The room was empty except for her, so I said, “Tell me, are you going to do that randy librarian thing, where any second you’re going to let her hair down and start roaring like a lioness and demanding I be your lion?”
“Huh?” she said, looking up from her screen.
“Never mind. You just … you have your hair up, and I was … entertaining certain librarian-related fantasies.”
“Oh, that. That’s just so I know where I’ve put my pen. Otherwise I lose it fifty times a day,” she said, pulling a Bic ballpoint from the back of her head and letting her hair cascade around her shoulders. Sadly, there were no feline sounds involved.
“How’s it going?” I asked. “Feeling okay?”
“Oh, I’m fine. I don’t get hangovers.”
“I thought hangovers were God’s way of making sure the Irish didn’t take over the world.”
“No, that’s whiskey,” she said. “Hey, why does your editor keep coming in here and shooting me dirty looks?”
“Who, Tina?”
“Yeah, she’s probably sneered at me three or four times today.”
“I’m sure she’s not sneering.”
“Oh, she’s sneering. You think I don’t know what a sneer looks like? She keeps going like this,” Kira said, then twisted her face into a countenance I thought could only be achieved by eating jalapeños.
“Oh, she does that to me all the time. That’s just how she looks when she’s thinking hard.”
“No, these were definitely intentional, directed looks. Seriously, what’s up her butt?”
“I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“I barely even know her.”
“All the more reason why it’s not about you.”
“Well I…” and then she stopped, tilted her head and shot me a sly grin. “Wait, you guys didn’t used to…”
“To what?”
“Shag?”
“Uh … not quite.”
“But she
wanted
you to shag her.”
“I suppose so, yes. Periodically. Or, rather, nonperiodically. It’s a long story.”
“Did you guys have a fling or something?”
To most in the newsroom, Tina Thompson’s love life was an open book, and our former … whatever … was common knowledge among those who cared. But I guess that book somehow hadn’t made it back to the library.
So Kira didn’t know about me and Tina, and clearly it was in my best interests to tell her now rather than later. After enough years of singledom, one accumulates a certain number of former relationships—some might call it baggage—and I’ve always felt it best to deal with it in a forthright manner. It’s not like I’ve got some big heavy, nine-piece luggage set. Mine is just your basic, middle-of-the-line Samsonite: a few high school girlfriends, a few from college, a few post-college, one live-in who didn’t work out, and a smattering of random dates along the way. It’s so unremarkable I always have to check the tags when it comes through at the airport to make sure it’s even mine.
Still, this was the first potentially complicated moment of our young relationship. We had yet to define what we were—exclusive/not exclusive, going somewhere/just playing around, et cetera—and I had to treat this with due care.
“Well, I guess Tina and I had some adult situations, but we never—”
“What, you never made the move?”
“No, I made the move—”
“But you never sealed the deal? What’s up with that?”
I explained, as best I could, how the combination of a ferociously ticking biological clock and an irrational fear of committed relationships had led to Tina’s desire for my seed and my seed alone.
When I was done, Kira said, “Oh. That’s kind of weird. But you said no?”
“I guess it’s not my idea of how fatherhood should work.”
“So, what, now she has voodoo dolls of you somewhere? You’re not suddenly going to start grasping your side when she puts a pin in you?”
“No, but it sounds like you might want to watch out. She’s practiced in witchcraft, you know.”
“I’ll be careful,” she said, then, thankfully, changed subjects. “By the way, Powell called me a little while ago. He wants to talk to you.”
“Why didn’t he just call me directly? He’s got my number—he sent me those text messages last night.”
Kira gave her eyes a quick roll. “I don’t know. He’s a little flighty sometimes. He spends so much time thinking about the dead he has a little trouble focusing on the living.”
“Yeah, I suppose I figured that.”
“Anyway, he seemed really excited to tell you about something. So you might want to call him.”
“Okay, I’ll go do that,” I said. “You want to grab dinner tonight or something?”
“Can’t. My steampunk book group meets tonight.”
“Oh. Can I come?”
