The Player

by Brad Parks

  Her eyes paused on the words atop the first page: “Last Will and Testament of Vaughn J. McAlister.”

  With one last deep breath, she started reading. She went slowly at first, then started skimming as she got closer to the end. It was all there, in black-and-white.

  He had left her everything. The house. Every dime in his savings account. His cars. The 401(k)—or what was left of it after he had raided it three times. His 50 percent interest in McAlister Properties. Everything.

  She slid the drawer closed, her hand shaking just slightly.

  CHAPTER 4

  The reluctance of the Newark Police to engage in solving Vaughn McAlister’s murder was curious. It’s not that they were terribly concerned about what it would do to their clearance rate. With eighty or a hundred killings a year, one sliding under the boards wouldn’t budge the numbers that much. Only about half the murders in Newark got solved anyway. Still, the Vaughn McAlisters of the world usually belonged in the half of the murders the Newark Police did solve. He was a regular citizen, after all—a well-known member of the business community, at that.

  And yet Pritch was telling me no special resources were being put toward it, because city hall didn’t seem to be making a fuss about it. And Hakeem Rogers was telling me not to hold my breath waiting for it.

  Did Marcia Fenstermacher somehow possess the connections or political wherewithal to get an investigation squashed? That seemed to strain credulity. She was secretary of McAlister Properties, not secretary of state.

  So was there something else about Vaughn McAlister’s life or death that someone high up in the police department or the city of Newark didn’t want exposed? Or was there some other actor or element out there I had yet to even discover?

  It begged an explanation that I could not, at the moment, produce. So, halfway back to the Eagle-Examiner offices, I broke off my usual route and turned toward the Clinton Hill section of the city. My Malibu, as sensitive to the unexpected course change as any Trigger or Silver, whinnied and neighed.

  “That’s right, boy,” I told it. “We’re not going to the newsroom. We’re going to visit an old friend.”

  When official sources don’t know much, or won’t say much, unofficial sources often do. And one of my best unofficial sources for all things related to the streets of Newark was a T-shirt-shop owner who more or less grew up on them.

  Tee Jamison is one of those people who proves that adage about the dangers of judging books by their covers—or, in his case, brothers by their tats. Because while he’s got the tattoos—and the braids, and the muscles, and a certain look that tends to make old white women nervous—he’s about as much of a thug as Betty Crocker. Put it this way: I once caught him in the back of the store with a box of tissues and a bootleg copy of Love, Actually.

  His real name is Reginald. In return for my never telling any of his friends that, he has been known to help me with an occasional story or ten. He enjoys sharing his knowledge of urban culture with me, and I’m happy to oblige by playing the part of the clueless white guy. He keeps claiming he has a second white friend, but I’m skeptical.

  The street outside his store was empty, as it tended to be in the morning. By afternoon, there would be an assortment of young men that Tee semi-lovingly referred to as “the knuckleheads.” They were a mostly harmless group who acted like they were in a gang—they wore gang colors, flashed one another gang symbols, affected gang attitudes—but were really just faking it. I asked them about it once, and it turns out pretending to be in a gang is a great way to get left alone by people who really are in a gang.

  I rang Tee’s doorbell and got buzzed in. From his back room, I heard, “Hey, why don’t black people take aspirin?”

  “Oh, my,” I said. “I don’t know, Tee, why don’t black people take aspirin?”

  “Because they’re too proud to pick the cotton out of the top of the bottle,” Tee said, emerging into the front of the store with a grin on his face.

  “That’s beyond horrible.”

  “Yeah, and if you told me that joke, I’d have to organize an angry mob to stomp on your pasty white face. But since it’s me telling it to you, it’s just funny. That’s what you white people like to call ‘ironic.’”

  “Well, maybe Alanis Morissette would, but I was never sure she quite got the definition of that word right.”

  “Who’s Alanis Morissette?”

  “She’s Canadian. And angry.”

