School number 20 is a grammar school less than five minutes from my house. I will certainly be there before Pete, and I try in these few moments to plan what I will do when I arrive. I don’t come up with anything, but the act of thinking helps to lessen the feeling of panic.
The parking lot and athletic field are behind the school, and I drive around at a high speed, pulling to a screeching stop. I want to make as much noise as I possibly can; if a bad guy is there, I want it to sound as though the cavalry is arriving.
It’s very dark back here, with no streetlights and little moonlight. I think I can make out Karen’s car, but it could just be a shadow. I run toward the back of the school and see a small light above an exit door. Standing there, that light glancing off her, is Karen. The fact that she is standing means she is alive, and the fact that she is alive is extraordinarily wonderful.
“Karen!” I call out, though I am still at least seventy-five yards away.
She looks over in my direction, a little startled, but there is no way she can see me.
“It’s Andy!” I yell at the same moment that I see a glimmer of light from the road, off to the right. There is another car there, and someone is in it.
“Run! Run!” I yell, but she is confused, and doesn’t move. “Karen, start running!” It is not until I add “Now!” that she starts to run, though I’m not sure she even heard the word, because at the exact moment, there is another, very loud sound. I know what that sound is, and therefore, I know why Karen crumples to the ground. I’m running toward her, but the sight of her falling is so painful that it feels as if the bullet hit me.
I hear another shot, not as loud, that seems to come from a different direction. Karen doesn’t look to have been hit again, and it doesn’t appear that I was either, since I’m still running.
Karen’s prone body is now shielded by the darkness, and for a moment I can’t find her. I finally do, and I lean down to her, dreading what I am going to see.
“Andy?” she says, and if there has ever been a more beautiful rendition of my name, I’ve never heard it. Barbra Streisand couldn’t sing it any more beautifully. Karen’s voice is weak and scared, but she has a voice.
“Andy, somebody shot me.”
“Where are you hit?” I ask.
“In my shoulder. Andy, it hurts so much.”
I hadn’t given any thought to whether the shooter is still out there, and the sound of a car screeching away answers the question. The reason for that is soon obvious, as Marcus comes running over. Clearly Marcus chased off the shooter.
In the dim light I can see that the upper right part of her body is soaked in blood, and another wave of panic hits me. I quickly call 911 on my cell and request an ambulance. I take my shirt off and wrap it around her. Maybe it will slow the flow of blood, or maybe it will keep her warm and ward off shock.
Or maybe it won’t do shit.
It was probably a good idea, because Marcus takes off his jacket and does the same.
“Karen, hang on. Help will be here in a minute.”
She doesn’t answer, and I fear that she may have lost consciousness. Within moments that seem like years, I hear the sound of sirens, and Pete and every police officer in the city seem to arrive simultaneously. The area is bathed in light, and soon paramedics have descended on Karen. Pete tries to lead Marcus and me away.
“No,” I say, “I want to see how she is.”
Pete nods and walks over to the EMT in charge. He talks to him for a moment and then comes back to me. “I’ll be the first one they’ll tell,” he says.
Pete leads me toward his car and starts to question me. He has one of his colleagues question Marcus-as futile an exercise as has ever been attempted.
“Do you have any idea who did this?” Pete asks.
I nod. “It’s got to be Keith Franklin. He works for U.S. Customs at the Port of Newark.”
“Why do you think it was him?”
“Karen left a message on my machine, telling me that Franklin called her and told her to meet him here. She said he told her not to tell me about it.”
Pete leaves me for a moment to tell one of the detectives to get Franklin’s address, and in less than a minute he has it. “We’re going to pick up Franklin,” he says. “You want to come?”
I look over and see that Karen is being loaded into an ambulance. “Any word on Karen yet?”
Pete signals someone who comes over and talks softly to him. Pete nods and turns to me. “She took it in the right shoulder. She lost a lot of blood, but they think she’ll make it. She won’t pitch in the major leagues, but other than that she should be okay.”
It is a feeling of such immense relief that I actually get choked up. This almost never happens to me; the last time I got choked up was three years ago when I mistakenly tried to swallow a chicken bone. “Let’s go,” is all I say, and Pete and I go to his car. I’m not sure where Marcus is, but I suspect he’ll be able to handle himself.
Pete has called ahead and sent other cars to Franklin’s house. We are not going to be the first ones on the scene, but no one will move or do anything of consequence until Pete gets there. He is the ranking officer on the case.
There are few things that I’d rather see right now than Franklin getting taken away in handcuffs, but I have no idea if it is going to happen tonight. I don’t know whether he just set Karen up for someone else to take a shot at her or, even if he did it himself, whether he would have gone home afterward. I don’t know what the etiquette is for attempted murders; maybe there is a traditional postshooting party, at which the criminal regales his colleagues with stories about pulling the trigger.
We park about a block and a half from Franklin’s house, and Pete has the operation well coordinated. Everybody moves in from various directions; if Franklin makes a break for it, he will find himself surrounded.
