by Brad Parks
The woman in front of me appeared to be in that subset. She was that kind of midforties where no one had the heart to tell her she couldn’t pass for midtwenties anymore. Her name tag identified her as Vicki. She was about five foot four—five nine, if you counted her gelled-up bangs. She had hoop earrings that could have doubled as stirrups and her well-developed jaw was getting a workout on a piece of chewing gum. A Jersey Girl if ever there were one.
“Hi, welcome to EverTan. How are ya?” she said, with a thick-enough Jersey accent that “are” came out more like “awe.”
“Hey, I’m good,” I said; then, before I could form my next sentence, she jumped in:
“Lemme guess, you’re going on a cruise with your girlfriend, and you want to get a good base before you go south. I have just the right package for you. I get guys like you all the time,” she said, pronouncing “all” like it was a piece of equipment that should have been found in a woodworker’s shop.
“No, actually, I’m not going on a cruise, I—”
“Why not, don’t you have a girlfriend?” she asked not so innocently.
“Uh,” I said, because that was a deeply complicated question.
“A cutie like you doesn’t have a girlfriend? What’s the matter? Too many to chose from?” she asked, and I may have been imagining it, but she thrust her left hand—with its bare ring finger—a little closer to me.
“No, not … not exactly.”
“Well, if you get one, you should take her on a cruise. Have you ever been on a cruise? I love cruises. All I do is pack a dress and two bikinis and I just tan on the deck all day. It’s awesome.”
Vicki was leaning halfway across the counter at me in a way that made me think that if I felt inclined to ask her to go on a cruise—or to tan with her in one of her two bikinis—she would be inclined to say yes.
“I’m sure it is. I’m actually not here to tan, sadly enough. My name is Carter Ross. I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner. I was curious, what’s with that pizzeria next door?”
“What, you doing, like, an investigation or something?” she asked, like she found it amusing.
“Something like that.”
“Oh, well, what do you want to know?”
“Why isn’t it open?”
“Tomaselli’s? Oh it’s, like, never open.”
“Never?”
“Well on Friday and Saturday nights it’s open, yeah,” she said. “But even then, no one goes.”
“So the advertisement in the window about Tuesday being family night…”
“Yeah. I know. Funny, right?”
“Yeah, funny. You know who owns the place, by any chance?”
This stopped her. Up until this point, Vicki had had a rather pleasant smile stretched across her bronzed face. The moment I inquired about ownership, it disappeared.
“What does that matter?” she asked.
“Do you know who it is?”
“Maybe. Why do you want to know?”
“I told you: idle curiosity,” I said, trying to keep it low-key, but she wasn’t buying it.
“Are you a cop or something?”
“No, as I said, I’m a newspaper reporter.” I dug out a press pass and a business card and handed them to her.
“Yeah, okay, so you’re a newspaper reporter,” she said, taking a cursory glance at the two items. “But how do I know you’re not wearing a wire for the cops or something?”
“Uh … I don’t know. Because I have an honest face?”
I thought she was going to suggest that she frisk me, but suddenly her smile was back.
“No,” she said. “I have an idea.”
* * *
Her idea started with my buying the BeachComber InTANsive package, which would entitle me to six twenty-minute sessions in the SuperBronzing SunBlaster 2400. It was the least expensive package they had—cheaper than the SunWorshipper FanTANstic package, for sure—and I was amenable to it, if a little curious as to how it would look on my expense report.
It was the second part of her idea that gave me pause.
“You want me to do what?” I asked, because I wasn’t sure I had heard it right the first time.
“Tan in the nude,” she said, matter-of-factly.
That, unfortunately, was what I thought she had said. “And what will that accomplish?”
“It’ll prove you’re not wearing a wire. That way I can talk to you. And I can tell you stuff about what goes on over there. But I don’t want to end up being like Adriana on The Sopranos. You know, like, you’re just going for a ride with your boyfriend, not thinking about anything, and then he pulls you off into the woods and, blam, that’s it. And why? Because you talked too much.”
