Read Faces of the Gone: A Mystery Online
Authors: Brad Parks
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Crime, #Murder, #Organized Crime, #Crime Fiction
ith the issue of compensation settled, Red and I hopped into the Malibu, which I turned in the direction of police headquarters. I drove quickly, mostly because Red was
stinking up my car so badly I was afraid the upholstery might
need to be detoxed if he stayed in there too long. With my nondriving hand, I called Tina.
She answered the phone with all the warmth I expected. “You’re a total ass,” she said.
“I know, I know.”
“No, you don’t know. I’m sitting here wondering if you’re
dead or alive like I’m some kind of damn war bride.
I am not a
damn war bride!
”
Tina was clearly a little crazed (is there such a thing as mindaltering ovulation hormones?). And while in my younger days I’d
tried reasoning with crazy women, I had reached the conclusion,
sometime in the wisdom of my late twenties, that it was simply
not possible. As long as she was immersed in crazy, it was better
to just agree with whatever she said until she emerged from said state. I guess you could say I had become a conscientious nonobjecter.
“You’re right,” I said. “You’re not a war bride.”
“If you think you’re getting any tonight, you are so mistaken.”
“I never thought that for a moment,” I said.
“For a while, I was thinking about teasing you and leaving you with a crippling case of blue- balls. But the fact is, I am so
repulsed
by you right now, I’m not sure I even want to be in the same room with you.”
“Definitely separate rooms,” I concurred.
“Make that separate zip codes.”
“So should I find another place to spend the night?” “Of course not,” she spat. “Don’t be an ass.”
“Sorry.”
“You have no idea how sorry you are!” she said, and then all I heard was the slamming of a phone.
I looked over at Red, who had this knowing smile on his face.
“I’m not sure I understand what just happened,” I said. “Sounds like you got woman problems,” he observed. “I suppose I do.”
“Ain’ nothing you can do ’bout it,” Red said with what was, for him, a philosophical air. “Sometimes those women, they jus’ love you so much they gotta yell at you to show it.”
“Is that so?”
“Trus’ me. I’ve had mo’ women love me like that than I can count.”
I nodded. Red started scratching himself. And we left it at that. I found a metered space not far from the Green Street entrance to police headquarters and herded Red inside. After sliding my business card through a slot in the bulletproof glass, I explained to the desk sergeant that the mustylooking gentleman with me had gotten a good look at the guy who blew up the Booker T building this morning.
The desk sergeant, an older guy with a white flattop who was probably just trying to hang on for another year or two until retirement, gave me this you-gotta-be-kiddin’-me look and picked up the phone. He talked for a few moments, then clicked on the microphone that allowed his voice to be heard in the lobby. “One minute,” he said.
Red had already settled into the ancient couch in the lobby. He probably knew as well as anyone, when you were waiting for the Newark police, you might as well get comfortable. “So, have you always lived around here?” I asked. “Naw, I been all over,” he said. “North Carolina. Maryland. Georgia. Served in Germany when I was in the army.” “You were in the army?”
“What? You think I been a bum all my life?”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I began.
“Tha’s okay,” he said, laughing. “I’m jus’ messin’ witchya. I like bein’ a bum. Can’t nobody tell you what to do when you don’t got no boss to please and no landlord to pay.”
Tough to argue with that worldview . . . y’know, as long as you don’t mind sleeping in abandoned buildings in Newark. “So how long have you, uh . . .”—been a bum—“lived in Newark?”
“I dunno. What year is it now?”
“Two thousand and—” I started.
But he was laughing again. “Come on, now, still messin’ witchya. I guess I been here, off an’ on, for ’bout twenty year. Used to go down South for the winter, jus’ thumb my way down then thumb my way back. But I’m getting’ too ol’ for that. Thumbin’ ain’ what it used to be. An’, besides, Mary’d miss me.” “How long you and Mary been, uh . . .”—knocking boots— “with each other?”
