The Player

by Brad Parks

  Eddie hung up the phone and immediately dialed Tony. Eddie’s primary concern was that Mitch DeNunzio knew where the information had come from, knew that Eddie was being loyal, and that therefore Eddie was worthy of more of the work DeNunzio had been tossing him. Tony thanked him for the information and assured him it would improve his standing with DeNunzio.

  Tony had, in fact, never mentioned Eddie to DeNunzio. Not once. He was subcontracting those small little tasks he had given Eddie—paying Eddie half of what DeNunzio had paid for the jobs, telling Eddie they were being ordered by DeNunzio himself.

  Thus, Tony immediately began angling for ways this information could improve his standing with DeNunzio. Stuff like this was gold. It would make Tony seem like he was connected. Important. Worthy of promotion, even. He relished telling DeNunzio all about it.

  DeNunzio thanked him for the tip, but wasn’t terribly concerned. He could avoid Tomaselli’s for a while, no big deal. Scott Colston had obviously been compromised. But that was almost inevitable. He had perhaps hoped to use Colston for some other projects, perhaps turn it into another nice little sideline. No matter. Now that he had the idea, it would be easy enough to create a new Scott Colston. He dismissed Tony and didn’t give it much more thought.

  It was when DeNunzio heard Buster Hays was snooping around, asking questions about Vaughn McAlister, that be became concerned. He couldn’t, under any circumstances, allow himself to be publicly linked to McAlister’s death. No venture capitalist wants to be known for knocking off the principals of the firms he invests in. It’s bad for business.

  Plus, the FBI reads the paper, too. And there’s nothing more the Fibbies like than a high-profile case. Mitch had associates who liked messing with the feds, but Mitch never got the wisdom of that. He prided himself on keeping himself off the FBI’s list, not closer to the top of it.

  Yes, he had to do something about this. Buster Hays, he didn’t worry about. He had dealt with Buster before and could call him anytime and trust him to be reasonable.

  But Carter Ross? He was more of a variable. He might not be as reasonable.

  So Mitch made a quick phone call.

  “I need you to track someone down,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “He’s a reporter for the Eagle-Examiner. His name is Carter Ross.”

  “No problem. What do you want me to do with him?”

  “For now, just find him,” came Mitch’s reply. “We’ll deal with the rest later.”

  CHAPTER 6

  I left my negotiation/blackmail session laden with two more of Buster’s All-Slop shifts—a triumph, since he was trying to pin me with four of them—then took a trip back to the Info Palace to see how Kira was doing in her search for Scott Colston.

  She was sitting in almost the exact same pose as the last time I’d seen her, except she had taken the pen out of her hair, which I found mildly disappointing in a way I couldn’t quite place.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” I asked.

  She looked up at me and frowned. “Did you get so drunk with Pigeon last night that you forgot how to spell?”

  “No. Sadly, I was sober last night. That’s not to say my spelling is completely beyond reproach. Why do you ask?”

  “Because I think you spelled Scott Colston incorrectly. Is it C-O-L-S-T-O-N?”

  “Yeah, I think so. I haven’t actually seen it in print yet, because I got it over the phone. But I can’t imagine there are many alternate spellings. Why?”

  “Because he doesn’t exist,” she said. “I checked every database I know how to check. The nearest Scott Colston I found lives in Virginia. His DOB doesn’t match the one you gave me. I FaceStalked him just to make sure and he’s just this guy who sometimes does karaoke under the name DJ Scooter. He doesn’t have a criminal record, in case you were wondering.”

  “I’m sure his mother is very proud of him,” I said. “I hate to ask, but would you mind looking at other spellings?”

  “Already did it. I looked up Collston with two ‘L’s, Scot with one ‘T,’ Colstun with a ‘U,’ Colsten with an ‘E.’ I ran as many permutations as I could think of. Nothing came up with that DOB.”

  “Huh,” I said again.

  “You want me to tell you which databases I checked?”

  “No, no. I’m sure you were thorough. Thanks for making it a priority.”