The word “talk” came out as “tawk.” The rest of it just came out as paranoid blabber. But there was no talking—or tawking—her out of it.
“So I just, uh, take off my clothes and that will prove to you I’m not wearing a wire for the cops?”
“Exactly,” she said, like it needed no more explanation.
“Uh, okay. I guess.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t peek,” she said, then threw in a quick wink.
“Right. So where do I—”
“Come on,” she said, grabbing me by the arm and escorting me through a set of curtains and into a room that had four doors on either side. She went to a door on the left side that had “3” on it, pulled a set of keys off her wrist, and unlocked the door.
“Here you go,” she said, holding it open. “Just holler when you’re ready.”
I walked inside. Vicki closed the door. As I hurriedly stripped down, I eyed the SuperBronzing SunBlaster 2400. It looked like a coffin lined with fluorescent bulbs. I suddenly got what the 2400 signified—it was the number of places you’d get skin cancer if you spent too long in the thing.
I removed most of my clothes, then paused when I reached my boxers.
“You sure I can’t keep my underwear on?”
“No,” she yelled from the other side of the door. “You could have a wire hidden in there. Besides, you’ll get awful tan lines.”
I shook my head and went Full Monty. Then I climbed inside the tanning bed, turned it on, and closed the top.
“Okay, I’m ready,” I shouted inside my crypt.
I heard the door open and close. Then, for some reason, I thought I heard what sounded like my car keys jingling.
“No offense, but I’m putting your clothes outside,” Vicki informed me. “Can’t be too careful.”
She reentered the room. The next thing I knew, she was lifting the SuperBronzing SunBlaster’s lid.
“Hey!” I said. “I thought you said no peeking!”
“Just had to make sure you didn’t still have the wire on,” she said. “You’ve got nice abs, by the way.”
I groaned. She continued: “Besides, it’s a good thing I checked on you. You forgot to put your glasses on.”
She handed me a pair of green goggles with a black circle in the middle of each lens—like some kind of angry, black-eyed frog. I placed them on my face, feeling ridiculously exposed the whole time.
“Okay. Good,” I said. “Now could you please lower the…”
“You know, you’re pretty pale. Sure you don’t want some tan accelerator? I’ve got this stuff called Black Storm that could really brown you up fast. I could help you put it on if you—”
“Just lower the lid, please.”
She complied. As I was enveloped in simulated sunshine, I heard her pulling a chair next to the tanning bed.
“Okay, so,” she started. “My girlfriend Trina has a cousin named Eddie whose best friend is this guy Tony. Now I don’t really know Tony all that well, but I see him around, you know? He doesn’t work but he always seems to have money. And he always pays for things in cash, if you know what I mean. And he’s a little gross because whenever I see him he’s like, ‘Oh, baby, I could treat you so good, baby. I could buy this for you. I could buy that for you.’ He makes me fe
el like a whore.”
The word “whore” came out with an extra syllable: “who-or.” She continued: “So Trina was talking to Eddie one day and she was saying, ‘Oh, yeah, my friend Vicki just got a job as a manager at EverTan, and I guess Tony was around and he just started laughing. And Trina was like ‘what’ and Tony was like ‘nothing’ and Trina was like ‘no really’ and finally Tony told her.”
I was so blinded by the lights of the tanning bed I was finding it a little hard to concentrate. But I sensed that Vicki wanted me to contribute to the conversation, so I said, “Told her what?”
“That this whole building … is owned … by … the mob,” she said, inserting pauses between the words to make her delivery more dramatic. “I’m not sure if the other businesses even know it. I mean, the dry cleaners are Korean, so they’re, like, too busy eating rice or whatever. And the guy who does taxes is, like, I don’t know, Armenian or something. The guy who owns EverTan is from Iowa and people from Iowa are, like, too straight for the mob, you know? But you were asking about Tomaselli’s, and…”
“And?” I prodded.
