by Brad Parks
She shook her head. “I can’t talk about that. Anything involving IA is strictly confidential. That’s department policy.”
“So you guys are sticking with ‘self-inflicted gunshot wound’?”
“For now, yes.”
“But … how do you explain those marks on his arms and wrists? Someone tied the man to a-”
She was again shaking her head. “I don’t mean to be dodging your questions, Mr. Ross, and they’re good questions. But I really can’t say anything more.”
“Are you saying he tied himself to a chair?”
From behind me, Hightower coughed. Captain Boswell didn’t look at him or even seem to notice it, but the noise broke what little rhythm I had going.
“Is there anything else you have to tell me?” she asked.
“No, I guess not. You know my paper is still going to run with the story about the autopsy photos.”
“And that’s your right to do that,” she said.
She smiled again. I got the feeling that while she took Kipps’s death personally, none of the rest of the maneuvering associated with it was personal to her. It was the job.
I guess that’s one way you get to be the first female precinct captain in Newark history: you learn to separate the two.
* * *
We finished up with some polite but entirely uninformative small talk, and soon my long-limbed escort was leading me back through the dimly lit hallway and down the stairs. I figured he’d stop once we reached the main door, but he kept going as we went down the front steps.
“Might as well go the whole way,” he said, seemingly reading my thoughts. “You get mugged and it messes up our CompStat numbers, and then the captain would get all pissed at me.”
“Very thoughtful of you,” I said.
When we got to the sidewalk, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes-likely his real motivation for going outside.
“That your ride?” he asked, nodding at my Malibu.
“Yeah, it’s bitchin’, ain’t it? The ladies can’t get enough of it.”
He let out a deep laugh, lit his cigarette, and took a draw.
“Drive carefully,” he said.
Smoke carefully, I thought. But instead I just said, “Thanks, Officer. Have a nice night.”
On my short drive back to Eagle-Examiner headquarters, I pondered what very little new information I had gleaned from Captain Boswell. Really, the only semiuseful thing she said was when I asked her about Kipps and Internal Affairs. This is me reading into things, sure. But when someone says, “I can’t talk about that,” it suggests there is something to be discussed.
I returned to the office determined to lean on Buster Hays until he gave up what he had, especially now that I had the necessary inducement: while I was gone, Ruthie Ginsburg-God bless industrious interns everywhere-had e-mailed me a completed Good Neighbors. It was about Stephen Rosenberg of Livingston, who had planned, fund-raised, and created a picnic area in Riker Hill Art Park as his Eagle Scout project. It more than met the high standards we expected of our Good Neighbors pieces, which is to say it appeared to have letters, spaces, and punctuation in approximately the correct distribution.
At the end of the e-mail, Ruthie wrote, “When can we talk about the Eighteenth Avenue town houses? I got some great stuff for you about that and the neighborhood.”
I actually felt a little badly all that “great stuff” was going to die in his notebook. But he would hardly be the first reporter to have that happen to him. Anyone who has been around this business for more than a minute has had to eat a story they thought was dynamite.
Looking over to the small armada of unassigned desks where we corralled the interns, I didn’t see Ruthie. Perhaps, having tested enough toilet water and uncovered enough good deeds for one day, he had gone home. I rattled off a hasty thank-you e-mail, then printed out a copy of the story and took it over to the wrinkled dean of the newsroom himself.
“Okay, Buster, give it up,” I said. “I got your Good Neighbors right here. I want IA.”
Buster had been concentrating on his computer, looking at it with his usual contempt, like he wished it would turn back into a typewriter, his preferred drafting instrument. He turned and peered at me from over a pair of reading glasses.
“I’m on deadline, Ivy,” he said. “You’re going to have to wait until I’m filed. Contrary to what your parents have probably been telling you your whole life, the sun doesn’t rise and set out of your ass.”
“A deal is a deal.”
“Yeah, yeah. Give me five minutes.”