“Well, we always do it in costume. I’m dressing as a proper Victorian widow who’s really a zombie. My character lures men into marrying her and then eats their brains. You want to come dressed as one of my soon-to-be-dead husbands?”
“That’s tempting, really, but maybe I’ll pass. I haven’t read the book, after all.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“Well, have fun,” I said, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek, because I knew no one was looking, then departed.
Kira hollered after me, “Watch out for the aging voodoo sperm witch!”
* * *
I was perhaps two strides back out into the newsroom, and still chuckling about what Kira had just said, when I saw something that made me immediately remove the smirk from my face.
It was the aging voodoo sperm witch herself. She had her arms crossed and was demanding to know, “
What
did she just call me?”
“Huhwhawho?” I said, hoping perhaps she had been too far away to really hear it.
“Oh she did
not
just say that.”
“Say, uh … say what?”
“Aging voodoo sperm witch?”
Ah, so apparently Tina was doing that pissed-off-chick thing, where they ask a question to which they already know the answer. There was only one response, of course, and that’s to do that conflict-avoiding-guy thing, where we try to say anything to stem a total cataclysm.
“Oh, she wasn’t … that’s a … a movie we saw. Kira’s into all that fantasy stuff, you know. Some of the titles are a little bizarre.”
“For the hundred millionth time, Carter Ross, I know when you’re lying,” she said and began stalking away before I could have much say in the matter.
About three steps into her stalking, Tina turned like she was going to say something. Then she changed her mind and continued on her way. There was no sense in going after her—in the same way there’s no sense in running your fingers under a working power saw—so I retreated to my desk.
I was at least semicurious as to what had Paul/Powell riled up, so I made him my first call. His phone cut straight to some indistinct-yet-ominous-sounding symphony music, which droned on for a good twenty seconds. There are few things more annoying than people who turn voice mail into an opportunity to foist their music on a defenseless listener.
Finally, his wannabe Vincent Price voice said, “You have reached Powell. Please leave a message in which you recognize that life is fleeting and death is forever.”
I wasn’t prepared to give up on reincarnation just yet, so I hung up.
This led to a few minutes of thumb-twiddling—more in the figurative sense, since literal thumb-twiddling gets exhausting if you try to do it for more than about thirty seconds—during which time I pondered my next step.
This was one of the other ways in which the Internet had changed the dynamics of the modern scoop. As soon as you posted something, it set the clock going: the competition would start scrambling to catch up with you, meaning you had to scoop your own scoop if you were going to stay in the lead.
In this case, I decided fairly quickly what my new scoop would be. A story that said the
Eagle-Examiner
had obtained autopsy photos contradicting police findings was good. But a story that said the police had recognized their egregious fault and renewed an investigation because of photos uncovered by the
Eagle-Examiner?
That was even better.
They just had to be given a reason to do it. And, of course, I happened to have witnessed that reason earlier in the day, when I saw the first few minutes of what could have been Mimi and Fusco’s amateur porn video. As Tommy had made me recognize, I would need to tell the police about that sooner or later. Might as well make it sooner.
I briefly considered telling Tina what I was about to do. But I knew how that would go. I would inform Tina I felt ethically obligated to tell the police about something. Tina would ask Brodie, who would ask the lawyers, who would dither about it for three days—at $400 per dithering hour—and then eventually decide I was, in fact, ethically obligated to do it. It would then go back down the food chain, making everyone feel justified they had done their job. And all the while, I wouldn’t be doing mine.
Not being in the mood for any of that, I dialed the number for my good friend Hakeem Rogers.
After a minute on hold and two minutes of insisting I really
did
need to speak directly with the Newark Police Department’s esteemed public information officer—and, no, I couldn’t just send him an e-mail—I was finally connected.
“Check your voice mail,” he said as soon as he picked up the line. “Everything I have to say is already on there.”
“I know, I know. And we’re about to post your very informative words online. I’m calling about something else. I’d like to report information about a crime that may have been committed. I’d like to speak with the investigating officer on the Darius Kipps case.”
Rogers took a second to swallow this before saying, “Really? You serious?”
