The Player

by Brad Parks

  “We’re getting there,” I said. “You’re just going to have to be patient.”

  “Oh, I’m plenty patient,” she said, then jerked her thumb in the direction of Brodie’s office. “It’s Mr. Hot Pants who’s pitching a tent.”

  With that rather graphic image, she left me to the All-Slop and the relative peace that was, journalistically speaking, a fairly mundane task. By that time of night, it was mostly routine stories about car wrecks, homicides, the weather, and whatever other disasters, natural or unnatural, were unfolding across the Garden State. We reacted to the stuff that seemed interesting and ignored the rest of it.

  When you’re on the All-Slop, you’re basically hoping the news comes in at what might be called Goldilocks speed. If you get too much, it starts to feel hectic. Too little and you get bored. You’re looking for juuuuuust right.

  This one was a little on the fast side, so I hadn’t really noticed the passage of time until around midnight, when things started to slow down. I was in the middle of some idle chitchat with Katie Mossman, one of the All-Slop’s regular editors, when she took a glance at the Web feed from the fire/police incident-pager network.

  “Uh-oh,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I’ve been keeping an eye on this house fire in West Orange. Sounds like a big one and now, apparently, it’s a fatal. Incident pager said they just found a body.”

  “A fatal in West Orange?” I said, because if there was going to be a deadly fire in the Oranges, East Orange was the most likely culprit. It had far more aging tenements, the type that tended to burn easily and catch inhabitants unaware—because the tenants stole the batteries from the smoke detectors in the hallways.

  “Yeah. I’m afraid you’re going to have to write it up.”

  “I got two hours left in this shift anyway,” I said. “Might as well fill it with something. What’s the address?”

  She looked at the screen again and said, “It’s in the one hundred block of McAlister Court.”

  I swore loudly. There was only one house in the 100 block of McAlister Court—only one house on McAlister Court, period. And there was only one body likely to be found in that house.

  Barry McAlister.

  They rode past the house twice. Any more than that and someone might notice.

  There were three of them—two thick guys and a thin guy, the same crew that had been hired to do the first McAlister job.

  Two passes turned out to be enough. The place was exactly as their employer said it would be: a two-story Tudor on a private lane, reasonably secluded, with enough trees that it couldn’t really be seen by its neighbors. At least not until the leaves fell.

  Still, they didn’t want to take any chances. So they stole a car, taking it from the parking lot of the West Orange train station. It was a Buick, at least fifteen years old—the kind that are easier to steal, because the antitheft safeguards hadn’t gotten too sophisticated yet. They aimed to have it back before the owner would even be aware of what had happened.

  They just wanted to make sure that if anyone saw a car turning onto Barry McAlister’s private lane, it wasn’t theirs.

  In truth, arson wasn’t really their specialty. They knew guys who were real artists at it, guys who could make it seem like a wire had shorted or an oven had been left on. Neither the two thick guys nor the thin guy knew any of those tricks.

  But that didn’t seem to matter to their employer, who said it didn’t matter if the authorities knew it was arson. The only instructions they had been given was that Barry McAlister’s house—and, in particular, his living room—needed to burn, and it needed to be a fire that would cover up as much of the evidence as possible.

  Cook everything. And leave the body behind.

  The body had to be found. Once again, that was key. The world had to know that Barry McAlister was dead. Same as it had been with Vaughn.

  So they pulled up in the driveway in their stolen Buick and went to work. They had enough lighter fluid for a decade’s worth of wiener roasts, and they used it to soak the living room. They thought about pulling some of the recycled newspapers out of the garage, so the fire would have enough fuel to get good and hot. Then they looked at Barry McAlister’s shag carpet, paisley couch, and ancient drapes and decided there was enough polyester to keep things raging for a while.

  The thin guy was the one who actually struck the match. The flame instantly leaped across the carpet, up the drapes and onto the easy chair where the corpse was resting.

  The fire alarm started ringing shortly thereafter and that spooked them a little bit. Even though they knew none of the neighbors would be able to hear it, it made them feel like they were attracting too much attention to themselves.

  So they took off, leaving a funeral pyre behind them.

  CHAPTER 7

  Before Katie Mossman could have much say in the matter, I told her I was heading out to West Orange. I’m not sure there was precedent for an All-Slop reporter being allowed to leave the desk. I’m also not sure there was anything Katie could have done to stop me.

  It was always possible the fire had been an accident. Barry McAlister was a chain-smoker who obviously enjoyed a drink or two. He wouldn’t be the first alcoholic to combine his two vices in a tragic way, dropping a lit cigarette on the couch as he passed out—to name just one way it might have happened.

  Then again, it was also possible someone, perhaps some minion of the DeNunzio crime family, had killed Barry and given his house the ol’ gas ’n’ go, knowing that if the place was torched properly, it would incinerate enough evidence to assure the assailant of getting away with it.

  I had been operating under the assumption Mitch DeNunzio had developed a serious grudge against Vaughn McAlister—for reasons I had yet to fully uncover—and had decided to take him out. Perhaps that grudge extended to Vaughn’s old man. Had he seen something he shouldn’t have seen? Had he known something he shouldn’t have known?

