“That’s fine.”
“Okay, I cut the corners. And you pay cash?”
This was another one of Mickey’s standard questions. “Sure.”
“Okay, you need new tire, new bumper. I have my body guy work on the dents, maybe touch up the paint a little. I give you new mirror. I do it for eight hundred.”
I thought about it and quickly decided getting the Malibu back on its feet, as it were, made more fiscal sense than making the massive outlay of cash to buy a new used Malibu. Sure, the way Mickey was proposing making the repairs, my car wasn’t going to be winning any beauty pageants. But it’s not like it was exactly in the running for a tiara before.
“That sounds fine,” I said, and was about ready to hang up when Mickey spoke again.
“Oh, but Mr. Ross? Your LoJack. It’s not so good. It’s busted up. And I can’t fix it. You need special tools and I’m not authorized dealer.”
“Mickey, I don’t have LoJack.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No I don’t.”
“Yes, sir, you do.”
“I’m quite sure I don’t,” I said. The guy I had bought the car from tried to sell me on a LoJack system. But I hadn’t gone for it because that was the whole point of buying a used Malibu: not even the most desperate car thief would steal it.
“Mr. Ross, I find the LoJack on the back corner of your car. It’s a little black box. Trust me, I know what it looks like. And your car has it.”
“Mickey, you’ve worked on that car … had you ever seen a LoJack there before?”
“No, sir.”
“So how did it magically…”
And then it dawned on me:
Someone LoJacked my car.
That’s how Black Mafia Family had been able to find me the second time. It’s why they weren’t waiting for me outside the medical examiner’s office. They didn’t know where
I
was—they just knew where my car was.
It was how they found me the first time as well. Mimi Kipps hadn’t set me up. My own car had done it. Did her pastor still have something to do with it? I couldn’t rule it out—after all, he did show up at her house mere minutes before BMF arrived, guns blazing. But Mimi? She now appeared to be just as ignorant as I was.
“Mickey, can you please just remove it?” I said.
“Yes, Mr. Ross.”
“Thanks. When will the car be finished?”
“A few days. Even cutting the corners, this one is going to take a while, Mr. Ross. It’s a mess.”
“I know, Mickey,” I said. “Thanks. I’ll be in touch.”
I ended the call, and Ruthie immediately relaunched his gang tutorial. But I shushed him. I needed a moment to think. A lot of things had just started to make sense. It was like I had been spending time in an idiot box and was finally crawling out.
Because I knew: LoJack is the stolen car recovery system used by
the police.
Only cops have access to the equipment that tracks the radio signals an activated LoJack device emits.
Which meant it was the police who told Black Mafia Family where to find me; which meant it was the police who slapped that LoJack on my car, perhaps while I was inside their precinct chatting with their captain—which meant it was the police who hired BMF to kill me.
Yes, life outside the idiot box was making a lot of sense. And it would make even more if I could get Buster Hays to confirm one simple detail, something that had seemed so insignificant when he first said it. I called his desk and he picked up after one ring.
“Hays.”
“Buster, it’s Carter.”
“You know, Ivy, I—”
“Save it, Buster. I need you to look back on your notes from the conversation you had with that IA guy.”
Buster didn’t reply immediately, but I could tell from the way he grunted that he was reaching for something, like a notebook. “Yeah, okay, what’s up?”
“You said Kipps called the IA guy and left a message about ‘seeing blotches.’ Did you really mean red dots? Was he calling with something related to red dots?”
“Hang on,” Buster said, then after a few seconds came back with: “Yeah, here it is. Yeah. Blotches. Dots. I guess it was dots. Red dots. Same difference. Does it matter?”
“Oh, trust me, it matters.”
* * *
I got off the phone with Buster before he forced me to explain
why
it mattered. I couldn’t risk telling Buster yet. He had cop sources all over the place, yes. But, without knowing how widespread the gun-selling was—and how much of the Newark Police Department was involved—I didn’t want Buster unwittingly tipping off someone that we were circling in.
