Faces of the Gone cr-1

by Brad Parks

  A deranged drug lord who sent corporate memos to his dealers like they were middle managers in cubicles? Yep, Brodie would get such a boner over that he wouldn’t be able to walk.

  I looked at the clock on my cell phone. 7:37 P.M. No point trying to squeeze it into tomorrow’s paper. We had plenty of news already, what with buildings blowing up across the circulation area. Besides, the Sunday editor would be cruising for something that would keep us in the lead on the Ludlow Street story. This would fit that need.

  It occurred to me I also might want to make some copies of the Director’s gruesomely illustrated package and hand them over to the National Drug Bureau. But then I remembered my last interaction with L. Pete, which had left me hoping he contracted an incapacitating toe fungus. If he wasn’t going to be better at sharing, I would just keep my toys to myself. He could read about the photos in Sunday’s paper like everyone else; then maybe I would hand them over. If he promised to behave. Or if he subpoenaed me.

  I looked at my phone again: 7:40. Red had been with the sketch artist for about an hour, and I couldn’t decipher whether that was a good sign (because Red gave them a lot of detail for an accurate portrait) or a bad one (because Red was so incoherent he was making the perp look like the Elephant Man).

  He reemerged a few minutes later, triumphantly waving a sheet of paper above his head.

  “This is him,” he said. “This is the guy.”

  This was Van Man. I looked at the sketch, hoping it might spark some recognition. Red had described a doughy-cheeked, thick-necked, middle-aged white man with a receding hairline. The guy looked more like a candidate for erectile dysfunction medicine than a serial murderer. I don’t want to say the sketch was completely useless, inasmuch as I suppose it could rule out some people. But if you went by this picture alone, half the country club members in New Jersey had just become suspects.

  “I tol’ the computer what he look like and the computer done made this picture,” Red said. “Tha’s one smart computer.”

  “We just got the system,” Rogers told me. “It lets us tweak things until we get it just right. Cuts the time to get a sketch done in half.”

  I looked down at the picture again, trying to imprint the face in my brain in case it should suddenly round a corner in my immediate future.

  “So what will you guys do with this?” I asked.

  “We’ll send it to our many friends in the media, of course,” Rogers said. “Then we’ll show it to the officers in the patrol division.”

  “And then you give it to the National Drug Bureau?” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “What do you mean, you guess? You said they’ve taken over the case.”

  “Oh, they’ve taken it, all right. The lead guy in the Newark office called our chief and made a big stink. Then when our detectives paid them the courtesy of going over there with a box full of evidence, they gave ’em the usual ‘we’re feds, we’re better than you’ act. Bunch of jerk-offs, if you ask me. But you can’t quote me on that.”

  Red wasn’t any more eager to hang at police headquarters than I was. So we cleared out and I took us in the direction of the Pathmark on Bergen Street, the only major chain supermarket in Newark. A deal was, after all, a deal. I encouraged Red to buy whatever he wanted-after all, it was sort of my fault his last haul of groceries had blown up. But Red’s tab only came to $41.05.

  “Can’t carry but so much anyway,” he told me.

  I took him back to Booker T with misgivings about dropping him back into such a cold night. The wind had picked up again, and the forecast was calling for a low of seventeen degrees. Red didn’t seem concerned by it. He was shaking a bit, but I didn’t think it was from the cold.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to take you to a shelter?” I asked.

  “Naw, I gotta get me a little something to drink. An’ if you go to the shelter, they take it from you,” he said as another tremor racked his body. He was nearly sober and his nervous system was starting to go haywire without booze.

  “Suit yourself,” I said as the car pulled to a stop outside Booker T.

  “Say, you mind loanin’ me a few bucks?” he asked nervously.

  I reached into my wallet and pulled out a ten. Perhaps it wasn’t the most responsible thing to do, enabling his disease. But it felt like the humane thing to do under the circumstances. “This do?” I asked.

