“Uh…” he said. Yep, I had definitely lost him.
“It means the pipes are backing up. So, again: if the pregnancy test on the toilet water comes back negative, some of the food coloring has bounced back at you. That means the pipe hasn’t been connected to the sewer and we have a scandal on our hands, because you can bet the contractor charged the Newark Housing Authority for pipes that connected to the sewer.”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, you’re right.”
I grinned. Having spun him around on a verbal baseball bat, it was now time to push him in a random direction and watch him fall down.
“Now, if the toilet is backed up, I’m going to need a full social history on each of the family members,” I said. “I want to know everything about them—where they came from, how they got here, what brand of toothpaste their grandfather used. I want
everything
. It should take a minimum of two hours, possibly four hours to get all the information you need. I want to be able to really tell these people’s stories. Then, once you’re done with the first house, you have to move onto the second. We need to get the whole street.”
“Okay, got it,” he said. “Are you going to meet me out there?”
“No. I’ve got other stuff to do. I figured this is simple enough for an intern to handle.”
“Umm … uhh…” he said, because I knew his instructions from Tina were probably to follow me and report back to her. I also knew that the block in question had twenty-six new units on it. If he was diligent—and worked nights and weekends—he ought to be done in about three weeks.
Then I went in for the kill: “Now, whatever you do, don’t tell Tina. She’ll get really,
really
excited that you’re doing this and she might not be able to contain herself. She might force us to rush this into the newspaper, and we don’t want to rush it. We want all our ducks in a row on this one.”
“R-right,” he said.
“Okay. I want a progress update tomorrow afternoon,” I said before I hung up. “I expect to hear from you in twenty-four hours.”
Maybe then I’d let the kid off the hook. Maybe.
* * *
With Ruthie out of my way, I turned my attention back to the Kipps conundrum—and my knotted scorecard. I needed some kind of tiebreaker, some unimpeachable source that could give me a definitive thumbs-up, thumbs-down.
The answer, I suspected, lay with the Newark Police Internal Affairs. But that was a safe I wouldn’t be able to crack by myself. The kind of officers who gravitated to Internal Affairs are not your normal cops. To want to join the police takes a certain adherence to order and structure. To want to police the police requires an altogether different level of regimentation. It’s not the kind of makeup that makes one prone to blabbing with reporters.
Still, I knew there was one person who might have the keys to that particular kingdom. And, unfortunately, that man was our veteran cops reporter, Buster Hays.
I say “unfortunately” because Buster—in addition to being cantankerous, curmudgeonly, and condescending—delighted in lording this sort of thing over me. He came to the
Eagle-Examiner
by way of da Bronx, and he fancied himself the last common man in a newsroom overrun with elites who are overeducated and out of touch. And, in that respect, he believed I was the personification of everything that had gone wrong with the newspaper
And yet? Though I’m sure we would never admit it, we shared a certain commonality of purpose and values, inasmuch as we both believed in getting the story right. So he seldom could resist helping me. Buster had a network of moles, informants, and gadflies—contained in four bulging Rolodexes that he steadfastly refused to computerize—that could shame the director of the CIA. He had developed them carefully, and through a reporting career that spanned parts of five decades, he had never burned a source. And you better believe his sources knew that.
His Rolodex was a kind of treasure that he had shared with me, albeit judiciously, throughout the years. And in the hopes he would again show his grudging generosity, I sat in my still-running car and dialed his desk.
“Hays.”
“Buster, it’s Carter.”
“Whaddayuwant, Ivy?” I heard in response.
In Buster’s world, Amherst was an Ivy League school. I had stopped trying to convince him otherwise.
“I’m working on a story about Darius Kipps—”
“The cop who swallowed a bullet? They finally put out a press release about that. I already shoveled something into the Slop. You’re wasting your time. I don’t think the dead tree is going to want more than six inches.”
The dead tree is what even dinosaurs like Buster had taken to calling the physical newspaper.