We’re about six houses away when Pete gets a message that the front door to Franklin’s house is wide open. Pete instructs me to stay behind as he and the other officers move in.
As I watch from a distance, the area around Franklin’s house is suddenly, eerily bathed in bright spotlights, and the sounds of men shouting through the previously quiet street are deafening, even though they do not include any gunfire.
Ignoring Pete’s admonishments, I start to walk toward the house. As I approach, I am stopped by an officer cordoning off the scene. “You can’t go any farther,” the officer says.
“I’m with Pete Stanton.”
“That’s fine, but you can’t go any farther.”
After about ten minutes, Pete comes out and walks over to me. “Franklin is dead,” he says.
I’m surprised to hear this. “Suicide?” I ask.
“Only if he’s a real bad shot. He had seven bullets in him.”
“Any idea how long he’s been dead?”
Pete shrugs. “I’m no expert, but I’d guess an hour or so. He sure as hell wasn’t the shooter at the school.”
Without a doubt, Franklin was the person who set Karen up to be shot, and without a doubt, he was not the one who shot her.
Pete verbalizes the questions that are forming in my mind. “You think he was forced to call her? Or did his partner turn on him after he did?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know who the bad guys are or what the hell they’re trying to accomplish. The only thing I know for sure is that Richard Evans isn’t one of them.”
* * * * *
EVEN THOUGH I’M anxious to get to the hospital, my first stop in the morning is the prison. I don’t want Richard hearing about his sister’s shooting from his radio or a guard. I want him to hear it from me.
On the way there I get a phone call from Kevin, who has gone to the hospital to check on Karen’s condition. She is weak but doing well, and her wound is not considered life threatening. She is very lucky, or as lucky as a completely innocent person who is suddenly shot by a high-powered rifle can be.
I spend most of the driv
e trying to deal with my guilt. I’m aware that it’s illogical; I did little to involve Karen in the case or expose her to danger. She constantly begged to be included, and most of the time I resisted. Nor did I send her to the school; I didn’t know about it until it was too late, and my arrival probably saved her life.
Yet the feeling of guilt is so heavy it feels crushing. I started a series of events that led to Karen Evans getting shot. If there were no Andy Carpenter, she would not be in a hospital, hooked up to IVs.
I get to the prison at 7:45, fifteen minutes before the prisoners can have visitors, even from their lawyers. By the time Richard is brought into the room, I can see by the look on his face that he already knows what happened.
“Please tell me she’s all right,” he says. “Please.”
“She’s going to be fine. She took the bullet in the shoulder, but she’s conscious and doing well. She’s not in danger.”
Richard closes his eyes for maybe twenty seconds without saying anything, probably giving thanks to whoever it is he gives thanks to. Then he looks up and says, “Please tell me everything you know about what happened.”
I take him through all of it, starting with Franklin showing us the crates of money at the port, right through to finding him shot to death at his house.
“Why would Franklin have showed you the money if he was part of the conspiracy to sneak it out of the country?” he asks.
“I don’t think this has anything to do with that money. Maybe Franklin discovered it and used it to throw us off the track. Or maybe he was an innocent victim and was coerced into calling Karen.”
“But how could anyone have anything to gain by killing Karen? Who the hell did she ever hurt? What the hell did she know that could hurt someone?”
These are questions I can’t begin to answer, and my fear is that Karen won’t be able to answer them, either. First Richard was gotten out of the way, and now an attempt has been made to permanently remove Karen. They apparently posed a mortal threat to someone, without knowing who or how.
Before leaving, I question Richard extensively about his relationship with Franklin. He’s answered the questions before, though now they have gained far more importance.
“We met through work,” Richard says, “but we became friends. Richard and his girlfriend would go out on the boat with Stacy and me pretty often, maybe ten or twelve times.”
“Could he have had a relationship with Stacy that you didn’t know about?”
He shakes his head. “Not possible.” He considers this a moment. “Sorry, I answered too fast. Anything’s possible, but I saw absolutely no evidence of that, and I can’t imagine that it could have happened. But even if it did, what would that have to do with Karen?”
“Nothing,” I say. “I’m just grasping at straws here. Was there anything about Franklin’s work that might be viewed as unusual in the light of what has happened?”
“Not that I can think of. We each handled our own area, so we didn’t interact at work that often.”
“And he came to see you for a while after you were convicted?”
Richard nods. “For about a year.” He starts to say something else, then hesitates.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Well, when Keith would come see me here, he’d talk about the job a lot. He’d tell me what was happening down at the port, what people were doing, and he’d ask me questions. I didn’t want to hear about it. I mean, I was never going back, but he kept talking about it. I figured my being in here made him uncomfortable, so that gave him something to talk about. But it was strange.”
“What kind of questions did he ask you?”
“Procedural things, how to handle certain situations. I had more seniority than him and knew more than he did.”
“So he was pumping you for information?”
He shrugs. “I didn’t think of it that way at the time, but I guess you could say that.”