“Oh, I’d say fo’ or five year now. Off an’ on. Can’t tie me down to jus’ one woman, you know. But sometimes I wonder what woulda happen if we met when we was younger. Maybe things woulda been different. Maybe we woulda had a family . . .” Red said, his voice trailing off.
How about that. Red Coles was not only homeless by choice, he was also a bit of a romantic. I was about to comment on it when Hakeem Rogers emerged from behind a door and motioned toward Red.
“Three shoppin’ trips, right?” Red said.
“Three trips,” I said with a nod, and Red bounced off the couch and through the door. I gave chase but was stopped by the lieutenant’s outstretched hand.
“You his daddy?” Rogers asked.
“Huh? No.”
“His mommy?
“No.”
“Then you can’t come with him,” Rogers said, pleased with himself.
“No fair outwiseassing a wiseass,” I said.
“They give me bonus pay for pissing you off,” Rogers replied. “Can’t wait to spend that check.”
“Yeah, now you’ll finally be able to get your mother that syphilis treatment she’s been needing,” I said. Then I called out to Red, “I’ll see you when you’re done.”
iguring I had a little time to kill, I went to a nearby pizzeria for two much-needed slices and a much-more- needed Coke Zero. On the way back, I swung by my car and retrieved the envelope the Browns had taken off Rashan. I had only glanced at its contents earlier and wanted to give them more serious scrutiny.
I slid the photos out and shuffled through them one by one, trying to study each in a variety of different ways. It’s amazing the things you can glean from a photo simply by breaking it down a little—looking at it piece by piece, instead of as a whole; cutting it up into an imaginary grid and only staring at one quadrant at a time; or holding it at certain angles or distances.
So that’s what I did, poring over each picture detail by detail. It was gut-roiling work. The exit wounds had mangled the victims’ features to the point where you weren’t sure if you were looking at human beings or roadkill.
Still, you could (sort of) tell how beautiful Wanda Bass had once been. Tyrone Scott (kind of) looked like a guy who always grabbed a second helping at Sunday dinner. Shareef Thomas (maybe) had been a lady’s man, with a scraggly little beard and a soul patch. Devin Whitehead? His shoulder-length dreadlocks covered part of his face, so it was hard to get much of a read on him.
Ordinarily, if you dissect a photograph long enough, it will gradually yield its secrets. It can tell you things not only about the scene being captured but the person who did the capturing. Over time, I think you can even begin to understand the intent of the photographer, how he felt about his subject and what he really wanted to show you.
But for as much as I examined these pictures, they never became more than what they appeared to be at first glance: four horrific portraits of people whose petty crime had been deemed worthy of death by a pitiless judge. Four faces of people now gone.
The memo wasn’t much more useful. In its own way, it was every bit as cold and spare as the pictures, leaving almost no room for interpretation.
I leaned back in my seat and looked up, slightly bleary-eyed from having stared at the photos so long. I was getting tired of playing detective. And it was only when I slipped off my detective hat and started thinking like a journalist again that I remembered the materials in my lap would make for a fantastic story.
A deranged drug lord who sent corporate memos to his dealers like they were middle managers in cubicles? Yep, Brodie would get such a boner over that he wouldn’t be able to walk.
I looked at the clock on my cell phone. 7:37
P.M.
No point trying to squeeze it into tomorrow’s paper. We had plenty of news already, what with buildings blowing up across the circulation area. Besides, the Sunday editor would be cruising for something that would keep us in the lead on the Ludlow Street story. This would fit that need.
It occurred to me I also might want to make some copies of the Director’s gruesomely illustrated package and hand them over to the National Drug Bureau. But then I remembered my last interaction with L. Pete, which had left me hoping he contracted an incapacitating toe fungus. If he wasn’t going to be better at sharing, I would just keep my toys to myself. He could read about the photos in Sunday’s paper like everyone else; then
maybe
I would hand them over. If he promised to behave. Or if he subpoenaed me.
I looked at my cell phone again: 7:40. Red had been with the sketch artist for about an hour, and I couldn’t decipher whether that was a good sign (because Red gave them a lot of detail for an accurate portrait) or a bad one (because Red was so incoherent he was making the perp look like the Elephant Man).
