On this day, my closet dive yielded the racy blend of khaki pants, a white shirt, and a blue tie. I tossed a bit of kibble in a bowl for Deadline—not that he would be awake to eat it for another few hours—then opened my laptop.
I had no intention of going into the office to be one of Tina Thompson’s “resources,” which would just involve sitting around a conference table until someone told me to do what any good reporter should have been doing all along. Sometimes editors just get in the way like that.
So I got to work. After about five minutes of accessing a few of the databases on which a reporter makes his living, I learned the late Darius Kipps had been with the Newark Police Department for twelve years and three months. He was thirty-seven years old, having celebrated his birthday on the first of March. He was making $93,140 a year, which is not unusual in a state with the nation’s highest paid police officers. He had a variety of addresses associated with him—some in Newark, some in Irvington—but seemed to have settled in East Orange.
Sure enough, when I checked the East Orange property tax records, I found a dwelling owned by Noemi and Darius Kipps on Rutledge Avenue.
And that, I had already decided as I closed the lid on my laptop, was where I needed to be.
This was something of a calculated gamble on my part. Without knowing how Darius Kipps met his untimely end, there was no telling what would figure prominently in our story. But, sadly, I could proffer up a reasonable guess. He was a detective, which is usually a pretty safe place for a cop. Unless, of course, you’re undercover. Then you’re just as exposed to danger as anyone else who tries to make a life on the streets. If not more so. All it takes is some punk deciding you looked at him the wrong way and, not knowing you’re a cop, pulling the trigger.
Or maybe something else had befallen Detective Sergeant Kipps. Point is, we had cops reporters who were in a better position to figure it out, leaving me to work other angles. And in a story like this, it was safe to assume that the grieving widow, Noemi Kipps, would be one of those angles.
That meant every minute counted. This was not necessarily out of any concern for the paper’s production schedule. It was all about the competition or, more accurately, the lack of it.
A Newark police officer killed in the line of duty would inevitably attract the attention of every television and radio station in the Greater New York area, which only happens to be the biggest media market in the country. All of them would know a grieving widow was a big part of the story, too. And since they have access to the same databases I did, they, too, would soon be heading in the direction of Rutledge Avenue in East Orange.
The cumulative effect of all those reporters would be something like cattle in a field. Put one cow in a small pasture, and what you have is a nice, green plot of earth. She can roam freely, nibbling grass as she feels like it, and generally has a pretty good time of things. Put a whole bunch of cows in that same field, and what you have in fairly short order is a big, stinky, muddy mess. And none of the cows feel like they’re getting much of a meal.
So the trick is to be that first cow, then find a way to lock the gate so the rest of the herd can’t get in.
Bidding Deadline farewell—he would miss me, but only due to the absence of body heat—I went out into the gray morning, hopped in my car, and began the short drive from my home in Bloomfield to the Kipps household in East Orange.
Along the way, I called Tina. There was a time when Tina and I had a fairly simple understanding: she simply wanted my seed. After two decades of using her beauty and cunning to run roughshod over the male species, cycling through its representatives in a series of relationships that lasted anywhere from one night to one month, she had reached a point where she realized her baby-making years were running short.
She was far too practical and goal-oriented to engage in the imprecise business of courtship, so she mostly judged men on their potential to pass certain desirable characteristics onto her offspring. She was looking for a partner with blue eyes and broad shoulders (check). She wanted him to be at least six feet tall (I’m six foot one). And she was looking for a certain kindly, easygoing disposition (howdy, friend). Hence, she decided I was the ideal sperm donor—and that rather than making the swap in a laboratory, we might as well do it as nature intended.
She made it clear it was a no-strings-attached proposition, that I could taste the fruit without buying the orchard, as it were. The only problem was, I sort of wanted the orchard. So we had reached an impasse in our relationship: namely, I wanted one and she didn’t.
Then she got promoted and became my editor, which imposed further impediments to the possibility of our getting together. So we sort of decided to cool it. I say “sort of” because nothing felt very cool when we wound up together after work, especially after a drink or two.
Then, in an unexpected development, I got tired of all that will-they-or-won’t-they stuff and started dating Kira O’Brien, a new librarian in the newspaper’s research department. Actually, I’m not sure you could call what we did “dating.” But that was another story.
Point is, things had been a little strained between Tina and me. She answered her cell phone with a testy: “What do you want?”
“I’m heading to East Orange.”
“What’s in East Orange?”
“The widow Kipps, from what I’ve been able to learn,” I said.
“Who told you to go after the widow Kipps?”
“No one. But I live about five minutes from her. I can make it there and try to get her talking before every television station in New York has a hairpiece and a microphone camped on her front lawn.”
Tina didn’t respond for a second or two. I’m sure she was trying to find some reason my plan was a bad one—because that’s sort of the way things had been going between us lately—but there were really no nits to pick.
“Fine,” she said. “Don’t screw it up.”
* * *
Knocking on the door of a woman who has just lost her husband—and then having the nerve to ask her all about it—is certainly not one of the cheerier parts of my chosen profession. Done poorly, it can leave you feeling like some exploitative, soul-sucking parasite who feasts on the misery of others. Some reporters flatly loathe the task, even citing it as a reason for leaving the business.
But, strange as it sounds, it might be one of the things I find most satisfying. It’s not that I enjoy other people’s suffering or that I find the whole business any less discomfiting than anyone else.
It’s that I see it as an opportunity to do some real good, in my small way. One of the fundamental things I believe as a writer is that words have the power to move people. They can make us feel angry or hateful or sad, sure. But they can also uplift us. They can provide hope. They can even comfort a grieving family.
And that’s what I went into a situation like this trying to do. I believed I could wade into the agony of the Kipps family, and by writing a sympathetic story about Darius—something that captured the best of the man, his service to others and the sacrifice he made—I could make things a little better. Maybe not right away, when everything was still so fresh. But maybe someday it could be something his widow could look at and read with a smile on her face.