But it was all clear now. Darius Kipps had somehow discovered red dot guns and planned to tell all. Maybe he had been part of it and finally decided to flip, figuring if he was the first to tell, he might be able to avoid jail time. Maybe he had a confidential informant who told him what was happening. Either way, he left a message with a trusted friend in Internal Affairs and planned to spill. Except before his call was returned, he was grabbed by the red dot guys, who took him somewhere, tied him to a chair, and poured bourbon down his throat until he was blackout drunk and vomiting all over himself.
Then they dragged him into the precinct, where anyone not involved would see him as just another cop on a bender, being nobly aided by his fellow officers. They guided him down to the locker room, turned on the shower, and blew his brains out—with the water nicely washing away much of the evidence that would have proven it was not a suicide.
Enter Mike Fusco, the loyal sometimes-partner. He knew Kipps hadn’t killed himself—knew it because of the drunkenness and the bourbon. And he had decided to dig in and get to the bottom of whatever happened. Maybe he was just driving that big truck of his around, leading people to think he was on to something, maybe he was making real headway.
Whatever it was, it had gotten him killed, too, in yet another faked suicide. The cops who were trying to keep their gun-selling operation alive had been able to smuggle his service weapon out of the precinct—because, as Pritch said, anyone with a uniform could get access to the precinct’s gun locker.
Then they snuck into his house and literally caught him sleeping. They forced him to call Captain Boswell and confess to killing Kipps. They shot him, then placed the gun in his dead hand and made him pull the trigger, so there would be gunshot residue. From there, they must have hoped that no one was going to want to look too hard at another cop suicide. And Boswell, under pressure from her superiors to stanch the flow of embarrassing news, played right into their hands by taking the confession and running with it.
There was still the issue of Fusco’s affair with Mimi. But seen in a different light—one in which he was a victim, not a perpetrator—I supposed it was possible their fling had started after Darius had been killed. Mimi Kipps would hardly be the first widow to turn quickly to the comfort of another man in a time of grief. And who was Mike Fusco to deny her? Their relationship didn’t have anything to do with either death. It was just something that I had allowed to mislead me.
So, finally, I had it mostly figured out. The what. The when. The how. The why.
All I lacked was the who. But with young Ruthie Ginsburg acting as my guide, perhaps his corner boys could help us fill in that final blank.
There was a small voice in one of my ears—one that I probably should have heeded—that told me perhaps it was time to pull back, return to the office, and lay it all out for Tina and Brodie. They would immediately hand it over to the authorities (to folks who didn’t have “Newark Police Department” on their badges), then write some big, four-thousand-word feature (a “takeout,” in newspaper parlance) in a couple of months, once all the arrests had been made.
Except that small voice was almost immediately shouted down by a more boisterous one that reminded me this was potentially a career story. Exposing a ring of murderous, gun-dealing cops? Pulitzer prizes had been won on less, especially in this day and age, when newspapers barely have the resources—that damn word, again?—to do real reporting.
“Sorry about that,” I said. “Please continue. You said there were five or six guys?”
“Yeah. But you might not actually see all of them. I haven’t quite figured out their system yet. It seems like they got one guy sitting on the stash, one guy handling the money, one guy talking to the customers, a couple guys acting as lookouts.”
“Doesn’t really matter, as long as they’re cool with you being there.”
“Yeah, they’re cool,” he assured me. “So how are we going to play this?”
“I don’t know. I mean, they’re kids, right?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Okay, so kids are easily confused by a situation they’ve never encountered before. We just keep in mind we’re the grown-ups in this scenario and act accordingly. Tell me a little about them.”
“Well, there’s a little guy everyone calls Twan. He seems to be the spokesman. Or at least he does most of the talking. But I don’t think he’s really in charge.”
“Okay.”
“There’s another guy you’ll see, a big guy who acts real smiley and happy. Everyone calls him Doc.”
“Doc?” I said. As far as I knew, most of the world’s Docs were a minimum of sixty years old, “Doc” being one of those nicknames—like “Scooter”—that seemed to be fading out of the lingua franca.
“Yeah, not sure about why he’s Doc. But whatever you do, don’t piss him off. I’m pretty certain he’s the one who’s armed at all times.”
