The Player

by Brad Parks

  “More or less, yeah. The LSRP is supposed to act independently and is bound by a code of ethics that says they can’t get too cozy with the developers. I’m not sure if it actually works out that way all the time. The DEP hopes it can keep the fear of God in these LSRPs because it’s ultimately their ass on the line. If the LSRP certifies a site as being clean and it turns out later to be causing groundwater contamination because of shoddy work by the LSRP? The LSRP could get fined or lose his license. But otherwise? But there’s nothing beyond the LSRP’s say-so that a cleanup has actually been done.”

  I absorbed this for a moment. “But you said the LSRP does have to file a bunch of paperwork, yes?”

  “Yeah, I guess. But I’ve seen it and I think even I could fake it. I’m sure someone who really knew what they were doing would have no problem filling in the forms in a way that passed muster. So why would that matter?”

  “It matters because those are public documents, which means a nosy reporter can easily get his hands on them,” I said.

  “Don’t get too excited. A lot of it is pretty technical. It wouldn’t necessarily make a lot of sense to you.”

  “Doesn’t matter. As long as it has someone’s name at the bottom.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Now, Quint, you know I’m a journalist and thus prone to cynicism,” I said. “But you don’t suppose, here in the very righteous state of New Jersey, that perhaps an unscrupulous LSRP might, say, take a little something under the table to sign off on a remediation that didn’t actually occur?”

  His laugh was genuine this time. “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose I can imagine that happening easily enough. But it’s not like someone is going to admit taking a bribe to a newspaper reporter.”

  “No, but I can make it obvious enough in what I write to make it clear that’s what happened.”

  It was one of the things that a few years in the newspaper business had taught me: readers were smarter than we sometimes gave them credit for. You didn’t always need to tell them the answer to the question was four. Sometimes you just had to tell them it was two plus two and have the confidence they’d figure it out.

  It was a nice thought, as I drifted to sleep on my couch, that this would be one of the times I could make the math simple for them.

  * * *

  The next thing I knew, there was a ringing sound. It was coming from somewhere near my front door. I was unsure what that might mean, but then, slowly, as I emerged from the grogginess of sleep, it occurred to me: someone was on my front porch, ringing the doorbell.

  I opened my eyes. Light was pouring in through the window of my living room. That meant—wait, don’t tell me—it was now morning.

  I wasn’t hungover. Or at least I shouldn’t have been hung-over. I hadn’t even been drinking the night before. I just felt like my brain had been dipped in peanut butter. Maybe some of the alcohol Pigeon had consumed had leaked into me by osmosis.

  As I got to my feet, the doorbell rang again. “Coming,” I said.

  I looked around for big-boy pants, but they were upstairs. Oh well. Whoever was paying me a visit at 8:00 A.M. would just have to accept me in my sleeping attire. I went over to the front door and, through the side window, saw Tina Thompson.

  And this is how sleepy I was: it didn’t occur to me I was doomed.

  “Good morning,” I said, opening the door.

  She was carrying a Dunkin’ Donuts bag, which had to be for me, because she ate carbohydrates only on her birthday and select holidays. She was also carrying a Coke Zero. Again, clearly for me. She was dressed for work—brown slacks, tapered white blouse that flattered her narrow figure—and had probably already been jogging. I would have told her she was glowing if I’d thought it wouldn’t get me slapped.

  “Good morning!” she said, brightly. “Sorry, I knew I might be waking you up. I just thought this would be a good time for us to talk about, you know, things.”

  Perhaps subconsciously, she looked down in the direction of her uterus.

  “Great,” I said, still not thinking for even half a second about my houseguest. “Yeah, definitely. Come on in.”

  Tina had just made it inside when, as if following instructions from the Awful Timing Handbook, Pigeon descended the staircase, rumpled and rubbing sleep from her eyes. She was wearing my T-shirt and boxers—and nothing else—and was clearly coming from the direction of my bedroom. She had gone to bed with wet hair, and it was now tousled in a way that made it appear she was coming off a very active evening.