  Whatever it was, I wondered if Barry had even been aware of it. He was so lost he’d thought Marcia Fenstermacher had something to do with this. You would think that if Barry was aware Vaughn had been having dalliances with the mafia, that would have been the first thing he told me—not some revenge fantasy involving a jilted secretary.

  When I got to West Orange, the short private drive that was McAlister Court looked like a staging ground for a disaster-training session, with an impressive assortment of firefighting equipment on hand. The municipalities in this part of the state are tiny—many just a few miles square—and yet they all have full fire departments that, on a given night, don’t have anything better to do than respond to fires in other towns. I counted at least six fire departments represented.

  There were also two ambulances; five marked police cars; six unmarked ones; a crime-scene-unit truck; and a K9 car, whose purpose I couldn’t begin to fathom, unless they feared one of the fire departments forgot to bring its Dalmatian and would need a spare dog. There were people in uniform everywhere, most of whom were present probably only because this was the most exciting thing that was going to happen to West Orange all year and they didn’t want to miss it.

  There was also, front and center, a car from the Essex County Arson Squad, which perhaps began to answer my question about whether the fire had been set accidentally.

  Then there was the house itself. Or, rather, what was left of it. I had covered a lot of fires in my time as a reporter, including some fatals. There weren’t many as thoroughly torched as this one. What had once been a nice Tudor house was missing most of its roof. It was hard to find a place on the shingled siding untouched by flame once you got much beyond the first floor.

  You generally didn’t get a fire like that unless it had a little bit of help from several dozen gallons of Shell’s finest 93 octane.

  I got out of my car and started skulking around. The blaze had been extinguished, though the air still had that sickly, unnatural stench that house fires get from the burning of things
that were never meant to be burned, like plastic and insulation. There was enough darkness and confusion that no one really paid attention to me, the first reporter at the scene. So I had free rein to cast about until I found someone who might tell me what was going on.

  It didn’t take long until I found him. Michael “Sully” Sullivan was the mayor of West Orange. He was a good guy—as Sullys everywhere tend to be—and I had dealt with him a couple of times before. He was a local Realtor, a better-than-average quote, and had been mayor for at least a decade, mostly because no one else really wanted the job. In a town like West Orange, being mayor was a part-time gig that paid precious little—maybe ten thousand a year—and came with more headaches than that stipend could possibly be worth.

  I was glad he was there, if for one reason only: when it comes to fire and/or crime scenes, mayors are great. They have absolutely no official purpose and are as essential to any investigation as nearby manhole covers. Yet, they often get briefed and will use the information to make themselves seem important to their constituents. You can usually get them to tell you stuff the fire and/or police department never will.

  “Hey, Mr. Mayor,” I said as I sidled up to him. He was looking at me blankly, so I said, “Carter Ross from the Eagle-Examiner. Isn’t this past your bedtime?”

  He took a moment to recognize me, registered mild surprise when he did, then recovered with: “Hey, Carter, nice to see you again. Isn’t it past yours too?”

  “Ordinarily, yeah. I happened to be pulling a night shift when this went out on the incident pager. I recognized the address as being Barry McAlister’s place. You may have heard about what happened to his son, Vaughn?”

  “Yeah, I read about it,” Sully said.

  “So you understand my curiosity. What’s the deal? Did whoever went after the son decide to go after the father and turn this into barbecue season?”

  He shook his head and said, “More like hunting season.”

  * * *

  Even in the dim, whirling light cast by the various fire trucks and emergency vehicles, I could still make out the pained expression on Mayor Sullivan’s face.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He pulled his hands out of his pockets, blew on them, then shoved them back in. “Can I just talk on background and then we’ll put something on the record later?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “Chief Delaney thinks Barry was dead before the fire started,” Sully said. “We found Barry’s car in the garage. The inside of it had blood all over it.”

  “Blood?”

  “Yeah. A lot of it. Chief’s theory was that someone waited for Barry in the backseat and, when he got in, reached around and slit his throat. The chief was saying the only way there could have been that much blood in the car is if someone severed Barry’s carotid artery.”

  “Ugh,” I said, flinching.

  “Yeah, so basically the chief was saying it looked like Barry was killed in his car and then dragged into his living room—there were blood smears on the stairs, too. The perp then lit the body on fire, perhaps to cover evidence of the throat slashing. One of the firemen said he had never seen a body burned so badly.”

  “Oh, man,” I said, feeling that bit of news in my stomach.

  “Yeah, but the perp didn’t do as good a job in the garage. I think maybe he hoped if he set a fire in the living room, the garage would catch fire, too. But there’s not much about a concrete-slab floor that will burn, so most of the garage survived intact.”

  “So, what, he was hoping the whole house would burn to the point where no one would be able to investigate and they would just chalk it up as an accident?”

  “Maybe. Who knows? Whatever his hope was, he wasn’t very good at it. One of the Arson Squad detectives said the living room still smelled like lighter fluid.”

  We stood there for a minute or so, both of us with our hands in our pockets, looking at this singed house. There was enough here to keep some determined investigators busy for a while. The crime scene guys would work on what was left after the fire. The Arson Squad guys would determine what kind of accelerant had been used to light the blaze. The medical examiner would get what he could from the charcoaled body.

