The Player

by Brad Parks

  “But when you ask me if we were having problems.” She let out an indignant huff. “That is just the most offensive, most horrible thing … As if this wasn’t already the worst day of my life. The nerve you have! I’m going to have to ask you to leave, Mr. Ross. Immediately.”

  She looked at me with hatred in her eyes. I wondered if Vaughn McAlister had seen that face at some point before his life ended.

  * * *

  I escorted myself from the office and, once outside, called Pigeon and filled her in on the world according to Marcia Fenstermacher. Pigeon was already out in Florham Park by the time I was done, so I instructed the intrepid intern to case the neighborhood to see what, if anything, she could learn about the happy/unhappy couple.

  Then I turned to my next task. If Vaughn McAlister had been getting ready to leave his mistress—or his girlfriend, or his life partner, or whatever we ought to call such people—and possibly rekindle with his ex-wife, it made the ex-wife my next logical contact.

  Alas, whereas Fenstermacher was an unusual name, McAlister was not, which I knew would complicate the task of finding her. I steered my car out of the parking garage to a spot where my smart phone would have decent reception and started asking my dear old friend, LexisNexis, for some help.

  They say that an elephant never forgets. But, truly, pachyderms have nothing on a good digital database. If you know your way around inside them, it’s amazing how much of a person’s biography you can start to assemble.

  Thus, I was able to find some old property records that linked McAlister, Vaughn to a McAlister, Lisa. Then McAlister, Lisa moved to Florida and reverted to her maiden name: Denbigh, Lisa.

  She didn’t stay long in Florida. From there, she’d gone to Arizona. Then California. Then Oregon. Without casting aspersions on Lisa Denbigh’s reputation, it’s fair to say she got around.

  It’s funny how you get a sense of a person just from the public records they leave behind. If you have someone who lives a stable life, doing dependably mature things—like buying a house, registering to vote, paying her taxes, and keeping up with her bills—she establishes a certain profile. It’s neat. Tidy. Simple.

  Lisa Denbigh, on the other hand, had created a swampy morass. In addition to the transient lifestyle that resulted in a dozen or so addresses across four states, she had an assortment of civil complaints against her for unpaid bills: $554 from her electricity provider in Florida; $897 from an electronics store in California; $734 from a cell phone provider; $17,554 from a credit card company; and so on. Some of them had progressed rather quickly to summary judgment, which meant she hadn’t bothered to answer them.

  She also had an assortment of speeding tickets, including one that had resulted in a bench warrant in California; and unpaid parking tickets, for which the county of Broward, Florida felt it was owed $570.

  It was all relatively small-time—there were no felonies or violent crimes, no DUIs or drug offenses, at least not that I could find—but it didn’t exactly paint Lisa Denbigh as the most fiscally responsible person in the world.

  It also wasn’t going to make her very easy to track down. I was able to find telephone numbers associated with some of her addresses, but not all of them. And, of course, none of the numbers was any good. Three were disconnected. One was clearly a wrong number—it led to a sandwich shop. One was for a fax machine. One forwarded to another number that was also disconnected. Another led to an answering machine that told me, “This is Roy. You know what to do. So do it.”

  I left a message, telling Roy if he knew where Lisa Denbigh was to have her call me. But it didn’t exactly instill in me a lot of confidence. She had likely left a long trail of bill collectors in her wake, all of whom were trying to call her on phone numbers that they, too, were finding on LexisNexis. That would only make her change numbers more often—because who the heck wants to be pestered by bill collectors all the time?

  Instead of attempting the impossible task of guessing where she might be now—somehow, I was thinking it wasn’t Oregon anymore if she and Vaughn were getting together again—I decided to go backward. Going through her history, I went past when she was Lisa McAlister to when she was Lisa Denbigh for the first time.

  I tracked her through a variety of addresses in Manhattan, then to Gainesville, Florida at a time when Lisa would have been roughly college age. And that meant more than likely she had been a student at the University of Florida. Good to know.

