Faces of the Gone: A Mystery (7 page)

I think, deep down, Szanto knew I would rather gargle razors than propagate the error that was Hays’s story. And therefore he had to know I was ignoring my assignment. Eventually, that would work out okay, because he would come around to the conclusion that getting the story right was a triumph for journalism— even it meant wiping some egg off the paper’s face.

But in the meantime, he would be much happier if I at least
pretended
I was working on the bar story. There were two ways to continue the charade: lying to him when he asked me for an update, which made me feel uncomfortable; or avoiding any meaningful interaction with him, which is the option I chose.

So when I saw Szanto lugging his pear- shaped body toward my desk, I immediately flipped out my cell phone.
“Carter Ross,” I said into the mouthpiece then paused a beat so my imaginary friend could answer.
“Oh, hey, how are you?” I said, giving Szanto the “one minute” finger. “That’s great. Thanks for calling me back. It’s wonderful to hear from you.”
I had almost succeeded in turning Szanto away when my phone rang for real. Szanto looked at me quizzically.
“Uh, hi,” I said, scrambling to answer. “We must have gotten cut off. Can you hear me now?”
“What the hell you talking about?” answered Tee Jamison, my T-shirt man.
“So, anyway, where were we?” I said. Szanto was still staring at me.
“We wasn’t anywhere,” Tee said. “You forget to take your pills this morning or something?”
Finally, Szanto turned back to his office, apparently satisfied I was going to be a while.
“Sorry, I just had to . . . never mind,” I said. “Anyway, what’s up?”
“You been down to the vacant lot where they found them bodies yet today?”
“No, why?”
“I’m just hearing some weird stuff. Meet me down there in fifteen?”
“You got it,” I said. Tee hung up, but I kept the phone at my ear until I was around the corner, out of Szanto’s sight.
I made good time to Ludlow Street. That was one of the advantages of working in an economically devastated city: less traffic. In short order, Tee rolled up behind me in a new Chevy Tahoe that could have swallowed my Malibu whole and still had room for dessert.
“Why is the poor black man driving this big fancy SUV while the rich white kid is driving this little tin can?” I asked.
“How many times I got to tell you: there’s money in the hood,” Tee said. “We just make sure you white people don’t know nothing about it.”
“Ah, my tax dollars at work,” I said.
Tee was dressed in a camouflage jacket with a black hooded sweatshirt underneath, having perfectly dressed the part of the urban tough. I wore a charcoal-gray peacoat and dressed the part of the insurance salesman.
“So why am I out here in the cold?” I asked.
“You gonna have to check this out,” Tee said, walking toward the shrine that had, as predicted, grown substantially. “Damn, it’s just like everyone’s been saying.”
“What is?”
“His shrine, man.”
“Dee-Dub’s shrine?”
“Yeah.”
I looked at the small cluster of candles and flowers dedicated to the memory of Devin Whitehead. It looked no different from the other victims’ memorials.
“Uhh . . . okay, what am I missing?” I asked.
“It’s what
the shrine
is missing,” Tee said. “It ain’t got no brown in it.”
“And that means . . . ?”
“Damn. Didn’t they teach you nothing in college about the hood?” Tee said. “Dee- Dub was supposed to be one of the Browns, you know what I’m saying? When one of them dudes gets killed, there is
always
a big-assed shrine filled with everything brown you can find. Brown bandanas. Brown bags. Brown teddy bears. One of them niggas even stole a UPS truck once.”
“A UPS truck?”
“Yeah, you know them commercials . . . What can brown do for you?”
“Oh, right,” I said. “So the fact that there’s no UPS truck here means . . .”
“It means Dee- Dub wasn’t with the gang no more.”
“Is it possible he got kicked out?”
“Oh, it’s possible,” Tee said. “It’s possible Tyra Banks is going to ask me to father her baby. I just don’t think it’s going to happen, you know what I’m saying?”
“No, Tee, I have
no idea
what you’re saying.”
“I’m saying, dudes like Dee- Dub don’t get kicked out of gangs like the Browns. It just don’t happen. Not to an OG like him.”
“So maybe he tried to leave the gang and they killed him?”
“Nah, because that don’t account for the other three cats that got smoked with him,” Tee said, crossing his arms as if preparing for a scholarly lecture in Hood Studies. “The Browns are pretty old-school. If they had a beef with Dee- Dub, they would put him down nice and quiet, not make some big thing out of it.”
“Good point,” I said, shifting my weight and fixing my eyes on a blob of melted wax that had once been a candle.
“However,” Tee said, pointing one finger in a professorial manner, “they might know something about what happened, being that it involved a former member. You know what I’m saying?”
“For once, yes, I know what you’re saying,” I said. “You got any kind of in with the Browns?”
Tee looked thoughtful for a moment.
“Well, let me ask you something,” he said.
“Shoot.”
“That cat of yours. You got someone who will take care of it in the event of your untimely death? I don’t want no orphaned cats in this world.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, cracking a smile. “It’s dealt with in my will.”