He reemerged a few minutes later, triumphantly waving a sheet of paper above his head.
“This is him,” he said. “This is the guy.”
This was Van Man. I looked at the sketch, hoping it might
spark some recognition. Red had described a doughy-cheeked, thick-necked, middle-aged white man with a receding hairline. The guy looked more like a candidate for erectile dysfunction medicine than a serial murderer. I don’t want to say the sketch was completely useless, inasmuch as I suppose it could rule out some people. But if you went by this picture alone, half the country club members in New Jersey had just become suspects.
“I tol’ the computer what he look like and the computer done made this picture,” Red said. “Tha’s one smart computer.”
“We just got the system,” Rogers told me. “It lets us tweak things until we get it just right. Cuts the time to get a sketch done in half.”
I looked down at the picture again, trying to imprint the face in my brain in case it should suddenly round a corner in my immediate future.
“So what will you guys do with this?” I asked.
“We’ll send it to our many friends in the media, of course,” Rogers said. “Then we’ll show it to the officers in the patrol division.”
“And then you give it to the National Drug Bureau?” I said.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“What do you mean, you guess? You said they’ve taken over the case.”
“Oh, they’ve taken it, all right. The lead guy in the Newark office called our chief and made a big stink. Then when our detectives paid them the courtesy of going over there with a box full of evidence, they gave ’em the usual ‘we’re feds, we’re better than you’ act. Bunch of jerk-offs, if you ask me. But you can’t quote me on that.”
• • •
ed wasn’t any more eager to hang at police headquarters than I was. So we cleared out and I took us in the direction of the Pathmark on Bergen Street, the only major chain supermarket in Newark. A deal was, after all, a deal. I encouraged Red to buy whatever he wanted—after all, it was sort of my fault his last haul of groceries had blown up. But Red’s tab only came to $41.05.
I took him back to Booker T with misgivings about dropping him back into such a cold night. The wind had picked up again, and the forecast was calling for a low of seventeen degrees. Red didn’t seem concerned by it. He was shaking a bit, but I didn’t think it was from the cold.
I asked.
“Naw, I gotta get me a little something to drink. An’ if you go
to the shelter, they take it from you,” he said as another tremor
racked his body. He was nearly sober and his nervous system was
starting to go haywire without booze.
“Suit yourself,” I said as the car pulled to a stop outside
Booker T.
“Say, you mind loanin’ me a few bucks?” he asked nervously.
I reached into my wallet and pulled out a ten. Perhaps it
wasn’t the most responsible thing to do, enabling his disease.
But it felt like the humane thing to do under the circumstances.
“This do?” I asked.
“Oh, that’ll do fine,” he said, pocketing it quickly. “I sho’ do
’preciate it.”
“No problem. Is this where I can find you over the next
couple days or will you be on the move?”
“Well, Mary ’n me got usselves set up in Building Three pretty good,” he said. “I s’pose we be staying there for a little
while.”
“All right,” I said. “Stay warm.”
Then I added, “Thanks for your help, Red,” and stuck out
my right hand.
He grasped it—which was like shaking hands with forty- grit sandpaper—and flashed me a two-tooth smile.
“You best watch out for yo’self, youngster,” he said. “This
ain’ no place for a white boy after dark.” He thought for a moment and, still holding the handshake, said, “This ain’ no place
for no one after dark.”
“I’ll be careful, promise,” I said. He let go of my hand, grabbed
his groceries, and stumbled off into the night.
I watched him until he disappeared around the corner, then
got moving. I had pushed my luck long enough.
Having nowhere else to go, I drove back to the office to
make peace with my new roommate, Tina. On the way in, I
passed Buster Hays, who was in the lobby, pulling on a trench
coat.
“Have a nice one, Ivy,” Buster said.
“You, too, Hays,” I said, and was about to get in the elevator
when something stopped me, something that had been tickling
my brain for the last few hours and had now developed into a
full-blown itch.