  Tina took one look at her and froze. Pigeon, likewise, stopped about halfway down the steps.

  “This isn’t what it looks like,” I said quickly.

  Tina’s eyes were wide and I could practically see the synapses in her brain jumping to conclusions. What else could she think? Pigeon and I were both in our underwear—or, rather, my underwear—and she obviously hadn’t just stopped by for breakfast.

  Without a word, Tina turned and walked out the door. Heedless of my indisposed state, I went after her.

  “Tina,” I said, charging down the steps. She was already halfway to her car and walking with considerable determination.

  “Tina, wait!” I said, having now made it to the driveway. “Let me just explain…”

  As she reached her car, she whirled and threw the Dunkin’ Donuts bag at me, hitting me square in the chest. The Coke Zero followed but, luckily, it sailed just to the right of my head.

  “Explain what?” she spit. “How many different positions you used? Save it for Penthouse Letters, big guy.”

  “Tina, this isn’t—”

  “What? Are you about to tell me what happened in there depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is? Because that didn’t work for Bill Clinton and it’s sure as hell not going to work for you.”

  “She got very drunk,” I said. “She couldn’t…”

  “Oh, terrific. Congratulations. So you only take advantage of twenty-two-year-old interns when they’re drunk? That makes it all better, then.”

  “No, no. Would you please listen to me? She was drunk. I didn’t know where she lived so I just let her sleep here. Nothing happened.”

  If Tina was listening, I couldn’t tell. She was fumbling with her car keys, trying to find the little “unlock” button on the keypad—more than likely, so she could get into the car and try to run me over.

  “You know, I can’t believe it, but I actually feel bad for Kira,” Tina said. “Because at least I know what an ass you are, and she’s still going to have to find out someday.”

  “Would you please just come back inside? I didn’t lay a finger on that girl. You can ask her, if you want. She’ll tell you everything.”

  “Believe me, I don’t want to hear it,” Tina said, having gotten her car door open and taken a seat.

  “Nothing happened,” I insisted.

  “I don’t really care, Carter,” she said. “Coming here was a huge mistake. Thinking that you were really serious about being a father was a huge mistake. Everything about you is a huge mistake.”

  She slammed the door. I had half a thought about standing behind her car to block her exit. But then I had another thought, one that involved Tina having to explain to her child someday that he didn’t have a father because she had rolled over him with her Volvo.

  So I let her go. She backed down the driveway, splattering the Dunkin’ Donuts bag in the process, then pulled out into the street without looking back at me once.

  I walked over to the bag. It appeared there had been two pastries in there, one filled with crème, the other with jelly. The insides were now oozing out of the bag, which had been thoroughly flattened.

  At the moment, I knew exactly how it felt.

  * * *

  Over the next hour, as I readied myself for another hard day of finding news, I accepted at least seven apologies from Pigeon, both for her behavior the night before and for fouling things up with Tina. Eventually, I returned her to her car so she co
uld go home, stop babbling at me, and change into something that wasn’t imbued with ossified Colt 45.

  The irony was that once I got rid of her, I immediately had to do what would have been her kind of thing: FOIA some LSRP reports from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

  Technically, the New Jersey version of FOIA was known as OPRA, the Open Public Records Act. But that made it no less magnificent, in my view. I made a hasty return to the office, ready to paper the state capitol in Trenton with requests.

  In my experience, there are two ways to go about this kind of thing. One, which is favored by some of my compatriots in the news media, is the Bull in the China Shop Approach. They assume that government doesn’t want to give up its precious documents unless the issue is forced. They assume state employees are foot-dragging malingerers. They know the law—make that The Law—is on their side, so they storm in, making demands that they know must be met, no matter what. And they shake their angry fists until they get it.

  The problem with this method is that, yes, your requests will be fulfilled. In approximately four years.

