by Brad Parks
As I leaned back to ponder that question, I became aware my friendship bread was under attack.
“I’m starving,” Tommy said as he hacked off a piece with my plastic knife. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” I said. “I thought you were babysitting the New York press corps.”
“I was. Buster Hays took over for me,” Tommy said, carefully transferring a slender slice to his plate. “He said a scene like that was no place for a little girl like me.”
Tommy lifted the bread to his mouth, then paused. “I swear, one day I’m going to stick my foot up his ass so far he’s going to be able to taste my Tod’s.”
“Tod’s … those must be … shoes?”
“You are so straight it hurts,” he said as he chewed. “Oh, my God, this is so good! Who made it?”
“Sweet Thang.”
Tommy stopped mid-chew. “You know you have to be careful of women who bake for you,” he said. “They’re all crazy.”
“Why does everyone keep saying that?”
“Cuv ith twue,” he said, through a full mouth.
“How would you know?”
He swallowed and smirked. “Actually, I don’t. But I bumped into Tina and she told me to come over here and say it.”
“Evil,” I said. “Anyhow, I ran down our friend Donato Semedo. It turns out he’s dead at the present time.”
“Let me get this straight: they let a dead guy take out a rental car, but they make me wait until I’m twenty-five?”
“I know. What a country.”
Tommy chewed some more. The refined sugar and all that other bad stuff didn’t give him pause. Then again, his metabolism hadn’t turned thirty yet. Just wait.
“So did you say Donato Semedo showed up in one of your ELEC reports?” I asked.
“I think so, let me check,” he said, and went to retrieve a notepad from his desk. “I started writing down all the names that didn’t look like they ought to be giving money to a Central Ward councilman. Yeah, here it is. Semedo comma Donato.”
He held up the pad, as if it was evidence.
“So here’s a thought,” I said. “If Donato Semedo is a dead guy, what’s the possibility some of the other names on that list are also dead guys?”
“I’d say it’s a good possibility,” Tommy said.
“You mind if your notebook comes over to my desk and plays for a little while?”
“Okay. But no unhealthy snacks and no scary movies.”
“Got it,” I said as he handed it over.
I started by running the names on Tommy’s list through the voter rolls. Anyone who was engaged enough in the political process to make a donation ought to be registered to vote, right? True, it wasn’t going to be perfect. Some names were too common-Jose Silva being the Portuguese equivalent of John Smith. And since some of these people would presumably be foreign born, they might not have earned the right to vote.
But that was where the death index again came in handy. And I started getting hits. Inacio Barbosa. Dead. Martinho Fortes. Dead. Cornelio Moniz. Dead. Desiderio Ronaldo. Dead.
Within half an hour, I had more than a dozen confirmed cases of daisy-pushing donors who had, in a fit of posthumous generosity, given roughly $50,000 to candidate Wendell A. Byers Jr. And, beyond those I could say with confidence were deceased, there were at least another two dozen whose mortality could be considered suspect. All told, the haul of potentially dirty money in Byers’s campaign coffers was over $100,000.
I went to Tommy’s desk to return his notebook.
“Your notebook played well with others,” I said. “But he has a lot of naughty names in him.”
“Yeah, what’s up with that?”
“Well, this is just a guess, but most of the time when you have bogus campaign contributors, it means someone is trying to circumvent contribution limits. The classic way of doing it is, say I’m president of a company that really needs a road-paving contract and I want to throw fifty grand at the mayor. I can have my company give so much-the dollar amount always changes, but it’s around ten grand-and I can give my ten grand personally. But I’m stuck after that. So I enlist a bunch of my employees, hand them each ten grand, and instruct them to make a generous donation in their own name.”
“Okay. So if you can have living employees do that, why enlist the nonliving?”
“Because, matey,” I said, affecting a pirate brogue, “dead men tell no tales.”
“Ah, pirates,” Tommy said wistfully. “To be stuck aboard a ship full of men out at sea for months at a time.”