  “My pleasure,” she said.

  I took a quick glance around the Info Palace, which was momentarily empty. “So,” I said. “You want to tell me more about that dress you’re wearing to the wedding?”

  “You mean the one that doesn’t have room for—”

  Her next word was interrupted by my phone ringing. It was Quint Jorgensen. “Ugh, I’m sorry,” I said. “Believe me, I want to hear all about it. But I do need to take this call.”

  She exhaled noisily. “It’s probably just as well. There’s no point in getting all worked up when I’m just going to have Buster Hays walk by any minute and try to hit on me again.”

  “Ew,” was all I could say. “Sorry to have to leave this conversation on that note, but…”

  “Yeah, go,” she said. I hit the button to answer the call.

  “Carter Ross.”

  He didn’t bother with introductions. “Dude, I just read the newspaper”—having just woken up, no doubt—“and I saw your article about the lawsuit. Why didn’t you tell me about it last night?”

  This was as agitated as I had heard gentle Quint since I’d suggested he trim his trees. “Well, to be honest, I didn’t even think about it,” I said. “But I suppose I should have. I assume you figured out K and J Manufacturing is one of the defendants?”

  “No, that’s not … It is?”

  “You mean you didn’t know?”

  “No.”

  “Then why do you sound so upset?”

  “Because!” he burst, like it should have been obvious. “This is a lawsuit against a major polluter? This is the perfect thing for my environmental people to protest! I’m going to call up that lawyer. I’m sure I can get him interested in a protest. I’m going to get some of those construction workers to show up. We’ll get the news media. This is going to be big. Huge!”

  “But … you sure you aren’t worried about K and J being sued?”

  “Oh, no,” he said, dismissively.

  “Why not?”

  “There’s really nothing left of K and J.”

  “So you’re not—”

  “You’re missing the point. This isn’t about K and J. It’s about the protest.”

  “But what are you hoping to accomplish, exactly?”

  “Accomplish?” he asked, like it was some kind of distraction.

  “Yeah. You’ve got to have goals. Demands. Something like that.”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we’re right and they’re wrong and we can use the protest to bring awareness of it. It’s so perfect. Everyone is going to have such a great time.”

  Quint had mentioned his love of protests once before. I hadn’t quite understood it back then. Now I was beginning to think maybe it was just because he was lonely.

  “Right, sure. Like a party,” I said. “And when are you going to have this protest?”

  “Tomorrow. Ten in the morning. I’ve got my car charged up and I’m taking a trip into Newark to file the permits right now. This is going to be great. Can you put something in the paper about it?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I can definitely get something on the Web site. They’re more desperate for content. The paper might be a little more discerning, but I might be able to slip it into whatever follow we do on the Vaughn McAlister killing for tomorrow.”

  “Okay. Great. You don’t mind that I tell everyone the Eagle-Examiner is going to cover the protest, do you?”

  “Quint, I’m not sure I—”

  “Aw, come on, pleeeease?” he begged. “Trust me. I throw a great protest. We’ll have two hundred people. Minimum. We’
ll come up with really creative placards for your photographers. I promise!”

  He seemed so excited—and I felt like I owed him, for putting me onto the LSRP thing—that I didn’t have the heart to turn him down. Besides, if he really could get some of those construction workers and a decent crowd around them—and if Will Imperiale grandstanded a little bit—it might smell just enough like news that it would keep Brodie distracted.

  “Sure,” I said. “Count me in.”

  * * *

  Quint’s call reminded me that I had yet to follow up on his tip about cadmium. I wandered back to my desk and tried to get the computer sitting there to come to life. The computers in the newsroom are old enough that their processors are really a series of winches and pulleys, powered by running water—or at least that’s about how fast they work—but eventually I got Google up on my screen.

  Sure enough, a search on cadmium poisoning brought up a list of symptoms that matched what the people on Ridgewood Avenue had experienced. It often started with achiness, fever, and chills that resembled the flu, which I had experienced. It included respiratory problems, like the cough that some of my interviewees had reported. It could lead to kidney failure, like what had taken Edna Foster’s life.

