by Brad Parks
“Yeah, but—”
“No buts!” I snapped. “I know asking a man about his dead son is a little harder than asking someone about the weather. And it’s something that as normal human beings, we could never do. But when we have our armor on, it’s something we can do. It’s something we have to do, because it’s our job. Look at it this way: we’re going to be writing about Vaughn McAlister whether his dad talks to us or not. But if you were his dad, wouldn’t you want the newspaper to talk to you, just so nothing inaccurate was written about your son?”
“Well, I gue—”
“Of course you would!” I interrupted, not because it’s how Socrates would have done it but because I felt like I was on a roll. “You would want nothing more than for the final words written about your boy to be a hundred-percent, spot-on perfect.
“Besides,” I added somewhat philosophically, “if we don’t talk to him, The New York Times might. And Brodie would blow a gasket if the Times had something on a Newark-related story that we didn’t. And when Brodie blows a gasket, the rest of the newsroom leaks oil. So let’s go.”
“Where?”
“To Barry McAlister’s house.”
“You’ll come with me?” she said, actually sitting up for the first time.
“Sure,” I said. “What are mentors for?”
“Wow, thank you,” she said, a little too gratefully. But maybe, given the emotional wattage that was charging other parts of my life, I didn’t mind a little uncomplicated professional admiration coming my way.
As we made for the parking garage, Pigeon gave me the address for the McAlister household: 7 McAlister Court in West Orange. What did these guys have about naming things after themselves, anyhow? It had to be some kind of egomaniacal disorder. Trump Complex.
I unhitched the Malibu and programmed Barry McAlister’s address into the GPS, which recognized McAlister Court. We got rolling and I started giving Pigeon a brief geography lesson. Even New Jersey natives get the Oranges a little confused, because they come in three different cultivations: East, South, and West. It’s really quite easy to keep them straight. The farther away from Newark, the higher the real estate values.
As such, I guessed that the McAlister home in West Orange would be a decent little shack. And it was. Though it wasn’t anything ostentatious. It was an older, two-story, Tudor-style home with mature landscaping, nestled at the end of a private drive. It turned out the “7” on McAlister Court was quite superfluous. There were no numbers 1 through 6.
“I guess this is it,” Pigeon said as I stopped the engine.
“Okay,” I said, but didn’t immediately get out of the car. Pigeon and I had been yammering so much on our way out—the geography lecture had given way to a lesson about Eagle-Examiner history—that I hadn’t given much thought to the task at hand. I usually wanted at least to try to anticipate how an interview like this might go. Would Barry McAlister be angry? Welcome us with open arms? Give us a stiff upper lip and a few bland comments?
I wasn’t necessarily afraid to knock on the door of a murder victim’s family like I might have been as a cub reporter, but I still wanted to feel mentally prepared for whatever I might find when I did.
“What are you waiting for?” Pigeon asked.
I grasped the handle to the car door and said, “Just taking a moment to put on my armor.”
* * *
I’m not sure what I expected Barry McAlister to be, but the moment he answered the door, I understood why he had made his son the front man for McAlister Properties. Barry McAlister didn’t exactly present well.
He was overweight and smelled like a Marlboro. He was dressed in a timeworn flannel shirt, shapeless jeans, and once-white sneakers that had gone yellow with age. He had a nose that filled a large portion of his face and a jawline that was almost entirely jowl. His skin was sallow and flaccid. I pegged his age as somewhere in his late sixties but his health as somewhere in his eighties.
At least by appearances, he was the opposite of his perfectly turned-out son in just about every way. The only thing he had passed onto Vaughn was his hair, which was rich and full. Barry’s was gray, not blond, but it was still an impressive mane.
“Can I help you?” he asked in a gravelly, Jersey-tinged voice.
I made the rather quick determination that if Vaughn McAlister had been all about show, his dad was all about substance. So I went with the direct approach: “My name is Carter Ross. This is Neesha Krishnamurthy. We’re reporters with the Eagle-Examiner. I know this is a difficult time for you, but we’re writing a story about Vaughn and we were hoping you could talk about him a bit.”
His face didn’t really move. He just opened the door a little wider. “Come on in,” he said.
He trudged into a darkened living room and sat heavily in a leather recliner that faced an old, round-screen television that was on but muted. There was a small folding tray next to him with a full ashtray and an empty highball glass. I could forgive him the early start.
Then I realized, to my surprise, I could do more than just forgive him. I actually understood it, in a totally new way. There I was, less than twenty-four hours into my life as a future father, and already I felt its tug. Multiply what I felt by forty-odd years’ worth of memories and experiences, and then lose it all in one violent moment? Forget drinking. It would be all I could do to stop myself from wanting to play in traffic.
I shook the thought from my head and looked around. The room appeared to have been preserved in a state that might best be described as 1977. The carpet was shag. The colors were predominantly brown and orange. The couch that Pigeon and I sat on was upholstered in a paisley pattern that was outlawed the day Reagan took office. The drapes were banned shortly thereafter as well.
There were a few pictures but they were also dated. Barry was absent from them—I can’t imagine the camera liked him much—so they all either featured a younger-looking Vaughn McAlister or an attractive blonde with high cheekbones and feathered hair that last looked good on Farah Fawcett.