  Hence, I go for a much gentler tack. Call it the Possum in the Auto Parts Store Approach. As a possum, I don’t know which oil filter to use. I certainly don’t have the opposable thumbs needed to install one. So I need help. And I assume the state employee actually wants to provide it—which, unfair stereotypes about government bureaucrats aside, most of them actually do. I approach with meekness, because possums are a very docile kind of animal, make it sound like I’m asking a favor (not making a demand), and thank them profusely for every small kindness they extend.

  With this in mind, my call got forwarded around the DEP until I ended up talking with a nice-sounding woman named Gina, who, just my luck, happened to be the administrator of the Licensed Site Remediation Professional program. We established a quick rapport and I had already made two jokes and three self-deprecating comments about my cluelessness. Then I told her I was a reporter. She stiffened for a moment, informing me she wasn’t supposed to talk with reporters. All reporter calls were supposed to go to the public affairs office. I promised her I wouldn’t tell and pointed out I couldn’t put her in the paper because I didn’t know her last name. With that, she relented. She wasn’t allowed to talk to reporters but, apparently, she could talk to possums.

  She said if I had the LSRP’s license number I could easily request whatever documents I needed. I told her that was the problem: I didn’t know who the LSRP was. And there came my big break. Gina could do a search by property-owner name. And thus she could tell me that the McAlister Arms site had been overseen by an LSRP named Scott Colston, license number 510552. She even gave me his date of birth and business address.

  Gina then directed me through the maze of the DEP’s Web site to the form where I could make an OPRA request for all the documents filed by that license number. She even told me what to put in certain blanks so the request would be filled quickly—in a week or so. I thanked her profusely, stopped just short of promising to name any female children I had after her, then ended the call.

  That it would take a week to get the documents was not a problem. I already knew they were going to tell me that Scott Colston had signed off on a cleanup that had never happened. Now I just had to do the fun part: find him and ask him why.

  I certainly planned to stop by his place of business. But there was undoubtedly more in the public record about Scott Colston. So I wandered back to the Info Palace, as our newspaper’s library scientists called their lair, where Kira was staring at her computer screen like it perplexed her. She had put her hair up with a pen—they must learn how to do that when they get their MLS degree—and was wearing another one of her prim and proper sweater sets, this time in lime green.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Is it?” she asked, then looked down at her watch, which appeared to have mouse ears on it. “Oh, I guess it is.”

  “Do you really have a Mickey Mouse watch?”

  “Yeah, isn’t it cool?”

  I just shook my head. It was getting hard to keep up with whether there were any cartoon characters/fantasy series/superheroes she didn’t like.

  “So I have two favors to ask,” I said.

  “Shoot.”

  “One, Pigeon got obnoxiously drunk last night and ended up sleeping at my house. But I swear to you, nothing happened.”

  She took in this news without reaction. “Uh, I’m sorry. What’s the favor?”

  “Just to believe me that I was pure and chaste and nothing untoward happened.”

  “Oh, okay. That’s easy enough. What’s number two?”

  I slid her a piece of paper with the date of birth and business address of Scott Colston, plus a bit of background as to why I was interested in him. “Give this guy the full workup. I want everything you can legally give me on him, plus any illegal stuff, too.”

  “Oh, you’re giving me a DOB? Hot stuff!”

  “Is that all it takes to get you excited? A date of birth?”

  “Well, for right now, yeah. You’ll have to do a little better later.”

  “You trying to make me blush?”

  “Would you like me to?” she asked in her I-live-dangerously voice.

  Giving Kira that kind of challenge in the newsroom would be engaging in a game of chicken I couldn’t possibly win. “No,” I said. “Definitely not.”

  “Too bad,” she said. “So how high a priority should I make Mr. Colston?”

  “If I bat my pretty blue eyes at you, will you make it your top one?” I said, blinking rapidly and trying to look endearing.