“Yeah, I know, I’m just indulging my curiosity a little bit. I spent some time with the family this morning and learned some stuff that made Kipps seem like he wasn’t the type to go killing himself. But then I also got a guy who says Kipps might have been tangled up with IA.”
“I got a guy who said the same thing,” Buster said, because, of course, I could never be allowed to have sources who knew stuff his sources hadn’t already told him. “What about it?”
“Well, you got anyone in IA who might tell us what the deal was?”
“What’s it matter at this point?”
“I don’t know. I just feel like we’re not getting anything close to the full story.”
“Well, Ivy, maybe they never taught you this at your fancy college, but you know the I in IA stands for ‘internal,’ right? That means it’s stuff they don’t want to get out.”
“So, what, you saying you don’t have anyone?” I asked, because there was no better way to goad Buster into action than to challenge the depth or breadth of his law enforcement contacts.
“I’m not saying that. I’m saying it’s going to take a little finesse, is all. I might have to call in a favor or two.”
“Well, I’d appreciate it if—”
“So that means
you
have to do
me
a favor.”
“Uh, okay, shoot,” I said, fairly certain this was somehow going to involve picking up dry cleaning or mowing a lawn.
Instead, Buster said: “You’re doing my Good Neighbors.”
Good Neighbors was the name of a feature that ran six days a week in our community news section. As its name suggested, it was a puff piece about someone who had done a kindly deed, whether it was volunteering, rescuing a cat from a tree, or selling hair to Locks of Love. It was a lovely thing for the readers and for the person featured, I’m sure. But from a journalistic standpoint, it was about as useful as bunions.
Back before the economic tsunami that washed away all trace of newspapering as we once knew it, we had enough resources—okay, it’s a handy word sometimes—that we could farm out Good Neighbors to our network of stringers, mostly housewives who delighted in doing stories that made everyone feel warm and fuzzy. Then the stringer budget was unceremoniously eliminated. As a result, every reporter at the paper had been put on a rotation that required them to produce one Good Neighbors piece every six months or so. In terms of things I liked to do with my time, it ranked ahead of oral surgery but behind trips to the DMV.
“Oh, what the…” I moaned. “Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack.”
“Jesus, Buster, I’m busy. I got this Kipps thing and a big thing about public housing that Tina wants by the end of the week. I don’t have time to—”
“You want IA? You give me Good Neighbors.”
“You … you wouldn’t.”
“Oh, I would. I am.”
“Couldn’t I just pick up your dry cleaning?”
“My clothes are wash-and-wear.”
“Mow your lawn?”
“I live in a condo.”
I thought about making some kind of argument about how, as colleagues working for the same noble cause, we ought to help each other without expectation of reward. But I didn’t need to be treated to the sound of Buster cackling in my ear.
“Couldn’t you just … I don’t know, do me a solid?”
“I’m gonna teach the Ivy boy a foreign language. Quid pro quo. It’s Latin for ‘quit your whining.’ We got a deal or not?”
Not seeing any other way out, I just sighed and said, “Deal.”
“It’s due Wednesday morning,” Buster said. “Don’t make me wait.”
* * *
The sun was getting low in the sky by this point, which meant it was high time to get off the streets. Like Officer Hightower said, the only white people who came into this part of Newark after dark were there to buy drugs. For someone of my pallor, sitting alone in a car on Irvine Turner Boulevard was an invitation to dealers to approach the window with that innocent-but-loaded question, “You looking?”
And I wasn’t. So I went back to the newsroom, which was nearing that familiar peak in its daily intensity level. For as much as things had changed in the world of newspapering—with the de-emphasis of the dead tree product and the movement to put more online faster than ever before—some things were the same as they had been a generation ago. Six o’clock is still a busy time. Nonbreaking stories are due, and reporters who have otherwise been procrastinating all day finally get serious about their tasks.
I knew, with a Good Neighbors now on my plate, I should probably join them. But having mentally tabled that until the morning, I sauntered back to the library—or the “Info Palace” as the librarians liked to call it—where I knew I could find Kira O’Brien, my newly discovered romantic interest.
