The Player

by Brad Parks

  It was only when I got close that I saw what was happening to snarl traffic. Roughly fifty of the protesters had linked arms and sat down in the middle of Irvine Turner Boulevard, blocking anyone trying to get to I-78.

  The police on the scene were just watching them, clearly unsure of what to do. Quint had mentioned he was going to Newark to get the permits, so I was sure the protest was legal. Blocking the street wasn’t, but the cops were probably edgy about cracking down too hard. They didn’t want to incite a crowd this large. Newark and riots don’t have a good history together.

  Out of curiosity, I sidled up to the first protester I saw. She was a young woman with long brown hair that actually had flowers in it, like she was trying to follow some sixties protest manual passed down from her grandparents.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner. I’m wondering: what are you here protesting?”

  “I think there’s some pollution or something?” she said, absent anything resembling guile. “But don’t ask me. I don’t actually know.”

  “If you don’t know, why are you here?”

  “I’m a friend of Quint Jorgensen’s,” she said, then corrected herself: “Actually, I’m more a friend of a friend. I don’t really know him. I more know of him.”

  “And so you came to his protest because…?”

  “Are you kidding? Quint organizes the best protests. I never miss them. The food alone is worth coming for.”

  “The food?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah, didn’t you see? There are vegetarian sandwiches over there,” she said, pointing to a long table with what appeared to be two five-foot-long sub sandwiches and a pair of volunteers behind them, cutting off pieces and passing them out. She pointed to a guy with a large foam Snickers for a hat: “That’s the candy man. He passes out candy bars and that sort of thing. That tub over there has chips—don’t worry, they’re made from organic, locally grown potatoes. Somewhere around here, there’s another lady passing out home-baked cookies. Protesting can work up an appetite, you know. Quint tries to think of everything.”

  As she was speaking, I had caught a whiff of marijuana smoke. I wondered if Quint had thought of that, too. I guess when you have millions of dollars and nothing better to do with it, you need not spare the extra trimmings.

  I was about to ask the young woman more questions—to see just how facile her understanding of the issue at hand was—when the Shabazz High School marching band decided to add to the bedlam. With three sharp whistle blasts, the drum section began a thunderous salute. Soon every kid in the band was doing some kind of fancy dance step in perfect unison with the others. They circled around the street blockers, to the encouragement and delight of the other protesters. Then they climbed a temporary stage that had been erected and began belting out the Shabazz High fight song.

  It was total chaos.

  And in the middle of it was Quint, holding a bullhorn, grinning at it all.

  * * *

  Picking my way gingerly through the crowd—a good portion of whom turned out to be smoking a substance that was not tobacco—I eventually made it to Quint, who was waving his arms in the air, acting like he was conducting the band. The kids were blaring away, not paying him any mind. He pretty clearly didn’t care. The homemade cookies weren’t the only things that were baked.

  “Hey, you made it!” he said, clearly pleased to see me, yelling so he could be heard over the music.

  “Yeah, this is … this is something,” I yelled back.

  “I told you: I throw a good protest.”

  “I see that.”

  “Please tell me you’ve managed to come up with some demands,” I said.

  “My hands?” he said. “What about my hands?”

  “No,” I yelled, then got closer to him so he could hear better, to the point where I was practically yelling in his ear. “Demands. Do you have any demands?”

  “Oh, no. Not yet.”

  “So what are you going to do with these people?”

  “I don’t know, actually,” he said, still seeming unconcerned. “The lawyer was supposed to handle the entertainment.”

  “The lawyer? Who, Imperiale?”

  “Yeah. I called the dude yesterday, told him about the protest and he was all excited about it. He said he’d get some of his clients here to talk about the injuries they suffered. But now here it is game time and I don’t even think he’s here. You haven’t seen him, have you?”

  I glanced around the crowd, trying to locate a man with a big nose and fake black hair who looked like he’d be comfortable on the back of a Yellow Pages. I didn’t see him anywhere.

  “Nope,” I said.

  “Stood up by a freakin’ lawyer,” Quint said, shaking his head, but seeming in good humor about it. Cannabis tended to have that effect.

  “Maybe he got called into court on some other matter?” I suggested.

  Finally, the band stopped playing. Everyone gave them an enthusiastic round of applause.

  “How the hell did you get a marching band to come?” I asked when the noise finally died down.

  “Will introduced me to one of his clients. A girl named Jackie? She lives somewhere around here. She pulled some strings.”

  “Jackie Orr?”

  “Yeah, that’s her. She’s right over there—the black girl with the bushy hair,” he said, directing my gaze with a point until it fell on Jackie. “Anyhow, if you’ll excuse me for a second, I got some work to do.”

  Quint walked over to the temporary stage and climbed its stairs and was soon acting as emcee, thanking the Shabazz marching band, getting another roar out of the well-fed, mildly buzzed crowd. I slid over to Jackie.

  “So I understand you and Quint have joined forces,” I said.

  She hitched her antiquated bug glasses up her nose, readjusted the bag she had slung over her shoulder, and gave me her usual critical stare-down. “Yes,” she said, and was not going to offer anything else.

