”
“Please don’t,” she said. “Come into the newsroom. I don’t want you out there. You’ll be safer here.”
“No,” I said. “Until I figure out who’s doing this, I won’t be safe anywhere.”

shut off my cell phone so Tina couldn’t bug me and turned in the direction of Miss B’s apartment on 18
^th
Street. I was still two blocks away when I came to a police barricade, but I could already see her building. It was mostly untouched, except for the upper right quarter of it, where Miss B lived. That part was streaked by black scorch marks and still steaming slightly. It looked soggy. The street outside was filled with puddles and fire trucks.

I left the safety of the Malibu, and as I got closer, I had this sense that whatever had been used on Miss B’s apartment was different from what razed my bungalow. First off, the building was structurally sound. There were no pieces of it scattered hither and yon, as there had been with my place. For that matter, none of the surrounding buildings appeared to have been touched— there were no blown-out windows. I also didn’t hear any car alarms.

It looked more like any of the number of slum- building fires I had written about: the cause of the fire always turned out to be a shorted-out space heater, an oven someone had left open for warmth, a cigarette igniting a couch, or something similarly banal.

I was now directly across the street from the building. Two TV stations were already there, which may have explained why my house blowing up hadn’t attracted any coverage. The TV guys had decided an apartment fire in Newark was more interesting.

One of the cameras was busy filming a man-on- the-street reporter who was pretending to be compassionate as he interviewed the shocked and bewildered neighbors. The other camera was shooting B-roll of the smoldering building while a pissy-looking blond reporter bitched into her cell phone about how she should be somewhere else.

Still, I was a little surprised more camera crews weren’t there. Fires combined the three elements necessary for local TV news: human tragedy, an easy-to- tell story, and great visuals. Where was the rest of the horde?

Not that I was complaining. And since neither crew seemed to be concerned with what had actually happened, I was able to sidle up to the Newark Fire Department captain who was overseeing the operation. He was a former high school basketball star—good enough to get himself a D1 scholarship, not good enough to take it any further—and still thought of himself as a local hero. I did nothing to disavow him of that and put his name in the newspaper whenever I got the chance. We were pals.

“Hey, Captain,” I said.
“This can’t possibly be the most interesting thing going on in Newark today,” he said. “Shouldn’t you be off trying to figure out who the city council is stealing from?”
“I was just driving into the office, saw the smoke, and wanted to see Newark’s bravest in action,” I said, trying to keep my tone nonchalant. “So what’s this one? Crack addicts get sloppy with their lighters again?”
“Nope, someone wanted themselves a bonfire,” he said. “You’ll have to get it officially from the chief’s office, but off the record, this sucker was set intentionally.”
“Oh?” I said.
“Whoever did it was quick and sloppy about it. You could still smell the gasoline when we arrived.”
“No kidding. When did you guys get here?”
“Call came in at seven thirty- six, I think. Chief will have that, too. We were here in four minutes—I don’t want to hear any more of that crap about slow response times. We were able to contain it pretty quickly. Only the upper two floors on that one end got it. But they got it good. There was definitely an accelerant involved.”
I looked down at my feet, sorting things out. The call in Nutley had come in at 7:29, right after the man in the white van tossed his little present through my living room window. At that time of the morning, it was at least fifteen minutes from my place in Nutley to 18
^th
Street, even if you drove like it was Indy qualifying. There was just no way Van Man could have gotten here, doused the place with gasoline, and gotten a good fire roaring so quickly. Obviously, Van Man had friends. This was a coordinated attack.
“Everyone get out okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, looks that way. Except for this one woman on the fourth floor. She wasn’t breathing too well when she got carted out of here.”
“Her name Brenda Bass, by any chance?”
“You know her?”
“I interviewed her once,” I said, skipping the details.
“Yeah, that’s her,” the captain said. “Brave lady. We’re pretty sure the fire got started in the apartment below hers—the super said it was empty. She must have smelled it pretty quickly, because she threw her four kids in the bathroom, stuffed some wet towels under the door, and got the shower going. Then she started looking for the fire to put it out. We found her in the living room with an empty fire extinguisher. The smoke got her.”
“Why didn’t she just take her kids and run out of the building like all the others?”
The captain looked over his shoulder at the TV crews then back at the building, then at me.
“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” he said. “And you didn’t get it from me. But someone barricaded her in that apartment.”
“Barricaded?”
“You didn’t get this from me, right?” he said.
“Right. Of course. We didn’t talk.”
“Good,” he said, speaking quickly in a low voice. “Some of my guys told me there was a board over her door.”
“Oh, dear God.”
“Yeah. You know how a landlord who is kicking out tenants will put plywood over the doors of the empty apartments to stop vagrants from breaking in?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s what someone did to this place, except the apartment wasn’t empty. That lady and her kids were trapped in there. Someone wanted to burn them alive.”
The captain’s radio squawked something unintelligible, but it was enough to get him moving.
“Interview over,” he said, as he walked away. “Call the chief’s office.”

s I watched water drip down from Miss B’s building, I wondered if this was how bugs who lived near the highway felt. They knew there was danger all around but they told themselves if they just kept flying, everything would be fine. And then all of a sudden, splat, there comes the one fast-moving windshield they couldn’t avoid.