Before I could jog Tommy out of that little fantasy, my cell phone rang.
I recognized the number as belonging to Detective Sergeant Kevin Raines.
“Hello,” I said. “Is it me you’re looking for?”
“Yeah, hey,” he said quickly. “It’s Raines.”
“What, no props for the Lionel reference?”
“I’m a little busy. I just realized I never returned your call from yesterday. How did things go with Mrs. Byers?”
“I can give you the play-by-play if you want, but I’m pretty sure that’s a dead end. We paid a visit to Akilah’s sister last night, and she told us Mrs. Byers has known about the affair for a long time-and besides, the two lovebirds split up several weeks ago. At the moment, I’m more interested in Donato Semedo.”
“Hang on a sec,” he said. “How the hell do you know about Donato Semedo? We haven’t told anyone about that.”
“What do you think I do here, sit around playing with myself all day waiting for you guys to tell me what’s going on?”
“Well, no, but-”
“You know he’s dead, right?”
“You mean the original Donato Semedo? Yeah, we figured that out,” Raines said.
“Know anything about the guy pretending to be Donato Semedo?”
“Yeah, he’s short, broad, and favors hats that keep his face hidden from security cameras.”
“He also favors nail guns from what I hear,” I said.
“Goddammit. Now how the hell do you know that?”
“Sometimes a reporter just knows things,” I said. “Did you also know that he made a contribution to Windy Byers’s most recent reelection effort?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Well, isn’t that illegal, Officer?”
“I got a murder on my hands,” Raines said. “You think I care about a campaign finance law violation?”
“But don’t you think it’s interesting that there was a connection between Byers and the guy who killed him?”
“Maybe. I’m still trying to get basic forensics done at this point. I don’t have time for all that Oliver Stone stuff right now. But if that’s really flipping your skirt up, go talk to Denardo Webster.”
Denardo Webster. The name rang a very soft bell, then I placed it: Windy’s chief of staff, the no-neck guy who escorted Mrs. Byers at the press conference.
“He’ll probably play dumb at first, but don’t let him. He knows what’s up,” Raines continued. Then, before disconnecting, he added, “I can’t believe I’m saying this to a reporter. But if you learn anything, let me know.”
I thanked him and turned to Tommy.
“See if you can find anything that ties all these names together, other than a predilection for taking long dirt naps,” I said. “I’ve got an errand to run.”
* * *
The constituent services office for Central Ward Councilman Wendell A. Byers was located on Springfield Avenue, just a few doors down from African Flavah, my favorite breakfast spot. And while I was tempted to visit Khalid and spend some quality time with his pancakes, that would have to wait.
My last act before leaving the office was to type the name Denardo Webster into our public employee database. It told me he was being paid $72,253 a year for his services. This, of course, gave me questions to ponder as I drove. Did a Newark councilman actually have a staff that needed chiefing? And what, exactly, did he do all day that was worth $72,253?
I suspected the answer would be: not much.
The office was a small storefront with impressive decal work on the glass door. The crest of the Newark City Council and Windy’s name were outlined in gold. The view inside was blocked by metal shades, which were lowered and drawn. Underneath the decal, taped to the door, was a handwritten sign that said APPOINTMENT’S ONLY. NO DROP IN’S PLEASE.
I tried not to let the wanton apostrophe abuse grate at me as I pulled on the door. It was locked. I pressed the doorbell and, as I waited, fought the urge to rip the paper off the door and scrub out the offending punctuation. I hit the button a second time and, finally, heard it buzz open.
I found Denardo Webster sitting in full recline, his feet propped on a desk. Up close, he was even bigger than he had seemed at the press conference: my height but probably twice my weight. Back in the day, he had been someone’s defensive tackle-or someone’s bouncer. And even now that he had allowed himself to go soft, I got the impression he’d be handy to have around if you needed someone to lift a piano.
