Eyes of the Innocent cr-2

by Brad Parks

  I hurried into the restaurant to find Khalid in his normal spot: behind the counter, standing at the grill underneath an institutional-sized oven hood, cooking twenty lunches simultaneously, the orders for which he somehow kept in his head. Frankly, Khalid’s occupation was my idea of eternal damnation. But Khalid once told me he could do it happily, ten hours a day, every day of the week-which is what he pretty much did. He opened at five every morning, when the airport porters and construction guys started drifting in, and kept the grill roaring until three in the afternoon, when the lunch crowd finally died down and he closed up shop.

  “What’s going on, Cousin Carter?” he boomed as soon as he saw me out of the corner of his eye.

  He called me “Cousin Carter” because his grandmother was half white-German, I think. He figured that one-eighth Caucasian blood must mean we’re related somehow.

  Then again, if you go back far enough, aren’t we all?

  “Cousin Khalid,” I returned. “How you been?”

  “Blessed. I’ve been blessed.”

  I watched as he displayed his virtuosity on the grill, mesmerized by his ability to juggle eggs, sausage, hamburger, potatoes, French toast, fish, grilled cheese, pancakes, and bacon.

  “So, trust me when I tell you I have a good reason for asking,” I said. “But tell me about that security camera outside.”

  “Uh-oh,” he announced to the other customers sitting at the counter, none of whom looked like me, “the white man is here playing PO-lice. We all in trouble now.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said, playing along. “You’re part white.”

  “Yeah, but only a small part. That means when the PO-lice come, they gonna leave one-eighth of me alone, but the other seven-eighths is gonna be gettin’ its ass kicked.”

  His audience cracked up. In truth, the frequency of police misconduct was exaggerated in the hood. A lot of it was just people telling stories, misrepeating versions of rumors that they themselves had greatly embellished. But it did happen on the rare occasion, and it only took one legitimate incident to lend credibility to all the loose talk for years to come.

  “So with that camera, you keep tapes or anything?” I asked.

  “Sort of, hang on,” he said. He said a few things in Spanish to one of the guys taking orders, who immediately assumed Khalid’s post behind the grill.

  “Come on,” Khalid said, walking through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY and into a small office. A newish computer sat on a cluttered table, and he parked himself in front of it.

  “This is actually pretty cool,” he continued. “They got these companies that want to charge you a billion bucks a month for monitoring, and then a billion more to store your data. But I figured out how to do it on this computer for free. The stuff you can do with wireless now is incredible.”

  How about that: Khalid, short-order chef and closeted computer nerd.

  “How much does the outside camera see of the street?” I asked.

  “It’s pretty high up, so it sees a lot. Here, let me show you,” he said as he started fiddling with the mouse.

  A few clicks later, I was looking at a reasonably wide angle view of Springfield Avenue, including the sidewalk outside the entrance to Windy’s place a few doors down.

  “How long do you keep the data?”

  “Oh, I got like a month’s worth. I got a big-ass hard drive and the way I got the camera set, it only takes a picture every six seconds. That makes the file sizes smaller, so I can keep it for a while before I got to throw it out for space.”

  “So if I wanted to see a week ago Tuesday, around lunchtime, could you do that?”

  “Yeah. Hang on a sec,” he said, and clicked some more. He opened a file folder with the appropriate date, then started choosing among data files that were labeled by time: “00:01–03:00,” “03:01–06:00,” and so on. He selected “12:01–15:00” and clicked.

  “What are we looking for?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. But I’m hoping I’ll know when I see it.”

  The full-color footage was relatively decent quality-several steps above the grainy black-and-white stuff you see on the news whenever there’s a convenience-store robbery-though the one-frame-per-six-second shutter speed made it like watching TV on jittery fast-forward.

  After a few minutes of seeing nothing promising, I started feeling bad for Khalid, who had a restaurant to run. I assured him I could handle it by myself. He gave me a brief primer on how to work the controls before going back to his grill.