I was looking for a gentle start to our conversation, so I pointed to a photo of the blond woman and said, “Is that Vaughn’s mom?”
“Yep,” Barry said. “That’s her just before she ran off with another guy and left me with Vaughn. Then she died of cancer.”
So much for a gentle start. He lit a cigarette and stared at the television. I sneaked a glance at Pigeon. She looked like she would have gnawed her arm off it would have gotten her out of that living room.
“Vaughn looked like her,” Barry continued. “Took after her, too, even though he barely knew her. She had a real sense of style, that lady. I was the one who raised Vaughn, but he always had more of his mother in him.”
“Yet he went into business with you,” I said.
“Yeah, well…” he said, let his voice trail off.
The whole vibe was weird—weird how the guy just let us into his house, weird how everything in the place felt so stale, weird how he just started talking like we were in the middle of a conversation—but I did my best to roll with it.
“So how did you and Vaughn become partners?” I asked, pulling out my notepad.
Barry let out a wry laugh. “I guess he didn’t really have a choice.”
“What do you mean?”
“Long story.”
“We’ve got time,” I said.
He looked at me for a moment, then returned his gaze to the television as he started talking. “I started off with one apartment building on Avon Avenue in Newark. It was a seventy-unit building—a big place for a guy who didn’t know what he was doing. I bought it for next to nothing and I still had to take out a loan to swing it. The place was a nightmare. The boiler was busted all the time. The pipes leaked sewage into the basement. There were holes in the walls, holes in the ceilings. No one paid their rent. This was in the late sixties, just after the riots, and the quality of the tenants was awful. They were all on public assistance.”
He took a drag
on his cigarette and continued: “I thought I was going to lose my shirt before I even had a shirt. For a year, I worked night and day on that place. I poured money I didn’t even have into it, fixed everything myself, got rid of the bad tenants, got better ones. They might have feared me a little bit, because I made it clear I’d kick them out if they didn’t toe the line. But I think they respected me, too. They knew I was going to give them a fair shake. And they knew I wasn’t like those absentee slumlords, because I was in the building all the time, making sure everything worked okay.”
Another drag. “After a year, I had the place turning a nice little profit, so I took on another building. Another nightmare. A little bigger than the last one, actually. Same thing happened. I slaved on that building until I turned it around. Then I bought another one. I was starting to make some decent money but, damn, it was hard work. People think property management is just about cashing rent checks but it’s a helluva lot more than that. At least it is if you want to make money at it. By the time Vaughn was born, I was doing pretty well but my wife started complaining about the hours. Not the money, mind you. Just the hours.”
He hacked into his hand, looked at his empty glass, then went on: “I had bought us this place and I thought that’d make her happy, you know. I mean, the perfect little house in the suburbs. It’s what every woman wants, right? But she was … it seemed like she was never happy. She kept complaining about me working all the time, but I … I guess I never took it seriously until one day she showed up at the office with Vaughn. He was maybe two. She handed me a Dear John letter, handed me the kid, and that was it.”
The last cigarette wasn’t quite done, but Barry wasn’t leaving anything to chance. He lit another one before the first one could burn down, sucked on it until it was lit, then put it down. “After that, I tried to get babysitters for Vaughn, but I could never predict when I’d be home. They kept quitting on me that same way Vaughn’s mom did. Finally I just said to hell with it and started bringing Vaughn with me everywhere. After day care, after school, Saturday, Sunday. The kid learned the business from the ground up. When you’re a landlord, you see people at their best and their worst. Mostly their worst. Maybe I should have shielded him from it, I don’t know. But I thought it was good for him to, I don’t know, see what life really was. So if I had to clear out an apartment that had been used as a crack den, he did it with me. If I had some woman calling me hysterical because her boyfriend was trying to break the door down and the police wouldn’t come, Vaughn would see that, too. He got an education, let me tell you—everything from fixing toilets to sitting in landlord-tenant court.”
Barry grabbed the new cigarette, flicked the accumulated ash off the end, sucked on it briefly, then concluded, “So you asked me when Vaughn and I became partners. But the fact is, it wasn’t really a decision. It was something life kind of thrust on both of us, and we made the best of it.”
“So that’s the residential side,” I said. “I thought all of Vaughn’s business was commercial.”
“It was,” Barry said. “Vaughn was like his mom in that he had a certain style—the clothes, the hair. He wanted everything to be fancy. He was like that in business, too. We could have both kept making a decent living doing what we were doing, but that wasn’t good enough for Vaughn. He didn’t want to spend his life managing ghetto buildings, chasing after deadbeats for their rent. He always had his eyes on downtown. He wanted those big, shiny office buildings. He wanted to wear nice suits to work. So he convinced me that McAlister Properties should add a commercial division and that he should be the head of it.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Ten years ago, I guess. I started selling off the residential buildings and Vaughn used it as seed money to go into the commercial side.”
I felt I had gotten Barry McAlister sufficiently warmed up that it was time to ask the important question: “So, I know this isn’t easy to think about,” I said. “But do you have any idea who killed him?”