  And it even could lead to broken bones. People who had repeated exposure to cadmium developed something called “osteomalacia”—which was a hard-to-pronounce way of saying their bones got soft. Soft enough that sometimes they just snapped.

  I read about the first documented cases of cadmium poisoning, which were identified in Japan during the 1950s. A mining company had been releasing cadmium into the Jinzu River, which local farmers used to irrigate their rice fields. People who ate the rice were ingesting low levels of cadmium. But apparently it doesn’t take much cadmium to have deleterious effects. So many people were suffering broken bones, the locals started calling it “Itai Itai Disease”—itai being Japanese for “ouch.”

  That soon led me to another unfortunate aspect of cadmium poisoning: there was no treatment for it. All you could do was treat the symptoms and try to stop inhaling the stuff.

  Speaking of which, I realized I owed Jackie Orr a visit. She and her neighbors deserved to know what I had discovered, even if there wasn’t much they could do about it. I pulled out my notepad, found her phone number, and dialed it. There was no answer, and I was in the middle of leaving a message when I got a phone call from her.

  “Hi, Jackie, it’s Carter Ross,” I said.

  “Hi,” she said, her tone noncommittal. I could guess she was still feeling a little betrayed by the reporter who had so quickly dropped her story for another one.

  “So I think I’ve got a line on what’s making your neighbors sick,” I said. “Ever heard of cadmium poisoning?”

  “No,” she said. “What is it?”

  I gave her my full book report on cadmium and delivered it in an authoritative voice, based on the twenty minutes of googling I had just done. At the end, she said, “So how do you cure it?”

  “Unfortunately, you don’t,” I said. “According to what I read, there are things you can do if you swallow cadmium, but if you’ve inhaled it, you just have to wait until it works its way out of your system.”

  “That’s okay. Mr. Imperiale says he’s going to take care of us.”

  “Mr. Imperiale?”

  “Yeah, that lawyer you wrote about,” Jackie said. “I saw your story about those construction workers and I thought that if he was representing all of them he could represent us, too. I called him up this morning and told him about all of us. He was really nice.”

  I bet he was. The twenty-odd residents of Jackie’s neighborhood had probably just added to his potential score by a couple of million bucks, presuming he was ever able to get a score.

  “He wants to meet with all of us tonight,” she said. “He said everyone just had to sign a sheet of paper saying he was their lawyer and then he’d be able to add us to the lawsuit. He said everyone could get their medical bills paid for, plus damages.”

  “If you win.”

  “What do you mean? Why wouldn’t we win?”

  “These kind of lawsuits can be very complex. It’s one thing to think you know what’s caused everyone to get sick, it’s another thing to actually prove it. Take your grandmother. You said she broke her leg. Weakened bones is a classic symptom of cadmium poisoning, but it’s also a symptom of aging. Who’s to say it wasn’t just an old lady breaking her leg? Who’s to say there’s even cadmium? And, if there is, who’s to say where the cadmium came from? The defense is going to come in and argue that there’s no cadmium anywhere on that site. Then it’s going to say that even if there is cadmium, the defendant had nothing to do with it getting there. Then it will say even if the defendant was responsible, the cadmium wasn’t to blame for her broken leg or her kidney failure or anything else. There are a lot of steps to proving this thing, and Will Imperiale has to nail every one of them if he wants to win. You see what I mean? So you might want to tell your neighbors not to go on any spending sprees. Even if they do eventually get something, it could be years before they see the money.”

  Jackie met that news with her usual considered silence. I felt like the guy who had just delivered the news that the leprechaun didn’t really have a pot of gold.

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, I’d just as soon put my faith in Mr. Imperiale. He seems to be a lot more positive about being able to help us than anyone else. At least I know he won’t run off and write about a rich developer instead.”

  It was a well-delivered punch to the gut. And I probably deserved it.

  “Well, just try to remember that a guy like Will Imperiale is ultimately serving his own interests,” I said. “That his interests and yours happen to align is merely a coincidence.”