  “Oh, that’ll do fine,” he said, pocketing it quickly. “I sho’ do ’preciate it.”

  “No problem. Is this where I can find you over the next couple days or will you be on the move?”

  “Well, Mary ’n me got usselves set up in Building Three pretty good,” he said. “I s’pose we be staying there for a little while.”

  “All right,” I said. “Stay warm.”

  Then I added, “Thanks for your help, Red,” and stuck out my right hand.

  He grasped it-which was like shaking hands with forty-grit sandpaper-and flashed me a two-tooth smile.

  “You best watch out for yo’self, youngster,” he said. “This ain’ no place for a white boy after dark.” He thought for a moment and, still holding the handshake, said, “This ain’ no place for no one after dark.”

  “I’ll be careful, promise,” I said. He let go of my hand, grabbed his groceries, and stumbled off into the night.

  I watched him until he disappeared around the corner, then got moving. I had pushed my luck long enough.

  Having nowhere else to go, I drove back to the office to make peace with my new roommate, Tina. On the way in, I passed Buster Hays, who was in the lobby, pulling on a trench coat.

  “Have a nice one, Ivy,” Buster said.

  “You, too, Hays,” I said, and was about to get in the elevator when something stopped me, something that had been tickling my brain for the last few hours and had now developed into a full-blown itch.

  “Hey, you got a quick second?” I said.

  Hays finished wrestling with his coat and glanced at his watch. “I’m officially thirty-seven minutes overdue for my first Scotch of the weekend. Make it fast.”

  “It’s about Irving Wallace.”

  “Ah, Irving. He help you out?”

  “He did. Twice, actually. I’m just curious: how do you know him?”

  “Aw, shoot, Irving?” Buster said. “When I met him, you weren’t even a stain on your mom’s sheets.”

  “So, it’s been a while. .”

  “Oh, it’s been a while,” Hays said, enjoying himself. This was Hays in his glory: seizing the chance to remind a young whippersnapper how much more he knew about the world, how many more sources he had, or how much longer he had been around the neighborhood. And I, being a young whippersnapper in need of the information, had no choice but to listen.

  “Let’s see,” Hays continued. “I met Irving Wallace in roughly 1970? Or 1972? The first couple years I worked for this paper, I covered high school sports. You might not believe it, but back in the day, Irving Wallace, the mild-mannered chemist, was a beast of a center for the Summit High School boys’ basketball team.”

  “Really?” I said, genuinely surprised.

  “Oh, yeah. You see more kids like it now, just because kids are bigger these days. But they didn’t make ’em like Irving back then. He was big and mean. He couldn’t shoot a lick from the outside, but he was a ferocious rebounder-on offense and defense. He made all-conference on put-backs alone.”

  I became aware that my heart was pounding.

  “How tall was he exactly?”

  “Jesus, Ivy, it’s not like I’m still carrying the roster,” he said, sighing.

  “You think he was maybe six four, six five?”

  “Sure.”

  “How much you think he weighs now?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in years. We talk on the phone.”

  “Any chance he might have ballooned up a little bit?”

  “We all do,” Hays said, patting his stomach. “You doing an expose on
old fat men now?”

  “No, I just. . Who does he work for, anyway?”

  “I really don’t know. He’s real secretive about that and I never bothered to ask because he’s always been good about helping me when I need his expertise. He must have been in the military for a while, because he went to West Point. Irving tells me I wrote a story about it when he got accepted and I take his word for it. Forty years’ worth of stories can tend to blend together,” Buster said, then got a faraway look for a moment.

  He continued: “Anyway, I don’t know how long he was in the army-we weren’t pen pals or anything-and I think he was in the private sector for a while. Then he switched to the government and we got reconnected when he ended up helping some sources of mine on a case. He remembered me from the old days, I remembered him. I still don’t know what part of the government he’s with-he’s big on that ‘I’d tell you but I’d have to kill you’ crap. But I do know his title is ‘lab director.’ ”

  “Lab director?” I said. “So the people who work for him, they would call him ‘Director.’ ”

  The pounding in my chest had now spread. I could feel it in my head now, a tiny little jackhammer going at the base of my skull.