ee had me follow him back to his store. It shouldn’t have been hard to trail Tee’s mammoth truck, except he squeezed it through the tiniest holes in traffic. He and I had once had a debate about what made a “good” driver. To me, it was someone who didn’t get in accidents. To him, it was someone who could make a fifteen-minute trip in ten by doing a grand slalom through three lanes of traffic, one of which was oncoming.

I could see he was talking on his cell phone, and by the time we pulled up in front of his store, he had already made some arrangements. I parked behind him and rolled down my window as he walked toward my car.

“Okay,” he said, “I got you an interview with the Browns.” “Great.”
“There’s just one condition.”
“Okay.”
“At some point they’re going to offer you some weed,” Tee

said. “I strongly suggest you smoke it.”
“And if I don’t?”
“They’ll think you’re a cop and they’ll shoot you.” “Well, then, tell them to put on Marley and bring on Mary

Jane!” I said.
“I thought you’d see it that way.”
“You coming along?”
“Hellllll, no,” Tee said. “Those dudes is messed up. I mean, I

know them. If they come in my store, I’ll talk with them. But that don’t mean I hang out with them. Besides, if my wife found out I was smoking weed while I was supposed to be at the store? She’d beat me silly.”

That was another way Tee’s tough-guy look belied what was underneath: he readily admitted to being afraid of his wife.
“Well, I sure don’t want to go pissing off Mrs. Jamison.”
“Damn straight,” Tee said. “I keep telling you, that bitch is scary.”
Tee told me to drive to an intersection a few blocks down on Clinton Place, get out of my car, and wait for the Browns to find me—which, he assured me, wouldn’t take long.
I drove to the designated spot and immediately began hoping the Browns got to me before someone else did. Dusk had come quickly, and the corner had an ominous feel to it. An intersection with three abandoned houses tends to be a bit foreboding that way. None of the houses had been boarded up—or if they had, the boards had been removed. You don’t want to know about what kind of stuff goes on in an abandoned house in Newark.
Down the street, there was a row of particularly slummy- looking brick apartments, the kind where the front door hadn’t existed in de cades, allowing the drug dealers free access. Each apartment had a
NO LOITERING
sign near the entrance, promising that Newark police would arrest anyone who disobeyed. It was a sure indication a building was bad news.
But on this block it wasn’t the only indication. There were enough shoes hanging from the telephone wires to start a Footlocker warehouse. Broken glass—some of it old booze bottles, some of it used crack vials—littered the sidewalk. And a row of brown bandanas flying from the traffic light stanchion told me I was clearly in Browns territory.
But where were the Browns?
I got my answer quickly enough when I felt something hard and metallic sticking in my back. “Don’t turn around,” said a voice that could put skid marks in even the bravest man’s underwear.
I raised my hands.
“Put yo’ hands down, fool. You want some cop driving by here thinking this is a stickup?”
“I thought it was,” I said.
“You the Bird Man, right?” my friend said.
“Yeah.”
“Well, then this ain’t no stickup. We just going to take you for a little ride is all. And you gonna have to put this on.”
I saw a hand reach around in front of me. It was clutching a brown bandana.
“Can’t I just promise to keep my eyes closed?”
“This ain’t no comedy club, Bird Man. Put it on. And put it on tight.”
“You got it,” I said, and tied a sturdy knot around the back of my head. He tugged on it, then came around in front of me. I felt a rush of air on my face, like a punch had been pulled just inches short of my nose. My friend was checking if I could see through my blindfold. But I didn’t flinch. In truth, I didn’t really
want
to see what was going on.
I heard a car—no, a van?—pull up beside me. The next thing I knew, someone picked me up, bride- across- the-threshold-style, and carried me a few steps toward the sound of the engine. From the ease with which he handled my 185 pounds—think child carrying rag doll and you’ve got the idea—I knew I didn’t want to pick a fight with him.
“Watch your fingers, Bird Man,” my friend said, and I heard two doors slam.
“Thanks,” I said, not sure if he could hear me.
Soon the van was rattling down the street and around several corners. After a while, I got the distinct feeling we were really just driving in a circle—we kept making right turns. But if that’s what they had to do to feel comfortable with me, I was fine playing along.
Finally, I felt the van coming to a stop and heard the engine cut. Someone opened the back doors.
“Come on, Bird Man,” my friend said. “We going to Brown Town.”

