I managed to win that battle, making use of a spare she had in her medicine cabinet. Otherwise, it was all go-go-go. On my way toward the door, Tina pressed a pear and an apple into my hand—the closest I was going to get to any fruit, forbidden or otherwise, on this morning—and shooed me out.
The address Tina gave me for Fusco’s place was in Belleville, a small but densely packed slice of New Jersey just north of Newark. It was just under twenty minutes away, and I knew I had to hurry. Still, I stopped for a Coke Zero. I had gotten four, maybe five hours of half-drunk slumber in someone else’s bed and, while wearing yesterday’s clothes, was being horsewhipped by my editor into frantic action. Such things are not meant to be borne without at least a little caffeine.
Plus, I needed to get my head working properly. It just couldn’t seem to swallow the idea that Fusco was dead. The killer had become the killed. Was Mike Fusco’s last act to give himself the ultimate punishment for the crimes he had committed? Or was this another staged suicide?
I had just gotten back on the road when I heard a news tease on the radio that ended “… and another police officer is dead in Newark, apparently by his own hand.”
This elicited a rare but emphatic swear from my lips. There would be no head start for me this time. To return to my pasture metaphor, there were few things worse than being part of the herd. There was no way to avoid smelling like dung.
It came as no surprise that when I pulled onto the narrow street in Belleville where Mike Fusco had lived, until very recently, three news vans were already there. Undoubtedly more were on the way. I parked outside one of the tidy little clapboard houses just in from the corner, then walked briskly toward Fusco’s place—the one with the crime scene tape strung along the outer edge of the property—about midway down the block.
Outside the house next door, two of the three cameras present were trained on a hirsute middle-aged white man who was telling a story that involved a lot of arm-waving and hand gesturing. I wouldn’t say the man was exactly ready for his fifteen minutes of fame—he had a three-day scruff and a torn New York Giants sweatshirt featuring Lawrence Taylor, which made it at least twenty years old. But I also wouldn’t say he struck me as the kind of guy who was too bothered about appearances. The slippers on his feet were one hint. The parachute pants were the dead giveaway.
I let the TV cameras finish up with him, then moved in. In short order, I learned his name and that he was claiming to have been the one who made the initial call to the police. He said he worked “in the sanitation industry”—like there was somehow shame in just saying he was a garbage man—which meant he was up early and just about to head out on his route. It was shortly after four when he heard gunshots.
“Gunshots with an ‘s’?” I asked. “As in, more than one?”
“Yeah. Two of them. It was a bang”—he waited for approximately ten seconds, his eyes wide and casting about the whole time, like he was still performing for the cameras—“and then a bang. Two shots.”
“Two shots,” I repeated. “What, did he miss the first time?”
“Beats me. I’m just telling you what I heard.”
I nodded and started taking notes. Sad to say, but if Mike Fusco lived in certain parts of Newark, his body would still be lying undiscovered right now. In a lot of neighborhoods, people long ago stopped bothering to call the police when they heard gunfire.
“So what happened next?” I asked.
“Well, it was tough to tell where the first shot was even coming from. But the second shot, I knew it was coming from Fusco’s place. I was paying attention at that point, you know? I didn’t know if someone was robbing the place or if it was some kind of gang thing or what. I didn’t think we had any of that out here. But sometimes a neighborhood can turn, you know? I mean, I heard some, you know, some blacks just moved in the next block over. I’m not racist, I’m just saying.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. Because it was better than saying:
“Actually, sir, that is the very definition of racism.”
“So, anyway, I went over to my window to have a look.”
“Did you see anything?”
“Nope. Nada.”
“And then you called the police?”
“Yeah, I figure that’s what I pay all those property taxes for, right? Let the police do their job. And I gotta give them credit, they were here in, like, two minutes.”
He continued: “So I went out and met them, told them the same thing I told the dispatcher. They asked me if I could hang out for a while, so I called into work—I got about a million sick days piled up anyway—and they went in. Ten minutes later one of them comes out and tells me what happened.”
“And what was that?”
“Well, Fusco was lying in bed with his brains blown out, that’s what. I guess he couldn’t take it no more.”