I leave Richard and head to the hospital to see Karen. She is already sitting up in bed and laughing with the nurses. Her upbeat attitude is truly amazing; by tonight she’ll be leading the entire hospital in a rendition of “If I Had a Hammer.”
She looks a little weak but far better than I expected. It’s hard to believe that it was just last night that I saw her lying bleeding and unconscious on the ground. I look worse than this if I stay up late to watch a West Coast baseball game.
“Andy!” she yells when she sees me in the doorway. “I was hoping you’d come by. Are you okay?”
It’s been twelve hours since someone fired a bullet into her body, and she’s asking how I’m doing. “Well, I might be coming down with a cold,” I say, and then smile so she’ll know I’m kidding. Otherwise she’ll jump up and offer me the bed.
She laughs and starts introducing me to the nurses. “Andy, this is Denise, and Charlotte, and that’s Robbie. This is Andy Carpenter, a really good friend of mine.”
We say our hellos, and then I prevail on them to give me a few minutes alone with Karen. I notice two books on the side table: Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, and Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë. Richard had told me she majored in English literature at Yale.
“You’re reading those?” I ask.
She nods. “Many times. They make me feel better.”
“How?”
“I’m not sure. Just knowing that people wrote things like this, so many years ago, and that they could feel what I feel. I guess it makes me understand that life goes on and that what happens in the moment is not everything.”
“I understand,” I lie.
“Have you ever read them?”
“The Brontë sisters? No, but I dated them in high school. They were really hot.”
She laughs, which I cut short by saying, “Karen, Franklin is dead. He was shot in his living room about an hour before they shot you.”
Karen doesn’t say a word; she just starts to sob. It’s amazing to watch her navigate 180-degree emotional turns at warp speed.
I give her a minute and then push on. “When he called you, was there anything unusual in what he said, how he sounded?”
“He sounded nervous, but I thought it was because of whatever it was he had found. The thing that he was going to tell me.”
“And he didn’t give a hint as to what that was?”
“No. All he said was that I shouldn’t tell you he had called. God, he seemed like such a good guy-how could anyone do that to him?”
“Karen, whether or not he was a good guy, the purpose of that call was to put you in a place where you could be killed. Now, Franklin may have been forced to make that call, or he may have made it willingly. The point is-and you have to face it-somebody wants you dead.”
She looks devastated, shattered, as the truth of this sinks in. “But why? I’ve never tried to hurt anybody.”
“You represent a danger to someone.”
“How? If I knew anything important, I would have told you already.”
I nod. “I know that. But you have to think about it.”
She is frustrated, a completely understandable reaction. “I will, Andy. But it just doesn’t make sense.”
“I know. And until we can make sense out of it, I’m going to arrange for you to be protected. Both in here and outside when you’re ready to leave.”
“So they might come after me again?”
She knows the answer to this as well as I do. “They might,” I say.
She thinks about this for a few moments, then nods. “So we need to get them first.”
* * * * *
IF POVERTY IS your thing, you probably don’t live in Short Hills, New Jersey.
The town projects a serene, upscale elegance, and as I drive through it I find it amazing that I am rich enough to live here, should I so choose.
I’ve tried twice without success to reach Yasir Hamadi at his Montclair office, so rather than alert him further, I’ve decided to visit him at his home. Hopefully he’ll be home, but if not, I’ve lo
st nothing and had a nice drive.
When feasible, I like to interview potential witnesses where they live. People in their offices are more inclined to be brusque and uncooperative, while being at home seems to activate their hospitality genes.
There is no wrong side of the tracks in Short Hills; in fact, I don’t see any tracks at all. The homes seem to divide into two camps, luxurious and spectacular, and Hamadi’s is in the latter category.
I say this even though I can barely see it from the street. It is up a long driveway from the curb, and the well-treed property blocks the view of most of the house. What I can see, however, is enough to convince me that Hamadi is not anxiously awaiting his monthly food stamps.
There are at least six trucks parked along the road, all with side panels indicating they are affiliated with a local construction company. They must be working on Hamadi’s house, since the nearest neighbor is probably a quarter mile away.
One of those workmen is standing next to the truck, looking intently at a large piece of paper, which seems to be a construction plan of some sort. “You working on the Hamadi house?” I ask.
He nods. “Yup.”
“Building an addition?”
He nods. “And repairing damage from the storm. Tree crashed through the back of the house.”
He’s probably referring to a major storm that went through North Jersey about three months ago, sending trees and power lines toppling.
I nod and walk toward the driveway. I’m trying to decide whether to drive up or park down here at the curb, when a BMW comes around the corner and turns into the Hamadi driveway. The driver of the car is a woman, mid-thirties, and the quick glimpse I get of her says that she is quite attractive. She notices me as she pulls in, but doesn’t stop. Since I’m driving an ordinary American car, she probably thinks I’m one of the workmen, or somebody here to case the joint for a future robbery.
I decide to leave the car on the street and walk up the driveway. Before I do so, I open the mailbox at the curb and see three pieces of mail. Two are addressed to Hamadi, and one to Jeannette Nelson.
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