  Going back in time even further, the earliest address I could find was on Thagard Road in Empress, Georgia, an unincorporated piece of Brooks County. The address was, as far as I could tell, still the home of Robert and Martha Ann Denbigh—presumably, Lisa’s parents. Their dates of birth were about right. Their public-records profile was more of the neat/tidy/simple version. There was only one phone number associated with them, so I called it.

  “Hello?” a friendly sounding southern gentleman said.

  “Hi, is this Robert Denbigh?”

  “It is.”

  “My name is Carter Ross. I’m a reporter with a newspaper in New Jersey. I’m trying to track down your daughter, Lisa.”

  “Oh, well, it shouldn’t be too hard for you. She just moved back up your way.”

  “She did? Do you know where?”

  “Well, no, to be honest. We just got a note from her on that Facebook thing maybe two weeks ago saying she was moving back to New Jersey. She didn’t say where. We figured we’d get a note from her once she was settled down.”

  “Do you have a number for her by any chance?”

  “Well, now, I don’t know if I feel comfortable sharing that with you,” he said.

  “I can understand that. Could you maybe give her my number and ask her to call me?”

  “I don’t think she’s very good about checking her messages, to be honest. When we want to get ahold of her, we usually just send her a message on Facebook. I don’t have much use for it, but my wife’s got an account. Why don’t you do that?”

  I thanked him for the suggestion and ended the call, a little embarrassed I hadn’t thought of it sooner. I know there are differing opinions about Mark Zuckerberg and the phenomenon he created and/or stole, but most reporters I knew were ready to make him one of our patron saints. When it came to snooping on unsuspecting citizens—“FaceStalking,” as sometimes we called it—few things were better than Facebook. It was amazing how much of their lives people would put online. Yes, Facebook has privacy controls. But a lot of people don’t even bother using them.

  By that point, I had enough information about Lisa Denbigh that I knew I’d find her easily, presuming she was one of the 7.5 billion people on this planet of 7 billion who have Facebook accounts. Sure enough, I came up with a Lisa Denbigh who had studied at the University of Florida and Brooks County High School.

  I clicked and started chuckling. Everything was falling into place. Lisa Denbigh was a statuesque bottle blonde with high cheekbones, fake boobs, a flat stomach, and very straight, very white teeth. She actually looked a bit like the picture I had seen of Vaughn’s mother, suggesting that, at least when it came to some people, maybe Freud wasn’t that far off after all.

  I now had the missing piece that more or less allowed me to put together a good guess at her life story. She had been head cheerleader and homecoming queen at Brooks County High School. Or maybe Brooks County Junior Miss.

  No matter. Point is, she was pretty and popular. Then she went to the University of Florida, where she was in the same sorority as all the other pretty, popular girls. She graduated, went to Manhattan, and got one of those jobs that beautiful young women can always find—hostess at a high-end restaurant, receptionist at an image-conscious business, pleasing face for hire at trade shows, whatever. There were always men around to buy her clothes, buy her drinks, buy her a boob job—anything she needed.

  About the time when she started realizing her youthful good looks weren’t going to last indefinitely—when younger, prettier girls started showi
ng up to replace her—she met Vaughn. He was a developer on the come who wanted some arm candy. They were a perfect couple, except for the fact that they had nothing to talk about.

  After a few years, the physical attraction stopped being enough. Vaughn made a real, deep connection with his secretary and ran off with her, leaving Lisa adrift. She started moving around the country, running away from her problems. Her half of the divorce settlement had run out—which might not have taken long, since Vaughn had probably been smart enough to get a prenup. And she had never really learned how to be accountable with money. She thought beautiful people didn’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else. Hence all those collection accounts I saw.

