by Brad Parks
“I wanted to offer you an apology,” I said.
“What for?”
I glanced at Trevor and asked, “Is there somewhere we can go and talk?”
This turned out to be a brilliant move, because it made Marcia realize that even though I was imprudent enough to have wrongly accused her of killing the man she loved, I was not so inconsiderate as to discuss it in front of her son and mother. Plus, by the time we moved into the study, which is where she shunted me, she had cooled off a little bit. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and while her hair was still perfectly immobile, the rest of her was presented more casually than when she had to play the part of Vaughn McAlister’s secretary.
“Look,” I said as soon as the door behind us closed, “I asked you some pretty pointed questions yesterday, and I just wanted to say I was sorry. I had caught hold of a little bit of gossip about you and Vaughn being on the rocks and him jumping back to his ex-wife. I know now it wasn’t true, but it made me jump to certain conclusions. Then we heard from one of your neighbors there was loud yelling coming from the house Monday night…”
“Uff, probably Mrs. Peters,” Marcia said. “She’s a busybody of the first order but she also can’t hear that well. I just … Trevor and I got in a little fight about his homework.”
“Yeah, anyway, I’m sorry. You were pretty clearly having the worst day of your life and I didn’t make it any better. Sometimes the first quasi-plausible explanation is the one that a lazy mind seizes, but that doesn’t make it right.”
She had her arms crossed—I do believe they call it a defensive posture—but most reasonable people have a hard time staying too mad when someone is laying the mea culpa on three layers thick. If there’s one good thing about screwing up as often as I do, it’s that you become a virtuoso at apologies.
“Why are you telling me this?” she demanded.
“Well, to be honest, my executive editor knew Vaughn as a kid. So he’s got a personal interest in this story, which gives me a personal interest, too. Plus, I’m more than a little curious myself at this point. So I’m hoping maybe you can help me figure out who did this.”
“Why should I?”
“Well, let me ask you this: have you heard from the police yet?”
“No.”
Her arms were still crossed. But at least now I had redirected some of her anger at a different target.
“Don’t you think it’s a little strange that they wouldn’t have contacted you by this point? You’re not only his significant other, you’re his secretary. Wouldn’t any diligent investigator want to talk to you? I mean, no one knew every facet of Vaughn’s life better than you.”
“Yes, I just thought … I thought maybe they just hadn’t gotten to me yet.”
“I’m sorry to tell you this, but they might not get to you ever,” I said. “Our sources are telling us no one in city hall wants to bring much attention to Vaughn’s life or death due to some of his property purchases. I had two officers in the Newark Police Department tell me in different ways that the case wasn’t a priority. And lord knows they’ve got other murders to solve. At this point, it seems like the Eagle-Examiner is the only institution in Newark that wants to see Vaughn’s killer brought to justice. So I’d really appreciate your help.”
The arms finally dropped to her sides. She flopped into one of two easy chairs in the corner of the study and pointed me to the other one.
“Have a seat,” she said.
“Thanks.”
She rubbed her temples and closed her eyes for a moment. Her brain had been experiencing a serious bear market, but it was doing its best to stage a rally. Finally, she said, “Okay, what do you want to know about?”
No point in sugarcoating things. “This is a hard question to ask. But please try to understand I’m trying to find the truth. And the truth isn’t always pretty. Is it possible Vaughn had gotten involved with the mob?”
She looked legitimately dumbstruck. “The mob? Why would he do that?”
“Maybe he needed the money? Maybe he went to them for a loan for the company that he couldn’t pay back?”
“But he … The company had plenty of money.”
“It did?”
“Well, yeah. I saw everything that crossed Vaughn’s desk. One of the things that he always had to sign off on were the quarterly profit-and-loss statements we submitted to the banks where we had loans. You always have to list assets and equities. I can’t pretend like I knew how to read everything on those statements. But in the last one, I swore I saw the McAlister Properties reserve account had something like eight million dollars in it.”
“Seriously? Do you have one of those statements for me to take a look at?”
“Not here. But I can show you if you come into the office tomorrow.”
“Okay.” I was still trying to process what I had just heard as I moved on to the next topic of interest. “Another question: do you know the name Scott Colston?”
She looked down and to the right as she groped through her memory. “Yes, but … why do I?”
“He’s the Licensed Site Remediation Professional who signed off on the cleanup of the McAlister Arms site.”
“Oh, right. Yes. I guess I’ve seen that name on some documents.”
“Have you ever met him?”
She gave this ten seconds of thought before saying, “No. But that’s not unusual. Someone like that would do his work on-site and I never … I never went to the site. Vaughn wanted me to stay in the office. So I wouldn’t have had the chance to meet someone like that.”
“Ever talked with him on the phone?”
Five seconds this time. Then: “No.”
“This may seem like a strange question, but … are you sure he exists?”
“Well, I … Why do you ask?”
I told her about having traced him to a pizzeria that was seldom open and known to be frequented by mobsters, including one Mitch DeNunzio.
“Wait,” she said. “Mitch DeNunzio is in the mob?”
“Mitch DeNunzio is the mob.”