“Yeah, I’m serious.”
“You’re not trying to backdoor yourself into an interview, are you? Because if I hear you were just—”
“No,” I cut him off. “I have real, actual, credible information.”
“What is it?”
“Ha, no way. I’m not doing this through intermediaries. I talk to the detective in charge of the investigation or I don’t talk.”
There was another pause on his end before he said, “What are you up to, Ross?”
“Just doing the right thing. Isn’t this what you guys are encouraging responsible citizens to do in all those tips posters you plaster all over the place?”
“Yeah, but…” He let his voice trail off. “Okay. Let me make a call.”
I went back to twiddling my thumbs (again, not really) and watched as my story went live on our Web site. This is horribly old-fashioned of me, I know, but a scoop online never feels quite the same as a scoop in the newspaper. The online scoop seems to disappear into the Internet ether—or, worse, into some message forum where five trolls who still live in their parents’ basements make comments on it like “yeh hahaha that remind’s me ov the time my cuzin got tyed up by his girl frend n the beeeyatch didnt let him go 4 like 3 dayz hahahahaha lol.”
The newspaper scoop, meanwhile, has a certain immortality to it. Mashed pulp and indelible ink are used to note it, and it is entered into the permanent record, such that if anyone in future generations feels like checking in on this day in history, it will be there waiting for them. You just don’t get that online.
Or maybe you do. I know they call them “PermaLinks.” But still. I just don’t see it. One of these days, our paper is going to make the inevitable switch to being online only, and I swear, that’s the day I quit and go work for the
Amish Times.
I was somewhere in the midst of that reverie—thinking of how I’d handle a story about one of those gruesome three horse-and-buggy tie-ups—when my phone rang.
“Carter Ross.”
“Hey, it’s Rogers. I called out to the Fourth. Captain Boswell out there wants to talk with you.”
“The captain? Why is he dealing with it?”
“The better question is why is
she
dealing with it. It’s Captain
Denise
Boswell.”
“Really? How enlightened of you guys.”
“Yeah, she’s been out there about six months now. She’s the first female officer we’ve had in charge of a precinct. I sent you a press release, but of course you guys didn’t run squat about it, because that’s positive news, and you guys aren’t interested in positive news about the NPD.”
I let him take his shot, then said, “Okay, now just to make it clear: I am
not
going out there to conduct an interview. I am going out there to offer information. But if she feels like making a statement after I’m done, I’m not exactly going to stop her.”
“I already told her you’d probably try to weasel your way into an interview and that she shouldn’t let you. But she’s a captain. That’s above my pay grade. If she feels like running her mouth, I can’t stop her.”
It was exactly what I wanted to hear. “I can live with that. When does she want to talk?”
“Right about now, from what it sounds like.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m on my way.”
* * *
Twilight was coming fast, what with the cloud cover, and it was a lights-on drive out to the Fourth. I thought about stopping by Uncle Bernie on my way—because, you know, I really
could
use some new All-Clad cookware—but decided I didn’t have time for the bartering or the bantering. I let the Malibu roll to a stop across the street from the Fourth Precinct, in front of a group of relatively new town houses that had been erected in the footprint of what had once been a blighted public housing high-rise.
It hadn’t been raining for several hours, but the front steps to the Fourth still had that wet, gritty feel and sounded like sandpaper as I trudged up them. I went inside and announced myself. Then I sat on a small bench that was designed for maximum discomfort and read the wanted posters. Some bad men stared back at me.
I was soon greeted by an old friend of mine: Officer Hightower. All six foot eight of him.
“You again?” he said. “Thought you didn’t have no story.”
“Yeah, I’m here to talk to—”
“I know. Come on.”
I followed him up some stairs and through the precinct, which had the kind of cramped feeling that obsolete buildings often did. It was dimly lit, which accentuated the fact that everything in it was either yellowish beige or bluish gray, and there seemed to be stuff—just stuff—stacked everywhere. It was basically clean, on a superficial level, but there hadn’t been cleaning products invented that could cut through all the grime accumulated from too many people toiling for too many hours across too many decades.