  Over the next twenty minutes of footage-which covered about two hours’ worth of real time-there were one or two images that made me stop the tape and take a closer look. But nothing really seemed like what I was looking for.

  Then I finally got a hit.

  * * *

  I watched it a few times all the way through, then started going frame by frame.

  Frames 1–4: A small, white pickup truck-New Jersey license plate JNM 89V-pulls up outside Windy’s office.

  Frames 5–7: The truck, now parked, sits still, with the driver inside. It’s impossible to tell what he’s doing-listening to a good song as it finishes up? — or whether he’s idling or has cut the ignition.

  Frame 8: The driver, small statured and brown skinned, probably Hispanic, gets out of the truck. He’s wearing a black baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, a bulky sweatshirt with the hood off, and jeans. I don’t see any tools or tool belt. But he looks like a guy who might be a contractor of some sort.

  Frames 9-11: The man walks to the front door of Windy’s place. It’s hard to tell for sure, but it looks like he’s moving with a certain amount of urgency.

  Frames 12–15: I don’t actually see him ring the bell-that part must have happened in between six-second interludes-but he’s standing outside like he’s hit the button and is waiting for Denardo Webster to get off his plentiful rump and buzz him in.

  Frames 16–31: The man disappears inside. Traffic continues moving up Springfield Avenue in that herky, jerky style.

  Frames 32–33: The man reappears and walks back to his Datsun.

  Frames 34–35: The truck pulls away.

  Figuring six seconds per frame, the whole transaction lasted three and a half minutes. I briefly tried to figure out how to do a screen grab and e-mail myself some of the key images, but that was beyond my technical abilities. So I did the next best thing, printing out several of the frames on a nearby ink-jet.

  I reemerged from the office to find Khalid in his favorite spot, in front of his grill.

  “I think I found what I was looking for,” I said. “Thanks more than you know. I gotta run.”

  “All right,” Khalid announced. “The PO-lice is gone, everyone can relax now.”

  Most of them seemed to know Khalid was kidding. But a few of them gave me the stink-eye just in case.

  I was fairly certain I had found my Spanish dude-or, more important, his license plate. But there was one man who could confirm it for me, and he was just a few doors down, still working through his chicken and fries.

  “What’s going on, my friend?” Denardo Webster asked as soon as I had been buzzed in. Yeah, we were friends. Sure. Blackmail makes everyone fast pals.

  “I think I found your Spanish dude on some surveillance camera footage,” I said, laying my printouts on his desk. “This him?”

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s the guy. Damn, that’s definitely him. He’s always wearing that hoodie, too. I forgot about that. Don’t matter how cold it is, he just wears that blue hoodie.”

  “This picture jog anything else in your memory about him?”

  “You know, I don’t think I ever heard that little dude say more than like two words all the times he came in here,” Webster said. “I don’t know if he spoke much English.”

  “Got it. Anything else?”

  He thought for a second, then shook his head. “Here’s my card,” I said. “If anything else comes to you, call me.”

  “You bet.”r />
  By the time I walked out the door and got in my car, I had already dialed Rodney Pritchard’s number.

  “Pritchard,” he answered.

  “I need a quick favor,” I said.

  “It’d better be quick,” he said. “I got a date with a ham sandwich.”

  “Can you run a plate for me? New Jersey JNM 89V.”

  “Yeah, hang on,” he said, and I heard him typing. “It’s a 1991 Datsun. You must be hanging out with the rich and famous again.”

  “Yeah, I saw Paris Hilton driving it.”

  “Well, it’s registered to Hector Gomes. DOB 1/16/74.”

  He gave me an address on Van Buren Street in Newark.

  “Thanks Pritch,” I said. “I-”

  “I’ll say it for you: you owe me.”

  “I do, indeed,” I said. “Enjoy that sandwich.”

  “Mmphhll,” he said, then hung up.

  I started the Malibu and did a quick illegal U-turn back in the direction of Van Buren, which was in the Ironbound. I was about halfway there when my cell phone rang and “Thang, Sweet” flashed up on the screen.

  “Hello, darling, how have you been?”