“Hey, you got a quick second?” I said.
Hays finished wrestling with his coat and glanced at his
watch. “I’m officially thirty-seven minutes overdue for my first
Scotch of the weekend. Make it fast.”
“It’s about Irving Wallace.”
“Ah, Irving. He help you out?”
“He did. Twice, actually. I’m just curious: how do you know
him?”
“Aw, shoot, Irving?” Buster said. “When I met him, you
weren’t even a stain on your mom’s sheets.”
“So, it’s been a while . . .”
“Oh, it’s been a while,” Hays said, enjoying himself. This was
Hays in his glory: seizing the chance to remind a young whippersnapper how much more he knew about the world, how
many more sources he had, or how much longer he had been
around the neighborhood. And I, being a young whippersnapper
in need of the information, had no choice but to listen. “Let’s see,” Hays continued. “I met Irving Wallace in roughly
1970? Or 1972? The first couple years I worked for this paper,
I covered high school sports. You might not believe it, but back in
the day, Irving Wallace, the mild-mannered chemist, was a beast
of a center for the Summit High School boys’ basketball team.” “Really?” I said, genuinely surprised.
“Oh, yeah. You see more kids like it now, just because kids
are bigger these days. But they didn’t make ’em like Irving back
then. He was big and mean. He couldn’t shoot a lick from the
outside, but he was a ferocious rebounder—on offense and defense. He made all-conference on put-backs alone.”
I became aware that my heart was pounding.
“How tall was he exactly?”
“Jesus, Ivy, it’s not like I’m still carrying the roster,” he said,
sighing.
“You think he was maybe six four, six five?”
“Sure.”
“How much you think he weighs now?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in years. We talk on the
phone.”
“Any chance he might have ballooned up a little bit?” “We all do,” Hays said, patting his stomach. “You doing an
exposé on old fat men now?”
“No, I just . . . Who
does
he work for, anyway?”
“I really don’t know. He’s real secretive about that and I
never bothered to ask because he’s always been good about
helping me when I need his expertise. He must have been in
the military for a while, because he went to West Point. Irving tells me I wrote a story about it when he got accepted
and I take his word for it. Forty years’ worth of stories can
tend to blend together,” Buster said, then got a faraway look
for a moment.
He continued: “Anyway, I don’t know how long he was in
the army—we weren’t pen pals or anything—and I think he
was in the private sector for a while. Then he switched to the
government and we got reconnected when he ended up helping some sources of mine on a case. He remembered me from
the old days, I remembered him. I still don’t know what part of
the government he’s with—he’s big on that ‘I’d tell you but I’d
have to kill you’ crap. But I do know his title is ‘lab director.’ ” “Lab
director
?” I said. “So the people who work for him, they
would call him ‘Director.’ ”
The pounding in my chest had now spread. I could feel it in
my head now, a tiny little jackhammer going at the base of my
skull.
“I don’t know,” Hays said. “I guess so, yeah. Why is your
face getting red?”
“It’s just getting hot in here,” I said, taking off my jacket. “Well, I hear that Scotch calling my name. I better be going,” he said, pushing through the door into the cold. So Irving Wallace was six four or six five, possibly three
hundred pounds. He had been a ferocious rebounder back in the
day, the kind of guy who might grow into someone who was
ferocious at other things. He had no shortage of access to heroin.
What had he told me? That his lab saw thousands of kilos of heroin a year? That would certainly be enough to fuel a major
distribution ring.
Then there was the coincidence that Wallace had just so
happened to call Buster Hays out of the blue a few days earlier.
Hays had said something about not having talked to the guy in
forever and then, bam, Wallace called to chat him up the moment Hays’s byline appeared on the Ludlow Street story. Finally, there was that itchy spot in my brain: in the article,
I had mentioned the Stop- In Go-Go, Miss B’s apartment, and
Building Five at Booker T as places where I had found evidence
of The Stuff, and they had all been torched.
I had never mentioned my house in the article. I had only
mentioned it to one person.
Irving Wallace.