  “Look, I know you’re upset with me, because you feel like I abandoned you. But if you had given me a little more time, I would have come back to you.”

  She shoved her hands into the pockets of the Aéropostale hoodie she was wearing. But something in her posture told me she was coming around, so I pressed on:

  “And, besides, in some ways, things have worked out pretty well. You wanted a lawyer. You got one. You wanted attention for your neighbors’ problems”—I gestured to the throngs of people around me—“and you pretty clearly have that, too. So what do you say we call a truce? I’m still going to write some kind of story about this. Even if I don’t know what it’s going to say or how this is going to play out, I’d like you to be a part of it.”

  I held out my right hand. She let it dangle there for a minute, then grabbed it and gave it a good, firm pump.

  “My grandmother always told me to judge people on their intentions as well as their actions,” she said. “I guess your intentions are good.”

  “They are,” I confirmed. “They are.”

  Up on the stage, Quint was still revving up the crowd. He was asking if any of the plaintiffs in the McAlister Properties lawsuit were present, inviting them to give their “testimony.” Obviously, Quint wanted to provide the entertainment, colorful lawyer or no.

  “So what about Will Imperiale,” I said. “How are his intentions?”

  “Good. Really good.”

  “You sure? He was apparently supposed to be here this morning but he didn’t show.”

  “Well, he showed up at my grandmother’s place yesterday afternoon when he said he would,” she said. “He talked us through what was going to happen, what we’d have to sign and what it said and all that. It all sounded pretty good. Everyone ended up signing with him.”

  That was unsurprising. Knowing how to work a living room full of potential clients was something of a necessary survival skill in the field of personal injury law.

  “Please tell me you asked him some hard question
s,” I said. “About the timing of everything. About the difficulties of the case. About how long it might take before you got paid—if you got paid at all.”

  “I did. He said it was no problem. He said we’d all get paid. He promised.”

  Well, at least the man didn’t lack for confidence. I wondered if he had somehow learned about Scott Colston, the fake Licensed Site Remediation Professional. Maybe Quint had tipped him off. Something like that would go a long way toward proving negligence. Still, nothing was ever assured in a court of law.

  “You know he can’t really do that,” I said. “No lawyer, no matter how sure he is about his case, can guarantee a victory. Juries are fickle. Even if he got a bench trial, where it’s going to be decided by judges, he might get tripped up on some minor statutory point. The defense is going to have smart lawyers, too, you know.”

  “No, no, that’s the thing: he said the defense has already agreed to settle.”

  “It has?”

  “Yeah. He said the details were still being worked out. And we might not get all the money owed to us, but that if we signed with him, we’d at least get something.”

  “Really? How much?”

  “He said even someone like me, who only got sick once, would probably get like ten thousand. He said some people would get a lot more. Maybe fifty or a hundred thousand.”

  “Wow, really?” I said, mostly because I was too astonished to say much more.

  She nodded.

  I looked up at Quint, who was railing about the wanton negligence of McAlister Properties, the greedy corporation that cared only about its profits. Now it was starting to sound more like a stump speech for a midterm election campaign. No matter. The crowd was loving it.

  “So, wait,” I said, still trying to make sure I understood what was happening, “which defendant settled? There were at least fifteen of them in the complaint I saw. I mean, even Quint’s family’s old company was a defendant.”

  “This one, I think,” she said, pointing to the ground. “McAlister Properties.”

  That was curious, to say the least. Between the construction workers and Jackie’s neighbors, Imperiale had something like fifty clients, some of them with broken bones and kidney failure. One of them had even died. It was a multimillion-dollar claim if ever I’d heard one. And it’s not like McAlister Properties’ insurance would cover it, because the insurance company could rightly point out that its policy didn’t cover negligence on the part of the insured. So the settlement would be coming out of McAlister Properties’ piggy bank. Why would the McAlisters fork over millions without a fight?

  Even though I knew the company had money—that eight-million-dollar reserve—I couldn’t imagine Vaughn would so willingly give up his nest egg. His only chance of surviving was to get his two main buildings profitable again, a turnaround that could take months or years, if it happened at all. He needed all the padding he could get. Why would McAlister Properties—which sounded like it was creeping toward the cliff of insolvency as it was—agree to pay a settlement that would push it over the edge? And would the settlement, which presumably was negotiated when both McAlisters were alive, hold now that both McAlisters were dead?

  “Well, I still wouldn’t go on any spending sprees,” I said.

  “He said it was as good as done.”

  “Did he put it in writing?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t think so?”

  “I … I mean, I didn’t actually read it,” she said, and at least had the good sense to be embarrassed about it.

  “Do you have the agreement you signed with you?”

  She fished around in her shoulder bag, produced an envelope that had Imperiale & Trautwig’s logo printed on it, and handed it to me.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I opened it and pulled out a four-page document. It all looked pretty standard. And, sure enough, there was no mention of any kind of settlement or of any kind of guaranteed payments. Imperiale was too cagey to put any of that on paper.

