One of the aunties, the one sitting in the corner, picked up the dialogue where Mimi left off: “You should have seen Darius with that boy. He visited him in the hospital every morning after his shift ended. He would just go in there and talk and talk and talk. He’d say, ‘You gonna be a Eagles fan, just like your daddy. And you gonna root for the Sixers, just like your daddy. And we gonna watch baseball together. And I’m gonna teach you to catch a ball and throw a ball. And you’re gonna be real smart. And you’re gonna go to college. And your daddy is going to be so proud of you.’”
Mimi chimed in: “Darius said our boy came out small, but he was going to love him so much he couldn’t help but get big. He was just going to fill that little boy up with his love.”
I looked down at Jaquille, the erstwhile miracle, and tried to swallow the cantaloupe that was suddenly growing in my throat. Right then, I knew what my story was going to be. It would be written as a letter to Jaquille, to be read on the day he graduated from college. And it would tell him all about the father he never got a chance to know.
* * *
Over the next few hours—as a succession of relatives, friends, and neighbors wandered to the house to offer their respects—I learned about who that man was.
Darius Kipps was born in Camden and grew up in nearby Pennsauken. Both places were in South Jersey, which explained why he rooted for all those Philadelphia teams. His father had been a cop, too, putting in twenty-five years with the Camden PD and retiring with a trunk full of commendations, which told me a little something about the tree from which Darius had fallen. Camden has long ranked in the top ten as the toughest American city in which to be a cop.
As a teenager, Darius was a bit of a prankster but also a natural leader, so he became the ringmaster of a group of quasi-misfits, who liked to party a little too much. It didn’t sound like they were bad kids, by any stretch. But it was subtly explained to me there may have been a mailbox or two that succumbed to Darius’s idea of a good time. I also heard an account of how he organized a group of fourteen guys to lift a principal’s car and move it back to the Dumpsters behind school. The distraught man ended up reporting it stolen before someone finally let him in on the gag.
After Darius graduated high school, he tried a variety of jobs, none of which really fit him. And finally he went to school and got an associate’s degree in criminal justice: police work was in his blood, after all. He took the police exam and posted a high score, such that he had a number of job offers—well-qualified black candidates were always in demand from departments looking to improve their diversity. His family urged him to accept an offer from one of the cozy, suburban police departments, where he wouldn’t have to dodge the same dangers as his father.
But Darius wanted to be where the action was. He wanted to be where he felt he could do the most good. He chose Newark.
Smart and hardworking, with those natural leadership skills, he rose quickly through the ranks, never going long without moving up. After a few years on patrol, with his potential obvious to all, he earned his detective’s shield. A few years after that, he aced his sergeant’s exam and got that promotion, too. Lieutenant couldn’t have been far away.
He was the kind of cop who kept the scanner on at home and listened to it as background noise—the way some people keep the television on—just so he knew what his fellow officers were up to. And if he heard something that sounded like trouble and was close? He stored his gun and his shield by the door so he could grab them quickly on the way out. He had once nabbed a carjacker that way. It was the kind of commitment to the job that had earned him commendation after commendation, just like his old man.
But he didn’t just look out for other cops. I heard another story about a witness he worked with during one of his cases. The kid had been shot up pretty badly and was in the hospital for a while. Darius kept visiting the kid, finding different ways to cheer him up, and kept doing it even after the case was closed. Last anyone had heard, the kid had recovered and Darius had helped him get a part-time job with Newark Parks and Recreation.
Meanwhile, it seemed the former prankster matured into a level-headed, responsible young man. Around the time he started working as a cop, he met Mimi, fell for her, and fell hard. They had been introduced through a friend of a friend. She had heard of his reputation as a hard-partying boozer, and being a teetotaler herself, she told him she couldn’t date someone who used alcohol. He quit cold turkey. They were married within a year.
“He said we were soul mates, so there was no point in waiting,” Mimi said.
A few years into the marriage, they had their daughter, Jasey. They bought the duplex in East Orange because Darius felt a family ought to have a house to call home. He took to fatherhood quickly, doting on his daughter.
