by Brad Parks
* * *
A light drizzle was falling as I pulled out of the parking garage. Right around the time I passed the seamless border between Newark and East Orange, it had turned into a steady rain. My windshield wipers could keep up, but the sky was so dark I’m not sure I could say the same for my headlights.
I spent the drive giving my brain its first real chance to grind on the big picture: the why, who, and what of a murder. Why would someone want Darius Kipps dead? Who would profit from it? What would they gain?
They were the kind of questions a good detective like Kipps had probably asked himself a thousand times on a hundred different cases. But for as much as I tried to spin a variety of theories, I had neither the information nor the imagination to make any kind of brilliant deductions. By the time I arrived at the Kipps residence, I was no closer to anything resembling an answer. So I focused on the small task at hand—getting a comment from Mimi Kipps for my story—and left the rest for later.
There were no family members milling outside the house on a day like this. I could see light pouring out of those curtainless second-floor windows, so I suspected someone was home. I parked on the opposite side of the street, folded my printouts and tucked them in an inside pocket of my peacoat, where they wouldn’t get wet, then grabbed my umbrella, doing the awkward open-the-umbrella-while-getting-out-of-the-car move. As I walked up the front walkway with my head down, I could feel the chill and the damp trying to work their way in through my coat.
The porch had an awning so I shook out the umbrella, then dropped it to the side. I rang the doorbell and waited.
No one answered. I rang again. Was she in the shower again? Feeding the baby? Maybe I should have called first.
I pressed the bell again, impatient and cold, holding it for a second, listening hard to make sure it was working. And, yes, I could hear a chime. But no Mimi.
Still standing on her front stoop, I pulled out my phone and dialed her cell number. Maybe she was out at the grocery store and left the lights on. She answered on the first ring with, “Please go away.”
“Mimi? It’s Carter Ross.”
“I know. And I know you’re standing on my porch right now. But I have nothing to say to you.”
“I … I’m confused. Did you not like the story today?”
“The story was fine, but I need you to leave.”
“Can I … can I come back later?”
“No.”
“Can we talk on the phone later?”
“No.”
“Uh,” I said, at an unusual loss for words. I had been rehearsing parts of my conversation with Mimi on the drive out, and this was not in any of the versions that had played out in my head. “Mimi, am I missing something here? Yesterday I spent a few hours at your home in the morning. Then I came back in the afternoon. You seemed very keen to have me working on this and now you’re freezing me out? What gives?”
There was a pause. Then: “Pastor Al says I shouldn’t talk to you.”
Ah. The anointed man of God strikes again. “And why did he say that?”
“He … he says you’re an agent of Satan.”
I couldn’t help it: I laughed. “Mimi, no offense, but that’s absurd. Do I look like an agent of Satan? Do I talk like an agent of Satan?”
“Pastor Al says Satan comes in many forms and can be very persuasive.”
“I grant you the prince of darkness is probably a little too subtle to send someone here with horns and a forked tail showing,” I said. “But, honestly, use your head. Use your heart. I was holding your baby yesterday. The little guy was sucking on my finger, for goodness’ sake. You really think one of Satan’s minions would go for that?”
In my time as a newspaper reporter, I had stood on a lot of front porches and tried to talk my way into a lot of houses. This, I was fairly certain, was the first time I had to convince someone I wasn’t shilling for Mephistopheles.
“Maybe … maybe you’re just trying to keep my guard down. I just don’t think Pastor Al would—”
“Look, Mimi, maybe I’m Satan’s soldier and maybe I’m not—it doesn’t sound like anything I can say will convince you anyway—but right now I know one thing I am, and that’s a reporter with a job to do. I came here because I have some photos of your husband you need to see before I write about them in the newspaper. Will you please let me in so you can look at them?”
I heard the deadbolt slide and there was Mimi Kipps, standing on the other side of the screen door, still holding her phone.
“What photos?” she said. I guess her curiosity—to say nothing of her desire to clear her dead husband’s name—was stronger than her fear of whatever menace I posed as Beelzebub’s buddy.
“They might be a little hard for you to look at,” I admitted, slipping my phone in my pocket. “They’re autopsy photos.”
Her hand had traveled as far as the handle of the screen door, but it wasn’t going any farther. Still, I was making progress.
“I still don’t think I … Maybe, maybe I can have Mike look at them.”
Mike as in Mike Fusco, Darius’s sometime-partner. It sounded like a fine compromise to me.
“Okay. Can you call him? Have him come out here?”
“Just wait here,” she said, closing the door.
I shoved my hands in my pocket. I was a little miffed at having to stay out on the porch like I was a Labrador who had been playing in puddles. But, at the same time, it was hard not to feel empathy for Mimi. The poor woman had to be reeling. She had lost her husband and didn’t really understand how or why, but probably didn’t have much time to think about it, mostly because she still had two kids to care for. She had her minister filling her head with superstitious nonsense, a pushy reporter trying to get her to comment on his story, untold numbers of relatives coming and going and yet—through it all—she was, in some very basic way, alone.