If there truly was anything Mike Fusco couldn’t take no more—sorry, any longer—the guy didn’t know. And neither did anyone else on the block. Over the next two hours of hanging out and chatting with various neighbors, I heard a lot of the same thing about Fusco. He lived by himself, no kids, no pets, no hobbies that took him outside with any great frequency; he would offer a nodding hello to people but otherwise didn’t say much; he drove a big red truck with jacked-up suspension; he had big muscles; and he was a cop.
At a certain point, I became satisfied there was really nothing more the good people of Belleville could tell me. And I was starting to consider pulling up the tents and hitting the trail when my phone rang.
The caller was Mimi Kipps.
* * *
I stared at the phone for one ring, two rings, trying to give myself a chance to come up with some clever idea how to play this thing. By the third ring, I hadn’t produced anything, but I answered anyway.
“Carter Ross.”
“Carter, it’s Mimi Kipps,” she said in a husky voice.
“Hi, Mimi.”
“Are you writing a story about Mike?”
“I am, yes.”
“Can you … can you come over? I was hoping I could … talk to you a little bit.”
“About what?” I said.
There was no immediate response. I thought I heard some hard breathing, definitely some sniffling. When she finally spoke, it was through a voice box squeezed with emotion: “I think … maybe the people who killed Darius might have killed Mike because he was … I don’t know.”
“He was what?” I pressed.
“I just … I think I may have gotten him killed,” she said. That was about as far as she made it before the sobs came. It was tough to tell what was coming out of her mouth. Words? Sentences? Random syllables? It was unintelligible.
I let her carry on like that for a little while. She was trying to compose herself, unsuccessfully. Finally, I said, “Mimi, I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes, okay?”
She blurted out something that might have been “thank you” and I hung up.
Say this much, she had addled my easily aroused curiosity. I wondered if she was warming up to make some kind of confession. She “may” have gotten him killed? What, exactly, did that mean?
I’m not saying I was ready to believe the worst about Mimi Kipps, but neither did I think she was just the pitiable, grieving widow. In a world where there are seldom coincidences, the two men she was sleeping with had both ended up taking bullets to the head. It was getting hard to imagine a scenario where she wasn’t involved in that somehow.
As I merged on the Garden State Parkway for the short trip down to East Orange, I called Tina just to check in and let her know I was on the move. I told her about how, other than the fact that there were two shots fired—which would require some explanation—I had gotten a whole lot of nothing from the neighborhood.
She informed me I had missed a similar amount of nothing in the office. The Belleville Police had promised some kind of statement in “a few hours,” though they had started making that pledge a few hours ago. The Newark Police were in total shutdown mode—Hakeem Rogers’s office was letting all calls go through to voice mail and no e-mails had been answered.
Even Buster Hays’s normally inexhaustible Rolodex was, so far, getting shut out. Not that I had lost faith in him. It was not quite ten o’clock, still early in the news-gathering day.
“So, anything else I need to know?” Tina asked, and I could tell she was in a hurry to get off the phone.
“No, I guess not … except … well, we never got a chance to, uh, talk about what happened last night.”
“What, the sex?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, it was fine. Better than fine. I’m sorry, I’m just distracted. It was great.”
“Well, thanks, but I wasn’t looking for a grade on my report card. I meant … are you, I don’t know, okay with everything?”
“Oh, honey,” she said with a chuckle, “I’m not in high school anymore. You’re not exactly my first. Daddy isn’t coming after you with a shotgun.”
“I just … After all this time, I didn’t expect … I didn’t go over there thinking anything like that would—”
“I swear, you’re more of a girl than I am sometimes,” she interrupted. “Look, we’re grown-ups. We had sex. It happens. Not to me a lot lately, but it does happen.”
I slid through a toll plaza going perhaps a little too fast, still not feeling I was getting my point across. “But did you, I don’t know, did you mean for it to happen? Was it the wine? Was it an accident?”
“What do you mean? Like did I just accidentally get naked and stumble onto your cock? No, I’d say that was pretty intentional.”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
Tina gave an exasperated sigh, then blurted out, “Look, you were a booty call, okay?”
