So I made the executive decision to take her back to my tidy two-bedroom home in scenic Bloomfield. If you’ve seen
The Sopranos
, then you’ve seen a certain depiction of Bloomfield—or at least what is represented as being Bloomfield—on your television screen. And there are certainly parts of town that are like that: a little urban, a little gritty, very Italian.
But there are also nice, leafy little neighborhoods, and my house—nestled in one of those neighborhoods—was a welcome sight when I pulled into the driveway. Kira didn’t move when I turned off the car, so I went around to her side, unbuckled her belt, and lifted up all ninety-eight pounds of her. Having a girlfriend who is roughly half my weight has its advantages, especially when my beer muscles, courtesy of the absinthe, hadn’t quite worn off.
She began stirring as I brought her into the house, smiling and pulling herself closer to me, enough that I could tell she at least knew where she was and who she was with. I brought her upstairs to my room and lowered her gently on top of my bed. Deadline, who was in his usual spot—sprawled in the precise, geometric middle of my comforter—hopped down and meowed indignantly at being disturbed, finishing his protest by walking out of the room.
I was enough of a gentleman that I was going to leave Kira there and spend the night on the couch when she murmured, “Aren’t you going to help me get out of my clothes?”
I decided that would be gentlemanly, too.
* * *
The next morning, the Kipps story was stripped across the top of A1. We didn’t have a picture of the press conference—because we hadn’t been invited—so the only photo that ran was a canned headshot of Reverend Alvin LeRioux on an inside page. But that did little to diminish the impact of the story. We had gone big with it, which—along with the television news treatment of it the night before—would mean all the radio stations would continue to stoke it this morning.
Which meant, because media tended to feed on itself, Brodie would be hungry for a follow-up. And while ordinarily that might cause me some angst as I worked through my Frosted Flakes, Tony the Tiger and I were feeling pretty relaxed. If all went well, I had all the follow-up I needed stored on my cell phone.
Kira had woken up with me and was walking around my kitchen in one of my T-shirts—and nothing else—which soon led to a demonstration of the sturdiness of my couch. But, eventually, the fun and games had to end. I showered, did my blind closet grab, and came out with charcoal pants/blue shirt/yellow tie. See? Works every time.
After making sure Deadline had enough food to sustain a rigorous day of napping, I drove us to the office. Kira, who didn’t have to be at work until one o’clock, had plenty of time to head home and replenish herself for the day, maybe even take a nap.
But there was no rest for the wicked reporter. If the day was to end successfully—with me as the heroic journalist who had just delivered the big scoop—a number of things had to go my way. The first, and perhaps most important, was convincing the higher powers to let me use my (slightly ill-gotten) photos.
It is perhaps assumed, thanks to some of the less scrupulous practitioners out there, that newspapers simply run anything they can get their hands on. That is far from the case. Readers would be stunned if they knew the stuff we had that never made it into print—bombshells that we leave unexploded simply because we don’t think it’s responsible to detonate them. We’re especially cautious when it comes to unnamed sources. Anytime I use one, I need to have it okayed by multiple editors. And they’re cautious when it comes to giving that permission. Anyone who’d like to understand why can Google “Janet Cooke Washington Post.”
As such, I knew having these pictures and being able to base a story on them were two separate issues. Paul/Powell hadn’t been savvy enough—or sober enough—to tell me not to use his name. But I knew the kid would get fired faster than a bullet if I put his name in the paper. Hence, I needed clearance to use him unnamed.
I went straight upstairs to the newsroom, got the pictures off my cell phone, blew them up the best I could and made printouts. Satisfied they would do the job, I took them into Tina Thompson’s office. I tapped on the frame to her door but hadn’t yet settled my butt into one of the two chairs in front of her desk when I was greeted with: “Uh-oh, Mickey and Minnie got busy last night!”
I thought about telling her we had actually gotten busy this morning, too, but instead took the high road: “I do not feel it necessary to dignify these spurious accusations with a response.”