  “Man, I would be too if I had to live in Canada,” he said. “Ain’t nothing but snow and polar bears up there. Hey, what do you get if you cross a black man and an Eskimo?”

  “No. I’m not playing along this time. I can’t run the risk you’re an informant for the NAACP.”

  “A’ight,” he said. “Fine. Ruin my fun. Anyhow, what’s up? You never come around no more.”

  “I was here last week.”

  “You was?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Aw, man, I thought that was my other white friend. You guys all look alike, you know.”

  “So I’ve heard,” I said. “Anyhow, I’m actually not just here to swap racially insensitive witticisms.”

  “Oh yeah, what’s going on?”

  “You’ve heard about McAlister Arms, right?”

  “Yeah, gonna get us a Best Buy!” he crowed.

  Like I said, Tee knows stuff about Newark. “The identity of the tenant is supposedly a big secret. How do you know it’s a Best Buy?”

  “Because one of the knuckleheads told me they saw some dudes in Best Buy shirts walking around the property a couple weeks ago,” Tee said. “It’s all over the city already. Every shoplifter I know is looking forward to it.”

  He was kidding. I think.

  “Anyhow,” I said, “the property’s developer got killed last night. He has a jealous girlfriend, so it might be pretty straightforward. But the cops don’t seem to be doing much with it. So I was hoping you could keep an ear out for any talk about it.”

  “What kind of talk?”

  “The usual who-done-it and why.”

  “Oh, well it’s probably one of his workers,” Tee said definitively.

  I felt my head recoil. “One of his workers? What makes you say that?”

  “They all getting sick.”

  “Sick?” I asked, getting another small jolt. Just when I thought sick people were out of my purview for the time being, here they were again. I had dismissed the possibility of the McAlister Arms site as the source of the Ridgewood Avenue mystery disease because Vaughn McAlister told me it had been cleaned up. But if construction workers were having the same symptoms as Edna Foster and her neighbors, I’d have to start digging a lot harder into McAlister Arms. Perhaps literally.

  “Yeah, sick. They been hiring a bunch of people from the neighborhood down there. And at first everyone was like, ‘Wow, a construction project that’s actually hiring black folks.’ Because usually they just bring in people from out of town, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Sure.”

  “So they start throwing around jobs, and then we figured out why they must have wanted black folks. It’s because whatever they’re doing down there is making them all sick. And, you know how it is, don’t nobody give a damn about sick black folks.”

  “Yeah, so I’ve heard,” I said. “What kind of sick are they?”

  “I don’t know. I just heard everyone working there is getting sick. But when they complain or don’t show up for work, they get fired. There’s enough people in this city who need jobs that there’s always someone to take their place. Some of the workers figured out the score and just stopped complaining—it’s good money, you know what I’m saying? But I know some other dudes who are really pissed off. One of them probably got pissed off enough that they, you know, handled it hood style.”

  An angry construction worker was certainly a lot more likely to be proficient with a blunt object than a secretary was. Then again, I’m not sure this simplified anything. I had see
n dozens of workers down at that site. That would make for a rather sizable suspect pool.

  “Do you know any of these guys who were working down there?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I know all of them. But ain’t none of them gonna snitch.”

  “No, no. I’m not looking for a snitch,” I said, then told him all about the people I had met on Ridgewood Avenue and how the construction workers sounded like victims of the same malady.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Tee said when I was done.

  “What?”

  He grinned and said, “Guess someone might care about sick black people after all.”

  * * *

  Tee and I made arrangements wherein he’d contact some construction workers on my behalf and I’d be the beneficiary of his efforts when I got to interview them at some later date.

  I was just out the door when my phone started ringing. The call was from the 973 area code, which meant it was local, but neither my phone nor I recognized the number.

  “Carter Ross.”

  “Yo, Bird Man,” I heard back. Bird Man is what people on the streets of Newark sometimes call reporters from my paper because of the more avian aspects of the Newark Eagle-Examiner’s banner. The person hailing me this way was young, African American, and vaguely familiar-sounding. But I couldn’t quite place his voice.