Not that he was working all that hard at the moment. An extra-large Styrofoam container of fried chicken and French fries sat on his rather generous lap. And he was about halfway through demolishing every grease-soaked morsel. The boss was dead, but it apparently hadn’t spoiled this guy’s appetite.
“Can I help you?” he said in a deep, thick, syrupy voice.
“I’m Carter Ross with the Eagle-Examiner,” I said. “You must be Denardo Webster.”
He took a bite of chicken and sat there, stoically, staring at me as he chewed. He swallowed and wiped his mouth with a napkin before answering.
“You got an appointment?” he asked.
“No,” I said impatiently. “If I had known Councilman Byers was going to die today, I surely would have made one. But it kind of caught me by surprise.”
More staring. The feet were still on the desk.
“I can’t help you if you don’t have an appointment,” he said.
Without exerting too much effort, he leaned slightly forward and grabbed a toothpick, then began cleaning his right front tooth.
“Okay,” I said, trying to keep from losing my mind. “Could I please make an appointment for, say, right now.”
“Can’t,” he said. “I’m on my lunch break.”
He chomped down on the toothpick with his back molars and reclined further.
“As a matter of fact,” he continued. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I’m on my lunch break. The office is closed right now.”
“You’re kidding me, right?” I said, close to yelling.
He looked at me impassively. Even the toothpick, which he lazily shifted from side to side, was moving slowly.
I considered my options. Strangling the guy was one of them. But that wouldn’t ultimately get me the information I needed, and, besides, I’m not sure I could locate his neck, much less choke it.
Trying to intimidate him with a damning article about bureaucratic inefficiency-what did he do for his seventy-two clams a year anyhow? — didn’t feel like it would motivate this guy much, either.
Then, magically, wonderfully, I heard Tommy’s voice in my head: I just always heard stuff about Windy Byers doing it on the down low with one of his council staffers.
I glanced around the office. There didn’t appear to be any other council staff besides the chief. Then I looked at the massive man stretched out before me and wondered, was it really possible? This guy and Windy? You’d be talking about more than six hundred pounds of man love rolling around on each other. Could it be?
Only one way to find out.
“Look, I know you and Windy liked to do it, okay?” I said.
As soon as I said the words “do it,” the toothpick dropped out of his mouth. And I knew it was true. Congratulations, Denardo Webster. I now own you.
“His wife knew about it, too-Windy told her,” I lied. “She and I agreed that it was best kept out of the newspaper-no sense in dragging out something that would just hurt a dead man’s reputation. But if you don’t cooperate with me, you give me no choice…”
“Just take it easy, take it easy,” he said, the molasses suddenly gone from his vocal cords. “Let’s just be cool, okay?”
I looked at his desk and saw the picture of a middle-aged woman and a pair of chunky little boys who favored their daddy. Yeah, I definitely owned him.
“Oh, I can be cool,” I said. “But I need some answers, and I don’t plan on waiting for an appointment to get them.”
“Okay, okay, yeah, sorry about that. It’s just I get people coming in off the street all day long and-”
I held my hand up to stop what would otherwise be a stream of excuses. “Don’t worry about it,” I said, and pulled out my notebook. “Tell me about Donato Semedo, Inacio Barbosa, Martinho Fortes…”
I could have continued, but there was not the slightest bit of recognition on his face.
“I got no idea who those dudes are, I swear,” he said.
“They all made pretty sizable campaign contributions to your boss,” I said.
“Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, I know what you’re talking about,” he said. “But, I swear, I never met them. I don’t know who those dudes are.”
“I’m sure you don’t. They’re all dead.”
He looked at me quizzically.
“Yeah?”
“Them and at least a dozen others. All dead people. All giving money to Windy Byers.”
“No foolin’,” he said.
I nodded.