“He’d kill me if I told you this,” said the corner auntie, “but he let that little girl paint his fingernails and toenails. He’d be running around before work, looking for the nail polish remover, trying to get that stuff off. Sometimes he ran out of time. I’m sure the guys down at the station just
loved
that.”
It sounded like Jaquille’s birth had cut into father-daughter time quite a bit. But once things settled down, he had talked of surprising Jasey with a family trip to Disney World as a present from her new baby brother. He had also been talking about moving his growing brood to a single-family house, maybe in a town with a better school system.
“He was all for the kids,” Mimi told me. “He was always saying, ‘It ain’t about us no more.’”
All in all, he seemed like a heck of a guy. I’m sure some of the stories were being embellished for my benefit, but I didn’t mind. Telling lies about the recently deceased is a long-standing tradition in our—and many other—cultures, and I wasn’t about to take too hard a look at them. As a reporter, I’ve learned to make a distinction between lies that could hurt someone and those that won’t. If I ended up making a slain police officer smell a bit rosier in death than he had in real life, it was hard to see who would be injured by that.
Throughout my interviewing, the phone in my pocket buzzed intermittently—no doubt Tina calling, looking for an update—but I wasn’t about to answer it. I was getting great material out of these people, and I didn’t want to break the spell.
The only mildly surprising thing is that none of the people knocking on the front door of the Kipps house were fellow members of the media. I would have thought for sure the rest of the horde would have learned about the dead cop and descended, locustlike, on the widow Kipps. It was hard to keep the lid on a story like this.
But there was no one. So as noontime came and went, I kept adding more good stuff in my notebook until, having filled it, I announced it was getting time for me to go. Mimi gave me her cell number, which I stored in my phone with a promise to keep in touch.
The last thing Mimi showed me was a picture of Darius with his kids at his birthday party a week earlier. There was a conical paper hat perched crookedly atop his bald head and secured with a thin white elastic band. His smile seemed to take up the entire photo. He was a burly guy, and the children practically disappeared in his arms—his infant son cradled tenderly in one, his daughter tucked in the other. They were arms that held and loved, arms that offered comfort and protection, the arms of a man who considered himself a father and a guardian.
“You can keep that if you want,” Mimi said, handing me a printout, which I slipped in the back of my notebook. “I made a bunch of copies this morning. That’s really how I want people to remember him. I can’t believe he only had a week to live in that picture.”
It gave me the opening to finally pose the uncomfortable question, the one I nevertheless had to ask: “What has the Newark Police Department told you about your husband’s death?”
“They didn’t tell me anything,” Mimi said.
“What do you mean?”
“The chaplain came out last night and told me Darius wasn’t coming home, that he had died, and that’s all I’ve heard so far. I don’t know the details yet. I’m not sure if I even want to know. My husband was in law enforcement. I … we all, all of us wives, we talk about this and we prepare for it. We hope it never comes, of course, but we have to prepare. However he died, it doesn’t change who he was in life. And that’s what I want to think about.”
* * *
When I got back out on the street, my phone told me I had missed five calls, all of them from Tina. She had left no voice messages, just a text: “No story. Come back in.”
“The
hell
there’s no story,” I said out loud to my phone. In what parallel universe was she living? I had a notebook crammed with material that begged to differ.
In a huff, I called her but got voice mail on both her work and cell numbers. Which was just as well. Some arguments were better had in person.
My car was, unsurprisingly, still sitting where I parked it. For some people, this is not a given. Newark and its surrounding environs are somewhat notorious for car thefts, having raised some of the nation’s leading automobile pilferers for several generations now. But that is one of the only things I
don’t
have to worry about when it comes to my ride, a six-year-old Chevy Malibu. Anyone who cared enough about cars to steal one would be embarrassed to be seen in mine.