Kira was twenty-eight, a fairly recent graduate of Rutgers’ Master of Library Studies program. In some ways, she’s textbook librarian, at least at work. She dresses like a Young Republican, keeps mostly to herself, and has a bookish air about her—all of which belies the fact that the moment she leaves the office, she’s basically insane.
Our relationship began at a house party being hosted by a mutual friend from the newspaper. It was late and we were somewhere between a little and a lot drunk. She was dressed like she had come from either a comic book convention or a sci-fi/fantasy convention. (I get them all confused, I just know each seems to involve women in skimpy clothing being leered at by nerds.) I went over to her to make some kind of clever comment about her hair, which had been dyed blue and purple.
We ended up having a lovely chat. And I noticed, to my surprise, she had a tongue piercing, which she never wore at the office. So—and this was, clearly, the booze talking—I asked her if she had anything else pierced. She hauled me into a bedroom and showed me. Before very long, the demonstration became rather aerobic in nature.
And that, more or less, was the basis of our relationship so far. We went places (often with her in costume). We got drunk with her friends (because hers were more interesting than mine). And then we did our aerobics (oftentimes in unconventional and/or public places). It was an arrangement that had allowed me to cross a number of items off my bucket list, some of which—like getting intimate with Princess Leia in an elevator—I didn’t even know were on there in the first place.
It was unclear if she was going to be a girl I could take home to Mother, or if we would even last that long. But she was feisty and fun, and we had dynamite chemistry. I have come to recognize that, between my sensible car, bland wardrobe, boring hairstyle, and the other totally uninteresting aspects of my life, I need a little crazy to balance things out. And that’s what Kira has been for me lately. My quota of crazy.
“Hey, what’s going on?” I said.
She looked up at me and smiled. Kira is small, dark-haired, and dangerously cute—dangerous because she knows just how cute she is. She has blue eyes that manage to be sweet and mischievous at the same time. Plus, what man can resist the naughty librarian?
“Hey,” she said, “want to go to a party in a bit?”
“A party … tonight? It’s a Monday.”
“What, you not allowed to go out on school nights?” she taunted.
“No, I just … okay. A party. On a Monday.”
She cast her eyes left and right, tilted toward me, and whispered, “It’s an absinthe party.”
“What’s an absinthe party?” I whispered back.
“I don’t know, actually,” she said, still hushed. “And I don’t know why we’re whispering about it.” She returned to regular volume: “I guess it’s just a party where we all sit around and drink absinthe.”
“Hasn’t absinthe been shown to cause mental illness?”
“I don’t know. Hopefully, yes.”
“Uh, okay, sounds like a blast.”
“I’m done here at nine,” she said. “We can go over together. Now go away. I have work to do.”
Following orders, I walked back to my corner of the newsroom, passing the All-Slop News Desk along the way. It was actually a collection of desks, of course, with a half-dozen small televisions coming down from the ceiling in the middle. The monitors are equipped to show both Internet and television, allowing us to monitor our competition across a variety of media simultaneously.
This time I was surprised to see one of the televisions contained an image of the Reverend Doctor Alvin LeRioux, all three-hundred-plus sweat-mopping pounds of him.
But it wasn’t one of his commercials. It looked like he was just beginning … a press conference? He was standing on the steps of Redeemer Love Christian Church in front of a bank of microphones. All the local television channels had obviously been invited. The agent-of-Satan local newspaper had not been.
“Oh, what the hell is
he
doing?” I asked no one in particular.
A few of the reporters chained to the All-Slop looked up at me, then reburied their heads in their laptops. We were getting the feed from the local twenty-four-hour news station, which always cut into press conferences on the early side, so it hadn’t quite started yet. But it was clearly about to. The camera was tight on Pastor Al, who was gesturing for someone to join him at the podium. Then the camera panned out slightly to capture Mimi Kipps, dressed in her finest suit, with her chin held defiantly high, coming to her minister’s side.
“Now what the hell is
she
doing?” I asked, but again no one paid attention to me.
I grabbed the appropriate remote control and turned up the volume just as the festivities began.