  “I’ve been great,” she whispered. “I found Akilah. I’m with her right now, but she doesn’t know I’m calling you. So shhh.”

  “Good news,” I whispered back, even though I probably didn’t need to. “Where did you find her?”

  “I texted her and told her I forgave her for stealing my jewelry and if she needed anything she could always call me and I would still be her friend. She called me like thirty seconds later.”

  “Awesome,” I said. “So, what’d she have to say about her ex-boyfriend?”

  “Oh, she confirmed everything. She said she and Windy dated for a long time and that he bought her the house, but then a little while ago he came and told her he had to sell it because he couldn’t afford it anymore. She said she got that second job because she was going to try to work out a deal with him where she paid the mortgage herself.”

  “Why didn’t she just tell us that the first time we talked to her?” I asked.

  “She said she still loves Windy, even though they broke up, and she knew if it got out he had an affair it could hurt him politically and she didn’t want to get him in any trouble.”

  “That’s nice of her,” I said. The loyal, loving ex-girlfriend. How come I always got the vindictive ones who mailed back my favorite sweatshirt in ribbons?

  “I think she knows who killed Windy,” Sweet Thang whispered with extra fierceness.

  “Really? Who?”

  “She’s hinted at it a couple times, but she won’t tell me. She says she doesn’t want to put me at risk, whatever that means. I can’t get her to … Hang on, she’s coming, call me right back.”

  Sweet Thang hung up. I dialed her number.

  “Hello!” she said in a chipper, much louder voice. Obviously, our phone call was now with Akilah’s full awareness.

  “Hey, Lauren, it’s Carter,” I said.

  “Oh, hi, Carter!” Sweet Thang said, as if we hadn’t spoken in years. She put the phone down for a moment and announced to Akilah, “It’s Carter. Remember my colleague Carter?

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “Oh, I’m just ducky,” I said. “Where are you guys right now?”

  I could hear Sweet Thang cup the phone.

  “He wants to know where I am. Is it okay if I tell him?” she asked Akilah, who must have signaled her assent because Sweet Thang brought the phone back to her mouth and said: “We’re back at Akilah’s house, just getting a few things. I’m helping her move into a Red Cross shelter.”

  I was about to tell her that sounded like a fine idea. But before I could get the words out, I was interrupted by Sweet Thang’s loud, piercing scream.

  Then the line went dead.

  The abduction of Wendell Byers went as smoothly as Primo could have hoped, aided in no small part by Byers’s own lack of guard. The fool was convinced being a councilman made him invincible, as if elected officials didn’t bleed like everyone else.

  Byers was so unsuspecting, Primo probably could have done the job himself. But Primo brought two men along, just in case. They were pros from New York, rented thugs. They went through the front door-unlocked-and found him in the study, typing on his laptop. He was, naturally, outraged at the intrusion. But his blather only lasted so long. One of the thugs clunked him on the head with a paperweight, opening a small gash in his scalp. The other bound him with an electrical cord. Together, they dragged him out of his house while Primo, having nothing else to do, grabbed the laptop.

  It had been an afterthought, taking the computer. Later, when a broken Byers started whispering secrets, Primo realized it had been a brilliant bit of criminal intuition.

  But first Primo had to do the breaking. They tossed Byers in the trunk of Primo’s sedan, then brought him back to the warehouse. When Byers came to and found himself tied to a chair, he was indignant at first, filling the room with his how-dare-yous and you’ll-pay-for-thises. It was typical Byers bluster, and Primo wanted to silence it.

  So he took his nail gun, grabbed Byers by the wrist, and shot a nail into Byers’s right hand, actually pinning it to the wall behind him. The man yelped with pain, cursing Primo loudly and profanely-as if it would do any good.

  There was still too much fight in Byers. So, slowly, Primo took it out of him. He positioned a clock in front of Byers’s eyes and informed the councilman that he would be leaving the room for ten minutes. Then he returned and punched a nail in Byers’s forearm.

