by Brad Parks
I picked it up used when it was merely a three-year-old Chevy Malibu and it has since handled all the punishment I have given it, and then some. I’d love to brag how many miles it has on it, but the truth is, I’m not sure. The odometer has been stuck at 111,431 for a while now. I would worry about how that’s going to affect the resale value, except I don’t think the junkyard I’m eventually going to push it into will much care.
Nevertheless, the Malibu faithfully delivered me to the Eagle-Examiner newsroom, into which I stormed, still spoiling for a fight. I didn’t even bother stopping at my desk. I went straight to Tina’s office, where I found her sitting in her usual loveliness.
Tina is thirty-nine, but she’s got the body of a twenty-year-old. Make that: a twenty-year-old Olympian. She’s long and lean, spends her prework time jogging and her postwork time doing yoga. In between, she sits around the office wearing short skirts that make me glad I’m straight. She has curly brown hair, which on this day she had clenched in one of those claw thingies. It had the effect of showing off her neck and shoulders, which also made me happy for my heterosexuality.
Still, this was one time I hadn’t come into the office for the view.
“What do you mean there’s no story?” I said, bursting in without knocking. “I just spent close to four hours recording the life and times of Darius Kipps in my notebook, and it’s good stuff.”
“Suicide,” she said, without looking up from her computer screen.
“Huh?”
“It was a suicide,” she said, this time at least lifting her eyes.
“What do you mean, suicide?”
“I mean suicide. It’s a fancy word we use for people who kill themselves.”
“No, I…” My voice trailed off. “Damn. This guy just didn’t seem like the type. Not even a little.”
“Well, the cops still haven’t announced it yet. They’ve shut down all information, put a muzzle on the PIO, the whole thing—which is as good a sign as anything it’s probably a suicide. They haven’t even confirmed one of their officers died. But one of Hays’s sources gave it to us off the record.”
Hays was Buster Hays, our most senior reporter and a certified pain-in-the-ass. But he also had sources that reached from the FBI all the way down to the Cub Scouts. If one of his moles told us something, it was usually pretty reliable. Buster never had to rely on the Public Information Officers for his stuff. If anything, the PIOs asked him what was going on.
“Apparently the guy went into the shower stall at the Fourth Precinct and blew his head off,” Tina continued. “He even turned the water on before he pulled the trigger so there wouldn’t be as much to clean up. Thoughtful guy.”
“Wow. His family doesn’t have a clue yet. When I left, I told them I’d be writing a big, beautiful tribute to the dead father and husband.”
“Yeah, well, you know how Brodie feels about suicide, so…”
I knew, all right. Harold Brodie, the paper’s executive editor for something like thirty years, had been there long enough that his pet peeves had solidified into hardened rules. And one of the rules at the Eagle-Examiner is that we never wrote in any depth about suicides. Brodie felt giving the subject extensive ink would “glorify” it. If Darius Kipps had been killed in the line of duty, it would have been worth several days of front-page stories in Harold Brodie’s newspaper. Dying by his own hand, Kipps would get no more than a brief obituary buried inside the county news section.
Still, it just wasn’t adding up. Sure, I had gotten a somewhat slanted view of Darius Kipps, one provided by loving friends and family. But he didn’t seem like a man awash in inner torment. He had a wife he was nuts about, a job he enjoyed, a daughter he doted on, and a brand-new baby—the son he always wanted. What guy like that decides his brain matter would look better splattered all over a shower stall?
I was turning it over so vigorously I made a crucial mistake because I said the following out loud: “Hey, would you mind if I spent a little time nipping at this thing? I know we’d have to keep it off the books, for Brodie’s sake, but this just doesn’t feel right.”
The mistake, of course, is that I should have just gone ahead and done it without telling Tina. Holding back information from one’s editor is one of the privileges of being a reporter. In some ways, it is as necessary to good journalism as steno pads. It allows you to travel a road for a few days on what could be a loser without anyone in charge being the wiser that their precious resources—there’s that word again—were being squandered.
Often the road dead-ends. But every once in a while it leads to a major score, which you only got because you were willing to waste a little time on it. Except now I had deprived myself of the opportunity.
“Why doesn’t it feel right?” she asked. “Because his mom told you how happy he was as a little boy playing with his G.I. Joe?”
“Come on, Tina, it—”
“No, you come on. I know you spent the morning with his family, but we’re going to have to write that off. You’ve got that public housing story to finish.”
“And I will. I’m mostly just waiting for documents anyway. I could keep juggling that while I plug at this for a few days.”
Tina shook her head. “Brodie is really hot for that project. I told him we might have copy by the end of next week and—”
“Then I’ll get you copy by the end of next week. I can do both without—”
“No, you can’t. I can see it in your eyes. You’re going to spend all your time chasing this fairy tale while—”
“It’s not a fairy tale! Look, I know Brodie’s thing about suicide. But I’m saying this is one of the times when we should ignore it. Can’t you just trust me that I’ve been around long enough to have decent instincts?”
“Was I talking too quickly for you before? Let me slow it down for you: nnnooo,” she said, sounding like an annoyed cow. “You have important work to be doing on a real story. I’m not going to have you wasting time on a nonstory.”