  “Let me just finish this thing I’m working on right now, then I’ll get to yours. You are lucky I find nerdiness charming.”

  “In so many more ways than one,” I said.

  “Okay, let me get to work,” she said, making a little shooing gesture. “Now go.”

  * * *

  One of the many advantages of being male—or at least of being the kind of guy I am—is the ability to compartmentalize. Yes, I seemed to have more than one woman in my life. Yes, one of them was furious with me, while simultaneously being pregnant with—still trying to get my inner air-traffic controller to land this fact—my child. And, yes, they were both my date to my sister’s wedding.

  But as I went out to the parking garage to get my Malibu, I put those issues in separate rooms, to be dealt with at some later time. All that mattered now was Scott Colston and his business address, which was on Route 46 in Fairfield.

  I enjoyed my ride out on I-280, passing a spot I had once written about. It was a patch beside the highway where authorities had found a sizable field of marijuana plants, being grown and cultivated by a group of miscreants who were, if nothing else, bold. To me, it spoke of the obliviousness of the road’s travelers. According to highway-usage stats, roughly 150,000 vehicles had passed that spot every day for two years without one driver or passenger noticing anything. It was amazing what you could keep hidden in plain sight.

  Leaving the highway, I merged onto Route 46, a four-lane divided road designed with collision-repair-shop owners in mind. They were the only ones who could enjoy a road so heavily trafficked with so many merges, bends, dips, and blind spots—and, hence, so many car wrecks.

  My GPS eventually led me to Colston’s address, which turned out to be in a strip mall on the westbound side. But I immediately became concerned that I had the wrong place. The strip mall was small, and its tenants included a cell phone peddler, a tax preparer, a dry cleaner, a tanning salon, and a pizzeria.

  There was nothing that looked like the office of an environmental consultant.

  I pulled into a parking spot and let the car idle while I double-checked my reckoning. Yes, I was in the right town. Yes, I had the right road. Yes, I had the right number.

  It was just that the number corresponded to the pizzeria, a place called Tomaselli’s, that occupied the unit on the left corner. Curious, I got out of my car to c
heck it out. As I approached, it looked like any other server of tomato pie in a state that very well may lead the nation in pizza parlors per capita. It had a variety of come-ons in the window: Tuesday, for example, was family night, with two one-topping mediums and a two-liter bottle of soda for $13.99. It had plastic booths for seating. It had pictures of Venezia, Firenza, and Roma on the walls.

  The only thing unusual about it was that when I pulled on the door, it didn’t open. Tomaselli’s was, apparently, closed. I checked the time on my phone. It was after eleven, a time when your typical pizzeria is gearing up for the lunch rush. There appeared to be enough of a workday crowd around here, and certainly enough traffic on the road, to justify being open.

  Especially in a town like Fairfield, which a half century ago had become a repository for all the Italians fleeing Newark. Even now, it had to be close to 50 percent Italian. People in this part of New Jersey took their pizza very seriously. You could start a heated discussion by asking which establishment in town had the best crust or the best sauce. Places that couldn’t compete went out of business rather quickly, and I couldn’t imagine being closed for lunch was helping Tomaselli’s stay afloat.

  With my curiosity thus addled, I went next door to the tanning salon. Tanning is an Olympic sport in New Jersey, and the woman at the front desk looked like a serious medal contender. I couldn’t say what race she was because, to paraphrase the immortal Snooki, she was neither black nor white. She was tan.

  A few years back, a woman from Nutley, New Jersey gained brief notoriety when she was accused of taking her six-year-old into a tanning bed with her. Part of what made the story go national—all the way to Saturday Night Live—was that the woman’s skin had approximately the color and consistency of a saddlebag. The six-year-old, who was very fair skinned, also ended up getting some face time on TV. For most of the nation, the tanning mom’s alleged transgression was exposing this pasty little girl to potentially harmful UV rays. For a small subset of people in New Jersey, the only sin was that Mommy had not used enough bronzer.