  Really, the only unusual thing about the agreement was the part about compensation. This was usually where there was language to indicate the undersigned attorney was entitled to one-third of any reward recovered by the plaintiff. But apparently that wasn’t good enough for Willard R. Imperiale, Esq.

  The bastard had conned these poor people—who probably didn’t know any better—into giving him 50 percent.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Interesting reading.”

  * * *

  Quint had finished up his speech and had finally been joined on stage by DaQuan Richardson, the first plaintiff to testify before this mock court of revelers. But first, the Shabazz band was going to strike up another song.

  This rendered further attempts at conversation somewhat pointless, so I bade Jackie farewell and wandered around the crowd for a while. One speaker after another kept coming up to the podium to complain about the malady McAlister Properties had visited upon them, each of them encouraged by Quint. It made for some odd pairings—the superrich heir from Madison and the downtrodden people of Newark—but, then again, this was an odd gathering.

  Eventually, I felt like my time at the show was drawing to a close. I had enough in my notebook to file something. The crowd was growing bored and starting to dissipate. The people sitting in the street had been persuaded to let traffic go. The marching band had high-stepped its way back to Shabazz High, a few blocks away.

  Not wanting to be the last princess at the ball, I meandered back to my car, only to find it double-parked by an extra-long, silver Cadillac Escalade. I stared at the car peevishly for a moment, not understanding what was happening and certainly not noticing that a rather large man had approached behind me—until I heard his voice.

  “Carter Ross,” he said.

  I turned to see a gentleman who had about four inches and a hundred pounds on me. He was wearing a black peacoat, even though it wasn’t that cold. And I don’t think it was because he had a circulatory problem.

  “There’s someone who wants to talk to you,” he said. “Get in the truck.”

  I looked at the vehicle and that’s when it hit me: a silver Cadillac Escalade. Mitch DeNunzio’s vehicle. I tried to appear unworried, even nonchalant, which is hard to do when you’re worried about soiling yourself.

  I cast a few furtive glances to my left and right to see if there was room for me to make a getaway. Although I couldn’t have beaten this goon in a wrestling contest, I was pretty sure I could outrun him. The problem was that I couldn’t outrun the bullets in his gun.

  “I don’t suppose I could politely decline your offer,” I said, bending my knees slightly so my legs would be ready to propel me somewhere else. And fast.

  Then another voice behind me said, “Not really.”

  It was another gentleman, a little shorter, but thicker. He was wearing a windbreaker, which meant either circulatory problems were contagious, or he was also packing. My odds of escape, which were already small, had become infinitesimal. I thought about making a break for it anyway. But then I started to think more rationally: if my choices were, basically, get shot now or get shot later, didn’t it make sense to delay the pain?

  “Well,” I said. “Can I ask where we’re going?”

  “Just get in the car,” Goon One said, closing in and grabbing my arm.

  I couldn’t believe, given that I had so recently been surrounded by hundreds of people—not to mention a full marching band—that I was now alone, with no one to witness that I was being abducted in broad daylight. But the little side street where I had parked was deserted.

  Goon Two opened the door for me as Goon One shunted me inside with something less than the courtesy he might have shown his grandmother. The seats had been arranged limousine-style, with one of the benches turned backward so it could face the other one. Goon One got in behind me and planted me in the middle of that backward-facing bench. Goon Two went around and sat on the other side
of me.

  Facing me was a sixty-something-year-old Italian man, dressed in a silver suit that was nearly as shiny as the Escalade. His shirt collar was open and unbuttoned more than, in my opinion, a man’s shirt ought to be. Not that I was going to share that reflection at the moment.

  “My name is Mitch DeNunzio,” he said as the SUV got moving. “That name mean anything to you?”

  “I know you’re, uh, probably not a big fan of the RICO statutes,” I said.

  He chortled. “Ha. You’re funny. This kid is funny, huh?”

  Having been given tacit permission to express their pleasure, Goon One and Goon Two chuckled.

  I wasn’t laughing. I was still looking for some kind of escape. We were trolling through Newark at a very reasonable speed, stopping at lights, obeying traffic laws. Could I overcome the six hundred pounds of meat bracketing me and hop out at an intersection? I wondered if Vaughn McAlister had been making the same calculations shortly before his head met the thick end of a baseball bat.

  “So,” he continued, “I understand you’ve been asking around about me. Having Buster Hays make some inquiries about me and Vaughn McAlister? Is that right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, cautiously. No sense in denying what the man already knew. Obviously, whomever Buster had spoken with had reported back to the boss. I wasn’t sure how they had found me. But since I had written about the protest in the paper today, it wasn’t hard to guess that I’d be covering it.

  “Well, in that case, I’m glad we’re talking,” he said. “I know that sometimes certain … rumors … can tend to take on a life of their own with me. And I don’t need bad publicity of that sort at this moment. So I want you to know: I had nothing to do with Vaughn McAlister.”

  Half of me wanted to say, Great to hear. Now how about you let me out of this car and I’ll go write that up?

  “You, you didn’t?” I said, sounding more incredulous than was perhaps polite.