by Brad Parks
“I don’t know. I wasn’t part of the phone call. And his honor the attorney general didn’t say. But I’m guessing once he heard LeRioux was dropping it, he thought there was no reason for him to pick it up. You can bet no one in Essex County is going to be clamoring for him to step in.”
“Okay, but let’s leave the politics out of this for a second—”
“This is New Jersey,” Hilfiker said. “You can never leave the politics out of it.”
“I know, I know, but…” I began, struggling to put words to my thoughts. I watched a woman in a hijab hurry down the street, carrying two plastic grocery bags, bowing her head to keep her face out of the rain.
“Well, call me naïve, but I thought maybe your boss might just do the right thing here,” I said.
“Who says he’s not?”
“Come on, you saw those pictures.”
“Yeah, but you’re thinking like a reporter. This is a lawyer you’re dealing with. He might have just decided that, legally, it was right to let the locals deal with it. Just because the attorney general is the top law enforcement agent in the state doesn’t mean he has to get involved every time someone disputes a traffic ticket.”
“This is hardly a traffic ticket…”
“You know what I’m saying. Sometimes the AG has to pick and choose, and maybe he figures this one is best left where it is.”
“In other words, the Newarkers made this mess, so let them clean it up.”
“Well, that’s another way to look at it. But yeah. And, remember, Newark makes the mess, but it’s really Essex County that ought to be cleaning it up. That’s how the food chain goes. Sure, it leads up to my guy eventually. But it hits the Essex County prosecutor first.”
“Right, right,” I said.
The hijab woman had rounded the corner, out of sight. I couldn’t think of anything else to ask the attorney general’s spokesman, so I didn’t object when Hilfiker said: “Anyhow, I gotta run. Good luck with it.”
“Thanks. For both conversations,” I said, ending the call and putting my car into Drive at the same time. I pulled a quick U-turn and pointed myself back in the direction of Mimi’s house.
I didn’t know if she’d believe me—what with me being an agent of Satan and all—but she needed to know that her beloved Pastor Al, the man she trusted so implicitly, had simply been exploiting her to get free advertising on the evening news. And now, having used her, he was dropping her and going back to whatever it was he really preferred to be doing.
Like drop-kicking orphans.
* * *
Arriving back at the Kipps household, I got out of the car with my umbrella open this time. I didn’t need any more of that tough guy stuff.
I was about to walk across the street when I happened to glance up at those naked second-story windows. I saw Mimi Kipps—or at least the top half of her—wearing one towel on her body and another on her head, having an animated conversation with someone. And being the naturally curious reporter that I am, I stopped to see who.
She wasn’t looking at the person very often. She was mostly puttering around the room. Making a bed, maybe? On occasion, she would bend over, pick something up, and put it somewhere else, like she was cleaning up toys in a child’s bedroom. She moved with the practiced efficiency of a mom who had done this before, but she also maintained her half of the dialogue the entire time. Her body language suggested she was angry, tense.
I kept watching—yeah, so I’m a voyeur, what’s your point?—but still couldn’t tell who was carrying the other side of the exchange. I moved up the street a little bit, to give myself a different angle. And there, standing with his arms crossed, was Mike Fusco. He was leaning against the wall with his head tilted to one side, giving no hint as to his emotional state.
And it struck me as, well, a little strange that Mimi would be talking with him while she wasn’t dressed. I realize that as a starchy WASP, I tend to be a smidge prudish about such matters. But still. There are a scant number of women in my life who would feel comfortable talking to me while wearing a towel. Half of them I’m related to and the other half I’ve …
Slept with? Could Mimi and Fusco be …
No. I chased the thought from my mind. Or at least I was trying to. And then Mimi made a large, frustrated motion—an “I’ve had it” kind of gesture—and Fusco walked up behind her and started rubbing her shoulders.
She didn’t fight it, just immediately let her body slump, giving in to the massage. Fusco worked on her for about a minute or so while Mimi stood there, giving me the chance to think that, well, maybe they were just really, really good friends. There was still some possibility this could be platonic, right? Mimi needed a human touch. Fusco wanted to give her some comfort, and he was probably the kind of guy who’d be better communicating with his actions than his words.