With this in mind, I made the turn onto Rutledge Avenue, a street lined with mature trees and cracked sidewalks. East Orange could be a rough town, having long ago been overtaken by the same urban malaise that blighted much of Newark. But this was one of the more livable areas. The definition of “livable” was, of course, that the dope fiends, dealers, and delinquents tended to stay at least a few blocks away.
I slowed as I reached the Kippses’ residence, an aging two-story brick duplex with a flower bed full of dead leaves that had accumulated over the winter. There were no window treatments on the second floor, which gave the house an unoccupied look. Except, of course there were lights on. So obviously someone was home. I parallel parked, noting—with relief—the lack of vans with television logos on them. At least for now, it looked like I would have the place to myself.
Walking up a short concrete pathway toward the house, then up the brick steps onto a small front porch, I felt the usual excitement. You never really knew what you were going to get when you knocked on one of these doors. I could be welcomed into the home with open arms, tossed into the street on my ass, or anything in between.
So I knocked, then held my breath.
The door was answered by a medium-height, slender African American woman with dark smudges under her eyes. She was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her feet were bare. She looked like she hadn’t slept that night. Or the previous night. Or, for that matter, the previous month.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Hi, I’m sorry to trouble you. I know this is a difficult time,” I said as apologetically as possible. “I’m a reporter with the
Eagle-Examiner.
I’m here to write a tribute to Darius.”
The word “tribute” was deliberate, of course. If I said I was there merely to write a “story,” there would still have been some doubt as to my intentions. I wanted to make it clear I was coming in peace.
“Oh,” she said, like this surprised her.
“I’m Carter Ross. Are you Mrs. Kipps?”
“Yes. I’m Noemi”—she pronounced it no-
em
-mee—“but call me Mimi. Everyone else does.”
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said, opening the door a little wider.
And, just like that, I was in. I walked into a living room filled with older women, most of them substantially larger than Mimi, all of them staring at me, all of them black.
I always get a kick out of white people who complain that blacks are “obsessed” with race and talk about it too much. If those white people could, just once, walk into a room like this, where suddenly they were the Other Race, they’d understand the “obsession” just a little better. Because you know what? We can all say we’re color-blind, and we can claim that race doesn’t matter in an America that has elected a black president.
But that’s foolishness. Race matters. It mattered at my prep school, where in a student body of five hundred there were maybe fifteen black kids, thirteen of whom had been brought there to play football or basketball. It mattered at my alma mater, Amherst College, where we were all supposedly enlightened multiculturalists, yet we still fell back into the easy comfort of our groups, black, brown, white, and yellow. It matters in my workplace, where editors have been known to pair reporter and assignment based on skin color, simply because you just couldn’t send a white reporter to write Story X, or you really had to send a Hispanic reporter to do Story Y. And until some distant time many centuries from now when there is a truly American race—when we’ve all interbred enough that the races are no longer distinct—it will continue to matter everywhere else in our society, too.
So I was the white guy in the room. And not just any white guy. I’m a purebred WASP, straight off the not-so-hardscrabble streets of Millburn by way of tennis camp. My quick read told me Mimi didn’t have a problem with white guys. She had bought the “tribute” line. But these other black women were still undecided. They were eyeing me with a mix of curiosity and hostility, their protective instincts fully engaged.
“This is the man from the newspaper,” she announced. “He’s here to write about Darius.”
“I just want to be able to write about what kind of person he was,” I interjected, “tell some nice stories about him.”
Mimi proceeded to introduce me to the six women in the room, a series of aunties and cousins whose names I didn’t quite register. I’d get them later. I didn’t even have my notebook out to write them down. For now, it was more important to smile pleasantly, make good eye contact, and shake a hand if it was offered to me.
Then she led me around to the corner, where there was a crib, one of those portable Pack ‘N Play things. Inside, a shriveled-looking baby slept soundly.
“This is Jaquille,” she said. “Darius’s son. He’s five months.”
That explained the raccoon eyes Mimi was sporting. I thought she looked like she hadn’t slept for a month. She probably hadn’t, with this little guy in her life.
And I do mean little. Since I hadn’t entered the reproductive portion of my life—Tina’s entreaties having been unsuccessful—I didn’t know from babies. But this one looked awfully small.
“He was born two months premature,” Mimi said, reading my mind. “He weighed three pounds, four ounces. He was in the hospital the first two months, because of some stuff with his lungs. But he’s fine, now. He’s up to nine pounds.”
“He’s beautiful,” I said, which was a flat-out lie. Like most newborns, Jaquille looked like a spindly legged alien with a human diaper attached to him. But saying that didn’t seem like it would ingratiate me to Jaquille’s mother.
“Darius was so proud of him. We have a daughter who’s seven, and he loves her like any dad loves his little girl. But he always wanted a boy. He said a man’s gotta have a son. So we tried and tried. Darius only had one testicle.”
Now
there
was a piece of information that likely wouldn’t be making it into the next day’s paper.
“And we were wondering if maybe that had something to do with it,” Mimi continued. “We had him tested, and his count was pretty low.”
Yet another piece.
“But we kept trying and praying. I had just about given up, but then God heard our prayers and gave us a son. I always thought of him as my miracle baby.”
Mimi stared at Jaquille, while I furtively studied Mimi out of the corner of my eye. She had this calm about her that was almost eerie. A woman who loses her husband and is suddenly left to raise two children, one of them an infant, by herself? She ought to be oozing tears, snot, and despondence.
Instead, she was gazing down at her baby beatifically, like the Virgin Mary in a Renaissance frieze. She must have still been in shock, the tragedy so new her mind couldn’t yet process it.