  “I don’t know,” Hays said. “I guess so, yeah. Why is your face getting red?”

  “It’s just getting hot in here,” I said, taking off my jacket.

  “Well, I hear that Scotch calling my name. I better be going,” he said, pushing through the door into the cold.

  So Irving Wallace was six four or six five, possibly three hundred pounds. He had been a ferocious rebounder back in the day, the kind of guy who might grow into someone who was ferocious at other things. He had no shortage of access to heroin. What had he told me? That his lab saw thousands of kilos of heroin a year? That would certainly be enough to fuel a major distribution ring.

  Then there was the coincidence that Wallace had just so happened to call Buster Hays out of the blue a few days earlier. Hays had said something about not having talked to the guy in forever and then, bam, Wallace called to chat him up the moment Hays’s byline appeared on the Ludlow Street story.

  Finally, there was that itchy spot in my brain: in the article, I had mentioned the Stop-In Go-Go, Miss B’s apartment, and Building Five at Booker T as places where I had found evidence of The Stuff, and they had all been torched.

  I had never mentioned my house in the article. I had only mentioned it to one person.

  Irving Wallace.

  The elevator arrived, and as I rode up, I began to wonder if there was any other information I had gathered that might make Irving Wallace fit with the crime.

  Of course. The gun. Rosa Bricker-the funeral director with the unexpectedly keen eye for forensics-had offered the professional opinion that the shooter had used a.40-caliber pistol. It had struck me as odd at the time, because.40 caliber is generally used by law enforcement. But I had dismissed it by assuming the perp had gotten his mitts on some pensioner’s gun-never thinking the perp was a pensioner.

  What else? I began replaying each of my interactions with Irving Wallace. The first time he wasn’t even going to talk to me until I said the words “Ludlow Street,” and suddenly he was interested. He had seemed pretty paranoid, which I had chalked up to him being a fed. Really, it’s because he was a criminal.

  Our next talk was after he did the testing for me. He freely told me the samples were more than 99 percent pure. Why tell me that? Wouldn’t that just lead me closer to the truth?

  Then it dawned on me: free advertising. He told me I could write it was the purest heroin ever sold on the streets in America. He knew I would write it-newspaper reporters are suckers for superlatives like that. And once New Jersey’s largest newspaper reported The Stuff was 99-plus percent pure, junkies from Newark all the way out to the Delaware Water Gap would be trying to get their hands on it. If I had the dexterity to kick my own ass, I would have.

  Then I thought about how he ended that conversation:

  Is what you gave me the only samples you have?

  I have one more bag of each-The Stuff and the generic.

  And you’re keeping them in a safe place?

  I’m going to tuck them away in my piggy bank at home.

  Good. Wouldn’t want them getting out.

  In my piggy bank at home. Lord. That one little throwaway line, which wasn’t even true, had nearly gotten me killed.

  Then I thought about our latest conversation, when he tried to put me off the theory that La Cabra was responsible for Ludlow Street. What had he said? That someone like La Cabra wouldn’t reach down to the street level in Newark? That someone was “snowing” me?

  I chortled. It might have been the only factual thing he told me-it just conveniently left out that he was the person doing the snowing. Of course he would steer me away from La Cabra: he wanted to protect his boss.

  I wondered how Irving Wallace, high school basketball hero and proud graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, could have fallen so far as to get in with a scumbag like Jose de Jesus Encarceron. What a sad, fascinating tale-one I would no doubt flesh out in the coming days.

  My legs had switched into autopilot and taken me to my desk, where I sat down and immediately went to our handy voter registration database. I typed in “Irving Wallace” and found three of them living in New Jersey.

  One was in South Jersey, beyond commuting distance. One was in East Orange, which would have made him one of about three white people in the whole city. But one was in Summit, on New England Avenue. The one time pride of Summit High School had stuck around his hometown.