“Well. After Tony told Trina and Eddie and me about this building being owned by the mob, I started paying attention to Tomaselli’s a little more. Because they’re never open—which is weird—but every once in a while you’d see these guys just showing up there and going inside. They’d stay in there for a little while and then they’d leave. It was like they were having a meeting or something. And then this one day, I’m sitting here and I see this really nice SUV roll up. It was a Cadillac Escalade. It was silver. Really nice—though I would not want to parallel park it. And you know who stepped out of the back?”
“Who?”
“I swear, it was Mitch DeNunzio. The boss himself. It was like something out of The Godfather.”
I nearly sat up so I could look at her. Then I remembered I was in a tanning bed. And naked.
So I just asked, “How did you know it was him?”
“Well, I don’t know, I’ve seen him on the news and stuff. I told Eddie about it and he was like, ‘Yeah, that’s him. He rides around in a silver Cadillac Escalade.’ I guess Eddie had started doing some little things for Tony—which is so not a good idea—and he had seen the Escalade a couple of times. It’s just wild, you know? You always hear about this kind of stuff and then, wow, there it is next door. I wonder if they kill people over there at night or something.”
I was quite sure they didn’t, which wasn’t to say there weren’t other nefarious things going on there—like Licensed Site Remediation Professionals using it as a mail dump.
“Have you ever heard the name Scott Colston?” I asked.
Vicki thought for a second, then said. “No. Doesn’t sound familiar. Are you sure you’re not with the FBI?”
“No, no,” I said. “Just the newspaper.”
“Yeah, I guess I believe you,” she said. Then she lifted the tanning bed one more time and added, “You pretty clearly have nothing to hide.”
* * *
I eventually was permitted to get dressed and leave EverTan, albeit with one more not-so-vague intimation from Vicki that we should go on a cruise together and a rather stern reminder that I should come back in a few days if I wanted my new tan to last. Also, she impressed upon me the importance of moisturizing.
As I aimed the Malibu back in the direction of Newark, my mind began churning. According to Vicki, whom I had no reason to doubt—and who had no reason to lie to me—Tomaselli’s was a mob front in a mob-controlled building. It was like the former marijuana patch I was once again passing: illegal, but hiding in plain sight.
And Scott Colston, whoever he was, was having his mail delivered there, which meant Scott Colston was likely mob controlled, too.
Which raised more than a few questions about Vaughn McAlister. Had he merely paid the mob for a fake remediation? Or did his ties to organized crime run deeper? Was his entire business mob owned, with Vaughn merely serving as the legitimate face of it? Had he run afoul of the bosses in some way?
I thought about who the more likely killer was: a jilted lover like Marcia Fenstermacher or a jilted mobster like Mitch DeNunzio. It wasn’t much of a contest. DeNunzio beat her on body count alone. He also was more likely to have a pair of black-sedan-driving hit men on his speed dial.
I suppose I shouldn’t have been exactly flabbergasted that McAlister would have ended up involved with the mob. This was New Jersey, after all. But, in truth, I was a little surprised. For whatever New Jersey’s reputation for organized crime may have been—and for whatever HBO Productions might lead you to believe—there weren’t mobsters under every rock in the Garden State.
Yeah, there was probably a rumor floating around every town in the state that this pizzeria or that gas station was a front for organized crime. But the reality was that outside of a few industries—hello, waste management—the mob’s influence had waned greatly, to the point where the rumors were likely all that was left.
Personally, I had never dealt with the mob. The mob to me was like an exotic elemental particle was to a physicist: I knew it was there, somewhere; and I had a variety of ways, both theoretical and experimental, to prove its existence; but I had never actually seen it.
Luckily for me, there was a staff member at our paper who had long experience with it. Buster Hays was our resident mob-beat writer. Within his several Rolodexes—Buster refused to digitize his contacts list—were a variety of old men with crooked noses and last names ending in vowels. And they were all legitimate businessmen. They just tended to have jobs that didn’t involve showing up.