“Look, all I know is, this dude came in all the time and gave me an envelope with cash in it,” Webster said. “Then he’d hand me a piece of paper with the name of the donor. I don’t know if it’s someone who’s dead or alive. I just write it down in the logbook, because Windy, he likes to put it in this computer file he has.”
“Computer file?” I asked, my interest piqued. “You mean, like an Excel spreadsheet?”
“Yeah. Whenever I got cash, Windy wanted to know so he could put it in his laptop.”
“Why in the world would he want to log illegal campaign contributions in a spreadsheet?”
“Maybe he didn’t know they were illegal,” Denardo said.
Even though Windy had never been the quickest draw in the saloon, I’m not sure even he could have been that willfully ignorant. He had to know the money was dirty. Then again, perhaps he hoped that if he logged it in his Excel file-then reported it for all the world to see on those ELEC reports-it would have the effect of cleaning it. It would at least give him some plausible deniability if he was ever investigated. Okay, so maybe he wasn’t as dumb as I thought.
“Do you have a copy of the file?” I asked.
“Naw, I didn’t do any of the computer stuff. I just did pen and paper. When the Spanish dude gave me cash, I wrote him a receipt. Then he’d leave. That’s all I know.”
“Tell me about the Spanish dude,” I said.
“I don’t know. He’s not the boss or nothing. He’s just a … a runner or something.”
“He got a name?” I asked.
“We never got real friendly.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Oh, man, he’s like … I don’t really look at him, you know?” Webster said. “He’s a Spanish dude. Kind of a little dude like those Spanish guys are. Sometimes he’s got tools on his belt. I think he’s like a construction worker or something.”
“What kind of car does he drive?”
“I don’t know.” Webster pointed to the drawn shades. “I can’t see the street from here.”
“How often does he come in?”
“Pretty regular. Every couple of weeks. Sometimes more, sometimes less.”
“When was the last time he was here?” I asked.
Webster reached into his desk, pulled out an account book, and leafed to the last page in which there were entries.
“Last week,” he said. “On Tuesday. I remember it was around lunchtime.”
> That narrowed it down at least a little. Though I suspected his definition of lunchtime was rather generous.
“How much did he give?”
“Ten grand.”
“Where does it come from?”
“I don’t know, I swear. Please.”
I concentrated on Denardo’s pudgy face, searching for any kind of twitch or eye shift that might suggest artifice. But all I saw was an earnest, bordering-on-desperate gaze in return.
“No clue who his boss is?”
Webster shook his head. “Look, man, I swear, I ain’t clownin’ you or nothing. If I knew, I’d tell you. I just don’t know. Windy, he did his own thing and I did my own thing, you know? It wasn’t like we told each other everything.”
“Okay,” I said, getting ready to leave. “I’m sure I’m going to have more questions. I’ll call you. What’s your cell number?”
He gave it to me and added, “We’re cool, right?”
“Well, that depends. You’re not going to give me a hard time again, are you?”
“No way, man,” he said. “Anything you need. No appointment necessary.”
* * *
As I wandered back out to Springfield Avenue, I knew I needed to find the mysterious Spanish dude, who was probably either Portuguese or Brazilian, given the names he toted on those little pieces of paper.
I got back in my car and sat there hoping maybe, somehow, the Spanish dude would just drive up and park in front of me, with his envelope stuffed full of cash, and tell me everything-who he worked for, what the money was about, why it resulted in Windy needing to be dead. I could have the story written by five o’clock.
But that wasn’t going to happen. He was never coming back. And the chances that someone on a bustling avenue might have rememebered one random Hispanic guy who pulled up on the street every couple of weeks and went into Windy Byers’s constituent services office? Slim.
If only there was a camera in the office. But I’d looked. No camera. I stared out at the street some more, watching the traffic scoot along, looking at the buildings, reading their signs, waiting for inspiration.
And then I saw what I needed. High atop the three-story brick building that housed African Flavah, there was Khalid’s bulletproof camera, safe inside its little cage, bolted into the concrete.