Besides, no woman who had given birth five months earlier—to say nothing of a woman who had just lost her husband—would be trolling for some kind of random hook-up. A guy might. Guys can pretty much turn off their brains and shut out those kinds of petty distractions when it comes to sex. But women are too practical about human relations for that sort of thing. So this was probably just …
I was still trying to work out that line of reasoning when Mimi Kipps blew it right away. She turned into Fusco, wrapped an arm around the back of his head, and pulled him close for a kiss. And it didn’t look like it was their first. Their heads fell into a familiar rhythm. His hands went for her back and butt, and I wondered how much longer the towel was going to stay in place.
Before things shifted to something more suited for late-night cable, Mimi pushed Fusco out of sight—into a back bedroom, perhaps—leaving me to sort out the ramifications of it all.
Fusco and Mimi. Ramifying, as it were.
Yikes.
I’m sure Mimi wasn’t the first widow to take up with her husband’s best friend, but wasn’t this a bit … soon? Don’t they usually wait a month or two—or, heck, at least until the deceased is in the ground—before they …
And then, finally, the lightbulb went on above my head: there was no need to wait because it had already been going on. This wasn’t a new romance. This was an affair. I thought about the first time I saw Mimi with Fusco, how they had been sharing a cup of coffee with such intimacy, how she had draped her hand so casually on his shoulder.
Then I thought about that conversation they had earlier, where Fusco had essentially berated her for giving money to the pastor. I had dismissed it as Fusco taking up his buddy’s battle, never thinking it was possibly his own battle. I had been watching a lover’s spat.
Yeah, Mimi and Fusco had probably been doing this for a while, which meant …
I felt like I needed one of those feathers to knock me over again. Here I was, slamming my brain around, trying to imagine these big, complicated scenarios that led to the death of Darius Kipps. And all along, it had been one of the oldest and simplest of sins. Lust.
Mimi Kipps was just another adulterous wife. Mike Fusco was just another swinging dick. And they both wanted the third wheel out of the way.
I began imagining a new scenario, one that made the pieces fit: Darius learned his quasi-partner was having an affair with his wife, got blisteringly drunk for the first time in a decade, and, while still smashed, angrily confronted Fusco. And sure, Kipps was a big guy. But he was also borderline blacking out, so Fusco was able to subdue him easily.
Maybe that’s when the chair tying came in. I could imagine Fusco tying up Kipps, just so they could talk without Kipps trying to throw punches. Maybe Fusco argued that he and Mimi were in love and that Kipps might as well face the fact that his marriage was over.
But Kipps refused, raved that he was going to get Mimi back no matter what, maybe even threatened to harm her. Whatever it was, it made Fusco realize he had to get rid of Kipps. So Fusco grabbed Kipps’s gun, untied him, pushed him in the shower in the locker room, and, blam, game over.
The ball
istics would match. And Fusco would have known the water from the shower would destroy or alter key evidence, like gunshot residue or blood spatter. And when other cops heard the gunshot and came to investigate, there’s Fusco, just another cop in the bedlam. No one would have realized he was there all along.
Or heck, maybe it was even more sinister than that. Maybe this was a premeditated act, and Mimi and Fusco had come up with some kind of plan to get rid of Kipps and make it look like suicide. They tied him down, forced him to drink a bunch of booze, then went for the kill.
Either way, it worked. Sure, Mimi had been hell-bent on clearing her husband’s name, trying to convince me and others he never would have committed suicide, even going so far as to have Fusco tell me about the inconsistency with the bourbon (which may have been invented). But all that—as Ben Hilfiker had so cynically pointed out—was just for insurance purposes.
The reaction of the Newark Police Department certainly made sense. The cops were just embarrassed that one of their own had killed himself and wanted the thing to be over with as soon as possible.