“A nonstory, huh? You’re really so certain—based on all you know about Darius Kipps—that this might not be something?”
“Monkeys will fly out of my ass first,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I’m so certain I don’t want you spending another second on that, I want copy on the housing project story by the end of this week so I can read it over the weekend. So you might as well get out of here. You’ve got work to do.”
“Fine … fine! I’m going to have lunch now! And you can’t stop me!” I said defiantly as I stood up.
But Tina was already ignoring me.
* * *
I scooted out of the building and walked down the street toward my favorite pizzeria, a place where I often went to sort messy mental laundry. I’m not sure if it was the two steaming slices or the cold Coke Zero, but somehow it always helped me gain perspective on things. Plus, Pizza Therapy is a lot cheaper than counseling.
Except this time I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about Darius Kipps. Eventually, I began flipping through my notebook to look for something I might have missed—and to imagine what might be missing. Did happy-go-lucky Darius have a quiet, brooding side no one talked about? Was all that drinking he did in his early twenties self-medication of some kind? Was there some hurt in his childhood no one wanted to tell me about?
Midway through my flipping, I bumped into that photo of Darius at his birthday party. I sat there, studying it for a good three minutes, looking at his wall-to-wall smile, a smile with seemingly no reason to end.
A reporter comes to understand that H. sapiens is a highly unpredictable creature; that our large, cunning brains make us capable of a greater range of behavior than any other animal on the planet; and that the ability to hide our emotions, from others and even ourselves, is one of our defining traits. How many times had a neighbor told me that so-and-so “never let on” or “she seemed so upbeat” or “he must have just snapped.”
It happened all the time. But had it really happened to Da
rius Kipps?
Finally, just to sate my curiosity, I grabbed my phone and called Newark Police Department Detective Rodney Pritchard. When I met him, Pritch—as everyone called him—had been in homicide. He had recently switched to the Gang Task Force, though since gangs were responsible for most of the homicides in the city, I’m not sure there was much difference. We had done a couple of stories together, including several that made him look pretty good. We had developed a relationship where he knew he could whisper sweet somethings in my ear without having to worry about it coming back to him.
He answered his phone on the second ring, saying, “Hey, if it ain’t Woodward N. Bernstein!”
Pritch was under the belief that the famous Washington Post reporting duo of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein was actually one person. I never bothered correcting him.
“Not too bad, not too bad,” I said. “Though I did just come from Darius Kipps’s house.”
“Oh, you heard about that, huh?”
“Yeah. We’re getting word he offed himself in a shower stall at the Fourth?”
“Yeah, man, that’s the word. It’s sad. Dude just had a baby and everything.”
“You knew him?”
“Yeah. Before I came downtown, I was in the Fourth with him. I was already detective when he was hired on patrol, so I only knew him a little. He made detective not long before I went downtown, so we never worked a case together or anything. But, yeah, I knew him.”
“What’d you think of him?”
“Good dude. Real good dude. He was one of those cops who was all about the law, you know?”
“What do you mean?”
“There are guys in the department who look at the law like it’s an impediment. You know, like, ‘We’d really be able to clean up this city if it weren’t for the damn Fourth Amendment.’ But Kipps, he wasn’t like that. He understood the job was about upholding the law, even when the law didn’t make sense. You know what I’m saying?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Give me an example.”
“Like, say a scumbag you put away got off on some technicality or got himself some slick defense attorney who was able to get armed robbery down to PTI”—pretrial intervention—“or something like that? Some guys get really pissed, go on and on about how the system is effed up. Not Kipps. He took that stuff in stride. He understood that the law was there to protect everyone—even criminals sometimes. He wanted to bust ’em as bad as anyone. But he wanted to do it the right way. He treated everyone with respect. It’s like, if you were going to play good cop, bad cop with a suspect, Kipps was always going to be the good cop. You know what I mean?”
“The good cop,” I repeated. “Okay, I hear you. So what do you make of this, then?”
“What do you mean?”
I had been fidgeting with my empty Coke Zero bottle, the label of which was now completely removed. I took a deep breath and said: “I don’t know, Pritch. It just strikes me as a little off. I didn’t know the guy like you did. But I just spent the morning talking to his family and he didn’t seem like type to do something like this. There’s the new baby. He was talking about buying a new house. Heck, he was going to be taking his kids to Disney World. Those are pretty optimistic things, you know? Is there something here I’m missing? Something his family didn’t know or wouldn’t tell me? I’m not writing it. This is just my own personal curiosity at this point.”
“I know what you’re saying. But I’ll tell you what, this job”—he pushed out a large gust of air—“it chews you up. Being a cop, you see some stuff, man, especially in this city. Some guys, they can put a good face on it for years. They laugh it off and seem to be good family men, but inside it’s eating at them the whole time, you know? Some guys start drinking or they let it ruin their marriage. But other guys? It just gets to be too much. Then one day they go off and swallow their gun.”
“You think what’s what happened here?”
I continued folding and refolding the Coke Zero label as I waited for Pritch to answer.