I rolled my eyes-not that he saw it-and retreated to my desk. I tried calling Paul/Powell and was again requested to consider my eternal and everlasting death. This time I left a quick message: “Powell, it’s Carter Ross at the Eagle-Examiner. Kira said you were looking for me. Give me a call.”
Returning to my desk, I saw I had a fresh e-mail. It was from “Thompson, Tina” and had the subject line, “???” which made me cringe as I clicked on it. What had I done wrong this time?
But it was just one line: “Want to have dinner with an aging voodoo sperm witch tonight?”
I considered this for a moment. Did I? Tina had been such a pill lately, I was actually looking forward to spending less time around her, not more. Then again, it’s not like I had any pressing plans-watching college basketball with Deadline curled up against my leg didn’t count-and maybe Chief Tina was finally making a peace offering. We could use a burying of the hatchet.
I looked over to Tina’s office, which was dark. She hadn’t been in there for at least ten minutes-we had those motion-sensing lights that shut off after so long. I fired back a quick, “Sure. Details?”
As I awaited a reply, I heard Buster bellow from a few desks over, “Okay, Ivy, I’m filed. Let’s do this.”
I grabbed the printout of Ginsburg’s story and returned to Buster’s desk.
“Let’s see that Good Neighbors,” he said.
I slid the story in his direction. He adjusted his granny glasses and took a quick gander at the top.
“You farming out your dirty work to interns now?”
I summoned my best impersonation of Buster’s Bronx accent and repeated the words he had said to me earlier in the day: “I do what I need to do in order to survive in this cruel world.”
The right corner of his mouth lifted-for Buster, that counted as a smile-and he said, “Good. You’re learning.”
He spent another five seconds scanning the copy, then proclaimed, “This’ll do.”
“Okay, so let’s have it.”
Buster removed the glasses, rubbed his face, then said, “At the time of his death, there was no IA investigation into Darius Kipps. Nothing. Zip. Zilch.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. My source is gold. IA is bound by an attorney general’s directive to investigate all complaints, no matter where they come from. If there was a complaint about him, there’d be a file. And my source said there’s no file. He did some checking with the other IA guys just to make sure. Kipps is clean, as far as they’re concerned.”
“Huh.”
“Now,” he said, grinning as much as Buster ever allowed, “ask me what else my guy told me.”
“What else did your guy tell you?”
“It’s going to cost you another Good Nei-”
I stopped him immediately: “Forget it, Buster. There’s quid pro quo and then there’s extortion. Don’t cross the line.”
“Okay, okay. Hang on,” he said, opening up a notebook and flipping to a page filled with random pen marks that may have been an attempt to represent actual letters. “Okay, according to my source, Kipps called an IA guy. My source wouldn’t say which IA guy, just that it was someone Kipps knew and trusted. The call came in late Saturday night so the guy wasn’t around. Kipps left a message.”
“What did the message say?”
“My guy said it was pretty vague. It didn’t make any sense to him. Something abou
t…” Buster was looking at his notes like he was struggling with them. “It was something about … seeing blotches on something … or … I don’t know. Point is, Kipps wanted the guy to call him back.”
“And did he?”
“Nope. By the time the IA guy got to the message, it was Monday morning. Kipps was already dead.”
* * *
If nothing else, Buster’s source helped illuminate the rumors floating around the NPD about Kipps and Internal Affairs. I’m sure as the news about Kipps was getting out, the IA officer-whoever he was-had been telling people something along the lines of, “Wow, Kipps just left a message for me over the weekend.”
Once that got out into the wind, it could have blown in any direction-cops love gossiping as much as reporters, and gossip can always get twisted, advertently or otherwise. That’s why my guy Pritch would have heard that Kipps had contact with IA, which could turn easily into “Kipps was dirty.”