Even Pastor Al’s actions were now a little more logical. He must have learned about the affair or guessed it was happening—Fusco and Mimi weren’t being terribly discreet, if glomming in front of a window was any guide—and washed his hands of it, dropping his call for an independent investigation.
Or maybe he just decided to let a higher authority sort it out.
* * *
I could have stood there for another hour, cataloguing the implications of my new discovery. But a car rolled by slowly, its occupants—an elderly couple—peering at me curiously. I suddenly became aware I was just a weird white guy standing in the rain in a town where I didn’t belong, staring at someone’s house. I couldn’t have been any more obvious with binoculars and a telescope.
I folded my umbrella, got back into my car, and skittered away before I attracted too much more attention. Or before my two lovebirds finished. Maybe I should have given Fusco more credit than that. But if he was still stuck in the backrub-as-foreplay method of seduction, he couldn’t necessarily be ruled out as a member of the Minute Man Club.
Back on Central Avenue, I again considered my dining options—there’s a Popeyes and a KFC, after all—but instead drove toward Redeemer Love Christian Church. It was time to pay a visit to the anointed man of God and I knew, both from my travels and from a multitude of billboards, that I could find him and his spiritual healing on West Market Street in Newark.
My plan was, basically, to play both smart and dumb. I knew he had called the attorney general—though, since I had that from an off-the-record source, I needed to get him to admit it. That would be the smart part. The dumb part was to ask why he made that call and pretend like I didn’t know the answer.
As I drove, I accessed our archives on my phone so I could quickly read over the story we had written about him and the church a few months back. The narrative started in early seventies Newark with Pastor Al, then a high school gym teacher, holding services in his basement. During a bleak time for still-riot-scarred Newark, a time when vacancy rates were soaring and “urban renewal” had become a grim joke, LeRioux was a charismatic preacher who offered hope. He took in wayward souls, gave them new birth through Jesus, and joined them with his flock.
Membership doubled every few years. Most tithed, and the money was constantly being plowed back into expanding facilities. Before long, the gym teacher was preaching full time and moved into a storefront on Sussex Avenue, then a former bowling alley on Norfolk Street. A church-affiliated day care was opened. Then a senior living facility. Redeemer Love Christian could take care of you from cradle to grave.
As the congregation grew, so did Pastor Al’s reputation and import. The story left as an open question when, exactly, LeRioux had found the time to get his doctorate or what institution had given it to him. But somewhere along the line he started calling himself Reverend Doctor. Maybe he just liked how it sounded.
Either way, the story made it sound as if Pastor Al had a mastery of political science, turning the perception that he could influence his parishioners’ votes into leverage to get what he wanted, whether it was funding for his day care, tax breaks for church-owned housing projects, or contracts to wash police vehicles at a chain of car washes the church had opened around the city.
Sometime in the nineties, he convinced the city council to more or less donate a chunk of land on West Market Street, and that was where his congregation built its current home—a massive, modern megachurch, complete with offices, broadcast facilities for Sunday’s services, and a theaterlike sanctuary with a large stage and seating for two thousand. The sanctuary was called LeRioux Chapel—named after Pastor Al’s parents, of course, because he was far too modest to name it after himself.
But no one was fooled. The church was essentially a monument to the Reverend Doctor Alvin LeRioux.
The real nut of the story came from a splinter group who said they had been cast out of the flock for asking too many questions about church finances. According to them, Redeemer Love Christian had revenues of approximately $22 million a year from tithes and various ancillary industries. But no one would give them—or our reporter—any accounting of where the money went. I guess they had noticed Pastor Al’s silk suits, too.
It reminded me of the old joke about the priest and the televangelist, talking about how they determined what percentage of the offering stayed with them and what percentage went to God’s work. The priest said he drew a line in the middle of his office, then tossed all the money in the air. Whatever landed on the left went to him, to the right went to God. The televangelist said he had a slightly different method: he threw all the money in the air, and whatever God caught, He could keep.