  Having already delivered the body blow, Jackie went for the big uppercut:

  “He’s not really so different from you then, is he?”

  * * *

  Hopelessly behind on all judges’ cards, I had my corner wave the white towel by ending the call. I knocked together a quick story for our Web site about Quint’s big protest, then my stomach told me it was getting to be pizza o’clock.

  Thinking I might as well make it a working lunch, I located Tommy, who was talking on the phone. I pointed at my mouth while rubbing my belly. He gave me the finger—the polite one that Jersey people reserve for when they’re not driving—and then, after wrapping up his call, started appraising me with a scowl on his face.

  “Why do you look like an Oompa-Loompa?” he asked.

  “An Oompa-Loompa?”

  “Yeah, haven’t you ever seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?”

  “Which one,” I asked, “the creepy one with Gene Wilder or the even more creepy one with Johnny Depp?”

  “Doesn’t matter. You could be cast as an Oompa-Loompa extra in either one.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Have you looked at yourself in a mirror lately?”

  I felt an instant sense of dread, like a woman who had tucked her dress into her panties but didn’t realize it until she had already walked across a crowded room three times.

  “Not … I mean, not really,” I said.

  “Come on, then,” he said, marching off to the men’s room. I followed him, entering when he held the door for me.

  “Look. See?” He pointed to my image in the mirror. “Oompa-Loompa.”

  I stared at myself, unsure of whom, exactly, I was looking at. The features were about where they should have been and resembled the ones I knew. It’s just that they had all turned this deviant shade of orange, like something faintly reminiscent of a Creamsicle.

  Or an Oompa-Loompa.

  “Oh my,” I said, gently poking my face. Every place I prodded, the skin momentarily reverted to its natural color, but then quickly went Oompa-Loompa again.

  “Yet another tanning-bed tragedy,” Tommy said, shaking his head.

  “How did you know?”
r />   “Spend as much time around gay men as I do and, trust me, you know. Tanning-related accidents are a serious problem in my community. By February it can be like an epidemic, all these orange men wandering around bars. The ones who are also on steroids have these big heads, too, so they start to look like pumpkins. It’s sad.” Tommy sighed wistfully. “Anyhow, what led you to the dark side?”

  “Would you believe I was feeling a little low on vitamin D and I was out of milk?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it,” I said. If I told Tommy the truth—that I had stripped to get a story—it would just become another thing I could never live down. I wasn’t ashamed of having done it. But only because I was the only one who knew about it besides Vicki. And Vicki wasn’t telling. She was too busy helping her face make the final ascent from caramel to chestnut.

  “Anyhow,” I said, before Tommy could continue his line of inquiry, “let’s go grab some pizza. Having radioactive skin really stokes your appetite.”

  He followed me out of the building and down to our favorite pizzeria. On the way, I updated him on my various findings. Once we were settled in front of a proper meal—two steaming slices and a twenty-ounce bottle of Coke Zero—I asked him what he had been up to.

  “I’ve been trying to follow Vaughn McAlister’s money,” he said. “Though, to be honest, it’s a little hard, because he didn’t seem to have any.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Well, start with his major existing properties—McAlister Center and McAlister Place. I talked to a commercial real-estate guy who kind of walked me through some stuff. McAlister Properties is a private company, of course. So some of this is guesswork. But the guy said that Vaughn was having major problems keeping the buildings full. He had lost a couple of big tenants in the last year or two.”

  “Why?”

  “Bad management. Bad luck. Some combination of both. My guy said there have been some security problems at both places—some break-ins, things like that. Computers stolen. Televisions stolen. The kind of heavy stuff that thieves shouldn’t be able to take if the security force you’ve hired is even half awake. But Vaughn’s wasn’t. Same with cleaning. I guess his buildings had started to slip there, too. You can’t go charging someone thirty-five bucks a square foot for Class A office space and then not keep it up. People have other options. And apparently all the commercial brokers in the area had started telling clients to avoid McAlister Properties buildings.”