Buster had been writing about organized crime for us long enough that I think he knew every mobster in the state—just as they knew him. He treated them with no special deference. He was fair and forthright with them, yes. But he was fair and forthright with all his sources. The mob was just another institution he covered. It was no different than, say, the Episcopal Diocese was to the religion reporter. It was just that the Episcopal Diocese marked the bodies it buried with headstones, whereas the mob tended not to stand on such ceremony.
I tried to call Buster’s office phone and cell and got no answer at either. I thought about texting him, then laughed at the absurdity: I’d have better luck texting the plant near his desk. Buster had only very recently acquiesced to e-mail as a valid form of correspondence. And even then, he still printed out all the messages he wanted to read.
Resigning myself to a far more ancient form of human interaction, I went into the newsroom and found him sitting at his desk.
“Hey,” I said. “I was just trying to call you.”
“I know you were,” he replied in an accent that, much like Buster, came from the Bronx.
“And you didn’t answer because…?”
“Because I looked on the calendar and it’s not Do Favors for Ivy Boy Day,” he said. Buster refuses to accept that Amherst is a proud member of the New England Small College Athletic Conference, not the Ivy League. Hence, I am either “Ivy” or “Ivy Boy,” depending on how patronizing he feels like being.
“What makes you think I need a favor?”
“You got that desperate look about you.”
“Then I suppose it will please you to learn that you’re right, as usual,” I said.
Up to that point, Buster had not been looking at me—one of his favorite ways of making it clear to me I’m not worth his time. He finally turned, looked at me over the top of some drugstore granny glasses, and said, “Whataya want?”
“I want to know why the mob killed Vaughn McAlister.”
He snorted. “What makes you think the mob did it?”
Without compromising Kevin’s Mack’s anonymity, I related to him what my reliable eyewitness had seen. Then I told him about Tomaselli’s Pizza and Mitch DeNunzio.
“Great,” he said. “Let’s just drop by Kenilworth Heating and Air Conditioning and ask Sam the Plumber why he had the guy iced.”
“Uh, okay. Wh
ere—”
“Never mind. It was before you were born,” Buster said, removing the granny glasses and tossing them onto his desk. “Look, this may surprise you, Ivy, but even though I’ve written about them from time to time, the local crime families are not in the habit of sharing the more intimate details of their operation with me.”
“Yeah, but maybe you talk to someone who talks to someone who might be willing to gossip a little,” I said. “I mean, how did McAlister Properties even get involved in the mob in the first place? And which mob family?”
“Well, I do have a guy who might hear some of the stuff coming out of the DeNunzio family, and…” Buster stopped himself. “No. Forget it, Ivy. I’m not getting involved. The mob isn’t like the Department of Community Affairs. They don’t have public information officers whose job it is to take our calls.”
Even as he was making a fuss, I could tell his brain was already churning. He just needed a little encouragement.
“I know,” I said. “That’s why I need you. Come on, Buster, you’re the only guy left at the paper who even has a shot at getting something like this.”
It was a naked appeal to his ego. But I knew it would also be an effective one. Buster took great pride in being the last of the old guard, a staunch preserver of The Way Things Were (And Still Ought To Be).
He let out a gusty sigh and shook his head. “Okay, fine. I’ll make a few calls. But the last time I looked, I’m not running a free lunch program. What are you going to do for me?”
With Buster Hays, there’s always a price.
In the end, it was just too much for Vicki to keep to herself. The visit from that cute Eagle-Examiner reporter had been the most gossip-worthy thing to happen at EverTan in months. And Vicki, who felt rather gossip starved ever since leaving her job at the health club, had to share. Just once.
Thus began the conversation chain. The first was between Vicki and Trina. It was one of those swear-to-God-you-can’t-tell-anyone type conversations.
So, naturally, Trina called her cousin Eddie and told him all about it. She felt she was acting in Vicki’s best interests—she wanted to know if Vicki could get herself in some kind of trouble for having blabbed about Tomaselli’s to a reporter—and she swore Eddie to total secrecy.