I picked it up used when it was merely a three-year-old Chevy Malibu and it has since handled all the punishment I have given it, and then some. I’d love to brag how many miles it has on it, but the truth is, I’m not sure. The odometer has been stuck at 111,431 for a while now. I would worry about how that’s going to affect the resale value, except I don’t think the junkyard I’m eventually going to push it into will much care.
Nevertheless, the Malibu faithfully delivered me to the
Eagle-Examiner
newsroom, into which I stormed, still spoiling for a fight. I didn’t even bother stopping at my desk. I went straight to Tina’s office, where I found her sitting in her usual loveliness.
Tina is thirty-nine, but she’s got the body of a twenty-year-old. Make that: a twenty-year-old Olympian. She’s long and lean, spends her prework time jogging and her postwork time doing yoga. In between, she sits around the office wearing short skirts that make me glad I’m straight. She has curly brown hair, which on this day she had clenched in one of those claw thingies. It had the effect of showing off her neck and shoulders, which also made me happy for my heterosexuality.
Still, this was one time I hadn’t come into the office for the view.
“What do you mean there’s no story?” I said, bursting in without knocking. “I just spent close to four hours recording the life and times of Darius Kipps in my notebook, and it’s good stuff.”
“Suicide,” she said, without looking up from her computer screen.
“Huh?”
“It was a suicide,” she said, this time at least lifting her eyes.
“What do you mean, suicide?”
“I mean suicide. It’s a fancy word we use for people who kill themselves.”
“No, I…” My voice trailed off. “Damn. This guy just didn’t seem like the type. Not even a little.”
“Well, the cops still haven’t announced it yet. They’ve shut down all information, put a muzzle on the PIO, the whole thing—which is as good a sign as anything it’s probably a suicide. They haven’t even confirmed one of their officers died. But one of Hays’s sources gave it to us off the record.”
Hays was Buster Hays, our most senior reporter and a certified pain-in-the-ass. But he also had sources that reached from the FBI all the way down to the Cub Scouts. If one of his moles told us something, it was usually pretty reliable. Buster never had to rely on the Public Information Officers for his stuff. If anything, the PIOs asked
him
what was going on.
“Apparently the guy went into the shower stall at the Fourth Precinct and blew his head off,” Tina continued. “He even turned the water on before he pulled the trigger so there wouldn’t be as much to clean up. Thoughtful guy.”
“Wow. His family doesn’t have a clue yet. When I left, I told them I’d be writing a big, beautiful tribute to the dead father and husband.”
“Yeah, well, you know how Brodie feels about suicide, so…”
I knew, all right. Harold Brodie, the paper’s executive editor for something like thirty years, had been there long enough that his pet peeves had solidified into hardened rules. And one of the rules at the
Eagle-Examiner
is that we never wrote in any depth about suicides. Brodie felt giving the subject extensive ink would “glorify” it. If Darius Kipps had been killed in the line of duty, it would have been worth several days of front-page stories in Harold Brodie’s newspaper. Dying by his own hand, Kipps would get no more than a brief obituary buried inside the county news section.
Still, it just wasn’t adding up. Sure, I had gotten a somewhat slanted view of Darius Kipps, one provided by loving friends and family. But he didn’t seem like a man awash in inner torment. He had a wife he was nuts about, a job he enjoyed, a daughter he doted on, and a brand-new baby—the son he always wanted. What guy like that decides his brain matter would look better splattered all over a shower stall?
I was turning it over so vigorously I made a crucial mistake because I said the following out loud: “Hey, would you mind if I spent a little time nipping at this thing? I know we’d have to keep it off the books, for Brodie’s sake, but this just doesn’t feel right.”
The mistake, of course, is that I should have just gone ahead and done it without telling Tina. Holding back information from one’s editor is one of the privileges of being a reporter. In some ways, it is as necessary to good journalism as steno pads. It allows you to travel a road for a few days on what could be a loser without anyone in charge being the wiser that their precious resources—there’s that word again—were being squandered.
Often the road dead-ends. But every once in a while it leads to a major score, which you only got because you were willing to waste a little time on it. Except now I had deprived myself of the opportunity.