The more intriguing question was what he was calling to say. If it had to do with “blotches”-whatever that was-maybe Kipps had a health problem. Weren’t blotches on the skin a symptom of HIV/AIDS? That would certainly be something Kipps wouldn’t want to get out. And maybe he would rather kill himself than let the world know he had contracted AIDS.
That would still leave the matter of those marks on his arms and wrists, but perhaps there was something I hadn’t thought of or didn’t know that explained those.
Or maybe Kipps was calling IA about misconduct by a fellow officer: Mike Fusco. There’s probably nothing in the Newark Police Department handbook that expressly prohibits sleeping with another officer’s wife. But it was possible Kipps had some kind of other dirt on Fusco he was suddenly willing to spill. If that was the case, and Fusco found out about it, it gave him yet another reason to put Kipps on the dead side.
Or maybe, I realized as I returned to my desk, I could just face facts that I was still speculating. A larger truth was out there, waiting for me. I just had to keep plugging away until I found it.
In the time I had been gone, Tina had sent me another e-mail. “My place. Eight,” it said. “Bring a bottle of wine and your appetite.”
That sounded promising-for a skinny girl, Tina knew how to cook-and it certainly beat the repast I had waiting for me in Bloomfield, which would have involved a hasty phone call to Panda Palace. I wrote back, “Sounds great. See you then.”
I was clicking the Send button as my phone rang.
“Carter Ross.”
“Carter, it’s Powell,” he said. I could hear street noises in the background.
“Hey, what’s going on?”
“I saw you posted a story about those photos I took. Pretty awesome. But why didn’t you run the pictures? Did they not come out well or something?”
“No, they came out fine. We just … they might be a little graphic for some of our readers.”
“Would you have run them if that dude was still alive?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter?”
“Well, yeah it matters. See, this goes to one of the central points of the Death Studies movement, and that is challenging the irrational fear of death in our culture. Until we change some of the basic assumptions about what it means to make the change from lucidity to morbidity, we will never-”
“Right, Powell,” I said, because I didn’t need to hear the lecture he was going to give when he became Professor Death. “Kira said you were hot to talk to me about something?”
“Yeah, I, uh … I was at the M.E.’s office today-because my internship is Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, you know? And I overheard him talking to someone.”
“Him? Who’s him?”
“The medical examiner. And he was pissed. I couldn’t tell about what at first. But I had never heard him that mad before. He was fired up. You could hear him going off. I thought he was going to have a conniption.”
I realized I needed to indulge Paul/Powell’s penchant for verbal meandering. So I said, “Okay. What was he mad about?”
“You couldn’t even really tell, at first. And I couldn’t, you know, just be seen hanging outside his office, eavesdropping. Technically, I’m supposed to be in the examining room, observing the autopsies, taking notes, you know? I have to be able to justify this internship to my adviser at the end of the term, and I can’t-”
I lost my patience: “Right, got it. Let’s get back to the mad medical examiner.”
“Oh, right. Well, it was tough to tell what he was pissed about, but I heard him say ‘Kipps.’ That’s the name of your dude, right?”
“Right.”
“Yeah, well, I guess somehow they had found out about the photos. I don’t know how they knew you had them-”
“I called them and told them.”
“You did?”
“It’s sort of what reporters do, Powell.”
“Oh,” he said, as if he couldn’t quite figure out why I would tip my hand like that. “Well, anyway, someone-like his boss or something-must have been asking him about the photos. And he kept saying stuff like, ‘I have no idea’ and ‘Well, they didn’t come from me,’ and ‘If I find out, I’ll fire the bastard,’ and all that.”
I smiled. I love it when government agencies go on witch hunts to figure out where a leak is coming from. It expends a tremendous amount of energy and almost never catches the real witch. Half the time the person who ordered the investigation into the leak is actually the person behind it-but knows he has covered his tracks well enough to never be caught. The other half of the time the source is someone they’d never suspect, like the intern who got the key from the janitor. They’d be better off trying to find Santa Claus’s workshop.