“I was?”
“Yeah. I just wanted to have sex last night, and it was either you or a random bar hookup. I didn’t feel like going out. So it was you. My God, what did you think that was about? I was barely wearing any clothing to start with, and then I began taking it all off. I would have been offended if you
hadn’t
had sex with me.”
“Oh. Right,” I said, and the conversation took a moment to lag as I thought of how to form my next question in a way that wouldn’t make me sound like an insensitive lout.
“What, you feel cheap now?” she said.
“No, I … No, that’s cool. What guy doesn’t want to be a booty call?”
“Great. I’ll talk to…”
“Wait, just … we weren’t … we didn’t exactly use protection. Was this … are we … am I going to be attending Lamaze classes soon?”
“First of all, don’t be an idiot, no one uses Lamaze anymore. All it does is make the woman hyperventilate and deprive the baby of oxygen. Haven’t you read
any
childbirth books? Second, I’m on the pill. So you have nothing to worry about.”
“The pill? Since when?”
“Since … I don’t know, a couple months now.”
“But what happened to … all your plans? Last I knew, you had everything from a car seat to a Bumbo Baby in your closet.”
“Yeah, I regifted the car seat and gave the Bumbo Baby to Goodwill.”
“But … why?”
“I just decided I’m just not cut out for that,” she said. “Lately, I feel like I can barely keep my own stuff together. Somehow adding another life-form into the mix didn’t seem too smart, especially if it was a life-form that was going to be totally dependent on me for its physical and emotional development.”
“Oh,” I said, because sometimes I like to offer my friends and loved ones brilliant insights like that.
“Anyhow, I have to go,” she said. “I’ll talk to you later.”
“Okay, bye,” I said to an already empty phone line.
* * *
The Malibu had made enough trips to Rutledge Avenue in the past three days that I wondered if it was going to steer itself there. Still, I kept my hands on the wheel—just in case—and arrived a few minutes later.
I hastily ditched my car a few doors down, the only place I could find a spot, and walked briskly toward the front porch, where I was confronted by Mimi’s doorbell button. I pushed it and waited. At least I knew she’d answer this time.
As I looked down at her leaf-insulated flower bed, I pressed the button again, growing frustrated. She had invited me there all of fifteen minutes earlier. What happened? She slipped into narcoleptic slumber?
“You’ve
got
to be kidding me,” I muttered.
I backed away from the porch and stepped down onto the sidewalk to have a look at the house. There were no lights on and no one making out in the second-floor windows, either. I whipped out my phone and dialed Mimi—maybe she had just taken the baby for a walk?—but didn’t get an answer.
Walking back up on the porch, I decided to knock this time. I did knuckles first, then switched to the butt of my palm, which is louder and, besides, it hurts less. But that got about as much attention from inside the house as the doorbell did.
“Mimi?” I eventually yelled at the door. “Mimi, it’s Carter. Are you there?”
A woman from the other side of the duplex appeared on her front porch, which was no more than ten feet away from the Kippses’ entrance.
“She ain’t here,” the woman said.
“But she just called me,” I said, as if this woman, upon hearing the injustice of this fact, could somehow change it.
“Well, she left.”
“How long ago?”
“You just missed her. Two minutes ago, maybe?”
“Was she alone?”
“No, she was with a man.”
A man? Another one? I wondered if this guy knew what the life expectancy was for men who hung around Mimi Kipps. “What did the man look like?” I asked.
The woman shifted on her heels and appraised me with suspicion, giving me the kind of look you give someone who is suddenly asking too many questions and might actually be a stalker. So I added, “I’m a reporter with the
Eagle-Examiner
. I was supposed to be meeting her here for an interview.”
“Oh, well I think it was her preacher. It looked like they were in a hurry.”
Her preacher?
What was he doing back here? I thought he was finally out of the picture. “Was he a big guy?” I asked, holding my hand above my head to indicate a man of some stature. “About yay high? Probably wearing a suit? Glasses?”
“Yeah, that’s him.”