I looked down at the flower bed, where the dead leaves had gone slick and shiny in the rain. Somewhere underneath, there might have been a bulb yearning to push through, or a perennial with roots full of possibility, or a seed waiting to germinate. The leaves had been like a blanket through the long winter, providing needed insulation. But unless someone got in there and cleaned them out, whatever lay underneath would be smothered, lacking the air and sunlight it needed to thrive.
The dirt needed to be uncovered. There seemed to be a lot of that going on around here.
* * *
Three, maybe five minutes later, Mimi again appeared at her front door.
“Mike is on his way,” she said. “Here. You look a little cold.”
She opened the screen and handed me a mug of coffee. I expressed my gratitude because that’s how my mother raised me. Mimi closed both doors, and as soon as I was sure she couldn’t see me, I emptied the contents of the mug in the flower bed.
After roughly another ten minutes on the porch, time I spent trying to fend off a case of the chills, Mike Fusco rolled up in what was clearly not a Newark Police Department vehicle. It was a shiny, black Ford F-150 with jacked-up suspension. Between that and all the muscles, I was beginning to think maybe he was overcompensating for something.
I watched him get out of his truck—actually “descend from his truck” might be more accurate—and walk with long but unhurried strides through the rain. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, just a different color tight-fitting sweater from yesterday, and he didn’t have a hat or umbrella. Yes, he was a tough guy. I tried to pretend like I hadn’t been shivering.
When he reached the porch, he nodded at me, then slid by me. He opened the front door, announcing, “Hey, Mimi, it’s me.”
He did a quarter-turn in my direction and said, “Come on in.”
I was barely inside the small entryway when Mimi appeared at the back of the living room, saw me, and said, “He can’t come in.”
“Why not?” Fusco asked.
Mimi immediately looked sheepish. But she still said, “Pastor Al says he’s an agent of Sat
an.”
“You gotta stop listening to that nut,” Fusco said, scowling.
“He’s not a nut, he’s—”
“You still giving him money?” Fusco interrupted. “I thought you said you were going to stop.”
Mimi looked down at her bare feet and started mumbling something. I couldn’t figure out the dynamic between her and Fusco, who not only felt comfortable enough to walk into the house without knocking—and invite me in—but knew about her finances. Maybe this was a battle Darius had been fighting, trying to get his wife to stop donating to the too-slick pastor, and now Fusco was stepping in, providing backup for his fallen partner.
“Never mind. We’ll talk about it later. Why don’t you go up and shower. I’ll keep an eye on the baby,” Fusco said, nodding in the direction of Jaquille. The miracle baby was sleeping in the Pack ‘N Play, wrapped in what appeared to be a baby straightjacket.
“Okay,” she said, disappearing upstairs. Fusco sat. I sat. And, like that, there we were again: eyeballing each other while Mimi Kipps showered. He broke the silence more quickly this time. “So you got some photos to show me?”
“Yeah,” I said, reaching inside the pocket of my peacoat and pulling out my folded printouts. I handed them to Fusco, who went through them one by one. He brought two of them up to his face for closer inspection, then put them down.
“You sure this is Kipps?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“And someone just leaked these to you?”
“Something like that.”
“You sure they’re not doctored or anything?”
“Positive. Saw it with my own eyes.”
He nodded.
“My source said it looked like someone tied him to a chair,” I added. “That how it looks to you?”
He grimaced. “Those photos are pretty blurry. Without really being able to look at them? I don’t know. But, yeah, he was restrained somehow, with something. A rope? Some wire? Shoelaces? Believe it or not, a good forensics guy can tell the difference.”
“Okay,” I said. “But just to make sure I’m not jumping to conclusions. I mean … this isn’t a suicide. Something weird happened, yes?”
“Yeah,” he said, staring at the screen of the television, which was off. Then he added a more emphatic: “Yeah.”
I let him sort through things for a few moments. He was no longer looking at the television but rather through it, at some distant spot that may as well have been a mile away.
“So what’s the scene like at the precinct right now?” I said, just to snap him out of it. “How did that whole Pastor Al press conference play?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
He turned his head toward me. “My captain basically told me to disappear for a few weeks, said I was going to be placed on administrative leave, said to call it a ‘mental health break.’ I said no way, I don’t want that nut bird stuff in my file. You get something like that on your record, it can seriously screw up a promotion. So captain said, ‘Call it what you want to. I won’t put anything in your file. I just don’t want to see you around here for a while.’”
It sounded like the cop version of that shirt at Tee’s place, the one that said, WHY DON’T YOU GO PRACTICE FALLING DOWN?
He shook his head in disbelief, adding, “I even had to turn in my service weapon.”
Mostly to keep Fusco talking, I said, “What do you make of that?”
He grasped the corner of his lip in his teeth. It was a very untough look. He might not have been aware he was doing it.
“You think the captain knew you were … looking into the Kipps thing?” I prompted.
“Who says I’m looking into the Kipps thing?”
I made a palms-up, you-think-I’m-stupid-or-something gesture. “I think there’s a grieving widow upstairs who is convinced her husband didn’t kill himself, and I’m betting she’s asked you for help. And you don’t strike me as the kind of guy who would turn down a request like that.”