“You don’t need to. I saw Minnie driving out of the parking garage wearing yesterday’s clothes, singing, ‘It’s a small world after all.’”
“Funny, last night she was singing the
Hallelujah Chorus,
” I said. “But I didn’t come to talk music with you. Check these out.”
I slid the photos at her. She spread them out, flinched when she saw the subject matter, then drew in for a closer look.
“What … what are these exactly?”
“Those are postmortem photos of Darius Kipps’s arms and legs, taken late last night in the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office. I know the quality isn’t superior, but let me help you out: they’re rope burns. Someone tied Detective Kipps to a chair shortly before he made his exit from this world.”
“Tied him to a chair? Holy crap. Do the police know about this?”
“I don’t know how they couldn’t know. Presumably, they saw the same dead Darius Kipps that I did.”
“But if that’s the case, how could they say he—” Tina began, then it dawned on her. “Holy crap.”
“Yeah, that about sums things up.”
“And if Kipps didn’t kill himself, then—”
“Who did?” I completed her sentence. “I really don’t have a clue. I figured I’d get this story in the paper before I worried about the rest of it.”
“Do we … how did you … hang on, I’m calling Brodie,” she said, picking up her phone and tapping four numbers. She waited for what sounded like two rings, then said: “Hey, it’s Tina. Carter Ross has something you’re going to want to see,” she began, then told him about the photos. She finished with, “We’ll be right down.”
“I’ll save you having to repeat yourself in explaining how you got this stuff,” she said, and before I could slow her down, she was already out from behind her desk and on the way to see our executive editor.
Harold Brodie had inhabited the corner office in our newsroom so long there weren’t many people around, besides perhaps Buster Hays, who remembered otherwise. He was a legend in the state of New Jersey and in the newspaper industry generally, a much-beloved patriarch.
In some ways, it was hard to take Brodie too seriously. He was now somewhere beyond seventy and he had this pleasant, grandfatherly manner about him, like he was going to offer you the maraschino cherry from his manhattan any moment. His high-pitched voice had gone raspy, as tends to happen to men of that age, and his wispy gray eyebrows were long enough to need braiding. A small man to begin with, he was now entering into the advanced stages of geriatric shrivel, such that I expected him to disappear altogether one of these years.
Still, for all that, something about Brodie scared the crap out of me. Hays had told me stories about him as a young editor that made my toes curl. And I had enough of my own experiences with his non-mellow side to know that he had the capacity to turn himself into a windshield—and me into a bug—at any time.
In truth, I had hoped that I could tell Tina the real story and then let
her
figure out what to tell Brodie. It wasn’t so much we wanted to lie to the old man. It’s just sometimes things needed to be, well, sanitized. Wasn’t that what direct-line editors were supposed to do for you?
But there would be no time to disinfect anything now. He was going to get the whole, dirty, absinthe-swilling truth.
Brodie was playing classical music, as was often the case, but turned it down when we entered. Tina didn’t even bother sitting down before handing him the photos. As we settled into the chairs in front of him, Brodie took his time studying the pictures, shuffling back and forth between them.
“So,” he said, in his old man falsetto. “How did we come into possession of these?”
* * *
Brodie had directed the question at Tina, not even looking at me. Brodie is big into chain of command, to the point you’d think he had a military background. On most matters, he preferred talking to the editors who reported to him, not the lowly reporters. It wasn’t unusual for Brodie to discuss things with his editor as if the reporter wasn’t even in the room. I think that’s part of the reason Brodie scared me: I almost never talked to the man.
“I actually haven’t heard the story myself yet,” Tina said, turning to me.
Brodie followed her gaze. Showtime. I cleared my throat and said, “They were sent to me by an intern in the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office.”
“Not for attribution, I assume?”
“Correct,” I said.
“And what is this person’s name?”
Another thing reporters owed to the legacy of Janet Cooke: editors insisted on knowing the identity of the unnamed source. They were then bound by the same ethics as reporters not to reveal it. Of course, I didn’t even
know
my source’s last name. I’m sure Kira did. But it was too late to ask her. So I just said, “Paul Powell.”