“Good to know.”
We stopped at a red light, and I watched as two little boys, each gripping their mother’s hand, crossed the street in front of us. They had book bags on their backs and happy little skips in their stride as they came back from school. It’s funny how Newark can be both so strange—full of gun-dealing cops—and so normal at the same time.
Ruthie continued his book report: “But the guy who really matters is this tall kid they call Famous.”
“Famous?”
“Yeah, Famous. I think maybe it’s a rap reference, but I don’t know.”
I clearly wasn’t going to be able to help him there. I was a little behind on my subscription to
Vibe
magazine.
“Anyhow, Famous barely says anything,” Ruthie continued. “I get the feeling he’s the leader, though.”
“How so?”
“He just … watches things, like he’s the king sitting on his throne. Twan will keep talking and the whole time, he’s got half an eye on Famous, waiting for him to make a little motion with his head or a hand signal or I don’t know what. But Famous is definitely the boss. He actually freaks me out a little bit.”
“Why?”
As we pulled up to Eighteenth Avenue, I soon found out.
* * *
During my years in Newark, I have come to firmly believe that the majority of kids involved in the drug trade are guilty of little more than going along to get along. They are truly products of their environment.
I know, I know, it sounds like liberal babble—and it leaves the factor of personal responsibility out of the equation—but it also happens to be true. Put most of these kids in a nice middle-class family in Franklin Lakes, and they end up heading off to Rutgers, majoring in business administration, and working in sales for a pharmaceutical company.
Put them in Newark and they end up drug dealers. The Newark kids are not inherently any more or less evil than the Franklin Lakes kids.
The first two kids I saw as I got out of the car were perfect examples of this. One was short, muscular, and a bit on the twitchy side, though not to the extent of being diagnosable. This, I guessed, was Twan.
He was on the sidewalk alongside a big, thick kid who had to be Doc. He was about six foot three and was a couple Ring Dings above three hundred pounds. Give him to the right high school football coach and a little time in the weight room, and he would have ended up playing left guard for Wisconsin.
Famous was seated on the front steps of one of the town houses, leaning against the side railing. He was tall—probably two inches taller than Doc—and lean, with bones jutting out in more than a few places. He had skin like mahogany and eyes like a lizard, large and set wide apart. There was an attempt at a beard on his chin, though it was pretty scraggly, barely visible against his dark complexion. His arms were crossed.
And I got the feeling, right away, he was a bad dude.
He was the kid that, no matter where he grew up, would have ended up involved in some malevolent venture, taking other kids along with him. Stick him in Appalachia and he’d start a crystal meth lab. Stick him on Wall Street and he’d engage in insider trading. That’s why he freaked Ruthie out: Famous was pure evil.
Still, as Uncle Bernie so pertly pointed out, this wasn’t a quilting bee. And I wasn’t here to ask him for advice on sashing and backing.
“Hey, what’s up?” Ruthie asked Twan as he approached on the sidewalk.
“Who’s he?” Twan replied, appraising me with the appropriate level of suspicion that a teenaged city kid gives a well-dressed (albeit
still
in yesterday’s clothes) thirty-something-year-old white man.
“This is my boss. He’s the one who needs to approve that story about you guys,” Ruthie said. He could have thrown a wink in my direction, but he didn’t need to. I got it.
“Oh, mos’ def, mos’ def,” Twan said, breaking into a wide smile. I translated that to mean “most definitely.”
But I wasn’t going to make this all go so easily. I figured that since I had been put in the position of being The Man, I might as well play the part.
“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Geoffrey,” I said. “We have policies and procedures that we must follow with the strictest adherence. As you know, all candidates for an
Eagle-Examiner
Good Neighbors profile must be carefully vetted to ensure they are of the highest character and moral fiber. The committee absolutely insists on it.”
There was no committee, of course. Just like there were no policies or procedures. But since I could tell Twan was only catching about half of the polysyllabic words I was using, I wasn’t too worried about being called on it. I only wished I had brought a clipboard along. A white man looks that much more convincing with a clipboard.