So I more or less knew what I was getting myself into as I parked on the street—eschewing Redeemer Love’s large, recently paved, fenced-in lot—and walked through the front door of the church offices. I passed a sign on a stanchion that read, PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR CELL PHONE WHILE IN GOD’S HOUSE, and I complied, just in case God was ready to hit me with His version of roaming charges. I was greeted by a receptionist, and when I told her I wanted to talk to Alvin LeRioux, she looked at me like I had just asked for an audience with the pope.
Nevertheless, I was ushered toward a set of double doors that had REV. DR. LERIOUX imprinted on a brass plate to the side. The doors led to a large office suite that contained several efficient, diligent female underlings, dressed in conservative suits that ran the color spectrum from black all the way to slate gray.
The one who appeared to be the alpha underling—she was wearing a wireless headset, like she was the operator standing by to take my order—was in her midthirties and, I must say, quite easy on the eyes. She was tall and elegant, with light-brown skin and the kind of cheekbones that were made for modeling. She fairly oozed cool professionalism, but I still couldn’t help but wonder if Pastor Al was getting some of her on the side. If he was? Well, bravo for him.
She greeted me by saying, “How can I help you?”
“I’m here to see Reverend LeRioux.”
“And may I ask who you are?”
“You may,” I said, and left it at that. I hate it when people beat around the bush.
It tripped her up for just a second, enough to put a small crack in her Little Miss Unflappable façade. But she recovered quickly enough. “Well, then, who are you?”
“Carter Ross, agent of Satan,” I said, smiling.
Another crack. She actually frowned.
“Sorry, that’s just what your boss calls me behind my back. I’m really a reporter for the Eagle-Examiner, and I have to say the Satan thing has been way overblown. We were using him as a stringer for a while, but we canned him. He kept trying to convince everyone that Milton had misquoted him in Paradise Lost and we all got tired of hearing it.”
This time she was determined not to miss a beat: “And may I say…” she paused to rephrase, “Why do you need
to speak to the reverend?”
I kept right on smiling. “I’m writing a story about Darius Kipps, the dead cop Pastor Al was very interested in last night but has apparently forgotten about today. He also forgot to invite us to the press conference, but it’s okay—I won’t hold it against him.”
“Please have a seat,” she said, pointing to a pair of easy chairs and a couch that surrounded a small coffee table in the corner.
Then she disappeared behind a door to her right. Probably to fetch security.
* * *
But it wasn’t a security guard who soon came out to greet me. It was the reverend-perhaps-doctor himself. And if irritation correlates to perspiration, he was plenty aggravated. He was already mopping himself by the time he greeted me.
Still, he seemed determined to play nice. With what was intended to be a friendly smile, he looked down at me—being six-and-a-half feet tall, I suppose he looked down on most people—and gave me a cologne-doused handshake, guaranteeing me another day of smelling like eau de Al. He asked me if I needed anything to drink and I declined. Then he thanked the alpha underling, whose name was apparently Desiree, and invited me into his personal chambers.
I followed him into a room with high ceilings and dimensions large enough to accommodate a decent game of Wiffle ball. He hobbled over behind his desk like a man ten years overdue for a knee replacement, and I tried not to pop an Achilles tendon every time my feet sank into his extra-plush carpeting. It was like DuPont had started making a brand called StainMaster QuickSand.
Pastor Al plopped himself in a chair, removed his gold-wire-framed glasses, and took another opportunity to mop his hangdog face. As he did so, I pulled a pen and notebook out of my pocket. No need to make him think this was a social call.
He replaced his glasses, sighed, and in that voice-of-God bass asked, “So what can I do for you today, Mister Ross?”
So I was Mr. Ross now. It was an upgrade from Lucifer’s cabana boy, or whatever he called me around Mimi.
Since he was showing courtesy, I did the same and kept my tone respectful, even while my words were sharp: “I’m working on a follow-up story about Darius Kipps, and to be honest I’m a little perplexed by your actions, Reverend. Last night you held a press conference and announced that the Newark Police Department was telling a big, bad lie. Then you said the state attorney general ought to step in. But this morning you called the attorney general and told him thanks but no thanks. Can you explain that for me?”