  “Hi, how can I help you?”

  The man lowered the phone and, chuckling, announced, “He asking, ‘Hi, how can I help you?’” This prompted laughter from his audience, which sounded like three or four other young men.

  “Damn, Bird Man, you really do got a funny way of talking,” he said.

  That’s when I knew who it was. “Bernie Kosar! Is that you?”

  He laughed again and said to his friends, “He just asked if it’s Bernie Kosar.” The buddies seemed to enjoy this, too, and Bernie returned to the phone. “You too funny,” he said.

  “Thanks. Anyhow, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

  I thought Bernie might feel compelled to repeat that line, too. But he answered, “You might want to come by Brown Town. Someone here wants to tell you something.”

  “Okay. I just happen to be in the neighborhood. I’ll see you in five minutes.”

  Brown Town was the quasi-secret world headquarters of the Brick City Browns, one of Newark’s more-venerated street gangs. In an increasingly partisan gang world of Bloods, Crips, Latin Kings, and MS-13—to name just a few—the Browns had remained staunchly independent. They had their hustle and answered to no one.

  Not long ago, while reporting a story, I had become an honorary member of the Brick City Browns. I had done this by earning their trust—this may have involved smoking a mildly psychoactive controlled dangerous substance—and then by giving them a fair shake in the newspaper. As a “member,” I was allowed to visit whenever I pleased. Which, admittedly, was not too often.

  Nevertheless, I remembered the way well enough. So it was actually four minutes later when I knocked on the door. Bernie Kosar—I had given him that name because he usually wore the retro uniform of former Cleveland Browns quarterback Bernie Kosar—answered. Except he wasn’t wearing Kosar’s number 19. He was dressed in droopy jeans and a brown camouflage hunting jacket.

  “Hey, what happened to your uniform?”

  “We ain’t been wearing those lately,” he informed me.

  “Why not?”

  “’Cuz the Cleveland Browns football team been stinking it up so bad. It don’t look good for our organization. I mean, if you’re wearing Patriots jerseys, people say, ‘There goes a winner.’ But the Browns? Man, the Romeo Crennel era was a joke. And don’t even make me start talking about that fool Eric Mangini.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “Anyhow, you said someone here wants to talk to me?”

  “Yeah, come on in.”

  I entered Brown Town, which was basically unchanged from the last time I had been there. On the outside, it was a tired-looking, three-story, wooden single-family dwelling, a genus of house Newark had in plenty. On the inside, it was one seriously pimped-out pad, with leather sofas, big-screen televisions, and enough mirrors to make you think it was being used as a set for Feng Shui Gone Wild.

  Bernie led me into the living room, where Kevin Mack—or the guy who used to wear Kevin Mack’s retro uniform, before that became untenable—was playing a shoot-’em-up video game with some other guys. Bernie nodded at him and Kevin put down the controller and said, “No fair killing me while I’m gone.”

  I followed the two of them into the kitchen, which was in its original, non-pimped-out condition. That meant we were sitting at a table that might be characterized as pre-Internet, surrounded by a whole lot of linoleum flooring and particle-board cabinetry. Bernie shot another look at Kevin, who started talking.

  “So I was down on Peshine Avenue last night when I saw something you might be interested in,” he said. “But, you know, you can’t tell no cops where you heard this.”

  “Okay,” I said. The Browns were, perhaps understandably, not fond of law enforcement. “What were you doing down there?” I asked.

  Kevin glanced at Bernie.

  “We’ve got some, uh, commercial interests in the area,” Bernie said.

  Back when I had gained membership, the Browns funded their activities through the sale of bootleg movies. I wasn’t sure if they were still in that business or if they had moved on, and I knew better than to ask. Sometimes, even a newspaper reporter doesn’t want to know the full truth.