  Finally she made a desperate attempt to reconnect with Vaughn—maybe on Facebook, who knows? By that point, Vaughn had grown tired of Marcia Fenstermacher, who was, while reasonably attractive, no Lisa Denbigh. And so she moved back to New Jersey and they rekindled, much to Miss Fenstermacher’s consternation. And two weeks after his ex-wife showed up back in down, Vaughn had ended up dead because of it.

  Or at least that was the narrative I had assembled, based on stereotypes, guesses, and certain well-honed reporter’s intuition. There was only one way to find out if my version was reasonably true: I clicked on the button to compose a message to Lisa, typed out a quick request for her to please call me, and hit Send.

  I just hoped she checked Facebook more often than she paid her bills.

  * * *

  I had more or less completed inventing Lisa Denbigh’s life story when Pigeon called me, sounding out of breath.

  “Hey, it’s Neesha,” she said, panting.

  “Hey,” I said. “Why do you sound like you’ve just run the New York Marathon?”

  “Because I hate dogs,” she said quickly, in between two large gulps of air.

  “Come again?”

  “I”—inhale—“hate”—exhale—“stupid”—inhale—“dogs,” she said, with one final huff. “Sorry. I just got chased through the neighborhood by one.”

  “What was it, like a pit bull or something?”

  “No,” she said, her breathing still fast but at least not desperate. “I think it was one of those … what was the kind of dog they had on Full House?”

  “Full House?”

  “Yeah, you know. That show where Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen played the same girl, except you always knew whether it was Mary-Kate or Ashley because Ashley looks ever-so-slightly weirder than Mary-Kate?”

  “Yeah, what about it?”

  “They had a dog. What kind was it?”

  “Pigeon … wasn’t that a golden retriever?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. A golden retriever.”

  “So you were being chased through the streets by … a golden retriever. What, were you worried he would lick you to death?”

  “Look, I told you, I hate dogs, okay?”

  “Duly noted,” I said. “So did you just want to tell me about your harrowing escape from this slobbering yellow menace or was there another reason for your call?”

  “Oh, yeah, so I talked to one of the neighbors, and you know what she said? She said that she heard that Vaughn and Marcia had, quote, ‘a big row’ on Monday night.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, she was kind of old—I guess that’s why she used the word ‘row’—and at first I was surprised that she could hear anything, because she asked me to repeat every question like five times. But she said she was walking her dog this morning—what is it with people in this neighborhood and dogs?—and she bumped into another neighbor who said she heard a lot of yelling coming from the house on Monday night.”

  “So this is a secondhand report of yelling,” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “She give any details?”

  “Not really. She just said everyone in the neighborhood was talking about it. The lady was a bit of a busybody, so really it might have just been her talking about it to everyone. But after what you said about Vaughn going back to his ex-wife, I thought maybe Monday night was when he told Marcia Fenstermacher and that’s when she flipped out.”

  “Okay, good stuff,” I said. “See if you can find the neighbor who actually heard this fight. And, in the meantime?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Watch out for wandering Pomeranians. We lost three interns just last year to those vicious brutes.”

  “Don’t be mean,” she said curtly. “That golden retriever was out to get me.”

  I was still laughing when she hung up on me.

  Putting the Malibu in drive, I started weaving through some back streets toward the office, then decided on a quick detour to Green Street. At some point, I’d have to get a comment from the Newark Police Department about the McAlister investigation. Might as well cross it off the to-do list.

  I parked at a meter and fed it—Green Street being the one place in Newark where Parking Enforcement consistently lived up to its name—then went inside the ancient and thoroughly outdated building that still housed Newark’s Finest. I announced I was there to harass Hakeem Rogers, the NPD’s public information officer and my occasional nemesis.

  After a ten-minute wait, he came downstairs, greeting me with: “Why can’t you just call me so I can have the pleasure of ignoring your message all day?”

  Officer Rogers and I don’t always get along very well. But at least we don’t pretend otherwise. And, truth be told, I think we both enjoy the antagonism.