I was escorted up a flight of steps, and from the creaking I could guess it was a typical specimen of Newark’s mostly wooden, mostly dilapidated housing stock. Once inside, I was led to a room and made to sit on a sofa that felt and smelled like expensive leather.

“Mind if I take off this blindfold?” I asked, but didn’t get an answer.
I heard the door open and could sense the lights dimming. I felt someone come up from behind me and untie the knot on my blindfold. Except when the bandana came off my face, I couldn’t see a damn thing; someone was shining a huge flashlight in my eyes.
“You have
got
to be kidding me,” I said. “You guys saw this in a movie once, right?”
“I thought I told you this wasn’t no comedy club,” said my friend, who was the one holding the flashlight.
“Look, guys, I just need a little information here. Can we drop the KGB act?”
My friend looked over to someone else, who must have consented, because the flashlight switched off. As soon as my eyes adjusted, I saw I was in a faintly lit room, surrounded by members of the 1987 Cleveland Browns. Or at least with guys wearing their retro uniforms. Number 34, Kevin Mack, was my friend, the one who approached on the street. The big guy, the one who had picked me up, was wearing Number 63, an offensive lineman’s number. Was that Cody Risien? Could be. He was the only offensive lineman from that team I could remember.
And the one who appeared to be the leader was wearing Number 19. Bernie Kosar.
“How you know Tee?” Bernie Kosar asked.
“I wrote a story about him once. We’ve been buddies ever since.”
“Yeah? Tee says you all right.”
“I try to be,” I said.
I furtively glanced around to get a better sense of my surroundings. It was a good- sized room, expensively furnished with the spoils of the Browns’ prosperity. The sofa was a never- ending sectional that felt sturdier than the house it sat in. There was a massive flat-screen TV directly in front of me, a similarly enormous fish tank to my right, and floor-to-ceiling boxes against the wall to my left.
“So what you want with the Browns?” Bernie asked, making some kind of quick hand gesture when he said the word “Browns,” almost as if he were a Catholic genuflecting after the Lord’s Prayer.
“Well, I want to know a little about Devin Whitehead.”
“Man, we ain’t got nothing to do with that,” Bernie said. “How come everyone thinks we did it?”
“Well, he used to run with you, didn’t he?”
“Yeah.”
“So . . .” My voice trailed off.
“Yeah, but he hadn’t run with us in a long time,” Bernie said. “He went to jail and when he got out he didn’t want nothing to do with us no more.”
“Yeah, why is that?”
Bernie looked at Kevin Mack and Cody Risien, sharing some silent communication. Then he turned back to me.
“So tell me something, Bird Man: you like to party?”
I laughed despite myself.
“Are you asking me if I want to smoke pot?” I said.
“What if I was?”
“I’d say I hope you have a lighter because I left mine at home.”
Bernie produced a lighter and marijuana cigarette that was the length of my hand and the thickness of my thumb. It could have almost doubled as a nightstick.
“My God.” I choked. “Are we going to watch
Pink Floyd—The Wall
after this?”
No one laughed. So I lit the end and took a drag, holding the smoke in my lungs for as long as I could bear, then handed off to Kevin Mack. I had smoked maybe half a dozen times in my life, and not at all since college. By the third pass, I already felt like my head was a helium balloon floating on a string, somewhere above my shoulders.
“Damn,” I said. “This is smooth.”
“We grow it ourselves,” Bernie said proudly.
“Where?”