  I typed the address from voter registration into our property-ownership database and found out that, indeed, Irving and Sharon Wallace owned a home on New England Avenue. And it was valued at $1.4 million. Not a bad little shack for a humble government scientist.

  I turned next to Lexis-Nexis, which told me, among other things, that Irving Wallace did not have a mortgage on his shack. He owned it free and clear, no liens, no nothing.

  “Must be very frugal,” I said to myself.

  “What’s that?” a familiar voice said.

  I looked up and Tina Thompson was sitting across from me.

  “Oh, hi,” I said, a little startled.

  “I’ve been here for ten minutes,” she said. “You’ve had your head buried in that screen the whole time. Another five minutes and I was going to start peeling off clothing and see if you would notice.”

  “Well, in that case. .” I said, sticking my face three inches away from the screen and banging on the keys.

  Tina giggled, then added an adorable smile/hair flip/eye bat combination. A little more than an hour ago, she had been breathing fire at me through the phone. And now she was. . flirting with me?

  “I know it’s not unusual for me to be slow on something like this,” I said. “But I’m trying to keep up: weren’t you pissed at me?”

  “Oh, very.”

  “And now you’re. .”

  “Sorry.”

  “Sorry?”

  The female of the species is, indeed, a most confounding creature.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Look, I’m sorry I’ve been so hard on you. That’s why I came over here. You’ve had an awful day, the kind of day I wouldn’t wish on anyone. And as I was thinking about it, I realized I was probably only making matters worse being such a bitch. And I feel just terrible about that. So I want to apologize.”

  “Oh, well, okay,” I said. As far as I could track, Tina had gone from nurturing consoler (last night), to worried friend (this morning), to overprotective bodyguard (this afternoon), to ranting quasi-girlfriend (earlier this evening), to remorseful supplicant (right now), to. . whatever she would be in five minutes.

  “This is usually the point in the conversation when you should say something like, ‘apology accepted,’ ” Tina prompted.

  “Oh, yeah, yeah. Definitely. Apology accepted. It’s been a long day.”

  “So we’re okay no
w?”

  “We’re great.”

  She moved over to sit in an empty seat at the desk across from mine. My reward-the superspecial toe-curl smile-was followed by a more serious countenance.

  “Are we good enough that I can give you a lecture?” she asked.

  “I suppose I have one coming.”

  “It’s real simple. Just be careful, okay? I care about you.”

  “I thought you only cared about my reproductive capacity,” I said, fixing her with what I hoped was an endearing grin.

  “Well, that, too. But I don’t want to have to tell my future child that his father got killed three days after conception.”

  “Conception? Who says I’m going to sleep with you? Since when am I that easy?”

  “Since puberty, I’m guessing.”

  Couldn’t exactly counter that point, so I decided to lecture back for a moment.

  “Okay, I know you’re just looking out for me. And it’s sweet, it really is. It shows your maternal side.”

  She blushed a bit.

  “But,” I continued, “this thing is, I don’t know, it’s like my responsibility now. I mean, there are four people in the morgue whose chances for justice are slipping away by the hour and it doesn’t look like anyone in an official capacity cares much whether they get it. Then there’s the matter of the woman in the hospital struggling for her life because of something I wrote.”

  Tina reached out across the desk and grabbed my hand.

  “That’s not true. You didn’t send that woman to the hospital. Some monster with a gasoline can and a lighter did that.”

  “And the monster never would have known about Brenda Bass if it weren’t for me. It’s not like we have a Hippocratic oath in this business. But if we did, I think it’s pretty clear I violated it.”

  “You’re being way too hard on yourself,” she said firmly.

  “Look, I don’t kid myself into thinking I can fix this mess-it’s already too broken for that. But maybe I can make it a little better.

  “Besides,” I said, with the requisite dramatic pause, “I think I may know who the bastard is.”