I thought for sure I had him now. That’s right, Mike Fusco. You’re a big hero. Now tell the friendly newspaper reporter all about it …
Most guys would grab that and run with it. But Fusco just sat there, looking at me with the same mile-off stare he had been giving the television.
“At risk of stating the obvious, your department is trying to throw a big old blanket over Darius Kipps’s death,” I said. “Unless I’m missing something, there’s no way anyone with half a brain could look at the marks on that body and say, ‘Oh, yeah, this man killed himself and was acting alone.’ Now, some people are saying Kipps was mixed up in something. Other people, like you, are telling me no way. All I know is, something is up. Someone killed Darius Kipps, for some reason I have yet to determine. Are you going to help me figure it out or not?”
“I don’t—” he started, then stopped himself. “Look, I can’t be talking to you. You know that, right? I shouldn’t have talked to you before. My department has policies about that, and even on leave—or whatever they’re calling it—I have to follow that. I’m only here as a favor to Mimi. I’ll show her these pictures, and if she has something to say, she’ll call you, okay?”
“So you’re just going to—”
“She’ll call you,” he said more firmly.
I could tell I was shoving him too close to the edge. And furthermore, I realized trying to move him any more was going to be futile. Mike Fusco didn’t get pushed around.
“Okay,” I said. “But, look, why don’t you just give me your number? That way, if I get anything else, I can call you and I don’t have to bother Mimi directly? I don’t want to upset her any more than she’s already upset, you know?”
It was, I thought, a reasonable request. And apparently Fusco thought so, too. I held out my pad and pen. He grabbed them, then wrote “Mike Fusco” with a phone number underneath.
For the time being, it seemed like the best I was going to get.
* * *
The rain had slackened but was still coming down hard enough to make the puddles dance as I went back outside. I grabbed my umbrella from where I had left it but didn’t bother opening it. If Fusco didn’t need one, neither did I.
Which just meant I was damp by the time I got back in my Malibu. What is it with these tough guys, anyway?
Feeling defeated, I considered consoling myself with an early lunch. A good, wholesome lunch. The kind that would be served on a real plate and, perhaps, even include vegetables and a side salad. Unfortunately, I was in a part of town where the food options were boundless—as long as you were looking for fried chicken. It’s hard to eat healthy in the hood.
I was still considering what to do about this dilemma three minutes later when my phone rang. It was a 609 number, which likely meant state government.
“Carter Ross,” I said.
“Hey, it’s Hilfiker.”
“That was fast. What’s going on?”
“Well, we’re about to have two conversations.”
“Okay.”
“The first is the one we’re having on the record, that you can go ahead and print in that silly newspaper of yours,” he said. “The second is the conversation I always wished people would have with me when I was a reporter, the one where I explain why the first conversation doesn’t make much sense.”
“Oh, this ought to be good,” I said, pulling over to the side of Central Avenue and fishing my notebook out of my pocket.
“Right, so here goes with the first one. You ready?”
“Yeah.”
“The attorney general’s office has determined that there is no need for an independent investigation into the death of Darius Kipps. The attorney general has every confidence that the Newark Police Department and the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office will conduct a thorough investigation and resolve this matter in a satisfactory fashion.”
I scribbled furiously, writing in the se
lf-taught shorthand I had developed over the years. Hilfiker helped by saying it slowly enough—“talking at notebook speed,” is what we call it—so I could get it down verbatim. I waited until he was done and then said, “Really?”
“Really.”
“You got a feather by any chance?”
“No, why?”
“Because you could knock me over with one right now,” I said. “You guys are seriously taking a pass on this? You told your boss about the pictures, right?”
“I did. I even showed them to him.”
“And he knows we’re going to run with this?”
“Yeah, I guess so. I didn’t say that explicitly. But he’s not a dummy. I don’t need to explain to him what mud-mucking journalists like you do for a living.”
“So … okay, I guess let’s have the second conversation now. Because, you’re right, I’m totally perplexed.”
“Okay, well, basically—we’re off the record now—your pastor took the heat off.”
“My pastor?”
“Yeah, whatshisname. The megachurch guy. LeRioux.”
“Why would he … that doesn’t make any sense.”
“I don’t know. Maybe he felt like he had gotten all the mileage he could out of this thing and decided he was done.”
“So he gets his face time and he goes home?”
“Something like that,” Hilfiker said.
“That’s cold.”
“Tell me about it. It’s also pretty stupid, frankly.”
“How so?”
“He’s screwing himself out of a payday.”
“I’m not following you.”
Hilfiker sighed. “Haven’t you learned to be a little more cynical by now? Think about it. I’m sure Detective Kipps has a life insurance policy—all cops do, especially Newark cops. Problem is, if his death is ruled a suicide, the policy is no good. That means the Widow Kipps is destitute. On the other hand, if she is suddenly flush with a half million bucks’ worth of insurance company money…”
“Maybe she expresses her piety by giving ten percent of it to the anointed man of God, in loving memory of her dead husband,” I completed.
“There you go.”
“So why would he call off the dogs?”