“In the basement. We got the high-intensity sodium- chloride grow lights, the heating mats for optimal germination, the liquid seaweed fertilizer. The fertilizer is key—it packs some high-quality nitrates, yo. Nothing but the best. That’s pure, hydroponic pot you’re smoking, Bird Man.”
“You guys must make a fortune off this stuff,” I said, taking another hit.
“Naw, man, this is just for us,” Bernie said. “We don’t sell it.”
“Come on, cut the crap,” I said, blowing out a large cloud of smoke. “How many hits do I have to take before you believe I’m not a cop?”
“Naw, man. I’m serious. That’s why Dee- Dub left us. While he was in jail, we switched operations. We don’t sell drugs no more.”
“Really? So how can you afford all this?” I said, looking around the room.
“C’mere, I’ll show you,” Bernie said.
I tried to rise from the couch, but as soon as I got about halfway up, my buzz caught me and took me out at the knees. Suddenly the room got slanty. I could feel myself going over and made an attempt to stay upright, but my legs wouldn’t bear any weight. I staggered one step, two steps, then lost it, slamming into the wall of boxes as I went down. Several of them came toppling over on my head, spilling their contents on the floor.
The Browns thought this was hysterical—the white man who couldn’t handle his weed. As they were high-fiving and enjoying my distress, I sat there dumbly, staring at what had slipped out of the box. It was DVDs of a new Adam Sandler movie, one that wasn’t even out at the box office yet.
“What the . . .” I started, and then it dawned on me. “Bootlegs? You guys sell bootleg movies?”
“Hell, yeah,” Bernie said, still laughing a little. “There’s more money in bootlegs than there is in drugs. Every brother in this city wants to sell you drugs. So now a dime bag of dope goes for six, seven bucks. A bootleg movie goes for five, and ain’t no one blow your head off because you selling bootlegs on their corner. Plus, a whole lot more people in this city watch movies than do dope. Hell, most of them are afraid to go out at night because of the dope, so all they
do
is watch movies.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said, feeling so high I was unsure if the whole thing was real.
“Yeah, and the Newark cops don’t bother us none,” Bernie said. “Bootlegging movies is a federal crime. It’s FBI business. And the FBI, man, once they figure out you ain’t a terrorist, they ain’t interested. So we got the best of all worlds: less competition, more demand, no police.”
A sound business model. I was impressed.
“So why wouldn’t Dee-Dub want a piece of this?” I asked.
“I don’t know. When he got out of the joint, he was all hot about this new source he had for smack. Kept talking about how it was the best in the world.”
“How long ago did he get out?”
“Dee-Dub? Like a year ago?” Bernie paused and looked to Kevin Mack, who nodded.
“Yeah, a year ago,” Bernie said. “He was all fired up. He said this stuff could make us all rich. And I’m like, ‘Yo, dawg, we
already
getting rich selling bootlegs. And ain’t nobody shooting at us.’ But he wouldn’t hear it.”
“So you let him go?”
“Man, this ain’t slavery. If he don’t want the Browns, the Browns don’t want him,” Bernie said, and suddenly all three were genuflecting again. “He had been doing his own thing for a while. Make sure you put that in your article because I’m sick of people talking bad about us. The Browns didn’t have nothing to do with this.”
I knew I should ask more questions, pump them for as much information as I could. But my usual journalistic vigor and innate curiosity was being sapped by one simple thing:
I was as high as the Himalayas.