  There would be more information. But none of it, I suspected, would actually help to solve anything. The answers weren’t in whatever forensics were left behind in that house. They were somewhere outside. I wondered if I’d ever be able to figure it out definitely myself.

  “Did you know him?” I said at last.

  “A little bit. I think everyone in town knew about what happened with him and his wife—it was a bit of a scandal at the time, her just leaving like that. After that, you’d see him around, at the grocery store and that sort of thing, but he was always sort of a tragic figure. I’ve probably sold ten houses in this neighborhood over the years and never once seen him outside or interacting with his neighbors.”

  My cell phone buzzed in my pocket—most likely Katie, asking if I had anything to report. I wasn’t going to answer it, but it did prod me enough to ask, “So you mind giving me that on-the-record quote you promised?”

  “Yeah, sorry to ramble so much,” he said. “Just put me down as something like, ‘This is a profoundly sad day for West Orange and the McAlister family. Our hearts go out to them. Yet even as we mourn this terrible loss, I am confident that Chief Delaney and his detectives will bring this killer to justice.’”

  I jotted the canned quote in my notebook. Just as I was finishing, Sully said, “Now, if you want to do me a favor, please make it clear in whatever you write that this poor guy was targeted for some reason and that the police believe this was an isolated crime. I don’t need everyone in town thinking there’s some kind of homicidal maniac going around West Orange slitting throats and torching homes.”

  “Bad for property values?”

  “No kidding,” he said. “Just when they were finally starting to get better.”

  I peppered Sully with a few more questions; then, when it was clear he had told me all he knew, I called the mayor’s quotes in to Pigeon, whose job it would be to immediately disseminate them to the insomnia-suffering masses surfing the Web at this hour. Before long, I started to feel like I was about as useful as all the unneeded cops hanging about. Chief Delaney, whom I was meeting for the first time, brushed me off with a “no comment.” I couldn’t find any investigators from the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office. And I didn’t know what the Arson Squad guys looked like, or if they’d even talk to me.

  Around the time the last of the out-of-town fire trucks pulled away, I decided to call it a night, too. It was 2:00 A.M. My time on the All-Slop was, technically, at an end. Anything else the authorities might have to say could wait until the light of day.

  The last thing I noticed before getting into my car was that the little angel statue, the one that commemorated the life of Elizabeth McAlister, beloved wife and mother, had disappeared. Maybe it had been knocked down by one of the fire trucks or shattered by an ambulance that went on the lawn or who knows. But it had somehow gone missing.

  She was the last of the McAlisters. And now she was gone, too.

  * * *

  It took forever to get to sleep—lingering adrenaline being what it is—and morning came too fast. I had set the alarm for 9:00 A.M., knowing I had promised Quint I would cover his piddling protest. I swore that only a half hour had passed when it rang.

  I dragged myself out of bed, ran the shower extra-hot, then finished it off extra-cold. It did some good, but not much. Sometimes, a shower just feels like polish on a garbage truck. I dressed in my best pleated khakis and finest white shirt and took the unusual step of packing a blazer, knowing I would likely have to go straight to the rehearsal dinner from work without time to stop at home to change.

  Before heading out, I sent quick e-mails to Tommy and Pigeon. I asked Tommy to keep working on Vaughn’s finances. I figured Pigeon could handle the follow on the fire/murder of Barry McAlis
ter.

  That left the protest for me. And not even my morning Coke Zero could generate much enthusiasm for that. I had covered enough protests to know how they normally worked: the organizers promised a big crowd of outraged citizens, only to get a dozen people, half of whom were actually there representing their own pet cause only tangentially involved with the issue in question. I could only imagine what kind of unemployed and underemployed environmentalists would crawl out from under the rocks at ten o’clock on a Friday morning for Quint’s little gathering. The Society for the Preservation of the Yellow-bellied Atlantic Squid. Left-handed Ukrainians for Environmental Fairness. Friends of the Roadside Puddle by Mrs. Jones’s House. I was convinced it would be a sorry assortment of souls.

  Instead, as I turned down Irvine Turner Boulevard and neared the McAlister Arms site, I had to come to a halt. A long line of traffic had formed. And it wasn’t moving. I saw some kind of commotion a few blocks up ahead. There were police vehicles already on the scene, parked at odd angles on the sidewalks. Some drivers were honking their horns. Others were trying to turn around and get out of the mess. A few had given up and were just standing by their cars.

  I did my own U-turn, then pulled onto a side street so I could park and walk closer. As I neared the area, I saw a large collection of humanity that, if it decided to, could have turned into a very respectable mob. I’m not exactly the National Park Service when it comes to estimating crowd size, but there were at least five hundred people. And that didn’t include the Shabazz High School marching band—in full uniform—assembled off to the side.

  I heard their chanting from several blocks away. It was the old standby: “What do we want? Justice. When do we want it? Now.” I found that pretty funny, since Quint had told me the day before he didn’t really have a goal for his protest—meaning the people didn’t even know what justice they were seeking.