The television did its silent blare. The most recent cigarette sat smoldering in the ashtray. He sat stonily in his recliner, to the point where I feared I had lost him in some kind of trance.
Finally he offered, “Yeah. His secretary.”
* * *
In certain ham-handed television shows, the sound technician would have inserted the sound of a record scratching, while the actors would have been instructed to stare dumbly into the camera.
“His secretary?” I said. “Miss Fenstermacher?”
“Yeah, that’s her,” Barry said. “Look, I don’t want you writing any of this, so put your pad away. I didn’t even tell the cops this, because I don’t know anything for sure, but I got some history with some people at your newspaper. Some good history. I always felt like you guys worked hard to get a story. Maybe if I put you on the right track you can get this one too, huh?”
“Okay,” I said, putting down my pad and closing the cover. “So what makes you think she did it?”
McAlister looked longingly at his empty highball glass, then hoisted himself out of the recliner.
“Want something to drink?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said quickly.
“What’s your pleasure?”
“What are you having?”
“I’m a Cutty Sark man.”
Scotch. I absolutely despise scotch. I’d had a bad scotch experience long ago, in college, and had avoided the stuff ever since. There mere smell of it made me a little queasy. So, naturally, I said, “Sounds great.”
He turned to Pigeon and said, “And you?”
I could tell Pigeon was about to make the terrible mistake of saying no, so I quickly interjected, “It’s her favorite.”
He disappeared into the kitchen and Pigeon glared at me and softly said, “What are you doing?”
“Well, apparently, I’m about to be drinking scotch. And so are you.”
“We can’t do that! We’re working!” she said, with utmost gravity.
“Yeah, I know. News flash: when you’re in this business, sometimes drinking with a source is working.”
“But … I’ve never had alcohol before,” she whispered, pronouncing the word “alcohol” like she was an international spokeswoman for the temperance movement.
“Is it some kind of religious thing?”
“No, I—”
“A health thing?”
“No, it—”
“Then live a little, Pigeon,” I said as Barry returned to the room carrying three glasses filled with ice and an amber-colored liquid that didn’t appear to have been mixed with anything that might lessen its potency or improve its taste. Scotch on the rocks. A Man’s Drink.
He handed Pigeon and me our glasses, settled into his chair, and choked out a quick, “Here’s to Vaughn.”
He tilted back the drink and swallowed half of it.
“To Vaughn,” I agreed. I took a less aggressive swig, but it was still enough to make my stomach feel like it had a small forest fire inside. As I brought my glass back down, I saw Pigeon was still just staring at hers. I shot her an urgent look.
“To Vaughn,” she said at last, brought the rim of the glass to her lips, then took a tentative sip.
I saw the look on her face—the words “shock and awe” came to mind—but I was proud of her for resisting the urge to spit it back up all over McAlister’s awful shag carpeting. It was, I could tell, a struggle.
I’m pretty sure Barry missed it. He had settled back into his chair and was fiddling with his drink, tilting it back and forth to bring more of the scotch into contact with the ice.
“This is absolutely off the record,” he said. “But you know Vaughn and his secretary had an affair, right?”
“No. I can say that didn’t exactly come up when he and I spoke.”
“I shouldn’t even call it an affair anymore. I mean, well, where do I start.… Vaughn was married to this girl—nice girl, good-looking girl. I really liked her. They didn�
��t have kids yet, but I kept hoping. And Marcia had a husband and a kid, too. Anyhow, Vaughn worked some pretty long hours. Marcia was always with him. So I suppose it was kind of natural for some sparks to start flying. It’s not like he’s the first guy to get the hots for his secretary, but, jeez, with those two it was like a forest fire. I walked in on them one time. Doing it right on her desk.”
That explained why she kept it so neat.
Barry shook his head, took another swallow of scotch, and continued: “I told him to enjoy it for a while and then go back to his wife and shut the hell up about it. But he started all this, ‘But, Dad, I love her,’ crap. Sometimes she’d attach a sticky note to a file he needed to look at, and it’d say something like, ‘I love you with every ounce of my being.’ Mushy stuff like that. I’d tell them to keep it out of the office. I mean, that’s what hot-sheet hotels are for, you know? Finally one thing led to another. He left his wife. She left her husband. It was a big mess. But he kept saying it was okay. They were in love.”
He said the word “love” like he didn’t believe it. I didn’t know if he was incredulous about it for his son and the secretary or just in general.
“So if they were in love, why would she kill him?” I asked.
“Because fires that burn hot also go out faster,” he said. “Vaughn had told her they were done. I think maybe he was planning on going back to his ex-wife. He had mentioned to me she was moving back to the area. Maybe he told Marcia the same thing and she went nuts. You know what they say about a woman scorned. I always thought she might come unglued a little but I never…”
He broke it off, overcome with emotion. He drained the rest of his scotch, actually resting his forehead on the glass for a moment.
I thought about Miss Fenstermacher, her helmetlike hair, her flawless manicure. I couldn’t necessarily envision her swinging a two-by-four at someone’s head. But, then again, I also knew that she wouldn’t have been the first jilted lover in history to exact the ultimate revenge.