“So I had to walk away at that point because, you know, I’m supposed to be-”
“In the examining room, right.” I cut him off.
“Yeah, but anyway, everyone in the office was totally buzzing about it. It wasn’t hard to hear him. I was talking to one of the secretaries about it, and you know what she said she heard him say?”
“What’s that?”
“She said that he said, and I quote, ‘What you’re asking me to do is unethical.’”
“What was he being asked to do? Did she know?”
“No. That’s just what she said he said.”
“Hmm…”
“Anyhow, I thought you’d want to know,” he said. “I gotta run. I volunteer at a funeral home on Tuesday nights. I’m doing it for credit, so I have to be on time.”
“Have fun with that. Thanks for the call.”
“Later.”
So the medical examiner was being asked to do unethical things. And he was understandably upset about it.
I just hoped he was upset enough to unburden his worries to the Eagle-Examiner.
* * *
From a reporter’s standpoint, public employees are wonderful creatures because they have no way of hiding from us. Within a few mere keystrokes, I can learn their full name, date of birth, and annual salary-time was, in the days before identity theft became so rampant, I could even get their Social Security number. Maybe that all sounds a little invasive of their privacy, but the framers of the Constitution didn’t want public officials to have privacy. They were deeply suspicious of anyone with authority and wanted citizens to have lots of tools with which to resist tyranny.
As such, I was able to learn in fairly short order that Essex County Medical Examiner Raul Ibanez was born on August 9, 1964, and was paid $177,716 a year to slice and dice dead folks and make pronouncements about them. A few keystrokes later and I was looking at a Google Maps overview of his home on Lenox Avenue in Westfield. It looked like a nice crib, though his trees needed some trimming.
I looked at the clock, which told me I had just enough time to ambush the medical examiner and still make it back to Tina’s by eight-but only if I hustled. So I grabbed my peacoat and made like a man in a hurry.
The best way to explain Westfield, New Jersey, is that someone cracked open an
upscale shopping mall above it, then sprinkled all the stores onto the streets below. As such, I could have given directions to Ibanez’s place as I would give directions to a food court: take a left at the Victoria’s Secret, pass the Williams-Sonoma, take another left after the Banana Republic.
After making the turn on a suitably genteel suburban street, I found Ibanez’s nicely appointed home on the left side. It had a basketball hoop mounted on the garage, healthy shrubs lining a slate walkway, and a handsome red door with a brass knocker that I was soon putting to use.
A smallish man with a neat goatee and a thin semicircle of hair around his otherwise bald head soon answered. He was wearing suit pants and a button-down shirt-no scrubs for this doctor-but had ditched the jacket and tie. He had a wireless device clipped onto his belt.
“Dr. Ibanez, I’m sorry to trouble you at home, but I thought it would be better to see you here than at your office. My name is Carter Ross and I’m a reporter for the Eagle-Examiner. I’m the guy who posted that story with the autopsy photos today.”
He exerted an effort at keeping himself impassive, though I got the sense hearing my name was like a small kick in the nuts. I was, after all, the guy who had ruined his day.
“What … what are you … I have no comment,” he said quickly, with a slight accent, and I expected the statement would soon be followed by a whole lot of red door being slammed in my face.
But he kept the door open. This was encouraging. Maybe he didn’t want to comment, but he did want to talk. I might be able to leverage what little information I had into a whole lot more-with help from a little semieducated bluffing.
“Dr. Ibanez, I can totally respect that. But I gotta tell you, you seem like a nice guy, and I don’t want to have to end up writing a story about you needing to answer charges from the state ethics board, you know what I’m saying?”
I didn’t know if the state even had an ethics board for medical examiners-much less what this guy was being asked to do that was unethical-but the words “ethics board” were like another shot to his bits. Since pretending to know more than I actually did seemed to be working, I continued:
“I just see how this is all coming together-I’m sure you’ve heard the AG’s office has looked at this thing-and I hate to see you being railroaded on this.”