  “Because,” I told him, “I wanted to get your thoroughly unhelpful quote early on so I could have the pleasure of making fun of your bad grammar all day.”

  “Yeah, you’re so smart. Anyway, what do you want?”

  “I’m writing about Vaughn McAlister,” I said.

  “Yeah, I figured. What about him?”

  “He was murdered in your fair city last night.”

  “Yeah, I heard. My comment is: Too bad it didn’t happen to you instead.”

  “Is the Newark Police Department investigating this heinous act?”

  “Of course we are,” he said.

  “Do you care to update the city’s newspaper on the progress of your investigation?”

  “Sure. You ready?”

  I pulled out my pad and said, “Go.”

  “The Newark Police Department is actively investigating the murder of Vaughn McAlister. Anyone with information relevant to this or any other crime is urged to contact the Newark Police Department’s twenty-four-hour Crime Stoppers anonymous tip line at—”

  “Seriously? You’re already going tips line on this one?”

  Rogers usually gave us the tips-line quote when it was another thug-on-thug gang-related killing they knew they’d never be able to solve.

  “That’s all I got for you,” Rogers said.

  I debated tipping him off about Marcia Fenstermacher, if only because it would speed things up. If the Newark Police arrested her, I’d be back to Jackie Orr and Ridgewood Avenue by the end of the week. But, maybe because I was annoyed at Rogers, I decided against it. Let the cops do their job—or not, as the case may be.

  I was about to announce my departure when Hakeem Rogers did something that, while not unprecedented, was at least unusual.

  “Hey, Ross?” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Put your pad away for a second.”

  I obliged.

  “Off the record?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t hold your breath on this one,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  But Hakeem Rogers was already walking up the stairs, his back turned to me, saying more with his silence than he had with words.

  Under ordinary circumstances, Marcia Fenstermacher had no trouble keeping her wits about her. She was orderly, logical and relentlessly organized. It was why Vaughn had hired her in the first place, poaching her from another developer by offering her a five-thousand-dollar raise. It was why Vaughn had become so dependent on her, relying o
n her to know even the smallest detail of his business. Sometimes she swore he wouldn’t know where the bathroom was without her.

  But, these being anything but ordinary circumstances, it took her a while to finally reach a conclusion about what to do next. There was just so much to process. Plus, everyone kept coming up to her with these big, weepy eyes, wanting to console her, inquiring how she was doing, asking if there was anything they could do. It was all well-intentioned, of course, but it kept distracting her from what she knew she really should be doing.

  Yes, there was a lot to be done. And everyone would expect Marcia Fenstermacher to be the one to do it, just like always.

  She needed to contact a funeral home, arrange for a viewing, find a minister to officiate at the service. Vaughn was a seriously lapsed Episcopalian who probably hadn’t darkened the doors of a church since his wedding day. But it would be nice to hear some comforting words from someone in a stiff white collar. It all had to look good.

  Except, of course, there was something she knew that had to be done first.

  Wanting to be alone, she waited until everyone was out of the office at lunch—or at least would not be coming to bother her about anything. She quietly rose from her desk, tossing her latest overloaded tissue into the wastebasket as she stood. She walked as quietly as she could across the hardwood floor to the door to Vaughn’s office.

  There, she paused. She hadn’t been in there since the night before, since …

  She took a deep breath, then pulled on the handle. Everything looked the same as it had the thousands of other times she had pushed through those doors. She reminded herself she was not a superstitious person. She didn’t believe in ghosts. Vaughn’s spirit was not in there.

  Only his files were. She walked over to the filing cabinet in the corner—the one he kept locked—and produced her key. What she needed was in the second drawer from the top.

  She pulled it open and found the folder, exactly where it was supposed to be. Inside was a sealed, plain brown envelope. There was no writing on it, but she knew it was the right one.

  Not bothering with a letter opener, she slid her finger under the flap, creating a series of jagged edges in her haste to get to the contents. Then she pulled out the document inside.