“Well, probably, yeah,” he said at last. “I don’t know nothing. And I don’t want to go giving Woodward N. Bernstein a big scoop. But…”
“But what?”
“Well, the Fourth is … like I said, I came up in the Fourth, so I know it pretty well. And it’s tight. Especially the black officers, no offense,” he said, as if I would somehow be offended I had been left out. “The brothers of the Fourth stick together.”
“So?”
“So I’m just hearing some weird stuff, is all. Stuff I never thought I’d hear coming from the Fourth. I went over there this morning, just to pay a visit to some of the guys I still know over there, see how they were doing with it, and…”
“What?”
“You ain’t writing this, right?”
“No. My paper doesn’t write suicides. It’s kind of a policy.”
“Okay. Well. Shoot, man, I shouldn’t even be talking about this. But they were saying Kipps might have been dirty.”
“Dirty? Dirty how?”
“I don’t know. But word is out he recently had contact with Internal Affairs. And a cop who’s spending time with IA, man, that doesn’t always look good.”
“Yeah, I guess not. Did anyone say specifically what it might have been? There’s all different kinds of dirty.”
“No. No one said. And I didn’t ask,” Pritch said. “The truth is, I don’t even want to know. The man is dead. Leave it at that.”
“Of course, of course,” I said as another call started ringing through on my phone. I took a glance at the screen.
It was Mimi Kipps.
“Pritch, I gotta run. Darius Kipps’s widow is calling on the other line.”
“Oh, geez,” he said. “Well, remember: I didn’t tell you nothing and you don’t know nothing, especially not about Kipps being dirty. That’s the last thing that woman needs to hear. She’s going to have it hard enough.”
* * *
As I clicked from one call to the other, I realized there was no good way to handle this. I couldn’t exactly continue the charade that I was going to be writing a glowing thousand-word paean to the life and times of Sergeant Kipps when I knew there were going to be about three paragraphs in the next day’s paper. At the same time, if the Newark Police Department hadn’t informed Mimi Kipps about the nature of or circumstances surrounding her husband’s death, I sure wasn’t going to tell her.
But I was spared at least part of that quandary when Mimi started off our conversation with: “He didn’t kill himself.”
“Mimi?” I said, just to make sure it was her.
“Yes, this is Mimi Kipps, and I want you to know: my husband did not kill himself. I don’t want you writing it that way. I don’t want anyone talking about him that way. I don’t care what the Newark Police Department or anyone else has to say about it. There is no way he did what they’re saying he did.”
The preternaturally calm Mimi Kipps I had met earlier this morning was gone. This version was spitting sharp stuff.
“I know my husband,” she continued. “And I know how he felt about suicide. You know what he called people who killed themselves? Cowards. Every time he responded to a suicide call—and he would catch them from time to time—he would always say the same thing: ‘That’s the coward’s way out.’ Especially when it was a man with a family. He’d said, ‘That man had no right to do that to himself and leave those kids behind without a daddy.’”
I had already left the pizzeria by this point. The Green Street headquarters of the Newark Police Department was right around the corner, but I wasn’t walking in that direction. I was going toward the Eagle-Examiner parking garage. I could tell Mimi and I needed to chat in person.
“Mimi, I—”
“Do you know why that chaplain didn’t give me any of the details earlier this morning?” she interrupted. “Because the higher-ups down at Green Street were debating how to word the press release. A stupid press release. They didn’t want to use t
he word ‘suicide’ because they thought it would make the department look bad. So they settled on ‘self-inflicted gunshot wound.’ As if nobody knows that it means the same thing. They were just out here, showing me a copy of it before they sent it out. Can you believe that? All they care about is how they’re going to look to the media. I threw them out of the house. It’s bull. It’s bull. No matter what they call it. There’s just no way. And I don’t want you writing it.”
“Mimi, I’m coming out to see you right now,” I said. “Can you just sit tight? I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll see you,” she said and ended the call.
I reached my car and tried to put my head in order as I drove back toward East Orange. On the one hand, there was what Pritch told me about Internal Affairs. Was Darius Kipps dirty? He had been talking about buying a new house, taking his kids to Disney. A guy making ninety grand a year might be able to swing those kinds of outlays on his own, depending on his other expenses. Or it might have been a sign he was supplementing his income in some less-than-legitimate fashion. And once he got caught, the decorated cop—who was the son of a decorated cop—couldn’t handle the shame. So he arranged himself a hasty exit.
On the other hand, I had my gut—and Mimi Kipps’s loud, insistent voice—saying that suicide didn’t fit. You didn’t spend hours at the hospital telling your infant son how he was going to root for the Eagles someday if you didn’t plan to stick around and do it with him, right? And there was also what I had learned about Kipps being an all-about-the-law police officer. Cops like that didn’t go bad, did they?
The bottom line was … well, there was no bottom line. I had no real idea what happened. And perhaps I should have let it drop—I had a big story about a public housing project to hand to Tina by the end of the week, after all—but part of being a reporter means never turning off your natural curiosity. There was nothing wrong with spending an afternoon indulging it a little bit.