“But I thought he was—I mean, I never…”
“Did Vaughn have interactions with Mitch DeNunzio?”
“From time to time, yes,” she said, quietly. She brought her hands to her face. They were starting to shake. “Oh my God. Oh, Vaughn, how could you?”
“Did Vaughn ever say what their meetings were about?”
“No. And it’s not like I was sitting in on them. Mr. DeNunzio came to the office maybe one or two times. And there were probably another few times Vaughn went out to see him. I never really knew what it was about. I thought DeNunzio was … I don’t know, an investor or something.”
“I suppose in a manner of speaking he was,” I said. “He’s just not the kind you can afford to cross.”
* * *
Another twenty minutes of conversation made it apparent Marcia Fenstermacher didn’t know anything more about the woes that might have led to Vaughn’s demise. She promised to keep pondering matters and said she’d call Vaughn’s dad to see if he knew anything about Vaughn’s interactions with Mitch DeNunzio. I promised to keep her in the loop about anything new I discovered. I departed with a friendly nod to Sandy and Trevor, who was still buried in his computer screen and oblivious to the world.
As I drove back to Newark, I rang up Kira, telling her about the four-thirty-or-else deadline being imposed by my mother and giving her my parents’ address. I wasn’t worried about her getting to the place. Kira was a librarian. She had been trained to find a children’s fiction book that had been filed in the 700s, next to the books about how to draw bugs. Finding my parents’ house would be no problem.
With the call completed, I settled in for a good drive-time think, trying to iron out this newest wrinkle. In some ways, it made sense that Vaughn might have had some cash in reserve. After all, he had gotten a big pile of money—$6 million from the DEP and $1.1 million from Newark—for a cleanup he’d only pretended to do. That di
dn’t quite add up to $8 million, but maybe the business had stashed away some profits back before it started losing tenants and going into the red.
Still, that did nothing to address the main question: if Vaughn had eight million bucks in the bank, why would he feel the need to go to the mob for money? I can’t say I was an expert in business financing, but in general I knew that La Cosa Nostra should be treated as a lender of last resort.
It perhaps spoke to my level of desperation and ignorance that I was starting to think my best hope for further understanding of this issue was Buster Hays. I found the newsroom’s resident grouch at his desk, reading his e-mail—which he had, naturally, printed out. I wondered if he’d send his reply via the town crier.
I took measure of the newsroom clock, which read 5:48, then made my move.
“Okay, Buster,” I said. “It is exactly twelve minutes until your All-Slop shift. If you expect me to be sitting in that chair in your stead when it begins, I’m going to need a little information from the organized-crime-beat writer. You got anything yet?”
“Just hold your horses, Ivy, I—” He stopped when he looked up at me. “What happened to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You look like you took a bath in Cheetos.”
“My unnatural coloring should not be an issue here,” I snapped. “Don’t be racist.”
“Fine. Have it your way. Anyhow, I did talk to one person who might be in a place to know a thing or two about your fair-haired boy. He said Vaughn McAlister had needed a favor from Mitch DeNunzio, and that he might have been willing to provide a favor in return.”
“What does that mean?”
“Ivy, I keep telling you, this isn’t exactly an organization that prides itself on transparency.”
“Yeah, but … a favor. So does that mean money or what?”
“No. No money. My source made it sound like a service of some kind had been performed. I don’t know exactly what.”
“And in return?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe they just wanted free office space? I kind of had to get this on the sly. The guy thought I was calling about something else and I dropped this into the conversation. If I asked too many questions, he would have stopped talking.”
“So that’s all I get? I’m going to spend all night chained to the All-Slop and all you give me is that Mitch DeNunzio and Vaughn McAlister exchanged unspecified favors?”
He leaned back, grinning in self-satisfied fashion. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Ivy, but that’s a lot more than you could have gotten on your own. I got a few other lines in the water. I’ll let you know if one of them jiggles.”
“Fine,” I said, feeling a little disappointed.
“Have fun shoveling,” he said, then started waving me off. “Now go away, kid. You bother me.”
“Trust me, it’s mutual,” I said, if only to offer a parting shot.
I returned to my desk. At least Buster had potentially solved one thing for me: a guy with eight million dollars did not need a loan from the mob. This, however, only renewed my curiosity as to why Vaughn McAlister was no longer breathing. Had he somehow reneged on the favor he had promised? Was that worth killing him?
I must have been lost in thought, because the next thing I knew a hand was being passed in front of my face.
“Hello? Anyone home?” Tommy was asking.
“Oh. Sorry,” I said, shaking my head a little bit.
“And stop that,” Tommy said.
“Stop what?”
“Chewing on that pen,” he said. I hadn’t realized it, but in my distracted state, I had taken a pen off my desk and stuck it between my back molars and was apparently giving it a good chomping.
“What’s it to you?” I asked.
“One, it’s gross,” he said. “Two, never let a gay man think you’ve got an oral fixation. It just leads us on.”
“What do you … Oh, never mind,” I said, suddenly getting it. I’d never look at a Bic in quite the same way. “Anyhow, what’s new?”
“More bad news for Vaughn McAlister.”
“Worse than being dead?”