I was nearly lost in that thought when I suddenly became aware of someone approaching behind me. With a surge of adrenaline, I whirled around in a crouched position, ready to be staring at a six-foot-five, white-van-driving brute.

Instead, it was just Tommy.
“Relax, I come in peace,” he said, holding his hands up. “You scared the crap out of me,” I said, putting my hand

over my fast-beating heart.
“Tina told me what happened to your place. She’s right. You
are
a mess.”
“I’m just a little edgy is all.”
“A little? I’ve never seen a white man jump so high.” I could still feel the pounding in my chest.
“You shouldn’t have turned off your cell phone,” he said.
“Tina is really freaked out.”
“Excuse me if I’m not awash in pity for her.”
“Well, she sent me out here to fetch you. She wants you to
come into the office immediately. She said to tell you Szanto
and Brodie said the same thing.”
“Then I’m going to ask you to pretend you didn’t see me.” “Carter, I don’t know. This is pretty serious. I mean, this guy
is a wacko. And Szanto and Brodie . . .” Tommy said, looking
stricken. He was a twenty-two-year-old kid. He had yet to learn
the finer art of ignoring the higher-ups.
“There is no way I can figure out who is doing this while
cowering in the office,” I said. “At least if I’m cowering out here,
I can keep my mind off it a little.”
Tommy said nothing, turning his attention toward the sodden, blackened building.
“What a mess,” he said. “Everyone get out okay?” I related what my fire captain had told me about the ply
wood on Brenda Bass’s door.
“Oh, my God, that’s terrible,” Tommy said. “This is real, isn’t
it? This guy is really going after you, her, everyone.” “Yeah, and don’t forget your name was at the bottom of that
story as a contributor,” I said. “You better watch yourself, too.” He nodded silently, looking down at a broken spot in the
sidewalk, nervously shifting his weight from side to side. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” I said. “There’s no
need for you to panic. There are a lot of guys named Tommy
Hernandez in the world. There’s no way these psychos are going
to be able to find you.”
“I guess they would have done it already,” Tommy said. “I
don’t know whether to find that comforting or terrifying.” We hadn’t really been looking at each other, but suddenly
he was staring me straight in the eye.
“Carter, please come into the office,” he pleaded. “Tina is
right. You shouldn’t be running around the city right now.” “I’ll be fine,” I said, trying to convince myself more than
him. “If it makes you feel better, I’ll call Tina myself. That way,
you’ll be off the hook.”
“It’s not about being on or off the hook. It’s about you being
dead or not.”
“Tommy, I just feel like my best chance to stay alive is to
keep moving and get to the bottom of all this. And I need to
have you on my side. Please help me.”
Tommy held my glance for another ten or fifteen seconds,
which feels like an awful long time when you’re looking straight
at another human being.
“Okay,” he said, finally.
“Thank you. I promise I’ll be careful.”
“You better be,” he said. He looked down at his shoes, then
added: “I’m not supposed to tell you this part, but there’s been
another explosion this morning.”
“Let me guess: Booker T.”
Tommy nodded.
“Initial reports are that Building Five is a big pile of rubble,”
he said.
“When did it happen?”
“It’s tough to say because we think it wasn’t called in right
away—there’s no one up there with a phone. Maybe an hour
after your house blew its top.”
I shook my head, thinking about Queen Mary and Red,
hoping they weren’t inside. And who knows how many other
vagrants might be sleeping there? How high would the body
count get?
“I’m scared,” I said.
“Me, too,” he replied.
We stared at the building for a while, a couple of guys feeling the weight of the bull’s-eyes on their backs. I put my arm
around Tommy. It felt nice to have a little human contact. Actually, I was starting to feel a lot better in general, like I
was coming out of the shock that had gripped me since my
phone call from the Nutley police. If anything, the shock was being replaced by euphoria. I was alive. And it felt damn good. I turned and gave Tommy a hug, patting him on the back. “Thanks,” I said.
“No problem.”
“Well,” I said, breaking the embrace. “If we wait here much
longer, Tina is going to come out here with handcuffs for both
of us. I’m heading to the Stop- In Go-Go. You mind checking out
the scene at Booker T?”
“Okay,” Tommy said.
“Do me a favor and ask around for Red Coles and Queen
Mary,” I said. “And, for God’s sake, watch out for tall men in
white vans.”