  Primo knew the anticipation of pain was almost as excruciating as the pain itself. So he kept returning every ten minutes, wordlessly shooting a nail into another part of Byers’s body, then departing. After forty minutes, Byers stopped cursing him. After an hour and a half, Byers was more than ready to talk. After three hours, Byers was begging to talk. But Primo waited until four hours passed before he chose to listen.

  That’s when it came pouring out of Byers-all the answers to Primo’s questions, everything Primo needed to bring this messy arrangement to a neat conclusion. Whenever Primo decided Byers was being something slightly less than a hundred percent forthcoming, he left the room, announcing he would return in ten minutes. Sometimes he left the room even when Byers was cooperating. It kept Byers’s fear at the appropriate level.

  Eventually, the councilman began growing weak, slipping in and out of consciousness. So Primo finally finished him off with a few nails to the head. By that point, Primo had already learned everything he needed to know.

  Other than the laptop-which Primo already possessed-Byers had left behind just one piece of evidence that could prove troublesome for Primo. But Primo could take care of that quickly enough.

  CHAPTER 8

  There is something about the female scream that juices my body chemistry. Probably it’s hardwired, a remnant of the days when my more hirsute forebearers clung together in nomadic bands wandering an inhospitable planet. Back then, a woman’s scream meant someone was about to be sabertooth tiger lunch. Or something like that. Whatever it was, I suddenly found myself wired on adrenaline, with my heart pounding and my body primed for large-motor activity.

  My hands were shaking, but I managed to force my fingers to call Sweet Thang back, on the off chance it was nothing-like a big spider scared her and made her drop her phone.

  But my call went straight to voice mail and, besides, I knew this wasn’t arachnid related. Sweet Thang had made that kind of noise when Akilah jumped her and put a knife to her throat. It was an I’m-in-trouble-come-help-me-now-don’t-dawdle-please kind of scream.

  I pulled a screeching U-turn, the kind that involved jumping a curb because the road just wasn’t wide enough, and sped toward Akilah’s house. As I blew through a series of red lights-I thought they were orange, Officer-I called my favorite detective sergeant, in hopes of getting some reinforcement.

  “Raines here.”

 
“I think Akilah Harris knows who killed Windy,” I said. “And I think the killer is after her.”

  “Whoah, whoah, whoah, slow down. What happened?”

  I relayed what Sweet Thang told me about Akilah knowing more than she let on, then told him about the scream.

  Raines was unimpressed.

  “All you really know for sure is that your colleague’s cell phone doesn’t work,” he said.

  “Come on, you’ve got two young women in trouble, probably kidnapped or worse,” I said, feeling a little frantic that I couldn’t impress on him the gravity of that scream. “Can’t you put out an amber alert or something?”

  “I can’t put out an amber alert because someone yelled just before her cell phone battery conked out,” Raines replied. “We would need confirmation an abduction had occurred. And besides, amber alerts are for kids, not adults.”

  I knew that, of course. I also knew, thinking as a levelheaded cop-and not an easily addled newspaper reporter-he was right: I had a strong hunch something was wrong, but little more than that.

  “If you can get a witness to say they saw a forcible abduction, we’ve got a different scenario on our hands,” Raines continued. “Otherwise, you got nothing.”

  “Can you at least ask a squad car to meet me at the house? Something?” I begged. “For all I know, it’s a hostage situation and they’re still holed up inside.”

  “Fine,” Raines said. “I’ll ask patrol to send a car over. But I’m a little busy, you know? I got a pretty major investigation here, and I’m going to have to ask you to lose this number if you keep bothering me with half-baked hunches.”

  He hung up before I could reply.

  Continuing to drive as if traffic signals were mere suggestions, I contemplated my next move, concluding quickly I didn’t have one. I couldn’t exactly charge into Akilah’s house, guns blazing. Not when the the most dangerous weapon I had in my car was nail clippers.

  Thankfully, I arrived at Akilah’s simultaneously with a white and black Newark patrol car. Two cops, a tall black man and a short Hispanic woman, got out. I waved to them.

  “We were told we got a possible DV,” the guy said. “You the one who called it in?”