  “Anyhow, I’m, you know, doing my thing, kind of waiting for … someone,” Kevin continued. “And suddenly this black car comes cruising down the street. I’m thinking maybe it’s the dude I’m waiting for, even though that ain’t his usual ride. So I’m watching it. Next thing you know, it stops, and these two white dudes get out and, real fast, haul this other white dude out of the backseat and toss him in this construction site. And then they leave real fast, and I’m like, what the…? Then I look at the dude they tossed out, and I was like, ‘Whoah shee! That dude is dead!’ And then I got out of there real fast, because I do not need to be the nigga they pin that on.”

  He didn’t need to tell me that the construction site was McAlister Arms or that the dead dude was Vaughn McAlister.

  Bernie Kosar cut in: “Then we saw in the newspaper this morning you was writing about that dude. We thought you’d want to hear how it went down.”

  “I appreciate that. A lot,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Hey, man, you a Brown, you a Brown for life,” Bernie said, then made some kind of hand gesture that, for as many times as I had seen it, I lacked the manual dexterity to duplicate.

  “So, these two white guys,” I asked Kevin. “Did you get a look at them?”

  “I mean, yeah and no,” Kevin said. “They sorta looked alike. They was both big. And they had they hair all slicked back. And they was wearing black leather coats. That’s probably all I saw. It all happened pretty fast.”

  And then Kevin added what I had already been thinking: “They looked like they was from The Sopranos or something.”

  It was possible. Mobsters in Newark, once a common sight, were now more of a rarity, having retreated from the neighborhoods along with the rest of the white population. But they still made the occasional foray.

  So it could be the mob. Or it could be professional killers.

  Which could still mean his secretary was behind it. It could also mean it was anyone with a few grand to spend and a grudge to settle.

  * * *

  We chatted for a little while, though Kevin Mack didn’t know much more than what he had already shared. Before long, they were extending an offer to partake in some of the aforementioned CDS, and I thought I was going to have to come up with a creative excuse as to why I couldn’t when my phone saved me by ringing.

  “Sorry, guys,” I said without looking at it. “I’m expecting a call from my editor. I gotta take this.”

  They bade me a fond adieu and as I darted out
I promised to visit again soon. The phone was already on its fourth ring—dangerously close to going to voice mail—when I yanked it from my pocket and saw it wasn’t my editor. It was Tee.

  I answered the way he always does: “Yeah.”

  “Hey, that’s my line,” Tee said.

  “I know, but haven’t you learned yet? We let you blacks invent stuff and then if it’s good, we whites steal it.”

  “That’s true. But y’all stole the Neville Brothers, too. So you can’t be that smart.”

  “Well, there’s no accounting for taste,” I confirmed.

  “Anyhow, I was going to try to round up a few of the guys who had been working on that construction site. But then one of them just walked into my store. You wanna talk to him?”

  “Yeah, I’m actually close-by. I’ll be there soon.”

  “Okay. He in the back watching a Sister Souljah tribute. So he ain’t going anywhere for a while.”

  “I’ll be right there anyway,” I said, hopping into my car.

  There was still no sign of any knuckleheads when I arrived. Tee buzzed me in and hollered, “We back here.”

  I went to the back room, where Tee was sitting on the couch with a young black man, who looked up from Sister Souljah as I walked in. He was dark skinned and neatly kept, with close-shaved hair and a thin mustache. He had a small gold earring in his left ear only, but I didn’t know if that meant anything anymore—other than that he didn’t feel like buying two earrings.

  The far more interesting accessory was the one he had on his right leg. It was a white splint, and it ran from his ankle to his thigh. There were crutches leaning against the far side of the couch.

  “Hi. I’m Carter Ross,” I said. Had he stood, I would have extended a hand to shake. But he was, for obvious reasons, staying seated.

  “’Sup,” he said.

  “As Tee probably told you, we’re writing a story for the Eagle-Examiner about McAlister Arms and some of the things that are going on in that neighborhood. You worked down there?”