Whatever. We could sort it out later.
“And what do we think motivated Mr. Powell in sending this to us?” Brodie asked.
A lot of alcohol,
I almost said. But that wasn’t the answer he was looking for. Brodie just wanted to know whether Paul/Powell had some kind of axe to grind, which was always something we had to take into account when using unnamed sources.
“Well, he’s a student, so I don’t think he has any ulterior motive,” I said. “He struck me as a kid who’s just trying to do the right thing.”
And besides, he had drunk enough absinthe to stone a horse.
“How do you know him?”
“Met him at a party last night. We got to talking. One thing led to another. He’s a little bit of an odd duck—if you met him and saw his tattoos, you’d understand—but all these kids have tattoos these days. There’s nothing he said or did that made me concerned about him. I think he was acting in good conscience.”
“I see,” Brodie said, his eyes again scanning the photos. “And how do we know for sure this is Darius Kipps?”
Here goes: “Because I saw it with my own eyes. I was with Paul late last night when he took these pictures.”
Brodie raised his scraggly eyebrows but kept his mouth closed. It was Tina who blurted out, “You were
what?!?”
“I was with him,” I repeated.
“Carter, you can’t go breaking into the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office!” Tina moaned. “Jesus, why are you wasting our time with this? You know we can’t use these. You better hope…”
“Hold on, hold on,” I said. “We didn’t break in. Paul is an employee. He told me he had a key and offered to take me in for a little show and tell. Look, I know it’s a little shady, but we’re not teaching Sunday School here. We’re putting out a newspaper.”
I decided to skip the backstory of how he had acquired the key. Tina and Brodie didn’t need to be bogged down in such petty details. The fact is, while we were strictly concerned that our staff members didn’t break the law in their reporting of a story, we were somewhat less concerned about that where our sources were involved.
“Okay, okay, I know,” Tina said defensively. “I’m just trying to make sure our ass is covered here.”
“There’s no need to mention in print that I was there, obviously,” I said. “We can just say the photos came from a county employee who didn’t want to be named for fear of reprisal and that the photos have been independently verified as being authentic. All of which is true.”
Brodie was watching us go back and forth without comment. He often let his underlings slug it out before he decided what to make of something. We were expected to make a good show of it. But, in this case, we were done.
“A tour of the morgue late at night, huh?” Brodie said, chuckling.
The old man leaned back, tented his fingers, and closed his eyes, his signal that he was ready to render a decision. In our shop, this was a celebrated pose known as the Brodie Think. Often imitated by staff members, though never perfectly duplicated, it made him look something like a praying mantis—albeit a praying mantis in need of a face-lift and eyebrow tweezing. He could go into this state for a minute or more, to the point when you could wonder if he had drifted off. It was unsettling, even when you knew to expect it.
This one seemed particularly lengthy, and at one point his breathing got so slow and steady I thought maybe he really
had
fallen asleep. But there was nothing to do except wait it out and hope for the best.
The fact was, I needed a win here. There were few things more agonizing for a reporter than knowing something—especially something as incendiary as this—and not being able to put it in the newspaper. And in this case it wasn’t just my big scoop and my interests as an ambitious reporter being served. It was a lot bigger than that.
It was Mimi Kipps’s husband being thought of not as a suicidal coward but as a murder victim. It was a killer—or killers—being brought to justice. It was his children getting to know the truth about their father someday. It was the Newark Police Department’s credibility, to say nothing of the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office. Maybe it would all come out eventually, if the Attorney General’s Office did decide to conduct an independent investigation, but there was a chance it would bow to political pressure and take a pass. There was a lot on the line here.
Finally, the old man opened his eyes, untented his fingers, and said, “Okay. Let’s go for it.”
According to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration, the road that begins at Route 1 in Miami and terminates 1,952 miles later at the Houlton/Woodstock Border Crossing in northern Maine is called Interstate 95.