“Well, maybe not that bad. But it was probably a serious bummer for him right before he got that way.”
“And what’s that?”
Tommy settled himself behind the empty desk across from me. That was one of the only good things about being in a business with ever-declining staffing levels: plenty of open seating.
“Well,” he said. “I started looking into Best Buy. I called up their corporate offices in Minnesota and got the usual runaround from their spokesman about how they don’t comment on their plans for expansion until the leases are signed and blah blah blah.”
“Which means they hadn’t signed a lease yet,” I said. “That’s something.”
“Yeah, but that’s not all. I started doing a clip search and found out the guy who brokered the deal for their store in Springfield is a guy I know.”
“Better to be lucky than good sometimes.”
“Yeah, so I called him and started chatting him up. And what he told me—not for attribution, of course—is that they had been in serious talks about moving into Newark. They had their advance people out on the site and everything. It looked like it was going to be green-lighted, but then it all fell apart about a week ago.”
“Why?”
“He said there were serious concerns about the financing of the project,” Tommy said. “Basically, Best Buy became convinced the thing was never going to get off the drawing board so they had told McAlister Properties they were pulling out.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” I said. “According to Vaughn’s secretary, he had a reserve account with eight million bucks in it.”
“Do you believe her?”
“She’s offered to show me their most recent P-and-L statement when she’s back in the office.”
Tommy considered this for a moment. “Yeah, but that still doesn’t take into account McAlister Properties’ problem with its DSCR.”
“Uh…”
“Debt service coverage ratio,” Tommy reminded me. “Remember, in the postrecession world order, no bank is going to extend money to a developer unless it’s convinced the business has significantly positive cash flow to be able to repay it. Vaughn wasn’t even breaking even. Heck, he was losing money. So to a certain extent it didn’t matter how much money he had in reserve. McAlister Arms was a hundred-and-twenty-million project. Eight million in the bank is vending-machine money compared to that.”
“And unless he could get his existing buildings back into the black, he was never going to get another dime in financing,” I said. “And he was losing roughly four million bucks a year, give or take, which means he was running out of time to turn things around.”
“You got it,” Tommy said. “And obviously Best Buy had decided that was never going to happen.”
* * *
I wanted to keep kicking around ideas with Tommy, but I caught the newsroom clock out of the corner of my eye. It was straight-up 6:00, which meant my time was no longer my own. The next eight hours of my life were going to be spent in service to the All-Slop. I excused myself from Tommy’s company and trudged over to that part of the newsroom, ready to do my part to feed the digital monster.
When I got over there, I was surprised to see Pigeon already seated at one of the other desks.
“Hey, what are you doing here?” I asked.
“The All-Slop intern called in sick,” she said. “They asked me this morning if I wanted to fill in. Since it meant I could sleep all day, I said yes immediately.”
I stifled whatever sly comment I was about to make about that because Tina was walking by and I didn’t want it to appear Pigeon and I were being friendly, talking, or even acting as if we were members of the same broad taxonomic family. I had successfully avoided Tina all day, and I hoped that had afforded her ample time to cool down and realize there were many explanations as to why Pigeon had spent the nig
ht at my house, and some of them might have actually been innocent.
Alas, she was eyeing me like she wished she had another Dunkin’ Donuts bag to throw at me.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“What does it look like? I’m creating original content so it can be stolen by aggregators who profit from my hard work without paying for it.”
She ignored my commentary and said, “Why is Buster’s name on the schedule?”
“I suppose ‘extortion’ would be one word for it. I needed his help with something, and Buster’s help never comes free.”
Tina shifted her glance to Pigeon, who was pretending to busy herself with a computer keyboard that had suddenly become terribly interesting.
“Cute,” Tina said. “You two plan this?”
My lungs expanded with the air I would need to object, but she didn’t give me the chance to let it escape. “Never mind,” she said. “I don’t even care. What I do care about is why you don’t have a follow on Vaughn McAlister.”
“I filed the thing about the protest…”
“I meant a real follow. With actual news in it. Something that signals to our readers we care about this story and they should, too. More importantly, something that signals to Brodie he shouldn’t replace you with a twenty-three-year-old that he’ll pay half as much to work twice as hard.”
“Brodie would never do that.”
“Spoken like a reporter who hasn’t seen the latest newsroom budget,” she said.
Tina wasn’t serious. I knew that. And if there was any further consolation, it’s what I had learned through hard-won experience with Tina: when she was out for blood like this, she didn’t really mean what she said. She just wanted to make sure she cut me somehow. I decided my best tack was to appear mortally wounded and hope she felt she had gotten her pound of flesh.
“Stop trying to look pathetic. It won’t work,” she said. “Does Tommy have anything?”
I thought about Tommy’s contributions: one not-for-attribution source saying Best Buy had pulled out of McAlister Arms; another background source, with no direct knowledge of McAlister Properties’ balance sheet, doing back-of-napkin math that said it was losing money; an anonymous tipster in city hall who said McAlister was sitting on more than a million dollars of Newark’s money. They were valuable additions to my understanding of Vaughn McAlister’s precarious financial situation, but it wasn’t really stuff I could put in the newspaper—at least not responsibly.
